Could Russia’s Ultranationalists Subvert Pro-Democracy Protests?
Repeating a recurring feature in Russia’s modern history, Moscow’s December 2011 protests have seen a new alliance between Russian democrats and ultranationalists. In spite of their dubious reputation, the latter were permitted, by the meeting organizers, not only to take part in the demonstrations. A number of well-known, radically nationalist politicians—most prominent among them the notorious writer Eduard Limonov—were also allowed to give speeches to the protesters. The justification for this was that the protest movement is politically open and democratically oriented. Excluding one camp or another, such goes the argument, would be in contradiction to the inclusive spirit of this all-national movement.
One wonders, however, how far the democratism of the right-wing extremists goes, and how they would behave in case they were to achieve power. To be sure, even such radical nationalists as Vladlen Kralin (a.k.a. Vladimir Tor) and Ilya Lazarenko were, in their speeches during the protests, speaking out in favor of political liberalization as well as free and fair elections. Yet as appropriate as these statements may have been at the time, the ultranationalists’ ideology and political past hardly suggest they would replace Putin’s authoritarianism with liberal democracy. Rather, one suspects, they have in mind an illiberal ethnocratic—if not an eventually autocratic—regime, to be headed by somebody who would be even more nationalistic and anti-Western than Putin.
To be sure, the anti-Putinism of at least some of the ultranationalists is as radical as, or even more profound than, the democrats’. Yet it may have other sources and be of a different kind than the oppositional stance of the various liberals, conservatives, Christians, socialists, moderate nationalists, and other democrats who have come together recently. Whereas the alliance of these other factions is natural, the far right’s participation in the movement is not. With their aggressive behavior during the December demonstrations, the ultranationalists have already, to some degree, discredited the Russian mass action of civic disobedience.
The case of Ilya Lazarenko, who addressed the crowds at the December 10th Bolotnaya Square demonstration, illustrates the point. Lazarenko is the former head of the fascist micro-party National Front, as well as the founder of an anti-Christian pagan sect, Church of Nav, labeled by some observers as “satanistic.” In 1997, Lazarenko was, in one of the rare anti-racist court trials of that time, found guilty of hate speech and sentenced to an eighteen-month suspended prison term. Two years before, in 1995, Lazarenko had published an article under the title “To Hell with Elections—this Mondialist [i.e., American] Circus!”