Window on Eurasia: Eurasians Organize 'Anti-Orange' Front in Russia, CIS

13.09.05

Tartu, September 12 -- The Eurasian Movement, an extremist nationalist group with ties to the Russian Federation's security agencies, is working to establish a Russian Federation and CIS-wide alliance of groups prepared to fight against those seeking to promote "orange"-style revolutions there.

Last Tuesday, Aleksandr Dugin, who heads both the Eurasian Movement and something called the United Tatar-Mari-Hyperborean Forces, said that he plans to unite all patriotic groups throughout the region who support President Vladimir Putin and to oppose any "orange" challenges to his policies (http://evrazia.org, September 7).

Dugin said that this alliance will include non-Russian nationalists from the Middle Volga region of the Russian Federation as well as from Georgia and Ukraine, the three areas that the Eurasian leader suggests are currently most threatened by and interested in carrying out revolutions intended to undermine the status and power of the Kremlin.

Dugin added that the new group, which he said already has commitments from organizations with more than 25,000 members, plans to convene a constituent congress before the end of this year. He said that the group will defend pro-Kremlin regimes and police and will attack leaders of groups opposed to Moscow.

Most observers of the post-Soviet scene are likely to dismiss Dugin's pronouncement as unworthy of any notice, the latest product of a fevered mind in the hothouse politics of extremist nationalist groups in the Russian Federation. But there are three reasons why that almost certainly would be a mistake.

First, as has been the case at various points throughout his career, Dugin appears to enjoy the support of the Russian security services and the Kremlin. Often, the latter have not been prepared to acknowledge these ties, but Dugin claimed last week that the Kremlin very much supports what he is trying to do now. 

Consequently, Dugin's actions should be considered not as an independent move but rather as part and parcel of the Kremlin's broader efforts to block what it sees as the threat to itself inherent in "orange"-style revolutions -- albeit one of the more extreme and ultimately deniable parts of that strategy.

Second, despite implausibility of uniting Russian and non-Russian nationalist groups, Dugin appears to have come up with a potentially effective formula in this case that will allow Moscow to unite and thus more successfully exploit nationalist forces in various places, even when some of them are at least nominally anti-Russian.

"Eurasianism," Dugin was quoted by "Vremya novostei" on Thursday as saying, is committed to just that kind of pluralism, albeit an "anti-Western" one. Thus, at least some nationalists who have already had a rapprochement with anti-Western groups may be able to work against democracy even if on other occasions they oppose one another.

In his remarks last week, Dugin specified whom the new group plans to support and whom it plans to oppose. In addition to Putin, of course, the anti-"orange' coalition hopes to back Belaru's Alyaksandr Lukashenka, Armenian president Robert Kocharyan, Tajikistan President Emomali Rakhmonov and ex-Kyrgyzstan leader Askar Akayev.

And among those, the new group will work against are the new Ukrainian and Georgian leaderships, the pro-democracy parties of the Russian Federation, and Tatarstan President Mintimir Shaimiyev whom Dugin said is working lcosely with "foreign agencies and special services."

And third, as "Gazeta" pointed out also on Thursday, Dugin appears now ready to do something that so far has eluded anyone else, including the government: He is gathering together �the most odious [nationalist] organizations" across the region and thus providing the Kremlin with a force that is likely to prepared to do things others will not..

That would give Dugin and those standing behind him the possibility of using this new organization, should it in fact take off as they hope as an ally of sorts to the "Nashi" group that the Kremlin has more explicitly backed up to now. 

Indeed, the Moscow newspaper suggested, the Kremlin may even plan for a certain division of labor between these two movements: the Nashi group will conduct mass actions and meetings, while the Eurasian-led group will conduct more "unofficial" and possibly violent actions against Putin's opponents.

One of Dugin's closest aides, Eurasian Union of Youth leader Valeriy Korovin, appeared to confirm that view. According to "Vremya novostei," he said last week that "'Nashi' is a good project, but ineffective" because its leaders have met with Putin, something that restricts their freedom of action.

Because the Eurasians seldom have such public contacts with the Russian leadership, they can do things like working directly with the police against demonstrators and attacking the leaders of pro-democracy groups in various ways that Nashi cannot lest that put the Kremlin in a difficult position before its Western partners, Korovin continued.

But the fact that the Kremlin has deniability in the case of the actions of the Eurasians and their friends does not mean, the leaders of this group and Moscow analysts suggest, that Putin and his entourage do not have a very real interest in what this group may do and, what is more important, how it will do it.

Paul Goble