Window on Eurasia

Kremlin Scored for Failing to Focus on Dangers from Radical Right

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 29, 2006 – Post-Soviet Russian leaders have failed to focus
on the dangers presented by radical right, in the 1990s because they
had a greater fear of a revival of left-wing radicalism and now because
many leaders do not themselves have “immunity” to this “virus,”
according to a leading Moscow analyst.

In an essay posted online yesterday, Tat’yana Stanovaya, the head of
the analytic department of the Moscow Center of Political Technologies,
argues that until very recently, Russian leaders generally ignored this
danger because they did not believe fascism could arise in a country
that defeated fascism in World War II.

But recent events, including the murders of foreign students and
members of ethnic minorities and the explosions at the Cherkizov market,
highlight a new reality: “right radicalism is emerging from a
restricted subculture and becoming a nationalist tendency shared by
society” at large
[http://www.politcom.ru/print.php?id=3296].

This trend not only energizes some older nationalist groups, but it is
taking on two very clearly defined forms: a superficially legal and
“respectable” one including groups like the Movement Against
Illegal Immigration (DPNI) and other, smaller groups that are now prepared to
use violence against their “enemies.”

Right-wing radicalism, Stanovaya argues, is far more attractive to
young Russians than is the older left-wing variety. Not only does it give
them greater opportunities for “self-expression,” but it is
“connected” with “the day-to-day discomfort” many Russians feel
in their dealings with representatives of other national cultures.

Moreover, young Russians are more likely to find themselves competing
with non-Russian entrants to the workforce. And they are less likely to
buy into the kind of internationalism promoted by Soviet ideological
workers in the past, something that continues to restrain many older
Russians, Stanovaya suggests.

The current Russian leadership, she continues, is pursuing an
internally inconsistent approach toward the radical right. On the one hand, she
says, it speaks out against “ethnocratic tendencies” in such
movements even as it seeks to arm itself with “civic patriotism.”

But on the other hand, she continues, “the elites of post-Soviet
Russia have a long history of connections with the right radicalis,”
and many of those who support President Vladimir Putin and his regime
do so because he is pursuing policies such as putting the country in order
that are similar to the ideas of those on the radical right.

As a result and “despite the liberal reforms that have been achieved
in the economic sphere, in politics, the government is pursuing a
clealry expressed illiberal line,” one that limits the rise of an
independent radical right only through policies that reflect much of
its agenda, Stanovaya suggests.

And that in turn has the effect of reducing the clear distinction
between “’healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ patriotism,” thereby
quite possibly opening the way to the further rise of the radical right
both independently and via “official nationalism” in the Russian
Federation in the future.

This situation creates “a paradox,” Stoyanova concludes, because
despite its playing with radical right thematics, the current
government is “the single effective restraining mechanism against right-wing
radicalism.” And if and when Putin leaves the scene, the situation
could develop in two dangerous ways.

After Putin, the Russian regime could so transform itself that right
radical ideas would play an even larger role in government policy, or
the post-Putin regime could behave in ways that would convert today’s
radical right in Russia into “an uncontrolled force, with which it
would be extremely difficult to deal.”

If the Russian government is not focused on the rise of the radical
right, ever more Russians are. According to a Levada Center poll
released on Friday, 53 percent of them believe that there are fascists
in Russia and that they have become more numerous in recent years
[http://www.levada.ru/press/2006082500.html].

And another poll, cited in an article on “models of fascism in
Russia” published in the current issue of “Sotsial’naya
real’nost’,” found that two out of every three Russians believes
that “supporters of fascist views represent a real danger for
society”
[http://www.polit.ru/research/2006/08/28/vovk.html].

Given this wave of popular concern, it is not surprising that some of
Russia’s leading commentators are now asking the eternal Russian
questions: who should be blamed and what should be done. One answer was
given by Gleb Pavlovskiy, head of the Effective Politics Foundation and
a frequent advisor to the Kremlin.

In an interview published in “Rossiiskaya gazeta” and posted on the
Kreml.org website yesterday, he suggested that the radical right young
are “the children of August 1991 and the Belovezhskaya accords,”
and he argued that solving this problem will require a wholesale revamping
of society as a whole.

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