National Bolsheviks invade Narva

NARVA - Posters calling on people to join the fringe Russian nationalist movement the National Bolshevik Party, which is unregistered in Estonia, suddenly began appearing on buildings around the country's eastern city of Narva about three weeks ago. It reveals an unnerving escalation in the organization's activities there.

During attempts by the municipality to get rid of the posters as soon as they appeared, unknown activists decorated the wall of a building near the house of the local branch of the Security Police with NBP-related graffiti.

This is the first time the NBP has been so visible in Narva, although another Russia-based ultra-right wing organization, Russian National Unity, has regularly carried out similar activities in Narva.

The NBP promotes Russian unity, together with hostility toward other nations. The party was created on May 1, 1993, under the leadership of Russian anarchist and fiction writer Eduard Limonov.

The NBP is more active in Latvia, where its activists, brandishing a dummy hand grenade, seized the spire of Saint Peter's church last November. The newsletter of the NBP, "Limonka", is also available in Narva.

There is no official NBP representative in Estonia, but Mikhail Yachmovich, a resident of the town of Kohtla-Jarve in northeastern Estonia, considers himself a dissident and is collaborating with the NBP. "We have about 10 active members so far," he said.

Yachimovich, a citizen of Russia, also runs an online newsletter dedicated to matters related to Estonia's internal policy. This newsletter, ironically named "Partizaan", which sounds like a corrupted Estonian word for partisan, was banned at two free Estonian Internet servers, hot.ee and tele2.ee.

Yachimovich himself said that when he called the servers he was told that the official circles in Toompea - the district of Tallinn's Old Town where the Parliament and the government are located - had decided to remove his newsletter because it was deemed offensive. "Partizaan" is currently located at boom.ru, a Russian server.

Hannes Kont, a spokesman for the Security Police, said he felt that this extremist organization lacked sufficient ground for social complaints in Estonia. "We are dealing with a marginal case, and the people who drew swastikas and explicit sentences on war monuments a couple of years ago are not mysterious nationalists but psychologically abnormal teenagers," he said.

At the same time, Kont said he did not accept that if a certain region faced a large number of socio-economic problems, the number of people who followed radical ideas could rise.