Writing in The Daily Beast, Anna Nemtsova has published two informative articles on right-waiting youth movements in Russia. Her August 10 report on this year’s Lake Seliger camp of the pro-Kremlin Nashi movement is a nuanced picture: in amongst the anti-American rhetoric there were 15 American guest campers, and some efforts made to advance the ‘reset’ in relations with the US.
Her second story, Fascist Russia, published on August 7, reports on the hard core fringe groups, some of whom welcomed Breivik’s massacre in Norway. She quotes Aleksandr Belov, founder of the far-right Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), as saying, “If the Kremlin cannot destroy [ultranationalism], they will try to lead it.” (The DPNI was dissolved by a Moscow court in April 2011.)
According to Pavel Koshkin writing in Russia Profile on August 1, nationalists have an active presence in the Russian blogosphere. In his article titled “Virtual nationalism” he reports that the social network site VKontakte “boasts more than 1,000 Russian nationalist groups, which can attract from anywhere between 3,000 and 110,000 members.”