Russia nationalist rides anti-West wave

MOSCOW -- The strapping nationalist lawmaker strode past the television crew camped in front of his office. Not long ago, Dmitri Rogozin would have gladly sought out a chance for some airtime. But not anymore -- not after his Motherland bloc rode a wave of Russian patriotism and disenchantment with Western-style reforms to an impressive showing in last week's parliamentary vote. Now the cameras chase after him.

"Mr. Rogozin!" a reporter called out. "What would you change about the Russian constitution?"

Rogozin paused briefly, his massive hand already opening the door to his spacious office, and then tossed off a booming reply without turning his head: "Everything!"

This is a heady moment for Rogozin, 40, a veteran legislator who had never been able to rally national support for his vision of Russia as a great power. Three months ago, aides say, he had to ask President Vladimir V. Putin for permission to form a political party to contest the vote for the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament. Putin agreed when his aides saw in Motherland an opportunity to steal votes from the Kremlin's traditional opponents, Russia's Communist Party.

The plan worked too well for the Kremlin strategists, who did not foresee Motherland becoming an independent political force. Motherland's populist slogans -- "We will reclaim Russia for ourselves" and "We will return the country's wealth to the people" -- appealed to millions of Russians who see everything pro-Western, proliberal, prodemocracy, and probusiness as the cause of their problems over the past decade.

"It's time to look at the West with a great indifference," Rogozin wrote in a manifesto that appeared in August. "The West is not our teacher, and we are not its students.

"Russia has three allies -- its army, its navy, and its strategic rocket forces."

Motherland won 9.1 percent of the vote, good for fourth place in an election dominated by the pro-Putin party, United Russia, which won 37 percent. Motherland appealed to Russians turned off by the xenophobic rhetoric of extreme right-wing leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose party placed third with 11.6 percent of the vote.

Motherland might have done even better if the Kremlin had not barred its candidates from appearing on state-run television for the last two weeks of the campaign. The ban was instituted when the Kremlin realized it had created a monster: Rogozin, a talented public speaker, trounced other parties in a televised debate in late November, according to an on-air survey.

"They showed us on TV until they realized we were doing well," Rogozin said in an interview. "In honest elections we would have won 15-16 percent. We will win the next elections."

Rogozin qualifies his fiery rhetoric with assurances that he supports Putin, whom he calls "Russia's number one patriot," and wants to serve in his Cabinet.

Analysts say Rogozin would not dare contradict the Kremlin line as long as Putin maintains his 80 percent approval rating. Russians like Putin for bringing stability to the country, even though they are tired of reforms. That paradox means that Putin can continue his pro-Western foreign and economic policies despite the success of nationalist parties with antibusiness platforms.

"The policies of these people are not what Putin has been trying to do," Michael McFaul, a Russia specialist at Stanford University, said of the nationalists. "They are much more anti-American or anti-Western than Putin. But they are pro-Putin at the same time."

Meanwhile, McFaul and other analysts say, there is no danger that Rogozin and Zhirinovsky, who are longtime antagonists, will join forces to create a larger right-wing bloc. In what is widely referred to as Putin's "managed democracy," Zhirinovsky's party always votes with the Kremlin. Still, Motherland's entry into the Duma in elections that ousted Russia's two main pro-Western parties has raised concern in Washington about a "shift in direction in the reform process and openness to integration with the West," a senior US diplomat in Moscow said last week.

Motherland's 37 seats in the Duma will go to such hawkish opponents of the West as retired general Valentin Varennikov, a leader of the August 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev and his liberalizing reforms. Another Motherland legislator, Sergei Baburin, brought with him candidates with close ties to Russia's neo-Nazis, who were removed from the bloc only when moderate members threatened to quit.

Motherland's economic guru, Sergei Glazyev, said Monday that Russia must revise the privatization deals of the 1990s that left the country with a several millionaires but millions of poor. He added that the big businesses allowed to survive should pay huge taxes to compensate for their gains over the past decade. His remarks sent shock waves through the business community, already stunned by the October arrest of the country's wealthiest tycoon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. But such rhetoric resonates with voters, who see Khodorkovsky and his pro-Western supporters as the reason for Russia's troubles.

"They are all disgusting," Alexei Obornev, 23, a driver for a Western company in Moscow, said of Russia's liberal leaders. "I voted for Motherland because they are for Russia."

Rogozin, who served as the chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the old parliament, compares his bloc to European social democrats or the left wing of the US Democratic Party. But his actions have raised alarm in the West and in the former Soviet republics. He coauthored a bill to criminalize gay sex, seeking to restore a Soviet-era law that Russia abolished when it joined the Council of Europe in 1996. Rogozin suggested that Russia leave the council when it proposed forming an international tribunal to investigate human rights violations in Chechnya.