Russian National Socialist Party

Russia
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The Russian National Socialist Party (Russian: Русская Национальная Социалистическая Партия) is a neo-Nazi party based in Russia. The group achieved international notoriety in 2007 when a video appeared on the internet showing members decapitating one non-ethnic Russian and shooting another.

Development

The party grew out of the followers of Konstantin Kasimovsky, a leading member of Pamyat in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He split from the Pamyat-led National Patriotic Front in 1992 and formed his own party, the Russian National Union, the following year. This party re-emerged as the RNSP around 1999 after Kasimovsky closed down the Russian National Union and began to move away from the emphasis placed on the Russian Orthodox Church by that group.[1] Despite this lessening of emphasis on religion the party's website lists Orthodox Christianity as one of its four main ideological principles, the others being a strong state, aggressive Russian nationalism and non-Marxist socialism.[2] The party symbol is the Labarum of Constantine the Great and since 1999 have published a newspaper Pravoye Soprotivleniye ('Right Resistance'), itself a successor to the earlier journal Shturmovik.[2]

Kasimovsky has since claimed to be the leader of a group called Russian Action although its nature, and that of its relationship to the RNSP, remains unclear.[3]

Beheading video

On 15 August 2007 Victor Milkov, a 23-year-old student at Maykop State Technological University in Adygea, an RNSP member, was arrested for distribution on the internet a video entitled Execution of a Tajik and a Dagestani, which depicts the murder of two non-ethnic Russian men by a "militant wing" of the RNSP.[4][5]

It is later identified that the victims were 24-year-old Shamil Odamanov from Russia's mainly Muslim Dagestan region, and 20-year-old Salakhetdin Azizov from Tajikistan.[6][7] The two men can be heard saying "We were arrested by Russian national socialists" before Odamanov is stabbed and beheaded and Azizov is shot in the head by two masked men dressed in combat fatigues.[8]

Initially, Russian Minister of the Interior suggested that the video is a fake,[9] but prosecutors eventually admitted it as authentic.[10][11]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Antisemitism and Xenophobia: Russia 2001
  2. 1 2 Official English language website of the RNSP
  3. ↑ Raphael Walden, Racism and Human Rights, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2004, p. 110
  4. ↑ "Russian held over 'deaths' video". BBC News. 2007-08-15.
  5. ↑ "An Execution Link Led to Its Master". Kommersant. 2007-08-16.
  6. ↑ Family identifies son in Russian beheading video
  7. ↑ Filmed beheadings show Russian neo-Nazis are borrowing tactics from al Qaeda
  8. ↑ Schwirtz, Michael (2008-06-12). "Video Draws Attention to Growing Violence Against Minorities in Russia". The New York Times.
  9. ↑ http://news.excite.it/estero/russia/478599/Russia-video-neonazi-era-un-falso Archived July 22, 2011, at the Wayback Machine.
  10. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20090714230357/http://www.russiatoday.ru/Top_News/2008-06-05/Internet_execution_video_was_real_prosecutors.html. Archived from the original on July 14, 2009. Retrieved July 4, 2009. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  11. ↑ Schwirtz, Michael (2008-06-12). "Video Draws Attention to Growing Violence Against Minorities in Russia". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-05-23.
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