#16 - JRL 8058
From: "Nickolai Butkevich" <nbutkevich@ucsj.com>
Subject: Re Rodina "fascist" party (JRL #8054-Gessen/Cohen)
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2004

I don’t feel qualified to assess whether or not Rodina can be accurately called a “fascist” party in the strictest ideological or historical sense, but I don’t think that Professor Cohen should have so cavalierly dismissed Masha Gessen’s argument that Rodina is fascist (“Motherland may not be lovely but anyone who thinks it is ‘fascist’ missed the twentieth century.”)

“Fascist” or not, Rodina’s ideology is rife with paranoia, fear, and hatred towards the West (the external threat), Jews (the internal threat), and Muslims and/or other non-Russian migrants (both external and internal threats). This is a matter of public record, not just a cheap PR ploy by the SPS, and the fact that a significant number of Russians voted for this party (as well as for the LDPR and for Communists like Kondratenko and Makashov for that matter) is a scary sign of the times. A word like “fascist” may or may not be over the top, but it comes a lot closer to the truth about Rodina and what its success means for Russia’s future than Professor Cohen’s phrase “not lovely.”

Ms. Gessen did a valuable service by quoting so extensively from the KRO’s web site. She accurately pointed out that this extremist ideology exists beyond Rogozin, down into the lower ranks of Rodina, but she doesn’t provide any more quotations from Rodina members beyond those from the KRO’s site. JRL readers might be interested to read below some more quotes from other newly elected Rodina Duma members; they can judge for themselves what label to put on them.

These quotes are excepted from a recent report that can be found on my organization’s web site at: http://www.fsumonitor.com/stories/011204DumaElections2003.shtml

Sincerely, and with apologies for the length of my posting,

Nickolai Butkevich

1. Andrey Savelev:

“Moscow over the past decade has turned into a new Babylon, where a horrifying mix of styles, faiths and traditions is taking place against the background of the lowering of the general level of spiritual culture of the population. In Moscow, we clash not with the spiritual traditions of Islam, but with politicized Islamism, which not only is gaining a privileged position within government agencies (that task has already been completed), but is also getting financial support, seizing whole sectors of the economy that are controlled by ethnic gangs.”(See his article entitled “Islamizatory,” Russky Dom, July 15, 2003.)

“A mosque and a synagogue have appeared on Poklonnaya Gora, which is a real insult for a Russian Orthodox person… The Islamist forces in Russia have fully adopted the ‘democratic’ methods of the Jewish diaspora. Most of all, they have set the goal of continuing the debunking of all that is Russian and try to soil every page of the history of the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church. Like the Jews, our politicized Muslims have begun to constantly complain about something: They are being persecuted everywhere.” (His article entitled “Islamizatsiya Rossii­polumesyatsem po krestu,” Russky Dom, November 15, 2002.)

2. General Igor Rodionov:

Former Minister of Defense under Yeltsin. According to a recent article in “Gazeta,” General Rodionov intends upon being elected to “demand that the Jewish people condemn Zionism and return what they have stolen from Russia,” and “repent before the Russian people the crimes committed by terrorists and extremists of Jewish extraction.” (Gazeta, July 13, 2003.) In the August 2003 issue of the monthly newspaper Patriot Mari-el, General Rodionov wrote that in order to save Russia, there had to be a struggle against “international Zionism as an intelligence gathering system acting on the basis of the postulates of Judaism.” He also called on Russians to “throw off the occupation of the Zionist regime” to stop Russians from becoming stateless people subjected to repression such as “the Kurds and the American Indians.”

3. Oleg Mashchenko:

“To the West, the need for the destruction of Russia corresponds to how much they fear it. After all, we are a nuclear power. The West itself is a prisoner of these terrible forces. The USA is declaring a war that could turn into a Third World War and it doesn’t understand that it is acting according to an alien, unseen order. The main enemy of the peoples of Russia and of other states is Zionism.

Due to the efforts of the media, this theme has become somehow indecent and forbidden. People don’t know what Zionists are and confuse them with Jews. In the end, the Jews are just as much hostages to Zionism as the Germans are to fascism. After all, you can’t say that all residents of Germany are fascists! However, Zionism is a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times worse than fascism. Fascism [Nazi Germany] was visible: Here comes the enemy, he is holding an automatic rifle, there is his tank, his airplane… [ellipsis in the original] And we perceived the target which we could repel. In addition, fascist ideas were preached by a limited number of countries at a defined moment in history.

But Zionism as such we do not see. It isn’t a party from one, defined country, it isn’t a movement, but a way of thought, a many-centuries long trend which unites a large group of people all over the world. And this group aspires to world domination, without hiding, it is founding a world government.” (Interview published in Kuban Segodnya, February 8, 2003.)

4. Natalya Narochnitskaya:

Dr. Narochnitskaya’s writings are frequently colored by conspiracy theories. In an article posted on Rodina’s web site entitled “The Axis of Washington-Tel Aviv-Istanbul and Others,” she makes the incredible argument that the Mossad and the CIA are behind Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel:

“The logic of “cui bone” (to whose benefit) gives rise to a skeptical view of the widespread cliché that Yasir Arafat supposedly stands behind the Palestinian suicide bombers. Just as the mojahedin and the Taliban had a very un-Islamic handler who was able to direct their angry potential along the necessary geo-political arc, the inter-relations between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs are a feature of an analytical cultivation and the influence of special services­today the CIA and the Mossad­in the recent past, Soviet intelligence.”

While she makes no effort to condemn Palestinian terrorism, Dr. Narochnitskaya describes Prime Minister Sharon as being “steeped in blood.” Israel, according to Dr. Narochnitskaya, is little more than a tool of Western Imperialism in the Middle East whose “function in world history” is to play the role of “the champion of Anglo-American interests in the region.” The destructive consequences stemming from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are “not because of the actions of Hamas, but instead are in full compliance with the new Anglo-American geo-strategy which demands a new situation in the Near East and in which there is no room for Arab-Muslim ‘centers of strength’­Iraq, Syria and Iran.” In a deeply hypocritical statement, given how many lives were lost as a result of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Dr. Narochnitskaya describes the 2001 US-led war against the Taliban as having resulted in the “total destruction of Afghanistan” and charges that it had nothing to do with hunting down Al Qaeda, but was instead motivated by the US government’s desire to control the Afghan opium crop. (“Os’ Vashington-Tel-Aviv-Stambul i dal’she,” www.rodina-nps.ru/article/show/?id=15)

5. Aleksandr Krutov and (KGB) General Nikolai Leonov:

Editorial board members of the fundamentalist Russian Orthodox television show “Russky Dom.” A typical example of the kind of material broadcast on Russky Dom came in June 1999, when the show hosted an “expert” who claimed that the Holocaust never took place. In shows broadcast earlier that year, Jews were accused of being part of a conspiracy to take over the world and there was a call for Kosher food to be sold at separate stores. According to a July 23, 1999 Moskovsky Komsomolets article, in a show broadcast over the summer of 1999, Russky Dom focused on what Mr. Krutov called the “ancient cabbalistic” murder of Tsar Nicholas II. Mr. Krutov reportedly posed the following question: “In the murder of Nicholas II, did the two thousand year old struggle that has been conducted against Christianity since the crucifixion of Christ find its logical culmination?”

Nickolai Butkevich

Research and Advocacy Director
UCSJ: Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union
www.fsumonitor.com -- Daily Updates on Antisemitism, Extremism and Jewish Life in the FSU.