Extremist Group Steps Up Pressure on Immigrants

By Galina Stolyarova

Staff Writer

Published: May 20, 2008 (Issue # 1374)

PLAYING SOLDIERS alexander belenky/spt / Staff Writer Members of a historical reenactment society, dressed as U.S. soldiers, take part in Museum Night on Saturday in the grounds of the Artillery Museum on the Petrograd Side. Twenty museums in St. Petersburg participated in the annual international event.

Members of the nationalist Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) launched a verbal attack on the pro-Kremlin United Russia party last weekend for introducing a series of reforms to the process of obtaining Russian citizenship.

Activists from the radical youth movement staged a protest outside the party’s local headquarters calling for an end to the reforms.

In April, the State Duma voted to support the first draft of the newly amended law on Russian citizenship that cancels the requirement for five-year residence in the country for former Soviet citizens permanently residing abroad and planning to relocate to Russia.

Under the new law, such applicants would no longer have to pass a Russian language exam or confirm their source of income.

The DPNI said that enabling mostly non-Slavic people to obtain citizenship would be, paradoxically, “a step that would inevitably result in the further growth of xenophobic sentiment in the country.”

“We do not want to believe that you are fully aware of all the negative consequences of such a move and that you really want this kind of future for the country, and therefore suggest that you use your influence to persuade the United Russia parliamentarians to end the plan,” reads the DPNI appeal to United Russia.

No official reaction has followed from United Russia.

Over the past several years the DPNI has been notorious for its nationalist rhetoric. Its website publishes a “crime watch” about crimes committed in Russia by non-Slavs.

The movement has also been involved in a number of street clashes with pro-tolerance movements.

Earlier this month, the Leninsky district court handed down suspended sentences to a group of anti-fascist activists responsible for starting a brawl with members of DPNI in September 2006.

The members of the “antifa” group — antifa refers to individuals and groups that are dedicated to fighting fascist tendencies — claimed responsibility for the street clash that resulted in three people being sent to city hospitals with stab wounds and head injuries.

Six members of the movement were tried on charges of a premeditated act of hooliganism.

Oleg Smirnov, Alexei Kogodovsky and Pyotr Osipov were each sentenced to a year in prison last Thursday, while Vyacheslav Sidorov and Maxim Khorkov were each sentenced to six months in jail. Igor Malyshev received six months in a labor camp. All the sentences were suspended.

The prosecution, which had demanded six years in prison for Smirnov and tougher punishments for the rest of the defendants, is planning to appeal the verdict.

The street fight was typical of the clashes between the two movements but it has become particularly notorious.

Violence broke out when activists from Antifa tried to disrupt a meeting of the DPNI on Pionerskaya Ploshchad on Sept. 17, 2006.

The meeting’s participants were expressing support for a race riot in the Karelian town of Kondopoga. The movement campaigns for the immediate deportation of immigrants from CIS countries.

Some members of the antifa group said they were driven to violence by the murder of Timur Kacharava, a student of the St. Petersburg State University and antifascist activist who was stabbed to death by a group of skinheads outside a bookstore on Ligovsky Prospekt in November 2005.

Timur’s killer, Alexander Shabalin, received 12 years in jail although the other members of the gang that attacked Timur were given suspended sentences.

“Yes, we did go there to disrupt their meeting, and yes, we were prepared to fight,” said Andrei, a witness to the fight and antifa member who asked that his last name be withheld to protect his safety.

“After the murder of Timur Kacharava we realized that fascists and nationalists understand only one language, the language of force,” he added. “If the authorities do nothing, we have nothing left to do but fight. We are aware of the fact that this makes us more vulnerable, but there doesn’t seem to be any other way of drawing attention to the problem. Verbal methods do not work.”

As Russia garners negative headlines worldwide due to a marked rise in skinhead violence against foreigners and minorities, the anti-racist activists have gotten far less attention.

The antifascist movement’s modest numbers are dwarfed by its opponents in the much larger, more vocal and often violent nationalist movement.

In addition to being subject to vicious assaults from skinheads, they are treated with suspicion and hostility by the police.

Most of the political elite and general public are either ambivalent about or indifferent to their goals. At their own rallies, police and counter demonstrators usually outnumber them.

Alexander Vinnikov of the Movement Against Racism compared the current political climate to the atmosphere of Tsarist Russia in the 1910s, complete with pogroms and outbursts of anti-Semitism.

“The hatred is a broader force now and is now directed at Georgians and other non-Russians,” he said. “True, it has not come to the pogroms yet but the degree of violence is steadily growing.”

Vinnikov and other rights activists say there has been a lack of leadership from Russia’s political elite and from law-enforcement bodies, which often appear to be in a state of denial about hate crimes.

The authorities have shown little interest in nurturing civil society or supporting groups seeking to do so. The opposite is often the case.

Antifascists claim it is the hands-off attitude of the authorities that has propelled them to act aggressively. Originally a peaceful movement, it started showing signs of splitting apart after the brutal murder of Kacharava.

After Kacharava’s death, some of the more radical members of the movement felt the time had come to change tactics and go on the offensive, said Ruslan Linkov, chairman of the small opposition organizaton, Democratic Russia.

Linkov said the police often appear more interested in portraying antifascist activists as extremists rather than combating far-right extremists. This, Linkov said, plays into an overall mood of xenophobia among the general public.

“The Movement Against Illegal Immigration is an extremist organization, that openly calls for ethnic cleansing. Yet it has not been troubled much by the police,” he said.

“This shows that the police and many government officials must sympathize with the nationalists. They also seem to be trying to spread the responsibility for street violence more evenly among various political forces,” Linkov said.