Neo-fascism

   Political ideology. Since the collapse of the oneparty state, neo-fascism has emerged as a major social and political force in Russia. In the waning years of the Soviet Union, the Pamyat movement attracted significant support and created a new generation of radical, sometimes neo-Nazi political activists. Since 1991, a host of new “brown” parties have been established around the principles of anti-Semitism, anti-Communism, and Russian racial supremacy. The movement is intellectually rooted in the doctrine of neoEurasianism, which presupposes global domination by whichever country possesses the heartland of the “world continent,” that is, Russia. Nearly all neofascist ideologies hold that Russia has long been the victim of a global conspiracy to suppress the Russian people; the supposed perpetrators include Freemasons, Jews, capitalists, Westerners, and Bolsheviks. Groups such as the Russian National Unity party and Igor Pirozhok’s “Werewolf Legion” are consciously modeled on German Nazism. Within this category, organizations such as Roman Perin’s Russian National Liberation Movement, Viktor Korchagin’s Russian Party of Russia, and Ilia Lazarenko’s National Front/Church of Nav also incorporate the ideologies of neo-paganism and Aryanism into the fabric of their movements. Some groups have tried to enter the political mainstream, the most successful of which is Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. More radical and peripheral political parties that have sought seats in the State Duma include Nikolay Lysenko’s National-Republican Party of Russia, as well as the splinter group of the same name led by Yury Belyaev. During the mid-1990s, despite conflicting ideological orientations, many of these groups entered into loose coalitions with radical left-wing parties such as the National Bolshevik Party and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, forming a “red-brown” alliance against Boris Yeltsin. In the post-Yeltsin era, the red-brown coalition weakened as many of its members gravitated to a pro-Putin political orientation.

   See also Nashi.