A New Generation Of Far-Rightists Has Emerged In Russia, Attacking Migrants Against The Backdrop Of The Invasion Of Ukraine, Filming Their Attacks On Video And Publishing Them On Telegram. A new generation of far-rightists has emerged in Russia, attacking migrants against the backdrop of the invasion of Ukraine, filming their attacks on video and publishing them on Telegram. Gennady, a participant in the Nazi Video Monitoring Project (NVMP), a project to monitor videos of attacks neo-nazis have published themselves, told Antifascist Europe how Nazi skinheads have returned to Russia, what their attitude to the war in Ukraine is, and how the media influences neo-Nazi content. How did the idea of NVMP come about in the first place? In the summer of 2023, the number of attack videos in far-right channels on the messenger Telegram increased dramatically. Earlier, attack videos were released monthly; now, they publish new videos weekly. It became clear that a new socio-political phenomenon was taking shape, so we came up with the idea of counting these videos so that we could operate with concrete figures that researchers, human rights activists, and journalists could refer to. (…) A recent report by Russia’s oldest monitoring center, Sova, also speaks of the emergence of a new generation of far-right activists, but it stresses that their attitude to the events in Ukraine is unknown. Do you agree with this? If we take the key channels distributing the video, there is a clear pro-Ukrainian stance. On the one hand, they do not accept hatred towards Russians. On the other hand, they support the idea of the brotherhood of all white people and first of all, Slavs. They consider Putin’s regime as the main culprit of discord between them. This protest subculture is formed through the denial of the existing regime and the desire for an eschatological RaHoWa. Despite the war, the Russian far-right is on good terms with the far-right from Belarus and Ukraine. Occasionally, clips from these two states, as well as from the Baltic states and Georgia, appear on Russian channels. Why do far-right activists publish their content on Telegram? The fact that Telegram is a safe platform for the far-right in Russia, Western Europe, and the United States is a long-known fact. This is the principled position of Telegram’s founder, Russian IT entrepreneur Pavel Durov, a well-known libertarian who only bans channels with extremist content under tremendous pressure. The messenger’s rules prohibit the distribution of calls for violence and violent videos in open channels, but this rule does not work in closed groups. Thus, Telegram has become a platform for a far-right environment that is entirely built around the aestheticization of violence. On Telegram, a full-fledged far-right subculture was formed, which functions in the environment of closed channels. It should also be noted that the Russian authorities banned Meta’s social networks, after which Telegram’s audience began to grow, not only as a messenger but as a platform for distributing news and content.
via antifascisteurope: An Emerging Generation of the Russian Far-Right