Russian Extremist Charged Over Recruiting for Serbs

Alarmed by growing activity by right-wing extremists in Russia’s second-largest city, the local prosecutor has filed criminal charges against a leading Nazi for openly recruiting Russian mercenaries to fight on the Serbian side in the Balkans and for publishing anti-Semitic literature.

The action against Yuri Belyayev, 36, a member of St. Petersburg’s city council, is the first by a Russian official against the well-financed recruiting drive, which has sent scores of soldiers of fortune to join Serbian-led ethnic purges of Croats and Muslims in former Yugoslav republics.

Belyayev was accused last week of violating an article of the Russian criminal code that outlaws “stirring up anti-Semitic, racist or ethnic dissension.” On Thursday, fellow deputies at the city council voted to suspend his immunity to prosecution, clearing the way for his arrest and trial.

“Now, of course, it’s difficult to arrest him because he’s in Yugoslavia,” said Vladimir Moroz, assistant to the prosecutor.

Belyayev, a policeman for 12 years, was elected to the city council in 1989. Two years later, as the Soviet Union fell apart, he helped found the National Socialist Party, which takes the name of Adolf Hitler’s movement and idolizes Hitler and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

In interviews, Belyayev has said his party is stockpiling arms and wants to see Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin toppled. He boasted of sending the first mercenary bands to Yugoslavia last fall. Russian television showed him last month training with other men in a military camp said to be in Yugoslavia. The report said 200 men from St. Petersburg were being trained.

“It is quite a smooth-working system,” the Moscow newspaper Izvestia quoted Belyayev as saying. “The thing is that we (Russians) will also have to fight in the near future. That is why we are training units. . . . Everything is done on a professional level. National businessmen are providing us with sufficient sums of money.”

Russian news media have estimated that as many as 900 Russian mercenaries are fighting for the Serbs--fellow Slavs who share the Orthodox Christian faith.

The Russian prosecutor general, Valentin Stepankov, has sent the Supreme Soviet a bill that would outlaw recruiting, training or financing of mercenary fighters. He argued that it is difficult to prosecute such activity under the current criminal code unless a suspect is arrested in illegal possession of arms in Russia.

Stepankov’s effort parallels moves by the Yeltsin government to cooperate with the West in seeking peace in Yugoslavia.

But the arrest warrant for Belyayev appears to be inspired by concern among city officials over the rise of ethnic violence and hate literature in St. Petersburg.

The city that suffered more than a million deaths during Hitler’s 900-day siege during World War II has, ironically, become Russia’s stronghold of the Nazi movement, with several hundred hard-core members.

The Nazi appeal here has grown with Russia’s post-Communist economic hardships and the influx of dark-skinned refugees from ethnic warfare in other parts of the former Soviet Union.

Nazis have targeted people from Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, many of whom sell fruit and vegetables in St. Petersburg’s markets. According to Nazi literature, Azerbaijanis control everything from the mayor’s office to the ruble-dollar exchange rate to the price of tomatoes. Belyayev charges that they are behind “one-third of the murders, rapes and robberies in St. Petersburg.”

One person was killed and 17 others, mostly from Azerbaijan, were injured last October when young Nazis in sweat suits and black jackets stormed a St. Petersburg market with pistols, lead pipes and walkie-talkies.

City officials have cracked down on the movement by using the law against stirring up anti-Semitic and ethnic dissension as a justification for banning Nazi literature.

Alexei Andreyev, editor of the movement’s newspaper, was arrested in September in a Moscow apartment that police said contained arms, a portrait of Hitler and copies of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

The St. Petersburg prosecutor has compiled a list of 15 forbidden books, including “Mein Kampf,” Joseph Goebbels’ “Theory and Practice of Bolshevism” and Richard Wagner’s “Judaism in Music,” and has instructed police to arrest street vendors selling them.