I just saw a documentary on telly about Neo-Nazis in Russia. I’d heard about them before but seeing this and them celebrating Hitler’s birthday struck me as bizarre. It makes as much sense to me as a black man joining the KKK. Can anyone please shed a bit of light on this phenomenon for me?
Did you already see wiki? Neo-Nazism - Wikipedia
Plain old White Supremacy, it looks like.
With a side of attention whoring - calling yourself a Nazi is pretty much guaranteed to make people pay attention. If they could get on TV by calling themselves Tsar loyalists or Stalinists, that’s what they’d be doing.
It seems to me that what the OP is puzzled about is how Russian neo-Nazis reconcile their position with Hitler’s and the Nazis’ radical racism towards the Slav nations. It really is puzzling, just as the rise of neo-Nazism in Israel (!).
My input for this discussion: The ideology of these groups is not a plain carbon copy of 1933-1945 German ideology. It’s an odd mixture of plain old racism and stereotypes which have been around for centuries, together with influences from the “original” Nazis (especially Nazi symbolism and terminology seems to be attractive to these idiots) and their own crude ideas. They beldn these elements to create their own ideology of their own racial superiority.
Simply put, there are just some people who cannot be hated as much as they’d like to be, without a little self-promotion.
Self hatred + a wee dab o’ raving lunacy = Neo-Nazi in Russia or Israel.
Interesting that the article about neo-Nazis in Israel links them to Russian immigrants.
Russian anti-Semitism runs deep in the country’s history, going back many centuries before Soviet rule. It’s not surprising that it keeps cropping up like a malign fungal growth. Some Russians are evidently able to ignore the destruction that Nazism brought their country, as long as it offers a framework to attack Jews and whatever other minorities can be harassed in order to make their own wretched selves appear powerful.
And why not? Stalin is still very much the local hero, and he wrought just as much ruin on the nation. The various totalitarian ideologies have a lot of appeal to extremists, and they always will do. No matter who or what is pissing you off, you can slot them into the appropriate ‘hate’ spots in your Nazi, Maoist or Stalinist template, fire up the violence machine, and away you go.
They should stop waving their nations colors so much. Don’t they know that God hates flags?
The fact that there are neo-Nazis in Israel demonstrates, in my opinion, that the Israelis and Jews in general are tolerant to a fault. (And I say this as a Jew.) Nazis in ISRAEL? I mean, what the fuck, guys?
Most of the Arab countries are fairly brutal but the one thing I give them huge props for is not breaking ranks when it comes to their pride. You start up an anti-Arab, anti-Muslim group in Saudi Arabia, and they’ll chop your head right off. The Jews in Israel should do the same thing to Nazis in their own country. It’s absurd that we’re even discussing such a situation at all.
Isn’t chopping peoples heads off for their beliefs sort of…well, you know?
So what do they do when they have a jewish person with Israeli citizenship who also happens to be a Nazi? Brand a Star of David on their forehead and pop them in a gas oven?
Have five or six soldiers give him a good gang-beating, and then throw his ass out of the country.
Sometimes, in life, you just have to kick someone’s ass. People respect power. Especially people whose personal ideologies thrive on hate and bigotry.
Throwing a citizen out of their own country tends to get a little complicated in the real world. Probably easier to pop them in the oven, don’t you think?
Back to the OP, Nazism in the former USSR is nothing really new - various right-wing forces in Ukraine greeted Hitler as a liberator during WWII. (Can’t remember the names of the more prominent supporters but I do remember seeing footage of pro-Nazi demonstrations in occupied Russia.) Of course the total ban on anything Nazi-related after the war was certain to have given the ideology a little mystique and provided a boost to its adherents’ arguments of a Jewish conspiracy aiming to ruin Mother Russia.
Nazism didn’t spring Athena-like from the soil of Ukraine during the war, either - as Jackmanii noted, anti-Semitism, to say nothing of archconservative nationalism, has deep roots in Russian society. The Black Hundreds were one of the more noteworthy reactionary organizations in pre-revolutionary Russia.
With the collapse of Stalinism in the 1990s and the subsequent freeing of political discussion, the neo-Nazis jumped out from under their rocks and started organizing. I remember walking along Nevsky Prospect in 1995/96 outside Gostinniy Dvor and seeing them alongside old Stalinists and anarchists and what-have-you angling for the attention of passersby.
Yaroslav Stetko? Andrej Melnyk? Stepan Bandera? They wee all Ukranian nationalists who used the German invasion to declare independence. Melnyk was fascist and pro-German, Bandera was anti-German (but more anti-Pole and anti-Soviet). Bandera’s UPA continued to fight the Soviets until the 1950s, actually.
Then there were Pavlo Shandruk (Commander of the Ukranian National Army, a German puppet army), and in Russia, Andrei Vlasov (Commander of the Russian Liberation Army, a German puppet army)
People like ideologies. Sometimes it doesn’t even really matter so much what exactly that ideology says. They just want something- anything- to believe in.
And if you put the evil aside, Nazism has cool flags, cool uniforms, a charismatic leader, some history behind it…if someone is searching for something to buy into, I can see how this could possibly be on the list.
Capt A - it may have been Vlasov, since the signs were in Russian - presumably others like Bandera would have used Ukrainian.
Probably. Vlasov did give some recruiting speeches in occupied Russia, including one that got him in trouble. The story of Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Army is interesting, and more than a little sad.
It was all too easy for the Ukrainians to hate the Jews, because it was Jewish landlords and tax collectors that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth installed to administrate the nobles’ estates in the Ukraine, back in the 1600s before Bogdan Chmielnicki’s populist revolt drove out these “parasites” and gained independence for the Ukraine. Chmielnicki himself, I’ve read, was not against the Jews as a people, and I remember reading some account of his early planning of the revolt in one of my history classes that actually described him as sitting in a tavern with a Jewish friend discussing his aspirations. But the men who fought for him - a mix of Cossack tribes and peasants - found the Jews a convenient scapegoat for their problems, and ransacked the Jews’ villages at every opportunity. A statue of Chmielnicki stands in Kiev, but to many Jews he is a symbol of oppression and persecution.
Later on, the Ukrainians very enthusiastically supported the Nazis, many of them joining special SS units and murdering Jews with great glee.
So the Russian neo-Nazis show that Russians, in general, are tolerant to a fault?