Russia's ultranationalist, skinhead, neo-Nazi, and right-wing groups and their sympathizers staged a series of demonstrations last week, celebrating the "National Unity Day" on November 4. Since the holiday was reintroduced in modern Russia in 2005, right-wing groups have used the occasion to demonstrate their own unity and to explain what 'being Russian' means according to their understanding. The march in Moscow brought together some 5.5 thousand people, which is a record for Russia's capital. During the demonstration, the participants shouted racist, nationalist, and antisemitic slurs while greeting each other with the "Nazi salute." In Saint Petersburg, the turnout was considerably less, about 1000 people. In some 30 other major cities, the march attracted anywhere from several dozen to several hundred participants. The notable exceptions were Samara (in the Volga region) with close to 1000 marchers, and Novosibirsk (in Siberia), with another 500 participants. Our colleagues from the Moscow-based SOVA Center, a think tank monitoring hate crime in Russia, attended several marches and reported the figures on attendance. Here is a slide show with some pictures taken in the Lyublino District of Moscow.
Russia's neo-Nazi gangs are the main perpetrators of hate crime attacks in the country, which have grown by some 15-20 percent annually from 2006--2009. The improved police investigations of these cases and increased number of prosecutions helped to reverse this negative trend, although skinhead groups remain active in Russia and dozens of murders have already taken place in 2010. While the police have begun to bring perpetrators of hate crimes to justice, attacks and murders against civil society activists and journalists remain largely unsolved. For example, Anna Politkovskaya's murderers and Lev Ponomarev's attackers are still at large. Such attacks continue to occur, as the latest incidents targeted reporters Oleg Kashin and Anatoly Adamchuk, the former representing the national powerhouse Kommersant and the latter employed by a small regional weekly newspaper Zhukovskie Vesti. President Dmitry Medvedev reacted to Oleg Kashin's beating on the day it was reported, urging the Interior Minister and the Prosecutor General to oversee the investigation of this case.
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