Two of the early direct actions organized by the young members of the NBP that combined self-martyrdom and totalitarian styob.
Post-Soviet
1998
During the 1990s, young members of Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party reclaimed totalitarian symbols and ideas, in part ironically and in part very seriously, as a form of protest against Yeltsin’s radical economic reforms. As far as the natsboly’s “direct actions” and their media coverage go, this paradoxical political style translated into two opposite trends. On the one hand, the NBP aggressive rhetoric was used as an additional proof that a “red-brown” (i.e., “fascist-communist”) threat to democracy existed, an argument which, in its turn, was frequently used to dismiss any form of dissent. On the other, the NBP direct actions soon acquired a component of heroism and martyrdom—in the sense that the natsboly publicly made themselves victims of political violence, and that their actions were most effective when this was the case. A good example of this is the coverage—included here—of two famous early actions organized by the natsboly. The first was the “attack” on the main architect of the shock therapy, Egor Gaidar, in January 1999. In the middle of Gaidar’s speech at his party’s yearly convention, in the exact moment in which he talked about the “real threat” to democracy coming from the national-communist alliance, a group of natsboly in the audience stood up and, while pointing their fists up, started yelling the slogan “This is how we will implement our reforms: Stalin! Beria! Gulag!”—until the security intervened and a struggle ensued. In the coverage of the incident by the main Russian TV channel, at the end of the report the anchorman described what the viewers just saw as “a brilliant confirmation that Gaidar was right,” claiming that any weakening of Yeltsin’s presidential power would result in a “red-Nazi” totalitarian state with widespread political repressions. The second, a few months later, was the action against the film actor and director Nikita Mikhalkov, who was targeted by the natsboly for his support of the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, that they in turn accused of discriminations against the country’s Russian minority. In this case, two NBP activists threw rotten eggs at Mikhalkov, who ran into the audience and proceeded to kick one of them in the head while two security guards held him down. The natsboly involved in the incident ended up spending a few months in prison and the one who was assaulted by Mikhalkov suffered serious injuries—but this time the brutality of the director’s reaction produced great scandal and won the two activists some public sympathy. Both tendencies—the dismissing of any form of political opposition as a red-brown, communist-fascist, “plague,” and the heroic/self-sacrificing style of Russian protests—remained a defining feature of public culture throughout the Putin era. Examples of the former include the delegitimization, in the early 2000s, of the anti-Putin coalition The Other Russia and the Dissenters’ Marches by pro-government media and organization, which frequently described them—and, as a consequence, any independent media and political groups—as the product of an anti-Russian “liberal-fascist” alliance (that was in turn seen as part of a broader “Orange plague” threatening Russia from the West in general, and Ukraine in particular). The “Nazi-communist” or, in its newer incarnation, the “Nazi-liberal” label was used to justify systematic political repressions and was later applied, as part of a sort of anti-political ethos, to the Movement for Fair Elections in 2011-13, Aleksey Navalny, Euromaidan, and, most recently, to Ukraine in its entirety. As far as the heroism and martyrdom go, this became a sort of trademark of the political style of the natsboly, who made themselves protagonists of a “tragic street theater” (to use the words of the poet Kirill Medvedev) by making themselves victims of state violence to prove that Putin’s Russia was indeed a police state—and who later went on to fight as volunteers in Eastern Ukraine as part of a paradoxically similar (from their point of view) “search for authenticity.” And this heroic/self-sacrificing tendency had a larger impact on other prominent forms of artistic protests, from the art collective Voina to Pussy Riot and Petr Pavlensky.
Nazarbayev, Nursultan, Gaidar, Yegor, and Mikhalkov, Nikita
Russia, former Soviet Union, and Kazakhstan
Vremia. Pervyi kanal/ORT. January 30, 1999 [Coverage of the protest staged by the natsboly during Gaidar’s speech at the 7th convention of the political party “Demokraticheskii vybor Rossii” in Moscow.]
Novosti. TV Tsentr. March 10, 1999. [Coverage of the protest staged by the natsboly against film director Nikita Mikhalkov.]