Limonov vs. Putin

by Edward Limonov

  These same young people were identified on photos by NBP and SKM members who suffered from their actions in the Moscow subway when they were returning from a CPRF meeting on February 12th.

  The Atington group has investigated the issue, using its own sources of information in various structures.

  The young man who has called himself ‘Vseslav’ during the deterrence action in the NBP headquarters is well-known in the circles of soccer fans like Vasya the Killer, is a Spartak fan, is a member of the Gladiators fan group. He is well prepared physically, knows man-to-man fighting, and is aggressive; as people say he possesses a knockout punch.

  He was approached by the corresponding services in summer 2004 when the Moscow police videotaped a mass fight in a MacDonald’s near the Prospekt Mira subway station between Spartak and Dinamo fans. During the fight a close friend of Vasya the Killer nicknamed Lastik was severely injured at the head with a baseball bat. He became handicapped. The victim’s mother brought charges but the case is not investigated although the police know the person who made the fatal blow – one of well-known Dinamo fans, a certain M. Many people, including bystanders were severely injured that day.

  For some time Vasya the Killer was hiding and left his home but later he returned to a legal life. Moreover together with a small group of Spartak fans he openly cooperated with the authorities. This caused a negative reaction among other Spartak fans who are either apolitical or have a negative attitude towards the power. Even his friends from the Gladiators group once emitted a written condemnation of his transfer to the service of the power.

  Nonetheless Spartak fans started to be sued for pro-governmental actions recently. For example during a Chelsea match in London a banner in Russian appeared on the tribune, stating a claim to Akhmed Zakayev in vulgar form. There is unconfirmed information about the participation of this group of fans in the pogrom on the Tsaritsin Market.

  Presently the described group is used to cover the actions of the Nashi organization. There is no information as to whether their interaction with some special structure was registered.

  The unwillingness of Vasya the Killer to hide his face during the action in the NBP headquarters is understandable: the law enforcing bodies have enough material on him even without this videotape that does not add much to the charges that can be brought against him.

  Also there is information that in case of a serious publicity this man who does not represent a great value for his bosses will be easily given away.”

  Atington group, Pravda-Info, 03.15.05.

  On February 26th in the Sinezh hotel near Moscow the Nashi movement held a conference. The leader of the youth Yabloko Ilya Yashin and the Kommersant correspondent Oleg Kashin who went to the conference were recognized by the security service of the Nashi and beaten up.

  In the middle of March Kaluga’s department of the Nashi affirmed that on March 15th some people broke into the Nashi headquarters in Kaluga and beat up a certain Andrey Maltsev, a Nashist. Maria Kislitsina, the Nashi leader in Kaluga affirmed that the people who broke in raised their hand in a fascist salute and chanted “Glory to the NBP!” On the following day, on March 16th according to Kislitsina 20 nazbols put fire to the door of the headquarters and broke the windows. And the senior police officer Alexander Ulyashin did not only reject the statement but according to Kislitsina, insulted and beat her up. On the following day an unsanctioned meeting of the Nashi movement gathering 800 participants, some of them from Nizhni Novgorod, Tver, Ryazan, Moscow and other regions took place near Lenin’s police station. The meeting ended with a public reading of the order given by the chief of Kaluga’s police about Ulyashin’s dismissal from the police.

  The National-Bolsheviks affirmed, “Everything that happened in Kaluga was a carefully prepared provocation” and demanded to examine the activities of the Nashi movement and to return the lieutenant colonel Ulyashin to his functions. Their arguments were: 1) The absence of witnesses and evidence about the identity of the attackers; 2) The senior police officer Ulyashin is characterized positively by his colleagues and residents; it is not clear how he could be accused of such a shameful action; 3) The nazbols proved that the meeting at the police station was thoroughly prepared. How could have such a mass of Nashi activists from cities situated far from Kaluga, such as Nizhni Novgorod and Tver been brought together in less than a day? Also the banners directed against Uliyashin were clearly produced in a factory and it is hard if not impossible to make them in one night. Nobody was accused of anything because of lack of evidence.

  After these events even “the speaker of the Federation Council Sergey Mironov compared the Nashi with the Chinese Red Guards of the 60s and called this movement “a masquerade” and “too dangerous”, Izvestia wrote.

  Most probably either Surkov or the president himself have reprimanded the Nashi for their crude job on March 5th – beatings, syringes, vodka, ORT interview with Vasya the Killer, baseball bats. So the Nashi prepared a set up of a nazbols’ attack in Kaluga. There is no other explanation to this incident.

  Approximately at the same time in Moscow and in the regions a wave of attacks on nazbols and NBP headquarters began. The attacks continue to this day with a frequency of two-three per week. Usually the nazbols are attacked where they live or near the NBP headquarters, they are hit from behind with a baseball bat or a pipe and beaten up.

  Being a fascist organization by its methods (how else could we call the attacks on political opponents with pipes and baseball bats?), the Nashi perfidiously and mockingly call themselves “antifascists”. On April 13th on a press conference dedicated to the congress of the movement Vasily Yakemenko said that the Nashi movement considers the fascists and their sympathizers as its enemies. When asked what movements in particular he considers fascist Yakemenko answered: NBP. As fascists’ sympathizers he named the leaders of the democratic movement. “Rizhkov, Khakamada, Kasparov are obviously sympathizing to the fascists,” the Nashi leader declared. Yakemenko added that today a perverted alliance between the liberals and the fascists, the westernizers and the ultra-nationalists, the international funds and the terrorists is formed. “Only one thing holds it together – hate to Putin,” he affirmed. “In this situation we will support Putin. We don’t care about someone’s personal attitude to Putin but we consider that those who don’t share his political views are our enemies.”

  Yakemenko read out the movement’s manifesto. It says that the generation that rules the country from the 80s has lost faith in Russia and in its perspectives. “Ruling the country in the conditions of economical recession and Russia’s ousting on the roadside of world’s history they grew used to retreat and they are scared to give the order “Forward!” the document says. “The issue of Russia’s unity is the issue of changing the generation of leaders. Our generation has to replace the defeatists at the helm.

  The main tasks of the movement as stated in the manifesto are to preserve Russia’s sovereignty and integrity, to modernize the country and to form a functioning civil society. “Our movement has to become a model for a functioning civil society. Enough of words about human rights. The phrase-mongering of today’s’ liberals is democracy’s worst publicity,” Yakemenko declared. “The phrase-mongering of the liberals” is a typical fascist expression just as the criticism of human rights is their subject.

  On April 15th the Nashi held their constitutive conference in Moscow. 750 delegates from 20 regions of Russia took part in it. But the most interesting is that the minister Fursenko and the governor of the Tver region Zelenin, i.e. official representatives of the power were present on the congress. And both made speeches, greeting the creation of an organization that fights political enemies attacking them with baseball bats.

  On April 17th during a meeting with youth organizations one of the participants of the meeting approached Kasparov, supposedly for an autograph, and hit him on the head with a chessboard. On the Echo of Moscow radio station the Nashi press secretary Ivan Mostovich has mockingly
accused… the NBP. “This looks very much like the NBP, Mostovich affirmed. “… Such methods are typical of the fascist Limonov and his assistants. … What else should happen in order for the State to intervene and stop the revelry of delinquency and fascism spread by the NBP? The Nashi movement has nothing to do with this incident,” he emphasized. Clearly this is a mocking lie; the NBP has never used violent methods, first. And second – why should we attack a person whom Yakemenko himself has counted among the comrades-in-arms of the “NBP fascists”?

  In the night of April 27th in Moscow near the NBP headquarters on Maria Ulianova Street, 17, a nazbol from Arzamas, Evgeny Logovsky was beaten. He was hit with a heavy object on the head, and then he was put a plastic bag on the head and was stabbed in the neck with a knife. In the night of April 28th a garage belonging to the National-Bolshevik Yuri Valiev was put on fire. Flags and banners, all NBP attributes, were kept in the garage. Two neighboring garages were burnt together with Valiev’s garage. In the beginning of the fire Valiev heard a small explosion and the garage burst into flames. When later the bookstores Phalanster and Bilingva were put on fire in Moscow, witnesses have also heard similar explosions.

  On April 29th at about 10 o’clock PM Sergey Udaltsov, leader of the Vanguard of Red Youth organization was beaten near his home on Zatonnaya Street.

  On May 15th the Nashi held a grandiose demonstration on Leninsky Street in Moscow. Over 2 thousand buses lined up on the sides of the street. Columns of Nashists marched to a stage near the Gradskaya hospital on specially marked asphalt. On May 16th Kommersant writes: “At noon the police has counted the participants of the action: they were 60 thousand. The crowd seemed to never end and the TV operators were cursing, not knowing how to film such a quantity of people. ‘We need Leni Riefenstahl over here,’ joked an operator. The image of columns with flags disappearing in the horizon really reminded scenes from Triumph of the Will (The triumph of the will cost the Kremlin from 1200 thousand dollars to one million and a half.) After the speeches followed the culmination of the action – an oath of allegiance beginning with the words: ‘I, citizen of a free Russia, today accept my homeland from the hands of the old generation.’ A thousand of veterans lined up among the side of Leninsky Street. Each veteran had to take the oath from 60 Nashis. After a young man or woman pronounced the text the veteran hung a cartridge-case on a ribbon around the neck of the newly converted. … After the oath the Nashi were left to take a walk in the city, which rejoiced most of the students from the regions. ‘In school they told us that we could have a free trip to Moscow, a student from Kovrov told Kommersant. ‘I want to go to the Red Square before the bus leaves.’

  In other words, according to the Old Russian tradition of forgeries and Potemkin villages they used the administrative resource and money from the budget. They sent an order to schools and universities: send students to a one-day trip to Moscow. For free. The students from the regions gladly accepted the trip. The invited veterans, as Kommersant explains, were fooled: “Actually, they didn’t know that they are taking part in an action of the Nashi movement. The Nashi federal commissar Alexander Gorodetsky explained the political meaning of the action to the journalists: ‘We gathered here to show that the neo-fascists under the NBP flags will never be able to march on the streets of Russian cities.’ ‘And the Yavlinskys won’t either,’ someone from the veterans supported the young man. ‘Exactly, only us,’ the commissar assured.

  Such a gloomy mockery of good sense is possible only in Russia. Meanwhile the media continued to investigate the Nashists. On 07.13 Gazeta.ru wrote in the article “They love soccer”: “The Nashi movement, into which all the leaders who headed the first pro-Putin youth organization went after the Walking Together collapsed, present a special interest considering the informational inaccessibility. The figure of Vasily Yakemenko himself is secondary because more interesting are the informal leaders who brought with them the participants of Moscow’s largest fan groups first to the Walking and then to the Nashi. Already five years passed since the time Walking Together was created and until the opening of the Nashi camp on Seliger in 2005, five years during which Alexey Mitryushin became the Nashi’s unofficial regional leader, pushing aside less successful leaders. Today Alexey Mitryushin holds the modest post of technical director of Nashi’s Moscow department, simultaneously heading Gallant Steeds, one of the largest informal associations of CSKA fans. Initially forming a separate unit in the Walking, headed by Mitryushin the fans went into the Nashi and now hold regular training exercises on the OMON training bases in the Tver region. (Governor Zelenin turned out to be useful! - E. L.)

  Mitryushin himself does not deny his soccer fan past, but declares that this was a long time ago. However his organization took part in a mass battle on the Kitay-Gorod subway station in March 2001, which resulted in 11 people sent to reanimation and in a large confrontation between delinquents on May 10th 2004 in Moscow on the Prospekt Mira station. The paradox of this situation is that in both cases the confrontations happened between the delinquents of informal organizations of CSKA and Spartak fans and from both sides there were leaders of first the Walking Together and then the Nashi movement. For example, Roman Verbitsky who is responsible for the regional development in the Nashi and Vasily Stepanov who directed the security service in the Walking Together and then transferred to work in the White Shield security organization (By the way this is a racist name! - E. L.) that provides security service during the actions of the Nashi movement, they both simultaneously head the Gladiators, the largest association of Spartak fans in Moscow. All the leaders, Mitryushin, Stepanov and Verbitsky were present on the meetings of the Nashi commissars with the head of Kremlin’s administration Vladislav Surkov and they all figure in the special files of Moscow’s 5th police department that works with soccer hooligans and skinheads.

  The Nashi prefer not to speak about the soccer component of their leaders’ life. ‘Even though a few years ago Alexey Mitryushev was a soccer fan, this was a long time ago and he left this, the movement’s press secretary told Gazeta.ru. The press service did not comment Vasily Stepanov and Roman Verbitsky’s involvement in the movement, confirming the information that Mitryushin is presently one of the leaders of the camp on Seliger. According to the information obtained from the editors of NBP-Info, both Verbitsky and Stepanov were arrested by the police in one of the raids on the NBP headquarters in Moscow and criminal cases were opened against them.”

  As we remember Vasya Yakemenko promised the summer camp already on February 10th. On July 11th 2005 he kept his promise: the Seliger-2005 all-Russian youth camp was opened on Seliger Lake on the lands of governor Zelenin. It closed on July 25th. Over 3 000 young people from 45 Russian cities took part in the activities of the camp. A journalist of the Moskovskie Novosti testifies on July 22-28th 2005. “However we discovered those whom the Nashi leaders intend for Russia’s intellectual and administrative elite. They mostly look like 12-16 years old girls and young men a little older. There are adults of course but the general membership of the Nashi is extremely young. During an informal conversation it appeared that a part of them arrived simply on vacation and ‘also to hear those we see on TV’. The gentlemen who looked more severe are the camp’s security. Actually they don’t annoy the residents of the camp with their presence. Outside the Nashi’s settlement the keen eye of the paparazzi notices scores of vehicles with tainted windows and antennas. There are cars and microbuses and we can only guess at what hides behind these tainted windows. … The workday of the Seliger camp’s commissar is saturated and versatile. There are conferences given by political technologists and trainings on various directions: political leadership, psychology, organization of mass actions, public relations, electoral technologies, etc. There is choice between sports clubs, master classes on journalism and many other things. … Hundreds of sport bikes and dozens of motorboats and kayaks, a few yachts, an Internet-center for 30 computers, in the evening there are shows of pop stars such as Uma Thurma
n, Zemphira, the Animals, etc. I have to say that the journalists who heard enough passionate stories about the poor people were wondering: why is all this magnificence available only for 3 000 selected individuals and not children from orphanages, for example?”

  Among other things the Nashi – Seliger-2005 Center says: “In 14 days the commissars and supporters of the Movement have listened to 870 hours of conferences, taken part in over 400 master classes, seminars and trainings. They were lectured by: Anatoly Utkin (deputy director of the USA and Canada Institute), Tatyana Evgenyeva (Moscow’s State University’s professor), Vyacheslav Sherbin (professor of the highest school of economics), Gleb Tyurin (expert of the European association for the development of the civil society), Alexander Solovyev (MSU professor) – in all over 70 teachers from the best universities. … The representatives of the country’s modern intellectual elite were sharing their experience and knowledge with the commissars … (Gleb Pavlovsky, Sergey Markov, Vyacheslav Nikonov, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Alexander Tsipko, Andrey Parshev, father Vsevolod Chaplin, sheikh Muhammad Karachay and others) as well as State functionaries of the highest rank (Vladislav Surkov, Dmitry Zelenin, Alexander Tkachev, Andrey Kokoshin, Mikhail Margelov and others).”

  On July 25th the camp on Seliger closed and on July 26th president V. Putin has personally met the Nashi. The Nashi informational center has announced the same day: “Russia’s president to the Nashi: you can influence the situation in the country. The text: ’56 commissars from 20 Russian cities who have demonstrated the best results in their specializations (social, economical, informational, analytical, Intellectual Club, Mass Actions, Rallying Events) have met the RF President Vladimir Putin during the all-Russian gathering of commissars and supporters of the Nashi youth democratic antifascist movement Seliger-2005 on Tuesday, July 26th. The meeting took place in the Zavidovo residence (Tver region) and lasted two hours. After they thanked the President for his attention and moral support the Nashi commissars asked Vladimir Putin over 20 questions on diverse subjects. … ‘I am certain that if you will not be too organized, if you won’t think in clichйs, you could help, not the country’s administration, but society and the State,’ The RF President said. According to him the question is about solving urgent problems, especially among the youth, such as alcoholism, drug addiction and the fight with all sorts of phobias and attitudes in the sphere of international and inter-religious relations. ‘Doubtlessly you can influence the situation in the country. I’m counting on it,’ Vladimir Putin said, adding that the active work of the NASHI is one of the signs of a functioning civil society. The president also thanked the Movement’s commissars for the actions they already held, in particular for the numerous events dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the Great Victory.”