Russian Liberals Growing Uneasy With Alliances with Nationalists

About two and a half hours into a recent strategy session of Russia’s new protest movement, someone raised the question that could tear apart the crazy-quilt alliance opposing Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s power.

“I’d like to ask on what basis extreme nationalists and ultra-right-wing groups are allowed to participate in this civic movement,” said Aleksandr Bikbov, a mop-haired and bespectacled sociologist. “Especially,” he added, “if they shout antidemocratic slogans like ‘Russia for ethnic Russians’ from the stage.”

For more than two decades, Russian liberals have been warning of the dangers posed by nationalism, often portraying it as a greater threat to freedom and stability in this multiethnic country than the soft authoritarianism of Mr. Putin, Russia’s once and probably future president. In recent years, the nationalist movement has become large and increasingly malignant, responsible for a pattern of racist violence against non-Slavs that includes kidnapping, torture and murder. Nationalists have taken responsibility for several beheadings.

But in the effort to drive out Mr. Putin, the opposition, driven by liberal and middle-class Russians, has nonetheless reached out to nationalists, seeing them as a vital bulwark at a critical moment.

How much influence nationalists will come to exert on the new protest movement is unclear. In their balaclavas and combat boots, they were clearly the black sheep at two huge anti-Kremlin protests in December, where their vocal denunciations of immigrants and calls for ethnic purity were often drowned out by chants of “Fascism will not pass!”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/world/europe/russian-liberals-weigh-alliance-with-nationalists.html

Since the liberal presidential candidate was just disqualified by the government from running in the election, Russian liberals are kind of stuck.