Russian Nationalists Lift Banner of Backlash

One party favors increasing corporate taxes by half to pay for social welfare programs and throwing the nation’s wealthiest businessmen in jail. The other wants to ban condoms to keep Russia from being overrun by Asians.

These positions may be extreme, Alexander Bochovsky admits, but so are the times. The 48-year-old army colonel works as a military translator by day and teacher by night to pay the rent on his small apartment. “Have you ever heard of a military officer in the States who has to have two jobs? Working 12 hours a day?” he said.

“If you look at the official statistics, you will see that 40 million people live under the line of poverty,” he said. “Of course, we need reforms badly. We need them now, in the shortest time possible. They must be sharp, deep and effective, and they must bring quick results.”

Bochovsky cast his ballot in Sunday’s parliamentary elections for the Homeland-National Patriotic Union bloc, one of two nationalist parties that made surprisingly strong showings. Homeland and the Liberal Democratic Party together attracted more than 20% of the vote, helping President Vladimir V. Putin lock in a resounding mandate for his second term.

The soft-spoken Bochovsky -- a Communist for most of his life -- doesn’t agree with the positions of the Liberal Democratic Party, which talks about banning condoms and legalizing polygamy. But he is concerned that China’s booming population could be a threat if Russians continue to decline in number. He supported Homeland’s platform, which calls for banning immigration and protecting Russia’s language and “cultural environment.”

He endorses the party’s plan to impose stiff taxes to take the nation’s vast oil wealth out of the hands of a few oligarchs and use it for social programs. “Taxation policy should have more social justice,” he said.

The strong performance of the Liberal Democrats -- who received twice the share of votes they drew in 1999 -- and Homeland, which mixes a milder right-wing nationalist message with left-wing socialism, has prompted deep worries among Russia’s liberal political elite.

Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, a fixture on the political scene since the collapse of communism a dozen years ago who had been largely dismissed in recent years as comic relief, came close to outpolling the Communists. His party took third place with almost 12%, while the Communists received nearly 13%. United Russia, a pro-Putin party, led the voting with 37%.

The results “show that the country has ultimately lost all fear of God ... and has given itself completely to its primordial and base instincts,” said Valeriya Novodvorskaya, leader of the Democratic Union, a small opposition party.

“Now that Zhirinovsky and Homeland have gained a foothold in the parliament, they will start raising the same issues they have been raising during their election campaign,” she added. “The need to imprison all oligarchs, to redivide their money and property, about protecting Russian producers from their Western competitors, about defending the interests of Russian people abroad and waging the war in Chechnya until the very last rebel is dead.”

Demonstrating how deeply the nationalists support Putin, on Monday Zhirinovsky proposed a constitutional amendment to extend the president’s term from four years to seven. “In fact, we’re thinking about abolishing the restrictions on the number of terms that a person can serve,” he said in an interview. The current limit is two.

Putin as president-for-life? “He will get tired, and he will go in 15 or 20 years,” Zhirinovsky said. “Don’t worry.”

He credited “the mistakes of the reformers” for the election results.

“This is why so many factories and plants have ground to a halt, people started to get lower salaries,” he said. “I tell people about the illegal division of the [wealth of the] country, which resulted in a great number of people ending up as refugees and a huge number of foreign traders at marketplaces.... [My party] openly says things that other parties avoid talking about,” he said.

Homeland, which drew 9.1% of the vote, probably appeals more to disenchanted Communists than hard-line nationalists. Independent political analyst Peter Lavelle said he once envisioned Homeland leader Sergei Glazyev as the potential architect of Russia’s first European-style social democratic party, aimed at the large segment of Russians comfortable with free-market capitalism but anxious to preserve the social safety net that communism afforded.

“What Glazyev is intent on creating is nothing less than a new non-Communist opposition for an electorate that has been left politically homeless for more than a decade,” he said earlier this year.

But Lavelle has changed his view. “Glazyev and [party co-founder Dmitry] Rogozin have changed a lot,” he said. Glazyev “in person is a lot more scary than he was in print, saying things like we need to use the legal system to punish the people involved in the privatization of the 1990s.

“I think what everyone’s realized is he’s the Kremlin’s point man to completely dismantle the Communist Party,” Lavelle said Monday.

Indeed, many analysts believe the Kremlin is supporting both parties to siphon votes from the Communists, the only serious opponent the government has faced. With that party in virtual meltdown, Glazyev, a former Communist who still shares many of the party’s economic ideals, has been mentioned as a possible new prime minister or even a presidential candidate.

His views are attractive to many Russians.

“I think Yuri Luzhkov [the mayor of Moscow] put it aptly when he said that we should work in the capitalist way and distribute in the socialist way,” Glazyev said earlier this year.

“In my opinion, we cannot confine ourselves to the European model of social democracy. We need to come to grips with the economy,” he added. “The state must preserve the regulating role in basic industries; it should keep controlling stakes in the power industry, in the railway transport; the state should be absolutely dominant in the exploitation of natural resources.”

Bochovsky agrees with many of these points. He worries Russia is bending too far to meet demands of international trade organizations and arguing too much with Europe when, he said, both face a threat from less developed, more populous nations.

“We must develop a common strategy with the West for dealing with these demographic monsters,” he said. “How can we deal with these people in 150 or 200 years, when they may be 25 billion in number? They inevitably will say, we need your land, or else we will die. We need your technologies, but we don’t have money to pay for them. The monsters will become even stronger and much more dangerous. What will you do then?”

Homeland, he said, “is a party that is dealing with these issues.”

Some liberal analysts worry that the government has succeeded in making the public believe that foreigners, oligarchs and corrupt bureaucrats are responsible for all the nation’s ills.

“In this sense, it is not Zhirinovsky’s party or Homeland that have managed to surprise the world with their high showings,” said Pavel Voshchanov, a political analyst for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper. “It is Russian society itself.”

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Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.