Vladimir Kvachkov, a retired Russian special forces colonel charged with the assassination attempt on the liberal Russian tycoon Anatoly Chubais, recently gave an interview to an ultranationalist newspaper. According to the Moscow Times, he argued that "traitors and hirelings of the West have established a 'regime of occupation' in Russia to please the 'world Judaic conspiracy.'"
The political spectrum in Russia is really interesting, and is a lot different than the typical "left-to-right" arrangement that you see in Europe. The Russians have an important slot in their political spectrum occupied by the so-called "red-brown alliance" parties that mix arguments from both the far-right nationalists and the communists. Zhirinovsky fits into this category, as does Zyuganov's Communist Party, which isn't afraid to adopt the remarkably un-Marxist tactic of pandering to Russian nationalism and xenophobia when the need arises. Another red-brown group is the National Bolsheviks (you can get a sense of their ideology from their logo - the old Nazi flag with a hammer and cycle in place of the swastika). Then of course you have some smaller, more pure fascist and communist organizations that are ideologically opposed to one another.
What do all these different extremist groups have in common? Their scapegoats - the Jews, America, and "the West". You will not come across a single problem in Russia that is not ultimately attributed to one of these oppressors. If Kvachkov's rhetoric reminds you of that eminating from much of the Islamic world these days, it's because the grand conspiracy theory alleging secret Jewish domination of the entire world was originally developed in tsarist Russia and was then imported into the Middle East after World War II.
