[Mb-civic] Kremlin Not Amused By Life of This Party - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

<>Kremlin Not Amused By Life of This Party
Political Antics Put Members on Trial

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 16, 2005; Page A08

MOSCOW -- The 39 defendants sat in cages lined up against the wall of a 
Moscow courtroom one day this month. The prisoners, most of them 
students in their teens and early twenties, were members of the National 
Bolshevik Party, a radical opposition group with a penchant for tossing 
eggs at officials, gate-crashing government buildings and generally 
thumbing their noses at authority.

They are accused of creating a "mass disturbance" in December after they 
burst into a reception room at the public offices of President Vladimir 
Putin outside the Kremlin and waved a banner out the window that read, 
"Putin Quit Your Job!"

But the prosecution of the political activists is part of a wider 
government crackdown on the National Bolsheviks, a party with 
ultranationalist roots that claims to have fashioned itself into a force 
for democratic change and economic justice, including redistribution of 
wealth.

The National Bolsheviks, whose name harkens back to the revolutionaries 
led by Vladimir I. Lenin who founded the Soviet Union, were banned in 
June by a Moscow court. Party lawyers said that was the first time a 
political party had been outlawed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet 
Union in 1991. The court held that the National Bolsheviks were intent 
on "a forceful change of the foundations of the constitutional regime."

The Russian Supreme Court was scheduled to rule on the party's appeal of 
that decision on Tuesday. "We are the most courageous party, we are the 
most uncontrolled," said the group's leader, Eduard Limonov, 62, an 
iconoclastic Russian writer who twirls his gray, Dali-esque moustache as 
he speaks. "We want to create a climate of political freedom and so we 
are very irritating to the Kremlin. We make the government crazy."

Occasionally, they even infuriate the lawyers trying to keep them out of 
prison.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/15/AR2005081501434.html?nav=hcmodule

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