radical nationalists: true till death?For its part the DPNI set up a broad coalition that included
Aleksei Navalnyi’s group and the remnants of Andrei Saveliev’s
party Great Russia (Velikaia Rossiia), created one year earlier, as
well as Konstantin Krylov’s Russian Public Movement (Russkoe
obshchestvennoe dvizhenie) (ROD), then the national democrats’
most notable initiative. Although the coalition soon withered
away, this highlighted the division of radical nationalists into
those who publically declared their opposition and those who did
not (it is hard to see Russian Image activists as being truly loyal).
The DPNI itself continued to be dogged by internal crisis, due
largely to the transformation of the movement into a more politi-
cised and centralised structure. The movement, for several years
the undisputed leader of the visible part of the nationalist sector,
now went into decline.^7
Methodological approach
The radical nationalist movement combines political activity and
violence, but it is more convenient to explore these two types
of activity separately, since – for the most part – different indi-
viduals take part in them and, accordingly, different dynamics
emerge. It is also important to take into consideration the rela-
tions of the movement as a whole with the authorities, since in
an authoritarian system this parameter is of great significance for
any movement.
Here I identify three measurements – level of political activity,
violence, and relations with the authorities. These are interde-
pendent, so it would be most correct to examine precisely these
interactions across every time period. That approach has already
been tested in SOVA Center for Information and Analysis publi-
cations, however, so here I will explore the dynamics of the three
lines of enquiry in sequence instead, only occasionally referring to
their interaction.
The Ukrainian crisis, escalating into violence since February
2014, has greatly impacted on radical nationalists (Al’perovich
and Yudina 2014b). Therefore I begin by examining these three
lines from 2009 up to early 2014, and then offer a provisional
summary of more recent changes.