BBC News:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has used a Victory Day parade to issue a warning to neo-Nazis and other nationalist extremists.

He said they were “leading the world to a dead end” and would not be tolerated in Russia.

His comments follow a series of attacks on foreigners – some of them fatal.
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By using a big, set-piece occasion to raise the issue, Mr Putin is stressing the moral urgency of Russia’s racist problem, says the BBC’s Russian affairs analyst Steven Eke.

“Those who are again trying to raise the defeated flags of Nazism, who sow ethnic hatred, extremism and xenophobia, are leading the world to a dead end, to thoughtless bloodshed and cruelty,” the president said.

“For this reason, the defeat of fascism must be a lesson and a warning against the irreversibility of vengeance.”

Russia is under increasing international pressure to crack down on nationalist groups, some of which openly display Nazi symbols.

Amnesty accused Russia of “turning a blind eye” to violent racist crimes.

There has been a wave of attacks, particularly in the north-eastern city of St Petersburg.

It’s a message that the whole nation will be hearing, one that taps into a national sentiment that has been growing since the end of the Soviet Union. His message to the people today, however, is not as important as how Russia has gotten to this point in the first place. It is ironic then that Putin denounces this rising racist sentiment when it is he himself that helped create it, just as he is a creation of the Yeltsin oligarch regime that he dismantled.

For this, we need some background.

Putin is a creation of the government that he replaced. Before Putin was nominated as prime minister in 1999, President Yeltsin and the oligarchs (Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky, met at his dacha to decide how to continue the path of the country under liberalization. Yeltsin found Putin to be a loyal and trustworthy man that he thought would continue the program that had been underway for the last decade. After that, it was decided that Putin would become prime minister, and Yeltsin would eventually resign from the presidency, allowing Putin to take over and make his star known before the election in 2000. They created a political party whose sole purpose was to support Putin. They used the largest television station, NTV, owned by oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, to promote him. Like a phenomenon, Putin swept the election and supporters of the Yeltin government believed that they had their man in office.

Only he wasn’t. He was loyal to Russia more than anything else. He embarked on a program of Russification; making everything “nashe” — a word which roughly means “ours.” Everything was now about Russia. He expelled the oligarchs. One of his first moves was to seize NTV for the state, as he knew that television had created him and it could just as well destroy him.

Russia during the ’90s had made a huge swing to the west during its program of liberalization. Thousands of western economists, entrepreneurs, planners, investors, everyone went there. The markets were flooded with western products. The airwaves were flooded with western pop music. It was all new and very exciting to people. But the oligarchs, many of whom were Jews, beat the infant system and became the de facto rulers of Russia who controlled Yeltsin — and not even in secret. This wasn’t helped by the financial crisis at the end of the decade, which people rightly blamed on the terrible way in which liberalization was approached. Since the economic model was designed by the west, it was then blamed on the west.

It was this entire decade that Putin decided to undo, and that’s why his first attack was the oligarchs (his other one was the communists). Everything for the country after that had to be “nashe.” It had to be Russian. Only Russian products would do. Only the Russian way of doing things mattered. The newly Putin-controlled media espoused this view. Companies run by people opposed to this were nationalized — think Yukos — while those cooperating were given tax cuts.

A youth group with supposedly no ties to the government was created, called Nashe, whose entire aim is to prevent colored revolutions and denounce anti-government oppositionists. It certainly plays up the all-Russia-all-the-time attitude.

You may have also heard about a new political party called Rodina (Motherland), that was barred from running from running in the Moscow city council elections for running a racist advertisement equating Caucasian immigrants to trash. It was actually created in collusion with Putin with an ideology of nationalism and socialism in order to marginalize the communists. The mix turned out to be quite popular, no doubt aided by the same media campaign that originally boosted Putin to power. In fact, it became so popular that it is proving a direct threat to Putin’s power, and its leadership has broken from the Kremlin. Its sole mission now is to win the 2007 Duma elections and challenge the government.

While Putin was trying to undo the ideologies of communism and liberalism, he accidently created an ideology of xenophobic nationalism that is slipping past his grip on power, just as he slipped past the oligarchs. He is being slowly outdone by his own creation.

It is funny then to see Putin denouncing this now that he can no longer control it. He is trying to once again reassert authority over the population. Lucky for him he still has control over the mass media and is still extremely personally popular. But the rise of extreme nationalism will continue and will become a force manifesting in both murder and political force.