Fighting party squads in Russia.

Abstract

The aim of the article is to verify the hypothesis about the significant influence of party militias on the formation of the Russian political scene, while assuming that the greater their participation, the more the ruling class in Russia is organized as a totalitarian party-state apparatus.

The newest world’s scientifical literature on party militias is largely focused on the analysis of historical cases (including the history of tsarist Russia at the beginning of the 20th century) and modern examples concerning mainly African and South-American countries. There is a lack of theoretical approaches concerning the role of party militias in the totalitarian party-state apparatus and hard military authoritarianism. The paper about Russian party militias is supposed to fill the gap regarding not only party militias in contemporary Putin’s Russia, but also their place in creating or stabilizing non-democratic political regimes.

The authors analyzed the activity and character of the most important party militias currently operating in Russia. It was also examined what institutions of the state apparatus control individual militias. The following militias were analyzed: SERB (Russian liberation movement) – South-East radical block, NOD (National liberation movement), Anti-Maidan, Sorok sorokov (equivalent to a “large number”), Russia Officers (All-Russian civic organisation «Russia Officers») and Neo-Kazachestvo (New-Cossacks).

A careful analysis of the most important organizations fighting with opposition activities and intimidating oppositionists proves that this hypothesis should be in great part falsified. Diverse organizations that also function as party militias are few, not subordinated to one institution and, in addition, their effectiveness is not too high.