The National Socialists

Every Saturday, a few members of the Russian National Unity movement, clad in black uniforms and armbands bearing swastika-like insignias, gather by a log cabin in eastern Moscow's Terletsky Park. The teenage members take a red flag bearing the movement's red and white insignia and hoist it up a flagpole in front of the cabin. They look sadly up at their emblem for several minutes, then lower the flag and leave. The young men can't enter the cabin, their headquarters, because city authorities sealed it off in January after the movement's leader, Alexander Barkashov, clashed with Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov.


This week the city took further steps toward quashing the Russian National Unity, or RNE, by outlawing the movement's Moscow regional branch and banning the group's newspaper. A Moscow district court ordered the withdrawal of the RNE's Moscow registration after prosecutors argued that the group broke laws by recruiting minors for political activities, organizing unauthorized rallies and distributing its newspaper in unsanctioned places. A separate district court banned the RNE's organ Russky Poryadok, or Russian Order, on charges that it violated some procedures during its registration with the State Press Committee in 1991.


Neither step is likely to have a major impact on the controversial group. Barkashov quickly responded that the RNE would continue to be active through its 33 branches in regions outside of Moscow, and that he could even run in December's State Duma elections by joining a coalition of other political parties.


Many Russians dismiss Barkashov as a fringe extremist figure, but judging from the RNE's growing number of branches around the country, he appears to have a steadily growing following. "The RNE is a hundred times more serious than the return of the Communists," said Alexander Ekshtein - a writer who until recently was a member of the RNE - in a February issue of the weekly Ogonyok magazine. "It is more frightening because of the high concentration of people in theRNE who are sincere, professional and smart, with an innate tendency toward cruelty." A February survey published in the intellectual Literaturnaya Gazeta ranked Barkashov ninth in a list of the 100 most influential politicians in Russia.


Despite laws and decrees banning neo-Nazism, Nazi symbols and the inciting of racial hatred, curiously few actions have been taken against the RNE, which has been active since the early '90s. This week's court case was the first ruling against the organization. "The prosecutor's office has been very professional in protecting the rights of the Nazis," says sarcastically Yevgeny Proshechkin, chairman of the Moscow-based Anti-Fascist Center, a private organization.


The flag-raising ritual at Terletsky Park is typical of the mystical practices of the RNE. The organization claims to be - and is widely regarded as - a political party. But in many ways it resembles a cult, reminiscent of the medieval Freemasons, a group RNE members say they despise. Under the authoritarian leadership of founder Barkashov, RNE members undergo various secretive initiation steps to achieve different ranks. Members call themselves national socialists and embrace extremist nationalist views, genetic purity, authoritarian rule and strong discipline. At gatherings and marches, they often raise their right arms in Nazi-like salutes.


Barkashov, 45, claims that the RNE has 300,000 supporters in Russia. Police and the Federal Security Service give a more realistic estimate of 7,000. Part of the controversy over the numbers may arise from the complicated stages supporters go through before acquiring lifelong membership and the existence of underground members who hide their affiliation with the group. The RNE count apparently includes all such sympathizers.


The first step an RNE hopeful goes through is to join the storonniki, or supporters. As their name suggests, the storonniki offer support services for the RNE such as organizing branches at their places of work, distributing RNE literature, fund-raising and working as drivers. Most such newcomers are teenagers. The more devoted storonniki proceed deeper into the movement by attending a crash course at RNE bases called "quarantines." At the classes, they study Barkashov's writings, including the RNE's bible, "The ABCs of a Russian Nationalist," a straightforward text explaining the existence of a conspiracy against Russia by foreigners, Jews and Caucasians. This first phase usually lasts for several months depending on the newcomer's zeal in studies. "We try to be nice with the young sympathizers and allow them to ask questions on things they do not understand," says Oleg Kassin, an RNE member for seven years. "To the commanders and older comrades-in-arms we are much more demanding."


At the next level up are the spodvizhniki, or comrades-in-cause. The spodvizhniki receive uniforms and armbands bearing the RNE insignia and participate in paramilitary and fighting training courses that are required of most members. If senior members decide that a spodvizhnik has proven loyalty and ability, he can rise to join the soratniki, or comrades-in-arms. The soratniki are regarded as full-fledged RNE members. The RNE expects lifelong loyalty from the soratniki, who follow a code of honor that says treason will be punished by death. "If a soratnik smears himself with disgrace, he can clean it only with his own blood," the code says. Alexander Vedenkin, a former soratnik who left the RNE in 1995 and founded his own nationalist organization, got into several violent fights with RNE members after his departure.


Barkashov claims that the RNE also has hidden members who work in the armed forces, police and security services. These undercover members are exempt from the RNE's physical combat training. Sources inside the RNE say there are sympathizers in the Interior Ministry who believe the organization offers good training for future police officers. The presence of supporters inside government offices could explain why no investigation into the racist activities of the group have ever resulted in a conviction.


In February, RNE members in Minsk beat and severely injured three members of the Belarussian Popular Front who were participating in a demonstration against Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko. No one was arrested and no criminal proceedings were started.


In the central Russian city of Orel, three RNE members were convicted last July of murdering a woman and her child. The head of the local RNE branch, Igor Semyonov, was given an 18-month sentence for collaborating in the murder. It became evident during the court proceedings that Semyonov ran a reconnaissance unit that monitored the activities of local Jews, but no charges were brought against the RNE.


Before city authorities closed down the RNE headquarters in Terletsky Park, several dozen, mostly young people came to the office every day. They read books on national socialism, exercised in a gym and patrolled the park. On some evenings, the RNE organized dances in the park for elderly people, playing tapes of old melodies on a battered cassette player. RNE members, unless in formally arranged interviews, shun the press, and it is hard to learn their life stories. Most of those interviewed in the park claimed to work in the security business, but wouldn't say in what capacity or for which firms. Some said they had been in the war in Chechnya, and a few older members claimed to be Afghan veterans. Some were born in Moscow, while others said they had left other former Soviet republics "because of persecution."


The unifying thread of RNE members is their adherence to national socialism, or Nazism. Barkashov calls himself a national socialist and gets very angry when the press refers to him as a fascist. "Fascism is a weak and corrupt political movement which existed in Italy in the '20s," he often says. "I have nothing in common with Fascism." Barkashov despises Mussolini but admires Hitler. In January, several hundred RNE members staged a march in northern Moscow commemorating the 66th anniversary of Hitler's coming to power. When asked about Hitler's attack on Russia in 1941 and the subsequent four-year-long war, Barkashov says that was "a huge misunderstanding" between Hitler and Stalin.


Like Hitler, Barkashov is a cult figure for his followers and demands glorification from them. Portraits of the scrawny and balding leader hang throughout the cabin headquarters in the park. When the office was open, female supporters carefully dusted the pictures with brushes every hour, referring to Barkashov as "our dear Alexander Petrovich." Members consider it a great honor when Barkashov gives them lectures on his "The ABCs of a Russian Nationalist."


Barkashov was born and raised in a poor suburb of southern Moscow. After graduating from high school and finishing military service, Barkashov worked at the same electric power plant as a boilerman where his father had worked all of his life. Until 1993, Barkashov lived with his parents, his wife and three children in a house with a view of the smoke rising up from the power station that was near his home. "When I returned from the army, I started to wonder why our lives were so miserable," Barkashov said in a 1996 interview with this author. He said he was enlightened after reading books on occultism, Russian nationalism, Hitler and Mussolini.


Barkashov entered politics in 1985 when he joined the extreme nationalist Pamyat movement, of which he later became deputy head. Pamyat members view Russian history as a sequence of Judeo-Masonic conspiracies, culminating in the killing of Nicholas II and continuing today. The movement first made headlines in 1987 when its members demonstrated in Moscow and had a meeting with Boris Yeltsin, then the first secretary of the Moscow party committee. Pamyat's leader and founder Dmitry Vasilyev was Barkashov's first nationalist mentor.


Pamyat was active in the '80s and early '90s, but most of its actions were insignificant. Its most flamboyant acts included disrupting a meeting of democratic members of the Soviet Union of Writers in 1990 and visiting the office of Moskovsky Komsomolets, which it considers a "Masonic" daily, and threatening its editor at the time, Pavel Gusev.


In 1991, Pamyat members used a crane to lift and bring down the statue of the former Cheka chief Felix Dzerzhinsky, a dramatic act attributed to pro-democracy demonstrators that became a symbol of the revolution for Western television. The Pamyat members took down the statue not because they shared the democrats' opposition to Dzerzhinsky and Communists in general, but because of their belief that all members of Lenin's government were Jews and Freemasons conspiring against Russia.


It was then that Barkashov says he became disillusioned with the Pamyat movement. "Vasilyev was just an old showman and I wanted some real action," Barkashov said in 1996. Barkashov then wrote his book "The ABCs of a Russian Patriot," later renamed "The ABCs of a Russian Nationalist," and launched the RNE together with several other disillusioned Pamyat members.


Unlike Vasilyev, Barkashov did not concentrate on intellectual theories but stressed paramilitary training and what he calls "grassroots activities." In 1993, he registered "a club for military and patriotic upbringing" in Terletsky Parkwith Moscow authorities. The head of the Eastern District's municipal administration, Nikolai Ulyanov, gave Barkashov's group the status of "a volunteer people's self-protection unit" and provided it with several buildings in Terletsky Park where the club was expected to "maintain order."


The RNE thrived. Its members, most of them teenagers, began gathering in public, wearing green uniforms. They later switched to black. They held fighting exercises and trained at shooting ranges. Numerous newspaper articles at the time reported RNE's racist views and controversial activities, but authorities took no action against them. In 1994, the press reported that several former RNE members who called themselves the Werewolf Legion had founded a camp near Moscow where they tortured homeless people and used them as slaves. Despite such stories, a local official commented at the time, "Look, there is order in the park at last. And the rest I don't care about." Barkashov, too, boasted of the RNE's activities in the park. "Now you don't see homeless drunkards urinating in the children's playgrounds here any more," he said repeatedly. "Talk to the people in the park and they will all say they support us and want us to stay here."


While slowly developing its reputation, the RNE also began building up its finances by entering the security business. The movement started offering protection services for businesses that shared its philosophies. Around this time Barkashov left his childhood home and moved with his wife and three children to a new apartment in Moscow.


Barkashov asked Alexander Rashitsky, a former official of the press service of the rebel Supreme Soviet's chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov, to work as his spokesman. A former journalist, Rashitsky tried to improve the RNE's public relations, but the mystical character of Barkashov's movement and his disgust with traditional Russian party politics kept the RNE apart from the mainstream opposition, as well as from other extremist groups.


In October 1993, Barkashov's men took part in the anti-Yeltsin uprising of Vice President Alexander Rutskoi and Khasbulatov, and along with other hard-liners they were inside the White House when Yeltsin's troops attacked. But most press reports say the RNE members did not mingle with the other anti-Yeltsin forces. They ate and slept separately and left on their own through the sewer system as soon as the first shot was fired.


Thanks in part to Yeltsin's mention of "fascists" being present in the White House uprising, the RNE gained notoriety as a political organization. Barkashov was arrested afterward and spent several months in detention in Moscow's Matrosskaya Tishina jail. The case never went to trial, and Barkashov was released. Mikhail Khalansky, deputy director of Moscow's Directorate for Detention, was head of the medical service of Matrosskaya Tishina at the time, and recalls Barkashov vowing to shoot him for not being polite enough.


The other Communist demonstrators at the White House were surprised and dismayed by the RNE's egotism and complained that the group only took part in demonstrations to recruit new supporters. "These people never mingle with us. They just join our marches with their anti-Semitic leaflets and slogans and then leave," said Gennady Seleznyov, then the editor of the newspaper Pravda and now the State Duma's speaker. The RNE says it participates in demonstrations alongside Communists because "the Russian people are there." But some Communists say they are tacitly supported by the Federal Security Service to discredit all nationalist movements. "I think some of them are agents provocateurs," Seleznyov said shortly after the White House uprising.


When Russian politicians were immersed in Duma and presidential election campaigns in 1995 and 1996, Barkashov stayed aloof, saying that he despised all of the candidates. "They are all idiots from the old party nomenklatura," he said in the 1996 interview. Barkashov rated Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, "as bad as Yeltsin," and called Krasnoyarsk Governor Alexander Lebed, "that stupid general." "I could easily collect the 1 million signatures necessary to nominate myself as a candidate for the presidency, but I just don't want to participate in this comedy," he said.


Barkashov has further antagonized other nationalists by refusing any cooperation with them. Unlike Duma Deputy Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who brags of his friendship with extremist parties in Europe such as the Deutsche Volksunion and France's National Front, Barkashov has shown no interest in collaborating with neo-Nazi groups in the former Soviet Union or in the West.


Distancing himself from politics, Barkashov continued to focus on what he called "real life." In 1996, Moscow city authorities gave the RNE the right to participate in police raids on markets near Terletsky Park and several other areas. For the RNE, this meant "cleansing" them of people from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Mostly teenage male members began checking the identities of the drivers and scrutinizing documents at parking lots by the markets. In Balashikha, a town northeast of Moscow, RNE members in uniforms have started to patrol the area alongside police.


From around 1993, the RNE movement began to spread to the provinces. In the regions, where there are fewer probing or skeptical media reports about the RNE's views, people have been more receptive to the movement than in Moscow. The RNE has an especially strong presence in Khabarovsk, Stavropol - which is near the Caucasus and where nationalist sentiment is high - and the conservative Orel.


Leading politicians have been strangely inconsistent in their views on Barkashov. Luzhkov and Zyuganov both recently spoke out against Barkashov. Zyuganov, for example, recently lashed out at Barkashov, calling him "an ally of Yeltsin and the liberals." Until then, Zyuganov had never objected to the presence of RNE members at Communist Party demonstrations. Neither has Zyuganov condemned the anti-Semitic remarks of Communist legislator Albert Makashov, who has called on Russians "to urinate into Yiddish windows."


The Moscow mayor now denounces Barkashov as a fascist. But until recently, Luzhkov never attempted to stop the RNE's activities in Terletsky Park, and he avoided commenting specifically on the RNE, responding to questions from the press with vague references to anonymous extremists in general.


Luzhkov challenged the RNE only after Barkashov announced in December that he would convene a national congress with 5,000 delegates at a hotel in the Izmailovo sports complex. Luzhkov banned the gathering, citing laws against inciting racial hatred. Barkashov retorted that he would "get 100,000 Russian men instead of 5,000, and we will show him what we are worth." Prosecutors then accused Barkashov of "insulting and threatening a state official," and city authorities sealed off the RNE headquarters cabin. A trial against Barkashov for allegedly threatening Luzhkov has not yet opened.


The shifting positions of the politicians seem to reflect an anxiety over the political power of Barkashov and the RNE. The politicians cannot decide whether they should try to quash the movement or enlist its political support in future elections. What they should be concerned about is the lack of protests to the RNE's racist philosophy. "What is worrisome is not the number of Barkashov's supporters. In every country, 1.2 percent are nationalist extremists," says Yury Levada, director of the All Russian Center for the Research of Public Opinion, or VTsIOM. "What is worrisome is the nearly total lack of active opposition to Barkashov in the rest of society and the political class."