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The Russian nationalists defy easy classification. The Russian Patriotic Movement peddles pictures of Czar Nicholas II and newspapers promoting the monarchy as the "only guarantee for liquidating the vices of the communist years of evil." Other groups include the pro-communist United Front of Workers. What unites the monarchists and the neo-Stalinists is opposition to Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms. As literary critic Vladimir Bondarenko puts it, "Russia does not need perestroika. Russia needs a revival."
For such patriots, the greatest threat to the motherland comes from "radical liberals" who are plotting to seize power. The nationalists point fingers at members of the reformist Interregional Group of parliamentary Deputies, such as Moscow populist Boris Yeltsin and historian Yuri Afanasyev, and at staunch glasnost editors like Yegor Yakovlev of the weekly Moscow News. But Enemy No. 1 remains Politburo liberal Alexander Yakovlev. They have never forgiven him for a 1972 article that blasted writers who glorified Russia's peasant past -- a risky political act that earned Yakovlev exile as Ambassador to Canada until he returned to Moscow in 1983.
In a bitter public feud that is a Soviet version of the 19th century dispute between Westernizers and Slavophiles, the new Russian nationalists support the notion of derzhava, a strong state, more than they do individual rights and freedoms. They denounce Western culture, "neocolonial" business concessions and attempts to foist a market economy and multiparty democracy on Russia. "Adopting Western political values and thinking has just led this country to disaster," explains Nash Sovremennik editor Stanislav Kunyayev. "The children and grandchildren of the leftist radicals who put Russia through the meat grinder in pursuit of socialist happiness want to do the same thing in the interests of capitalism."
The ideological porridge of traditional Russian values and Soviet patriotism has gone down well among members of the military establishment, already disgruntled by reductions in the armed forces and the conversion of defense industries to civilian production. The platform issued by a coalition of ten "social-patriotic movements" that backed candidates in last Sunday's elections pointedly denounced efforts to turn the army, police and KGB into a "scapegoat for failures." Uniformed men regularly speak at these rallies, often decrying efforts, as one officer put it, to turn the military "into a prostitute, used for experiments that win applause in the West."
Supporters can also be counted among the 25 million Russians who live in the country's 14 other republics and who complain bitterly that Moscow has not done enough to protect them against ethnic violence and discriminatory new laws. At a patriotic meeting in Leningrad three weeks ago, cries of "Throw out the government!" greeted a man who had been forced to flee the Azerbaijan capital of Baku after he described how he and other Russians were being isolated at special settlements outside Moscow.