Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 4, 1993 TAG: 9310040088
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HOWARD WITT and JAMES P. GALLAGHER CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Medium
They also are among its craftiest, well-schooled in techniques of organizing revolutionary cells, inciting crowds and fomenting violence.
Among them are diehard communists who never accepted the demise of the Soviet Union, fanatic nationalists who fight to restore the glory of the "Russian Motherland," neo-Nazi storm troopers who wear swastika emblems on their combat uniforms, and disgruntled Russian army officers who dream of recreating the powerful Soviet Army.
Their ranks also include royalists who want to restore the regime of the czars, Russian Orthodox priests who blessed anti-Yeltsin fighters before they rushed into combat, jack-booted Cossacks with long swords and fur hats, and mercenary soldiers who have fought for pay in the many ethnic wars raging on Russia's periphery.
Although divided by radically different ideologies - it was the communists, after all, who executed Russia's last czar - they are united by hate.
If this dangerous amalgam of anti-democratic forces were to succeed in seizing power, Russia could be plunged back into totalitarianism and darkness.
But it seems equally likely that this hate-filled alliance simply would fracture along ideological lines; such marriages of convenience scarcely seem to last.
Communists still hate fascists as a residue of World War II, while Cossacks hate the communists who tried to outlaw them.
And they all despise Russia President Boris Yeltsin for presiding over the dissolution of the Soviet Union and ushering in dramatic economic and political reforms.
They hate Westerners, and particularly Americans, for the support they have given Yeltsin - and the "decadence" they have brought to the ancient Russian nation.
They can't stand Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Chechens and any other nationalities from the former Soviet Union, who are perceived to have built up mafias inside Russia to control business and commerce.
But they reserve their most blood-curdling wrath for Jews, spitting hatred against them with nearly every word they speak.
Jews destroyed the old Soviet Union, so they could steal its resources and dominate its people, they assert. Jews control the Russian economy and run it for their own benefit. Jews own Russia's mass media.
Jews run the Kremlin - and the White House in Washington.
But facts have little to do with the unreasoning, deep-seated prejudices that spew from Yeltsin's opponents, many of them poor, little-educated workers and pensioners who have suffered greatly under the sharp economic transformations of the past two years.
by CNB