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Analysis & Opinion
05.11.08 A Dubious Kind Of Unity
By Roland Oliphant

Despite sterling efforts by the state to lend the November 4 holiday some kind of substance, the Day of National Unity has, since its inception, been associated with a flavor of nationalism that even the Kremlin seems uncomfortable with. This year the authorities made a determined effort to win it back with officially-sanctioned celebrations on Red Square. President Dmitry Medvedev, in his role as a kind of Russian Prince Charles, even took part in a public wreath laying ceremony to mark the 1612 uprising that the holiday is supposed to commemorate.

In an effort to defuse the threat of nationalist violence, the authorities even allowed the latter to march on the Taras Shevchenko Embankment, a road that runs along the bank of the river conveniently out of sight of the center, and which is easily closed off with little disruption to traffic. The march attracted several hundred peaceful, if somewhat menacing, protestors. Predictably, however, others were not satisfied with such a second-class venue, and gathered to march down Old Arbat in the center of the city. There were many more Nazi salutes, and a bit more of a fracas (Omon riot police broke up the march) than at the sanctioned event. Similar clashes took place in other cities across Russia.

Two days earlier, on Sunday November 2, the pro Kremlin youth group Nashi fielded a much more impressive 15,000-strong protest outside the U.S. embassy, for which the authorities obligingly shut down two lanes of the Garden Ring, Moscow’s crucial circular artery. It was unrelated to the festivities of November 4 (it apparently had more to do with the U.S. election and the idea that Halloween is a deeply significant American holiday), but it opened a week of political street theatre and is a powerful illustration of just where the authorities’ sympathies lie.

On Friday November 7, the communists will defiantly march on the holiday that November 4 replaced, to commemorate another uprising - the October Revolution. That event is likely to be far more dignified, but it will highlight the reluctance of a significant part of the population to embrace the new notion of “national unity” as promoted by the government. Whether by accident or design, the week has become not so much a time of unity as one of fractious arguing over history and remembrance.

The disunity in the nation is repeated and magnified among the nationalists themselves. Back in October the leaders of several leading nationalist movements – the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), The Slavic Union (SS), The Nationwide Russian Movement (RONS), the Russian Public Movement (ROD), Russian People’s Union, Pamyat, and the National Bolshevik Front – issued a joint statement calling for unity and promising to march on November 12 “under one banner.”

Nonetheless, several of these groups applied for permission to hold the Russian March, apparently independently of one another. Permission was eventually granted to the People’s Union, who organized the march on the embankment. Meanwhile, many of those arrested on Old Arbat were reportedly members of the DPNI. So much for sticking together.

Even the “official” march struggled to put on the show of unity that their leaders had so solemnly committed to a month earlier. Despite the organizing committee’s ban on flags of individual parties and organizations, the white, gold and black was overshadowed by the black flags of Obraz, the Russian incarnation of a far-right Serbian group that has been described as orthodox “clerical fascists.” Other banners included Tsarist and religious flags, and a jolly roger emblazoned with the words “death or glory.”

Disunity has been and continues to be the scourge of Russia’s nationalists, but a more serious problem may be irrelevance. The event gathered far fewer than the 5,000 who attended last year’s event, a success the organizers had hoped to repeat. At its peak, maybe 1,500 people joined the march along the embankment, but they quickly melted away once the speaking started. By the time events were concluded only a few hundred were left. Reports from various news sources suggest the police detained between two hundred and five hundred people on Arbat. Even adding the figures together, it seems unlikely more than about 2,000 people took to the streets.

And this is despite what Olga Kamenchunk of VTsIOM, a pollster that monitors nationalist sentiment in Russia, calls the “capital effect.” “Moscow and St. Petersburg are like many European capitals in that while they are generally more liberal, they also have the most serious ethnic tensions. So they are much more nationalistic than the rest of Russia,” she said before the march took place. The fact that so few took to the streets in Moscow, where the numbers should if anything have been inflated, suggests Russia’s nationalists are going through a leaner patch than at any time in the past several years.

The speakers did their best to capitalize on the economic crisis, which some observers predict could benefit extremist parties, but they were preaching to the converted. “I am here because there are too many immigrants in Russia, taking jobs that Russians should be doing,” said one elderly protestor clutching an icon. The low turnout, however, suggests they have a little longer to wait before competition for jobs really pushes frustrated Russians to embrace the far right.

Tuesday’s events showed little other evidence that Russian nationalists are adapting to the times. Apart from appealing to an economic hardship that most Russians are not yet feeling, playing up nationalist sentiment related to the recent war in Georgia and denouncing the fact that “America is about to elect a black president,” the speakers and the marchers were banging a tired old drum. Each speaker in turn denounced the betrayals and excesses of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. The dwindling crowd reserved its biggest cheers for Vladimir Kvachkov, the former army colonel who was recently acquitted of trying to kill reforming economist Anatoly Chubais, who told the crowd of nostalgic soldiers and masked young men that “the Jewish yoke under which we now suffer is worse than the German occupation, and Chubais and his Jewish SS are worse than the German SS.”

That is a bizarre twisting of history that is likely to repel even those Russians accustomed to routine anti-Semitism. But Russia, the novelist Robert Harris once wrote, is history’s own country. It is perhaps fitting that Russia’s day of National Unity, established on the anniversary of a forgotten uprising to avoid association with an all too well remembered one, has been so defined by both unifying myths and ugly distortions. The ethos of nostalgia was best captured by the speaker’s self-appointed bodyguards – historical re-enactors in the full armor of warriors of ancient Rus’.
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