News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[One wonders how to interpret terms like "anarchist" in this
context. Contrary to the author's claim, the National
Bolshevik Party has no element of anarchism.--DC]
RFE/RL Article
Thursday, 14 April 2005
Russia: Radicalized Youth On The Rise
By Victor Yasmann
The recent successes of the revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine,
and Kyrgyzstan, as well as the much earlier success of the
Yugoslav opposition in bringing down Slobodan Milosevic,
have generated considerable interest in the driving forces
behind these movements. Key roles in all these uprisings
were played by informal but radical and disciplined youth
movements espousing direct-action tactics. These groups
include Ot**** in Serbia, Kmara in Georgia, ****a in Ukraine,
and KelKel in Kyrgyzstan.
[For more on the rise of political youth groups,
see RFE/RL's special website "The Power of Youth."]
In the last couple of months, there has been an upsurge of
activity by youth groups across Russia's political spectrum,
with many groups speaking about their desire to adopt the
tactics of their successful counterparts abroad. This spurt
of activity has been stimulated by Russia's domestic unrest,
caused primarily by the government's reform to convert most
in-kind social benefits to cash payments. Widespread
demonstrations and protests have gripped the country since
January and the government has been forced to retreat and
subtly allot about $8 billion for additional payments to
benefits recipients, "Argumenty i fakty," No. 14, re****ted.
Although the benefits protests were initiated by pensioners,
many political groups -- including the youth movements --
learned lessons from them, primarily that the government can
be moved by the power of mass civil disobedience. Ilya
Ponomarev, leader of Youth Left Front, an umbrella
organization of antiglobalists, anarchists, Trotskyites, and
communists, gave a concise account of the sea change that
has occurred in recent weeks. "The expectations of
revolutionary transformation have grown drastically," he
said, according to http://kreml.org
on 3 March. "These
expectations can be achieved, for understandable reasons,
only by young people. Therefore, those who control the youth
movement will win the next elections."
Ponomarev added that the evolutionary path of development
has reached its end because "the democratic system of the
1990s has been destroyed." "There are no traces of the
democratic state -- no separation of powers, no system of
checks and balances, no federalism, no local
self-government. All branches of government have lost their
independence and political expression through parliamentary
procedures is impossible," he explained.
Perhaps the best Russian analogue to ****a or Ot**** as far as
tactics is the National Bolshevik Party (NBP), which was
created in 1994 by radical writer Eduard Limonov,
Eurasianism ideologue Aleksandr Dugin (who soon left the
party), and rock musicians Yegor Letov and Sergei Kurikhin.
The party's ideology was a strange hybrid of ultraleftism,
anarchism, and nationalism, mixed with openly fascistic
ideas. Officially, the NBP is not a party, since the
government has refused to register it, dismissing it as a
group of hooligans and criminals.
But the most im****tant thing about the NBP is not its
ideology but its tactics of direct action, which include
such things as taking over government offices and throwing
eggs or tomatoes at members of the ruling elite or
high-profile foreign guests. Since 2001, the NBP has
retreated from its radical antiglobalist position in order
to focus on its irreconcilable opposition to President
Vladimir Putin.
Limonov was arrested by the Federal Security Service (FSB)
in 2001 and spent 2 1/2 years in prison on terrorism-related
charges stemming from an alleged plot to send weapons to
ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan. In all, more than 100 NBP
members have served time in prison over the last decade and
47 are in custody now.
"Russkii zhurnal" wrote about NBP on 15 January that "in
today's Russia there is no other organization with such a
long record of direct action [against the government], such
creative leader****p, and, most im****tantly, so many
activists who sincerely consider themselves revolutionaries
and who are ready for sacrifice."
In addition to the NBP and the Left Youth Front, there is
also the Vanguard of Communist Youth (AKM), a small Marxist
group whose acronym is the same as that of a popular
Kalashnikov automatic-weapon modification. AKM leader Sergei
Udaltsov told "Komsomolskaya pravda" on 2 February that the
main revolutionary force in Russia is the government itself.
"None of us [revolutionaries] managed to do in 10 years what
the government has done in six months," Udaltsov said.
"[Health and Social Development Minister Mikhail] Zurabov is
a revolutionary genius."
To counter these radical groups, the Kremlin not only has
the national pro-Putin youth movement Walking Together, but
also a new offshoot organization called Na**** (Ours).
According to National Strategy Institute Vice President
Viktor Militarev, the Kremlin would like to turn Na**** into
the main counterrevolutionary ****eld against a possible
"orange" threat," kreml.org re****ted on 4 March.
Russia's liberal parties generally have weak and ineffective
youth movements, but Yabloko has two organizations for young
people that are re****tedly dynamic enough to worry the
authorities. These are the party's youth subdivision and the
more informal and more radical Oborona (Defense), both of
which are headed by Ilya Ya****n.
In an 8 April interview with kreml.org, Yabloko Deputy
Chairman Sergei Mitrokhin acknowledged that Yabloko's youth
movements are sympathetic to ****a and Kmara, but are not
analogous. "They are specifically Russian organizations and
are not subject to any influence from abroad," Mitrokhin
said. He added that the groups are capable of radical
actions but "will confront the current regime within the
framework of the law." Mitrokhin said that he expects "an
explosion of youth activity" in 2007-08 if the government
continues its policies of dismantling free higher education
and cutting back military-draft deferments for students.
On 13 April, the FSB blocked the release of a Russian
edition of "From Dictator****p To Democracy," by American
political scientist Gene Sharp, that was prepared by
Oborona, newsru.com re****ted. That book, a short guide to
nonviolent political action, re****tedly played a role in
guiding the revolutions in Yugoslavia, Georgia, and Ukraine.
Many analysts correctly argue that the majority of Russian
youths are too apolitical, passive, or op****tunistic to go
out into the streets for the sake of democracy. However, the
number of radicals who are willing to do so appears to be on
the rise. According to "Komsomolskaya pravda" on 15 March,
the Russian branch of ****a has 200 members, but they expect
to be able to bring 5,000 people into the streets within six
months. The Yabloko youth organization, which is aligned
with ****a, has about 1,600 members, while the AKM has about
500. The largest anti-Kremlin youth organization, the NBP,
has 12,000 members. In all, the daily concluded, the
youth-oriented radical political opposition today numbers
about 20,000.
By contrast, the newly created pro-Kremlin Na**** already has
3,000 members and boasts that it can bring 50,000 sup****ters
into the streets, the daily re****ted. Walking Together
claims 100,000 members.
In any political confrontation, the key is how many people
can such organizations bring out into the streets of Moscow
and St. Petersburg. In this context, it is worth recalling
that former KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, who was one of
the leaders of the August 1991 putsch attempt against Soviet
President Mikhail Gorbachev, estimated that the number of
people who came out in sup****t of Russian President Boris
Yeltsin in the two cities was about 170,000.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1587154838/thedanclorenecro/
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
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