Russia watchers will have breathed a sigh of relief at Vladimir Putin’s assurance that he does not plan to revive the Soviet Union with his plans for a Eurasia federation. But it seems that the plan may have an arguably more sinister ideological provenance.
“We have waited for 25 years for these words to be uttered in public by our leadership,” said Alexander Dugin (right), the leader of the ultra-nationalist Eurasianist Movement. “We did help in the preparation, but, unfortunately, they softened our formulas,” he told a Moscow University forum.
Putin needed “an ideology, a reason why he needs to come back,” said Dugin. The Kremlin’s advocacy of Eurasianist politics, even in diluted form, will give cause for concern, not least among Russia’s neighbors.
Eurasianists advocate reclaiming former Russian territories, including the Crimea in Ukraine and Transdniestria in Moldova. “Russia has grown much stronger and is in a position to revisit the status quo in the post-Soviet space,” said Dugin, once dismissed as a marginal “fascist.”
”Political momentum has been shifting in [the ultra-nationalists'] direction for quite some time,” according to John Dunlop from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Russia is a unique Slavic-Turkic civilization and the antithesis of soft, decadent Europe, Dugin and his followers believe. Eurasianism has become “a justification for the resurrection of an empire on the ruins of the Soviet Union and for a struggle to the death against the Atlantic democracies,” says one analyst.
The Kremlin’s federation proposal “is likely to spark concerns in the west that Mr Putin will use his new presidency to attempt to restore the Kremlin’s sway over other former Soviet states with non-democratic leaderships, in what analysts have called an ‘authoritarian consolidation’,” FT reporters suggest.
Putin is “playing a dangerous game” in flirting with the far right, says The Economist, but such sentiments go deep into his regime, judging by polling data it cites from the Levada Centre which shows that 52% of his security services believe in “Russia for [ethnic] Russians” and openly admit hostility towards Chechens, Roma and other minorities.
Ultra-nationalists have also been associated with the growing incidence of racist assaults on ethnic minorities. Last year, according to the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, 37 people were killed in racially motivated attacks last year. SOVA analyst Vera Alperovich a recent decline in violence to a strategic shift in the extreme right. There is no need to beat up migrant workers “when power is already here,” she said.
Ultra-nationalist Nikita Tikhonov was recently convicted of the murders of human-rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova (right), but most analysts and advocates doubt that he acted alone and some suspect that he was prompted to act by elements within the security services.
“The authorities thought they could control and manipulate nationalist groups; but they quickly get out of control,” said SOVA’s Galina Kozhevnikova.
The cynical manipulation of violent ultra-nationalists who escape the control of their would-be masters. Now where has that happened before?
SOVA and the Levada Center are grantees of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.
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