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THE
RUSSIAN NATIONALISM BULLETIN
A Biweekly Newsletter of
Current Affairs
Vol. 7, No. 12(200), 24 June
2013
Compilers: Fabian Burkhardt,
Parikrama Gupta, Vildane Oezkan & Andreas Umland
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/russian_nationalism/

I NEWS: 16 - 31 May 2013
II SURVEYS, ANALYSES,
COMMENTS
III PRIMARY SOURCES (on
Alexander Dugin)

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as the source. Thank you!]
==============================



I NEWS: 16 - 31 May 2013


Three-fourths of Russians insist govt. should
ban public display of homosexuality
Interfax-Religion, May 17, 2013
 
Moscow, May 17, Interfax - Homophobia is
rather common in Russian society and attitudes toward the LGBT community have
been changing slowly throughout the past year, sociologists said.
The same as a year ago, three-fourths of Russians brand gays and lesbians as
morally loose (43%) or mentally deficient persons (35%). Only 12% acknowledge
homosexuality's right to existence, the Levada
Center told Interfax on Friday presenting a nationwide survey.
Yet the opinion of Russians whether gays and lesbians should have equal rights
with heterosexuals has changed over last year: now 47% call for limiting their
rights, as compared with 40% in 2012. The number of respondents supporting
equality has reduced from 46% to 39%. The percentage of hesitant respondents
remains rather high, 15% now and 13% a year before.
Public opinions were also split over a law banning discrimination based on
sexual orientation: 37% supported that measure, 37% raised objections and 26%
could not decide. The Levada Center said the opinions have not
changed much since last year.
Some 73% of the respondents polled in 130 towns and cities in 45 regions in
late April insist that the government must ban any public displays of
homosexuality or excuses for such (14% disagreed). Some 44% of the respondents
said that the government did not have to protect sexual minorities from
possible aggressive acts, and 38% argued that security must be ensured.
The survey showed that Russians were more hostile to gays and lesbians than to
people of other nationalities, religions, social statuses or values. Fifty-one
percent of the respondents said that homosexuals "must be prosecuted"
and given therapy. Only 8% said such people should be helped " to live a
worthy life" in society, and 31% said they "should be simply left
alone."
Some 45% of the respondents answered a direct question about the essence of
homosexuality that homosexuals became such under the influence of society, 21%
said it was an inborn feature, and 20% said "both variants were equally
frequent." Fourteen percent failed to answer the question.
Russia does not have a federal law banning propaganda of homosexuality amongst
minors, but some regions - Ryazan, Arkhangelsk, Kostroma and Novosibirsk
regions and St. Petersburg - have passed such legislative acts.
 
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=10463
-----
 
Moscow police swoop on suspected illegal
migrants 
BBC, 16 May 2013
 
Police in the Russian capital Moscow say they
have arrested 236 people suspected of being illegal migrants from Central
Asia.  They were detained in an
industrial zone. A further 154 Central Asians were arrested in a separate raid,
Russian media report.  Russia
increasingly relies on cheap labour from Central Asia, where many families
depend on migrant earners.  But the issue
of migration has fuelled social tensions.  Of the 236 people detained on Dorozhnaya Street, 100 were found to have
illegal status, a Russian migration official later told Interfax news
agency.  Among items confiscated during
the raid were an improvised pistol, five cartridges, two daggers and what
appeared to be two stolen cars. Police also said they had discovered an illegal
cafe at the site.  The 154 Central Asians
detained on Lyublinskaya Street, in the south-east of the city, were found in
an abandoned building, police told Interfax, without giving details.  Millions of Uzbeks, Tajiks and Kyrgyz people
have migrated to Moscow and other parts of Russia in recent years, in search of
work.  Often poorly paid and badly
housed, they are predominantly Muslim, creating tensions with central Russia's
mainly Orthodox Christian population, and they frequently face discrimination. Moscow's
lack of mosque space is a particular sore point.  Russian officials have also voiced concern
about the involvement of migrants in crime, such as the trafficking of heroin
from Tajikistan. On Wednesday, 80kg of what appeared to be heroin were found
aboard a train travelling from the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, to Moscow, Russian
police said.
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22555652
-----
 
Human rights activist Pamfilova: 'Demand for
change in Russia is increasing'
Deutsche Welle, 17 May 2013
 
The Kremlin's strong political line will not
last forever, says Ella Pamfilova, a renowned human rights activist and former
adviser to the Russian president. She told DW that the first signs of change
are visible.  DW: You criticize the lack
of trust in Russia's civil society. What do you think is behind that?  Ella Pamfilova: If you compare the NGOs'
awareness levels to the degree of trust they enjoy, you will get totally
different results. NGOs are becoming more and more visible. Just a couple of
years ago, less than 20 percent of Russian citizens knew that NGOs existed.
Now, more than half of the population is aware of that - about 56 percent.  But trust in NGOs is still quite low. It
slowly increases by 1 percent per year. This can be explained by the fact that
Russian citizens are generally very distrustful. Of all societal organizations,
it's the well-known institutions that are trusted the most: the president, the
church and the military forces. The political parties are hardly ever seen as
trustworthy. In a sense, Russians only trust their relatives and friends.    Do you think Russian society is
changing?  There are signs that society
is coming together. The main human need is the desire for justice, especially
for social and legal justice. We have carried out an extensive study and found
out that people are most concerned about issues like alcoholism and drug
addiction. Issues like housing and local economy come second; after that it's
security and medical care.  People are
unified in their protest against corruption and arbitrariness. There is an
increased interest in solving ecological problems. Even the interest in
respecting human rights has risen. In the past, only about 2 percent of the
interviewees have said it was important; today there are regions where some 10
to 15 percent regard this as important.  In 2010, you stepped down as head of the president's council on human
rights and civil society. Do you regret this decision in light of recent
developments in Russia?  I stepped down
when everyone was still excited about a liberal Dmitry Medvedev [Russia's
former president and incumbent prime minister]. But I knew very well where all
of this was going to end. Putin and Medvedev competing against each other -
what a bluff! I know this from an insider's perspective. I stepped down because
I understood that I wasn't able to fulfill my duties anymore without losing my
self-respect. I couldn't fight against what was looming over Russia on my own.
I don't see a place in this system for me. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin speaks with Russian Olympic team athletes in Vancouver from Moscow
(photo: ALEXEY DRUZHININ/AFP/Getty Images) Things will change after the 2014
Olympic Games in Sochi, said Pamfilowa  When could Russia change?  Very
soon, I think. There's a desire for change within society. I am sure that
Vladimir Putin will start to change his policy because of several reasons: It's
due to the citizens' pressure, but also because he realizes how dangerous the
current system is - that it destroys itself. He needs to change the system if
he no longer wants to lean on the pillars of power that might be loyal but are
decayed. Even if he just wants to preserve power, he needs to change the
current system from the core and allow more political competition. Some first
steps have been made. The situation will get better after the Olympic Games in
Sochi 2014. You will remember my words then.  And what are all those NGOs supposed to do that have been searched?
Should they just wait and see?  No, they
should continue working. This craziness - as we have seen with these mass
searches - is going to cease. The way this was done has appalled many people.
Even uncomfortable, oppressive authorities can be overcome. I think Putin will
realize that this approach is only damaging - damaging to him and his
reputation as well. I would advise NGOs to inform the public more about their
work and to be very transparent in everything. It's more important to look for
support in Russia instead of support from foreign countries - and to organize
resistance from within the country.  From
2004 to 2010, Ella Pamfilova headed the president's council on human rights and
civil society which was founded by then-and-current President Vladimir Putin.
At the time, many civil rights activists claimed she was too moderate. But she
took on Putin's party United Russia, only stepping down the day after a
controversial law on Russia's internal security agency (FSB) came into force.
Previously she had called on then-President Medvedev not to expand the FSB's
rights.
 
http://www.dw.de/human-rights-activist-pamfilova-demand-for-change-in-russia-is-increasing/a-16820710
--------------------
 
Moscow authorities block LGBT rally bid 
By Anna Arutunyan 
Moscow News, 17 May 2013
 
Moscow City Hall has refused a request by LGBT
activists to hold a "Rainbow Rally" in Moscow's Gorky Park on May 25,
citing last day of school festivities scheduled for the same day.  Earlier, an announcement on Rainbow Rally's
Facebook page said that a rally with about 200 people would be held in support
of gay rights on a square next to the Krymsky Bridge in Gorky Park. But on
Friday, a City Hall official said the rally would not be held.  "This event will not take place because
all squares will be occupied May 24-25 for last day of school festivities,"
RIA Novosti quoted Alexei Mayorov, head of City Hall's regional security
department, as saying.  Earlier this
month, Moscow introduced several so-called Hyde Park zones in Gorky Park and
Sokolniki Park, modeled on the Hyde Park Speaker's Corner in London, as places
where various groups could express their views. Unlike rallies held in the
city, where organizers have to obtain permission from City Hall, those who want
to assemble in "Hyde Park zones" need only to fill out an application
on the park's site.  According to
Mayorov, end of school festivities will mean that most "Hyde Park"
events will not be approved on May 25-26.  Earlier Moscow authorities blocked a bid by LGBT activists to hold a
march and a rally in central Moscow on May 25, while Gorky Park refused to
approve a bid to hold a rally on the territory on May 26.  Gay activists have tried to hold authorized
rallies in the past, but Moscow authorities have never approved them.
Unauthorized events will be dispersed by police, City Hall said.
 
http://www.themoscownews.com/local/20130517/191519505/Moscow-authorities-block-LGTB-rally-bid.html
-----
 
Foreign grantmakers must get approval of
Ministry of Education & Science posted 
HRO-org, 19 May 2013
 
Foreign philanthropic and academic foundations
working with Russian researchers and academic institutions will be obliged to
obtain the approval of the Ministry of Education & Science.  Grani.ru, citing the newspaper Vedomosti,
reports that a government decree lays down this demand.  Grantmakers henceforth must present the
Ministry with their founding documents and information about the research
project for which money is being provided. Moreover, they must give the
officials their own bank details and the numbers of the bank accounts of the grant
recipients. All these documents must be translated into Russian.  The officials can refuse the philanthropists
if they consider that the goals of the research conflict with the Russian
legislation or do not correspond with the established priorities for the
development of science and technology. The right to work without the permission
of the Ministry of Science & Education is retained for 13 organizations,
including six agencies and organizations of the United Nations, particular
European and intergovernmental associations (the Council of Ministers of the
Northern Countries, the Council of States of the Baltic Sea) and the
Intergovernmental Foundation of Humanitarian Cooperation of the CIS.  Earlier, academic institutions had been
removed from the list of organizations affected by the law on 'foreign agents.'
This government decree now puts academics receiving financing from abroad on an
equal footing with organizations registered as 'foreign agents.' Experts asked
by HRO.org said that they expect that prosecutors will visit academic
institutions that are recipients of grants, and that there will be more
prosecutions of academics.
 
http://hro.rightsinrussia.info/hro-org/academicfreedom-1
-----
 
Prosecutors say more than 50 kinds of NGO
activity are 'political'
HRO.org, 19 May 2013
 
On the basis of more than 30 warnings issued
by prosecutors to NGOs under the law on 'foreign agents', the human rights
organization Agora has counted more than 50 kinds of activity that have been
classified as 'political.'   Pavel
Chikov, director of Agora, told Vedomosti that 'all socially useful activities'
have been classified as political activity, including legal consultations for
those who took part in protests in December 2011 and the publication of a
leaflet such as 'The International LGBT Movement: From Local Specifics to
Global Policy.'  In general, Pavel Chikov
concludes, coming forward with any initiative can be considered political
activity, from making recommendations to the authorities to the holding of
demonstrations.  Chikov says that the
label 'foreign agent' can be applied to any active NGO. For this reason, Chikov
supports the proposal by the Presidential Council on Human Rights that the criterion
'political activity' be excluded from the definition of a 'foreign agent', and
that the sole criterion be the presence or absence of foreign funding.  Rosbalt news agency reports that recently the
Presidential Human Rights Council held a special session on the NGO inspections
being conducted in Russia. The results of the session have been published by
the Council. This points out that starting in March 2013 in many regions of
Russia the prosecutors have been conducting mass inspections of non-profit organizations.
The Human Rights Council states that the inspections have already affected
several thousand NGOs, including groups that have won wide recognition for
their work in the areas of human rights, the environment, research, education,
sport, religion and other areas.  In
particular, the report states that these inspections have been carried out in
violation of the established law regulating oversight by federal bodies of the
work of NGOs.
 
http://hro.rightsinrussia.info/hro-org/foreignagents-49
-----
 
Russians become calmer about Pussy Riot
ITAR-TASS
May 20, 2013
 
Russians' attitude towards the Pussy Riot
girls' punk band has become calmer, the Izvestia newspaper writes. The number
of citizens who believe that the girls got their prison term fairly has
decreased over the past year by 22 percent.
According to the Yuri Levada Analytical
Centre, over the past year Russians have become more tolerant towards the Pussy
Riot band and the action of its members in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.
Last September, the verdict of Moscow's
Khamovnichesky Court that sentenced Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Mariya Alyokhina
and Yekaterina Samutsevich to two years in prison, was supported by 78 percent
of the survey participants. And 43 percent of those polled thought that the
sentence was too lenient.
Over this period, the number of supporters of
the prison term for them has decreased by 22 percent - in April 2013 only 56
percent of respondents agreed with the court decision. At the same time, the
number of those who think that the punishment is excessive or see no crime
components in the actions similar to those staged by the group has increased
significantly. If last September 14 percent of the respondents regarded the
punishment for the girls "excessive," then this April their number
was 26 percent. And the number of those who believe that radical performances'
participants should not be brought to criminal liability increased from 2 to 9
percent.
Deputy Director of the Levada Centre Alexei
Grazhdankin believes that the softening of the attitude of Russians towards the
punk performance participants at Moscow's Christ the Saviour Cathedral is
logical.
"The confrontation and scandal are gone,
and the people have a calmer and more sober view on the events. When the
problem is ideologised and politicised, the severity of assessments and
inclination to the most extreme and harsh measures is always growing," the
sociologist said.
Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samutsevich
believes that people are gradually getting rid of the influence of television
propaganda.
"There is much less noise now, the
harassment campaign, which was at the time of the trial, has practically ended.
And maybe people are not influenced any more by television. They have a more
sober outlook on the situation," she says.
Chairman of the Synodal Department of the
Russian Orthodox Church for public relations Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin
believes that Russians have forgotten the severity of the offense committed by
Pussy Riot.
"I think the disgusting nature of the
committed act has been forgotten. Forgotten partly because the society and then
the state have given a tough response to this action and made sure that nothing
like this happens again. Therefore, everything was done correctly, we can
defend our shrines, our society is morally healthy," said the cleric.
Deputy Secretary of the General Council of the
United Russia party Sergei Zheleznyak agrees with him.
"The peculiarity of human memory is to
forget the bad. The situation with Pussy Riot has become less relevant and now
it is easier for people to be complacent," he said.
 
http://www.itar-tass.com/en/c142/741764.html
----
 
Patriarch Kirill tells CoE's secretary general
same-sex marriage sinful
Interfax-Religion, May 21, 2013
 
Moscow, May 21, Interfax - The Russian
Orthodox Church will always insist on the depravity of same-sex
"marriages", Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia said.
"If people choose such lifestyle, this is their right but the Church's
responsibility is to say that this is a sin in the face of God," the
patriarch said on Tuesday at a meeting with the Council of Europe's Secretary
General Thorbjorn Jagland.
Patriarch Kirill said that the Russian Orthodox Church was concerned with the
fact that "the sin is justified by law for the first time in the entire
history of mankind."
The patriarch told Jagland that the Russian Orthodox Church was "very
touched" that millions French were opposed to the legalization of same-sex
marriage and was "shocked no one listened to the opinions of these
millions and the Senate passed this law with several votes."
 
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=10476
-----
 
Russians favor authoritarian leaders - poll
Anna Arutunyan
The Moscow News, May 22, 2013
 
Some of Russia's most authoritarian leaders
are the most popular, according to a recent poll by the Levada Center, with
Leonid Brezhnev, Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin leading the list.
By contrast, reformers like Mikhail Gorbachev
and Boris Yeltsin were the most disliked, according to the poll, published
Wednesday in the Kommersant daily.
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled from
1964 until his death in 1982, came in first with 56 percent of respondents
saying they had a positive view of him. Brezhnev was associated with a
tightening of political repressions after the thaw of his predecessor, Nikita
Khrushchev. He was also associated with what is widely referred to as an era of
stagnation on the one hand, and stability on the other.
Stalin, who oversaw one of the most repressive
periods in Russia's history, followed with 50 percent of respondents viewing
him favorably. "Although no one would want to live in the Stalin era, he
stands for what's lacking today - justice and equality in fear,"
Kommersant quoted Valery Solovei, a professor of the Moscow State Institute of
International Relations.
Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II, was viewed
favorably by 48 percent of respondents.
By contrast, 66 percent viewed Gorbachev
negatively (for Yeltsin that number was 64 percent), a figure that experts
linked with the breakup of the Soviet Union which he oversaw.
Experts pointed to a trend where harsh,
authoritarian leaders were viewed more favorably than those who ruled during
periods of increased freedom.
"Associating [President Vladimir] Putin
with Brezhnev is not dishonorable for the government," Solovei added.
 
http://themoscownews.com/russia/20130522/191535253/Russians-favor-authoritarian-leaders---poll.html
----
 
Ecuadorian
Forward Tries to Ignore Russian Football Racism
RIA-Novosti, May 22, 2013
 
MOSCOW, May 22 (R-Sport) - Lokomotiv Moscow
forward Felipe Caicedo has told R-Sport he tries to block out racist chants at
Russian football stadiums.
"I try not to notice these things, not to
react in any way," said the 24-year-old Ecuadorian. "It's not easy
because you are agitated during the game and the smallest thing can throw you
off the balance, but I try so it doesn't bug me."
Caicedo is completing his second season in
Russian football after joining Lokomotiv from Manchester City in 2011, and has
scored 18 times in all competitions since.
The forward is already accustomed to ingrained
xenophobia in the Russian game.
"Yes, I often encountered racism,
especially when the team is not playing very well or during away matches,"
Caicedo said.
But he added: "I think the opponents'
fans always demonstrate racism towards any player, and not only black, but white
as well."
Lokomotiv was plunged into scandal in March
2012, when a fan threw a banana at the Anzhi Makhachkala defender Christopher
Samba at the team's stadium in northwest Moscow.
Last season, similar incidents happened twice
with ex-Brazil international Roberto Carlos, though at different locations.
Earlier this season, Zenit St. Petersburg came
under attack after their main fan club published a manifesto calling for an
outright ban on the club signing black or gay players.
Officials are keen to eliminate the problem
ahead of the 2018 World Cup, when Russia will host the event for the first
time.
 
http://en.rian.ru/sports/20130522/181296185/Ecuadorian-Forward-Tries-to-Ignore-Russian-Football-Racism.html
-----
 
Radical Islamism is the most real threat to
Russia - General Kulikov
Interfax-Religion, May 22, 2013
 
Russia has no honest allies in issues relating
to the prevention of aggressive Islamism
Moscow, May 22, Interfax - Radical Islamism is now present in 55 regions of
Russia, General Anatoly Kulikov, former interior minister of Russia and
president of the Russian Military Commanders Club, said at the conference
Islamism and National Security of Russia held on Wednesday.
"Of all existing threats, the most real threat to Russia is radical
political Islam, or Islamism, which has declared a jihad in our country,"
Kulikov told the conference.
Kulikov recalled that "Islamist centers have been at war with us since the
time the Soviet contingent was brought to Afghanistan."
"They assisted the Dudayev regime in Chechnya and they now continue
helping the extremists in the Northern Caucasus with money, weapons,
instructors and people, and they are ready to continue the war on the entire
territory of the country," Kulikov said.
"The ways in which the role of Islamism is disseminated or increased on
our territory is comparable to the way in which the West promotes its
democratic values (interference in the internal affairs of other countries, use
of force), and therefore it appears that further tolerance of radical movements
has nothing to do with freedom of religion," Kulikov said.
Kulikov believes that "Russia has no honest allies in issues relating to
the prevention of aggressive Islamism." 
"The entire fight against terrorism in the Northern Caucasus showed that.
Terrorists, ideologists, and Islamist adepts find secure shelter in countries
with so-called ancient democracies, even in cases when these democracies come
under terrorist attacks," Kulikov said.
Kulikov said he is convinced that among the factors that influenced the spread
of radical Islamism in Russia is "the overpopulation of many regions of
Russia by migrants."
General Anatoly Kulikov was previously commander of the United Group of Troops
in the Northern Caucasus and interior minister of Russia.
 
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=10483
-----
 
CoE secretary general urges Russia to protect
gay rights to demonstrations, freedom of speech (updated)
Interfax, 22 May 2013
 
Moscow - The Russian authorities should ensure
the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community's rights, such as the
right of expression, including by means of demonstrations, which is among the
principal provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, Council of
Europe (CoE) Secretary General Thorbjorn Jagland said at a press conference at
the Interfax main office on Wednesday.
Members of the LGBT community should have the same rights as other people in
terms of holding demonstrations, expressing their views and so on, but the
Council of Europe is not calling for granting the LGBT community some special
rights, Jagland said.
The Council of Europe is also calling on the Russian State Duma to not pass
legislation banning the propaganda of homosexuality among the underage.
Jagland said that his position on the issue is clear and that he had earlier
forwarded a letter to the State Duma chairman, urging him not to pass the said
legislation in the second reading.
It is important that any bill on this issue, as well as any other, not
undermine the fundamental principle of freedom of speech, he said.
 
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=10480
----
 
Russian police raid homes of leftist activists
The Moscow News/RIA Novosti, May 23, 2013
 
Police carried out searches on Thursday at the
homes of two members of Russia's Left Front movement, which played a key role
in last year's mass protests against the rule of President Vladimir Putin.
Police detained Vasily Kuzmin, head of the
Moscow branch of Left Front, and raided the home of Denis Kuraishi, a former
bodyguard for the movement's leader, Sergei Udaltsov, who has been under house
arrest since February, rights groups said.
A lawyer for the RosUznik rights group said
Kuzmin had been detained by officers and taken to the offices of the
Investigation Committee for questioning.
A spokesperson for the rights organization For
Human Rights said Kuraishi was not at home when the raid took place, but that
social services had removed his two children without informing him where they
were being taken.
Kuraishi was reported by Russia's online
lenta.ru news portal as saying the raid was connected to the ongoing
investigation into clashes between police and protesters on the eve of Putin's
inauguration for a controversial third presidential term.
Over 650 people were detained at a May 6, 2012
rally on Moscow's Bolotnaya Square. Most were soon released, but a case soon
followed into what investigators called mass riots. The riot allegations are
hotly disputed by the opposition, which blames the police for provoking the
clashes and claims the case is political.
Investigators on Wednesday concluded their
probe into the cases of twelve people charged over the disturbances and court
hearings are expected to begin in June.
Udaltsov and two other activists were accused
last fall of conspiring with a Georgian politician to organize nationwide
disturbances, including the Bolotnaya Square unrest, with the aim of toppling
Putin. The charges were brought after a pro-Kremlin TV channel aired what it
said was secretly recorded footage of the alleged plotters.
One of the men charged with the plot,
Konstantin Lebedev, a former member of a pro-Kremlin youth group who went over
to the opposition in 2004, pled guilty to the charges and was jailed for two
and a half years last month. 
Udaltsov and the other activist, Leonid
Razvozzhayev - who has been in custody since October - deny the charges, which
carry a maximum sentence of ten years behind bars. The Georgian politician
allegedly featured in the footage, Givi Targamadze, denies ever meeting the
activists. Georgia, which fought a brief war with Russia in 2008, has said it
will not extradite him to Moscow.
 
http://themoscownews.com/news/20130523/191538478/Russian-police-raid-homes-of-leftist-activists.html
----
 
FMS plans to limit inflow of migrants from CIS
countries to Russia
ITAR-TASS, May 23, 2013
 
According to the Federal Migration Service's
data, one of every five crimes in Moscow is committed by non-residents. It
became known at the FMS board meeting on Wednesday that Russia intends to
tighten up the immigration laws. A proposal was presented to oblige CIS
citizens to receive an invitation to arrive in the Russian Federation. Experts
believe it will not complicate life of illegal migrants.
According to FMS chief Konstantin
Romodanovsky, guests from Tajikistan, Moldova and Uzbekistan are most often
among those in reports about crimes committed by immigrants, the Moskovsky
Komsomolets notes. The number of crimes committed by them in the capital has
risen catastrophically -- by 42 percent. They committed about 2,400 crimes in
three months last year and about 3,500 during the same period of this year. The
number of serious crimes increased by 72 percent. They have begun to commit
more crimes as members of organized groups -- 5.5 times more often.
"We have created all the prerequisites
for legal presence of people -- work permits, licenses. But if people remain in
shadow and do not want to live under our rules, perhaps, there must be other
approaches, but not amnesty. We close entry for offenders, and rather
intensively," the Rossiiskaya Gazeta quotes Romodanovsky as saying. As
speaker said at the FMS meeting on Wednesday, entry to Russia is closed for 53,000
migrants since the beginning of this year. A draft law is in the State Duma,
calling to extend the period to ban entry for offenders -- five years for one
offence and ten years for repeated violations.
Head of the "Migration and Law"
information and legal centre Gavkhar Dzhurayev believes invitations will not
help the authorities to solve the problem of illegals, but just increase the
number of intermediaries who make money on migrants, the Kommersant notes.
There are already corruption circles around them at present - -beginning from
persons at railway stations who sell permits and ending with officials and
leaders of diasporas who create shadow business on this. If invitations are
introduces, all will invite, but for money -- from suddenly appearing relatives
and to firms inviting to have a walk around Moscow, Dzhurayev said. Meanwhile,
tightening of entry regulations for migrants may also serve for other purpose -
the European Union has repeatedly demanded that Russia must close the borders
with CIS countries before beginning talks about visa-free travel to Europe for
Russian citizens.
 
http://www.itar-tass.com/en/c142/746122.html
----
 
Protestors against residence registration
rules summoned for questioning 
HRO.org, 24 May 2013
 
Five participants in a protest action on Red
Square against the law on residence registration ('propiska') held on 18 March
have been summoned to Moscow police department for questioning as witnesses.
Summonses for 22 and 27 May were sent to Gennady Stroganov, Vladimir Michurin,
Oleg Prudnikov, Aleksey Nikitin and Anastasia Zinovkina.  According to Stroganov's Facebook page,
police handed them the summonses in Special Detention Centre No. 1, where all
five have been serving terms in prison for an anti-government protest held on
Moscow's Tverskaya Street on 9 May entitled 'Death to the Kremlin
Occupiers'.  Detective Aleksander Zotov
and Police Captain Sergey Gladkov had initially planned to speak to the
activists without summonses. The arrested individuals were told that some human
rights defenders wanted to have a word with each of them, but the ruse did not
work, writes Stroganov. After this, Zotov and Gladkov appeared in chambers,
having assured that they would enter the refusal to give testimony under
Article 51 of the Constitution on every record. Yet still the activists refused
to answer any questions without summonses, reveals Grani.ru.  A few hours later, the police returned with
the summonses, none of which specified the case number. Once Zotov had entered
the number by hand, four of the activists agreed to accept the summonses, but
Zinovkina refused to sign one, and the document was served on her in the
presence of witnesses.  Stroganov,
Prudnikov and Nikitin, who had been summoned for questioning on 22 May, were
freed the night before. The Main Internal Affairs Directorate agreed to
postpone the questioning until 27 May, on account of the fact that the
activists had not had the chance to make arrangements with their lawyers. The
management of the special detention centre did not allow them to make a phone
call. 13 participants of the 'Death to the Kremlin Invaders' protest action on
Tverskaya Street were given terms ranging from 10 to 15 days for
"disobeying orders by the police", whilst in the special detention
centre activists held a collective hunger strike.  The case regarding the protest action on Red
Square was initiated on 20 March under Part 2, Article 213, of the Criminal
Code ("hooliganism committed by a group of persons in a preliminary
conspiracy or an organised group, connected with resistance to a representative
of authority or to any other person who fulfills the duty of protecting the
public order or who prevents violation of the public order"). The maximum
punishment given under this part of the Article is seven years'
imprisonment.  The Office of the Public
Prosecutor for the Central Administrative District of Moscow has authorised
that criminal proceedings be commenced. "It has been established that on
18 March 2013 on Red Square a group of young people held an unauthorised
picket, which involved the use of obscene language and placards bearing
corresponding phrases. When the police attempted to stop this breach of the
peace, picketers resisted law enforcement officers, using lit flares as
weapons," said a statement by the press office.  14 members of the protest action against the
Law on Registration were arrested on 18 March in Red Square in Moscow.
 
http://hro.rightsinrussia.info/hro-org/residence-6
-----
 
Russian Foreign Ministry says U.S. State
Department's religious freedom report politicized
Interfax, May 24, 2013 
 
Moscow - The 2012 international religious
freedom report of the U.S. State Department has been done superficially and
does not reflect the objective situation, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
"We are to conclude that the U.S. State Department has again presented a
contorted and politicized picture of the situation in the religious freedom
sphere in the recently released annual international religious freedom report
for 2012, having substituted deep analysis of reasons for religious intolerance
with superficial accusations against a number of countries, including Russia,"
Russian Foreign Ministry's special envoy on human rights, democracy and
supremacy of law Konstantin Dolgov said in a comment posted on the ministry's
website.
Dolgov said that the indisputable progress achieved in preserving and enhancing
the inter-religious peace had been ignored in regard to Russia.
The situation in this sphere in the U.S. remained outside the criticism as
usual, he said.
The comment said that according to the report of the Tel Aviv University and
the European Jewish Congress on anti-Semitism in the world in 2012 and review
of main tendencies, the U.S. is the second in the world on the number of
anti-Semitism incidents, 99, recorded in countries with numerous Jewish
citizens.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said that other Western countries, pretending to
have full implementation of religious freedoms and having received high
evaluations in the U.S. State Department's report, were no better.
U.S. non-governmental organizations are concerned with the conditions of U.S.
Muslims, accounting for around 18% populations of the country. Special services
and law enforcement authorities of the U.S. are consistently implementing the
policy of total control over Muslim communities and certain preachers, up to
legalizing out-of-court executions abroad using air drones. 
"We suppose that regardless of announced goals, such biased opuses lead to
aggravation of inter-religious problems. Not politicized leaflets, but
inter-confessional dialog and respected attitude to traditional humanistic
values common of all world religions are needed to solve them," the
statement said.
 
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=10488
----
 
About 45 detained during gay-homophobe
punch-up in Moscow
Interfax, May 27, 2013 
 
Moscow - Gay rights activists came to blows
with homophobes in Moscow's so-called "Hyde Park" on Saturday, with
about 15 people being detained by police, a spokesman for the city police
authority said.
All the detainees were taken to police stations, the spokesman told Interfax.
"Hyde Park" is an area near Moscow's Gorky Park.
There were other arrests on Saturday during an abortive gay rights parade in
the center of the Russian capital that had not been permitted by the city
administration.
"About 30 followers and opponents of the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender
[LGBT] movement have been detained in the city center for various violations of
public order, including an attempt to hold an unsanctioned event," a
spokesman for the city police authority told Interfax.
 
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=10492
----
 
Russian Government Supports Tightening 'Anti-Extremism'
Laws 
Hro.org, 28 May 2013
 
A commission of the Russian government has
supported a bill to increase punishments for crimes of 'extremism', the website
of the Cabinet of Ministers states. It is not yet known when the bill will be
sent to the State Duma for consideration. Nor is it known at present what
changes are foreseen to the Criminal Code.  The website of the cabinet of Ministers states that changes are proposed
to the following articles of the Criminal Code: Article 280 ("Public calls
to commit extremist activities"), Article 282 ("Incitement of enmity
or hatred, or degrading human dignity"), Article 282.1 ("Organization
of an extremist group") and Article 282.2 ("Organization of the
activity of an extremist organization").  The bill has been developed by the Ministry of Justice. The Ministry's
April report on its legislative drafting, the bill to increase the punishments
for crimes of an "extremist" nature was finalized in March. The draft
was sent to the government with a letter classified as "For official use
only".  Currently the minimum penalty
for the most widely used "anti-extremism" article - Article 282 - is
a fine of 100,000 roubles; and the maximum penalty is deprivation of freedom
for a period of five years, Lenta.ru reports.  The opposition has on several occasions demanded the removal of Article
282 from the Criminal Code. Opponents of the article argue that it is used to
suppress civil society activists. Under this and other "anti-extremism"
articles the supporters of the now-banned National Bolshevik Party of Eduard
Limonov have been regularly convicted.
 
http://hro.rightsinrussia.info/archive/anti-extremism/legislation/penalties
-----
 
Russian government seeks stricter penalties
for extremism
Moscow News, May 28, 2013
 
A Russian government commission has approved a
draft law increasing criminal punishments for extremism-related crimes and
wrongdoing by religious organizations, seeking stiffer penalties for an
existing controversial extremism law.
"The government legislation commission
has approved for consideration a draft law establishing a legal basis for
neutralizing the destructive activities of religious organizations in Russia,"
the Cabinet said in an official statement posted on its site.
Larger fines and longer prison terms will be
handed down for offences under several articles of the Criminal Code, including
those relating to destructive activity by religious organizations, extremist
activity, and inciting hate crimes as well as organizing an extremist group.
Other offences facing tougher penalties include publicly calling for extremist
activity, and promoting hate crimes, the cabinet said in a statement.
The draft law also proposes tougher
punishments including community service for public calls for extremist
activity, public or media-broadcast statements containing hatred, or causing
damage to human dignity with sexual, racial, national, linguistic or religious
characteristics.
The current maximum punishments listed in the
Criminal Code for the offences mentioned range from up to three to up to 10
years in prison as well as fines of up to 300,000 ($9,500) and 500,000 rubles
($16,000), depending on the nature of the crime. The statement did not specify
the new punishments proposed.
Previously introduced "anti-extremism
legislation" in Russia has been criticized by human rights advocates, who
claim it has often been used to clamp down on dissent rather than real threats
to public order, and say the definition of extremist is subject to the
interpretation of prosecutors and investigators.
Religious minority groups have also faced
prosecution in Russia for activities considered "extremist," or for publishing
"extremist publications."
In 2011, prosecutors in the city of Tomsk
tried to impose a ban on the Russian translation of "Bhagavad Gita As It
Is," written by the founder of the International Society for Krishna
Consciousness (ISKCON) A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, claiming that the
scripture promoted extremism. A court later ruled against the prosecutor's
case.
 
http://russialist.org/russian-government-seeks-stricter-penalties-for-extremism/
----
 
Residents and Migrants Clash Violently in
Suburb
Irina Titova
The St. Petersburg Times, Issue #1761, May 29,
2013
 
St. Petersburg investigators opened an
investigation following a fight between migrant workers and local residents
last Friday in the suburban village of Pargolovo. 
The case will investigate the accusations
surrounding reports of the violent assault, the website of the St. Petersburg
Investigation Committee said. 
The conflict began when three local men, under
the influence of alcohol, attacked a citizen of Tajik descent. The victim ran
to his dormitory to escape and the three attackers fled the scene. 
Later that night the same three men returned,
entering the victim's dormitory with two guns and physically assaulting the
migrants living there. One victim was later hospitalized, the Investigation
Committee stated. 
After leaving the dormitory, the suspects went
to a nearby soccer field and fired five times at a group of migrants returning
from work to their dormitory. 
One worker suffered minor injuries and was
later hospitalized. 
The three men are reported to be 32, 29 and 26
years old. Preliminary information claims the reason for the conflict stemmed
from an earlier argument between the men and the migrant workers. 
St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast police
ordered an increase in police patrols in Pargolovo to prevent any further
conflict, Interfax said. 
This is not the first reported attack on
migrant workers this month in St. Petersburg. On May 3, police detained a group
of people suspected of attacking migrant workers from Uzbekistan after one of
the victims was hospitalized with a head injury, Zaks.ru online portal said. 
Police have also reported fights between the
migrants themselves. In February, seven citizens of Uzbek descent fought in the
city, the result of a dispute over a woman. Two participants in the fight were
hospitalized with minor injuries, Baltinfo reported. 
The number of migrant workers in Russia
continues to grow every year, stoking resentment among a large part of Russia's
native population. However, experts say Russia needs migrant workers to keep
its economy developing since migrants often do the physically toughest, lowest
paid work. Migrants often agree to work in uncomfortable conditions and, even
though they are paid little for their work, it is enough to support their
families back home where incomes are extremely low. 
Searching for ways to make the life of migrant
workers in Russia safer and more comfortable, Russian authorities, including in
St. Petersburg, have organized Russian language courses for workers, who often
speak little to no Russian and are unaware of their rights. 
The number of foreign nationals coming to
Russia continues to rise, the Russian Federal Migration Service deputy head
Anatoly Kuznetsov said in March, adding that "compared with the same time
last year, the number of migrants entering the country has grown 14 percent." 
According to official FMS statistics, the
number of migrant workers in Russia is close to five million people, including
three million who are here illegally. 
Meanwhile, experts say the real figures are
much higher and may be closer to 10 million. According to the 2012
International Migration Outlook, issued last year by the Paris-based
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Russia is home to the
world's largest illegal migrant population, accounting for almost seven percent
of the country's workforce, RIA Novosti reported.
 
http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=37354
----
 
Abductions continue in Chechnya 
HRO.org, 29 May 2013
 
On 28 May a disturbing report reached Civic
Assistance Committee from Chechnya. Early in the morning on 22 May 2013 in the
village of Yandi in Achkhoi-Martan district, Grozny resident Beslan Baidulaev
was reported missing. The day before, 21 May, Baidulaev had arrived at his
family's country home in Yandi to do a number of tasks (including cutting hay,
and so on). In the evening he had had supper until late at his cousin's home,
and then left to sleep at his home. Early in the morning on 22 May, villagers
saw a large number of law enforcement officers outside his house. Baidulaev did
not return to Grozny on that day, nor has he done so since.   On 23 May, Baidulaev's relatives were
ordered to the Achkhoi-Martan district police station. There they were told
that on 22 May officials tried to arrest Baidulaev, but he escaped. The police
officers demanded that the relatives tell them Baidulaev's whereabouts, and
threatened to burn down their house if they did not. On 25 May, Baidulaev's
relatives were again called to the police station, where the officers repeated
their demands and threats.  Beslan
Baidulaev's relatives told Civic Assistance Committee that in 2009 Baidulaev
had been convicted on charges of aiding and abetting illegal armed groups. In
2010 after he had served his sentence, he returned to Grozny and began to live
a peaceful life. He married and he and his wife had two children. Each week he
reported to the local police officer.   His relatives are certain that Baidulaev had not had any contacts with
the underground, nor could he have run away as he was the only support of his
elderly father, who is ill, and is fully committed to looking after him.   Moreover, according to his relatives,
Baidulaev's house in Yandi village is in an open location. Baidulaev had no
weapons, and the neighbours heard no shots, and several dozen law enforcement
officers had been present at his arrest. In such circumstances, it seems
unlikely that Baidulaev would have run away.   Baidulaev's relatives fear that he has been abducted, and may be
subjected to torture to force him to give false testimony, or he is being illegally
detained in an unknown location so that, when his beard has grown, he may be
killed and it would be reported that the body was that of a member of an
illegal armed group. Police are reporting that he escaped in order to stop
relatives looking for him.   Many similar
instances indicate that the concerns of Beslan Baidulaev's relatives are not
groundless, Civic Assistance Committee reports.
 
http://hro.rightsinrussia.info/archive/NC/chechnya/baidulaev
-----
 
Pussy Riot's Alyokhina moved to prison
hospital over hunger strike
The Moscow News/RIA Novosti, May 29, 2013
 
Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina was
transfered to a medical unit in her prison colony after a week of hunger striking,
a representative of the federal penitentiary authority in the Perm Territory
told RIA Novosti on Wednesday.
He refused to comment on Alyokhina's health,
citing patient confidentiality.
Attorney Irina Khrunova told RIA Novosti that
regional human rights activists planned a visit on Wednesday to assess
conditions in the prison colony in the Urals town of Berezniki.
In February 2012, five young women wearing
brightly colored balaclavas staged a "punk-style" prayer in the
Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow. An edited video of their performance was
posted on the Internet and caused a public outcry.
In August 2012, the Khamovnichesky District
Court in Moscow sentenced Alyokhina and two other Pussy Riot members - Nadezhda
Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich - to two years in a prison settlement
for hooliganism.
In October 2012, the Moscow City Court changed
Samutsevich's verdict to a suspended sentence and released her immediately
based on her new attorneys' argument that she was seized by security guards
prior to reaching the altar.
Alyokhina's and Tolokonnikova's sentences were
upheld.
In April 2013, the Zubova Polyana District
Court in Mordovia rejected Tolokonnikova's request for parole.
Alyokhina began her hunger strike after being
barred from attending a parole hearing. Her request for parole was rejected by
the Berezniki court on May 23.
 
http://themoscownews.com/politics/20130529/191558102/Pussy-Riots-Alyokhina-moved-to-prison-hospital-over-hunger.html
----
 
Spartak fined for fans' monkey chants
The Moscow News, May 29, 2013 
 
Spartak Moscow have been fined 500,000 rubles
($15,900) by the Russian FA for racist chanting by their fans, while the victim
of the abuse received a two-game ban for swearing at the supporters.
The sanctions relate to Spartak's 2-0 win over
Alania Vladikavkaz on Sunday, in which Alania's Ivorian defender Dacosta Goore
was sent off after six minutes for an obscene gesture at Spartak fans who
racially abused him.
"For insults by the spectactors,
imitation of the habits of a primate, toward the Alania FC player Dacosta for
the reason of racial characteristics and the color of his skin, [Spartak are fined]
500,000 rubles," Russian FA disciplinary commission chairman Artur
Grigoryants said.
Goore has been banned for two top-flight games
for the gesture, a sanction he is unlikely to serve since Alania have been
relegated, and also fined 50,000 rubles ($1,590), the FA said in a website
statement.
As well as the fine for the racist abuse,
Spartak has been fined 200,000 rubles for firework-throwing by their fans and
another 100,000 rubles for abuse of Alania coach Valery Gazzaev.
Sunday was the last day of the Russian Premier
League season. Spartak secured fourth place and a spot in the Europa League,
while Alania finished 16th and last.
 
http://themoscownews.com/sports/20130529/191558554/Spartak-fined-for-fans-monkey-chants.html
----
 
State Duma to discuss measures to prevent
adoption of Russian children by same-sex couples
Interfax, May 29, 2013
 
Moscow - An expanded meeting of the Russian
State Duma's committees on family, women's and children's affairs and on
international affairs will be held on June 3 and deputies will discuss
legislative measures to prevent adoption of Russian orphans and children
without parental custody by same-sex couples.
"It is planned to consider during the meeting issues of implementing
existing international agreements on adoption as well as prospects of
concluding other similar agreements between Russia and other countries,"
the press office of the committee on family, women's and children's affairs
told Interfax.
The adoption cooperation agreement concluded between Russia and France will be
discussed separately amid the passing of the law on same-sex marriages in
France allowing same-sex couples to adopt children. As of now, this agreement
was ratified by Russia alone until July 28, 2012.
"A French delegation is planned to participate in the meeting. It refers
to non-governmental organizations' representatives, who participated in
manifestations in France against passing this law allowing same-sex marriages
in the country," the press office said.
State Duma deputies, education and science ministry and Supreme Court's
officials and children's rights commissioner have been invited to the meeting
as well.
 
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=10503
----
 
Migrant workers unwelcome in Moscow - Mayor
The Moscow News/RIA Novosti, May 30, 2013
 
Migrant workers from Central Asia should not
be encouraged to remain in Russia, Moscow City Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in an
interview with Moskovskiye Novosty newspaper on Thursday.
"People who speak Russian badly and who
have a different culture are better off living in their own country. Therefore,
we do not welcome their adaptation in Moscow," he said in an interview
during which he also expressed hostility towards the idea of ethnic ghettos.
"Moscow is a Russian city and it should remain that way. It's not Chinese,
not Tajik and not Uzbek."
The Russian capital, like the country as a
whole, depends heavily on migrant labor, but there is widespread opposition in
many areas of society to higher levels of immigration.
Sobyanin also said he was against the
formation of ethnic ghettoes in Moscow, and that people of different races
should be encouraged to live side by side.
"To mark them [ethnic groups] out as
separate, to set off different cultures against each other, is very dangerous
and simply explosive, especially for our city," he said.
There are around 5 million migrant workers in
Russia of which about 3 million are illegal, the Federal Migration Service said
in March. Russia has the world's largest number of illegal migrants, accounting
for almost seven percent of the country's working population, according to a
2012 report by the OECD.
Russia passed a law in December 2012 requiring
a mandatory minimum level of ability in the Russian language for migrant
workers in certain professions including retail and public services.
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Dmitry
Medvedev said Russia needed to look again at its migration legislation. "We
need to turn migration into a manageable process," he said.
The inflow of migrant workers is a trend that
is "neither positive nor negative; it's just life," he added.
 
http://themoscownews.com/local/20130530/191560550/Migrant-workers-unwelcome-in-Moscow---Mayor.html
----
 
Government advisors protest Russian 'Foreign
Agent' law
The Moscow News/ RIA Novosti, May 30, 2013
 
A group of leading Russian economists has
called on the government to reconsider a controversial new law that obliges
some NGOs to register as "foreign agents," saying it threatens to
destroy the cooperation between independent experts and the authorities.
The letter written by the economists, many of
whom were involved in devising a strategy for Russia's economic development
through 2020 and act as expert advisors to the government, was published in
Vedomosti newspaper on Thursday. Russia passed a new law in November obliging
all NGOs involved in political activities and receiving any funding from abroad
to register as "foreign agents."
"The wave of inspections [of NGOs] by
prosecutors checking their adherence to the foreign agents law included many
analysis centers and the Association of Independent Centers of Economic
Analysis. It showed that any NGO receiving funding from abroad and involved in
anything remotely connected to politics is at risk," the economists wrote,
referring to checks carried out at hundreds of NGOs earlier this year.
The letter's authors echoed earlier complaints
by NGOs over the term "foreign agent," protesting the use of the term
"agent" in connection with research and study organizations, and
arguing that following the prosecutors' logic, nearly every expert analysis
organization is comprised of foreign agents.
"We have always acted in the interests of
our country (and are certainly not spies), and therefore registering as foreign
agents would be [an act of] self-denunciation that we cannot commit," the
analysts wrote.
They also warned that further pressure from
law enforcement bodies would lead to the closure of research centers and a
decline in the quality of economic analysis, and could have serious
consequences for Russia's economy.
"There has already been a period in the
history of our country when economics and economic analysis was fully
controlled by the state," they wrote. "The consequence of this
control and ideological blinkers was incompetent decisions in economic policy.
How it all ended for Soviet economics is well known."
The economists' appeal to the government came
the same day that a respected Russian independent pollster, Levada Center, said
it would stop working on research projects commissioned by foreign
organizations because of the new law.
"We are not ceasing to accept foreign
funding, but we are stopping work on projects commissioned by foreign
organizations until the issue  of whether publishing sociological research
can be classified as political activity is resolved," said Alexei
Grazhdankin, deputy director of the Levada Center, which was told to register
as a foreign agent by prosecutors earlier this month following an inspection.
He added that the center was not launching new
projects or taking new orders for research from the organizations the
Prosecutor's Office had warned them against working with, such as the Soros
Foundation, the New York-based Ford Foundation and other Western institutions.
Last week, the Levada Center said in a
statement on its website that prosecutors had suggested that publication of its
surveys "influences public opinion and therefore does not constitute
research but political activity," meaning it is required to register as a "foreign
agent."
Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada Center,
said the organization's research projects, whether commissioned or undertaken
at its own behest, have nothing to do with "political activity."
In late April, election monitoring NGO Golos
was fined 300,000 rubles (around $10,000) by a Moscow court for failing to
register as a "foreign agent," in the first case of an NGO facing
administrative penalties following the introduction of the law.
The new law has also subsequently been applied
to NGOs involved in apparently non-political activity such as wildlife
conservation and public health issues.
The Russian government insists the
controversial law was necessary to prevent foreign meddling in the political
system.
 
http://themoscownews.com/politics/20130530/191560814/Government-advisors-protest-Russian-Foreign-Agent-law.html 
--------------------
 
Russian Church criticizes EU for forcing anti-Christian
norms on Europe
Interfax, 31 May, 2013 
 
Moscow - The Moscow Patriarchate is concerned
that the administration of the European Union has taken an ultra-liberal stance
on moral issues.
"Unfortunately, the administration of the European Union has recently
taken anti-church and anti-Christian positions on some issues,"
Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, head of the Moscow Patriarchate
Department for External Church Relations, told a briefing in Moscow on Friday.
As an example, Metropolitan Hilarion mentioned the processes taking place in
the UK and France, "where laws making same-sex unions equal to traditional
marriage are being passed despite mass protests."
"These processes alarm us very much. The EU administration is forcing
anti-Christian norms on all EU countries. Some countries manage to repel these
attacks, and some can't," he said.
Metropolitan Hilarion believes the conflict of ideologies "which is now
present in the EU countries and which was caused by artificial forcing of some
anti-Christian norms on the entire population of the EU will resonate in
different countries in various forms."
 
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=10509
----
 
Bodies of More Than 200 Stalinist Purge
Victims Discovered 
The Moscow Tımes, Issue 5138, May 31, 2013 
 
The remains of 208 people believed
to have been victims of the Stalinist purges have been discovered
by a search team near Voronezh, Interfax reported Friday.
Members of the Don Search Team, who were
responsible for uncovering the bodies, said that the executions
were almost certainly carried out during the most grievous months
of the Great Terror, between January and February, 1938.
An anthropological investigation will now
be carried out on the remains in a bid to compare any biological
data with archival records.
Since the collapse of the Soviet
Union, a number of research groups have sought to find
and honor the victims of political repression, as well as
conducting proper burials for unknown fallen soldiers.
 
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/bodies-of-more-than-200-stalinist-purge-victims-discovered/480903.html
==============================
 

II SURVEYS, ANALYSES,
COMMENTS


Russia Threatened by Hidden Disintegration in
North Caucasus and Middle Volga, Remizov Says
By Paul Goble
Window on Eurasia, May 15 2013
 
Because of the disintegration of the USSR and
the two post-Soviet Chechen wars, Russians are especially sensitive to anything
resembling separatism, but they have paid less aattention to "another
dimension of the collapse of statehood" - the loss of the basic
prerogatives of state power over portions of the country, according to a new
study. But the loss of these prerogatives, including "the supremacy of its
jurisdiction everywhere in the country, support for basic standards in the
shere of law and security a certain level of loyalty and solidarity, [and] a
monopoly on legitimate force," exist in Russia today, are "no less
dangerous than territorial" challenges and can "in the final analysis
grow into [them]."  That is the
conclusion of a 54-page report on "The Map of Ethno-Religioius Threats:
The North Caucasus and the Volga Region" prepared by the Moscow Institute
for National Strategy (apn.ru/userdata/files/ethno/Ethnodoc-new-full-sm.pdf),
and discussed by the institute's leader, Mikhail Remizov, in "Nezavisimaya
gazeta" (ng.ru/ideas/2013-05-14/5_ethnoreligion.html).   Among the most important indications of this
hidden disintegration are "the de facto falling out of the legal space of
Russia of a number of regions," such as Chechnya, Ingushetia, and
Daghestan and especially "the de facto formation of systems of organized
force not under the control of the Federal Center."  A second is the rise of ethnocracies "in
practically all and even the most well-off republics of the Russian Federation
and a tendency toward legal particularism" in places like Tatarstan,
Bashkortostan, Sakha and Tuva. Because in most cases, "behind the national
question stands the property question," that trend is especially
serious.      A third indication is the
rapid spread of radical political Islamism, which now offers an alternative
arrangement to society territorially, ethnically and socially and which has
penetrated not only organized criminal groups but even parts of the state
administration. A major contributing factor to this development is massive
immigration from Central Asia.      And a
fourth is the rise of ethnic stereotypes on both sides which promote the
further radicalization of the population, especially among the young.  Unfortunately, Remizov says, "the
authorities continue to struggle with the symptoms of this tension and not with
its systemic causes."      A major
reason for this is that "the arsenal of the federal authorities to counter
such threats is extremely limited." For example, they have bet on "traditional
Islam," something that has proved a weak reed in and of itself and a
strategy that its opponents view as a sign of weakness and yet another chance
for them to spread their influence.  But
even more important in this regard is the failure of Russians to recognize that
Russia faces a threat from pan-Islamism because of "a crisis of the Russian
state itself."  If the state were
fulfilling its functions, the threat from political Islamism would be
significantly less than it now is.  But
instead of addressing those shortcomings, Remizov says, the government is
making the situation worse by its clumsy efforts to combat extremism by force
alone or by throwing money at the problem, something its opponents are all too
ready and able to divert to support their own plans and add to the existing
level of instability.      Unfortunately,
he writes, this year is an especially bad time because "the period of the
preparation and conduct of the Olympic Games in Sochi is a time of heightened
ethnopolitcal risk and forced concessions by the Federal Center which not only
prevents the taking of decisions but even the consideration of serious
problems."  To counter this
development, Remizov makes a number of specific proposals: better coordination
among government agencies, greater support for local civil society, heightened
respect for traditional political groups like the Cossacks, appointment of
stronger officials to oversee the region, and shifting Stavropol kray out of
the North Caucasus FD.  But "the
main thing" Moscow has to do is to understand and act upon the basic
physics of political "gravity."  Russia has an ethnic core: it consists of ethnic Russians, and they have
no one to support them besides the Federal government.  Moscow must thus act on their behalf to hold
the country together.  In the North
Caucasus, that means "strengthening the perimeter of rhe frontline ethnic
Russian regions" because only if things go well will "a 'recolonization'
of the Caucasus in the course of modernization of its economy" be
possible. And in the Middle Volga, Moscow must ensure that Russians stop
leaving but stay where they are to hold that region for Russia.
 
http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.de/2013/05/window-on-eurasia-russia-threatened-by.html
--------------------
 
Ethnic Abaza React to Rising Karachai
Nationalism 
By Valery Dzutsev 
Eurasia Daily Monitor,  May 15, 2013
 
On May 3, groups of Karachay and Abaza youth
clashed in Karachaevo-Cherkessia. According to a member of the Abaza
organization, Janibek Kuzhev, the fight took place in the village of Psyzh in
Abazin district of Karachaevo-Cherkessia. As Karachay youth tried to
intimidatingly drive through the village in 30 cars, the Abaza youth blocked
their way, not allowing them to pass. The Karachays, celebrating the Day of
Karachay People's Revival, had reportedly attempted to enter the village at
midnight. The Abaza activists said that last year the Karachay youth entered
their village late at night and chanted provocative nationalist slogans. This
year, as young people on both sides prepared for the encounter, the incident
led to a confrontation and reverted to a fistfight that was stopped by the
police (http://www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/223785/).  Deputy Interior Minister of
Karachaevo-Cherkessia Boris Erkenov denied the clash took place in the
district, saying that the police prevented this from happening and that "nothing
special happened on May 3." Yet, the head of Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Rashid
Temrezov, condemned the attempt of the Karachay youth to march on Psyzh
village. "When all the republic was celebrating the Day of Karachay People's
Revival, it has a unifying nature for all peoples of the republic. A group of
young people, presumably from Ust-Jeguta district, totally blocked traffic in
the republic's capital and then for some reason went to the village of Psyzh of
Abaza district. Serious trespasses against public order and traffic regulations
occurred," said the head of the republic at a governmental meeting (http://www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/223822/).
Ethnic Karachays were sent en masse into exile to Central Asia by Joseph Stalin
in 1943 for alleged mass collaboration with the Germans. After their
rehabilitation in the post-Stalin Soviet Union and later in the post-Soviet
era, the Karachays have marked the return to their homeland by celebrating the
Day of Karachay People's Revival in the republic.  Periodic incidents of marches of one ethnic
group through the perceived "canonical" territory of another ethnic
group strikingly resemble similar trends in Northern Ireland where Catholics
and Protestant communities have repeated disputes of the same kind. The
inter-ethnic situation in Karachaevo-Cherkessia has never been without some
problems in the past two decades, but reports of ethnic clashes in the republic
occur more often now, than several years ago. This republic is the second most
ethnically diverse in the North Caucasus after Dagestan. Ethnic Abaza, who are
related both to the Circassians and to the Abkhaz, comprise about 8 percent of
the population of the republic. Ethnic Karachays comprise the plurality in the
republic with 41 percent of the republican population. Karachays are followed
by a large, but politically powerless, Russian population of 32 percent. The
Circassians (Cherkess) make up the remaining 12 percent of the republican
population. Ethnic Nogais are another indigenous ethnic group in the republic
and comprises a little over 3 percent of the total population of
Karachaevo-Cherkessia.  In August 2012,
police officials of Karachay ethnicity in Karachaevo-Cherkessia clashed with a
group of Circassian youth that marched through republican capital city,
Cherkessk. The police officers reportedly fired their guns in the air and were
confronted by defiant Circassians. At the time, Circassian organizations warned
that the continuation of what they regarded as discriminatory policies of the
Karachay elites toward ethnic Circassians may lead to a destabilization of the
situation in the republic and beyond (http://natpress.net/index.php?newsid=9374).  Ethnic clashes and general instability are
not something unfamiliar to the residents of Karachaevo-Cherkessia. During the
1999 local presidential elections, the Karachay and Circassian communities of
the republic nearly went to war with each other over the position of the
republican president. In 2004, protesters stormed government building in
Cherkessk and occupied the office of the then-president of the republic,
Mustafa Batdyev, for several days, demanding his resignation. Batdyev's
son-in-law was implicated in a killing of a group of local businessmen that the
Karachaevo-Cherkessian government failed to investigate until the civil unrest
exploded (http://www.ng.ru/regions/2004-11-11/1_batdyev.html).  The development of the nationalities policy
in Karachaevo-Cherkessia took a markedly different turn in comparison to
Dagestan. In Dagestan, ethnic groups live in ethnically mixed districts and
towns, especially in the lowlands where the majority of the republican
population resides. Ethnic minorities' demands to allow them have some form of
administrative autonomy within Dagestan do not find support in the government.
Whereas, in Karachaevo-Cherkessia, the government chose to support its ethnic
minorities' claims for their own ethnic territories.  In 2006, the Abaza district was officially
established near the capital city of Cherkessk. While the district contains
only five villages, it has a population of 17,000 people, which comprises less
than half of the total Abaza population residing in the entire republic. In
2007, the Nogai district was established in the northern part of the republic
that has a substantial population of ethnic Nogais. The Nogai district is also
small, made up of about 16,000 people and five rural settlements. The creation
of the districts for minorities apparently appeased them to some extent, but it
is not known yet how this will affect the republic's ethnic situation in the
long run.  As the latest incidents show,
the ethnic enclaves of minorities are perceived by the minorities themselves
and outsiders as ethnic fortresses and enclaves similar to the various ethnic
pockets found in the Balkans. As in the Balkans, these local residents often
feel a strong desire to defend their enclaves should they be attacked,
depending on the ethnic group. Increasingly, rising nationalism in Russia is
creating a blowback effect among ethnic groups in the North Caucasus, as groups
like the Karachai experience rising nationalist sentiment while smaller groups
like the Abaza feel threatened by this surge.
 
http://www.jamestown.org/programs/edm/single/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=40879&cHash=9a1be6077ee5076f0642dccb9f3db454#.Ub48c9gcXGA
--------------------
 
"The story with 'foreign agents' is just
another example of a runaway campaign by government bodies" 
HRO.org, 16 May 2013
 
Interview with Mikhail Fedotov, chair of the
Presidential Council on Civil Society & Human Rights  By Nadezhda Krasilova   Source: Novye Izvestiya
On 15 May the Presidential Council on Civil
Society and Human Rights sent Vladimir Putin recommendations concerning the
inspections by prosecutors of NGOs. Among the main proposals by the human
rights defenders are the amendment of the law on NGOs, and in particular the
substitution of the odious term 'foreign agent' by a more neutral designation,
namely 'non-profit organization funded from foreign sources.' In an interview
with Novye Izvestiya, head of the Human Rights Council Mikhail Fedotov
explained why it is so important to remove the term 'foreign agent' from the
law, who will invest money in a special fund for supporting the human rights
movement, and what needs to be done to stop the runaway campaign by prosecutors
in relation to the country's NGOs.  -
Mikhail Aleksandrovich, the main purpose of the recommendations put forward by
the Human Rights Council concerning the prosecutors' inspections of NGOs is to
substitute the term 'foreign agent' by a more neutral wording, namely 'non-profit
organization funded from foreign sources.' But, after all, for the authorities
it is precisely the phrase 'foreign agent' which is important. Do you think the
President will agree to the change you propose?  - If we carefully read everything the President has said about this law,
then you will see that, in his view, the main thing is to make public the
sources of the money that enter Russian politics and how this money is spent.
What is of great importance is the issue of openness, transparency of this
funding. In this he is quite right. And this can and should be done. But it
should be done by means of small changes. What do I mean? - instead of the
phrase 'foreign agent', the law should provide for the designation: 'an
organization receiving funding from foreign sources.'  - But what about the broad interpretation of
political activity which displeased human rights defenders?  - We propose to exclude political activity
altogether from this law. In order to achieve complete transparency, we must oblige
all NGOs who receive money from foreign sponsors to report in detail,
regardless of what they are engaged in - politics or other activities. They
must all be forced to inform the general public about each dollar, each euro,
yuan they receive from abroad.  - But to
begin with the Human Rights Council was talking about the need to substitute
the broad formula 'political activity' with something more specific…  - Yes, initially we discussed such changes to
the law. But later we rejected this variant. Now practically any activity by
NGOs can be treated as 'politics'. And the prosecutors' inspections have shown
this.  - Among the recommendations sent
to the President is a proposal to create a special fund that would provide
support to the Russian human rights movement. Do you intend to limit the
government's role in this fund?  - We
think it would be necessary to limit government participation in the
administration of the fund. In terms of the monetary funds themselves, a large
part could come from government. And that is even how it would probably be.
After all, we are sending these proposals to the President. Аnd the President
has in his power only government resources. He can pass our proposals to
parliament to introduce the required changes to the budget. But he cannot give
instructions to private companies. He can, of course, issue an appeal and make
suggestions to private companies, such as: 'It would be good to give some money
to this fund.' If such a fund were to be created by the President or under his
patronage or aegis, then, of course private philanthropists would
contribute.  - And they won't be afraid
of funding NGOs as they are now?  - Of
course, now they are afraid. Recently I spoke with the leader of one very large
company who told me: 'Why should we fund projects of some NGOs or other, when
we would do better just to give money to an orphanage? And that would be it -
we'd have no problems.' But if they help some human rights organization or
other, then they might get into difficulties. This is something with which we
are all familiar. With these recommendations we are trying to resolve this
situation. There is now an impression that the government intends to destroy
the human rights movement. And this impression is incorrect and very harmful.  - And how can this runaway campaign, as you
call it in your recommendations to the President, by law enforcement bodies to
force NGOs to register as 'foreign agents,' be stopped?  - Yes, it is a good example of a runaway
campaign by government bodies. But I think that there is a certain amount of
benefit to be derived from all this. What's happened has shown all the
imperfections of this law, that it cannot be implemented. And that means it
must be changed.  - When do you expect to
get an answer from the President to your recommendations?  - It's hard to say. A meeting of the Human
Rights Council with the President is scheduled for some time in May or June.
And perhaps we shall hear an answer at that meeting.and for change in Russia is
increasing'
 
http://www.rightsinrussia.info/archive/russian-media/novye-izvestiya/fedotov
--------------------
 
Putin's Regime Resembles Brezhnev's but
Russian Society isn't Soviet Anymore, Gudkov Says
By Paul Goble
Window on Eurasia, May 16, 2013
 
The way in which media controlled by the
Russian government have played up the recent spy case makes one feel that the
country has "returned to the 1980s model of the USSR," an Russian
opposition figure says, but the briefest of reflections leads to the conclusion
that the regime may have but that the population hasn't and won't. In a
commentary on his blog yesterday, Gennady Gudkov says that as someone who grew
up in Soviet times, he immediately caught the message of these government
stories: "Hostile 'voices' paid for by the CIA are again conducting
ideological diversions against the fortress of communism, and a traitorous 'fifth'
column … is besmirching the bright image of our Motherland" (gudkov-gennadij.livejournal.com/126505.html).
The financiers of the opposition remain the same - the CIA and the US State
Department - with only the names of "the chief enemies of the Soviet
(forgive me!) current powers" changed from Academician Sakharov to people
like Boris Nemtsov who "was a supporter of Boris Yeltsin who made Vladimir
Putin his successor." The Russian government media now as the Soviet media
did 25 years ago, the opposition figure continues, are still promoting the very
same message: those who protest have suffered "a  moral collapse" and are selling Russia
to its "accursed" enemies for small change. In order to convince the
Russian audience of this, the government media make use of people like
Andrannik Migranyan, "who is more well-known in the Russian Federation for
his talent at a necessary movement to repeat the news that is necessary to
necessary people," again a pattern familiar to those who remember Brezhnev's
times. The government media now offer no discussions or debate or even nuances.
They put out only "naked" propaganda, "crude lies, and open
slander," again just as the Soviet media did in the past. But whatever
those in power who order this kind of thing may think, Russians and Russia now
are not what they were a quarter of a century ago. First of all, Gudkov says,
the Cold War is over; Russians have travelled and studied abroad and even own
property there. They thus have the basis for comparison between what the regime
says about the West and what the reality there is that their Soviet
predecessors often did not. Second, the regime's continued reliance on such
propaganda shows that it wants to rely not on the most educated and most
informed part of the population but rather on the least. That raises the
question: "what kind of a country are we building, a country of fools?"
Or is it just that the regime has been fooling itself. And third, Gudkov
argues, it appears that the powers that be do not recognize something else,
that their propagandistic approach is driving the country into a dead end, one
in which "civil conflict will become the single means of resolving the
contradictions that have been building" in the very different Russia of
today. The top leaders clearly do not remember what happened to those like
Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn whom the Soviet regime persecuted. Today, they are "the
first names" of the country and there are even streets in Moscow named in
their honor. And they appear not to be able to imagine that the same pattern
could repeat itself. According to their limited understanding, "the
extra-systemic (that is, real) opposition is preparing a 'color revolution'"
by promoting dissatisfaction with the regime. But a revolution is not something
that is cooked up in that way, Gudkov argues. It is "a spontaneous
phenomenon like thunder or a storm." No one can order it up, but it can
only be avoided by "wise agreements" or be prepared for, especially
if the situation in a country is deteriorating as it is in Russia today. But
those at the top of the Russian regime do not understand that either and remain
prisoners of "the illusion that they have total control over the political
situation." That too recalls the final years of the Soviet Union. Then too
the Politburo and its hangers' on thought that they were in full control and
would remain so. "A very sad parallel," Gudkov concludes and then
asks "perhaps it is still not too late" to avoid yet another
cataclysm with all that that would entail.
 
http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.de/2013/05/window-on-eurasia-putins-regime.html
--------------------
 
Russia Should Become Neither European nor
Asian but American, Moscow Commentator Says
By Paul Goble 
Window on Eurasia, May 16, 2013
 
In thinking about Russia's future, most of the
country's opposition figures remain trapped in the old debate about whether
Russia is fundamentally European or really Asiatic, but, one Moscow commentator
argues, it is time to recognize that "the successful Russia of the future"
can and must be a country like the United States.  In an article on the "Osobaya bukhva"
portal yesterday, Roman Popkov says that those opposition figures "who
consider themselves to be on the left" want a Eurosocialist Russia. Those
on the right want a Thatcherite one. And those who don't want to give
themselves away talk "abstractly about Europe"
(specletter.com/obcshestvo/2013-05-15/otkroju-vam-ameriku-pro-rossiju.html).  Thus, he adds, "Navalny loves to talk
about Russia as Europe. Belkovsky calls the participants in the protest
movement Russian Europeans. Pavel Pryanikov is a 'Euro-socialist,' and the
national democrats are inspired with love for Estonia and Poland." But all
talk as if Russia must become European because they do not want it to be
Asiatic, the only choice they acknowledge.  But in fact there is an alternative. Not the "'special Russian
third war'" that Kurginyan and Dugin talk about, but rather the American,
something that becomes obvious, Popkov argues, if one considers how different
Russia is from European countries and how similar it is to the United States in
some very important respects.  "I
cannot imagine that Moscow will ever just as much in common with Makhachkala as
Paris does with Orleans," Popkov writes. But "I can imagine that
Moscow could resemble a mixture of Washington and New York. It might be better
to build another capital and let Moscow be New York, a city of businessmen,
corporations, [and] theaters" and then "Makhchakala can be not
Orleans but New Orleans," an ethnically distinct place very different from
the center.  It is difficult to imagine "Russia
as a European country" given the nature of Europe today "in
comparison with former times, a continent with few ambitions and not driven by
any passionate goal. But it is not hard to imagine Russia as a second America,
and consequently, "in contrast to the Petrine era, we need to open a
window to the United States."  Russian are far more similar to Americans than they are to Europeans,
Popkov insists. Both are "people of a historic mission." Both are "condemned
to feel themselves Romans" in the classical sense. And while Americans may
not know geography, they feel just as Russians do that their forces can
dominate any country, go anywhere and do anything.  Both countries have "an enormous,
complex social and economic geography." Both have subjugated primitive
peoples in the name of building a state. The only different is that Russian "pioneers
went east and [American] pioneers went toward the sunset, but [the places they
occupied] were equally wild and empty."  Both Russians and Americans, Popkov says, "have a feeling of
regionalism" and a sense of being "a single whole." Both "have
been involved in the construction of a civic, political nation which unites
people of different national and racial origins in the framework of a single
civilizational model under a common flag," with the Americans having been
somewhat more successful in this than the Russians.  And despite all the talk about Russian
collectivism, both nations are individualistic in the extreme, albeit of a
somewhat different kind.  Because of the
trauma of the country's defeat in the Cold War, Russian individualism has
become distorted and "mixed together with [a false and distorted]
patriotism," something that needs to be combatted if Russia is to move
forward.  Properly understood, Russians
are rugged individualists too, and while some remain mired in anger about
defeat, "the greater part of Russians want their country to be great no
less than do their counterparts in the United States."  That is something that the Russian opposition
needs to recognize and act upon.  It is
long past time to "replace the propaganda falsehoods of Putin with a real
strategy of building a New Russia as a strong and free super power from ocean
to ocean" rather than behave like a small European country or still worse
an Asiatic despotism.  That will require
many things, including a Bill of Rights that enshrines "the right of the
people to revolt against tyranny."      And it is long past time, Popkov concludes, to "kill" the urge
for revenge among Russians and to "create a symphony of healthy
individualism, inalienable civic freedoms and faithfulness tot eh Motherland."
That is what real "sovereign democracy" looks like "so to speak
according to the American model."
 
http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.de/2013/05/window-on-eurasia-russia-should-become.html
--------------------
 
International Islamist Movement Spreads to the
North Caucasus 
By: Mairbek Vatchagaev 
Eurasia Daily Monitor, May 16, 2013
 
The Jamestown Foundation has repeatedly
reported on Hizb ut-Tahrir's (HuT) activities in Russia over the past several
years. And as the investigation of the Boston bombings progresses, reports are
surfacing in the West that Tamerlan Tsarnaev interacted with Magomed Kartashov,
the leader of the Dagestan-based Union of the Just-essentially an offshoot of
HuT (see Simon Shuster, Time.com, May 8). HuT is banned in Russia and has been
driven underground, so Kartashov's Union of the Just is nothing more than an
offshoot of HuT with a new label. Due to the poor level of Western
understanding about this group and its activities in Russia, Jamestown felt it
appropriate to provide its readers with some background information should
further details emerge about the links between Tsarnaev and this HuT
offshoot.  Previous reports about the
activities of Hizb-ut-Tahrir primarily focused on such regions of Russia as
Tatarstan, Moscow and St. Petersburg (see EDM, November 20, 2012). However,
this Islamic organization is active throughout most parts of the post-Soviet
space, including Ukraine-especially in the Crimea-and the countries of Central
Asia, including Kazakhstan (www.kavkazoved.info/news/2012/12/20/hizb-ut-tahrir-ot-kryma-do-kitaya.html).
Now it has also started operating in the North Caucasus as well.  Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (a.k.a. Party of
Liberation) is an international organization that is banned in Russia. The
Supreme Court of the Russian Federation designated HuT a terrorist organization
and outlawed it on February 4, 2003. The organization is also on the list of
banned organizations in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) (www.cisatc.org/134/160/208).  Despite the ban, arrests of suspected HuT
members in various parts of the Russian Federation are regularly reported.
Reprisals against members of the party persist even though its program does not
envisage taking any actions against Russia. According to Vitaly Ponomaryov,
director of the human rights group Memorial's program for monitoring human
rights in Central Asia, the party was outlawed in Russia to appease Uzbekistani
authorities because it is highly influential in Uzbekistan (http://muslimgauze.narod.ru/hizbut.html).
An alternative explanation for the oppression of HuT in Russia is that it is
considered to be under the control of Western security services, a claim made
because the group operates freely in the United Kingdom (www.vesti.kg/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=142).
Arrests of party members in Russia do not go unnoticed among party members
elsewhere in the world, who have called on Russia not to ban their movement (http://hizb.org.ua/ru/izdaniya/proklamacii/794-hizb-ut-tahrir.html).
Demonstrations by Hizb ut-Tahrir's members in front of the Russian Consulate in
Simferopol, Ukraine, protesting the arrests of their colleagues, indicated that
Russia had made yet another enemy (http://mail.volga-tv.ru/politika/Islamisty-iz-Khizb-ut-Takhrir-piketirovali-rossiyskoe-konsulstvo-v-Simferopole-FOTO-VIDEO-Konsul-vyrazil-vozmushchenie-passivnostyu-vlastey.html).  Hizb ut-Tahrir was long thought of as an
organization that had no interest in the North Caucasus, instead being focused
mostly on Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and the large Tatar diasporas in Moscow and
St. Petersburg. The organization also worked among the ethnic Uzbek, Tajik and
Kazakh diasporas concentrated in large Russian cities. It would be logically
consistent to expect HuT to work among Turkic-speaking groups in the North
Caucasus. However, an analysis of recent events shows that the organization
does not rely solely on Turkic-speaking ethnicities.  In 2012, HuT was still not prepared to go
public, and the North Caucasus public began talking about this Islamic group
for the first time after a rally in the central square in Makhachkala,
Dagestan, on February 8. Along with the Salafi organization the Association
Ahlu al Sunna, there were also black banners identified at these rallies, and
their bearers reportedly were party members of HuT. These banners were familiar
to many people who knew about previous events in Tatarstan (http://xn--c1adwdmv.xn--p1ai/news/1625472.html).
That was the organization's first public exposure in the North Caucasus.  The second warning about Hizb ut-Tahrir's
expanding influence in the North Caucasus came from Ingushetia several months
ago. On March 2, Ingush law enforcement agents detained four local residents on
suspicion of being members of HuT.  According to an Ingush interior ministry spokesperson, on February 29,
police received a tip from local residents about a functioning HuT cell. The
police confiscated a large amount of literature while detaining the suspects (www.interfax-russia.ru/South/news.asp?id=297361&sec=1672).  The movement received additional attention
following an incident near the city of Kizlyar, Dagestan, when a wedding
procession with black banners was stopped by the police and its participants
were beaten up.  The wedding procession,
consisting of 25 cars, was dispersed by the police simply because they had "displayed
extremist symbols" (http://kavpolit.com/imidzh-dagestana-i-xizb-ut-taxrir/).  Russian authorities have never charged any of
the detained HuT members with participating in or sympathizing with terrorist
activities. This is apparently not of concern to the Russian authorities.
Indeed, even a conference in Kazan organized by the Russian Institute of
Strategic Research (RISI) in 2012 could not coherently explain why the party
should be considered a terrorist organization (www.riss.ru/index.php/actions/1328-fdjhl#.UY_ylzQqyKI).
Conference participants spoke at length about the harmful nature of this
organization, but did not cite a single instance of its involvement in
terrorist activities. While regarding the idea of creating an Islamic state as
a seditious plot, they could not explain why HuT members should be considered
terrorists simply for believing in certain ideas.  Hizb ut-Tahrir's appearance in the North
Caucasus may cause yet another division among Muslims in the region. Even
though the party calls for the creation of an Islamic Caliphate as its primary
goal, it also recognizes the legitimacy of other Muslims. Most strikingly, as
the organization strives to build a worldwide Caliphate, it does not ally
itself with the jihadists anywhere in the world, including in the North
Caucasus.  Moreover, the armed resistance
movement in the North Caucasus considers this party a sect that does not understand
Islamic teaching (http://ummanews.com/opinions/9786-2013-01-28-22-57-23.html).  For the Russian authorities it would be much
easier to have to deal with HuT than with militant jihadists. So it is
plausible that the party's emergence in the North Caucasus is not accidental.
The Islamic party may become a political wing of the Islamists that will
attract Salafi supporters.  At the
moment, it appears that Hizb ut-Tahrir's supporters are primarily concentrated
in Kizlyar, in northern Dagestan. Since this movement is officially outlawed,
its adherents operate under the guise of other organizations. The Union of the
Just in Kizlyar, which is headed by Magomed Kartashov, represents Hizb
ut-Tahrir. Kartashov is a relative of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the slain Boston
bombing suspect. However, the Union of the Just is not a Salafi organization.
The Salafis do not recognize HuT, their ideology or their means of struggle.
For the Salafis, it is simply a sect that has no right to exist (http://world.time.com/2013/05/08/exclusive-cousin-who-became-close-to-tamerlan-tsarnaev-in-dagestan-is-a-prominent-islamist/#ixzz2SlgzKDNN).  Thus, Hizb-ut-Tahrir is manifesting itself as
a new player in the political arena of the North Caucasus. It will certainly
make inroads into the support bases of other Islamic movements in the region
due to the conservative culture of the local inhabitants, particularly in
places like Dagestan. However, it is too early to say who will suffer most from
the drain, the Sufis or the Salafis. It is plausible that Russian authorities could
be behind HuT's emergence in the North Caucasus, as the Russian special
services likely could be secretly supporting these groups by simply allowing
them to freely meet, operate and hold public rallies in the hope that it will
undermine Salafist groups who stand to suffer the most from the defection of
adherents.  Since the bulk of the
supporters of the regional resistance movements are made up of Salafist-leaning
groups, the rise of another Islamic group like HuT stands to benefit Kremlin
aims in splintering these groups. If the situation develops in an unexpected
way, however, it could spin out of Moscow's control once and for all-and much
sooner than expected.  One thing is
certain, as Western experts and journalists pay closer attention to the North Caucasus
because of the Tsarnaev brothers, more and more details will emerge about these
little-known groups in the North Caucasus like the Union of the Just led by
Kartashov. Journalists and analysts should not rush to indiscriminately accept
the interpretations by Kremlin-backed sources or certain Russian journalists
regarding Hizb-ut-Tahrir or other such groups in the North Caucasus without
first assessing the background, history and aims of these organizations in
Russia. Most importantly, outside observers will need to discern whether sudden
new revelations about a little-known group might not be part of a Kremlin-led
information campaign aimed at convincing Western security services that Moscow
is an indispensable ally in counter-terrorism cooperation. Accepting all such
claims uncritically may force Western law enforcement and counter-terrorism
experts to spend time and precious resources investigating groups that in
reality have little influence in the tangled web of Islamic militancy in the
North Caucasus.
--------------------
 
Sochi's Olympic Security Obstacles
By Sergey Markedonov 
The National Interest, May 17, 2013
 
Sochi borders Abkhazia, a de facto breakaway
region of Georgia, which is itself a major strategic partner of the United
States, the European Union and NATO. Abkhazia's statehood and national
independence have both been recognized by Russia, making the athletic events at
Sochi into a major geopolitical issue. The Georgian authorities have many times
called for a boycott of the Olympics, drawing comparisons between the Russia of
the 2000s and the Soviet Union during its invasion of Afghanistan from 1979 to
1989.
The rise to power of the "Georgian dream"
coalition during the parliamentary elections of 2012 has led the new
authorities in Tbilisi to propose the normalization of relations with Moscow,
and Georgia's National Olympic Committee formally supported the country's
participation in the Sochi Olympics. Yet the principal conflicts, such as the
status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and the absence of diplomatic relations,
have caused the "Sochi issue" to remain one of the most salient,
topical questions on the Russo-Georgian agenda.
Russia-Abkhazia: Asymmetric Partnership
Today, Abkhazia enjoys its status as an entity
protected and supported by Moscow. However, concerns persist within the Abkhaz
elite and public about the relationship with Russia, especially asymmetric
nature of the relationship. The Abkhaz leadership and especially its opposition
fear the penetration of Russian big business in the republic and possible
engagement in property redistribution or oil explorations in the Black Sea.
They also are concerned by the return of ethnic Georgian entrepreneurs who currently
hold Russian passports.
Russia considers Abkhazia a territory that
should be engaged in the preparations for the Olympic Games. This provokes some
fear and phobias among those Abkhaz who are concerned about losing ethnic
preferences that were obtained during the 1992-1993 war with Georgia. Thus, the
Abkhaz leadership is suspicious of the ongoing infrastructure development
taking place with Russian assistance. Abkhaz President Alexander Ankvab went so
far as to reject the "Cherkessk-Sukhumi" road development project on
the basis of questionable "ecological concerns."
Protection for the Cossacks
As a part of the Krasnodar region, Sochi holds
special strategic importance for Southern Russia. Its southern border is formed
by what is left of Russia's Black Sea coast, and it plays host to Russia's most
important ports at Novorossiysk and Tuapse. This region is the
third-most-populous Russian territory, trailing only the Moscow region, with
5.5 million people. Oil and gas pipelines from Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan run
out of Novorossiysk, and the Novorossiysk and Tuapse ports rank first and third
nationwide in the rate of freight turnover.
The Krasnodar region is affected by
considerable internal and external migration. For example, Armenians now
compose roughly 30 percent of the total population of Sochi. This has provoked
nationalist aspirations on the ground: Russian nationalism mixed with elements
of Kuban's Cossacks has become the official ideology of the regional elite. The
result has been increasingly nationalist rhetoric, with Alexander Tkachev, the
regional governor known for his close ties with the Kremlin, suggesting the
construction of a so-called "migration filter" to prevent a
repetition of the Kosovo scenario on the primordial "land of the Cossacks."
The upcoming Sochi Olympics face serious
security and geopolitical challenges. The first subtropical Winter Olympic
Games will require from the Russian authorities not only high quality, creative
public relations but also the ability to provide a high level of security.
Without proper attention to the complex ethnopolitical issues at play in Sochi,
the Kremlin will not reap the expected benefits from the games that it has
sought for many years. Before the opening ceremony, Russia should prove that
its return to the major leagues of international politics is more than just
political rhetoric.
Sergey Markedonov is a visiting fellow in the
Russia and Eurasia Program of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies.
 
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/sochi-olympics-security-obstacles-8481?page=1 
--------------------
 
'Blasphemy Bill' Signals Return to
18th-Century Morals, Activists Say 
By Alexander Winning
The Moscow Times, 17 May 2013
 
Rights activists on Thursday ridiculed the
notion that Russia is a secular state, saying draft legislation seeking tougher
penalties for offending believers' feelings shows the country is returning to
18th-century morals.  "Officials and
religious leaders are leading us back to Peter the Great's times," Viktor
Bondarenko, founder of rights group Russia for Everyone, said at a news
conference held just a stone's throw from Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral.  "We are witnessing, or have witnessed, a
clerical coup," he said. "The Russian Orthodox Church is flouting the
Constitution at will, openly and cynically violating the principle that all
ethnic and religious groups should be treated equally."  Banned under the Soviet Union, the Orthodox
Church has flourished over the past two decades, assuming pride of place among
the country's many faiths.  Since
returning for a third term last May, President Vladimir Putin has increasingly
presented himself as a champion of traditional Russian values, while Patriarch
Kirill, Russia's top religious official, has declared Putin's 13-year rule a
"miracle of God."  Activists on
Thursday characterized the so-called "blasphemy bill," which would
impose fines of up to 500,000 rubles ($16,000) and maximum prison sentences of
five years for offending believers' feelings or defiling places of worship, as
repressive and said it was further evidence of the cosy relationship between
church and state.  Duma deputies
overwhelmingly passed the legislation, which supporters say would help stave
off attempts to dilute Russia's traditional beliefs by heretics including punk
rockers Pussy Riot, in a first reading last month.  State Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin, a United
Russia heavyweight, said at a meeting with non-parliamentary parties on
Wednesday that such legislation is urgently needed.  "By offending believers' feelings, you
not only offend them personally, but also touch on serious social issues,"
Naryshkin said, according to a statement on his party's website.  Opinion polls show that roughly 80 percent of
the population backs the bill, he said.  It must pass two further readings in the lower house, one in the upper
house and be signed into law by Putin before it takes effect. Given that the
bill enjoys open Kremlin support, few doubt that it will be formally approved
in the near future.  "Quite simply,
the bill should be thrown out," said Sergei Buryanov, co-chairman of the
Institute of Freedom of Conscience.  "We need to stop this madness, but our lawmakers do whatever
they're told," he said, referring to the Duma by the catchphrase "the
mad printer," a term used by opposition bloggers to paint the parliament
as a rubber-stamp body.  Yekaterina Samutsevich,
of Pussy Riot fame, told reporters at the news conference that the bill would
become a weapon to intimidate Kremlin opponents.  Two of Samutsevich's fellow band members are
currently serving two-year jail terms for staging a provocative performance
railing against Putin and Kirill in Christ the Savior last year. Samutsevich
was freed at an appeal hearing in October.  "It's not even clear whom the law is designed to protect," she
said. "It seems it's been thought up to allow authorities to open criminal
cases whenever they want."
 
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/blasphemy-bill-signals-return-to-18th-century-morals-activists-say/480086.html
--------------------
 
Russia's paedophile hunters 
By Mikhail Loginov
Open Democracy Russia, 17 May 2013
 
Combatting child sexual abuse in Russia
involves some unexpected players - on the one hand, vigilantes who hunt down
online child abusers, and on the other, the Kremlin, anxious to discredit the
opposition. Mikhail Loginov reports.     
Once a month Ilya Stepanov turns into a girl.
He registers on a popular Russian social networking site and creates a page
apparently belonging to a teenager of 14 or so. 'Tanya' or 'Viktoria' starts
acquiring friends of her own age, and sometimes an adult male friend. To draw
this man into arranging a meeting with the young girl, Ilya posts real photos
of his thirteen year old niece on the page. Sooner or later one of these older
friends will hint that he'd like to meet up for real. 'Tanya' warns him that
she's under age, but this doesn't deter him and he insists on a meeting. And
when he turns up at the agreed place there is someone to meet him - but it isn't
a young girl called Tanya. It can't happen here!  'We don't have sex here' - said a Soviet
woman in the mid 1980s during one of the first Soviet-American live TV 'bridges'.
The subject of sexual relations was indeed taboo in the USSR; in the arts and
literature even any mention of heterosexual relations was strictly limited. So
it is not surprising that an esoteric sexual area such as paedophilia was
considered non-existent. Both sexual abuse involving violence and non-violent
relationships with minors were simply impossible to imagine. Paedophiles did,
of course, exist. Russian psychotherapists today frequently find themselves
treating older people who were sexually abused in childhood. But at the time
these events usually remained a secret between the child and their abuser.  In Soviet times even 'normal' sexual
relations outside marriage were considered deviant, so a desire to seduce a
child just seemed impossible. The Criminal Code did in fact provide for
exemplary punishment for 'corruption of a minor', but no such cases ever made
the papers.  There were two reasons for
this. The official line was that moral standards, including sexual ones, were
higher in the Soviet Union than in the west. People in the west were in thrall
to their own sexual urges, whereas Soviet Man (and Woman) acted rationally and
reasonably and didn't give in to his or her base appetites. Even 'normal'
sexual relations outside marriage were considered deviant, so a desire to
seduce a child just seemed impossible. The Criminal Code did in fact contain
articles providing for exemplary punishment for 'corruption of a minor', but no
such cases ever made the newspapers.  In
practice, however, most Soviet citizens were ruled not by the progressive
morality of the future, but by a traditional peasant morality that laid the
blame for the crime at the feet of the victim: she disobeyed her mother, stayed
out late and so on. A child who reported either sexual violence or consensual
intimate relations with an adult could expect not help, but scoldings and
beatings at home and jeering from classmates.  So the subject of paedophilia was taboo at both an official and everyday
level. Parents used to frighten their children with terrifying tales of a boy
or girl being promised a ride in a car (there were so few private cars around
at the time that this would be a really tempting prospect), taken away
somewhere and subjected to something very bad. But what that might be, was
never explained. A misdemeanour - or a capital offence?  Paedophiles were rarely caught and their
trials were held in closed session, given that their crimes were an official
secret. And once convicted, a Soviet child abuser would quickly realise that a
long prison sentence was the least of his worries. The only social group that
recognised the existence of paedophiles were convicts. Someone convicted of a 'nasty'
offence would often be murdered even before he could be sent off to a prison
camp, or be himself subjected to sexual abuse and as a result be consigned to
the lowest rung of the prison hierarchy. It didn't matter whether he was a 'new
boy' or a hardened criminal - there were no exceptions. Nor did it make any
difference whether he was a violent rapist or a sports coach who had consensual
sex with a young athlete.  Someone
convicted of a 'nasty' offence would often be murdered  ...  or
be himself subjected to sexual abuse and as a result be consigned to the lowest
rung of the prison hierarchy.  So the
terrible tales that went around among teenagers less about 'maniacs' who
molested kids than about unfair convictions that more or less amounted to a
death sentence. One story that did the rounds went as follows: an 18 year old
student met a girl at a party and they spent the night together. The next
morning it emerged that she was 16 or 17 [in the USSR the age of consent was
18; it is 16 in Russia now] and started blackmailing the student for a large
sum of money. In the eyes of the law she was underage, and he was an adult. So
if she made a complaint and the 'paedophile' was sent to prison, his cellmates
might not know the circumstances and treat him as though he had abducted and
raped a seven year old. What's the difference between a pedagogue and a
paedophile?  When the communist regime
fell in Russia and the country acquired a free press, it seemed as though there
was a sex maniac around every corner: suddenly the papers were full of court
reports about the latest paedophile conviction. 'Parents left child alone for
fifteen minutes and it was raped', ran one headline; another read, 'Everyone in
the building knew he loved children. No one knew he was raping them'. Some
parents only found out from the tabloids that it might be dangerous to let your
child out to play in the yard.  The
hacks, however, offered the public not just lurid child molestation reports.
Readers discovered the existence not only of paedophiles, but also of
blackmailers. The popular press was full of tragic stories about a mother who
persuaded her underage daughter to accuse her boyfriend of rape and demand
money to hush it up. The victim had no money and was sent to prison, where he
was raped and turned into a passive homosexual. On his release he went home and
murdered the women who had falsely accused him.  So the subject of sex between and adult and a minor began to provoke
more than one reaction. Sexual violence against children remained the object of
universal condemnation, but where a child or young person seemingly consented
to sex with an adult reaction was more nuanced and there were even jokes along
the lines of: 'Q. What's the difference between a pedagogue and a paedophile?
A. Paedophiles actually love children'. In intellectual circles people proudly
pointed out that it was a Russian writer, Vladimir Nabokov [7], who had first
uncovered the theme of a relationship between an adult and an adolescent to the
world in 'Lolita'.    A change of
attitude  The start of the 2000s saw a
change in government and public attitudes to paedophilia. Articles began to
appear in the press about shocking cases where the police refused to act on
claims by parents that their children had been subjected to sexual advances and
even violence. There were reports of court cases where people who had raped
children received suspended sentences. The Criminal Code was updated to provide
for more severe penalties for child sexual abuse, both violent and non-violent.
The concept of an age of consent was also clarified; the existing law,
formulated in Soviet times, used the woolly phrase 'persons who have not
reached sexual maturity'. A law of 1998 set the age of consent at 14, but in
2003 it was raised to 16.  In this new
climate, the courts started imposing stiffer sentences, some of them highly
controversial. One man was sentenced to 13 years for abusing his young
daughter, although the only evidence produced against him was from an expert
witness on the basis of the child's drawings: in a drawing of a cat the animal's
tail evidently resembled an erect penis (the defence also protested that the
witness herself, a well known aficionada of lesbian BDSM parties, could not be
considered impartial). In the end the sentence was reduced to five years.  One man was given 13 years for abusing his
young daughter, although the only evidence produced against him was from an
expert witness on the basis of the child's drawings: in a drawing of a cat the
animal's tail evidently resembled an erect penis.  Another case concerned a lorry driver who
stopped at a roadside for a pee and was accidentally seen by two small girls,
who called their parents. The driver himself suggested calling the police, and
admitted to a minor offence. Later, however, he was suddenly charged with
deliberately exposing himself to the children. He claims a detective offered
him a deal - a suspended sentence in return for 200,000 roubles - which he
refused, and he was sent down for seven years. His case is now up for
review.  Real rapists, on the other hand,
sometimes still get away with it. Take the pop singer Igor Kondratyev, who
performs under the name Konstantin Krestov [8]. He would drive around towns on
the outskirts of Moscow and whenever he saw a young girl would stop, let his
Pekinese dog out of the car and ask her to catch it for him. When the girl
handed the dog to him, he would grab her and pull her into the car. Most of the
time, the charges made against him would be settled out of court: his wealthy
parents would buy his victims off with large sums of money and new flats. One
case [9] did reach the courts, and he was given a light, two year sentence, but
under public pressure he was retried and sent down for five years.  Children are also taught at school not to
talk to strangers and to shout for help if approached, and the message is
hammered home by public service videos shown on large screens on city streets.
But there are some people in Russia who believe that this is still not enough
to deter paedophiles.   A non-consensual
interview  A man walks into a cafe, sits
at a table, looks at his watch. He's waiting for a teenage girl, but a burly
man sits next to him instead. 'Were you expecting Viktoria?' he asks. 'I'm here
instead'. The first man says there must be some mistake, but the other takes a
piece of paper out of his pocket and shows him a printout of his online
conversations, which shows that he had indeed arranged a meeting with a young
girl called Viktoria. He wants to leave the cafe, but two more men in masks
made out of knitted ski hats appear and sit on either side of him. A fourth man
records the meeting on a camcorder.  Maksim Martsinkevich, a neonazi and a former leader of the far-right extremist
group Format18, after serving a sentence for incitement to ethnic strife, has
become famous as a self-proclaimed paedophile-hunter. He filmed his own abuse
of people suspected of paedophilia and published videos on the Web. Photo:
Polit.ru  'Viktoria's' friend is faced
with a choice: he can answer the questions honestly and admit he is a
paedophile, and then his admission will not be posted on the internet. Or, if
he doesn't, the recording will appear online, along with screenshots of his
messages to an underage girl.  The
conversation proceeds rather like an interview, although not a consensual one.
Viktoria's friend is faced with a choice: he can answer the questions honestly
and admit he is a paedophile, and then his admission will not be posted on the
internet. Or, if he doesn't, the recording will appear online, along with
screenshots of his messages to an underage girl. Usually child abusers agree to
an 'interview' to avoid trouble, although if the conversation takes place on
the street, rather than in a cafe, they may try to make a getaway and a fight
may ensue. Sometimes it's the paedophile that comes off worse, sometimes the
anti-paedophilia activists. In one provincial city the 'target' came to the
meeting by car, and when he saw he was being filmed he drove straight at his 'hunters',
knocking down and permanently disabling two of them. The war on Nabokov     Over the last year, paedophilia has become
a target for political propaganda campaigns by both marginal activist groups
and government structures. The hateful nationalist politician Maksim
Martsinkevich, better known by his nickname, 'the Slasher' [10], has proclaimed
himself an 'anti-paedophile warrior'. Martsinkevich owes his fame to fake
footage he posted on line which apparently showed the beheading of a Central
Asian drug dealer (on closer inspection the head was that of a sheep). Now he
is campaigning for the killing of paedophiles.    Recent events in St Petersburg could also
be seen as part of this political 'war'. Here the victims have been Vladimir
Nabokov and popularisers of his work. One night a window of the writer's museum
was smashed by a bottle containing a sheet of paper with quotations from the
bible denouncing sexual vices, and a wall at his family's country estate [11],
also now a museum, was defaced with the word 'paedophile ' painted in large
letters. At the same time Artyom Suslov [12], the producer of a show based on
Lolita, was set upon and beaten up in the street, although his unknown
attackers accused him of paedophilia not over his Nabokov connection, but
because his page on the social network VKontakte shows photos of naked children
(the work of acclaimed US photographer Sally Mann). The show was also cancelled
thanks to the efforts of some so-called 'Petersburg Cossacks [13]', although
official Cossack [14] leaders deny any involvement.  Martsinkevich owes his fame to fake footage
he posted which apparently showed the beheading of a Central Asian drug dealer
... Now he is campaigning for the killing of paedophilesThe most high profile
politico-paedophile row concerns, however, the prominent blogger Rustem
Agadamov, who posts under the name 'drugoy' ('the other'). In December 2012 his
ex wife accused him in her own blog of sexually abusing a young girl (who was
not named). Agadamov dismissed her claim as 'bollocks', but refused to lodge a
complaint. Russia's Investigative Committee [15] then began to examine the
claim, but no details have been made public, and the chief police officer in
the Norwegian town where Agadamov's ex wife lives has denied there have been
any allegations there or that any investigation is taking place.  Nabokov's museum walls with graffiti saying
'paedophile', in letters large enough to be seen from the nearby highway.
Photo: Polit.ru You're part of the opposition - you must be a paedophile!      The attack on Suslov, the broken window
and the Agadamov scandal are probably all part of a Kremlin smear campaign. It's
all quite transparent: if the opposition leaps to the defence of the blogger or
condemns the 'Cossacks', it can be confidently announced that a significant
number of its activists are paedophiles. Krasnoyarsk journalist Oleg Leontyev,
for example, has been the object of a trumped up charge [16], accused of
exposing himself to a young girl in the lift at his block of flats. He had an
impeccable alibi - at the time of the alleged offence he was out covering a 'fair
elections' rally and was caught on police cameras. But the local police are
still insinuating that he had some connection to the incident in the lift.     Ilya tells me he's an apolitical person.
He sees paedophilia as a real threat to Russian society and denies that
politics has anything to do with it. 'I'm not in the least interested in the
opinions of a person who sets up a meeting with an underage girl. I don't care
whether he's a communist or a liberal or a nationalist from 'The Other Russia'
[17]. He preys on children - that's enough for me. So I prey on him.'   The highjacking by the Kremlin of the public's
anti-paedophile mood may turn out to be a passing phase, unlike its continuing
harassment of homosexuals, culminating in new legislation banning gay 'propaganda'
[18]. The Kremlin's ideologues have, particularly over the last year, taken to
appealing to the public's worst prejudices and outdated stereotypes. In Russia
today there are nevertheless people who are unafraid to come out as gay and
there are organisations that support them. But no one is going to admit to
being a paedophile or to supporting paedophilia. Where prominent opposition
figures have been 'fingered' by the regime for alleged child abuse, their
defenders have always emphasised the falsity of the allegations. And given that
none of them have been proved guilty of paedophilia, the chances are that the
Kremlin dogs will be called off them and told to concentrate on 'the gays'. The
opposition's vocal criticism of the anti-gay campaign gives the regime, after
all, an excuse to portray it as an element that rejects the values held by most
of the Russian public.   As for the
paedophile-hunting vigilantes, once Kremlin, and therefore public, interest
dies away, they might also abandon their campaign. However much the recent
furore has been driven by the regime, Russians' attitude to paedophilia has
genuinely changed. Both the government and the public recognise the existence
of the problem, and people who sexually abuse children no longer get away with
suspended sentences, as they did 15 years ago. And children are taught in
school that they should report any inappropriate behaviour by an adult. So if
paedophilia itself will not disappear, it should perhaps become less prevalent.
 
http://www.opendemocracy.net/print/72762 
--------------------
 
Foreign Agents Dead End 
By Lev Ponomarev
HRO.org, 18 May 2013
 
In Soviet times streets used to be named after
famous Marxist-Leninists. In particular, it is said, there was the name:
Communist Dead End. The situation with "foreign agents" in Russia is
developing along the same tragi-comic lines - it has reached a complete dead
end. There is no compromise in sight between the Public Prosecutor's Office and
other agencies directed by the President and NGOs. How did this situation come
about and is a compromise possible?  In
the 1990s human rights organizations and other NGOs were supported by the state
and had good relations with government institutions. However, the country's
budget was in a perilous state, there was not enough money not just for NGOs,
but not even for teachers, doctors, etc. That is why the authorities were ready
to see NGOs, as well as science and culture, being financed by international
and foreign funds.  In the 2000s Vladimir
Putin became Russian president. Virtually from the very start of his time in
office, and on his initiative, actions began that were targetted against an
inviolable part of the Constitution aimed at protecting the rights of Russian
citizens and grass-roots democracy. Direct elections of governors were
abolished, the independent press was destroyed, suddenly there were dozens of
political prisoners, and presidential and parliamentary terms were increased.
Naturally he met with opposition from civil society, especially from human
rights organisations.  When he assumed
the post of president for a third term, he decided (he was thoroughly fed up
with it all) to once and for all put an end to the NGOs, which were a constant
thorn in his side.  He finds out that 90%
of Russian NGOs, primarily human rights organisations, are financed from abroad,
and only 10% from inside Russia. He asks his advisers: "How are things
done, over there?" The information he is given states that NGOs abroad are
in the main funded from sources inside their own country. But they forget to
tell him, because he doesn't really want to hear it, that the charitable
infrastructure in those countries has been created over dozens, sometimes even
hundreds, of years as a result of the development of democracy in these
countries. And when Russian business got its hands on some spare money for the
first time, the first attempts were made to make a significant private
investment in Russian civil society. This attempt was suppressed with the fall
of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. After this, Russian businessmen no longer wanted to
risk becoming involved in assisting independent NGOs.  Also noteworthy is the fact is that NGOs
abroad that are funded from foreign sources do not have any restrictions placed
on them, and are not subjected to any unnecessary inspections or
discrimination. The only restriction is in the United States on
non-governmental organisations that officially act on behalf of foreign
governments. This law was introduced in 1938 to counter lobbying for the
interests of Nazi Germany and Comintern (the FARA law).  What does the president have to say to all
this? He places the focus on a single example in the United States (there is
nothing similar in Europe), on the FARA law, which nowadays is hardly even
applicable. He also relies on the fact that three organisations created abroad by
Russian nationals to advocate for the Putin regime, Andranik Migranyan and
Veronika Krasheninnikova's organisations in the United States, and Natalya
Narochnitskaya's organisation in France, faced several difficulties in
registering, and in the United States were even subjected to inspection by the
CIA.  Based on these two points, the
State Duma dutifully pens a law that enables all independent NGOs to be made
illegal, so that now in accordance with the law, NGOs, created in Russia by
Russian citizens, are supposed to stick the humiliating label of "foreign
agent" on themselves. And any activity aimed at protecting human rights is
deemed political.  What is human rights
activity? Human rights activity is based on three fundamental axioms. Firstly,
a defendant is not someone who has come into conflict with another individual,
but someone who has suffered harm from a state institution or official.
Secondly, a human rights organisation explains to citizens free of charge their
rights and tells them how it can protect them. And thirdly, and this is the
most important axiom, a human rights organisation appeals to government
institutions in the interests of citizens and gets them to act in the interests
of those citizens, in other words they engage in public lobbying of the
interests of citizens. When the rights of a whole group or section of citizens
are violated (migrants, prisoners, opposition activists, etc.) human rights
defenders appeal to state institutions to change government policy towards
these groups.  It should be noted that
under the law on foreign agents, an organisation is deemed to be engaged in
"political activity" if it "participates in the organisation and
conducting of political events with the aim of influencing the decisions of
government institutions for the purpose of changing state policy as carried out
by them, as well as shaping public opinion for these purposes."  This implies that under this law the activity
of any human rights organisation can be called political. Which means that in accordance
with this law if an NGO receives foreign grants it should register as a
"foreign agent."  It goes
without saying that human rights organisations are not going to register as
"foreign agents." I'll explain the reasons why using our movement,
For Human Rights, as an example.  It is
clear that for the ordinary man in the street the term "foreign
agent" has negative connotations. That is why Russian citizens who require
the help of human rights defenders will be frightened of consulting human
rights organisations.  Another argument
carries even more weight. The main work of our organisation involves public
lobbying in the interests of specific individuals who have come to us for help.
By repeatedly appealing to state institutions we can persuade these to act in
the interests of individuals. The attitude of the state institutions towards us
is very loyal: they reply in a timely manner and are often willing to meet us.
But if our organisation's letterhead states that we are "registered as a
foreign agent," will we be able to find even one official willing to deal
with us?  In addition, today's human
rights activists naturally regard themselves as the successors to the Soviet
dissidents and human rights activists. Many of them were also called foreign
agents for opposing the totalitarian regime, but they resolutely refused to
accept that label and sometimes paid for it with their lives. So are we
betraying them?  If I registered as a
"foreign agent" I would be breaking the contractual relationship I
have with foreign foundations. For those of you who know little about this
relationship, I will briefly outline the procedure. An organisation that
specialises in a particular area, for example the Foundation in Defence of
Prisoners' Rights, writes an application for a particular project. That
application is entered into a competition, and if the Foundation wins the
competition, it is allocated money for the activities which it proposed in its
application. What's more, the donor never imposes any conditions on the proposed
project. In this way the donor is not the "customer" for the work
(from the point of view of civil law), and the organisation implementing the
project is not the "contractor" (from the point of view of civil law -
the representative, ie the agent).  Finally, and most importantly: we know that we are not any kind of
agents. Can we lie to everyone, including ourselves?  There is of course only one solution: the
abolition of this law, which contradicts the Constitution of the Russian
Federation, the international obligations Russia assumed when it joined the
Council of Europe, and finally, common sense. The Human Rights Ombudsman has
already expressed his opinion on this subject, as has the Presidential Council
for Human Rights.  Given the fact that almost
all human rights organisations have said that they would like to receive money
from inside Russia, such possibilities should be made available. Establish a
foundation for supporting the human rights movement, tell business that they
can invest in it. There should be a supervisory board, which people with moral
standing in civil society could join, and this board would see to it that none
of this money goes to GONGOs (government-organised non-governmental
organisations).  PS. An organisation that
protects the rights of patients with the severe and rare disease cystic
fibrosis is now being forced to register as a foreign agent because, according
to its charter, "one of the organisation's aims is to defend the rights
and legal interests of disabled people/patients suffering from cystic fibrosis
with regard to government agencies."
 
http://www.rightsinrussia.info/archive/comment/ponomarev/foreign-agents-3
--------------------
 
Disappointed in Moscow, Russian Circassian
Activist Hails Georgia's Approach to the North Caucasus 
By: Valery Dzutsev
Eurasia Daily Monitor, May 20, 2013
 
In an interview with the Kavkazskaya Politika
website, the well-known Circassian activist Ibragim Yaganov said Russia must
take steps to alleviate the hardships it inflicted on the Circassians. Yaganov
contrasted Russia's policy of stubborn silence on the Circassian issue to the
European colonial powers, which have been quite apologetic for colonialism. The
Circassian activist said that even the Georgians surprised him with their
frankness when they told him: "We do not refuse to admit that we
participated in the Russian-Caucasian war. Many Georgian officers and Georgian
militia fought in the ranks of the Russian army in the Caucasus. To repay for
our part of the responsibility for participating in the Russian-Caucasian war,
we recognize the Circassian genocide. At our own expense we are erecting a
monument for the victims of that genocide and offering [the Circassians] to
establish all kinds of relationships with us on the basis of our laws and the
most favorable regime for them in the fields of education, healthcare, art and
so on" (http://kavpolit.com/tyazhelo-byt-cherkesom).  Georgia's image among the Circassian
activists in the North Caucasus underwent a dramatic change in May 2011, when
the Georgian parliament officially recognized the Circassian "genocide,"
making Georgia the first country in the world to do so. The importance of this
recognition is emphasized by the fact that Georgia is a neighboring country,
bordering every republic on the northern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains, and
has always had influence in the North Caucasus.  Ibragim Yaganov fought against Georgia in the Georgian-Abkhaz war of
1992-1993. According to Yaganov, the Circassians at the time thought that
Abkhazia would become a "window to the outside world" for them.
Instead, he said, Georgia, not Abkhazia, has now become a window to the outside
world for the Circassians. "We fought for a free, independent Abkhazia,"
he said. "After twenty years we see that Abkhazia has neither
independence, nor freedom, nor a state. There is not even an economy.
Practically, I believe that the current Abkhaz authorities betrayed the idea
for which so many people fell and so much blood was spilled" (http://kavpolit.com/tyazhelo-byt-cherkesom).  Back in February, some news agencies reported
that Moscow was putting pressure on the new Georgian government of Bidzina
Ivanishvili to withdraw its recognition of the Circassian "genocide."
The deputy minister for diasporas in Mikheil Saakashvili's government
reportedly reached out to the Circassian diasporas and warned them to put
pressure on Ivanishvili's government to prevent it from backing away from the "genocide"
recognition. Sources said Moscow was especially concerned about the Circassian "genocide"
issue in the run-up to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, which will take place
on historical Circassian lands (http://kavkasia.net/Georgia/2013/1359866721.php).
Yaganov, who recently visited Georgia, said that despite the ongoing internal
political struggles in the Georgian establishment, Georgia's policies toward
Circassians and the North Caucasus have remained broadly intact. Georgia is
still keen on expanding its relations with the North Caucasus in the
humanitarian sphere. Illustratively, the Tbilisi-based Circassian Cultural
Center-created at the initiative of President Saakashvili in 2011 (http://www.georgiatimes.info/en/news/65709.html)-continues to operate (http://kavkasia.net/Georgia/2013/1369081702.php).
The Circassian Cultural Center has established joint cultural exchanges with
organizations in the North Caucasus and has actually hosted Yaganov to speak on
several occasions. Similarly, Caucasian House, established in 1999 to carry out
a number of educational, peacekeeping, general and cultural projects, also did
not stop functioning, but expanded its cooperation to other regions of Russia,
apart from the North Caucasus (http://www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/222493/).  It is remarkable that Georgia's outreach
program to the North Caucasus has survived the country's change of government.
This is probably one of the few Saakashvili policies that Ivanishvili, his
successor, has not scrapped. As the Georgian Dream coalition promised after it
won the elections in October 2012, the program for establishing Georgian-North
Caucasian connections became much less politicized, but did not disappear. This
indicates that the Georgian leadership sees long-term value in closer relations
with the North Caucasus.  As a prolific
Circassian activist, Yagonov painted the state of affairs of the Circassian
organizations in the North Caucasus in bleak colors. "In 2000, when the
authorities established full control over the International Circassian
Association, they simply destroyed it," he said. "That is why I do
not participate in that organization, it does not exist for me." According
to Yaganov, the current head of the International Circassian Association,
Khauti Sakhrokov, was appointed "almost after consultations with
[President Vladimir] Putin himself" (http://kavpolit.com/tyazhelo-byt-cherkesom).
A Kabardino-Balkarian bureaucrat, Sakhrokov was elected head of the Circassian
organization in October 2012. Reportedly, most Circassians were in favor of
Vyacheslav Derev, a Circassian businessman from Karachaevo-Cherkessia, but the
Russian leadership, including Putin, spoke out against his candidacy (http://circassiatimes.com//611-velikie-posidelki-v-mcha.html).  Even in normal times, Putin emphasized that
the North Caucasus should be governed through "manual control,"
meaning handpicking candidates for every possible position that has the
slightest political or administrative consequences (http://archive.premier.gov.ru/events/news/11301/print/).
It is plausible that in the run-up to the Olympics in Sochi, the Russian
government's handpicking exercise culminated in appointing even the heads of
Circassian non-governmental organizations. Since many Circassians in the North
Caucasus are hostile to the Olympics in Sochi and the region is bound to
attract unusually large international interest, Circassian non-governmental
organizations (NGO) became natural targets of Russian government scrutiny. With
the government apparently paying so much attention to Circassian organizations
in the North Caucasus, it means that civil activism is an influential force
that cannot be simply ignored by Moscow. So Circassian activists might want to
use this opportunity to establish themselves firmly as independent actors that
could defend the rights of their constituents not only during the frenzy of the
Olympic Games, but after they are over.
 
http://www.jamestown.org/programs/edm/single/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=40899&cHash=7b60f488fae1c5c5972871269854c8ab#.Ub49_9gcXGA
--------------------
 
Russian independent pollster targeted in
'foreign agent' crackdown
By Miriam Elder
The Guardian, 20 May 2013
 
Russia's only independent pollster has warned
it may have to shut its doors after a government demand that it register as a
foreign agent.  The Levada Centre, which
carries out sociological studies and regularly rates Russia's top politicians,
is the latest target for prosecutors seeking to enforce a new law requiring
political NGOs that receive foreign funding to stamp themselves with the
Soviet-era tag.  Levada's director, Lev
Gudkov, said that by accusing the group of carrying out political work
"the prosecutor is basically putting our organisation on the verge of
possible sanctions on the one hand, and undermining our credibility and
reputation on the other".  The
group's public surveys are essential to journalists working in the country. In
the past seven days it has published polls measuring Russians' attitudes
towards homosexuality, the church and the tsarist system, as well as a survey
documenting growing internet use in the country.  Gudkov said foreign grants amounted to
between 1.5% and 3% of Levada's funding.  Critics of the law say it is designed to crack down on civil society and
increase suspicion of foreigners. The law requires groups to stamp
"foreign agent" on all publications and websites, and to undergo
extra budgetary checks.  Several NGOs
that receive foreign funding have refused to register as foreign agents,
arguing that the term would scare away potential partners.  Hundreds of NGOs around the country have been
raided in the past few months, after a speech by Russian president Vladimir
Putin in February demanding that the law be enforced.  In late April an election monitoring group,
Golos, was fined 300,000 roubles (£6,300) for failing to register as a foreign
agent, becoming the first organisation to be fined under the law.  • This article was amended on 24 May 2013.
The original included the following paragraph: "Unlike pollsters linked to
the state, Levada regularly shows that Russians' approval of Vladimir Putin is
not as high as the Kremlin portrays. According to its most recent poll, 26% of
Russians approve of the president. Russia's two other pollsters, VTsIOM and the
Public Opinion Foundation, put the number at 52%." That was incorrect: the
figure of 26% was actually the net approval rating for Putin in Levada's most
recent poll, in April 2013. Asked the question "Do you approve of the
activities of Vladimir Putin?", 62% said they did approve, 37% said they
did not approve, and 1% did not answer. The picture caption on this article was
also changed; the original caption also referred to the 26% poll figure as an
approval rating.
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/20/russian-independent-pollster-levada-centre/print
--------------------
 
Kremlin orders Russian pollster to register
itself as 'spy'
By Fred Weir
The Christian Science Monitor, May 20, 2013 
 
Russia's only independent polling agency, the
Levada Center, may face closure after Russian prosecutors ordered it to
register as a "foreign agent" - a term that's synonymous with
"spy" in Russian - under a new law designed to clamp down on
nongovernmental organizations that receive any amount of funding from abroad
and engage in any form of activity that authorities deem political. The
prosecutor's warning, delivered to the Levada Center on Monday and reproduced
on the agency's website, essentially declares that Levada's world-renowned
public opinion research is not considered by Russian authorities to be
scientific work but rather "political activity" that is "aimed
at shaping public opinion on government policy."  Levada, a registered NGO, is the only one of
three major Russian pollsters that is independent of state funding and
management. It has often had a tense relationship with the Kremlin. But many
experts expressed surprise Monday over the prosecutor's threat, if only because
Levada's sociological research - including regular tracking polls on Vladimir
Putin's public popularity - has always been highly regarded on all sides of the
political spectrum and is constantly cited by officials, parliamentarians, and
state-run media.  RECOMMENDED: Do you
know anything about Russia? A quiz.           In a statement, Levada's director Lev Gudkov
said the order to cease publishing its work until it registers as a
"foreign agent" puts the agency in "an extremely difficult
situation."  "The prosecutors
office is hanging our organization on the hook of possible fines while at the
same time undermining its credibility and business reputation. Basically, the
extremely vague definitions of 'political activity' and 'foreign funding' being
applied here allow for the most arbitrary and elastic interpretations.... Hence,
we face the possibility of administrative action against the management of our
agency and even possible liquidation," he said.  Dozens of Russian NGOs have already been
ordered by prosecutors to wear the "foreign agent" label in all their
public activities, or face crippling fines and, ultimately, police shutdown.
None have yet complied with the order, which they say does nothing to improve
financial transparency and is solely designed to destroy their credibility with
the Russian public, official institutions, and other organizations by saddling
them with a label that means "spy" and nothing else in Russian.  Among those that have been singled out by
prosecutors are the grassroots election monitoring organization Golos, the
corruption watchdog Transparency International, and human rights monitors such
as Memorial.  All of the targeted groups
insist that they do not engage in partisan political activities of any kind,
but that prosecutors are deploying a definition of "political" that
includes any activities that might irritate authorities.  "This is not an attack against us
specially but it is part of a growing assault against all NGOs and active civil
society," says Alexei Grazhdankin, Levada's deputy director.  "What authorities want to do with Levada
is to regulate the way we do our sociological work and control our relations
with clients.... We are not engaged in political activity because we do not
interfere, we just track the changes in public opinion and record them. It's
not clear to us how this law is being applied, or how the publication of our
data can be interpreted as a means to influence public opinion," he
says.  "When some of our polls about
Putin or the government get published, they get angry at us. We do other polls
about the protest movement and the opposition that get them upset. We're just
doing our job, which is to try to shed light on what's happening in the
country," he adds.  The prosecutor's
warning letter alleges that Levada has received $777,000 over the past four
years in funding from outside groups such as the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford
Foundation, and George Soros' OSI Assistance Foundation.  The agency also earns money by doing
sociological research and market surveys on behalf of foreign clients, Mr.
Grazhdankin says.  In his statement, Mr.
Gudkov insists that such funding has not amounted to more than 3 percent of
Levada's budget in recent years.  "Unlike other polling organizations, we have no direct state
financing or state grants for carrying out surveys that often entail
significant financial and organizational expenses," writes Gudkov.
"The funds we have received from foreign sources (including donations and
grants won on a competitive basis) or payment for ordered surveys by foreign
organizations (such as universities, mass-media, universities and consulting
firms) makes up an insignificant part of the budget of Levada Center, basically
between 1.5 percent and 3 percent in various years," he added.  All major NGOs have agreed among themselves
to refuse prosecutors' orders to don the "foreign agent" label, which
they argue is tantamount to swallowing a poison pill.  The authorities' next step, many analysts
argue, will be to step up the pressure with huge fines until the biggest NGOs
buckle, or send in police to close them down.  "In a sense we are returning to Soviet times, when all political
information will be generated and doled out by the authorities," says
Dmitry Oreshkin, head of the Mercator Group, an independent Moscow media
consultancy.  "It's a convenient
situation for the authorities, who can just write down the number of votes they
need and it will be so reported. Economic indexes will grow constantly, and
support for our beloved leader will be always buoyant. And it will go on that
way until everything once again collapses," he says.
 
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2013/0520/Kremlin-orders-Russian-pollster-to-register-itself-as-spy
--------------------
 
"Golden Age of Russian Nationalism"
By Alexander Yanov
The Institute of Modern Russia, May 21, 2013
 
The Institute of Modern Russia continues the
series of publications by prominent scholar Alexander Yanov on the history of
Russian nationalism. In this article, the author analyzes the reasons for the
Slavophiles' victory over the adherents of "state patriotism."
The reader has undoubtedly realized already
that the riddle at the end of the previous article has
a double meaning. The first one is evident: it has to be explained how the
Slavophiles, dissidents of the "Russian idea," who were hardly
noticeable in the 1840s, could overthrow the all-powerful "official
nationality," and take away its status as the "hegemonic idea "
of post-Nicholas Russia.
There is a catch, though: I am not sure that
most readers are acquainted with the aforementioned expression.  Without
it, however, it would be difficult to understand the subsequent history of
Russian nationalism and Russia itself. I have to digress to explain the
expression. The author of this term is the famous Italian dissident Antonio
Gramsci, a leading Marxist thinker, former general secretary of the Italian
Communist party, who spent the last decade of his life in prison in Fascist
Italy. In his Prison Notebooks, he challenged a sacred cow of Marxism of
that time, namely Lenin's theory- that only "parties of a new type"
can win the struggle for power. He was, so to speak, doubly dissident.
According to Gramsci, not parties, but ideas
play the decisive role. He claimed that the dissident idea that succeeded in
winning the minds and becoming the "hegemonic idea," gained power in
Italy in 1922.  National Socialism did the same in Germany in 1933. It
goes without saying that, judging from the experience of Slavophilism, the
status of the "hegemonic idea" does not necessarily guarantee power
(nor does the fact of there being "parties of a new type,"-witness
their defeat throughout Europe). It can also happen-and this time, I am
applying Gramsci's ideas to Russia-that the "hegemonic idea" leads
the country to a dead-end, and a different dissident idea gains influence over
the minds by offering a way out.   This is what happened in Russia in
1917.
Slavophiles, who were hardly noticeable in the
1840s, overthrew the all-powerful "official nationality."
However, the victory of Slavophilism in the
1850s is just the first aspect of our riddle. Its second aspect requires that
we explain why the idea of "official nationality," which was
established under Nicholas I (during the epoch that the well-known historian
Alexander Presnyakov called the "golden age of Russian nationalism,")
and which many thought would last forever, suddenly disappeared without a trace
after the Czar's death.   It the 1840s, the Uvarov triad1-Orthodoxy,
Autocracy and Nationality-embraced by Nicholas I was indeed strong. Even major
talents and minds came under its influence. Nikolai Gogol, for instance, could
never free himself from it.  Fyodor Tyutchev remained its prisoner for a
long time.  And here is the confession of Nikolai Nadezhdin, one of the
most enlightened editors, whose Teleskop journal published
Belinsky's Literary Dreams and Chaadaev's famous Philosophical
Letter.  "We have one eternal, unalterable element-the Czar! One
source of the people's life-sacred love for the Czar!  Our history has
been until now a great poem with one hero, one character. This is the
distinctive authentic character of our past. It also shows us our great future
mission." Quite eloquent, is it not?
But suddenly, there was no "poem"
anymore. Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov denounced the "unscrupulous
adulation, which...turns the respect due to the Emperor into
idolatry."  One has to agree that our discussion cannot move forward
until this catastrophic downfall of the triad, the "hegemonic idea"
of Nicholas's Russia, is explained.  Let us try to do it. Especially
considering that this explanation turns out to be surprisingly relevant for
today.
Triad
I remember from my school days my history
teacher's contempt when he talked about Uvarov's triad. In college, I found the
same attitude prevalent among academics, even in Soviet times.  Imagine my
surprise when, recently, I came across a sort of a short course of
"national patriotic" thought by S.V. Lebedev, where the author writes
with admiration: "It is no coincidence that this triad is still one of the
most popular slogans of today's Russian right-wingers.  It is characteristic
of modern patriots to strive to reduce all of Russian culture to these three
words. Thus, according to a well-known sculptor, V. Klykov, the Russian idea is
Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality."
Unfortunately, S.V. Lebedev did not explain
whether "modern patriots" (the book was published in 2007) were also
advocating the return to serfdom, which the author of the triad, so cherished
by them, had been vehemently supporting.  Here is what Uvarov wrote about
this: "The question of serfdom is closely related to the question of autocracy...They
are two parallel forces that developed together.   They have a single
historical origin, and their legitimacy is identical.  This tree has put
down deep roots, and both the Church and the throne have given it shade." 
Uvarov did not leave any doubts as to what was meant by the Russian nationality
in the triad: "Our nationality consists in unlimited devotion and
submission to Autocracy." In other words, it consists in serfdom?
 The "modern patriots" did not even try to question these
revelations by the author of their "motto."
One has to assume then that they do not mind
serfdom. But in the name of what, then, are they ready to sacrifice the freedom
of their people?
"Pagan peculiarity"
According to Academician A.E. Presnyakov, the
triad represented something else besides the total lack of freedom:
"Russia and Europe were deliberately opposed to one another as two
separate cultural and historical worlds, with fundamentally different
foundations of their political, religious, national way of life and
character." This was the rejection of both the European enlightenment and
universal Christianity. This is why Vladimir Solovyov called it the Muscovite
faith, the "pagan peculiarity."
It all turns out to be very simple: just like
their predecessors from the period of the triad, the "modern
patriots" are prepared to be slaves in their own Motherland in order to
break away from the sinful Western world.  As their truest apostle
Alexander Dugin put it, they refuse to live in a "world of apostasy, of
the coming Antichrist."  Is it surprising, then, that in 19th century
Russia, most enlightened people considered such thinking as an unthinkable
anachronism, as the death of enlightenment and an anti-Petrine revolution in
national thought?
Here is the testimony of censor and
academician Alexander Nikitenko: "Everything indicates that the work of
Peter the Great has no fewer enemies today than it did during
the... streltsi rebellions.  However, in those days they did not
dare crawl out of their dark holes...  But now, having heard that the
Enlightenment was freezing up, growing torpid and decaying, all these secret
underground swamp reptiles have crawled out again."  Famous historian
Sergei Solovyov's criticism was equally harsh: "From Peter the Great to
Nicholas I, enlightenment had always been the ambition of the government. With
the enthronement of Nicholas I, enlightenment ceased being a virtue and became
a crime in the eyes of the government."
Even stronger and sharper were the voices of
those who only saw the light after Russia's shameful capitulation in the
Crimean war, into which Nicholas I and his "official nationality" had
led the country. Those who repented were close to sprinkling ashes on their
heads.   The following is Tyutchev's verdict: "In the end, it
would have been unnatural for the thirty-year regime of stupidity, depravity
and abuses to bring success and glory." And he addressed theses verses to
the Czar, a man, as he put it, of  "monstrous stupidity:" 
"To serve God and Russia was never your intention. Your conceit alone
deserved your full attention. Whether good whether bad, your every task was
nothing but spectral, false invention. You had no throne-you wore an actor's
mask!" Mikhail Pogodin, at the time a well-known historian and publicist,
with whom we shall meet again, wrote the following prophetic epitaph of
Nicholas' Russia: "Ignorant people praise its quietness, but it is the
quiet of the graveyard, rotting and stinking, both physically and morally.
Slaves praise its order, but such an order will lead it not to happiness and
glory, but into an abyss."
I intentionally quoted contemporaries of the "official
nationality" of different, sometimes even opposite, beliefs. The reader
can also see that among them there are no famous dissidents of that period,
such as Belinsky, Herzen, Chaadaev and Bakunin, although they could say a lot
about their time.  The same idea united the moderate conservative
Nikitenko, the moderate liberal Solovyov, the poet of the empire Tyutchev and
the father of Russian Pan-Slavism Pogodin: their recognition that in the 19th
century, a Muscovite regime and Muscovite ideology were unbearable.  After
Peter the Great, Russia simply could not go back to
the streltsi rebellions and "pagan peculiarity." These
people's unanimous outcry did not leave any doubt that after Nicholas' era
ended, Russia would find itself at a new crossroads.
Crossroads
Many realized that after Nicholas's death the
triad would have to surrender its status as the "hegemonic idea" to a
different ideology. What is not so obvious is why the triad was replaced by
Slavophilism, that is, by another incarnation of the "Russian idea,"
whose main postulate, like that of the triad, contradicted Catherine the Great's
project for Russia to become a European power.
There is no doubt that the Slavophiles were
incomparably more civilized and refined than the triad's ideologists. They
quoted from Schelling by heart and borrowed a lot from German romantic
Teutonophiles. The experience of Nicholas' regime and the national humiliation
that the country suffered in the Crimean war quickly cured them of old
Muscovite fantasies.  However, they remained faithful to Karamzin's
school, which explains their whole-hearted support for autocracy that (as in
Nadezhdin's time) they saw as the "distinctive and authentic
character" of the Motherland.
On the other hand, after the days of the
Decembrists, liberal Russia matured as well. Especially considering that once
Alexander II allowed free speech, there was no longer any need for secret societies
or military pronunciamentos. The code word of the Decembrists' program to
become a part of Europe-"constitution"-was on everyone's lips. The
thirty-year nightmare that the country had just gone through, and the 1856
"shameful peace" were considered to be direct consequences of
autocracy. Uvarov's argument that the "question of serfdom is closely
related to the question of autocracy" was turned against the retrogrades:
the abolition of serfdom demanded the rejection of autocracy ("of any form
of slavery," as Alexei Unkovsky, marshal of the nobility of Tver province
and leader of the liberals of that time, put it). They repeated Nekrasov's
verses: "Enough rejoicing!" the Muse whispered to me.  It's time
to move forward. The people are free, but are they happy?"
Slavophiles idolized the "people"
and contemptuously labeled the educated part of society as the "public."
The attitude toward this illiterate people was
what divided once and for all these two ideologies-Slavophilism and liberalism-which,
in the 1850s, had for a short time been rivals in the fight for the status of
the "hegemonic idea" in the post-Nicholas Russia (by that time, "official
nationality," as the reader understands, was already out of
play).   At some point both ideas competed to be considered the heirs
of the Decembrists' legacy, and Herzen wrote about them: "Like Janus...we
were looking in different directions, but a single heart was beating within
us." This was under Nicholas I. The first breath of freedom changed it
all.
Now, on a crossroads, it turned out that the
Slavophiles idolized the "people" and contemptuously labeled the
educated part of society as the "public." They were sure that the "people"
possessed some kind of original wisdom, and the "public" was yet to
learn it. As Konstantin Aksakov put it, "the whole country's thought is
concentrated in the common people."   In other words, they were
the first Russian "narodniks," or, as Vladimir Solovyov called them,
"narodopoklonniki" ("worshipers of the people").
Liberals, on the other hand, supported the
enlightenment of the people. Their worst fear was that the continuity of
autocracy would inevitably radicalize young people, who would, in their turn,
waken the terrible "peasants' kingdom" before its time. As strange as
it may seem, Nikolai Chernyshevsky expressed the liberal credo better than
anybody: "Our people are ignorant, filled with crude superstition and
blind hatred for those who have rejected their wild habits.  Therefore, we
are equally against the anticipated attempt by the people to rid themselves of
all supervision and care and to take on the management of their own affairs. In
order to avert this horrifying denouement, we are prepared to forget everything-our
love of freedom and our love of the people."
Considering that the passionate haters of
reforms and the retrogrades represented the only alternative "hegemonic
idea," the Czar Liberator did not have much choice.  Thus, the
Slavophiles, who had until then been hardly noticeable, became the dominant
force in the editorial committees that were drafting plans for the Great
Reforms. This is how it all started.
1Named after its author Sergei Uvarov,
education minister under Nicholas I.
 
http://imrussia.org/en/society/462-qgolden-age-of-russian-nationalismq 
--------------------
 
Homosexuality in Contemporary Russia: The
conflict between "Soviet" and "Western" definitions
Pavel Svyatenkov, translated by Catherine A.
Fitzpatrick
InterpreterMag (originally published by
Vzglyad on May 15, 2013), May 21, 2013
 
[The recent brutal murder of Vladislav
Tornovoy, a 23 year-old gay man, in the Moscow suburbs has once again brought
the subject of homophobia in Russia to the fore. Below is a blog post by Pavel
Svyatenkov examining cultural definitions of homosexuality, and how Soviet-era
propaganda has been carried into the post-Soviet era. -- Ed.]
The current war against "homosexuality"
is not a conflict between homosexuals and heterosexuals, as it is portrayed in
the media. It is a conflict between two different versions of homosexuality - "Soviet"
and "Western."
"Soviet homosexuality" was based on
a system of labor-camp sodomy created under Nikita Khrushchev. Joseph Stalin,
who had himself been in exile, understood the needs of prisoners well. That is
why he put the women's labor-camp zone and the men's zone next to each other, a
few kilometers apart. Many memoirists testify that in the labor camps, there
was normal family life (with the caveat that the labor camps themselves were
abnormal). Women married men they met in the labor camp because they already
despaired of seeing their husbands alive.
Khrushchev and his clique discovered that
people were "f***ing" in the labor camps and separated the male and
female zones 100 kilometers apart (I read this information in Evgeniya Ginzburg's
Journey into the Whirlwind). As a result, homosexuality flourished in the labor
camps, but of a particular type.
From the perspective of the criminal
underworld's philosophy, it was shameful to be a passive homosexual, or a
petukh [rooster], as they were called. However, an active homosexual was
described as "a real pasan" [the word in Russian for "lad"
is patsan-Ed.]. There is a status in labor camps known as being "dropped"
[victim of rape] but there isn't a concept of "dropper" [rapist]. It
hides shamefully in the shadows.
Since you would have to have strength and
power in order to be able to "drop" somebody, homosexual relations in
labor camps mirrored the structure of power; the relations of authority and
submission. The labor-camp philosophy infected all of Soviet society,
particularly the siloviki and the intelligence services.
The philosophy of Soviet-developed
homosexuality penetrated even those social segments where it did not literally
exist. What does a manager mean when he says that his bosses have "f**cked
him in the a**?" It's obvious: "The bosses have made a strict
reprimand." In other words, the relations of power and submission in
Russia are understood by many in terms of the homosexual sex act.
That is, the very "vertikal of power,"
the famous "Chekist hook" is essentially…yes, you get the idea.
Hence, the cult of "the real pasan"
or "muzhyk" [from muzhik, the word for peasant man-Ed.], which
developed in the gopnik [street toughs], semi-criminal world. The pasan is an
active homosexual, respected in labor camp, not the pathetic petukh. Why is
this cult necessary? Because people are afraid. They are afraid they will be "dropped."
And in order not to be "dropped," you have to "drop" others
first. The pasan is a heterosexual man who behaves as an active gay man under
the pressure of circumstances and the social setting, but who portrays his
behavior as the manifestation of manliness in doing so.
Thus, "Soviet homosexuality" and its
relations of power and submission rest on three whales [as in the Mordvin
creation myth]. The first whale is fear of being "dropped" and thus
winding up in the lower caste. The second whale is "knowledge of life,"
that is knowledge of the real nature of the hierarchy and claims to power on
the basis of this knowledge (usually peculiar to middle-ranging bureaucrats who
are in Sorokin's "caterpillar" between the masters and the
submissives) [so named for the scene in Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir
Sorokin describing a ritual of men forming a chain for anal sex; the oprichnik
was the tsar's henchman-Ed.]. The third whale is the interpretation by the
masters of the process of ruling the country precisely in the terms of
developed homosexuality.
The most amusing thing is that the
overwhelming majority of participants in the system of Soviet-developed
homosexuality are heterosexuals.
Soviet-developed homosexuality is experiencing
a serious crisis, as it encounters the Western model of attitudes toward
homosexuals. "What, are petukhi now people, too?" - this groan, like
a song, has been carried through all levels of the power hierarchy. It is this
conflict of models that explains the current "homophobia." If the
petukhi and homosexuals in general are to be declared people, that would mean
that the very foundations of rule of the Soviet bosses who remain in the
Russian power structure would crumble.
The pasan who admits that he is an active
homosexual is no longer a pasan. The petukh, recognized as a person, is no
longer a petukh. The Soviet labor-camp castes are cracking at the seams and are
ready to collapse. This explains the hysterical war against homosexuality, at
the leading edge of which are Soviet pasany with beer bottles at the ready. In
order to prove that they are not gay, the pasany are prepared to do a lot-even
sticking a bottle in the rear end of their "opponent."
What follows from this? Europeanization will
affect even this very intimate region of the Soviet hell. Developed homosexuality
awaits the same fact as developed socialism. The question is only whether
Russia will come to the Western model for attitudes toward gays, or will
elaborate its own peculiar "sovereign homosexuality.
 
http://www.interpretermag.com/homosexuality-in-contemporary-russia/ 
----
 
RUSSIA: Why were hundreds of religious
organisations checked?
By Geraldine Fagan
Forum18.org, 22 May 2013
 
 Hundreds of religious communities across
Russia are among non-governmental organisations (NGOs) inspected by officials,
Forum 18 News Service has found. Check-ups ranged from a simple telephone
request for documents to multiple, extensive searches. It "wasn't simply
the initiative of the Prosecutor", Moscow-based lawyer Konstantin Andreyev
told Forum 18. "There's a political subtext." Yet the new regulations
on foreign funding for NGOs - including designation of some as "foreign
agents" - do not legally apply to religious organisations. In several
cases, religious organisations appear to have been inspected due to
"foreign" links, such as Catholic charity Caritas and the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The General Prosecutor's Office order for
the sweep is not public, but Samara Regional Public Prosecutor's Office ordered
that inspections should check compliance with laws on "surveillance and
criminal procedure" and the Extremism Law by "social and religious
associations and other non-commercial organisations".  Many hundreds of religious communities across
Russia were among non-governmental organisations (NGOs) inspected by state
officials this Spring, in a sweep apparently seeking to uncover foreign backing
for political opposition initiatives. It "wasn't simply the initiative of
the Prosecutor", Konstantin Andreyev, a Moscow-based lawyer specialising
in the rights of religious organisations, explained to Forum 18 News Service on
16 May. "There's a political subtext."  Yet Forum 18 notes that controversial new
regulations on foreign funding for NGOs - including designation of some as
"foreign agents" - do not apply to religious organisations. "But
because they fall under the category of NGOs," agreed Andreyev, "they
were included in this sweep."  Results to be assessed at end of May  To the alarm of human rights defenders, NGOs across Russia underwent
unexpected government check-ups beginning in March and April 2013. Check-ups
ranged from a simple telephone request for documents to multiple, extensive
searches.  NGOs inspected included prominent
human rights groups, both Russian (Memorial, the Moscow Helsinki Group) and
international (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch). European cultural
organisations such as the Goethe Institute, Danish Cultural Institute and
Alliance Française were also checked, according to Russian human rights
organisation Agora, itself inspected.  Russia's Presidential Human Rights Council estimated that several
thousand NGOs were inspected in total, according to a report prepared for its
15 April extraordinary meeting on the check-ups and published on its
website.  The results of the sweep will
be assessed at the end of May 2013, according to a 23 April letter to Council
chair Mikhail Fedotov from Deputy General Prosecutor Viktor Grin, seen by Forum
18.  A press spokesperson at the General
Prosecutor's Office insisted to Forum 18 in March that all questions be
submitted by fax. Forum 18 has earlier faxed questions to the Office's press
service but received no response (see F18News 21 March 2013 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1815).  Religious communities included  By 24 April, when inspections appeared to be
ending, Agora human rights organisation could name 262 NGOs inspected in 55 of
Russia's 83 regions. Seen by Forum 18, this list spans a broad range of
organisations, including those supporting children, consumer rights, the
disabled, the environment, prisoner welfare and public health.  Agora's list also includes hundreds of
religious organisations, including Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Muslims,
Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons.  Agora's
list draws partly on a government list of nine organisations functioning in two
or more Russian regions. Seen by Forum 18, four of its entries are religious
organisations: the Catholic charity Caritas; the Jehovah's Witnesses;
congregations of the Latvia-based New Generation Pentecostal Church; and
parishes inside Russia loyal to the portion of the emigre Russian Orthodox
Church Abroad that opposed reunification with the Moscow Patriarchate in
2007.  Several entries on Agora's list
refer to multiple Pentecostal and Jehovah's Witness communities, suggesting
that a disproportionately large number of NGOs checked were religious.  While no precise figures were collected, around
100 churches were checked during April out of over 2,000 in the Russia-wide
Pentecostal union led by Bishop Eduard Grabovenko, his assistant Ivan
Borichevsky estimated to Forum 18 on 13 May.  The sweep affected around 300 congregations out of over 3,000 in the
Russia-wide Pentecostal union led by Bishop Sergei Ryakhovsky, his assistant
Konstantin Bendas told Forum 18 on 14 May.  Since the beginning of March, 142 Jehovah's Witness congregations have
been inspected out of a total of 2,400 across Russia, their spokesperson
Grigory Martynov told Forum 18 on 17 May.  Forum 18 has found these - and other - religious organisations'
experience of the check-ups to be mixed (see F18News 28 May 2013
http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1841).  "Foreign agents"?  The NGO sweep appears to have been prompted
by President Vladimir Putin's 14 February speech to employees of the FSB
security service. In it, he commented: "The regime governing the
activities of NGOs in Russia is in place, and it also applies to funding from
abroad. Obviously, these laws must be complied with. Any direct or indirect
interference in our internal affairs, any form of pressure on our country or on
our allies and partners, is unacceptable."  In an interview with Germany's ARD TV station broadcast on 5 April,
Putin further alleged that 654 NGOs operating in Russia are both funded from
abroad and "engaged in internal political activity".  Putin's comments chime with 2012 amendments
to the 1996 Law on Non-Commercial Organisations concerning "foreign
agents". These oblige an NGO to register with the state as a "foreign
agent" if it receives funds or property from foreign sources and engages
in political activity on Russian territory (Article 2.6). "Political
activity" is most broadly defined as "forming public opinion with a
view to influencing decisions made by state organs". However, this is also
stipulated as not including cultural activity, disease prevention, defence of
children and/or citizens, social support or environmental protection.  A second amendment obliges NGOs receiving
funds or property from abroad - whether engaged in "political
activity" or not - to submit separate accounts on their foreign income to
the state authorities (Article 32.1.3).  Crucially, religious organisations are in law exempt from both these
amendments (Article 1.4).  "Surveillance and criminal procedure"  The selection of religious organisations for
inspection despite this legal exemption indicates the authorities are failing
to distinguish between NGOs, Forum 18 notes.  In several cases, religious organisations appear to have been chosen due
to "foreign" links. Representatives of two - the Catholic charity
Caritas and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly known as
the Mormons) - have told Forum 18 that Public Prosecutor representatives
conducting their inspections explained orally that they were doing so due to
the 2012 amendments regulating foreign-funded NGOs (see F18News 28 May 2013
http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1841).  The original General Prosecutor order for the
sweep has not been made public, Dmitry Kolbasin of Agora told Forum 18 on 15
May. However, a 10-page order for corresponding check-ups issued by Samara
Regional Public Prosecutor's Office to its sub-offices on 28 February evidently
follows from it. Seen by Forum 18, the order explains that inspections should
check implementation of laws on "surveillance and criminal procedure"
when dealing with "extremism"-related crimes, as well as compliance
with the 2002 Extremism Law by "social and religious associations and
other non-commercial organisations" (see Forum 18's Russia
"Extremism" religious freedom survey http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1724).  The order thus does not ascribe the check-ups
to the 2012 amendments to the Non-commercial Organisations Law. However, it
does refer to that law's new, broad definition of "political
activity" - while failing to mention the types of NGO activity exempt from
it.  The order further instructs special
attention to be paid to NGOs "financed from foreign sources and
participating (..) in political activity on the territory of the Russian
Federation. As a rule, these are human rights and religious organisations,
national-cultural and youth associations, foundations etc." By ordering
analysis of such NGOs' foreign funding for the years 2010-12, it again fails to
acknowledge the legal exemption of religious organisations.  Senior figures in the General Prosecutor's
Office have similarly failed to observe the legal exemption of religious
organisations. In their public statements, they have directly attributed the
March-April inspections to the 2012 amendments.  General Prosecutor Yuri Chaika referred to the 2012 amendments as the
reason for the NGO sweep in his interview published on the Justice Ministry's
website on 29 April. Remarking that those inspected included
"organisations receiving foreign funds" and that "the law is the
law, it must be implemented," Chaika emphasised that the amendments had
set a deadline for submitting necessary documents, and that the time had come
"to check what has been done and how".  In his 23 April letter to the Presidential
Human Rights Council seen by Forum 18, Deputy General Prosecutor Grin similarly
maintains that the inspections are in line with a plan to check implementation
of the Law on Non-commercial Organisations due to the 2012 amendments -
"including organisations receiving foreign finance and acting in the
socio-political sphere".  Different
reasons  Creating still more confusion
over the NGO sweep, however, senior state representatives have offered varying
explanations for it, Forum 18 notes.  Despite his explanation above, Deputy General Prosecutor Grin has maintained
that any discussion of the inspections prior to their completion would be
"inexpedient". Grin offered this as the reason for cancelling his
subordinate Aleksei Zhafyarov's attendance at the Presidential Human Rights
Council's 15 April extraordinary meeting, the Council's website reported that
day.  The Justice Ministry thought
differently, however, sending its representative Tatyana Vaghina to address the
15 April meeting. Asked what the General Prosecutor's Office was looking for
during its inspections, Vaghina reportedly could not answer. According to the
Council's website, she stated only that the Justice Ministry had looked for -
but failed to find - evidence of "extremism" in the 528 checks in
which it participated.  In several cases
involving Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants and Muslims, "extremism"
featured as a key reason for inspections (see F18News 29 May 2013
http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1842).  Earlier contacted by Forum 18 about her
dealings with religious organisations, Vaghina said she was not authorised to
comment to the press (see F18News 12 November 2008
http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1216).  A lawyer's view  Andreyev, the Moscow-based lawyer focusing on
the rights of religious organisations, confirmed to Forum 18 on 16 May that the
General Prosecutor is authorised to conduct large-scale, impromptu inspections
on NGOs as seen this spring. "But of course you need to understand that
this mass check-up wasn't simply the initiative of the Prosecutor (..) There's
a political subtext."  Since the
2003 arrest of tycoon and philanthropist Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Andreyev
explained, Russian business has largely "tried to play by the rules of the
game" by not funding political opposition initiatives. The Kremlin is thus
turning its attention to non-commercial organisations, he continued, and the
recent inspections' main targets were "human rights NGOs through which -
in the opinion of the authorities - the opposition is being funded".  These organisations are also the focus of the
2012 amendments on "foreign agents" and foreign funding, Andreyev
told Forum 18. While exempt from these, religious organisations were checked
because they fall into the legal category of non-commercial organisations.
"The General Prosecutor gives an order - 'Check all non-commercial!' - and
such is Russian reality that not everyone in Public Prosecutor's Offices
understands what a non-commercial organisation is and what a religious
organisation is," said Andreyev. "There's an order to check, so they
check." (END)  For more background,
see Forum 18's surveys of the general state of religious freedom in Russia at http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1722,
and of the dramatic decline in religious freedom related to Russia's Extremism
Law at http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1724.  An analysis of the way that the Russian
authorities have used the Pussy Riot case to intensify restrictions on freedom
of religion or belief is at F18News 15 October 2012
http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1754.  A personal commentary by Alexander
Verkhovsky, Director of the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis http://www.sova-center.ru, about the
systemic problems of Russian anti-extremism legislation, is at F18News 19 July
2010 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1468.  A personal commentary by Irina Budkina,
Editor of the http://www.samstar.ucoz.ru Old Believer website, about continuing denial of equality to Russia's religious
minorities, is at F18News 26 May 2005
http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=570.  More reports on freedom of thought, conscience
and belief in Russia can be found at http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?query=&religion=all&country=10.  A compilation of Organisation for Security
and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) freedom of religion or belief commitments can
be found at http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1351.  A printer-friendly map of Russia is available
at http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/mapping/outline-map/?map=Russia.  All Forum 18 News Service material may be
referred to, quoted from, or republished in full, if Forum 18
<www.forum18.org> is credited as the source.
 
http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=1839
--------------------
 
Operation Total Eradication of NGOs
Vladimir Ryzhkov
St. Petersburg Times, Issue #1760, May 22,
2013
 
Although many initially thought that
the government's repressive new law aimed at nongovernmental
organizations and the so-called "Dima Yakovlev" law, which bans
U.S. citizens from adopting Russian orphans, represented a surgical
attack against a few undesirable organizations, it has now become clear
that the authorities are intent on completely eradicating all
remnants of civil society. 
The Kremlin's goal is to completely
block foreign funding of all NGOs and to shut down those that resist
the ban or the requirement to label themselves as "foreign
agents." Meanwhile, it has stepped up funding of Kremlin-friendly
NGOs by allocating grants through the Public Chamber and money
through regional budgets to create a wide network of NGOs that
are completely dependent on the authorities for their existence.
Since Russian businesses do not fund NGOs unless they have been directed or
given approval to do so by the authorities, independent NGOs will
disappear altogether, leaving only those that are loyal to the
authorities. Thus, Kremlin-friendly NGOs will be added to the Kremlin's
vertical-power arsenal, along with the courts, the siloviki,
mainstream media and the State Duma. 
A huge special operation involving
the Kremlin, State Duma, Prosecutor General's Office, Justice Ministry
and other government agencies is underway to eliminate all
independent NGOs. 
The first blow was strategically directed
against the most powerful and influential NGOs that have been
irritating the Kremlin for years with their investigations that
reveal gross abuses of power, corruption and violations of human
rights. 
The first to fall under
the heel of the authorities was the Golos election-monitoring
organization. Golos published conclusive evidence of massive fraud during
the 2011 parliamentary and 2012 presidential elections. Now
the authorities are taking their revenge against the  country's only
effective tool for fighting electoral fraud. Golos has refused
to label itself as a "foreign agent" and will very
probably be forced to cease operations. 
The Memorial foundation, founded with
support from legendary human rights activist Andrei Sakharov
and former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, has also been served
a warning by the authorities. Memorial documents crimes that were
committed by the Soviet regime and assists victims of human
rights abuse in the North Caucasus and other areas. The Federal
Security Service, which is likely behind the attacks, wants
to silence Memorial, which has exposed the crimes of the KGB
and today's FSB, an agency that continues to worship
the Red Terror's henchman, Felix Dzerzhinsky, whose portrait still hangs
in dozens of FSB offices. 
Among the organizations that
the authorities are attempting to stigmatize as "foreign agents"
are well-known and respected NGOs like Transparency International, which
fights corruption; Agora, which provides legal assistance to protesters
wrongfully imprisoned for participating in the protest march
on Bolotnaya Ploshchad; and even the Levada Center, which
conducts polls. 
"Foreign agent" is a term taken
directly from the Stalinist era, when the authorities induced mass
paranoia by claiming that the country was "surrounded
by enemies." To agree to be considered a "foreign
agent" is to sew a yellow star on your shirt or coat,
to acknowledge that you have committed some horrible crime of treason
and deserve to be an outcast in society.
The repressive NGO law was a key component of the Kremlin's
propaganda campaign that whipped up fear and hatred of everything
foreign and of both external and internal enemies. 
President Vladimir Putin tries
to explain that the government is not prohibiting NGO activity, but
only wants to know where their sources of financing are coming from.
But that question was answered long ago. NGOs have submitted accounting reports
on all income from both domestic and foreign sources since
the mid-2000s. In practice, though, NGOs would rather shut their
doors than humiliate themselves and tarnish their reputations
by labeling themselves as "foreign agents." And that is
precisely what this law was designed to accomplish. 
The state pogrom against NGOs will affect
not only polling agencies, human rights activists, independent elections
observers and corruption-fighters. Despite assurances to the
contrary, the NGO law has also been applied to harass organizations
that protect children and used against groups that work in the fields
of education, health care and environmental protection. 
The Prosecutor General's Office
and Justice Ministry are sending official warnings out to every 
NGO that receives any money at all from abroad. The second
criterion by which they are branded as "foreign agents" is if
they are deemed to engage in "political activity."
The siloviki have no trouble proving that claim because
the definition of political activity is interpreted so loosely as
to include practically everything. The Agora NGO has already listed
50 types of activities commonly carried out by NGOs that
the authorities classify as "political" in nature.
Practically everything that benefits society in some way is included,
from treating childhood illnesses to working to keep lakes
and rivers clean. 
Civil society is beginning to realize
the scale of the unfolding disaster. The Presidential Council
on Human Rights has appealed to Putin to repeal the law or
to urgently introduce mitigating amendments to it. 
But there is little hope. The Russian
state cynically speaks about the need for modernization and a
strong civil society, while it works methodically to destroy its very
foundation.   
Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy
from 1993 to 2007, hosts a political talk show on Ekho
Moskvy radio and is a co-founder of the opposition RP-Party
of People's Freedom.
 
http://www.sptimes.ru/index_bp.php?action_id=2&story_id=37339&section=3
--------------------
 
'It's Hard to Be a Circassian' -- and Moscow
is Making It Harder
By Paul Goble
Window on Eurasia, May 21 2013
 
On the 149th anniversary of the genocide of
the Circassians in the Russian Empire tomorrow, their descendants both inside
the borders of the Russian Federation and beyond are insisting that "it's
hard to be a Circassian" today and that the Russian authorities are doing
everything they can to make it harder still. Many Circassians say that Russia
has done everything it can to ignore or downplay the Circassian issue, but
others note that as the Sochi Olympiad approaches, Moscow has increasingly
adopted a policy of openly falsifying the history of the Circassians in general
and the events of 1864 in particular. An especially egregious example of the
latter is a two part article by Nikolay Sevostyanov in Moscow's "Segodnya"
newspaper entitled "The Myth of the Genocide of the Circassians"
which ignores the historical record and seeks to bury it in a mountain of
myth-making (segodnia.ru/content/122341 and segodnia.ru/content/122381). Faced
with this upsurge in anti-Circassian rhetoric, an interview with Igragim
Yaganov, a Circassian who serves on the Social Council attached to the North
Caucasus Federal District plenipotentiary Aleksandr Khloponin, as published in "Kavkazskaya
politika" under the title "It's Hard to Be a Circassian"
(kavpolit.com/tyazhelo-byt-cherkesom/). Yaganov said that he was "a
supporter of the national movement in the 1990s" and kept up with that
issue then. But unfortunately, "in the Russian interpretation the
nationality question is a crime and the worse nationalism and separatism are
curses." In other countries, things proceed in legal channels and that is "significantly
better" than what is the case in the Caucasus. Whenever and wherever
ethnic issues are dealt with in a legal framework, everything is possible, but
in the Russian case, attempts to raise the most innocent issues are
criminalized, thereby making progress toward a resolution of those and larger
issues difficult if not impossible and radicalizing both sides. "That
which is taking place in Mocow with these 'skinheads,'" Yaganov continued,
"is not nationalism; it is fascism and chauvinism.  A national idea is a completely different
thing." Georgia shows how that is possible: There the nationalists were in
power over the last decade, but at the same time, Georgia became a European
legal state." According to Yaganov, "if the state in which I live is
not called Circassian, it doesn't matter very much whether it is called:
Russia, Turkey or America. I have the legitimate right to dream about statehood
just as 'a good soldier dreams of becoming a general.'" Like all peoples, "the
Circassians want to live in a democratic and legal state," and they "will
seek to promote that rather than destroy the state within which we live."
The Circassian activist says he works with various social organizations, including
with the No Sochi movement since "we are against the Olympiad"
because "we completely support Olympic principles" and believe that
Sochi is the wrong place at the wrong time: the wrong place because it is a
subtropical, and the wrong place because of 1864. As the world must know, on
May 21, 1864, the act on the subordination and unification of the Caucasus with
Russia was signed. Having a sports competition on the 150th anniversary of that
is simply inappropriate, although Russians and others should know that the
Circassians remain proud of what they did. "Hitler struggled against
Russia for four years; Napoleon for a year and a half," Yaganov says. "The
Circassians in contrast fought for 101 years and in the end, were defeated
[only] after a plague epidemic. That has been scientifically shown." The
Circasssians today are very much aware that the 19th century was an age of
European empires. But the other countries apologized to those against whom thy
committed a genocide." That has allowed both to move beyond the sad
history of the earlier century. "But Russian cannot go beyond this period
because it denies or at least minimizes the fact of the Caucasus war."
What happened to the Circassians 150 years ago was a tragedy because they were
expelled from their own lands.  It was
the result of a conspiracy of the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire: "Russia
needed the Caucasus without Caucasians; Turkey needed the Caucasians." And
that led to the expulsion. Now, "it is Russia's responsibility to
recognize all these facts and to help the peoples who suffered." Right
now, thaat means in practiular helping the Circassians of Syria to escape the
bloodshed in that country. But it also means that Russia must acknowledge its
role in the crimes against the Circassians in the 19th century. Acknowledging
that he fought for the independence of Abkhazia because he believed this could
be the path to the sea for a revived Circassia, Yaganov insisted that he did
not "fight agains thte Georgian people but rather agains the State Council
of Georgia," whose behavior did not reflect Georgian interests either.
Georgia has been most supportive of Circassian issues, Yaganov continued,
noting that the change of government has not changed that nearly as much as
many seem to think and that the Circassian Center, media reports to the
contrary, continues to function and Georgians continue to be welcoming. As far
as the international Circassian movement is concerned, Yaganov said that "the
International Circaassian Association simply does not exist."  It arose as a public organization but it has
been taken over by the powers that be. That destroyed it and consequently, he
said, he refuses to have anything to do with it or take the compradore
statements of its leaders seriously. Right now, Yaganov argued, the primary
responsibility of Circassians is to keep their nation alive and hopeful for the
future. "In Russia, many seriously processes are taking place, and we
cannot interfere. We cannot destroy it or save it from destruction. Our task to
survive, to preserve outselves as an ethnos, to keep alive our traditions,
religion, culture and territory." That requires often unglamorous cultural
activities. But it also means that Circassians must be ready to take advantage
of situations, one of which is "the inevitable" amalgamation of
regions in the North Caucasus.  At
present, the rulers there act on Moscow's behalf rather than on the behalf of
the people. But a new Circassian Republic could change that.
 
http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.de/2013/05/window-on-eurasia-its-hard-to-be.html
--------------------
 
Putin Returning Russia to Its Soviet Past
Pavel Felgenhauer 
Eurasia Daily Monitor,Vol. 10, Issue 98, May
23, 2013 
 
Vladimir Putin's third presidential term began
on May 7, 2012, and has been dominated by an increasingly vicious campaign of
suppression of civil society and of any public manifestations of political
dissent. Human rights and non-governmental advocacy groups are being labeled "foreign
agents"-essentially spies for the United States-and now face mass
harassment and closure. The combined effort by state law enforcement, the
Federal Security Service (FSB) and state-run TV propaganda have been largely
successful. According to a survey taken last month by the independent
Levada-Center polling organization, the vast majority of Russians (66 percent)
agree with the Kremlin that human rights organizations that criticize the
authorities must not be allowed to receive grants or any aid from abroad.
Whereas, 53 percent concur that such organizations must be sanctioned or closed
down. Some 62 percent of Russians believe that foreigners support non-profit
and human rights groups in a desire to influence the internal Russian political
scene and to undermine Russia's national interests. According to the
Levada-Center, the majority of Russians today, as during Soviet Communist
totalitarian rule, believe the nation is surrounded by vicious enemies and all
sorts of evil are coming from abroad. The majority believes that activities by
non-profit organizations and human rights organizations are ether harmful or
senseless, while only some 19 percent believe such activities do Russia any
good (Vedomosti, May 17).
Not only human rights activists or political dissidents, but gay and lesbian
minorities have become victims of the current vicious hate propaganda campaign
run by the Kremlin. At present, the State Duma is preparing legislation that
will make any gay advocacy a felony. The bill is expected to become law before
the Duma summer recess, beginning in mid-July. According to the Levada-Center,
the state assault on gay rights has been highly successful: some 80 percent of
Russians believe that homosexuals are ether morally corrupt or insane. Some 73
percent believe the state must suppress any public advocacy of gay rights,
while 47 percent believe homosexuals must not be granted equal rights with
other citizens. Some 44 percent believe the state must allow aggressive
harassment of homosexuals by gay-hate groups, and around 51 percent believe
gays and lesbians must be prosecuted or receive medical treatment to change
their ways. Gay hatred has been increasing year by year in Russia, according to
the Levada-Center, and there is no possibility it will begin to recede anytime
soon: "Hatred is a government policy and it may only grow." In Soviet
times under legislation introduced by dictator Joseph Stalin, being gay was a
felony, punishable by long sentences in the Gulag (http://www.levada.ru/, May 17). 
The Levada-Center is today the only major and truly independent polling
organization in Russia. The two other major pollsters-FOM (Fond Obtsestvennogo
Mnenya) and VTSIOM-are Kremlin sponsored and controlled and tend to formulate
the questions they ask to get the results the Kremlin will like. In a recent
poll, FOM announced that if presidential elections were held in Russia now,
Putin would receive 62 percent of the vote; while, according to the
Levada-Center, Putin would receive 29 percent (Kommersant, May 16). It seems
the authorities are fed up with being humiliated by the Levada-Center's
independent polling, and this week they have moved to destroy the organization.
The prosecutor's office has officially issued a warning to the Levada-Center
that it is a "foreign agent." The results of its polls "are
forming public opinion about state policies," which make it a "political
organization," the prosecutors alleged, adding that, in recent years, the
Levada-Center received some grants from US-based foundations as well as
payments from foreign organizations for performing polls. The prosecutor's
offices demanded that the Levada-Center register as a "foreign agent"
or face the consequences: heavy fines and possible prison sentences for its top
executives. The director general of the Levada-Center, Lev Gudkov, told
journalists: "We will not volunteer to register as 'foreign agents' under
any circumstances, since we are not spies and have not done anything wrong, but
we may be forced to close down." The Kremlin considers the Levada-Center
an "enemy organization" and will continue to harass it together with
other state-assigned "foreign agents" 
Recently Putin has been increasingly using Soviet propaganda cliches to prop up
his regime, which is faltering as economic growth has virtually stopped in
Russia while inflation is still rampant. The government has announced that by
November 15 "a single concept of Russian history for school textbooks must
be established." This "concept" must indoctrinate the students
with an officially approved, non-deviant "history" of the ancient
formation of the Russian state and recent events: World War II, the demise of
the Soviet Union and Putin's rule. At the same time, legislation will be rushed
through the Duma to introduce a mandatory, officially-approved uniform for all
school students, male and female, in Russia (Rossiyskaya Gazeta, May 13).
Militarized high school uniforms were mandatory in Imperial Russia and were
reintroduced by Stalin after World War II when the Soviet Union transformed
into an imperial superpower. These school uniforms continued to exist until the
collapse of Communist rule.
While a restoration of Soviet-style imperialism in public life and state
policies (though without a restoration of Communist ideology) is in full swing
in Russia, Putin has hesitated to acknowledge it publicly; but apparently this
is changing. This week, meeting in his Sochi summer residence with a delegation
of South Federal University students and faculty, Putin spoke about the need of
all ethnicities in Russia to support a "strong state," adding: "Do
we need to restore something like the Great Soviet State (Derzhava)? I am not
sure, but we are absolutely, surely a great nation!" (Kommersant, May 23). 
According to a recent Levada-Center poll, a majority of Russians more or less
equally like the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II as well as Soviet rulers
Vladimir Lenin, Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev; while reformers Mikhail Gorbachev
and Boris Yeltsin are disliked by over 60 percent of the population. Brezhnev
was constantly ridiculed by anecdotes within Soviet society during his long
rule from 1964 to 1982 (Kommersant, May 22). 
Today, indoctrinated by state-run propaganda, Russians do not seem to value
freedom or know their own history, while Putin's regime is doing its best to
keep its subjects as ignorant as possible.
 
http://www.jamestown.org/regions/russia/single/?tx_ttnews[pointer]=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=40917&tx_ttnews[backPid]=48&cHash=c971ab3a5c88bce7ee2a47839c2523cf
--------------------
 
Keeping the peace with Russia
By Paul J. Saunders
The Washington Post, May 24 2013
 
Why the hysteria about Russia? From the tone
of what passes for policy discourse in Washington, one would think that Russian
troops were massing on the country's western border and that opposition
activists were being executed by the hundreds. Some realities in Russia are
indeed disturbing, but a sense of perspective is needed. If Moscow were really
the capital of a brutally authoritarian anti-American state, things could be
far worse - and profoundly damaging to U.S. national interests. But demonizing
Russia doesn't change conditions there and only undermines our ability to get
what we want and need.  Domestically,
Russia is a corrupt and semi-authoritarian country where citizens lack many of
the protections in the Bill of Rights and elections are not fair. That said, it
is no longer the Russia where dissidents were routinely sent to psychiatric
hospitals (as happened in the 1970s), shipped en masse to Siberian labor camps
(the 1960s) or shot after show trials - real show trials, in which the accused
confessed after torture and threats to their families (the 1930s).  Likewise, Moscow's foreign policy is not what
it was in the 1980s, when Soviet forces occupied Afghanistan; or the 1960s,
when the Soviets supported revolutionary movements around the globe; or the
1930s, when Stalin and Hitler eyed and then carved up Poland. Anyone tempted to
call Syria's civil war a "proxy war" should remember the proxy wars
of the past, when Soviet and American "advisers" were providing
vastly greater military assistance to their clients and were in combat, as
during the U.S. war in Vietnam and the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Russia is
trying to prevent a very nasty regime from collapsing in a conflict with more
than a few pretty nasty people on the other side - some of whom are receiving
arms from U.S. allies. Bashar al-Assad must go, but ending the conflict in
Syria requires persuading Russia to halt its support rather than encouraging
all sides to escalate.  The United States
and Russia have significantly different interests, priorities and perspectives
on many major international problems. They could not be considered friends by
any reasonable standard. But neither could they be considered enemies - and the
sooner we recognize this and act accordingly, the more effectively we will
advance our goals in Russia and in the wider world. Polemical rhetoric that
blurs this distinction and obscures opportunities makes policy worse, not
better.  Those who want to "stand up"
to Russia rarely, if ever, acknowledge the potential outcomes of such a course.
The first is that Moscow might decide to stand up to the United States. Think
Vladimir Putin is already doing this? Think again: A hostile Russia could
behave in profoundly different ways. Russia may be providing Syria with
anti-ship missiles to deter outside military intervention, but by historical
standards it is giving relatively little military or economic help to the Assad
regime. Moscow is not sending combat troops or advisers, it is not offering
grants or subsidies, and it does not appear to be sharing intelligence to shut
down arms shipments to the rebels. Its naval deployment to the region is
largely symbolic - Russian ships couldn't and wouldn't defend Syria from U.S.
military action, which seems quite unlikely anyway.  On other issues, while Russia has blocked
stronger U.N. sanctions on Iran, it has also supported several sanctions
resolutions and refrained from delivering S-300 surface-to-air missiles or more
modern S-400 missiles. Moscow is not supporting al-Qaeda terrorists in their
attacks on the United States and its allies, and Russian authorities warned the
CIA about the growing extremism of Tamerlan Tsarnaev well before the Boston
Marathon bombings, even if they hoped to thwart an attack on their territory
rather than ours. Russia is not aiding U.S. opponents in Afghanistan and has
been a critical link in U.S. efforts to supply our forces and now in
withdrawing them. Although the Russian route is long and expensive, it helps
Washington avoid total dependence on Pakistan, where access has been unreliable
and convoys have been attacked. Perhaps most important, Moscow is not an active
participant in China's massive military modernization. If Russia reversed some
or all of these policies, it could be very damaging to U.S. interests.  Russia probably deserves much of the
criticism from activists and others who don't like its domestic practices or
foreign policy. Activists can get away with ignoring the consequences of what they
propose; thinking about overall U.S. national interests isn't their job. But
the purpose of U.S. foreign policy isn't to give others what we think they
deserve - it is to "provide for the common defense," as stated in the
Constitution, something U.S. officials should keep foremost while crafting
policy. Making a real enemy of Russia won't help the United States.  Finally, for those who must decide what to
do, the highest moral standard is the standard of results rather than
intentions, hopes or statements. Shortsighted efforts to satisfy emotional
impulses at the expense of fundamental U.S. security interests, or of Syrians
or others who live on the world's battlefields, would be a grave and costly
mistake.
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/keeping-the-peace-with-russia/2013/05/23/24849ad4-c304-11e2-914f-a7aba60512a7_story.html
--------------------
 
The New Russian Anti-Semitism
By Victor
Davidoff
The Moscow Times, May 27, 2013 | Issue 5134
 
Sometimes you're sorry that the Nazis
didn't turn the ancestors of today's liberals
into lampshades."
That shocking phrase wasn't printed in an
obscure neo-Nazi newsletter but was the subheading of an article
in the web version of one of the country's most widely read
newspapers, Komsomolskaya Pravda. The author, Ulyana Skoibeda, is also
widely read and notorious. She first came into the public eye when
she proposed euthanizing newborn infants with disabilities and then took
the spotlight with her fight for "racial purity"
in the Russian state. She criticized the practice of inviting
African soccer players into Russian teams and said "foreign
citizens" like journalist Vladimir Pozner and writer Mikhail ­Veller,
should be banned from television. Not long ago, Skoibeda got another 15
minutes of fame when she demanded that a text by the Russian
writer Dina Rubina should not be used in a nationwide contest because
"a citizen of Israel has no right to teach us" about
Russia. Skoibeda, with the help of the popular newspaper
Komsomolskaya Pravda, has helped take the centuries-old phenomenon
of anti-­Semitism mainstream.
This time Skoibeda's ire was ignited by a
post on LiveJournal by the liberal politician Leonid Gozman, who
also happens to be Jewish, like most of the other subjects of Skoibeda's
attacks. Gozman wrote a critical post about the television series
"SMERSH," an acronym for the Soviet wartime military
counterintelligence agency, because it portrayed the agency's activities
in a rosy light.
"SMERSH operatives didn't have snazzy
uniforms, but that's about the only thing that differentiates them
from the [Nazi] SS," Gozman wrote. "I don't know how many
innocent people they shot, but it was a lot. The acronym SMERSH, like
SS and NKVD, should make people shudder in horror and not be
used as the name of a group of patriotic soldiers."
Historians are more certain of their
figures. At a minimum, SMERSH arrested almost 500,000 people
and executed 30,000 or 40,000 of them. Most of them were Soviet
citizens who usually didn't even know what crime they had committed, which was
typical for the Stalinist period. We do know why one of those
thousands was arrested - an Army captain by the name
of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He was sentenced to eight years
in the camps for calling Stalin "mustaches" in private
correspondence.
SMERSH also was active on Soviet-occupied
territories. In July 1945, two months after the end of World War
II, a SMERSH unit near Bialystok in northeastern Poland executed
almost 600 Poles without trial because they were suspected of having
served in the Armia Krajowa, the Polish resistance under German
occupation.
But the issue here is clearly not
history. Since President Vladimir
Putin first came to power, Russia has become a field where
the threatening weeds of xenophobia and nationalism grow
rampant. In Moscow, thousands have marched in nationalist
demonstrations and taken part in riots. Crimes motivated
by nationalism are so common that they are barely worth mentioning
on the local crime news. Following the dark logic of European
nationalism, whomever Russian nationalists start with as their enemy -
migrant workers or African soccer players - sooner or later they get
to the Jews.
Columnist Ilya Milshtein wrote
on Grani.ru: "From low-grade xenophobia to an attack
on Israeli citizens and blacks to lampshades. That is
the historical path: from state patriotism to the crematoria
at Auschwitz and the gulag camps."
Anti-Semitism always flares up in Russia
whenever the political situation heats up. Today's patriots, like
the monarchists a century ago, can't help but notice that there are
several Jews among the opposition leaders. They also can't resist
the chance to portray the entire opposition as secret agents
of "Jewish capital."
Prominent opposition leader and satirist
Viktor Shenderovich jokes that his day is ruined if it doesn't begin with
an anonymous phone call asking when he will finally emigrate
to Israel. Strangely enough, the more he changes his cellular number,
the more anti-Semitic calls he gets.
Film critic Yury Bogomolov wrote
on his Facebook page: "A civil war is already being fought, although
it's still a cold war. Liberals are not yet being shot, but they are
labeled subversives in Komsomolskaya Pravda and on television. …
The ideological basis for savage reprisals has been articulated,
and the legislative mechanism may soon be put in place."
Incidentally, lawmakers didn't miss
the publication in Komsomolskaya Pravda. The State
Duma decided that three of its key committees, including defense
and security, should be entrusted with an investigation. Alas, they
weren't tasked with investigating the fascist statement by Skoibeda.
Instead, the Duma focused only on Gozman's blog to determine if
he violated the law by "equating Red Army troops with SS
troops." If not, several lawmakers suggested, new legislation should be
passed to make statements like Gozman's that equate ­Nazism with Soviet
communism a crime.
Vladimir Sungorkin, editor-in-chief of Komsomolskaya Pravda,
apologized to his readers for the publication, saying that he is
unable to check all the material himself. But a few days later
the newspaper treated its readers to another attack on a
liberal, who - surprise - is also Jewish. In a comment
to writer Mikhail Berg, a Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist regretted
that "we can't put people like that on the cobblestones of Red
Square just before a convoy of T-90 tanks goes by in
a parade."
After that, Skoibeda's dream of making
lampshades out of the skin of liberals and their forefathers
sounds almost quaint. When can we expect the headline calling
for everyone to launch a pogrom?
Victor
Davidoff is a Moscow-based writer and journalist who follows
the Russian blogosphere in his biweekly column.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/the-new-russian-anti-semitism/480498.html
--------------------
 
Why the Kremlin Hates Levada Center
Daniel Treisman
St. Petersburg Times, Issue # 1761, May 29,
2013 
 
The older undemocratic regimes
becomethe more mistakes their leaders tend to make. Cutting
themselves off from accurate information is one of the most
common - and most self-destructive. 
This problem became particularly relevant
earlier this week, when Lev Gudkov - the director of the Levada
Center, Russia's preeminent independent polling agency - said he feared he
may have to shut down operations amid a government crackdown
on nongovernmental organizations. Prosecutors warned Levada that it must
register with the Justice Ministry as a "foreign agent." 
Since it was founded in 1987, originally
as the All-Union Public Opinion Research Center, the Levada Center
has conducted the country's most credible surveys on social
and political topics. It is known around the world for its
objectivity and professionalism. 
As a Western scholar who publishes
articles on Russian public opinion, I am often asked how one can trust
the available polling data. Levada's reputation is usually enough
to satisfy questioners. 
Now, prosecutors have ruled that
the Levada Center's posting of poll results and analyses
constitutes "political activity" because they "influence public
opinion." Under a law passed last July, organizations that receive
foreign funding and engage in activity deemed political must register
as "foreign agents," a label that is synonymous with spies
and calculated to evoke fear and distrust among ordinary
Russians. 
Since less than 3 percent of the Levada
Center's budget comes from foreign sources, according to Gudkov,
renouncing these grants might seem an easy solution. But that misses
the point. The prosecutors' attack is already casting a shadow
over Levada's work. Such investigations threaten to scare away
the polling center's Russia-based clients, whose contracts make up
the other 97 percent of the budget. And poll respondents will
not be so eager to answer sensitive questions next time the "foreign
agent" comes knocking at the door. 
Even if Levada were to comply
and register as a "foreign agent," which is understandably
out of the question for Gudkov and his colleagues, this would
certainly not end the center's troubles. If organizations are out
of favor with the Kremlin, the authorities will find other
pretexts to shut them down. The goal is not to end foreign
dependence so much as to eradicate independence. 
It is unclear whether Levada was targeted
on direct orders from above or merely fell victim to the broader
campaign by law enforcement agents to scare and disrupt
the modern, globally connected civil society that President Vladimir
Putin now considers his enemy. Either way, the Kremlin itself will be
among the victims if Levada closes. 
Surprisingly often, authoritarian governments
collapse less because of well-organized opposition than because
of their own errors. Overconfident and misinformed, leaders stumble
into danger and lack the skill and vision to get out. 
Consider Chile, where in 1988, General
Augusto Pinochet, the country's military-appointed president of 14
years, called a referendum asking the public to authorize him
to rule for eight more. Having restored order and prosperity
after the chaotic Salvador Allende presidency, he could not imagine how he
could lose. 
But lose he did. As the results came in,
aides found Pinochet "stunned and enraged … raving that he had been
betrayed by his advisers and outflanked by his enemies,"
in the words of the writers Pamela Constable and Arturo
Valenzuela. Although Pinochet tried to persuade his military colleagues
to overturn the result by force, the vote had undermined
his authority. The other generals refused. 
Another example occurred when
the Argentine military dictator Alejandro Lanusse called an election
in 1973, confident his candidate would triumph. In opinion polls
taken just days before the ballot, fewer than 40 percent said they would
support the candidate backed by the exiled populist leader Juan
Peron. In fact, the Peronist candidate surged to victory. 
Why is it so hard for authoritarian
leaders to accurately discern public opinion and act accordingly?
The explanation lies in the information bubble in which they
isolate themselves. 
Over time, even leaders who start out
open-minded grow accustomed to flattery and servility. Contradicting
the boss becomes dangerous. Reports from the ruler's advisers are
tweaked to match his preconceptions and to make him look good. 
As authority is concentrated at the top,
controlling the upward flow of information becomes a source
of power for those lower down. Competing for approval, advisers
slander each other and deflect criticism at external "enemies."
The general public gets more difficult to read. 
Even those who manipulate elections need
accurate information about public opinion. If they are overconfident, they may
manipulate too little, as in the case of Pinochet. If they manipulate
too much, they risk provoking popular outrage. 
In Russia, two other pollsters -
the Public Opinion Foundation, or FOM, and the All-Russian Public
Opinion Center, or VTsIOM - generally do respectable work. But their
frequent contracts for the Kremlin raise questions for some
observers. 
At present, Levada serves as
an anchor. If the results of other pollsters drift too far
in the Kremlin's favor, they risk losing their reputation. Were there no
Levada Center, even Putin's political operatives would have to wonder
whether the friendly pollsters were slanting results to ingratiate
themselves. 
Conversely, when Levada polls show, as they
have consistently, that more than 50 percent of Russians approve
of Putin's actions, this is believable. The fact that Levada
predicted a vote of more than 60 percent for Putin in the
2012 presidential election did more to legitimize his return to the
Kremlin than any glitzy inauguration. 
Shooting the messenger seems peculiar
given that many of the messages these days are just what the Kremlin
would like to hear. For example, Levada has documented a fall
in the readiness of Russians to participate in protests
and low popularity levels for all potential opposition leaders. 
Ironically, one of the most recent Levada
polls found that a majority of Russians favor "tough sanctions,"
including liquidation for organizations that violate the "foreign
agent" law. The authorities could clearly force the Levada
Center to close without antagonizing Putin's electorate in the
provinces. 
But that would be a mistake - not
just for Russia, but also for the Kremlin itself. 
Daniel Treisman is professor of political
science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author
of "The Return: Russia's Journey from Gorbachev
to Medvedev."
 
http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=37378
---------------------
 
Russia Underscores its Military Presence in
Georgia's Breakaway Regions
By: Vasili Rukhadze
Eurasia Daily Monitor, May 29, 2013
 
On May 14, Russia's Defense Minister Sergei
Shoigu visited Russia's 7th military base in Gudauta, in the Georgian breakaway
region of Abkhazia. At the base, Shoigu toured a Russian military sanatorium
and parking lot under construction, which is planned to house current and
incoming military hardware (www.regnum.ru, May
15).  Shoigu's visit at the base
underscores Russia's military occupation of the breakaway Georgian territories
of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali region (South Ossetia) and sends a clear and
aggressive signal to Georgia and the rest of the world that Russia is here to
stay for the foreseeable future, entrenching its military presence in the South
Caucasus.  Russia greatly strengthened
its military presence in Abkhazia since the 2008 Russian-Georgian war. Moscow
allocated $465 million to the development of the military infrastructure in the
region. The works included the construction of residential compounds for
Russian military personnel, as well as renovations at Bombora, the largest
military airfield in the South Caucasus. Moscow also renovated the Ochamchire
naval port, strategically located a mere 19 miles from Georgian-controlled
territory. The Kremlin has stationed eight patrol boats at the Ochamchire port.
Russians also set up radar stations along Abkhazia's Black Sea coast. With
these, Moscow effectively controls not only occupied Abkhazia's, but also the
rest of Georgia's coastline. Currently Russia keeps about 5,000 military
personnel in Abkhazia, 1,500 of which are Federal Security Service (FSB)
officers and border guards. However, Russian military infrastructure in
Abkhazia can sustain about 10,000 troops (www.civil.ge,
May 15).  By entrenching its military
presence in Abkhazia, Russia created a strategically important bridgehead
against the rest of Georgia. In case of a military campaign against Tbilisi,
Moscow possesses ready infrastructure to house and mobilize a formidable
military force on Georgian territory against Georgia. Russian military
infrastructure also can be used to support Moscow's military campaign against
the armed insurgency in the North Caucasus.  Russian military presence in Abkhazia also has demographic significance.
Housing thousands of Russian military personnel in Abkhazia, from where an
estimated 270,000 Georgians (about 50 percent of the region's population) were
ethnically cleansed during the 1992-1993 war, is changing the demographic
situation in favor of Russia and, in fact, it amounts to a demographic
colonization of this Georgian region.  The situation is comparable in Russian-occupied South Ossetia. In
November 2012, Russia declared that it would build a military town for 400
Russian military personnel in this breakaway territory (www.regnum.ru,
November 21, 2012; see EDM, December 12, 2012). Russia has already stationed
thousands of troops in South Ossetia. Russia's 4th military base in South
Ossetia has two branches-one in Tskhinvali district and another one in Java
district. These troops, along with troops stationed in Akhalgori district
(which do not belong to 4th military base) include about 3,500 military
personnel. In fact, Russian troops, stationed in South Ossetia, stand in
striking distance-25 miles away-from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. In case
of a military conflict with Georgia, Russian troops could reach the Georgian
capital within 30 minutes. Moreover, Russian occupation forces from Tskhinvali
could easily, within a matter of one hour, capture the vital East-West Highway
and, thus, split Georgia into two parts. Finally, Russia's 4th military base
possesses "Tochka" short-range tactical ballistic missile complexes
and "Smerch" heavy multiple rocket launchers-both of which could
deliver a devastating blow to virtually any geographic point on the territory
of Georgia (www.armada.ge, February 17, 2012).  South Ossetia's so-called minister of defense
is Russian Lieutenant General Valery Yakhnovets. The armed forces of South
Ossetia are, in fact, little more than a rag-tag militia. Their fighting
capacity is close to zero. By Lieutenant General Yakhnovets' own words, without
Russia's help, South Ossetian forces would not stand a chance against the
Georgian Armed Forces. The breakaway territory's armed forces depend on Russia
for weapons, ammunition and military infrastructure. According to Yakhnovets,
for the last 20 years not a single military facility has been built in South
Ossetia (www.pirweli.com.ge, February
24).  Although, 3,500 Russian troops are
not enough to mount a full-scale military offensive against Georgia, Russian
military presence in South Ossetia provides another convenient bridgehead to
mobilize thousands of Russian troops directly from Russia in a fairly short
amount of time via the Roki Tunnel, which connects South Ossetia with the
Russian Federation. The tunnel is now under Moscow's complete control.  Russia's military presence in Abkhazia and
the Tskhinvali region represents the most dangerous threat to Georgia's
territorial integrity, independence and statehood. Though Moscow on a regular
basis claims to be the guarantor of peace and stability in the South Caucasus,
its military presence, in fact, remains the single biggest challenge to peace
and stability not only in Georgia, but in the entire South Caucasus region.  Russia will do everything in its capacity to
maintain a powerful military presence in Georgia. Moreover, it is highly likely
that should Georgia decide to upgrade its own military capabilities, Russia
will extend its military infrastructure and presence in the occupied regions
and may even answer Georgia with military provocations. It is certain that
Russian military bases will continue to hang as a Sword of Damocles over
Georgia for the foreseeable future. But it is highly unlikely that Tbilisi will
manage to achieve the removal of Russian occupying forces from its territories
on its own, without the help of Western countries. As long as the West talks
softly to President Vladimir Putin's regime, Russia will remain the dominant
military power in the South Caucasus. Conversely, however, as long as Russia
remains militarily entrenched in the region, the resolution of the Abkhazian
and South Ossetian conflicts will remain elusive.
 
http://www.jamestown.org/programs/edm/single/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=40952&cHash=086bd5be562f92ff31ee66b5bbcec6c4#.Ub4_NdgcXGA
--------------------
 
"The logic of the law enforcement
agencies equates the expert community with foreign agents" 
HRO.org, 30 May 2013 || Vedomosti.ru, №93
(3355)
 
Common sense must be applied to the standard
definitions of Federal Law No. 121
The events of recent years, including the
development of Strategy 2020, the work of the Open Government, and the creation
of the Presidential Economic Council have all clearly demonstrated the
government's commitment to independent economic analysis. We have always tried,
and continue to try, our hardest to respond constructively to the authorities'
demands, and we are fully open to substantive cooperation.  However, a campaign is now underway that
threatens to destroy that collaboration. A wave of investigations by public
prosecutors under the legislation on foreign agents has affected many think
tanks and the Association of Russian Economic Think Tanks (ARETT), and it has
become clear that any non-governmental organisation which has funds from
foreign sources in its budget and carries out activities even loosely tied to
politics is under threat. Moreover, 'political activity' is defined very
broadly and vaguely by the relevant legislation, Federal Law No. 121, and the
experience of the investigations, has shown that a simple reference to the
words 'politics' or 'authorities' in an organization's charter is enough for
the organisation to be considered a foreign agent.  Economists, by the very nature of their
profession, are constantly connected to the development and delivery of
economic policy, whether they want it or not. This includes implementing
government initiatives (for example, the expert work behind Strategy 2020),
carrying out research in the interests of various state agencies, and public
discussion of social and economic reforms. In doing so, due both to the global
nature of modern economics and the fact that social and economic research in
Russia is under-developed, think tanks look to collaborate with foreign
partners and to diversify their sources of funding, which may include foreign
donors.  Following the logic of the law
enforcement agencies, this all goes to prove that the community of expert
analysts is almost entirely made up of foreign agents, who are forced to
register as such. However, in Russian, the word 'agent' means someone acting in
someone else's interests, or a spy. We have always acted in the interests of
Russia, and continue to do so, and we are certainly not spies. Therefore,
registering as foreign agents would represent self-incrimination, something we
cannot allow ourselves to do.  So, where
have funds from foreign sources been directed, and where do they continue to be
sent, in the field of economic research?  - On the development of education in economics. Thanks to international
donors, the best economists in the world have been lecturing at Russian
universities since the early 1990s, training a new generation of researchers,
analysts and tutors that today are at the forefront of Russian economics.  - On passing on practical experience to young
researchers. For many years, economics students at Russian universities have
been offered internships at think tanks, allowing them to take part in the
latest research projects.  - On
generating high standards of economic research. Programmes supporting economic
research have allowed Russian economic thought to catch up with the rest of the
world to a great extent, and to prepare projects that meet the highest
international standards.  - On
institutionalising research centres. Supporting theoretical research and
promoting research groups and bodies, including in the international academic
sphere, has helped in the creation of numerous think tanks.  - On publishing the results of economic
research. It is impossible to develop theory and practice properly without
making results public - it allows an exchange of opinion, the formulation of
new ideas, and the selection of those ideas with the most potential for future
development. However, publishing specialised literature, both journals and
books, is almost always loss-making. Large universities and institutes publish
them at their own expense, but organisations without these resources require
funds from donors (including foreign donors).  In all these cases, international funding helps the development of the
expert community, in the same way that Russian funding does. Since the main
focus of our work is to contribute to the country's economic development, it is
the government and society as a whole that benefit from the foreign funds
directed to our sector. The independence of economic think tanks and the
objectiveness of their evaluations and forecasts are provided by competition in
the field of economic research, the publication of results, the possibility to
study and contest results, and diversification of sources of funding.  We believe that common sense must be applied
to the standard definitions in Federal Law No. 121, and that there should be
changes made to the way this law is implemented. Clearly, only a legal entity
that not only receives funding from abroad, but also acts in the interests of a
foreign state or foreign company, can be considered a foreign agent. This is
the approach taken in other countries that apply the 'foreign agent'
concept.  The government is currently
showing a high level of interest in the results of economic analysts' work.
However, it should be remembered that this is based on two decades of effort
from our community, which has created Russian think tanks, taught students
analytical skills, and created journals and other infrastructure, without which
it would be impossible to work on the programme for developing the country's
economy.  It should be borne in mind that
continuing the strict and illegal application of the law on foreign agents, and
the arbitrary use of its provisions, will lead to the closure of think tanks,
lower quality economic analysis and reports, and the breakdown of continuity
and support mechanisms in the profession.  Russia has already lived through a period when economics and economic
analysis were fully controlled by the state. This control and the ideological
blinkers that accompanied it led to incompetence in decision-making in economic
policy, and the effect this had on the Soviet economy is well known. We hope
that government representatives support rational and objective analysis, both
in economic policy and in other areas of public life. This can only be provided
by independent experts who are free from political pressure.  The following took part in preparation of
this article:   Evsei Gurvich, President
of ARETT, member of the Presidential Economic Council, head of Expert Group No.
2 on the development of Strategy 2020;  Elena Abramova, Vice-president of ARETT, member of the Russian
Government Expert Council;  Andrei
Yakovlev, Vice-president of ARETT, member of the Russian Government Expert
Council, head of Expert Group No. 4 on the development of Strategy 2020;  Aleksandr Abramov, member of the board,
ARETT;  Irina Karelina, member of the
board, ARETT;  Natalia Akindinova, member
of the board, ARETT, member of the Presidential Economic Council 'Macroeconomics
and Financial Policy' working group, involved in developing Strategy 2020;  Vladimir Nazarov, member of the board, ARETT,
member of the Russian Government Expert Council, head of Expert Group No. 9 for
the development of Strategy 2020;  Lilia
Ovcharova, member of the board, ARETT, member of the Russian Government Council
on Guardianship in the Social Sphere, involved in developing Strategy
2020;  Yury Simachev, member of the
board, ARETT, head of Expert Group No. 15 for the development of Strategy
2020;  Aleksandr Auzan, President of
ARETT from 2005-2011, member of the Presidential Economic Council, head of
Expert Group No. 14 on the development of Strategy 2020;  Vladimir Gimpelson, member of the Russian
Government Expert Council, involved in developing Strategy 2020;  Natalia Zubarevich, member of the Russian
Government Expert Council, involved in developing Strategy 2020;  Nadezhda Kosareva, member of the Russian
Government Expert Council, involved in developing Strategy 2020;  Galina Kurlyandskaya, member of the Russian
Government Expert Council, involved in developing Strategy 2020;  Tatyana Maleva, member of the Presidential
Economic Council, head of Expert Group No. 3 on the development of Strategy
2020.
 
http://www.rightsinrussia.info/archive/russian-media/vedomosti/foreign-agents
--------------------
 
Unposed Questions
By Alexander Yanov
The Institute of Modern Russia, May 31, 2013
 
The Institute of Modern Russia continues the
series of publications by prominent scholar Alexander Yanov on the history of
Russian nationalism. In this article, the author discusses the ideological
influence of Slavophiles on the Great Reform of 1861.
In the time of the Great Reform, the press
mainly debated the issue of how to liberate the peasants-whether they would or
would not receive repayment, whether they would be allowed to keep their
existing land allotment or whether it would be cut off in favor of the
landlords. In short, the controversy was over an idea and revolved around a key
question: As a result of the liberation, would serfs become the "prosperous
rural class" promised by the government, or would the "white negroes
turn into day laborers with land," as opponents of the reforms predicted?
After this storm of controversy, the "power
over a peasant's identity focused in the village," that is, in the land
community (from which Stolypin would try to liberate the peasants half a
century later)-a fact that went almost unnoticed. The difference lay only in
the fact that, as a historian of the Great Reform noted, "The community
executed all the public police functions, which were carried out by a
landowner, free-of-charge, as chief of police during the law of serfdom."
The emperor chose an interesting man, General
Yakov Rostovtsev, to lead the process of liberating the peasants. Rostovtsev
once publicly explained that "a man needs a conscience in his domestic
life, but in the service, the higher authorities replace it." Later he
wrote: "Russia needs a community-based structure at the present moment.
People still need a strong government that can replace the power of the
landowner." It appears that the community was intended to take on the role
of chief of police.
In the eyes of the law, a peasant was dead. He
was not subject to rights or property, and he was not considered an individual-he
was not a man, if you like. The subject was part of a collective, whether this
was called the village, the community, or the kolkhoz. And the peasant could
still be flogged-if not by the will of the landlord, then by the order of the
community elder. Is it any wonder that historians commented on this collective
slavery this way: "The community, as in the time of Ivan the Terrible, was
more about state authority than it was about peasants' self-government."
In the eyes of the law, a peasant was not
subject to rights or property, and he was not considered an individual.
None of this, however, could be learned from
the writings of the Slavophiles. For the first time, in the enslaving of
peasants by the community, they experienced their future "hegemonic idea."
Collectivism, in which the identity of a peasant sank without a trace,
represented, in their opinion, "the supreme act of personal liberty."
As Alexei Khomyakov wrote, "Collective principle is the basis, the ground,
throughout Russian history, in past, present, and future." Community for a
peasant "is like a personification of his social conscience, in front of
which he straightens up the spirit; it supports the feeling of freedom in him,
consciousness of the moral dignity and all higher motives, from which we expect
his revival."
Something of George Orwell's 1984 pervaded
the tirades of the Slavophiles ("Slavery is freedom!"), especially if
we compare them with the evidence of a witness-and what a witness! Alexander
Engelhard was not only a professor but also a practicing landowner. In his
famous Letters from the Village, a bestseller in the 1870s, he literally
wiped the myth of the Slavophiles from the face of the earth. Here is how the "higher
urges" of a peasant looked in reality: "Peasants highly developed
individualism, egoism, and the desire for exploitation. Envy, distrust, a
tendency to undermine one another, the humiliation of the weak by the strong,
the arrogance of the strong, the worship of wealth. . . . Kulak's ideals reign
[in the community], each proud to be a pike and seeking to devour a carp. If
the circumstances favor it, every peasant will exploit another; no matter
whether he be a peasant or a landlord, he will squeeze the juice out of him and
exploit his need." So wrote one of the most
famous narodniks (populists) of his time.
However, not only empirical observations
contradicted the Slavophile myth. Science also conflicted with it. The most
outstanding historian of the Russian peasantry, Boris Nikolayevich Chicherin,
proved that "our present rural community does not natively ancestrally
belong to the Russian people, but turns up as a result of serfdom and the
capitation tax." In response, the Slavophiles branded Chicherin a
Russophobe who slandered ancient Russia. The real riddle, however, was
elsewhere.
Ghetto
This mystery is that nobody asked a very
simple question: Where was Russia heading if the peasants were deprived of
their civil rights at the very moment that urban residents were allowed to
acquire these rights (through representation in the City Dumas, access to
independent courts, and the abolition of corporal punishment), deepening the
terrifying chasm between the two Russias-European and medieval, Peter's and
Muscovia's-and perpetuating, in fact, "the power of darkness" over
the majority of the Russian people? The great question of the unification of
Russia that the Decembrists had posed to the country was forgotten entirely.
Yesterday's liberals, the Slavophiles, were in fact revealed as nationalists
(or, if you will, "national liberals"). In the name of "artificial
identity" (the expression of Vladimir Solovyov), they burned bridges
between their own educated Russia, with its Pushkin and Gogol, and the
illiterate, boorish kingdom, where nobody could recognize these great writers
from one another.
Using their position in the editorial
committees presiding over discussion of the Great Reform, the Slavophiles
easily imposed their will not only on the government, which was dreaming of
finding a new chief of police for the peasants, but also on the Westernizers.
That was the first instance of the Slavophiles acting in the role of a "hegemonic
idea," having subordinated practically the entire country's elite to their
influence. And boorish Russia was not only robbed, but also locked into some
kind of ghetto, with its special medieval laws. Half a century had to pass
before Witte and Stolypin asked whether such a peculiar system would eventually
lead to new peasant uprisings.
And What's With Westernizers?
Slavophiles didn't ask this fatal question in
the 1850s and 1860s, because they themselves were prisoners of the myth. But
why was this question not asked by the Westernizers, Russia's Europeans? Here
is my explanation: the Westernizers, successors to 16th century "non-possessors," who
sympathized with all the humiliated and offended, took the defeat of the
European revolutions of 1848 hard. They searched desperately for evidence that
the workers had a fair future, in spite of reactionary triumphs throughout
Europe. And they found it with the help of the Slavophiles-in Russia, of
course, and in the same peasant community. So liberal Westernizers (like
Herzen) and radicals (like Bakunin) accidentally found themselves in the same
boat as the Slavophiles.
And just what did they imagine about the poor
people locked in the community ghetto? In their eyes, this community
personified not only equality and brotherhood, but life itself. Bakunin once
wrote: "Our people are perhaps rude, illiterate, but they have life in
them, and there is power, and they have a future-our people are alive. And we,
actually, do not exist; our life is empty and pointless." Compare this
with the words of Konstantin Aksakov, who attributed to the same people "the
whole idea of the country." And then compare these words with the
heartbreaking recognition of Dostoevsky: "We, in other words, the
intelligent layers of our society, now are some quite strange people (narodik),
very small, very insignificant." And try to tell the difference between
Bakunin, who was a deep-rooted Westernizer, and the Slavophiles.
Herzen was no less eloquent: "On its
hospital bed, Europe, as if confessing or telling its last secret, which was
purchased mournfully and too late, points to those elements that strongly and
deeply lie in our people's character as the only way of salvation."
 This in an open letter to the czar! Autocratic Russia, only yesterday the
"gendarme of Europe," whose aggressive attempt to dismember Turkey
only a few years prior led to such great bloodshed-as Europe's savior? Such a
claim must have looked strange to the Europeans, especially with its abstract
reference to "the people's character." Always suspicious, Marx-himself
crazy about the other "Messiah," the proletariat-labeled Bakunin
(along with Herzen) a czarist agent. 
An alternative course of post-reform Russia-let
us call it the Stolypin course-was possible also in the 1850s, when it seemed
that the life of the country was again springing anew, when Leo Tolstoy, not a
sentimental man, wrote: "Who has not lived in 1856 does not know what life
is; all wrote, read, talked, and all Russians, as one man, were in urgent
delight"; when the star of the czar-liberator was high, and Herzen
congratulated him from faraway London: "Thou hast conquered, Galilean!"
Alexander II could do everything in those days, not like Nicholas II half a
century later, after the execution of the workers and the revolution of 1905,
when Stolypin tried to revise the old error. It turned out, alas, that history
does not forgive such mistakes.
The origin of this error is clear: the
Slavophiles insisted, the government played along, and Westernizers agreed-each
for his own, albeit opposite, reasons. No one protested. Fatal errors happen
this way sometimes, simply because there is no opposition. Special blame for
not asking questions lies, of course, with the Westernizers (what could be
asked of the nationalists?). For them, to be in opposition to autocracy is
supposed to be a job description. But as we can see, the mission of rescuing
Russia was more important for them as well.
Which brings us to this strange and quite
seditious thought (at least from the point of view of conventional
historiography): Were post-Decembrist Westernizers really Westernizers, as we
imagine them to be? Or did they become, God forbid, "national liberals"
after the dictatorship of Nicholas I? Of course, they did so with certain
reservations: the dream of the constitution was still smoldering and autocracy
still disgusted them with its foolishness and archaic police character under
the flag of "protection of traditional values," and the Decembrists'
dream of the conversion of the Empire into a Federation was still not
forgotten. And still. . . .
Wasn't the famous historian Sergei Solovyov
right when he wrote that "ignorant government ruined the whole generation"?
Or when former Education Minister Alexander Golovnin frankly confessed in his
diary: "We survived Nicholas I's last decade, the experience which
mutilated us psychologically"? Of course, there were (as we shall see)
exceptions, and, of course, this is no more than a hypothesis.
Were post-Decembrist Westernizers really Westernizers,
as we imagine them to be? Or did they become "national liberals"?.
If, however, we were able to prove this
hypothesis, it would explain a lot of things about the subsequent course of
events in Russia after Nicholas I: Why Slavophilism managed to attain the
status of an "hegemonic idea;" why Russia's elite, which was quite
Westernerized in the 20th century, chose Slavophilism in the critical hour;
why, when they were given the chance to shape the fate of their country for
many generations, they allowed the country to get involved in World War I, a
wrong and disastrous choice in the name of the same Russian mission. In other
words, why they risked "national self-destruction" (the expression of
Vladimir Solovyov) for the sake of Slavophile tribal solidarity and the cross
on the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Constantinople.
To prove this hypothesis is not easy. But
here, at a new crossroads, we face questions that nobody, as far as I know, has
asked since that time a century ago. The most important among them concerns the
following. Every historian, both domestic and Western, without exception,
agrees that if Russia had not rushed into World War I in 1914, no catastrophe
would have happened three years later. During that fateful July, the influence
of "red" demons on political decisions was about equal to the impact
of today's supporters of Eduard Limonov-little to zero. But if they did not
make that suicidal decision, then who did? In other words, who is responsible
for the death of Petrine Russia? This decisive question, it would seem, has
been asked by no one.
Would it be interesting to know why almost all
the Russian elite-from Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov to the philosopher
Nikolai Berdyaev, from State Duma Speaker Mikhail Rodzianko to the poet Nikolay
Gumilev, from high-ranking officials to the theorists of symbolism, from "vekhovtsy" to
their most cruel critic Pavel Milyukov-unanimously, in a fit, brought their
country into the abyss of "the last war" (again the expression of
Vladimir Solovyov)? Note that I'm only saying this about the faithful
Westernizers; Slavophiles, of course, were overjoyed on the occasion of this
war. "'Ex Oriente Lux!' declared Sergii Bulgakov, now that Russia was
intended to lead the European people spiritually. Life had justified all
expectations, all classic provisions of Slavophile teachings. The byword of the
period was Vladimir Ern's brochure, The Times are Slavophiling."
Why no one has asked this main question is
clear. "What to do?" some say. "There was no alternative for
Russia. Germany decided everything for it." And then the victory of the "red"
demons was inevitable. It means that there is only one way to overturn this
century-long argument-to prove that there was an alternative.
 
http://imrussia.org/en/society/470 
==============================



III PRMARY SOURCES


Eurasian Policy of Turkey
By Alexander Dugin
The Fourth Political Theory, n.d.
 
From the point of view of geopolitics, Turkey
belongs to the "coastal zone", and therefore, the geopolitical
theorem of Turkish policy on a global scale is solved through the balance and
confrontation between the two orientations - Atlanticist and Eurasian. Since
the days of Kemal Ataturk, Turkey has a strong national consciousness,
perceives its statehood as a colossal, almost absolute value, and tends to play
a strong and independent part in the regional context.
Modern Turkey was born in a bloody battle on
the Bosphorus against the British. Kemal Ataturk builds "young Turkey"
on the basis of hard confrontation with the Anglo-Saxon project. In other
words, the Eurasian choice lies in the foundation of the modern Turkish state,
where anti-English momentum begins its modern history. The geopolitical line of
Ataturk is clear: Turkey does not intend to be atlanticist colony: it's a free
and fundamental choice of father-founder of the Turkish state. And this choice
is Eurasian geopolitically.
In the second half of the twentieth century
the regional policy of Turkey arised from the balance between orientation
towards the U.S. and NATO and desire to preserve its national identity and
regional independence. Even in the period of the closest rapprochement with
Washington Ankara never considered itself to be a colony, but aimed to become a
partner of America.
After the collapse of the USSR Turkish special
services sharply intensified their activities in Azerbaijan, Central Asia and
the Caucasus. Ankara sought to consolidate their interests in the format of the
anti-Russian Fronde in the territories, where Moscow's positions were weakened.
The climax of these trends was achieved during the first Chechen campaign,
which was actively supported by Turkey logistically, informatically and
economically. In short, by the mid of 1990-es atlanticist role of Turkey in its
relation to Eurasia reached its climax. If Moscow at that time left the North
Caucasus, amenable to the separatist invasion, and weakened and lost control of
the situation in other regions, we cannot exclude the scale of participation of
Turkey in the administration of the gigantic Eurasian territories.
A cursory analysis of the latest changes in
the geopolitical picture of the world shows the context of the changing
geopolitical functions of all major players. Turkey"s geopolitical
position in the scale of regional policy is great. Eurasianism in Turkey most
actively began to spread in left-wing circles. It was the left, "Communist"
version, in many ways reminiscent of a similar evolution of the Russian
Communists. It's concentrated around the "Working party of Turkey",
Dogu Perincek, the journal "Aydenliik" and other culturally close
initiatives. In this case, the inertial anti-capitalist and anti-American
vector, traditional for the left and the extreme left, combined with a growing
nationalism and nеоkеmаlism which, coupled with a keen attention to strategy
and geopolitics, brought these circles to the issues of Eurasianism.
However, a certain interest to Eurasionism was
shown by completely opposite forces - right nationalists, centrists, some
religious circles, a certain segment of the military leadership of Turkey, such
intellectual foundations as "Yasawi "and ASSES, a movement called "Platform
of Eurasian Dialogue ", seeks to bring together intellectuals of the CIS
countries and Turkey. This interest is also attributed by economic structures
such as "The Eurasian Forum" of Arcan Суver, Eurasian Department of
the chamber of Commerce of Turkey, organization of Eurasian cooperation of
Russia and Turkey РУТАМ, non-conformist magazine "Yaryn" etc.
Finally, there were a lot of support of Eurasianism in private conversations in
official negotiations with many high-ranking officials and representatives of
law enforcement agencies, especially the army. In each case, the framing of
Eurasianism was unique, but the main vector was clear: Ankara actively seeks
the answer to the challenges of the new geopolitical system, refuses from unambiguous
atlanticist choice, revokes and collapses the former anti-Russian scenario,
searches for a new understanding of Turkey's place in the regional balance of
powers and looks at the new Eurasia with new eyes. And this implies a new
system of interaction with Russia -- under new rules in the new context.
Turkey is the East, who went to the West,
remaining East essentially. Turkey is the West pushed deeply into East and
fused with its values. Modern Turkey as modern Russia, is built on the ruins of
the Eurasian Empire. The roots of Turks are in the endless expanses of the
Eurasian continent. Their vector of movement goes to the West. Turkey itself is
Eurasia, a powerful bundle of historical and political will, remelting peoples
and the state in the new historical phenomenon. European and Asian Turks
inseparably merged among themselves, and the axis of this synthesis is the
national Turkish state, the State that is deeply Eurasian.
This brief analysis explains to us the essence
of the processes taking place in Turkey today.
The fact is that the last 5 years the Erdogan's
government (moderate Islamists) moved away from the Eurasian model, though it
paid special attention to Eurasian doctrine, despite the tough clash with a
group of Eurasian Kemalists (in the case with "Ergenekon"), inspired
by the provocateurs from the CIA. Thousands of Kemalists and Eurasianists,
including most of the leaders of the Turkish General staff, were removed from
their offices, and many hundreds of them were thrown in jail on false charges
in violation of all laws. This Atlantisist and Pro-American revolution of
Erdogan received the name of "neoosmanian policy" and meant a new
integration of Ankara into the American project of the Greater Middle East.
Erdogan almost broke ties with Iran, became close with the pro-US Wahhabi
regimes of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and sharply deteriorated relations with
Moscow. The Arab world, of course, did not improve its attitude to Turkey
(former Empire), and Eurasian partner's ties were severed. Having set the task
to strengthen its influence in the region with the support of Americans and
colluding with Israel (which took advantage of the visibility deterioration of
relations with Turkey in becoming intimate with Greece and buying there a
strategically important assets (energy) and earth), in the case of a new and
serious clashes with the Islamic world, primarily with Iran, Erdogan undermined
not only possible Eurasian axis (in particular, the axis of Moscow-Ankara, to
which I devoted a separate book published in Turkish language a few years ago),
but also jeopardize the integrity of Turkey, provoking terror against the
government of the half of the population and creating conditions for a new wave
of Kurdish separatism. In other words, "Neoosmanian policy" of
Erdogan was a complete failure and jeopardized the very existence of Turkey.
When Erdogan was supported by the Wahhabi Pro-American extremists in Syria and
was opened on one side to Israel, it became obvious that he crossed the line
and that Turkey is doomed. In this case The policy of Erdogan was not a
fluctuation of the coastal zone between the Land (Eurasianism) and the Sea (the
USA, and its regional subimperiolistic allies -- Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel,
Wahhabis, etc), but definite embedding in Atlanticism, that is the straight
path to suicide. Erdogan was in a position of Saakashvili in 2008 or
Yushchenko. Not a long time remained before the collapse of his regime and the
collapse of Turkey.
Many of the " patriotic" experts,
being ignorant in geopolitics and obsessed by conspiracy theory, are ready to
see here "the hand of the Americans" and the manipulation of Soros
Foundation and Rothschild. They better prefer to explain all world events and
never to take resolute and active position -- only passively observing what is
happening. Let's imagine, that the revolution will begin in the camp of our
enemies: in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, in the United States; alas, such unnoticed by
us revolutions today reveals themselves in the dramatic struggle of the Bahrain
folk Shia majority against Bahrain pro-Saudi atlanticist dictatorship, for
example. They certainly should be classified as Eurasian, and they should be
encouraged by us by all means. But the revolutions in Libya, Syria, or Iran, by
contrast, are atlantisist from a geopolitical point of view. Uprising societies
in Egypt and Tunisia can be considered politically ambiguous. It's the same
with the recognition of independence of certain newly proclaimed countries.
Recognition of Kosovo's independence - is Atlanticism, and of South Ossetia and
Abkhazia - Eurasianism.
The geopolitical line of Ataturk is clear:
Turkey does not intend to be the atlanticist colony. It's a free and
fundamental choice of the father-founder of the Turkish state.
Moscow sooner or later has to learn the basics
of geopolitics and act in accordance with indigenous long-term and objective
national interests. So we should support the people uprising in Turkey. Nothing
personal, Mr. Erdogan, you will reap the fruits of what is sown by yourself.
This is what 's happening before our eyes.
Today atlanticism of Erdogan came into the final conflict with the Eurasian
masses of Turkey. Therefore, this revolution unlike many other episodes of the
so-called "Arab spring", should be geopolitically qualified as
positive. Of course, it involves different forces, moderated from the USA,
which are among the rebels, and their networks, always making bets to several
trends. But the intellectual center of the uprising is the Eurasian left of the
"Working party of Turkey" and their publication (in particular, "Aydinlik")
and independent TV channel Ulusal. Leaders of the party Dogu and Mehmet
Perinchek are currently in prison, but millions of their followers are waging a
bitter struggle with the atlantist, the Wahhabi and pro-Israel lobby, still
officially dominant in Turkey. Turkey now is against Russia - almost militarily
- in Syria, where we support directly opposite forces, as Eurasians and
atlantisists are always on different sides of barricades. But Turkey has the
freedom to choose Russia with its geopolitical place. Today the duality of
Turkey appears to be obvious: Eurasian opposition attacks atlanticist,
anti-national, Pro-American power. Of course, the control of the Turkish
Eurasians over the total mass of the rebels is not complete, but significant.
But it is obvious for Moscow with whom to be in such a situation. And we should
look more closely at every Russian expert who advises in this situation to move
in the direction of Erdogan or not to intervene at all: if he is himself a part
of the Pro-US atlanticist network, whose presence in the Russian leadership was
prevailing, until Putin had not started cleaning of the agents of Western
influence in the political elites of Russia (which, alas, is far from being
finished).
 
http://www.4pt.su/en/content/eurasian-policy-turkey
-----------------
 
On "White Nationalism" and other
Potential Allies in the Global Revolution
By Alexander Dugin
The Fourth Political Theory, n.d.
 
[The following text was compiled from various
informal statements that Prof. Dugin posted to his Facebook page over the last
year which deal with common themes. I have combined and restructured them in an
attempt to reshape them into a single, coherent text, and also brushed up the
language somewhat.-Ed.]
There are different tendencies in the new
generation of revolutionary, non-conformist movements in Europe (on the Right
as well as the Left), and some of them have been successful in attaining high
political positions in their respective countries. The crisis of the West will
grow broader and deeper every day, so we should expect an increase in the power
and influence of our own Eurasianist resistance movement against the present global
order, which is a dictatorship by the worst elements of the Western societies.
Those from either the Right or the Left who
refuse American hegemony, ultra-liberalism, strategic Atlanticism, the
domination of oligarchic and cosmopolitan financial elites, individualistic
anthropology and the ideology of human rights, as well as typically Western
racism in all spheres - economic, cultural, ethical, moral, biological and so
on - and who are ready to cooperate with Eurasian forces in defending
multipolarity, socio-economic pluralism, and a dialogue among civilizations, we
consider to be allies and friends.
Those on the Right who support the United
States, White racism against the Third World, who are anti-socialist and
pro-liberal, and who are willing to collaborate with the Atlanticists; as well
as those on the Left who attack Tradition, the organic values of religion and
the family, and who promote other types of social deviations - both of these
are in the camp of foe.
In order to win against our common enemy, we
need to overcome the ancient hatreds between our peoples, as well as those
between the obsolete political ideologies that still divide us. We can resolve
such problems amongst ourselves after our victory.
At the present time, we are ALL being challenged,
and ALL of us are being dominated by the forces of the prevailing global order.
Before we concern ourselves with these other
issues, we first need to liberate ourselves.
I am very happy that Gábor Vona, whom I have
met, and who is the leader of the Jobbik party in Hungary, understands this
perfectly. We need to be united in creating a common Eurasian Front.
In Greece, our partners could eventually be
Leftists from SYRIZA, which refuses Atlanticism, liberalism and the domination
of the forces of global finance. As far as I know, SYRIZA is anti-capitalist
and it is critical of the global oligarchy that has victimized Greece and
Cyprus. The case of SYRIZA is interesting because of its far-Left attitude
toward the liberal global system. It is a good sign that such non-conformist
forces have appeared on the scene. Dimitris Konstakopulous writes excellent
articles and his strategic analysis I find very correct and profound in many
cases.
There are also many other groups and movements
with whom we can work. The case of the Golden Dawn (Chrysi Avgi) is interesting
because it is part of the growing (and very exciting indeed) reappearance of
radical Right parties in the European political landscape. We need to
collaborate with all forces, Right or Left, who share our principles.
The most important factor should not be
whether these groups are pro-Russian or not. What they oppose is of much
greater importance here. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. It is simple and
easy to understand. If we adopt such an attitude in order to appeal to all
possible allies (who either approve of us or who do not), more and more people
will follow suit - if only due to pragmatism. In doing so, we will create a
real, functioning network - a kind of Global Revolutionary Alliance. It is
important that we pursue a strategy of uniting the Left and the Right
everywhere, including in the United States. We need to save America from its
own dictatorship, which is as bad for the American people as it is for all
other peoples.
The issue of limited or unlimited government
is, as far as I can see, of lesser importance in comparison with geopolitics -
it all depends on the historical tradition of the nation in question. Gun
ownership is a good thing when the guns are in our hands. Therefore, these two
points when taken as a political platform I consider to be absolutely neutral
in themselves. Such an American Right can be good or bad, depending on other
factors beyond these two points. We need to have a dialogue with those who look
deeper into the nature of things, into history and who try to understand the
present world order.
I consider the "White nationalists"
allies when they refuse modernity, the global oligarchy and liberal-capitalism,
in other words everything that is killing all ethnic cultures and traditions.
The modern political order is essentially globalist and based entirely on the
primacy of individual identity in opposition to community. It is the worst
order that has ever existed and it should be totally destroyed. When "White
nationalists" reaffirm Tradition and the ancient culture of the European
peoples, they are right. But when they attack immigrants, Muslims or the
nationalists of other countries based on historical conflicts; or when they
defend the United States, Atlanticism, liberalism or modernity; or when they
consider the White race (the one which produced modernity in its essential
features) as being the highest and other races as inferior, I disagree with
them completely.
More than this, I can't defend Whites when
they are in opposition to non-Whites because, being White and Indo-European
myself, I recognize the differences of other ethnic groups as being a natural
thing, and do not believe in any hierarchy among peoples, because there is not
and cannot be any common, universal measure by which to measure and compare the
various forms of ethnic societies or their value systems. I am proud to be
Russian exactly as Americans, Africans, Arabs or Chinese are proud to be what
they are. It is our right and our dignity to affirm our identity, not in
opposition to each other but such as it is: without resentment against others
or feelings of self-pity.
I can't defend the concept of the nation,
because the idea of the "nation" is a bourgeois concept concocted as
a part of modernity in order to destroy traditional societies (empires) and
religions, and to replace them with artificial pseudo-communities based on the
notion of individualism. All of that is wrong. The concept of the nation is now
being destroyed by the same forces that created it, back during the first stage
of modernity. The nations have already fulfilled their mission of destroying
any organic and spiritual identity, and now the capitalists are liquidating the
instrument they used to achieve this in favor of direct globalization. We need
to attack capitalism as the absolute enemy which was responsible for the
creation of the nation as a simulacrum of traditional society, and which was
also responsible for its destruction. The reasons behind the present
catastrophe lie deep in the ideological and philosophical basis of the modern
world. In the beginning, modernity was White and national; in the end, it has
become global. So White nationalists need to choose which camp they want to be
in: that of Tradition, which includes their own Indo-European tradition, or
that of modernity. Atlanticism, liberalism, and individualism are all forms of
absolute evil for the Indo-European identity, since they are incompatible with
it.
In his review of my book The Fourth
Political Theory, Michael O'Meara criticized it on the grounds of advocating a
return to the unrealized possibilities of the Third Political Theory. It is
good that people from different camps present their responses to the Fourth
Political Theory, but it uses typically old Right/Third Way racist/anti-Semitic
arguments. It is not too profound, nor too hollow. I doubt that we can get
anywhere by repeating the same agenda of Yockey and so on. This draws the line
between the Third Way and the Fourth Way. At the same time, I consider Heidegger
to be a precursor of the Fourth Political Theory, and he was acting and
thinking in the context of the Third Political Theory.
Concerning the "identitarians," I
have never uttered the name of Faye in all of my writing - he is not bad, but
also not good. I consider Alain de Benoist to be brilliant - simply the best.
Those "identitarians" who view the positive attitude toward Islam or
Turks as a negative aspect of the Fourth Political Theory do so, I believe,
partly due to the manipulation of globalist forces who seek to divide those
revolutionary forces which are capable of challenging the liberal-capitalist
Atlanticist hegemony.
Muslims form a part of the Russian population,
and are an important minority. Therefore, Islamophobia implicitly calls for the
break-up of Russia. The difference between Europe and Russia in our attitude
toward Islam is that, for us, Muslims are an organic part of the whole, while
for Europe they are a post-colonial wave of re-invaders from a different
geopolitical and cultural space. But since we have a common enemy in the
globalist elite, which is pro-Pussy Riot/Femen, pro-gay marriage, anti-Putin,
anti-Iran, anti- Chávez, anti-social justice and so on, we all need to develop
a common strategy with the Muslims. Our traditions are quite different, but the
anti-traditional world that is attacking us is united, and so must we become.
If "identitarians" really love their
identity, they should ally themselves with the Eurasianists, alongside the
traditionalists and the enemies of capitalism belonging to any people,
religion, culture or political camp. Being anti-Communist, anti-Muslim,
anti-Eastern, pro-American or Atlanticist today means to belong to the other
side. It means to be on the side of the current global order and its financial
oligarchy. But that is illogical, because the globalists are in the process of
destroying any identity except for that of the individual, and to forge an
alliance with them therefore means to betray the essence of one's cultural
identity.
The problem with the Left is different. It is
good when it opposes the capitalist order, but it lacks a spiritual dimension.
The Left usually represents itself as an alternative path to modernization, and
in doing so it also opposes organic values, traditions and religion, just as
liberalism does.
I would be happy to see Left-wing
identitarians who defend social justice while attacking capitalism on one hand,
and who embrace spiritual Tradition and attack modernity on the other. There is
only one enemy: the global, liberal capitalist order supported by North
American hegemony (which is also directed against the genuine American
identity).
In terms of traditionalism, usually
traditionalism is defensive or is considered to be such. What we need is to
break this assumption and promote offensive traditionalism. We should attack
(hyper)modernity and make the status quo explode, in the name of the Return. I
mean "offensive" in all ways. We need to insist.
Politics is the instrument of modernity. I
think neo-Gramscism is an important tool. We have to form a historic bloc of
traditionalists alongside organic intellectuals of a new type. We have Orthodox
Christians (and perhaps other types of Christians as well), Muslims, Buddhists,
and Hindus who all reject the idea of the "Lockean heartland" (as per
Kees van der Pijl) becoming global. We need attack it together, not by
ourselves. And we need to attack in any possible way - everyone as he or she is
able - physically, politically, and intellectually…
It is time to be offensive.
Soon the world will descend into chaos. The
financial system is going to collapse. Disorder, ethnic and social conflicts
will be breaking out everywhere. Europe is doomed. Asia is in tumult. The
oceans of immigrants everywhere will overthrow the existing order. The present
system will be broken and disbanded.
After this transitional period, direct global
dictatorship will be implemented. We should be prepared and start to organize
the global resistance right now - the planetary network of traditionalists, Conservative
Revolutionaries, Heideggerians, the partisans of the Fourth Political Theory
and multipolarity, and non-conformists of all sorts - a kind of Sacred Front
beyond Right and Left, and consisting of different, older political and
ideological taxonomies. All three of the political theories have been phased
out of modernity, and also out of conventional and assumed history. We, and
also our enemies, are entering absolutely new ground.
Every traditionalist should ask himself (or
herself) the following questions:
1. Why have I arrived to be on the side of
Tradition in opposition to modernity?
2. What is the reality that makes me what I
am, in essence? Where have I got it from?
3. Is my vocation as a traditionalist the
result of my socio-cultural heritage (society, family, and culture) or is it
the result of some other factor?
4. How it is possible, in the midst of
modernity and postmodernity, to be differentiated from them?
5. In which way can I cause the modern world
around me real damage? (In other words, how can I effectively fight against the
Devil?)
The Fourth Political Theory struggles for the
cause of all peoples, but it is not made for the people. It is a call to the
intellectual elite of every human society, and rejects hegemony in all senses
(philosophical, social, and political). This time, the people cannot help us.
This time, we must help the people.
Opposing us is nothing more than an
intellectual elite, but it is a hegemonic one. All its material power is
nothing but an illusion and a phantasm: its texts, discourse and words are what
really counts. Its force lays in its thought. And it is on the level of thought
that we have to fight and, finally, win. Everything material that opposes us is
actually nothing but pure privation. Only thought really exists.
It is easy to manipulate the masses, much
easier than to persuade the few. Quantity is the enemy of quality - the more
so, the worse. The capitalist elite thinks differently. That error will be
fatal. For them. And we are going to prove it.
We need an open, undogmatic Front that is
beyond Right and Left.
We have prepared for the coming moment of
opportunity for too long. But now, finally, it is not so far in the future.
We will change the course of history. At
present, it is on a very wrong course.
We can only win if we combine our efforts.
 
http://www.4pt.su/en/content/white-nationalism-and-other-potential-allies-global-revolution
-----------------
 
Interview with Alexander Dugin
Counter-Currents Publishing, July 27, 2012
 
Introduction
In February 2012, Professor Alexander Dugin
traveled to New Delhi, India to attend the 40th World Congress of the
International Institute of Sociology, the theme of which was "After
Western Hegemony: Social Science and its Publics." Professor Dugin was
kind enough to take some time away from the conference to answer a few
questions by representatives of Arktos who attended the event. 
In this interview, we attempted to have
Professor Dugin clarify some of his basic beliefs in order to dispel the
confusion and misrepresentations that exist about him and his movement, the
Eurasian Movement, and its offshoot, the Global Revolutionary Alliance, in the
English-speaking world. The interview was conducted by Daniel Friberg, CEO of
Arktos, and John B. Morgan, Editor-in-Chief.
This interview is being released in
conjunction with Prof. Dugin's appearance at Identitarian Ideas 2012, being
held by the Swedish organization Motpol in Stockholm on July 28, 2012, and the
simultaneous release of Prof. Dugin's book The Fourth Political Theory by
Arktos (http://www.arktos.com/alexander-dugin-the-fourth-political-theory.html).
This is the first book by Prof. Dugin to appear in the English language.
--There is a perception in the West that you
are a Russian nationalist. Do you identify with that description?
The concept of the nation is a capitalist, Western
one. On the other hand, Eurasianism appeals to cultural and ethnic differences,
and not unification on the basis of the individual, as nationalism presumes.
Ours differs from nationalism because we defend a pluralism of values. We are
defending ideas, not our community; ideas, not our society. We are challenging
postmodernity, but not on behalf of the Russian nation alone. Postmodernity is
a yawning abyss. Russia is only one part of this global struggle. It is
certainly an important part, but not the ultimate goal. For those of us in
Russia, we can't save it without saving the world at the same time. And
likewise, we can't save the world without saving Russia.
It is not only a struggle against Western
universalism. It is a struggle against all universalisms, even Islamic ones. We
cannot accept any desire to impose any universalism upon others - neither
Western, Islamic, socialist, liberal, or Russian. We defend not Russian
imperialism or revanchism, but rather a global vision and multipolarity based
on the dialectic of civilization. Those we oppose say that the multiplicity of
civilizations necessarily implies a clash. This is a false assertion.
Globalization and American hegemony bring about a bloody intrusion and trigger
violence between civilizations where there could be peace, dialogue, or
conflict, depending on historical circumstances. But imposing a hidden hegemony
implies conflict and, inevitably, worse in the future. So they say peace but
they make war. We defend justice - not peace or war, but justice and dialogue
and the natural right of any culture to maintain its identity and to pursue
what it wants to be. Not only historically, as in multiculturalism, but also in
the future. We must free ourselves from these pretend universalisms.
--What do you think Russia's role will be in
organizing the anti-modern forces?
There are different levels involved in the
creation of anti-globalist, or rather anti-Western, movements and currents
around the world. The basic idea is to unite the people who are fighting
against the status quo. So, what is the status quo? It is a series of connected
phenomena bringing about an important shift from modernity to post-modernity.
It is shaped by a shift from the unipolar world, represented primarily by the
influence of the United States and Western Europe, to so-called non-polarity as
exemplified by today's implicit hegemony and those revolutions that have been
orchestrated by it through proxy, as for example the various Orange
revolutions. The basic intent behind this strategy is for the West to
eventually control the planet, not only through direct intervention, but also
via the universalization of its set of values, norms, and ethics.
The status quo of the West's liberal hegemony
has become global. It is a Westernization of all of humanity. This means that
its norms, such as the free market, free trade, liberalism, parliamentarian
democracy, human rights, and absolute individualism have become universal. This
set of norms is interpreted differently in the various regions of the world,
but the West regards its specific interpretation as being both self-evident and
its universalization as inevitable. This is nothing less than a colonization of
the spirit and of the mind. It is a new kind of colonialism, a new kind of
power, and a new kind of control that is put into effect through a network.
Everyone who is connected to the global network becomes subjected to its code.
It is part of the postmodern West, and is rapidly becoming global. The price a
nation or a people has to pay to become connected to the West's globalization
network is acceptance of these norms. It is the West's new hegemony. It is a
migration from the open hegemony of the West, as represented by the colonialism
and outright imperialism of the past, to an implicit, more subtle version.
To fight this global threat to humanity, it is
important to unite all the various forces that would, in earlier times, have
been called anti-imperialist. In this age, we should better understand our
enemy. The enemy of today is hidden. It acts by exploiting the norms and values
of the Western path of development and ignoring the plurality represented by
other cultures and civilizations. Today, we invite all who insist on the worth
of the specific values of non-Western civilizations, and where there other
forms of values exist, to challenge this attempt at a global universalization
and hidden hegemony.
This is a cultural, philosophical,
ontological, and eschatological struggle, because in the status quo we identify
the essence of the Dark Age, or the great paradigm. But we should also move
from a purely theoretical stance to a practical, geopolitical level. And at
this geopolitical level, Russia preserves the potential, resources and
inclination to confront this challenge, because Russian history has long been
intuitively oriented against the same horizon. Russia is a great power where
there is an acute awareness of what is going on in the world, historically
speaking, and a deep consciousness of its own eschatological mission. Therefore
it is only natural that Russia should play a central part in this anti-status
quo coalition. Russia defended its identity against Catholicism, Protestantism
and the modern West during Tsarist times, and then against liberal capitalism
during Soviet times. Now there is a third wave of this struggle - the struggle
against postmodernity, ultra-liberalism, and globalization. But this time,
Russia is no longer able to rely on its own resources. It cannot fight solely
under the banner of Orthodox Christianity. Nor is reintroducing or relying on
Marxist doctrine a viable option, since Marxism is in itself a major root of
the destructive ideas constituting postmodernity.
Russia is now one of many participants in this
global struggle, and cannot fight this fight alone. We need to unite all the
forces that are opposed to Western norms and its economic system. So we need to
make alliances with all the Leftist social and political movements that
challenge the status quo of liberal capitalism. We should likewise ally ourselves
with all identitarian forces in any culture that refuse globalism for cultural
reasons. From this perspective, Islamic movements, Hindu movements, or
nationalist movements from all over the world should also be regarded as
allies. Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and pagan identitarians in Europe,
America, or Latin America, or other types of cultures, should all form a common
front. The idea is to unite all of them, against the single enemy and the
singular evil for a multiplicity of concepts of what is good.
What we are against will unite us, while what
we are for divides us. Therefore, we should emphasize what we oppose. The
common enemy unites us, while the positive values each of us are defending
actually divides us.  Therefore, we must create strategic alliances to
overthrow the present order of things, of which the core could be described as
human rights, anti-hierarchy, and political correctness - everything that is
the face of the Beast, the anti-Christ or, in other terms, Kali-Yuga.
--Where does traditionalist spirituality fit
into the Eurasian agenda?
There are secularized cultures, but at the
core of all of them, the spirit of Tradition remains, religious or otherwise.
By defending the multiplicity, plurality, and polycentrism of cultures, we are
making an appeal to the principles of their essences, which we can only find in
the spiritual traditions. But we try to link this attitude to the necessity for
social justice and the freedom of differing societies in the hope for better
political regimes. The idea is to join the spirit of Tradition with the desire
for social justice. And we don't want to oppose them, because that is the main
strategy of hegemonic power: to divide Left and Right, to divide cultures, to
divide ethnic groups, East and West, Muslims and Christians. We invite Right
and Left to unite, and not to oppose traditionalism and spirituality, social
justice, and social dynamism. So we are not on the Right or on the Left. We are
against liberal postmodernity. Our idea is to join all the fronts and not let
them divide us. When we stay divided, they can rule us safely. If we are
united, their rule will immediately end. That is our global strategy. And when
we try to join the spiritual tradition with social justice, there is an
immediate panic among liberals. They fear this very much.
-- Which spiritual tradition should someone
who wishes to participate in the Eurasianist struggle adopt, and is this a
necessary component?
One should seek to become a concrete part of
the society in which one lives, and follow the tradition that prevails there.
For example, I am Russian Orthodox. This is my tradition. Under different
conditions, however, some individuals might choose a different spiritual path.
What is important is to have roots. There is no universal answer. If someone
neglects this spiritual basis, but is willing to take part in our struggle,
during the struggle he may well find some deeper spiritual meaning. Our idea is
that our enemy is deeper than the merely human. Evil is deeper than humanity,
greed, or exploitation. Those who fight on behalf of evil are those who have no
spiritual faith. Those who oppose it may encounter it.  Or, perhaps not.
It is an open question - it is not obligatory. It is advisable, but not
necessary.
--What do you think of the European New Right
and Julius Evola? And in particular, their respective opposition to
Christianity?
It is up to the Europeans to decide which kind
of spirituality to revive. For us Russians, it is Orthodox Christianity. We
regard our tradition as being authentic.  We see our tradition as being a
continuation of the earlier, pre-Christian traditions of Russia, as is
reflected in our veneration of the saints and icons, among other aspects.
Therefore, there is no opposition between our earlier and later traditions.
Evola opposes the Christian tradition of the West. What is interesting is his
critique of the desacralization of Western Christianity. This fits well with
the Orthodox critique of Western Christianity. It is easy to see that the secularization
of Western Christianity gives us liberalism. The secularization of the Orthodox
religion gives us Communism. It is individualism versus collectivism. For us,
the problem is not with Christianity itself, as it is in the West. Evola made
an attempt to restore Tradition. The New Right also tries to restore the
Western tradition, which is very good. But being Russian Orthodox, I cannot
decide which is the right path for Europe to take, since we have a different
set of values. We don't want to tell the Europeans what to do, nor do we want
to be told what to do by the Europeans. As Eurasianists, we'll accept any
solution. Since Evola was European, he could discuss and propose the proper
solution for Europe. Each of us can only state our personal opinion. But I have
found that we have more in common with the New Right than with the Catholics. I
share many of the same views as Alain de Benoist. I consider him to be the
foremost intellectual in Europe today. That it is not the case with modern
Catholics. They wish to convert Russia, and that is not compatible with our
plans. The New Right does not want to impose European paganism upon others. I
also consider Evola to be a master and a symbolic figure of the final revolt
and the great revival, as well as Guenon. For me, these two individuals are the
essence of the Western tradition in this dark age.
--In our earlier conversation, you mentioned
that Eurasianists should work with some jihadist groups. However, they tend to
be universalist, and their stated goal is the imposition of Islamic rule over
the entire world. What are the prospects for making such a coalition work?
Jihadis are universalists, just as secular
Westerners who seek globalization are. But they are not the same, because the
Western project seeks to dominate all the others and impose its hegemony
everywhere. It attacks us directly every day through the global media,
fashions, by setting examples for youth, and so on. We are submerged in this
global cultural hegemony. Salafist universalism is a kind of marginal
alternative. They should not be thought of in the same way as those who seek
globalization. They also fight against our enemy. We don't like any
universalists, but there are universalists who attack us today and win, and
there are also non-conformist universalists who are fighting against the
hegemony of the Western, liberal universalists, and therefore they are tactical
friends for the time being. Before their project of a global Islamic state can
be realized, we will have many battles and conflicts. And global liberal
domination is a fact. We therefore invite everybody to fight alongside us
against this hegemony, this status quo. I prefer to discuss what is the reality
at present, rather than what may exist in the future. All those who oppose liberal
hegemony are our friends for the moment. This is not morality, it is strategy.
Carl Schmitt said that politics begins by distinguishing between friends and
enemies. There are no eternal friends and no eternal enemies. We are struggling
against the existing universal hegemony. Everyone fights against it for their
own particular set of values.
For the sake of coherence we should also
prolong, widen, and create a broader alliance. I don't like Salafists. It would
be much better to align with traditionalist Sufis, for example. But I prefer
working with the Salafists against the common enemy than to waste energy in
fighting against them while ignoring the greater threat.
If you are in favor of global liberal
hegemony, you are the enemy. If you are against it, you are a friend. The first
is inclined to accept this hegemony; the other is in revolt.
--In light of recent events in Libya, what are
your personal views on Gaddafi?
President Medvedev committed a real crime
against Gaddafi and helped to initiate a chain of interventions in the Arab
world. It was a real crime committed by our President. His hands are bloodied.
He is a collaborator with the West. The crime of murdering Gaddafi was partly
his responsibility. We Eurasianists defended Gaddafi, not because we were fans
or supporters of him or his Green Book, but because it was a matter of
principles. Behind the insurgency in Libya was Western hegemony, and it imposed
bloody chaos. When Gaddafi fell, Western hegemony grew stronger. It was our
defeat. But not the final one. This war has many episodes. We lost the battle,
but not the war. And perhaps something different will emerge in Libya, because
the situation is quite unstable. For example, the Iraq War actually
strengthened Iran's influence in the region, contrary to the designs of the
Western hegemonists.
Given the situation in Syria at present, the
scenario is repeating itself. However, the situation, with Putin returning to
power, is much better. At least he is consistent in his support for President
al-Assad. Perhaps this will not be enough to stop Western intervention in
Syria. I suggest that Russia assist our ally more effectively by supplying
weapons, financing, and so forth. The fall of Libya was a defeat for Russia.
The fall of Syria will be yet another failure.
--What is your opinion of, and relationship to
Vladimir Putin?
He was much better than Yeltsin. He saved
Russia from a complete crash in the 1990s. Russia was on the verge of disaster.
Before Putin, Western-style liberals were in a position to dictate politics in
Russia. Putin restored the sovereignty of the Russian state. That is the reason
why I became his supporter. However, after 2003, Putin stopped his patriotic,
Eurasianist reforms, putting aside the development of a genuine national strategy,
and began to accommodate the economic liberals who wanted Russia to become a
part of the project of globalization. As a result, he began to lose legitimacy,
and so I became more and more critical of him. In some circumstances I worked
with people around him to support him in some of his policies, while I opposed
him in others. When Medvedev was chosen as his heir, it was a catastrophe,
since the people positioned around him were all liberals. I was against
Medvedev. I opposed him, in part, from the Eurasianist point-of-view. Now Putin
will return. All the liberals are against him, and all the pro-Western forces
are against him. But he himself has not yet made his attitude toward this
clear. However, he is obliged to win the support of the Russian people anew. It
is impossible to continue otherwise. He is in a critical situation, although he
doesn't seem to understand this. He is hesitating to choose the patriotic side.
He thinks he can find support among some of the liberals, which is completely
false. Nowadays, I am not so critical of him as I was before, but I think he is
in a critical situation. If he continues to hesitate, he will fail. I recently
published a book, Putin Versus Putin, because his greatest enemy is himself.
Because he is hesitating, he is losing more and more popular support. The
Russian people feel deceived by him. He may be a kind of authoritarian leader
without authoritarian charisma. I've cooperated with him in some cases, and
opposed him on others. I am in contact with him. But there are so many forces
around him. The liberals and the Russian patriots around him are not so
brilliant, intellectually speaking. Therefore, he is obliged to rely only upon
himself and his intuition. But intuition cannot be the only source of political
decision-making and strategy. When he returns to power, he will be pushed to
return to his earlier anti-Western policies, because our society is
anti-Western in nature. Russia has a long tradition of rebellion against
foreign invaders, and of helping others who resist injustice, and the Russian
people view the world through this lens. They will not be satisfied with a
ruler who does not govern in keeping with this tradition.
 
http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/interview-with-alexander-dugin/
------------------------
 
THE FOURTH POLITICAL THEORY - A REVIEW 
By Olivia Pistun
The Fourth Political Theory, n.d.
 
Professor Aleksandr Dugin is Head of the
Centre of Conservative Researches at the Faculty of Sociology at Moscow State
University and leader of the International Eurasian Movement.
What is perhaps initially most appealing about
this publication - aside from the promise of an offer of a fresh, viable
alternative to the present stagnant political void, this "end of history"
in which we find ourselves - is the comprehensive critique of the prevailing
liberal ideology from a perspective which neither wholly aligns itself with the
traditional positions in opposition to liberalism, nor stations itself against
these.
The principal aim of Professor Dugin's work is
not simply to deconstruct the previous failed political theories, which he
lists as fascism, communism, and liberalism, but to fashion a new fourth
theory, utilising what may be learnt from some of the previous models after
their deconstruction rather than dismissing them outright on the basis of
particulars worthy of rejection. That is not to say that the Fourth Political
Theory is simply a synthesis of ideas that in their singular form have seen
their day. Dugin is conscious of the necessity to bring something new to the
table, with one of the principal of these novel ideas being the rejection of
the subjects of the old ideologies, such as class, race, or the individual, in
favour of the existential Heideggerian concept of Dasein (roughly Being or being-in-the-world.
Literally da - there; sein- being) as the primary actor.
Arguably this is the greatest difficulty in
Professor Dugin's book. Whereby the subject of class or race may be conceived
of on the scientific, quantifiable level, the metaphysical idea of Dasein as
the cardinal actor in the Fourth Political Theory is significantly more
difficult to grasp in an age which overvalues the scientific method. This said,
the title of the book itself serves to suggest that the contents will not be
free from abstract concepts. This is, after all, a work of theory.
Those hoping for a comprehensive outline of a
route to salvation will be disappointed. At least initially. The Fourth
Political Theory does not seek to form a rigid ideological structure founded on
an exhaustive set of axioms, but rather to serve as an invitation to further
build upon what is an initial guiding framework.
Traditionalists who ascribe to a more
conservative world view need not be put off by Dugin's avant-garde approach
towards historically enemy ideologies. His boldly honest examination -
unhindered by any concern of how he will be received - of the previous
political theories is illustrative of the principle which is prevalent
throughout his work, namely the opposition to the sort of reflexive reaction
that stems from ingrained preconceptions, and advocating instead a willingness
and ability to acknowledge the positive parts within an overall negative whole.
With this in mind, it may serve to benefit any to cast aside suspicions and
scepticism towards this Russian thinker and to refrain from dismissing this
innovating work on the basis of the presupposition that seemingly disagreeable
notions act as principle maxims within the Fourth Theory.
Regardless of where one stands in relation to
this seminal work, the Fourth Political Theory is a valuable contribution to
the alternative political discourse and, I suspect, will be quick to gain even
greater momentum.
Copies of Aleksandr Dugin's The Fourth
Political Theory can be purchased from ARKTOS
 
http://www.4pt.su/en/content/fourth-political-theory-review
--------------------
 
Unthinking Liberalism: Alexander Dugin's The
Fourth Political Theory
By Alex Kurtagic
Counter-Currents Publishing, September 17,
2012 
 
Alexander Dugin
The
Fourth Political Theory
London: Arktos, 2012
Arktos recently published what we can only
hope will be the first of many more English translations of Alexander Dugin's
work. Head of the sociology department in Moscow State University, and a
leading Eurasianist with ties to the Russian military, this man is, today,
influencing official Kremlin policy.
The Fourth Political Theory is a thoroughly
refreshing monograph, combining clarity of analysis, philosophical rigor, and
intellectual creativity. It is Dugin's attempt to sort through the confusion of
modern political theory and establish the foundations for a political philosophy
that will decisively challenge the dominant liberal paradigm. It is not,
however, a new complete political theory, but rather the beginning of a
project. The name is provisional, the theory under construction. Dugin sees
this not as the work of one man, but, because difficult, a collective heroic
effort.
The book first sets out the historical
topology of modern political theories. In Dugin's account, liberalism, the
oldest and most stable ideology, was in modernity the first political theory.
Marxism, a critique of liberalism via capitalism, was the second.
Fascism/National Socialism, a critique of both liberalism and Marxism, was the
third. Dugin says that Fascism/National Socialism was defeated by Marxism
(1945), that Marxism was defeated by liberalism (1989), leaving liberalism
triumphant and therefore free to expand around the globe.
According to Dugin, the triumph of liberalism
has been so definitive, in fact, that in the West it has ceased to be
political, or ideological, and become a taken-for-granted practice. Westerners
think in liberal terms by default, assuming that no sane, rational, educated
person could think differently, accusing dissenters of being ideological,
without realizing that their own assumptions have ideological origins.
The definitive triumph of liberalism has also
meant that it is now so fully identified with modernity that it is difficult to
separate the two, whereas control of modernity was once contested by political
theory number one against political theories two and three. The advent of
postmodernity, however, has marked the complete exhaustion of liberalism. It
has nothing new to say, so it is reduced endlessly to recycle and reiterate
itself.
Looking to identify what may be useful to
salvage, Dugin proceeds to break down each of the three ideologies into its
component parts. In the process of doing so, he detoxifies the two discredited
critiques of liberalism, which is necessary to be able to cannibalize them. His
analysis of liberalism follows Alain de Benoist. Because it is crucial, I will
avail myself of de Benoist's insights and infuse some of my own in Dugin's
explication of liberalism.
Dugin says that liberalism's historical
subject is the individual. The idea behind liberalism was to "liberate"
the individual from everything that was external to him (faith, tradition,
authority). Out of this springs the rest: when you get rid of the transcendent,
you end up with a world that is entirely rational and material. Happiness then
becomes a question of material increase. This leads to productivism and
economism, which, when the individual is paramount, demands capitalism. When
you get rid of the transcendent, you also eliminate hierarchy: all men become
equal. If all men are equal, then what applies to one must apply to all, which
means universalism. Similarly, if all men are equal, then all deserve an equal
slice of the pie, so full democracy, with universal suffrage, becomes the ideal
form of government. Liberalism has since developed flavors, and the idea of
liberation acquires two competing meanings: "freedom from," which in
America is embodied by libertarians and the Tea Party; and "freedom to,"
embodied by Democrats.
Marxism's historical subject is class. Marxism
is concerned chiefly with critiquing the inequities arising from capitalism.
Otherwise, it shares with liberalism an ethos of liberation, a materialist
worldview, and an egalitarian morality.
Fascism's historical subject is the state, and
National Socialism's race. Both critique Marxism's and liberalism's materialist
worldview and egalitarian morality. Hence, the simultaneous application of
hierarchy and socialism.
With all the parts laid out on the table,
Dugin then selects what he finds useful and discards the rest. Unsurprisingly,
Dugin finds nothing useful in liberalism. The idea is to unthink it, after all.
Spread out across several chapters, Dugin
provides a typology of the different factions in the modern political landscape-e.g.,
fundamental conservatism (traditionalism), Left-wing conservatism (Strasserism,
National Bolshevism, Niekisch), conservative revolution (Spengler, Jünger,
Schmitt, Niekisch), New Left, National Communism, etc. It is essential that
readers understand these so that they may easily recognize them, because doing
so will clarify much and help them avoid the errors arising from opaque,
confused, contradictory, or misleading labels.
Liberal conservatism is a key category in this
typology. It may sound contradictory on the surface, because in colloquial
discourse mainstream politics is about the opposition of liberals vs.
conservatives. Yet, and as I have repeatedly stated, when one examines their
fundamentals, so-called "conservatives" (a misleading label), even
palaeoconservatives (another misleading label), are all ideologically liberals,
only they wish to conserve liberalism, or go a little slower, or take a few
steps back. Hence, the alternative designation for this type: "status-quo
conservative."
Another key category is National Communism.
This is, according to Dugin, a unique phenomenon, and enjoys a healthy life in
Latin America, suggesting it will be around for some time to come. Evo Morales
and Hugo Chavez are contemporary practitioners of National Communism.
Setting out the suggested foundations of a
fourth political ideology takes up the rest of Dugin's book. Besides elements
salvaged from earlier critiques of liberalism, Dugin also looks at the debris
that in the philosophical contest for modernity was left in the periphery.
These are the ideas for which none of the ideologies of modernity have had any
use. For Dugin this is essential to an outsider, counter-propositional
political theory. He does not state this in as many words, but it should be
obvious that if we are to unthink liberalism, then liberalism should find its
nemesis unthinkable.
But the process of construction begins, of
course, with ontology. Dugin refers to Heidegger's Dasein. Working from this
concept he would like the fourth political theory to conceptualize the world as
a pluriverse, with different peoples who have different moralities and even
different conceptions of time. In other words, in the fourth political theory
the idea of a universal history would be absurd, because time is conceived
differently in different cultures-nothing is ahistorical or universal; everything
is bound and specific. This would imply a morality of difference, something I
have proposed as counter-propositional to the liberal morality of equality. In
the last consequence, for Dugin there needs to be also a peculiar ontology of
the future. The parts of The Fourth Political Theory dealing with these topics
are the most challenging, requiring some grounding in philosophy, but,
unsurprisingly, they are also where the pioneering work is being done.
Also pioneering, and presumably more difficult
still, is Dugin's call to "attack the individual." By this he means,
obviously, destabilizing the taken-for-granted construct that comprises the
minimum social unit in liberalism-the discrete social atom that acts on the
basis of rational self-interest, a construct that should be distinguished from "a
man" or "a woman" or "a human." Dugin makes some
suggestions, but these seem nebulous and not very persuasive at this stage.
Also, this seems quite a logical necessity within the framework of this
project, but Dugin's seeds will find barren soil in the West, where the
individual is almost sacrosanct and where individualism results from what is
possibly an evolved bias in Northern European societies, where this trait may
have been more adaptive than elsewhere. A cataclysmic event may be required to
open up the way for a redefinition of what it is to be a person. Evidently the
idea is that the fourth political theory conceptualizes a man not as an "individual"
but as something else, presumably as part of a collectivity. This is probably a
very Russian way of looking at things.
The foregoing may all seem highly abstract,
and I suspect practically minded readers will not take to it. It is hard to see
how the abstract theorizing will satisfy the pragmatic Anglo-Saxon, who is
suspicious of philosophy generally. (Jonathan Bowden was an oddity in this
regard.) Yet there are real-world implications to the theory, and in Dugin's
work the geopolitical dimension must never be kept out of sight.
For Dugin, triumphant liberalism is embodied
by Americanism; the United States, through its origins as an Enlightenment
project, and through its superpower status in the twentieth and twenty-first
century, is the global driver of liberal practice. As such, with the defeat of
Marxism, it has created, and sought to perpetuate, a unipolar world defined by
American, or Atlanticist, liberal hegemony. Russia has a long anti-Western,
anti-liberal tradition, and for Dugin this planetary liberal hegemony is the
enemy. Dugin would like the world to be multipolar, with Atlanticism
counterbalanced by Eurasianism, and maybe other "isms." In
geopolitics, the need for a fourth political theory arises from a need to keep
liberalism permanently challenged, confined to its native hemisphere, and, in a
word, out of Russia.
While this dimension exists, and while there
may be a certain anti-Americanism in Dugin's work, Americans should not dismiss
this book out of hand, because it is not anti-America. As Michael O'Meara has
pointed out in relation to Yockey's anti-Americanism, Americanism and America,
or Americans, are different things and stand often in opposition. Engaging with
this kind of oppositional thinking is, then, necessary for Americans. And the
reason is this: liberalism served America well for two hundred years, but
ideologies have a life-cycle like everything else, and liberalism has by now
become hypertrophic and hypertelic; it is, in other words, killing America and,
in particular, the European-descended presence in America.
If European-descended Americans are to save
themselves, and to continue having a presence in the North American continent,
rather than being subsumed by liberal egalitarianism and the consequent
economic bankruptcy, Hispanization, and Africanization, the American identity,
so tied up with liberalism because of the philosophical bases of its founding
documents, would need to be re-imagined. Though admittedly difficult, the
modern American identity must be understood as one that is possible out of
many. Sources for a re-imagined identity may be found in the archaic substratum
permeating the parts of American heritage that preceded systematic liberalism
(the early colonial period) as well as in the parts that were, at least for a
time, beyond it (the frontier and the Wild West). In other words, the most
mystical and also the least "civilized" parts of American history.
Yet even this may be problematic, since they were products of late "Faustian"
civilization. A descent into barbarism may be in the cards. Only time will
tell.
For Westerners in general, Dugin's project may
well prove too radical, even at this late stage in the game-contemplating it
would seem first to necessitate a decisive rupture. Unless/until that happens,
conservative prescriptions calling for a return to a previous state of affairs
(in the West), or a closer reading of the founding documents (in America), will
remain a feature of Western dissidence. In other words, even the dissidents
will remain conservative restorationists of the classical ideas of the center, or
the ideas that led to the center. Truly revolutionary thinking-the re-imagining
and reinvention of ourselves-will, however, ultimately come from the periphery
rather than the center.
 
http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/09/unthinking-liberalism/
--------------------
 
Dugin's America
By Matt Parrott
Counter-Currents Publishing, October 11, 2012
 
Alexander Dugin is a popular, well-connected,
and academically respected professor at Moscow State University. Unlike his
North American and Western European counterparts, his ideas are not censored by
Russia's mainstream media, and he more or less enjoys the favor of Putin's
Russian government. While he's indubitably the most prominent New Right
thinker in Russia, his domestic influence and his ambitious efforts to build
international partnerships and relationships have made him arguably the most
prominent New Right thinker in the world. 
His recently written and translated book, The Fourth
Political Theory [2] is a critical milestone in the global development
of a New Right school of thought. In it, he strives to speak to a truly global
audience, though his parochial biases and perspectives are a regular
distraction from that goal. He strives to speak above and beyond modern liberal
paradigms and values, but there's a fair share of self-censorship, cleverness,
and . . . Realpolitik . . . to wade through.
Fortunately, those who are intelligent and
thoughtful enough to gain anything from this book will be intelligent and
thoughtful enough to look past those distractions and at his invaluable
insights, strategies, and perspectives. After all, the whole point of Benoist's
pluriversalism (universal pluralism) which he endorses is that the different
regions and communities can retain and preserve their own unique narratives and
perspectives. In the Russian psyche, "America" is something quite
alien to what we Americans experience . . . just as our imaginary "Russia"
is surely alien to actual Russians.
Foreigners, especially Russians, almost
exclusively see our bad side. In many ways, Russians think more about America's
military and foreign policy than we do. Their exposure to "our"
culture is almost exclusively from a handful of Jewish and cosmopolitan hubs
which are nearly as alien and hostile to ordinary Americans as they are to
Russians. When they visit, they're more likely to visit those hubs. Just as
20th-century Americans perceived Russia as a villainous caricature of Jewish
Bolshevism and belligerent Marxism, contemporary Russians perceive America as a
villainous caricature of Jewish liberalism and cannibal capitalism.
In one especially irritating example among
many, he explains how American liberal Ayn Rand's capitalist ideology of
Objectivism is the Protestant work ethic taken to its logical extreme. For the
record, Ayn Rand was born and raised in Russia, only traveling to America after
completing her studies in the very post-secondary university system Dugin works
for. The conflation of Rand's Hegelian inversion of Marxist ideology with
Protestant perspectives on predestination could only occur in the fevered
imagination of a Russian anti-American polemicist.
Of course, we on the North American New Right
 are so gauche as to note that she's actually neither Russian nor
American, but a Jewess (actual surname: Rosenbaum), with a secular Jewish
identity, attitude, and spirit. If we were to define a clear distinction between
a host nation and Jewish culture, we would find that our actual differences are
but a filioque relative to the chasm between either of our nations and the
Jewish nation.
Dugin's political theory "rejects all
forms and varieties of racism" as one of its "essential features."
This may be a translation issue, but he seems to define "racism" as
supremacism, carrying on about the evils of class racism, progressive racism,
economic racism, technological racism (Mac vs. PC?), and cultural racism.
Fortunately, he declares that his political theory has a "positive
attitude toward the ethnos," which is perhaps a loophole through which
biological definitions of ethnic identities could be smuggled.
It's very easy to denounce racial "supremacism"
when both you and your society have had the privilege of being removed from
racial strife. Historical examples of "supremacism" were not
instances of simple villainy, but emergent reactions to powerful historical
forces. Continental Europeans and Russians have plenty of advice to offer and
judgment to pass on White South Africans, Australians, and American Southerners
who didn't have the luxury of developing racial attitudes at the comfortable
distance afforded to a tenured professor deep in the heart of a largely White
country.
Even within America, you've had (and continue
to have) the aloof Yankees lecturing the South on the immorality of their
structured relationship with the Black American people. The Great Migration of
Black Americans into the North over the past century has afforded Yankees an
opportunity to put their egalitarian theories into practice. Instead of a
structured relationship, America's Northerners opted for no relationship at
all. While Southerners merely insisted on "separate but equal"
schools, Northerners have avoided, evaded, and neglected their way to a
definitively "separate but equal" country.
As the saying goes:
Southerners don't mind Blacks living nearby .
. . as long as they don't get uppity.
Northerners don't mind Blacks getting uppity .
. . as long as they don't live nearby.
If Russians are as alarmed by our supposed
mistreatment of Black Americans, Amerindians, and other minority groups as they
purport to be, perhaps they would consider offering them asylum? Perhaps the
disproportionate share of Blacks we've imprisoned are political prisoners,
political prisoners who will thrive in a less "supremacist" society?
I kid. I kid. The Russians aren't suicidal enough to invite that problem into
their country and wouldn't handle the problem any better than we have. Finally,
Black Americans would not accept such an offer. Statistically speaking, Blacks
may not be as intelligent as Whites . . . but they're not stupid. They're not
about to pass up the rather comfortable and privileged position they enjoy in
America's "supremacist" society.
But there's little point in seriously engaging
the racial perspectives of Dugin and other New Right intellectuals abroad,
because it's a subject they clearly don't take seriously yet. The European
and Russian New Right will likely avoid taking racial issues as seriously as
the North American New Right does until the sweeping demographic changes
present them with serious racial issues. While we in America have a tremendous
amount to learn from our brothers abroad, our current status as the primary
host of Jewish Power and our intimate historical and direct familiarity with
the racial question requires that we approach those problems clearly and
directly, without word games, obfuscations, and evasions.
I agree with Dugin and the rest of the New
Right that the structured "supremacist" framework of the American
South and elsewhere should be retired in favor of ethnic identity and
autonomy. I agree with Dugin that the hour has come for a sweeping
alternative to the political theories of yesteryear. I agree with Dugin about
the basic contours of that political theory: a pluriversalist and multipolar
world order constructed upon the time-honored political unit of tribal
identity.  I agree with Dugin that Western capitalism is at the heart of
the problem . . . though I'm not willing to ignore the critical role Jews have
historically played and continue to play in advancing and directing that
destructive force.
I've been and will continue to be very
critical of not only America's subverted and psychotic regime, but of the
degenerate aspects of our culture which cannot be blamed on Jews and
multinational corporations. A good share of the problem is surely our fault. As
we move forward, this problem of anti-Americanism is one we'll need to parse
thoughtfully and carefully. Much of the antipathy coming at us from our
European and Russian counterparts is valid, understandable, or easy to brush
off. There is, however, a good share of it which amounts to mere abuse,
distorted demagoguery which plays well to domestic audiences at the expense of
developing the very partnerships and relationships of which Dugin obviously
grasps the importance.
 
http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/10/dugins-america/
-----------------------------
 
The Third Political Theory
By Michael O'Meara
Counter-Currents Publishing, April 26, 2013 
 
"We will march to fight for Holy Russia/
And spill as one our blood for her."
-White Army song
The "Third Political Theory" (3PT)
is what Alexander Dugin, in The
Fourth Political Theory (2012), calls Fascism and National
Socialism.[1]
According to Dugin, National Socialist Germany
and Fascist Italy were not just militarily, but ideologically defeated in the
Second European Civil War (1939-45)-victims of "'homicide', or perhaps 'suicide'."
Thereafter, these two national anti-liberal ideologies allegedly "overcome
by history" ceased to address the great challenges facing European man.
Then, with Communism's fall in 1989/91, the second major anti-liberal "theory"
opposing the Judeo-financial forces of Anglo-American liberalism collapsed.
Today's anti-liberal struggle, Dugin concludes, requires an ideology that has
not "been destroyed and disappeared off the face of the earth."
There is nothing in The Fourth Political
Theory likely to please the Correctorate-which is, perhaps, reason for reading
it. Nevertheless, Dugin's effort to develop a compelling new "theory"
appropriate to the global anti-system resistance must be judged (I'll not be
the first to say) a "failure"-an interesting failure, admittedly, but
one also constituting a possible snare for the anti-system opposition,
especially in its misleading treatment of 3PT and its implications for the
anti-system resistance.
In early 1992, not long after the Soviet
collapse, Alain de Benoist, the Paris-based leader of the French "New
Right" (who was then just discovering le facteur Russie), was invited by
Alexander Dugin to meet in Moscow. Though elements within the Correctorate
immediately raised the specter of a "red-brown alliance"[2] (which
apparently caused Benoist to keep his distance) and though petty differences
continued to divide them, Dugin was eventually accepted as a kindred,
anti-liberal spirit, sharing, as he does, the New Right's Traditionalism
(Evola), political theology (Schmitt), Heideggerian ontology, anti-Americanism,
and tellurocratic geopolitics (Haushofer). In recent years, their differences
seem to have succumbed to all that link their closely related projects.
Dugin has since become a prominent fixture in
the NR constellation, sharing the heavens with Benoist. This prominence is
entirely deserved, for the gifted Dugin (something of a one-man think tank) is
conversant in all the major European languages, erudite in the anti-liberal and
esoteric heritage the NR rescued from the postwar Memory Hole, and, above all,
an uncompromising, metapolitically-prolific opponent of the United States, "the
citadel of world liberalism" and thus the principal source of evil in our
time.
The exact nature of Dugin's project (embracing
various elements shared by Europe's anti-system opposition) has, though, never
been entirely clear when viewed from afar. This seems due less to the many bad
English translations of his early articles or the numerous conflicting
interpretations that can be found of his work-than to a remarkable political
itinerary (possible only in the last sovereign white nation on earth) that took
him from the political fringes to the heights of power: an itinerary that began
with his membership in the ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic Pamyet Party in
the late 1980s, followed by the post-Soviet Communist Party of Gennady
Zyuganov, next the National Bolshevik Party and certain other Eurasianist
formations, then the Orthodox-monarchist Rodina bloc, and, for the last decade,
after achieving national prominence as a "public intellectual," an
occasional adviser to Vladimir Putin and the Russian Duma.
These formations and capacities, each
respectable, together raise certain obvious questions about the nature of a
political project that spans such a wide spectrum of belief and blends such an
eclectic mix of seemingly incompatible ideas (Evolean Traditionalism, NR
thought [already a pot-pourri des idees divergentes], Eurasianism, inter alia)
into a worldview suitable to the post-Soviet Russian state.
Arktos' nicely translated and edited
publication is such a publishing event precisely because it gives the
Anglophone world its first book-length exposure to Dugin's thought and thus a
clearer view of his NR project.
Though still difficult to pigeonhole, I've
become increasingly critical of Dugin over the years, mainly on account of his
Eurasianism-which is not a National Bolshevism in the German sense (of allying
Russia and Europe and hence overcoming the narcissistic differences dividing
the Greco-Slavic East from the Romano-Germanic West), but rather something of a
prospective state ideology inclusive of the Jews, Muslims, and Turks occupying
Russian lands-more concerned thus with geopolitical than ethno-civilizational
(state power rather than Russian) hegemony-and hence something potentially
anti-cultural. This threat is underscored by Dugin's formal allegiance to the
ethnopluralist, multiculturalist, and communitarian principles (spin-offs of
the Western universalism he formally opposes) that are key components of
Benoist's culturally-relativist "pluriversum."[3]
Though unintended, these principles shared by
Dugin and Benoist cannot but endanger Europeans, for they legitimize Islam's
colonization of their historic lands, just as they risk turning European
Russians into a Turkic-Slavic or Asian people, and thus away from the destiny
they share with other Europeans (the "Boreans": the white or
Indo-European peoples of the North).
In his talk at Identitär Ide IV, Dugin the
ethnopluralist even toyed with the Left-wing fiction that "race" (as
a scientific or zoological concept) is a "social construct" (in spite
of his Evolean Tradionalism, which acknowledges the significance of "race"
in both its physical and spiritual sense).[4] His position here, though it
wavers at times, is like Benoist's in slighting the racial fundament of what
Saint-Loup called the patrie charnelle-the genetic and territorial heritage
without which Europeans cease to be who they are.[5]
Dugin, of course, is correct in dismissing "race"
as a key social determinant. The white man's impending demise is spiritual, not
biological, in origin. (This, incidentally, is why an American White
Nationalism that appeals mainly to race is already a failed project.) Spirit is
always primary and the materialist or biological basis of human existence is
simply a vehicle of the spirit.
But however "insignificant" as a
determinant, race is nevertheless indispensable-in the sense that man's world
is impossible without it. For man is a living, blood-infused being: change his
blood (race) and you change his spirit. As it is with being and Being, there is
no spirit without blood-the blood distinct to man's "being-t/here"
(Dasein). This doesn't mean that blood explains or determines anything (at
least directly), only that the genetic heritage cannot be dispensed with,
without dispensing with the very condition (the "thrownness and facticity")
of human being. Not to see that race, stock, and kinship is an inextricable
facet of being is not to see the necessarily embodied nature of Dasein. In
fact, Dugin's is not Heidegger's Dasein, but an "idealism" (like his
Traditionalism).
Dugin's concessions via Benoist to the
miscegenating principles of globalist cosmopolitanism, along with his Turko-
and Islamophilia, are evident not just in a Eurasianism that mixes white and
yellow, Christian and Islamic peoples in a single polity (instead of promoting
the cultural homogeneity characteristic of the West European lands of the High
Culture), but also in his stance on the former Faye-Benoist debate on
ethnonationalism and communitarianism.
Guillaume Faye is no Vestal Virgin[6],
admittedly, but on the decisive issues-race, culture, immigration, Islam-he has
stood against the system's ethnocidal forces for the sake of European Europe,
while Dugin, again like Benoist (who in 2000 publicly denounced Faye as a "racist,"
just as the French state had launched a judicial assault on him for inciting "racial
hatred"), has repeatedly sought an accommodation with the anti-white
forces (which probably accounts for a certain Third-World/Islamic interest in
4PT).
In The Fourth Political Theory, Dugin depicts
Benoist as a fellow toiler in 4PT and explicitly identifies him with his
project. This follows Benoist's similar public affiliation with 4PT in Moscow
in 2009.[7] In spite of their lingering differences, this collaboration between
the Paris and Moscow New Rights in recent years seems aimed at giving their
related brands of NR discourse (rechristened 4PT) a larger, more consequential
audience. (But here I speculate, given that I no longer read their
publications.)
Cui bono? For the "political soldier"
(who, Dugin believes, is obsolete), for the white ethnonationalist, and, I
suspect, for the Russian nationalist, Dugin's affinity with Benoist, along with
his anti-racist opposition to Faye, must set off alarms, signaling, as it does,
Dugin's allegiance to the most communitarian and ethnopluralist-i.e., the most
politically correct and demographically compromising-of the NR tendencies.
The Fourth Political Theory is full of
insightful discussions of 1PT (liberalism) and 2PT (Communism), which is
another reason for reading it, but, strangely, there is almost no discussion,
except in passim, of 3PT (Fascism/National Socialism)-perhaps because this "theory"
was itself a negation of theory-and thus a negation, among other things, of the
"modernism" Dugin rather simplistically attributes to it.
Just as questionably, he treats National
Socialism and Fascism, though obviously different, as closely related
tendencies, while at the same time ignoring their common roots in an earlier
history of anti-liberal resistance. He similarly neglects the post-1945
extensions of this supposedly moribund "theory," refusing to accept
that 3PT did not die after the war and, more important, that the historical
forces which once made it a power in the world (the destruction of meaning and
the social-economic dislocations that come with excessive liberalization: think
today's "globalization") are presently creating conditions conducive
to another mass, "fascist"-style, anti-liberal insurgence.[8]
For Dugin, 3PT-let's call it "fascism"
(lower case)-is understood in a way not unlike that of the Communist
International following its Popular Front turn (1934). In endeavoring then to
rally the democratic plutocracies to a collective-security alliance with the
Soviet Union against insurgent Germany, the Comintern used "fascism"
as a generic term to describe a multitude of movements, allegedly in cahoots
with the most reactionary and militaristic factions of Big Capital, but having
little else in common other than their anti-liberal or anti-Communist defense
of the nation or the nation's tradition.
Not just Italian Fascists and German National
Socialists, but the KKK and Republicans in the US, Franquistas and Falangists
in Spain, the "leagues" and others in France, Catholic Rexists in
Belgium, Orthodox Iron Guardists in Romania, and virtually every tendency of
the interwar period opposing the nihilistic devastations of "democratic
capitalism," Soviet Communism, or Jewish chicanery ended up tagged as "fascist."
Conceptually, this "fascism" was so vacuously defined that "cognitive
control over entry criteria into the class was all-but-lost," as the term
evolved into a form of liberal or Left-wing exclusion-like the term "racism."
After 1945, both the Left and the Academy
continued to follow the Comintern line, using the term "fascism" to
describe everything or everyone who might oppose 1PT or 2PT in the name of some
tradition or rooted identity (what Dugin calls "Dasein"). There's
nothing "scientific" (i.e., rigorous) here, for the term is expressly
used to demonize whomever or whatever opposes the forces of capitalist or
Communist subversion-usually because the arguments and claims justifying their
practices cannot withstand rational scrutiny, even in their own courts. That
Dugin uses the term in the same way suggests something about his own assessment
of European anti-liberalism.
The second major problem with Dugin's
treatment of 3PT (specifically Fascism and National Socialism) is that he fails
to acknowledge that these "ideologies" originated not ex nihilo in
the 1920s and '30s, but from a half-century long movement that had emerged in
opposition to similar modernizing forces propelled by Jewish and speculative
interests profiting from liberalism's ongoing economization of European life.
Not seeing or stressing the social-historical crucible out of which 3PT emerged
causes him to miss the larger counter-modernist intent of its "Third Way."
3PT struggles against liberal modernity,
already beyond Left and Right, first stepped onto the historical stage in the
late 19th century, as elements from the revolutionary anti-liberal wing of the
labor movement joined elements from the revolutionary anti-liberal wing of the
nationalist movement to resist liberalism's Hebraic (i.e., usurious) model of
state and society-a model which turns the nation into a market, caters to
cosmopolitans, and denies it a history and destiny.[10]
In this sense, German National Socialism and
Italian Fascism represented continuations of these earlier socialist and
nationalist expressions of anti-liberalism, being sui generis mainly in
embodying the specific spirit and tenure of their age.
Like our court historians, Dugin cannot define
"fascism," except vacuously. Indeed, it can only be defined vacuously
given that "fascism" was an ideological deception, for there was only
one Fascism and numerous distinct and particularistic forms of 3PT:
anti-liberalism, anti-capitalism, anti-Communism, anti-modernization,
anti-Semitism, ultranationalism, etc.-sometimes overlapping with one another,
sometimes not-but, in most cases, defending their collective Dasein in terms of
a specific land and people.
In a similar stroke, Dugin ignores the
historical circumstances that brought Italian Fascism and German National
Socialism to power: the profound material and psychological dislocations of the
1914-18 war and the devastating economic crisis that followed in the '30s. If
more attention were paid to this aspect of his subject, he might have noticed
that since the crisis of 2008, economic stagnation, predatory confiscations by
the Robber Barons, and the hollowing out of European institutions, preeminently
the state, have created conditions in which another mass form of 3PT may arise
to challenge the ethnocidal forces in command of state and society.
If this should occur, the Third Political
Theory (the "anti-liberal" and hence anti-system "ideology"),
which arose in rebellion against liberal modernity and corporate capitalism in
the 1890s, and was called "fascism" in the 1920s and '30s, is likely
to assume what earlier were the unforeseeable forms of identitarianism,
goldendawnism, casapoundism, and whatever other revolutionary nationalist
tendency that presently fights the liberal devastation of European life in the
name not necessarily of "race," "state," or theory (as
Dugin has it), but in that of the traditions defining Europeans as a people
(i.e., as Dasein and Mitsein-concepts, via Martin Heidgegger, native to 3PT).[10]
Not coincidentally, the tendencies that today
represent 3PT are as distinct and different as the "fascisms" of the
interwar period, though each belongs to the same epochal rebellion against
liberal modernization that was defeated in 1945 and is only now, and still
hesitantly, beginning to reassert something of its former oppositional
significance.
Anti-liberals are nevertheless indebted to
Dugin for giving them the term "3PT"-because they can now refrain
(when being forthright) from describing or thinking of themselves as "fascists"
(who, to repeat, were part of something born of an earlier European struggle
against the rising forces of Jewish modernity)[11] and therefore ought, more
accurately, to be seen as expressions of this larger historical movement (3PT),
which has had many different manifestations, most of which converged in
resisting the ethnocidal forces associated with capitalism, Communism, or the
Jews. Beyond that, there was little ideological similarity ("theory").
However 3PT is characterized-as "fascist"
or as a larger anti-liberal movement-it continues to speak to the present world
situation, for unlike the timid imputations of 4PT and the apoliteia lingering
in its antecedents, it has an indisputable record of fighting the dark legions
of the Antichrist-not for the sake of a theory, but for certain primordial
identities rooted in blood and spirit, kin and countrymen. Indeed, if Europeans
are to survive the 21st century, it seems likely that they will have to fight
for something of greater "mythic" significance than the
self-effacing, bloodless, theoretical tenets of 4PT.
As it was with Fascism and National Socialism
in their time, 3PT in our time is also likely to reject the established
political arenas and manifest itself "extra-institutionally"-against
the Troika (IMF-ECB-EC) and its Masonic Parliaments, Money Changers, and
Judeo-Americanists-as it resists liberalism's nation-destroying effects and,
more generally, the usurious system the US imposed on defeated Europe in 1945.
In the new political arenas it will create
(analogous to 2PT's Soviets), 3PT's appeal will not be to a party, a theory, or
a metaphysical abstraction (Dasein), but to the "sovereign people"
(diminished as his term may be in the "society of the spectacle")-as
it (3PT) rallies the opposition against an unreformable system threatening
Europeans with extinction.
And like its earlier manifestations, today's
3PT struggle will create a counter-hegemony anticipating a future in which
Europeans are again free to pursue the destiny born of their Gothic "kings
and emperors." It will not promote an "affirmative action"
program for international relations or seek to ensure the communitarian
integrity of the alien populations occupying their lands.
The third and most significant problem in
Dugin's treatment of 3PT lies in ignoring its postwar extensions and thus in
failing to recognize those aspects of postwar "fascist" thought
relevant to the current situation, especially now that it has shed its earlier
petty-state nationalism, bourgeois ("vertical") racism, and
anti-Slavism.
Dugin and Benoist are both extraordinarily
creative forces, from whom much can be learned, but ideologically the project
of these "free-floating intellectuals" are closer in spirit to
Britain's "Traditionalist" Prince Charles than to such postwar 3PT
figures as the American Vabanquespieler, Francis Parker Yockey, whose so-called
"postwar fascism" took the theory and practice of 3PT to a point not
yet attained by 4PT or NR thought.
Yockey would know nothing of Dugin's
postmodernity, but by the early 1950s, based on European aesthetic (i.e.,
Spenglerian) rather than scientific objective criteria and thus with a sort of
postmodernism avant la lettre, he had worked out a prescient understanding of
what lay ahead, offering both an analysis and a means of fighting whatever
postmodern form Satan's Synagogue might assume.[12] It's hardly coincidentally
that the postwar anti-liberal resistance starts-and culminates-with him.
A revolutionary imperial struggle against the
Atlanticist Leviathan (aka the NWO)-the struggle to which Yockey gave his life-revolves
around the formation of a Euro-Russian federation to fight the thalassocratic
powers: les Anglos-Saxons incarnating the Protestant ethic and the spirit of
capitalism-England and America-whose hedonist dictatorship of "creative
destruction" was not the invention of maniacal Jews, but entirely
homegrown, given that it was born at Runnymede; came of age with Henry VIII's
sacrileges, which turned Christianity into a religion of capitalism
(Protestantism); and triumphed with the Whig Oligarchy that has dominated the
Western world since 1789, when its Continental ideologues overthrew the French
monarchy, representing a "Catholic" and regalian modernity.[13]
By 1952, Yockey understood that both the
liberation and destiny of Europe were henceforth linked to Russia-the sole
world power capable of resisting the satanic counter-civilization
geopolitically aligned along the Washington-London-Tel Aviv axis.[14]
Resisting the Leviathan, the movement
stretching from Yockey, Saint-Loup, Rene Binet, and others in the 1940s and
50s, to Jean Mabire, François Duprat, and Jean Thiriart in the '60s and early '70s,
and to the current generation of revolutionary nationalist, identitarian, and
other "Third Way" or anti-system tendencies awakened by the golden
dawn[15]-attests (I would think) to the continuing vitality of this allegedly
moribund "theory," especially compared to the deedless metapolitics
of NR or 4PT discourse.
In contrast to 4PT, there beats at the heart
of 3PT the spirit not of theory but of practice. The great 3PT tribunes all
followed Pisacane in their conviction that "ideas spring from deeds and
not the other way around." What always is (and has been) most lacking is
not ideas, but men to realize them. There are, as such, no metapolitics without
politics.
Privileging Evola's royal way to Guenon's
sacerdotal, the 3PT resistance distinguishes itself today by fighting for
socialism against the Left, for nationalism against the Right, and for Europe's
"difference" against the multi-racialist ideologues of 4PT.
After 1945, 3PT's POWs were exiled to the
margins of European society. It is from there, accordingly, that the final
assault on the liberal center is being prepared. For the propagandists of the
deed-intent on ridding Europe of her usurers and alien interlopers, and thus of
resuming her destiny-Dugin's theory is a detour from the Euro-Russian Imperium
offering the one possibility of creating not the utopia of 4PT multipolarity or
replicating the vileness of US unipolarity, but of establishing a peaceful
world order based on Borean principles. 
Notes 
1. Alexander Dugin, The Fourth Political
Theory, trans. M. Sleboda and M. Millerman (London: Arktos, 2012).
2. Thierry Wolton, Rouge-Brun: Le mal du siecle
(Paris: Lattes, 1999).
3. Michael O'Meara, "Benoist's
Pluriversum: An Ethnonationalist Critique," The Occidental Quarterly 5: 3
(Fall 2005); http://toqonline.com/archives/v5n3/53-mo-pluriversum.pdf [3]. Also Michael O'Meara,"Community of Destiny or Community of Tribes?,"
Ab Aeterno n. 2 (March 2010); http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/08/community-of-destiny-or-community-of-tribes/ [4].
4. Dugin's Identitaer Ide IV talk is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X-o_ndhSVA [5]. On race and Traditionalism, see Julius Evola, Elements pour une education
raciale, trans. G. Boulanger (Puiseaux: Pardes, 1984 [1941]); also Frithjof
Schuon, Castes and Races, trans. M. Pallis and M. Matheson (Bedfont, UK: 1982
[1959]).
5. Saint-Loup, "Une Europe des patries
charnelles," Defense de l'Occident, n. 136 (March 1976).
6. Michael O'Meara, Guillaume Faye and the
Battle of Europe (London: Arktos, 2013).
7. http://www.evrazia.tv/content/alien-die-bienua-o-chietviertoi-politichieskoi-tieorii [6].
8. George Friedman, "Europe, Unemployment
and Instability" (March 5, 2013), http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/europe-unemployment-and-instability [7].
9. Karlheinz Weissmann, Der Nationale
Sozialismus: Ideologie und Bewegung 1890-1933 (Munich: Herbig, 1998); Zeev
Sternhell, La Droite revolutionnaire 1885-1914: Les origines françaises de
fascisme (Paris: Seuil, 1978); Arnaud Imatz, Par-delà droite et gauche:
Histoire de la grande peur recurrente des bien-pensants (Paris: Godefroy de
Bouillon, 2002).
10. Pace Dugin, Martin Heidegger remained a
proponent of 3PT, evident in his National Socialist critique of Hitler's
regime; see his "second magnum opus," Contributions to Philosophy (From
Enowning), trans. P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1999 [1936-38/1989]).
11. On the essentially "Jewish"
character of "modernity," see Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
12. Francis Parker Yockey, The Proclamation of
London (Shamley Green, UK: The Palingenesis Project, 2012 [1949]); Francis
Parker Yockey, "The Prague Treason Trial: What Is Behind the Hanging of
Eleven Jews in Prague" (1952), http://www.counter-currents.com/tag/the-prague-treason-trial/ [8].
13. E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary
Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend, Ind.: Fidelity Press,
2008); Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven & London:
Yale University Press, 2009).
14. Desmond Fennell, Uncertain Dawn: Hiroshima
and the Beginning of Post-Western Civilisation (Dublin: Sanas, 1996).
15. Nicolas Lebourg, Le Monde vu de la plus
extrême droite: Du fascisme au nationalisme-revolutionnaire (Perpignan: Presses
Universitaires de Perpignan, 2010).
 
http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/04/the-third-political-theory/
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