St.
Petersburg’s Russian Imperial Movement has trained foreign saboteurs
Last
May, Attorney General Merrick Garland told a Senate
hearing that “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” posed the
most dangerous domestic threat to the United States.” And to make sure
the lawmakers knew exactly who he was talking about, Garland added:
“Specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race.”
A
month later, the Biden administration unveiled a national strategy to
fight the nation’s white supremacist and nationalist militia groups, requesting
Congress provide the Justice Department more than $100 million to hire more
investigators, intelligence analysts and prosecutors. The administration also
sought more resources for the State Department to investigate ties between
American white supremacist groups and the growing number of neo-Nazi
organizations in Europe and Russia.
But
nearly a year later, the administration’s legal offensive against white
supremacists at home and abroad is moving at a snail’s pace, due to a lack of
staff and a thicket of bureaucratic red tape stemming from privacy and
free-speech concerns, according to Verified, a sobering
investigative podcast produced by the Scripps news organization.
In
a recently released six-part series, Mark Greenblatt,
the Scripps Washington Bureau’s senior national investigative correspondent,
dives deep into an evolving global network of violent white supremacist
groups.
He introduces listeners to the Russian Imperial Movement,
a virulently anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant organization that is actively
working with neo-Nazi groups and individuals around the world in a push for
global white Christian power.
Greenblatt
says that while the group is not sponsored by the Russian state, it has
allegedly recruited and trained Russians to fight on the side of pro-Russian
militias in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The group seeks a purely white
Christian Russia, ruled once again by an authoritarian monarchy, preferably one
headed by a descendant of the Romanovs, who held the throne until their
overthrow and murder during the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.
In 2020, the State Department designated the
Russian Imperial Movement as a foreign terrorist organization, the first and
only time that a white supremacist group has earned the label.
The
designation, which has been most frequently used for Islamist extremists,
requires the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign assets Control to seize
any American property or assets belonging to the group. It also prohibits
Americans from having any financial dealings with the organization and bans its
members from traveling to the United States.
In
one of the podcast’s highlights, Greenblatt interviews Stanislav Vorobyev, the
leader of the Russian Imperial Movement. Vorobyev, a lawyer, military veteran
and devout follower of the Russian Orthodox Church, was labeled an individual
terrorist when the State Department designated his organization as a terrorist
group.
Despite
his terrorist designation, Vorobyev tells Greenblatt his organization is still
in contact with American white supremacists, though he declined to name them,
and is making inroads across Europe and Australia. His goal, he tells
Greenblatt, is to unite white Christian all over the world for what he calls
“the Last
Crusade,” named after the European Christian military expeditions to the Holy
Land during the Middle Ages to drive out the Muslims.
While
such plans sound delusional, Greenblatt notes this comes as Avril Haines, the
director of National Intelligence, takes seriously the influence that such
groups have on American white supremacists. Last year, she warned that the
nation’s white supremacists are the domestic extremists “with the most
persistent and concerning transnational connections” and hence “most likely to
conduct mass-casualty attacks against civilians.”
Terrorism Training Camp
In
his interview with Greenblatt, Vorobyev, speaking through a translator,
confirms the group runs two training camps outside St. Petersburg where, for
just $500, white supremacist militants and neo-Nazis from Russia, Europe and
the United States—in fact, anyone, including would-be Islamist terrorists—can
come for a week-long course to learn rural and urban assault techniques,
tactical weapons, and hand-to-hand combat.
Two Swedish members of the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement
who trained at the camps later went on to bomb several refugee centers in
Sweden in 2017. They were convicted and sent to prison. The State
Department cited their
training in its terrorist designation of Vorobyev and his group.
Greenblatt
also points listeners to an earlier U.S. government counter-terrorism strategy from 2018
that describes what it calls “a broad range of revolutionary nationalist and
separatist movements overseas whose use of violence and intent to destabilize
societies often puts American lives at risk.”
The
document cites the Nordic Resistance Movement, which it describes as “a
prominent transnational, self-described nationalist socialist organization with
anti-Western views that has conducted violent attacks against Muslims, left
wing groups and others.” It adds, “The group has demonstrated against the
United States government actions it perceives are supportive of Israel and has
the potential to extend its targeting to United States interests.”
The
Verified podcast, produced by PBS veteran Sean Powers, edited by former NPR
stalwarts Susanne Reber and Ellen Weiss, and hosted by Pulitzer Prize winner
Natasha Del Toro, adds some of its own reporting about the group, describing
how its podcast, with more
than 200 episodes targeting English-speaking audiences, acts as an effective
global amplifier of white supremacist ideology by spreading its anti-immigrant,
anti-Semitic, and anti-American ideas to its listeners. The Verified team
reports that U.S. intelligence agencies are worried that such ideas threaten to
inspire white supremacist groups and individials in the United States to attack
immigrants and minority targets at home.
The American Connection
The
Verified podcast plays a portion of one of
those episodes featuring Matthew Heimbach, a
prominent American white nationalist and neo-Nazi. He lauds the Swedish group
for “the inspiration you provide that you are on the front lines fighting the
struggle. And we're fighting the same enemy on the same barricades, and it
inspires us.”
In the last episode of
the Verified podcast, Greenblatt asks Hillary Johnson, a senior U.S.
counter-terrorism official, why the Nordic Resistance Movement still hasn’t
been designated a foreign terrorist organization, despite the fact that it was
named in both the 2018 and Biden’s administration’s strategies. At first,
Johnson describes the high legal bar on constitutional protections of free
speech and privacy that the State Department must clear before such a
designation can be made. But she finally tells Greenblatt the biggest
obstacle.
“It's
hard to do designations,” she tells him. “I've got a great designations team. .
. they would love to be able to deploy this tool everywhere,” she says.
But “we just don't have the resources and staff and the information.”
Left
unsaid is the fact that Senate Republicans blocked Garland’s funding request
for Biden’s strategy against domestic extremist violence. They accused
Democrats of politicizing the issue by describing the violent white supremacist
groups that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 last year as coming from the far
right.
But
the Verified podcast provides compelling evidence for Republicans to recognize
the foreign white supremacist extremism that threatens to incite further racist
violence here at home, and to put the country’s security ahead of their concerns
for the party’s political image.
For
Greenblatt, the son of a Holocaust survivor and grandson of a Jewish man who
fled from Russia to the United States at the end of the 19th century to escape
czarist pogroms, his encounters with Vorobyev and neo-Nazis who praise Hilter’s
slaughter of six million Jews, including members of his own family, was a
profoundly disturbing experience.
“People need to be talking
about what's going on in the world of white supremacy,” Greenblatt says. “We
have met someone who is labeled as a terrorist in today's modern day society
who wants to bring about the same kind of society that my great granddad ran
away from.”
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