Word: pamyat
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Dates: during 1989-1989
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...United Worker's Front who oppose a "return to capitalism"; military officials angered by plans to convert defense factories to civilian use; entrenched party apparatchiks who fear the loss of position and privileges; and Russian nationalists who hanker after the Czarist past, many of them aligned with the reactionary Pamyat (Memory) movement. Whatever their ideological differences, the conservatives are united by a concern that the reforms are moving too fast and bringing in alien Western ideas that are pushing the country toward a social breakdown...
...perhaps in conjunction with the KGB. Though many top Soviets -- including Yeltsin -- dismiss this scenario, Central Committee members voiced fears of a coup to Marshall Goldman, a leading American Sovietologist, last summer. The coup menace is exacerbated by the growing strength of Russian ultra-nationalist organizations. Extremist groups like Pamyat have targeted Jews (a paranoid Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory), "intellectuals" and "Russophobes" as scapegoats for national decline. The nationalists are at heart anti-Communist, but their appeal overlaps with a growing blue-collar nostalgia for the despotic simplicities of the Stalinist...
Many of the Russian writers are openly sympathetic to the ugliest manifestation of Soviet neoconservatism. Founded in 1979 as a cultural and historical group attached to the Ministry of Aviation Industry, Pamyat (memory) has grown into a violence-tinged social movement that blends ardent nationalism with virulent anti-Semitism. To Pamyat's conspiracy theorists, an evil alliance of Zionists and Freemasons is responsible for most of the world's woes; Jews who were at the heart of the Bolshevik Revolution are blamed for the failures of Communism...
...Russian," says Dmitri Vasiliev, the group's principal theoretician. "It was organized by Jews." Vasiliev is mildly contemptuous of Gorbachev ("He has no clear thoughts and no perseverance") and calls Lenin a "merciless Bolshevik." At the movement's noisy rallies, hecklers are often attacked by Pamyat toughs who are the Soviet version of skinheads. Soviet Jews are concerned that Pamyat's modest membership of several thousand is an inadequate index of its power. Says Boris Kelman, a Leningrad refusenik: "Pamyat is not only protected but controlled by people at a high level in the party. It gets support from...
...gathering called two weeks ago to nominate Vitali Korotich, editor of the pro-glasnost weekly Ogonyok, the candidate's backers fell into a fistfight with members of the ultra-right nationalist group Pamyat. Arriving at the rescheduled meeting last week, supporters of the Ogonyok editor found that militiamen had sealed the hall. Fearing that right-wingers were trying to exclude them from the meeting, Korotich supporters broke down a fence and stormed the building...