The weekend was marked by demonstrations in Moscow involving two groups of hard-line nationalists, with a street march by members of Russian National Unity and a disturbance by writer Eduard Limonov's supporters at a liberal party's meeting.
Russian National Unity, or RNE, staged a march in northern Moscow on Sunday in apparent defiance of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who banned their Dec. 19 convention and has pressed for criminal charges against their leader, Alexander Barkashov.
About 200 RNE members, wearing street clothes but with red armbands, marched in two columns to the Rechnoi Vokzal metro station, accompanied by a camera crew from NTV television, which gave the march extensive coverage.
Members of the group wear black uniforms and red armbands with a swastika-like symbol. Barkashov has said he wants to run for the presidency in 2000.
Police briefly detained some of the marchers but soon released them, saying they had committed no violation. An unidentified police official even apologized to marchers.
The fact that nothing was done to stop the march was puzzling after the angry remarks Luzhkov has made about the group.
Luzhkov's spokesman Sergei Tsoi on Monday criticized the lack of response by law enforcement, saying the mayor believed officers should have used "authority and force" to disperse the demonstrators.
Luzhkov would not overlook the provocation, Tsoi said, and the deputy chief of the northern police department had already been dismissed for "inaction" during the march. Tsoi said Luzhkov would invite Justice Minister Pavel Krasheninnikov and Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin to a meeting on combating extremism this week.
Interfax quoted a senior law enforcement official as saying police did not have legal grounds to block the march.
On Saturday, several members of another hard-line group, Limonov's National Bolshevik Party, disrupted the convention of former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar's Democratic Choice of Russia party held in eastern Moscow.
As Gaidar was criticizing anti-Semitic remarks made by Communist legislators Albert Makashov and Viktor Ilyukhin last year, protesters rose from their seats in the back rows and started shouting "Stalin! Beria! Gulag!"
Lavrenty Beria was of the NKVD secret police under dictator Josef Stalin and was responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people executed or sent to the gulag network of labor camps.
In response to the demonstrators' outburst, the congress delegates shouted "Shame!" and "Get out, fascists!" The protesters did not try to resist them and let the crowd escort them out of the hall without violence.
"It would be great if the fight with nationalism in Russia would be that easy," former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, who attended the meeting, said on NTV television. He, like Gaidar, didn't look at all distressed by the incident - which helped to draw extra media attention to the meeting.
Gaidar said the incident "only confirmed ... that the threat of national-fascism in contemporary Russia is real."
Police briefly detained some of the demonstrators but let them go after a document check.
Last December the Justice Ministry refused to register Limonov's extreme nationalist party, which he claims has 6,000 members.
In an interview on NTV, Limonov said that he had not given instructions to his followers to disrupt the meeting.
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