Watering the Seeds of Fascism

In early September, events in the little Karelian town of Kondopoga reverberated across the country. Every major news agency showed the aftermath of the town residents’ rebellion against Caucasian transplants: the devastated restaurant Chayka, which was owned by an Azeri; empty stalls of the city market; stores, where Chechens once plied their wares. It offered the mass media, politicians and opinion makers a chance to once again warn of the rising danger of Fascism in Russia.

I was in Kondopoga and saw how the Russian media exaggerated these events. What began as a typical restaurant brawl boiled over into a knifing, and then turned into citywide meetings against... not Caucasians in general, but against a specific, criminal Chechen gang, which had long been terrorizing this town of 35,000.

For seven years, the restaurant Chayka has been owned by an Azeri businessman who is well-known in Karelia. And for this entire span, the restaurant has been “supervised” by a certain Chechen gang. During this seven years there was one murder at the Chayka – of a girl who was peacefully dining in the restaurant. Residents say her death was an accident, that she was caught in the crossfire between Russian and Chechen criminal gangs, but it was nonetheless not reported. 

The restaurant’s Chechen guards tooled about the city in a black Mercedes without a license plate, refusing to submit to the authority of the local police. Residents tried on many occasions to get the town’s law enforcement agencies to investigate the multiple accidents which the Mercedes was involved in, but nothing was done, and the Mercedes owners continued their harassments. 

After yet another fight in the restaurant, when the guards finished their settling of accounts by striking out at passersby with knives and baseball bats, after two innocent persons had died, the citizens of the town took to the streets, demanding that authorities deal with the restaurant and its guards. Then, deciding not to wait for an answer, the crowd itself rampaged upon the restaurant, setting it alight. A similar fate was meted out on several stores owned by Caucasians.

And then the federal mass media started talking about anti-Caucasian pogroms. “It is all because these visitors acted defiantly, ignoring the mentality of our people,” declared the governor of Karelia, Sergei Katanandov. In this, he supported those who carried out the pogrom. Yet, at that time the police were investigating it as a murder of persons happening by the restaurant, followed by a case of mass disturbances. What is more, Karelian authorities – including the governor and prosecutors – said that the disturbances were well organized. And they even named the organizers: The Movement Against Illegal Immigration (MAII), a nationalist organization which only very recently appeared and which is rapidly gaining strength.

First, about the pogroms. I was at the market after the attacks. Just as before, there were Georgian, Azeri and even Vietnamese traders there. Ossetians were all working in city sawmills (Karelia as a region survives off its forestry trade), or as drivers for city buses and fixed-route minibus taxis. Only the owners of the black Mercedes were missing, and there were a few empty stalls at the market. Authorities said that they had moved Chechen refugees – women and children mainly – to a recreation center outside the city, guarded by the militia. But residents said that they do not hate Caucasians, and that they have problems not even so much with the Chayka Chechens, but with municipal authorities, who have proven themselves incapable of maintaining order in the town.

Unfortunately, deputy prosecutor Pyotr Klemeshev refused to help me visit the recreation center that was cordoned off by law enforcement agencies, saying it was “not the proper time.” A few days after the disruptions, however, Natalya Zakharchuk, a Petrozavodsk journalist for the electronic publication Stolitsa (Capital), visited the center. According to Zakharchuk, there were some 50 people there. “It is unlikely that the afflicted can count on serious compensation, either for destruction of property or for punitive damages,” Zakharchuk said, “The formal evaluation of the refugees’ losses was 150,000 rubles, and that is the most they can all, as a group, hope for.”

Why did the local administration, the prosecutor and militia not want to listen to the complaints of residents? Why did they allow the situation to spill over into citywide disturbances, into rampaging and destruction of city property, into the banishment from the city of Chechen women and children? At present, Karelia is investigating not only a case of murder and the ensuing mob actions, but also the activities of the Kondopoga militia. If is it proven that the militia did nothing about the Chechen criminal group, the cause of such inactivity will be investigated. Quite possibly one cause could be the corruption and bribe-taking that flourishes in the Russian law enforcement system.

And what about the assertions by the Kondopogan and Karelian administrations that the disruptions were organized by some sort of visiting extremists? 

At the very beginning of this affair, the residents of Kondopoga gathered in something like an assembly, where they elected representatives to act on their behalf in meetings with the city administration. One of them, Sergei Ivanov, is a young man who works as a guard in the Kondopoga city hospital, where injured persons were brought during the rampage. 

“I am not a member of MAII,” Ivanov said, “it is simply that, at the time, the interests of city residents coincided with those of this organization. No one in the city warned any members of this movement about the situation in the city. The organization communicated with residents on their own. If the case had been limited to a fight at Chayka, the authorities would have hushed up this affair. It was necessary to attract attention to the lawlessness that has gripped the town, and attention was drawn. We don’t hate all Caucasians, but we are against certain, quite concrete Chechens who have long been sowing disorder in Kondopoga with the connivances of local authorities.”

MAII did not organize this disruption, but it quickly exploited the situation for its own ends. After emissaries of MAII arrived in Kondopoga, the town was plastered with anti-Caucasian flyers. It is also known that certain unidentified persons began handing out free alcoholic drinks at large public meetings. 

Federal authorities have also exploited the crisis toward their own ends. It is no accident that all of the federal television channels, which are firmly controlled by the Powers That Be, continually reported about pogroms and Caucasian deaths, despite the fact that they all had film crews on location and could have easily explained the true nature of things in Kondopoga.

“There is nothing unusual in a drunken brawl,” said Alexander Tarasov, Russia’s top sociologist, “they happen all across the country. Locals fight with outsiders, and particularly often with temperamental Caucasian guys. This is a criminal matter. But this time the events were blown out of proportion. Nothing like this happened in any Russian city in June, but now such occurrences will be frequently exacerbated. This is because presidential elections are just around the corner, and the elections will be conducted under the slogan, ‘Putin or the Fascists.’ This scheme has already worked twice successfully. The first time was in the mid-1990s, when we were forced to think that, if we did not vote for Yeltsin, then the communists would return to power. Then, in 2000, they demanded that Putin be elected, since only he was able to defeat the terrorists. It worked both times, and the Powers That Be are not interested in inventing something new. Fascists are a fine threat. But first the fascists have to be bred and nourished. In the meantime, the MAII organization appeared and was expanded very quickly – its affiliates appeared across the country; lots of money and effort was thrown at its development.”

“I am well aware of accusations that our movement is connected with the FSB,” said Alexander Belov a MAII coordinator. “If the FSB wanted to play such a role with us, I would agree. But the FSB suspects us of having ties with the U.S. Congress and the CIA. Former employees of the Russian special services – analysts – write reports identifying us as a structure involved in CIA operations to destabilize Russia. Our people in the regions are being investigated by the secret services. They try to make us into accomplices in a huge, strange game. But in reality we are perhaps the only social movement in Russia not created for elections, not created by some sort of oligarch or powerful government official.”

Yet Alexander Tarasov offers some interesting information about Alexander Belov. According to Tarasov, Belov’s real last name is Potkin, and this is not his first foray into politics. In the 1990s, he was press secretary for Dmitry Vasilyev, leader of the very first post-perestroika nationalist organization, Pamyat. Then Belov-Potkin disappeared. But now he has re-entered politics, in the meanwhile having graduated from the legal faculty of the Institute for Economics, Management and Law at the Russian State Humanitarian University (RSHU). 

Actually, this faculty is a rather peculiar place. Allegedly, teachers and students all know that the faculty at RSHU regularly hands out higher education degrees to FSB employees who need them. These “student-agents” appear at RSHU just twice – to matriculate and to receive their diplomas. “This fact,” Tarasov said, “also leads us to conclude that this extremist movement is connected with the Lubyanka.”

Thus, it would appear that the Powers That Be are cultivating fascists, so that they can later do battle with them under the aegis of “a rising tide of Fascism,” in order to win the elections. And it is not likely that, in the bowels of Russia’s security organs, they are weighing the danger of this path: sooner or later such cultivated fascists could escape from their makers’ control. 

The weakness of local authorities in Kondopoga, and their inability to immediately stop the disorder there, proved that this could in fact happen anywhere in Russia. RL

[At press time, the three top security officials in Karelia – the head of internal affairs, of the FSB and the top prosecutor – were dismissed as a result of the events in Kondopoga.]