That success–at the expense of Communists and liberals–worries Russia’s neighbors, scares the country’s ethnic minorities and has gotten the Kremlin to sit up and pay attention. The United States, too, is watching to see if Rogozin’s anti-American rhetoric translates into a tougher foreign policy, especially if (as a long shot) he gets the foreign-minister spot in Vladimir Putin’s new government after the March presidential election.
Rogozin speaks five languages and heads the Duma’s foreign-affairs committee–and is keenly aware of the unease he inspires, especially among East Europeans. Like an earlier generation of German leaders who harped on the plight of their countrymen stranded abroad, Rogozin talks about the nearly 1 million ethnic Russians ostensibly trapped in the new EU members of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, denied their culture, language and proper citizenship. He speaks about the 6 million Chinese who have swarmed into Siberia, threatening Moscow’s grip on the vast region. Other Homeland-party members insist that Russia’s boundaries aren’t limited to its current borders but by a “cultural space” that covers the old Soviet Union.
Some Russian liberals brand Homeland a party of fascists. After its strong showing at the polls, surging from zero to 9 percent of the electorate in three months and grabbing a big chunk of seats in Parliament, they loudly pronounced it a threat to democracy. Rogozin dismisses such talk as the hyperbole of sore losers. Immediately after the vote, he reached out to the West, asking the Italian ambassador to host a lunch at which he reassured representatives from 25 European countries that he was a political moderate, not a hotheaded hatemonger. “If I hadn’t appeared, some other person would have,” Rogozin explains. “And that person would have said, ‘The Jews are to blame for this problem. The Azerbaijanis are to blame for that one. The Americans are to blame for yet another’.”
Rogozin’s deeds do give pause. Recently he exacerbated a potentially dangerous territorial conflict with Ukraine by taking a group of uniformed Cossacks to a disputed spit of land in the Sea of Azov near the Crimea. Rogozin has also accused America of dirty tricks in Georgia, where a peaceful “Rose Revolution” recently toppled the former Soviet republic’s leader, Eduard Shevardnadze. With NATO moving nearer Russia’s borders and the United States reportedly preparing to open bases in Poland, Azerbaijan and Georgia, Rogozin can expect the seven yellow government telephones on his desk in the Duma–two of them connected to the Kremlin–to get a workout, as they did last Tuesday just before a meeting with NEWSWEEK, when the Foreign and Interior ministers called.
Rogozin isn’t the only nationalist elected last week. The misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of ultranationalist bad boy Vladimir Zhirinovsky also made it into the Duma, with 12 percent of the popular vote, twice its 1999 result. As political analyst Alexander Verkhovsky explains, “Only the nationalists had a loudly enunciated platform.” Other smaller parties with nationalist leanings (and names like Russia’s Rebirth or True Patriots of Russia) also won seats. Zhirinovsky, a superb orator with the manners of a playground bully, got into two fistfights during pre-election debates. He and Rogozin despise each other.
Rogozin is a creature of the establishment, who aside from his Duma duties also serves as Putin’s special emissary to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea. The word is that Homeland was created by Kremlin strategists looking to bleed the Communists. Rogozin denies it, adding, as he crosses himself, “I swear.” As Rogozin tells it, he visited Putin at the president’s suburban Moscow residence in July and floated the idea of creating Homeland. Putin was “sympathetic.” Will Homeland toe Putin’s line in the Duma? Yes, if Rogozin has his way, says a party insider. But he is vying for control with fellow party leader Sergei Glazyev, a former Communist who opposes the Kremlin and may harbor presidential ambitions.
Whatever happens, Rogozin’s voice will be heard. He sternly condemns the U.S. occupation of Iraq and wants “cooperative states” on Russia’s borders. “Why do we need NATO?” he asks. “Who are you going to fight? Russia? We don’t want to fight.”
There’s little reason to believe that Homeland’s success will change Russian foreign policy. Instead, human-rights activists worry that Homeland’s rise will be felt on the streets. That’s where skinheads and neofascists among the ethnic Russians who make up 72 percent of the country’s population are looking for scapegoats. Says Yelena Ryabinina, a case worker at a Moscow center that helps victims of racist attacks, Rogozin’s nationalist rhetoric is “like taking a match and throwing it on gasoline.” She, like others, will be watching warily.
