Alexander Dugin was advisor to Russian Communist Party Duma chairman Gennady Seleznyov from 1998 to 2003
"...at present, the direct threat to democratic freedoms coming from the Russian radical nationalist movement seems insignificant. At the same time, there is a real possibility of a gradual shift of the regime towards increasingly radical forms of nationalist ideology".
M. Sokolov
Since Vladimir Putin's confirmation as Prime Minister and official successor of Boris Yeltsin, the Russian Radical Nationalist Movement (hereinafter referred to as the RRND) has experienced significant changes caused, on the one hand, by a change in the structure of political opportunities, and, on the other hand, by a shift in the dominant political discourse.
Putin's administration's course of strengthening state power indirectly contributed to the decline of most right-wing radical organizations focused on early power. After the events of autumn 1993, when during the constitutional crisis, the RRND activists were defeated in battles with the regular army, the majority of nationalists abandoned the idea of committing an armed coup. However, there were still hopes among the supporters of the movement that the right would be able to form a government by winning the elections (Zhirinovsky's progress in the elections on December 12, 1993 were perceived by them as a very encouraging sign), or after the alleged collapse of the Yeltsin regime created a power vacuum, which could be used by a paramilitary organization of the RNE type.
The first year of Putin's rule destroyed both hopes. The regime created by the new president gave the impression, on the one hand, strong enough not to collapse on its own, and, on the other hand, undemocratic enough to prevent the victory of representatives of the disloyal opposition in any national (and, as the case of the Kursk ex-governor Rutsky showed, even regional) elections.
The second trend that had a significant impact on the ravitiy of the RRND was the change in the dominant political discourse, which in the ten years since 1991 has changed from predominantly liberal to frankly nationalist. In an ideological sense, the regime has taken a step towards the right-wing radicals, creating more favorable conditions for them than ever since the proclamation of independent Russia, for penetration into administrative structures. Many of the intellectuals of the nationalist movement, who had sufficient educational level and competence to establish themselves in the administrative field, did not hesitate to take advantage of this opportunity, especially since state markets had a much more solvent demand for their symbolic products than non-state sector organizations.
Under these conditions, many, if not most, nationalist organizations have experienced a split between the factions of "realists" ready to play by the new rules within the state apparatus, despite the inevitable compromises and deviations from the maximum program that such a game entails, and "fundamentalists" who do not want to give up their principles. The loudest of such splits was the one that led to the rupture of the old political alliance between Eduard Limonov, the leader of the NBP, and Alexander Dugin, the leading ideologist of the Russian New Right. Limonov, who remained in uncompromising opposition to the regime, was imprisoned after a while on charges of creating a terrorist organization (on closer examination, very far-fetched), and Dugin took the post of adviser to the speaker of the State Duma Gennady Seleznev, enjoying all the charms associated with the post of a state ideologist.
The two trends mentioned above had a different impact on different segments of the RRND. Right-wing radicals in Russia are not united by any organizational structure (all attempts to create a broad coalition in the first half of the 90s have hopelessly failed), and they do not have a common ideological credo. Moreover, RRND activists belong to several social environments, each of which has its own subculture, thus forming several relatively closed communities.
Right-wing radical oranizations, as a rule, are oriented to one such community. Although organizations whose social base are different communities often agree to recognize each other as nationalist, their cooperation is usually extremely hampered by the incompatibility of political practices and, so to speak, the styles of political action of their members. In the entire history of the RRND, there have been only a few actions in which all nationalist groups participated, and only one of them has taken place in recent years (rallies at the embassies of NATO member states in April 1999). In all other cases, even the most massive actions did not go beyond the socio-cultural boundaries of one community.
I think the most successful classification is the one that singles out three such communities - "national patriots", "New Right" and "skinheads". National Patriots are the oldest group that emerged in the late Soviet period, most of whose well-known representatives participated in the "Memory" of the 80s. As a rule, national patriots see the main enemy in the World Jewish Conspiracy, which has completely subjugated the United States and other Western countries. Their political program, usually imbued with religious motives, consists in restoring the Golden Age that once existed in Russia's past, and thus fulfilling the country's messianic mission, which is designed to give a model of piety and justice to the whole world.
The social base of national-patriotic organizations are most often employees of law enforcement agencies, such as the army or police, usually middle-aged or even elderly. Their favorite collective actions are semi-military exercises, rallies and marches demonstrating the combat strength of armed formations, and, most importantly, actions presented by their participants as actions of "maintaining order and restoring justice", sometimes carried out together with the bodies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Typical organizations representing the national-patriotic segment of the RRND are many Cossack troops, and before its recent collapse was the RNE of Alexander Barkashov.
The new right-wing in Russia became widespread relatively recently, although some commentators point to the emergence of the first groups of this kind in the 1960s. Positioning themselves as representatives of the pan-European traditionalist movement, the Russian right-wing conservatives led by Alexander Dugin see their main opponent not in the "Jewish Conspiracy" (many of them seem completely devoid of anti-Semitic beliefs), but in the United States. At the same time, he sees the evil coming from the States not so much even in the political domination of America, but in the influence of American mass culture, hostile to the spiritual experience of traditional society. The conservative revolution, which is promoted by the New Right, should create a society capable of reliving this spiritual experience.
The majority of the New Right are young specialists and students, usually living in large megacities (the three largest cells of the NBP, the largest organization that proclaimed the Conservative Revolution as its program goal, are located in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk - part-time, the three largest educational centers of the country). Typical for the New Right, the types of collective action are based on the professional practices of university scientists and bohemians: they may include the publication of magazines and the development of websites containing their interpretation of history and current events, public lectures or concerts. More traditional types of political actions, such as rallies or demonstrations, were constantly carried out by a group associated with them as the NBP. However, in the case of the NBP, we can observe the imprint of an artistic attitude to politics, typical of the New Right: their actions are always theatrical and represent small performances that bring their participants, including considerable aesthetic pleasure.
Finally, skinheads as an independent community appear on the Russian right scene quite recently. The first reports of attacks carried out by skinheads on foreign students and economic migrants from the southern regions of the former USSR date back to 1995. The attention of the press, however, was drawn to them not earlier than the spring of 1998, when skinheads launched a campaign of daily attacks on dark-skinned students in Moscow, timed to the birthday of Adolf Hitler. After that, every few months there were new high-profile cases of beatings and pogroms, in which skinheads took part (the most famous were the attack of Semyon Tokmakov on the security guard of the American Embassy William Jefferson in the summer of 1998 and the pogroms in Savelovo, Yasenevo and Tsaritsyno in 1999, 2000 and 2001, respectively).
As can be seen from this list, the most strong subculture of skinheads in Moscow, however, there are many of them in many regional cities. The majority of skinheads are teenagers and young people from 15 to 25 years old, schoolchildren, vocational school students, young unskilled workers and unemployed, often poorly educated and with low incomes. Skinheads do not have a well-thought-out ideology and, as a rule, are not very interested in it. An important detail in this context is that the skinhead community largely intersects with the community of football fans. There are sufficient grounds to argue, for example, that social networks and practices used by right-wing radicals in organizing attacks were borrowed from the fan subculture, where they were originally used during wars between fans of rival teams.
Football-based violence and racial violence are still closely intertwined. Thus, commentators from the Moscow Department of Internal Affairs claimed that the pogrom in Tsaritsyno on September 30 this year, during which 3 people were destroyed, occurred because the clash between the fans of Spartak Moscow, which included the pogromists, and St. Petersburg Zenit, which was expected the day before, did not take place. Although it is doubtful that the choice of new victims was completely random, as well as the fact that none of the attackers on the traders in the market planned this attack in advance, probably if large-scale fights between warring fans had taken place the day before, the next day it would have been very difficult to mobilize their participants for new power actions. Conversely, the fact that they did not take place certainly made it easier for the organizers of the pogroms to work.
Skinheads are represented by several organizations, such as Semyon Tokmakov's "Russian Target" and the Moscow branch of the international "Blood and Honour". None of them has strict membership and, in general, they are organized more like social networks typical of youth subcultures than as "adult" political organizations.
Comparing these three communities, we cannot fail to notice the obvious differences. Although they all declare themselves "nationalist" by chance, and even sometimes use the same ideological constructions, their nationalism has completely different sources and is reflected in completely different forms of political practice.
I dare to say that only for national patriots participation in the RRD is a policy in the sense of conscious and purposeful efforts to protect group interests, although even they have a purely instrumental approach to politics-as-a-means-meas means is intertwined with the perception of their participation as the fulfillment of moral and religious duty. At the same time, for the New Right, participation in collective actions acquires features more inherent in group art therapy. As for skinheads, their practice of racial violence, no matter how terrible it sounds, carries a shade of sports entertainment for its performers. The difference in political styles corresponding to this difference in motivations is obvious. It is impossible to imagine skinheads giving public lectures (as Dugin does), members of the NBP patrolling the streets together with the police as people's guards (as members of the RNE do), or RNE activists staging a pogrom in the dormitory of African medical students (which is typical for skinheads).
The transformations taking place in Putin's Russia had a different impact on the activism of the members of these three communities. The saddest was the fate of organizations representing national patriots. The realization by their supporters of the impossibility of coming to power or at least exerting direct influence on this power led to a reduction in their support and, in the future, to the decline of most of them, including the RNE. Their situation was further aggravated by the fact that many of their potential participants were fascinated by Putin, whose decisive policy to strengthen the state and whose past of a special services officer largely corresponded to the aspirations of their possible electorate.
The low educational level and odious criminal ties of the majority of members of national-patriotic organizations made it difficult for them to adopt an alternative strategy of integration into the state apparatus. Some, however, succeeded, although the fee for cooperation with the authorities in each specific case was the rejection of the most radical requirements of the program. An example of this is the trajectory of the Saratov organization of the RNE, which was able to join the Council under the Mayor of the city and participate in the protection of order in the city in exchange for numerous statements by its leader Grigory Trofimchuk that his group denies all ethnic and religious discrimination, and is ready to accept Muslims and Jews into its ranks (he claimed that, in fact, both are already in it).
Another strategy adopted by some national patriots, such as Konstantin Kasimovsky, Alexander Ivanov-Sukharevsky and Yuri Belyaev, was an attempt to find support for their groups among skinheads, whose community is on the rise. Several coalitions of this kind have been created. For example, one of the most famous Moscow skinheads, Semyon Tokmakov, proclaimed his group "Russian Goal" a youth organization under the People's National Party of Ivanov-Sukharevsky in 2000, and the popular musical group "Kolovrat" in the relevant environment used the symbols of the RNE and declared its sympathy for Barkashov.
However, none of these associations has yet proven its efficiency, since the actions to which national-patriotic leaders would like to push young skinheads (participation in their election campaigns, for example), do not correspond to the interests of the participants of skin groups. In turn, the actions that really attract them can only compromise closely related politicians. Zhirinovsky could afford to express his sympathy for the Moscow pogromists, because he knew that his specific reputation would save him from suspicions of complicity in the organization of mass riots, but it is unlikely that any of the Russian politicians could decide to do so, whose words the audience (and law enforcement agencies) had a more serious attitude.
The RRND segment associated with the skinhead community is likely to suffer less from losing hope of early political power, since the latter was not part of their political program (it is doubtful that their actions are inspired by any particular program at all). President Putin, impressed by the recent pogroms in Tsaritsyno, instructed the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to develop more effective tactics to combat violent crimes of skinheads, however, no one has high hopes that the Ministry of Internal Affairs will cope with this in the foreseeable future.
The New Right has the best prospects in the current situation. On the one hand, since their actions were more of an aesthetic expression than instruments of obtaining political power, they lose little from narrowing the structure of political opportunities (although, as some of them have already seen from their experience, the new regime is less tolerant of the most challenging types of their political self-expression than Yeltsin's regime was). On the other hand, the high educational level and acquaintance with the practices of academic science allows them to successfully meet the demand that has arisen in the state apparatus for the development of a new Russian nationalism, spreading their views as authors of textbooks, lecturers of state universities and consultants to the authorities.
However, as in the case of national patriots, it should be noted that cooperation with state officials always requires ideological compromises and rejection of the most radical and revolutionary aspects of the New Right-Wing Ideology, unattractive from the point of view of the state apparatus. In the tandem Dugin - Seleznev, the speaker of the State Duma Seleznev has much more chances to influence the ideological position (at least expressed publicly) of his counterparty, since he is the one who has great political resources. Dugin's latest speeches on television related to the terrorist acts of September 11 fully confirm this guess: in their cautious and full of reservations of readiness to cooperate with the United States in the fight against world terrorism, they would be typical for a moderate member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (like Seleznev), but not for a fiery conservative revolutionary (as Dugin previously imagined himself).
In conclusion, I would like to make some assumptions about the further fate of various segments of the RRND. National-patriotic organizations, whose support was associated with hopes for a coup or their success in the elections, will probably continue to weaken. Perhaps none of them will overcome the current crisis. Individual activists can penetrate the state apparatus, and even contribute to the building of right-wing enclaves, territorial (such as the Krasnodar Territory has been in recent years) or institutional. However, this will be given to them only by giving themselves and their policies a new look, in which there will be no extremist features. This does not mean, however, an end to racist violence, since these trends are unlikely to delay the growth of the skinhead subculture, which, if the current trends continue, will attract more and more and more militant features.
In general, at present, the direct threat to democratic freedoms emanating from the RRND seems insignificant. At the same time, there is a real possibility of a gradual shift of the regime towards increasingly radical forms of nationalist ideology. However, although some of the RRND intellectuals may take part in this shift, its true causes lie far beyond their activity.