the new russian nationalismopposition fervour. As far as can be judged, at the close of this
period of active protest, radical nationalist political organisations
have not managed to strengthen their support base, whether in
terms of new protest participants or in terms of radical nationalist
youth. Groups that opposed the protest movement in every way,
like the Russovet coalition or the Great Russia Party, have also
notably failed to achieve anything in this respect.
As a result, radical nationalists have begun to distance them-
selves from the politics of the united opposition. The summer
2013 Moscow mayoral election campaign saw the opposition’s
greatest political success, with more than a quarter of the vote
going to Navalnyi. This campaign split the radical nationalists:
the Moscow Russkie movement supported Navalnyi (together
with the national democrats), while the main St Petersburg
leaders (Nikolai Bondarik, Dmitrii (Beshenyi) Evtushenko and
Maksim Kalinichenko) shared the opinion of the majority of
radical nationalists: one cannot vote for a ‘liberal’. However, very
few activists spoke out on either side.
Moreover, this distancing of the radical nationalists from the
opposition basically coincided with the beginning of the anti-
migrant campaign. That meant that activist fervour could now be
deployed on ‘home ground’. We have noted the attempts of the
radical nationalists to attach themselves to spontaneous riots, and
the great surge of ‘raid initiatives’ among the most diverse organi-
sations, old and new. Radical nationalists have also conducted a
range of meetings, for instance the ‘Day of Russian Wrath’, held
on 13 April 2013 in ten towns – a record for this kind of new
networked action. From July to September there were many meet-
ings ‘against ethnic criminality’, often in the form of ‘people’s
assemblies’. In other words they were not coordinated. They did
not descend into rioting, but in recent years the very format of
‘assemblies’ would indicate that this is a possibility.
On 13 October the Russkie movement helped local residents
organise a ‘people’s assembly’ in the Biriulevo- Zapadnoe region
of Moscow, which snowballed into the most politically signifi-
cant public disturbance of the year. However, at least equally
significant was the appeal by local radical nationalists to which
local residents and, importantly, militant kindred spirits from the