Chip said:
Hi,
Oh good, a Red/Brown coalition. Just the coalition we need. Such a good history, pioneered by the national socialists in Germany. So, is the Indymedia site in Moscow still run by an anti-corporate-globalization fascist? I heard a bunch of the volunteers quit because of the antisemitic articles claiming globalization was a Jewish plot. Is there more information on this you could share? I get nervous when I hear about these types of coalitions.
- -Chip
And I say:
Actually, last night about 100 people the government identified as members of Russia National Unity, which is a Nazi group, went on a well-organized rampage, if that's not an oxymoron, in one of the markets in southern Moscow, beat up loads of people and killed two. Market vendors tend to be immigrants from the Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan and whatnot, so they're targeted a lot by racist thugs.
The CPRF isn't really red-brown; they're not even Communists, actually. If you read their 2000 program (which is on their Website, in English), you'll see that they are basically Soc.-Dems.: They're big on support for small and medium business, increasing social programs, free education, etc. So, even if they do wave around pictures of Stalin, they're actually not Stalinists or even Leninists in actual practice. (I think one problem for left-wing organizations in Russia is that the only time social justice was made a theme was during the USSR, which results in people linking social programs and Stalin.) And they hate fascists like the plague, since a large proportion of the CP constituency are elderly and remember WWII. They're also very attentive to trying to get accurate vote counts, since they know their position depends upon their popularity with the electorate -- 40% of Russians regularly vote Communist, and the CP wants to make damn sure those ballots don't get dumped in the river by some regional governer or city mayor.
They're also not nearly as anti-Semitic as portrayed in the West: Most anti-Semitic comments come from rinky-dink regional polititians in some place in the middle of b-f. nowhere in Siberia or whatnot. This is not to say that a lot of people in the CP are anti-Semites, but that's because a lot of Russians are anti-Semites. It's not part of the party program or anything. (BTW, when a Russian talks about "Jewish influence in the country," it's not as anti-Semitic as it sounds to a Westerner: They're reacting to the fact that the Mafia is dominated by people of Jewish ethnicity and, of all the oligarchs, only one, Vladimir Potanin, is a gentile. The most hated man in Russia, Boris Berezovsky, is head of the Russian Jewish Council.)
The Red-Browns are a bunch of fractured, little groups, like the National Bolshevik Party, which I suspect is half performance art on the part of its leader, the writer Limonov -- who writes for the eXile and is in jail now under allegations of running guns, BTW -- Russia National Unity, Slavic Unity, etc. (Yes, that's write, Taibbi and Ames are friends with the leader of the NBP.) A friend of mine used to hover around the fringes of the NBP in the early 90s, when he was trying to be a badass everybody-is-scared-of-me punk rocker, and he says Limonov is a fraud and probably a squealer. The Komsomol, which was kicked out of the CP for being "too radical," have some brown tendencies -- its doors are open only to Slavs and their pretty hypernationalistic. Have pretty cool graffiti though: "A steak for the poor, a noose for the rich!"
I don't think they pose any threat on anything other than the street level, as the government is pretty tough on cracking down on them, which was not the case I understand in Weimar Germany, for example, where the gov. used them to beat up on the Communists. And they're pretty small and fragmented. Not that that helps you if you're a Dagestani selling shoes in the market.
I don't know about indymedia, but www.left.ru, which Boris Kagarlitsky writes for, carries a lot of "Milosevic is a hero" stuff. I wouldn't call them brown by any means, but they are very nationalistic.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal