Word: pamyat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When such personal convictions are projected onto the entire nation, they give rise to a militant patriotism based on a no-fault Russia. This is expressed today in its most virulent form by the neofascist Pamyat movement, which wants to absolve Russians of responsibility for the horrors of the communist era. Pamyat contends that the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was actually conceived and carried out by Freemasons and Jews. The search for scapegoats was a national passion long before Stalin filled the docks at show trials, and the fall of the Soviet Union has sparked another round of finger pointing. This...
Furthest on the fringe is Pamyat, a rabidly nationalist, anti-Semitic group espousing a return to the czarist monarchy and unabashedly proud of its fascist symbolism. Its members blame most of the country's ills on "people of alien ethnic origin," and refuse to ally themselves with any communists. Declares Pamyat president Dmitri Vasiliev: "No democratic, no communist system or any other ism will be able to stop this irresistible drive toward purification and freedom...
These hatreds are harnessed by a variety of movements, many of them grouped under an umbrella organization called Pamyat, which preaches a sacred nationalism looking toward an authoritarian Russia purged of all foreign influences. The leader of one such group, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, though widely regarded as a clown, placed third in a field of seven in the Russian presidential election last June -- and that was before the political disintegration and economic collapse had reached anything like their present stage...
...serious is Yeltsin's conversion to liberal democracy? The hard-to-please Muscovite intelligentsia were deeply skeptical of Yeltsin at first. After all, as Moscow party boss he actually received a boisterous delegation from Pamyat, the openly anti-Semitic Russian ultranationalist organization. But suspicion turned to respect after Yeltsin won election to the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989 by winning 5 million out of the 5.5 million votes cast in Moscow...
...sheen of utopian rhetoric is thin indeed. The very state that has laid claim to erasing religious tensions has, for the last half century, promoted anti-Semitism through vigorous campaigns against "cosmopolitanism," a euphemism for Jewish influence. The ultra-nationalist group Pamyat ("memory") and lesser known groups have recently taken the lead from the government in stirring up such antagonisms...