№ 1 - 2006
Sokolov M.M.
The Russian National Unity: Analysis of the Political Style of a Radical-Nationalist Organization

The article offers an original interpretation of style distinctions between three segments of Russian radical-nationalist movement of the 1990s, embodied respectively by the Russian National Unity (RNU), the National-Bolshevist Party, and the skinheads. Regarding political style as a series of demonstrative conversions, of a certain specific kind of resources into political influence and vice versa, the author articulates a hypothesis according to which the style of right-radical organizations was determined by the nature of those kinds of capital that their adherents had possessed. On analyzing from this angle the RNU’s political style, he comes to the conclusion that it harboured rational strategy aimed at converting the ability for violence into political capital and at applying the latter as resource for doing violence. The author accounts for the flowering of this style in the 1990s by relating it to the crisis of the Russian state which found itself unable to realize its monopoly of violence and to successfully integrate specialists in doing it.