Extremism in Russia, should we be scared?

Rather than talk about Georgia and the, which has already been done to the death by the media, I am going to talk about how Russia poses a threat to world peace and how it is vital to learn from past mistakes made.

In Politics, especially international affairs, it is vital to learn from past mishaps. 19 years is a long time, but the generations that lived under the iron fist of communism still remember the days of when Russia was a mighty superpower, not one trying to be on par with the West. Many look back at Russia during it’s Communist days with a certain nostalgia, even if that regime wiped out 1/3rd of it’s own population.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who passed away earlier this month, was a very influential writer in the 20th Century. He was exiled in 1974 for his anti-government feelings and spent 20 years in prison. He was the author of The Gulag Archipelago and One day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, both very anti-regime. He moved to Vermont, USA where he continued to write heavily against the Communist regime in Russia. When the USSR collapsed around Moscow many revered Solzhenitsyn, many loathed him. The post-communist economic strife, and the creation of the sudden free-market in Russia, made people wonder what is freedom if old people have to scrabble through the rubbish left behind on rich people’s plates? Although Solzhenitsyn made it clear that he felt it wasn’t him who collapsed the Soviet Union and created this backlash, he said he was purely waging a war on Communist ideology where people were in 3 different groups; those who were the executioners, those who were the downtrodden and those who were indifferent to the sufferings of others. Many far-left Russians argue nowadays what’s the point in having Capitalism if it creates a social cleavage between the rich and the poor? With Russian oligarchs spending their money on yachts and football clubs rather than the state’s infrastructure and industry, Russia has an extremely bleak future.
So, certainly many look back at the collapse of the Soviet Union with relief, especially in Eastern Europe, but many Russians long for a strong leadership to lead them to supremacy, it’s the ‘slave mentality’ according to a Russian meeting Solzhenitzen at Olga station, that make Russians long for a strong leadership and a clear goal to work towards.

Throughout the 1990’s the victorious West, taking advantage over the weakened Russian government, pushed the Russians further down. Investing cheaply in its infrastructure and making a laughing stock of Russian troops in Kosovo. For a country that was scaring the rest of the world only 9 years earlier this was hard to bear, especially when it looked like Chechnyan terrorists were routing the Russian army in Chechnya.

You may read that above and wonder, so what if we treat Russia in this way, what implication does this have for the West? The answer is very severe. Dictatorships tend to spring up in Economic and Political strife, when the country is going backwards rather than forwards, we saw this in 1920’s Germany and Russia and 1949 in China. Usually a Civil war breaks out between those who are moderate and those who are extremist. The huge problem Russia faces is that it’s not between just the moderate and just the extremist. It’s rather a three-way battle between the moderates, the extremists and the ultra-extremists. I am very surprised we hear very little in the Western media of the emergence of extremism in Russia. As Ross Kemp’s series showed, it’s not just the Communists that are looking for political clout in Russia, there has been a growth in the amount of Fascist ideology. The Russian election of 2007 had a very small turnout of 61% and there were shouts from many Western commentators of foul play with the German government calling the Russian government ‘Not democratic’. What we can see from the fact that only 61% voted and Putin had to resort to foul play to win the election, is that the Russian government is very scared of emerging extremism, let’s be frank it’s already rife throughout the Russian durma, you cannot exactly call Putin and Medvedev moderaist can you? After all Putin changed the election system to the Party List System and changed the law the limit the number of opposing parties in the Durma, isn’t this exactly what Hindenburg did before Hitler took power? The truth is there is a lot of support for these smaller extremist parties in Russia, especially among the working class. Russians are becoming more and more disillusioned with democracy; more and more Russian jobs are being taken by Muslim immigrants coming from the South. Infact this has got so bad that there’s almost an ethnic cleansing of immigrants from certain parts of Moscow, with the Russian press and police turning a blind eye as groups of thugs board trains and beat immigrants to death than boast about it on websites later.

It’s not just in the working class the Fascists has support, many anti-fascist groups say that the Police and the Army have been infiltrated by Russian Fascists. Politics also boasts a number of parties, organizations and movements. From the extremely Fascist and anti-semantic Black Hundred and Pamyat to the Russian National Socialist Party and the Russian national Union led by the neo-Nazi Russian MP Konstantin Kasimovsky. The support of the Fascists in the Russian durma isn’t kept private behind closed doors, politicians such as Nicolai Kuryanovich and the former head of the RNU Alexander Barkashov have all expressed their ultra-nationalistic views over Russian media. One only needs to look at the Coordination Forum of Countering Anti-Semitism (CFCA) and see how many time incidents have sprung up in Russia regarding ‘skinheads’.

The problem isn’t new, fascism has been around in Russia for nearly two decades now, parties have taken advantage of new civil rights to promote racial hatred, although it is not likely in the near-future that the extremists gain political representation, it is worrying that a country that controls most of Europe’s gas supply, has such military clout over it’s neighbours and has nuclear arms at it’s disposal has an undercurrent of extremism. The question is not if, but when, the two forces of Communism and Fascism again fight to make Russia’s history, and when this happens it’ll be a big wake up call to the West, rather than giving the red flag like it has in the past. After all German Fascism, Russian and Chinese Communism and Japanese Imperialism are all by-products of an indecisive West in the past. The West from now on has to act more firmly and decisive with Russia, which after all despite it’s huge land mass and military, is still an extremely weak country with an under-funded and poorly trained army.