Home Блоги intern's blog The "Understudied" Field of Russian Ultra-Nationalism: Instead of a Necrologue for Galina Kozhevnikova (1974-2011) Submitted by intern on Mon, 27/02/2012 - 00:34. By Andreas Umland, National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy," Ukraine One year ago, on March 5, 2011, the eminent Russian political analyst Dr. Galina Kozhevnikova, Deputy Director of Moscow's Information and Analyses Center SOVA (owl), died of cancer. SOVA has been the major Russian agency monitoring post-Soviet extremely right-wing tendencies for the last ten years[1]. Its most prominent spokeswomen, Kozhevnikova, had been seriously ill for some time. She was 36 when she died... Galina was an exceptional person: warm, kind and fearless, as well as an outstanding specialist in the field of research into Russian ultra-nationalism and xenophobia. The significance of her many publications and interviews was borne out by, among others, several verbal and physical threats she received from Russian neo-Nazis[2]. Her death extinguishes an important beacon on the Russian political, social and intellectual scene. The Dearth of Scholarly Research into the Post-Soviet Russian Extreme Right In spite of the activities of such NGOs as SOVA, and despite the obvious importance of the subject, the overall community of researchers studying Russian right-wing extremism has, so far, been small. The number of in-depth scholarly studies - whether papers, chapters or books - is relatively small. Such a situation might be a matter of envy for students of subjects with an over-abundance of specialists and publications. Yet there are too large anumber of unexplored areas in the field of Russian ultra-nationalism and its groupings, factions, periodicals etc. The individual researcher trying to assess the phenomenon, as a whole, is confronted with a vast amount of unverified, under-contextualized and non-interpreted data. Sometimes, it simply turns out that important political developments have been under way for some time, but that there is no published detailed analysis of them, at all. The regular reports from SOVA, the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights[3] and other Russian NGOs go some way to alleviating the situation. But they do not completely solve the problem. There are many forms of ultra-nationalism in Russia today - and they are on the increase. The research carried out under the direction of Galina and the founder of SOVA, Alexander Verkhovsky so far[4], has been covering mainly hate crimes or inflammatory statements, religious extremism and various forms of racist violence. SOVA also systematically researches the - often dubious - methods used by Russian law enforcement agencies dealing with these and other supposedly extremist phenomena. SOVA's researchers, however, concern themselves less with manifestations of Russian ultra-nationalism in areas such as pop music, literature, journalism, art, higher education, intellectual discourse, and book publishing. One would, therefore, wish that there were a second annual report by SOVA or another monitoring center covering these and other under-investigated platforms as they often furnish those ideas serving Russian skinheads and other extremists as sources of inspiration, justification and apology for their crimes. The Russian media, to be sure, does feature updates, on a weekly basis, about ultra-nationalist incidents in Russian society, culture and politics. The main sources providing such information include independent periodicals (such as "Novaya Gazeta" and "The New Times") as well as various internet publications (e.g. Polit.ru, Gazeta.ru and Grani.ru). But, apart from the SOVA specialists, academic analysts of these phenomena, who work long-term, predominantly and in-depth on them, are hardly more than a handful. Marlene Laruelle[5], Vladimir Pribylovsky[6], Viktor Shnirelman[7] and Vladimir Malakhov[8] are among the very few scholars world-wide who engage in sustained research and regularly publish their findings in different languages, on Russian ultra- nationalism. The quarterly and yearly reports by SOVA and publications by Vladimir Pribylovsky's Panorama Agency are often the only serious up-to-date secondary sources available for a would-be student of these phenomena. Such a lack of specialists on the topic is regrettable given (a) the fact that Russian ultra-nationalism has consolidated its position within domestic politics, and (b) the central role Russia still has and, in the foreseeable future, will have for international security. We do not know enough about increasing extremist activity in the world's largest country that continues to be a nuclear superpower - a deplorable situation that the death of Galina will further exacerbate. Such a state of affairs is a luxury that neither Russia nor the West can afford. The price of remaining insufficiently informed about Russian radical political tendencies could be high. The Zhirinovsky Case: Russia's Extreme Right and Democratic Decline In the early 1990s, for instance, Russian and international analysts paid little attention to the aggressive ideology and steep rise of the first prominent post-Soviet ultra-nationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky[9]. His entry into the Russian parliament in late 1993 was a factor that, among other reasons, facilitated one of the most destructive political decisions by Boris Yeltsin: military intervention in Chechnya in December 1994[10]. The so-called Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) was, at the time, the only party in the State Duma, which unreservedly supported this action from the start. Zhirinovsky's ideologically-motivated autobiography The Last Dash to the South, published in a print run of thousands the year previously, had to a certain extent paved the way for Yeltsin's Caucasus campaign[11]. To be sure, Zhirinovsky was, apparently, not personally involved in Moscow's decision to send federal troops into Chechnya in late 1994. But pro-democratic politician Grigory Yavlinsky[12] and other observers[13] have pointed out that without the LDPR's triumphant victory in the first post-Soviet Duma elections of December 1993 (22.92%), the decision to storm Grozny, on year later, might never have been taken. Zhirinovsky's unexpected success in the elections weakened the democratic camp. Yegor Gaidar[14] and other democrats left the government. At the same time, the prevalence of neo-imperial ideas, nationalist thinking and militarist rhetoric was stepped up in Russian parliamentary debates, Moscow's elite discourse, and national media reporting. This, in turn, created a situation in which the so-called "party of war," i.e. some hawkish office-holders within the Russian executive, rose to dominate internal government thinking as to how the federal center should react to the armed conflict in Chechnya. It was not only the direct results of Yeltsin's Caucasus campaign that were catastrophic. According to Professor Leonid Luks[15], the effects of the two Chechen Wars on Russian post-Soviet society, culture and the already struggling economy were an important factor in the collapse of the second Russian democracy (the first democratization attempt having taken place in February 1917 - January 1918). Oddly to many observers, the right-wing extremist Zhirinovsky, to this day regarded by many as a mere "political clown," made an indirect contribution to the failure of democratization in the world's largest state. Will Studying the Russian Extreme Right Become "Popular"? Many political and intellectual leaders of the Russian extreme right and their supporters are often just as aggressive, but they are mostly even less studied than the political rise and influence of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. To be sure, there are some post-Soviet radically nationalistic phenomena that have received considerable scholarly attention. This concerns, for instance, increasingly ethnocentric tendencies in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, or the so-called "Neo-Eurasianism" of Alexander Dugin [22] - topics that have been popular among students of the Russian political scene and have been studied and discussed more or less intensively. But there are many ultra-nationalist parliamentarians (past and present), parties and circles whose activities, position and role in Russian society remain poorly researched. In this context, the loss of Galina Kozhevnikova is a tragedy, which affects not only her family and friends. She will be irreplaceable in future academic and public debates on the increase of ultra-nationalism in Russia. One can only hope that in Russia or other countries there will be under- and postgraduate as well as students, journalists NOTA BENE: «Cтруктуры и культуры имперского и постимперского разнообразия»: программа журнала "Ab Imperio" на 2012 г.* ATTENTION!: «Structures and Cultures of Imperial and Post-Imperial Diversity»: "Ab Imperio" 2012 annual theme* (August 2011): «The Second World Beyond Geopolitics...»: «Ab Imperio» № 2-2011 * (август 2011 г.): Вышел в свет «Ab Imperio» № 2-2011: «Второй мир вне геополитики...» * «The Concept of the “Second World” at the Crossroads of Social Sciences and Imperial History»: Ab Imperio 2011 annual theme* «Концепция Второго мира на перекрестке социальных наук и имперской истории»: программа журнала Ab Imperio на 2011 г.* SENDING BOOKS TO REVIEWERS! * ВЫСЫЛАЕМ КНИГИ РЕЦЕНЗЕНТАМ! * The "Understudied" Field of Russian Ultra-Nationalism: Instead of a N... http://net.abimperio.net/node/2427 1 of 2 27.02.2012 08:21