06 11 2006
06 11 2006
State of Hate. The country goes on a neonationalist binge,
apparently with the Kremlin's blessing. The question is, why?
Denis Sinyakov / AFP-Getty Images
Party people: Pro-Putin youth celebrate on Red Square
By Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova
Newsweek International
Nov. 6, 2006 issue - Russia is becoming an increasingly scary place.
Ask Marat Gelman, whose gallery made the mistake of hosting a
show by a Georgian artist at a time when Georgians are the subject
of official disapproval. Last week the gallery was wrecked by 10
masked men-"not vandals, nor hooligans from the street, but highly
professional and experienced militants who came to do their job,"
says Gelman, who was badly beaten. Or ask art historian and
curator Aleksandr Panov, attacked (but not robbed) by thugs days
after he publicly condemned the attack on Gelman. Or ask ordinary
Georgians who, increasingly, have been the victims of police
extortion and skinhead attacks, among them 24-year-old carwash
supervisor Irakly Bukiya. "We immigrants have always been
second-class people in Russia," says Bukiya, who knew better than
to call the police last week after he was beaten up in the Moscow
Metro. "I know that the state is on the side of corrupt police and
the skinheads."
Anti-immigrant attacks, a violent backlash against critical
intellectuals-Russia seems to be getting uglier and uglier. Yet
Russian President Vladimir Putin is defiant. Meeting with European
leaders in Finland, he brooked no lectures. When EU ministers
raised questions about corruption in his country, he noted that "
'mafia' is not a Russian word." As for Russia's fast-deteriorating
human-rights situation and the recent murder of crusading journalist
Anna Politkovskaya, he hinted that her death may have been
organized by those wishing to discredit the Kremlin.
Though he initially remained mum about the wave of anti-Georgian
violence sweeping the country, Putin has since condemned it.
Yet he himself seems to be embracing an increasingly nationalist line.
Illegal immigrants and "ethnic gangs" have "no place" in a
"law-abiding country," Putin said earlier this year. Recently he called
for ethnic Russians to be given a fixed quota of places in the
country's open-air produce markets-traditionally controlled by
immigrants from the Caucasus-in order to "protect the interests of
the native Russian population." That truculent rhetoric has not gone
unnoticed. The president's tone has given a "clear sign to
bureaucrats and security services," says Svetlana Ganushkina, head
of the NGO Civil Assistance. "Putin's words inspire nationalist
movements growing across Russia."
Racism is hardly new in Russia. But never in modern times has it been
sanctioned at such a high level of government. More than a
thousand Georgians have been deported during the past month,
says Vladimir Khomeriki, president of the Congress of Ethnic
Associations of Russia, who claims that almost every
Georgian-owned business has been visited by tax police or
municipal inspectors. Police checks on people with non-Slavic
features have become more frequent, as have violent attacks,
according to Human Rights Watch, which has been unable to
compile hard numbers because its activities were briefly suspended
under new rules governing foreign NGOs. Last year some 300,000
people were fined for immigration violations in Moscow alone.
This year, according to Civil Assistance, numbers are many times
higher. Bukiya says he was beaten by police as well as skinheads in
the past month: "They make us live as though it were wartime,
never coming out of our bomb shelters."
No group is a better barometer of the new mood than the Movement
Against Illegal Immigration, a nationalist organization that claims to
be the most powerful NGO in Russia with 20,000 members and
branches in 15 regions. It emerged last year after sponsoring
protests in support of Aleksandra Ivannikova, a Russian woman who
killed an Armenian taxi driver who she claimed tried to rape her.
Its leader, Aleksandr Potkin, is a dapper 30-year-old lawyer who goes
by the pseudonym Aleksandr Belov-a name derived from the
Russian word for "white." He became a national media figure in
October after anti-immigrant riots broke out in the northern Russian
town of Kondoponga, forcing dozens of non-Russians to flee for
their lives. "Guys from the Caucusus beat and raped girls at the
disco," Belov complained on national television from Kondoponga in
the aftermath of the riots, which left non-Russian-owned
restaurants and businesses sacked and burned. "The people of
Kondoponga expelled criminals from their midst."
It's not clear what role Belov's group may have played in the violence,
but his creed is simple. "Russia for Russians!" he told NEWSWEEK
during an interview at a stylish Moscow café. "Russia doesn't need
immigrants for work. Russians can do everything without any
foreigners. We don't need them here." He seems to nurse a
particular grudge against migrants from Tajikistan. "They spread
infections and rape Russian girls," he claims, as well as import the
heroin that "has killed 100,000 Russians." Belov says he enjoys
wide support among Russians, including "successful middle
managers from companies like Gazprom, students and even
journalists."
That's probably fanciful. But this week will bring a major test as
nationalists gather to celebrate Russia's Day of National Unity on
Nov. 4. "It will be our day," says Belov.
"There will be five to ten thousand of our members on the streets of
Moscow!" Meanwhile, Belov was recently appointed as an assistant
to Duma deputy Andrey Savelyev of the nationalist Rodina faction
and claims senior police and Security Service officers among his
supporters.
All this alarms people like Gelman, a prominent political analyst as well
as an art dealer, who sees neo-nationalism entering the
mainstream. "Things have changed tremendously in Russia in the
last half year," he says. "Nationalists feel that the government is
fully on their side, that their moment has come. They think that
public opinion, the courts and the police all support them." If the
rising tide of nationalism isn't stopped before next spring, in
advance of the parliamentary election campaign, Gelman warns,
"these groups will begin their campaigns with ratings that are
worryingly high."
Gelman knows the dangers of playing the nationalism card all too well.
During the last elections, in 2003, he was a key adviser to a group
of pro-Kremlin "political technologists," as he calls them, who set
up a pseudo-opposition party designed to siphon antigovernment
protest votes away from the large Communist Party. Its name was
Rodina, or the Motherland, and its message was pure nationalism.
The ploy worked all too well. Rodina picked up 9.7 percent of the
vote-transforming it from a Potemkin opposition party into a
genuine threat. Rodina's bumptious leader, Dmitry Rogozin,
subsequently fought off the efforts of Putin's men to rein the party
in and struck out on his own-only to be slapped down when
Rodina was banned from running in Moscow's municipal elections
last year.
The question now is the degree to which the Kremlin seeks to turn the
potent force of political nationalism to its advantage, particularly with
an eye to dominating the 2007 Duma elections. They are important
in themselves-but especially so next year, because it is this Duma
that will set the agenda for Putin's anointed successor in 2008.
For now, the president seems to be trying to play both ends at once.
Last week he told television viewers in a nationwide phone-in
that he was "pained" to speak of extremism in Russia, and said it
must be "dealt with swiftly and decisively." At the same time, his
championing of the interests of "ethnic Russians" and his defiantly
pro-Russian foreign policy are an obvious hit with voters and a
major factor in his 80 percent approval rating.
There's nothing anti-Putin in the new nationalism, explains Georgia-born
novelist Grigory Chkhartishvili, better known by his pen name, Boris
Akunin. To the contrary, "Putin wants to improve his popularity by
playing xenophobic games. You can be sure that the [Nov. 4] march
of Russian chauvinists will carry portraits of Putin." The real danger,
warns Chkhartishvili, is that nationalism has a way of getting out of
hand. "If the government don't distance themselves from Russian
nationalism in the near future," he says, "they won't be able to
control it."
Anna Politkovskaya may be the most visible victim of what the beaten
art critic Aleksandr Panov calls "a new climate of barbarism." Not
long before her death her name was posted on a list of "enemies
of Russia" compiled by Nikolai Kuryenovich, a Duma deputy from
Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party and
member of the Russian Parliament's security committee. Gelman's
name was also on the list. Kuryenovich, who denies involvement in
either assault, says that the time has come for Russians to "rise up
from our knees" and to "free Russia of foreign occupiers."
Perhaps it's small wonder that Politkovskaya's killers felt emboldened to
strike down an "enemy of Russia," especially after Chechnya's
Kremlin-appointed Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov (a favorite of
Putin) also made public threats against her. The latest leads in the
case suggest that her death may have been organized by
associates of a Russian Special Forces officer, OMON police Lt.
Sergey Lapin, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison last March
after a report by Politkovskaya revealed his role in the murder of up
to a dozen Chechen civilians in January 2001. Two other police
officers implicated in the murders, Maj. Aleksandr Prilepin and Lt.
Col. Valery Minin, had allegedly earlier threatened to kill
Politkovskaya before going into hiding. But the pair were recently
spotted in their hometown of Nizhnevartovsk, in the Khanty-Mansisk
region of Siberia, according to a source at the Russian federal
prosecutor's office not authorized to speak on the record, and are
"leading suspects" in the murder.
As Russia revels in its oil wealth and newfound confidence-after years
of post-imperial poverty and humiliation-it's only natural that a
revived national pride should follow. Putin's made very sure that he,
and no one else, is the focus and beneficiary of that national
revival. So why the compulsion to play the nationalist game?
Ordinary Russians are enjoying a stability and prosperity not seen in
a generation. With their power, money and popularity, the country's
leaders shouldn't feel the need to further bolster their standing by
persecuting Georgians or expelling immigrants. But instead, the
Kremlin has chosen to make nationalism the currency of Russian
politics. It could prove a dangerous weapon.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.
http://www.radioadiga.com/
apparently with the Kremlin's blessing. The question is, why?
Denis Sinyakov / AFP-Getty Images
Party people: Pro-Putin youth celebrate on Red Square
By Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova
Newsweek International
Nov. 6, 2006 issue - Russia is becoming an increasingly scary place.
Ask Marat Gelman, whose gallery made the mistake of hosting a
show by a Georgian artist at a time when Georgians are the subject
of official disapproval. Last week the gallery was wrecked by 10
masked men-"not vandals, nor hooligans from the street, but highly
professional and experienced militants who came to do their job,"
says Gelman, who was badly beaten. Or ask art historian and
curator Aleksandr Panov, attacked (but not robbed) by thugs days
after he publicly condemned the attack on Gelman. Or ask ordinary
Georgians who, increasingly, have been the victims of police
extortion and skinhead attacks, among them 24-year-old carwash
supervisor Irakly Bukiya. "We immigrants have always been
second-class people in Russia," says Bukiya, who knew better than
to call the police last week after he was beaten up in the Moscow
Metro. "I know that the state is on the side of corrupt police and
the skinheads."
Anti-immigrant attacks, a violent backlash against critical
intellectuals-Russia seems to be getting uglier and uglier. Yet
Russian President Vladimir Putin is defiant. Meeting with European
leaders in Finland, he brooked no lectures. When EU ministers
raised questions about corruption in his country, he noted that "
'mafia' is not a Russian word." As for Russia's fast-deteriorating
human-rights situation and the recent murder of crusading journalist
Anna Politkovskaya, he hinted that her death may have been
organized by those wishing to discredit the Kremlin.
Though he initially remained mum about the wave of anti-Georgian
violence sweeping the country, Putin has since condemned it.
Yet he himself seems to be embracing an increasingly nationalist line.
Illegal immigrants and "ethnic gangs" have "no place" in a
"law-abiding country," Putin said earlier this year. Recently he called
for ethnic Russians to be given a fixed quota of places in the
country's open-air produce markets-traditionally controlled by
immigrants from the Caucasus-in order to "protect the interests of
the native Russian population." That truculent rhetoric has not gone
unnoticed. The president's tone has given a "clear sign to
bureaucrats and security services," says Svetlana Ganushkina, head
of the NGO Civil Assistance. "Putin's words inspire nationalist
movements growing across Russia."
Racism is hardly new in Russia. But never in modern times has it been
sanctioned at such a high level of government. More than a
thousand Georgians have been deported during the past month,
says Vladimir Khomeriki, president of the Congress of Ethnic
Associations of Russia, who claims that almost every
Georgian-owned business has been visited by tax police or
municipal inspectors. Police checks on people with non-Slavic
features have become more frequent, as have violent attacks,
according to Human Rights Watch, which has been unable to
compile hard numbers because its activities were briefly suspended
under new rules governing foreign NGOs. Last year some 300,000
people were fined for immigration violations in Moscow alone.
This year, according to Civil Assistance, numbers are many times
higher. Bukiya says he was beaten by police as well as skinheads in
the past month: "They make us live as though it were wartime,
never coming out of our bomb shelters."
No group is a better barometer of the new mood than the Movement
Against Illegal Immigration, a nationalist organization that claims to
be the most powerful NGO in Russia with 20,000 members and
branches in 15 regions. It emerged last year after sponsoring
protests in support of Aleksandra Ivannikova, a Russian woman who
killed an Armenian taxi driver who she claimed tried to rape her.
Its leader, Aleksandr Potkin, is a dapper 30-year-old lawyer who goes
by the pseudonym Aleksandr Belov-a name derived from the
Russian word for "white." He became a national media figure in
October after anti-immigrant riots broke out in the northern Russian
town of Kondoponga, forcing dozens of non-Russians to flee for
their lives. "Guys from the Caucusus beat and raped girls at the
disco," Belov complained on national television from Kondoponga in
the aftermath of the riots, which left non-Russian-owned
restaurants and businesses sacked and burned. "The people of
Kondoponga expelled criminals from their midst."
It's not clear what role Belov's group may have played in the violence,
but his creed is simple. "Russia for Russians!" he told NEWSWEEK
during an interview at a stylish Moscow café. "Russia doesn't need
immigrants for work. Russians can do everything without any
foreigners. We don't need them here." He seems to nurse a
particular grudge against migrants from Tajikistan. "They spread
infections and rape Russian girls," he claims, as well as import the
heroin that "has killed 100,000 Russians." Belov says he enjoys
wide support among Russians, including "successful middle
managers from companies like Gazprom, students and even
journalists."
That's probably fanciful. But this week will bring a major test as
nationalists gather to celebrate Russia's Day of National Unity on
Nov. 4. "It will be our day," says Belov.
"There will be five to ten thousand of our members on the streets of
Moscow!" Meanwhile, Belov was recently appointed as an assistant
to Duma deputy Andrey Savelyev of the nationalist Rodina faction
and claims senior police and Security Service officers among his
supporters.
All this alarms people like Gelman, a prominent political analyst as well
as an art dealer, who sees neo-nationalism entering the
mainstream. "Things have changed tremendously in Russia in the
last half year," he says. "Nationalists feel that the government is
fully on their side, that their moment has come. They think that
public opinion, the courts and the police all support them." If the
rising tide of nationalism isn't stopped before next spring, in
advance of the parliamentary election campaign, Gelman warns,
"these groups will begin their campaigns with ratings that are
worryingly high."
Gelman knows the dangers of playing the nationalism card all too well.
During the last elections, in 2003, he was a key adviser to a group
of pro-Kremlin "political technologists," as he calls them, who set
up a pseudo-opposition party designed to siphon antigovernment
protest votes away from the large Communist Party. Its name was
Rodina, or the Motherland, and its message was pure nationalism.
The ploy worked all too well. Rodina picked up 9.7 percent of the
vote-transforming it from a Potemkin opposition party into a
genuine threat. Rodina's bumptious leader, Dmitry Rogozin,
subsequently fought off the efforts of Putin's men to rein the party
in and struck out on his own-only to be slapped down when
Rodina was banned from running in Moscow's municipal elections
last year.
The question now is the degree to which the Kremlin seeks to turn the
potent force of political nationalism to its advantage, particularly with
an eye to dominating the 2007 Duma elections. They are important
in themselves-but especially so next year, because it is this Duma
that will set the agenda for Putin's anointed successor in 2008.
For now, the president seems to be trying to play both ends at once.
Last week he told television viewers in a nationwide phone-in
that he was "pained" to speak of extremism in Russia, and said it
must be "dealt with swiftly and decisively." At the same time, his
championing of the interests of "ethnic Russians" and his defiantly
pro-Russian foreign policy are an obvious hit with voters and a
major factor in his 80 percent approval rating.
There's nothing anti-Putin in the new nationalism, explains Georgia-born
novelist Grigory Chkhartishvili, better known by his pen name, Boris
Akunin. To the contrary, "Putin wants to improve his popularity by
playing xenophobic games. You can be sure that the [Nov. 4] march
of Russian chauvinists will carry portraits of Putin." The real danger,
warns Chkhartishvili, is that nationalism has a way of getting out of
hand. "If the government don't distance themselves from Russian
nationalism in the near future," he says, "they won't be able to
control it."
Anna Politkovskaya may be the most visible victim of what the beaten
art critic Aleksandr Panov calls "a new climate of barbarism." Not
long before her death her name was posted on a list of "enemies
of Russia" compiled by Nikolai Kuryenovich, a Duma deputy from
Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party and
member of the Russian Parliament's security committee. Gelman's
name was also on the list. Kuryenovich, who denies involvement in
either assault, says that the time has come for Russians to "rise up
from our knees" and to "free Russia of foreign occupiers."
Perhaps it's small wonder that Politkovskaya's killers felt emboldened to
strike down an "enemy of Russia," especially after Chechnya's
Kremlin-appointed Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov (a favorite of
Putin) also made public threats against her. The latest leads in the
case suggest that her death may have been organized by
associates of a Russian Special Forces officer, OMON police Lt.
Sergey Lapin, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison last March
after a report by Politkovskaya revealed his role in the murder of up
to a dozen Chechen civilians in January 2001. Two other police
officers implicated in the murders, Maj. Aleksandr Prilepin and Lt.
Col. Valery Minin, had allegedly earlier threatened to kill
Politkovskaya before going into hiding. But the pair were recently
spotted in their hometown of Nizhnevartovsk, in the Khanty-Mansisk
region of Siberia, according to a source at the Russian federal
prosecutor's office not authorized to speak on the record, and are
"leading suspects" in the murder.
As Russia revels in its oil wealth and newfound confidence-after years
of post-imperial poverty and humiliation-it's only natural that a
revived national pride should follow. Putin's made very sure that he,
and no one else, is the focus and beneficiary of that national
revival. So why the compulsion to play the nationalist game?
Ordinary Russians are enjoying a stability and prosperity not seen in
a generation. With their power, money and popularity, the country's
leaders shouldn't feel the need to further bolster their standing by
persecuting Georgians or expelling immigrants. But instead, the
Kremlin has chosen to make nationalism the currency of Russian
politics. It could prove a dangerous weapon.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.
http://www.radioadiga.com/
