Dmitry Vasilyev, 58; Russian Nationalist Group’s Leader
Dmitry Vasilyev, 58, leader of the anti-Semitic Russian nationalist organization Pamyat, has died, the group said Thursday. Vasilyev died Wednesday at his dacha in Pereslavl-Zalessky, outside Moscow, after a long battle with a blood disease, said Yevgeny Bykov, his aide.
Pamyat, or Memory, stormed into the limelight with its vitriolic anti-Semitic statements in the late 1980s, amid then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign to allow freedom of expression. It faded into the background about a decade later and appeared to soften its rhetoric.
Vasilyev had led Pamyat since 1985, according to the Interfax news agency. In its early years, the group held frequent rallies whose participants condemned Jews and others they called “alien races.” In the early 1990s, it published the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” -- a forged document that has been used as a pretext for anti-Semitic attacks since it appeared in Russia about a century ago.
In 1999, Vasilyev said he wanted to run for mayor of Moscow and turn the city into the capital of an ethnic Russian state.
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