The Party thought and is thinking about it. Still a few years back the “Limonka” newspaper declared a “contest on the best Revolution project”. People sent interesting and not very interesting projects. We published the best ones in the paper. For one of them, and exactly, signed by me, if I am not mistaking it was called “Revolution in Crimea” (or “Uprising in Sevastopol”), the paper received a warning from the press committee. So our projects, even in the literary version already provoked the power’s discontent. By 1999 it became clear to the NBP leadership and the regular party members: the functioning of the parry in Russia is not possible anymore. We were convinced in this at every turn. During our meetings and pickets we became surrounded by such a thick police wall from all sides, they even stood behind our backs, like we were prisoners of a concentration camp. Our slogans became censored, police officers forbid to develop, in their opinion, aggressive slogans. Even before we were unlawfully, without our permission, filmed on video cameras by the FSB and the MVD, but the last couples of years the Public Prosecutor office and the Moscow FSB started to open criminal cases about the content of our speeches on meetings, recorded by them on videotape. Once I was proceeded against for the word “revolution”. Simultaneously the mass medias’ behavior changed. More and more dependant from the power, the mass medias simply stopped to appear on NBP actions or appeared but the material was not shown and not published. Therefore we started to think, should we conduct actions, anyway society will not learn about them. We’re not going to work for half a hundred of passers by, are we? Reportages in the mass media were needed to us as a means of communication with the masses, with the country, as a means of propaganda. But the power usurped itself the television and the press, since Kremlin’s little tables, little couchettes and cushions and Kasyanov’s and Putin’s suits are forced on us everyday. They force us to watch every lowering and rising of the president’s ass! It became clear to us that our political existence is censured by the mass media (among these the supposedly “oppositional” NTV impudently censured us) and the power.
Under the pretext of the fight with terrorism they censured the largest youth party in Russia.
The Party decided that it makes sense to bring the political activity on the RF territory to the level of human rights activity. But instead to transfer the burden center of our political struggle on the defense of the Russian speaking population in CIS countries. Besides that nobody did this kind of struggle, not a single political organization. All the struggle was reduced to the demagogic declarations of some deputies of the State Duma or the Federal Assembly and the rare and weak declarations of the MID [Ministry of Foreign Affairs]. The 24 August 1999 our guys – fifteen national-Bolsheviks infiltrated the tower of the Marine club in Sevastopol, barricaded themselves there, hung out NBP flags and the slogan “Sevastopol is a Russian city!” and started to scatter leaflets with the heading “Kuchma, you will choke on Sevastopol!” from the towers’ balcony. The tower was stormed, the nazbols arrested and subsequently spent six months in the Sevastopol and Simferopol prisons. Afterwards, under public pressure, Ukraine authorities handed the guys in Russia, where they were released on liberty. Back then, at the end of January 2000, such a thing was still possible. The Restoration did not yet triumphed completely, didn’t consolidate itself completely. Russia’s special services didn’t yet intervene in our struggle on the territory of CIS countries, or perhaps simply overlooked our activity.
In February, March, April 2000 NBP members and sympathizers conducted a row of spontaneous actions against the embassies of Latvia, Kazakhstan, Poland, Switzerland in Moscow and against Latvia embassies in Saint Petersburg and Pskov. The actions, in their essence, were about human rights. In the case of Poland it was a response to the outrage over the Russian flag in Poznan. In the case of Kazakhstan – the sentence to the “Kazimirchuk groups” made public recently – up to 18 years of incarceration in two cases, 14 years, 11 years to many other participants. But also for the human rights actions against the embassies, criminal cases were opened against the natzbols, although it’s only bottles with paint that were thrown at the embassies’ buildings. It became clearer and clearer that the Restoration is already equal to the reaction. Soon it was discovered that the Restoration does not tolerate concurrence. Notwithstanding the fact that the NBP still back in 1994-1995 put forward and formulated national-patriotic slogans and orientations of its politics, part of which are today successfully used by Putin personally and his restored power, not only they don’t want to acknowledge in us the predecessors, the prophets, the avant-garde! They are persecuting us. From August 1998 NBP started to lead a struggle for the liberation from the Latvian prison of the just recently arrested then Vasili Kononov, a 76 years old red partisan, a demolisher accused of a “military crime”, in the shooting of a polizei detachment in 1944. The NBP developed “Kononov’s case” practically alone, we came out on innumerable demonstrations in his defense, painted the trains who were coming to Latvia with the inscriptions “Free Vasili Kononov!”, bombarded several times the embassy and the consulate of Latvia with paint bottles. It was us who the first in 1998 called for the boycott of Latvian products, escorted by a TV-6 camera went around shops and appealed for a boycott. A month later, Moscow’s mayor called for a boycott, and having understood from where and in which direction the wind blows, some regional heads joined the boycott.
Finally, at the time of Kononov’s trial, by the beginning of 2000, the president himself was forced to notice Kononov’s case and by an edict made Kononov citizen of Russia. The Latvians got scared, since they saw that Kononov’s case has become the symbol of the fight for the rights of the Russians in Latvia and released Kononov from jail. But in Latvia prisons, other old men, partisans and chekists remained: Farbtukh, Savenko, the former chekist Vasili Kirsanov staid there forever, died. Meanwhile they were getting ready to try Russian heroes, participants of the VOV [Great Patriotic War] in Lithuania and Estonia. Again they brought a suit to Kononov, though they left him in liberty. Farbtukh, an 85 years old handicapped, was brought to prison on stretchers. Latvia ignored Russia’s protests. We had to smack them.
It seemed, gentlemen from the government, let’s work on this front together! It is clear for us that you are a restorative, temporary power, but let’s together get the Russians out of prisons of CIS countries and fight for the rights of the Russian speaking people. That, which you can’t do, the status doesn’t allow – stain an embassy with paint, break glass, paint their cities with slogans, scare them a bit, in short, express the anger of the Russian people, we’ll do. To you – the government it is not convenient. And you, the government, pressure them diplomatically, economically. I even met in the beginning of February 2000 with the chief of the FSB administration on the fight with political extremism and terrorism, with the general Vladimir Pronin and offered him our services: “Use us in the CIS countries!” But the restorative power doesn’t suffer concurrence. It doesn’t need the help of the civil society, political parties are annoying to it, following the soviet instinct, it sees enemies in us. During all the summer 2000 the FSB tracked the NBP. (Actually, still a week before the conversation with Pronin they had been in my apartment on Kaloshino Lane in my absence and fixed some kind of long-range instruments for shadowing me. And they set up an external surveillance. I informed then about it the General Prosecution Office, the MVD and… the FSB.) In November 2000 the FSB treacherously warned Latvia’s security police about the fact that a group of national-Bolsheviks went out on the train Saint-Petersburg-Kaliningrad, with the goal of getting out on one of the Latvian stations. FSB’s official version (that got into newspapers), is that the warning was sent through the MID in Latvia’s embassy, they didn’t warned directly, they were still embarrassed to admit last year the direct contacts of the special services. As a result four national-Bolsheviks were arrested and recently received 7 months of jail each. Three national-Bolsheviks still managed to infiltrate Latvia’s territory and captured on November 17 the observatory of the basilica of Saint Peter in Riga. The trial took place in April 2001. The guys were judged on the clause “terrorism”. (Apparently, with a long-range goal.