The iron fist of hate An insidious new breed of Nazism is sweeping across Russia, uniting violent bovver boys and the establishment. And its cost is written in blood

Tesak tells me he wants white power in Russia. He wants his country to be rid of

''niggers, Jews, the Chinese, Indians, Arabs, people from the Caucasus: any f-er who is not white and not Russian''. Most of all, though, he wants to kill Chechens. On September 9, 1999, his girlfriend was murdered. Natasha, aged 15, died along with another 105 people when a bomb explosion brought down two sections of an apartment block at Guryanova Street in the south of Moscow. Another 900 people were horrifically injured, including 260 children, in an atrocity perpetrated by Chechen rebels. ''I watched the news on television,'' he says. ''As soon as I heard Natasha was dead I got hold of the biggest f-ing knife I could and went looking for Chechens.''

That was when Tesak first encountered other neo-Nazi skinheads: ''They wanted to get revenge as well, so that's where it all started for me.'' Now Tesak, with his shaved head and the build of a prizefighter, is a key part of Russian Goal, dealing in propaganda as well as violence for this banned organisation. It has taken five days of negotiations to get him to agree to meet me in Moscow. Any foreigner is viewed with suspicion.

When he does appear outside an underground station, wearing a bomber jacket, jeans and boots, he is abrupt and unsmiling. He says he wants somewhere quiet to talk - and quickly, since he hasn't much time - so we find a cafe close by. ''We have members in jail,'' he says. ''I was taken in by the police to be interrogated and tortured last year. They beat me, put a plastic bag over my head and gave me electric shocks on my hands.''

He is only slightly less candid when asked if he has ever killed anyone. ''All I will say is probably - when you jump on someone's head and hear their skull crack.'' His manner is unnerving, his face inscrutable: dead eyes like a great white shark. He says he is at war. Inspired by the example of al Qaeda, Russian neo-Nazis say they are organising themselves into a network of autonomous terror cells and that the time of their jihad has come.

Tesak is part of a new wave of nationalism sweeping through Russian society. As democratic reforms have stuttered and living standards fallen dramatically since the collapse of the USSR and the end of communism in 1991, Russia's latent xenophobia has developed into a more radical, sinister form. More and more young people like Tesak are coming under the sway of neo-Nazi ideology as a response to terrorism and immigration from the former Soviet republics.

Human rights organisations such as Amnesty International are becoming increasingly alarmed at the escalating violence across Russia and the number of racially motivated murders. On my second day in Moscow I witness for myself the aftermath of a firebomb attack on a cafe run by Azeris, Tajiks and Armenians in Ostankinsky Park in the north of city. The situation has been exacerbated this year by Chechen terrorist attacks that have killed hundreds of people across the country - in the space of less than two weeks in August two passenger planes were brought down over southern Russia and a suicide bomber killed 40 people in the Moscow underground. This was followed by the horrific events at Beslan that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of children, murdered after they were taken hostage at a school. Human rights organisations say fascist groups are feeding off these events and are manipulating

and exploiting people's fears to promote neo-Nazi dogma.

According to a report in June from the Russian Academy of Sciences, which has a department studying xenophobia and extremism, there are at least 30,000 ultra-right skinheads in Russia. If less active supporters of their cause are included, it is estimated there could be as many as 300,000 such racists. Emil Pain, author of the report, said: ''If in the 1990s there were only a few individuals who could be characterised as skinheads, by the beginning of the 2000s there were tens of thousands. Such a growth rate is unprecedented in world history.''

The Moscow-based newspaper Izvestia says neo-Nazis have violently assaulted at least 15,000 people over the past seven years, and the Moscow Bureau of Human Rights estimates that up to 30 victims a year die from such assaults, which are increasing at an annual rate of 30 per cent.

Recently there has been a catalogue of chilling murders. On February 9 this year Khursheda Sultanova, a nine-year-old Tajik girl, was knifed to death in front of her father and young cousin after an evening of sledging in a St Petersburg park. In another grotesquely violent incident on September 13, 2002, a group of about 25 people murdered Mamed Mamedov, a 53-year-old Azeri fruit-seller and father of eight, by beating and stabbing him to death at his stall in the Primorsky district of Russia. Armed with metal bars, the group set upon Mamedov about 8.30pm and beat him for about two minutes until they were sure he was dead. They even filmed the murder. Police seized the videotape within days of the killing, and it was used as evidence in court.

Three skinheads were convicted of murdering Mamedov in March this year, but critics say the sentences they were given showed the reluctance of the Russian state to seriously tackle racially-motivated crime. Alexei Lykin, 18, was released on the grounds that he had already served enough time in detention (18 months), while his fellow assailants Maxim Firsov and Vyacheslav Prokofiyev, both 17, were sentenced to four and seven years in prison respectively.

In June came the clearest warning yet that Russian neo-Nazis were willing take up arms. The assassination of Nikolai Girenko, a 64-year-old academic and leading expert on Russia's neo-Nazis, took the situation to a more disturbing level than ever before. As the founder of the Group for the Rights of Ethnic Minorities, Girenko had been a key adviser in 15 Russian ethnic-hate-crime trials, including a case involving six members of the St Petersburg-based fascist group Schultz88. He was shot on his doorstep as he was preparing for a trial involving six members of the neo-Nazi group Russian National Unity, charged with inciting racial hatred.

Police and colleagues say Girenko was silenced, and for many observers his death marked a turning point, proof that the neo-Nazis were becoming stronger and more arrogant. The situation is spiralling out of control, says Amnesty International; for his part, Tesak openly warns that there will be bloodshed on a massive scale in Russia. ''We have access to weapons and there will be war in Russia, as happened in Kosovo and Yugoslavia. It will happen soon.''

Violence and intimidation are an everyday occurrence for Samuel Tay. Simply because he is black and lives in Moscow, he lives in daily fear of his life. The 22-year-old Ghanaian works in a soup kitchen run by a Christian church in the south-west of Moscow, near the state university and close to the Swedish embassy. He helps feed the area's poor, its destitute, its invalids and its war veterans; those bereft of any adequate welfare aid from a Russian state that continues to fail people who cannot fend for themselves.

We meet in a basement below the kitchen, the pungent smell of boiled cabbage pervading the dank autumnal air and snaking its way unappetisingly downstairs. Barely out of his teens, Tay has an engaging, hopeful face when he smiles. Otherwise there is an air of world-weariness and dejection about him, as you might expect from an old man who has witnessed too much.

In July, when he had barely been in Russia for a week, he was robbed of all his belongings in St Petersburg. ''I rather naively trusted someone at the railway station,'' he says. Without documents and money he spent three days in a police cell before a sympathetic officer gave him his fare to Moscow.

On arrival in the capital, Tay decided to go by underground train to the Ghanaian embassy in order to get new papers. A group of skinheads boarded at a station along the way. ''There were about ten of them,'' Tay says, his eyes widening. ''Then they saw me.'' The men surrounded him and began spitting at his face, shouting obscenities. Tay did not understand anything they yelled apart from ''Russia, Russia!'' Then they took turns to slap him. He thought at first they were just roughing him up. Then a punch. A kick. Fists and feet aimed at his head. One man swung from the overhead handrail backwards and forwards for extra momentum as he battered Tay's head against the shatterproof glass with his boots. The assault seemed to go on and on.

''I didn't understand what they were saying,'' says Tay. ''I was covered in blood. I think I passed out.'' The tube was full when the assault took place, but nobody intervened. Perhaps they were scared, I suggest. ''Perhaps,'' Tay replies, lowering his eyes.

In light of the number of murders in Russia, he counts himself lucky. The assault left him battered and bruised, but nothing was broken; he knows it could have been a lot worse. When Tay eventually reached the Ghanaian embassy he was simply told: ''That's what to expect in Moscow. The ambassador himself was beaten recently in Victory Park.''

Africans are assaulted so regularly now that a Russian website, www.africana.ru, keeps a running log. In St Petersburg last month there were street demonstrations by black students demanding greater protection from the authorities following the murder of a young Vietnamese man. In the basement below the soup kitchen we hear other Africans - students and volunteers - tell of similar experiences. Rony Kumy, 33, a Ghanaian, lost his teeth last October after being assaulted by four men in an unprovoked attack; Kifle Sulomon, 36, from Ethiopia, has been assaulted four times since he came to Moscow in 1995; Sylvester Anene, 35, from Nigeria, was beaten badly on the metro a year and a half ago with three friends, and attacked twice going to church recently. All 16 of the people we speak to have been assaulted at some point. Their fear is all too palpable.

Pastor John Calhoun of the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy, who has run the soup kitchen for three years, says the situation is deteriorating week by week and that black people live in constant terror of their lives. There is little protection from the police or the state, he adds. How do they cope? ''We just have to pray to God,'' he says.

Boris Miranov has already had a stint in government. He worked in the Ministers' Council of the USSR as director of its publishing office before becoming minister for press under the enigmatic Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first president after the fall of the Soviet empire. He was sacked for his ultra-right political views in 1994.

Today Miranov remains immersed in political activity. Besides being a writer, he is the chairman of the Slavic Union of Journalists, representing 100 newspapers across Russia. Undoubtedly he is still a powerful and influential actor in the sphere of Russian politics. Sitting in the White Piano cafe in east Moscow, dressed smartly in a black shirt and matching trousers and with a blond crew-cut, this articulate 53-year-old father-of-three is blunt with his political views. Just ask him about Adolf Hitler and the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis. ''The Holocaust was a fairy tale, a myth,'' he says matter-of-factly. ''When Hitler set about his Final Solution it was not about eliminating Jews but about moving them to the island of Madagascar. There is plenty of scientific proof that shows the Holocaust was completely exaggerated. The Jews are very clever and have made big business from this.''

The Jews are Miranov's enemies. They are not Russian, he says. They are the root of all the nation's problems, controlling disproportionate power within business and government. Until they are removed from such positions, he tells me, Russia will never regain its economic and military prowess.

How would he remove Jews from Russia? ''Only by force, of course - and it will happen,'' he replies acidly. His political ideology stems from the simple principle that each nation should be ruled by its own people - the French rule France, the Germans rule Germany and Russia is ruled by Russians.

''The Scots wanted to be ruled by Scots,'' he says. ''Look at the film Braveheart, which is a very popular film in Russia. The Scots tried to drive the English out, and that is what we must do with the Jews. And the will in Russia is now there.'' As he speaks, Miranov smacks his fist into his hand.

Citing the recent upsurge in nationalism across Russia, he explains that before the end of communism Russians were afraid to talk of a Russian motherland, but that ''citizenship'' is a concept that is now widely accepted and promoted. As the chairman of the Slavic journalists' union, purveying fascist propaganda is Miranov's political raison d'etre - and it is a role he relishes.

At present Miranov is facing three criminal charges for producing literature liable to incite racial hatred, but remains dogmatic. He hands me a book he has published. It has a picture on the cover of a fearful-looking young Russian woman in a headscarf, holding a baby and cowering from a dagger with the Star of David inscribed on it. Like Tesak, Miranov predicts that there will be an armed uprising by white Russians, and that it will happen sooner rather than later. ''They will not silence us and the movement is growing,'' Miranov says. ''There will be another revolution in Russia.''

Sergey Belikov, a 28-year-old academic who has put his life at risk to infiltrate neo-Nazi organisations, has a deep understanding of how the nascent fascist movement operates at street level and in the political arena. Currently writing his third book on the subject, he explains that the neo-Nazi political elite from the largest groups - such as United Brigade 88, Blood and Honour, Hammerskins and Russian Goal - have connections to the main political parties, and are working within them to promote the cause of Russian ''nationalism'' in an attempt to drag the parties further to the right.

He cites Rodina as an example - it took about ten per cent of the vote at last year's election and has 37 seats in the Duma. ''It has three wings, one of which is called the People's Wheel,'' says Belikov. ''Its leader, Sergei Babourin, is good friends with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French fascist. I know of many fascists within it.''

Babourin is not the only high-profile politician in Russia infamous for holding ultra-right views. Others include Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the notorious Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, a stridently anti-Western, anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalist organisation that polled 11.6 per cent at the last election and won 38 seats. Many newer, younger organisations are also springing up across Russia with a view to espousing the nationalist cause.

Mikhail Ochkin, a 21-year-old economics student from Moscow, is a leader of the youth movement of an organisation calling itself the Supreme Russian Patriotic Motherland. Despite insisting that he advocates peaceful means to gain political power, Ochkin has views that are entrenched in far-right ideology. ''In Germany it is stated in law that there were less than six million Jews killed,'' he tells me, citing the American author David Duke - a former Klansman, and a consummate racist and anti-Semite - who wrote My Awakening, a minor-league Mein Kampf. Ochkin claims that the far right has even infiltrated United Russia, the nation's largest political party, which supports President Vladimir Putin. He adds that there are strong relationships with fascist groups elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Germany.

It is also widely claimed that many soldiers who return from Chechyna, a breeding ground for fascist sentiment, end up joining the police. A natural progression, this has led to racism pervading many forces across Russia. I see this for myself when we meet Maxim Tesak again, this time near Red Square in the magnificent Ploshchad Revolutsii underground station, resplendent in black marble from the Urals, Armenia and Georgia.

It is rush hour and a sea of gaunt faces washes out of carriages. I spot Tesak standing with two other skinheads, speaking to a policeman. My translator approaches warily. They start walking towards us; then Tesak suddenly lurches forward, smashing his shoulder into the face of a young Chinese man. People stare and the man runs, while Tesak, and his friends Andre and Elia, laugh. The policeman smiles before taking off his cap. He is a skinhead too. n

The Herald would like to thank Irene

Sheludkova for her assistance with this article.

Days of fear and nights of murder

This year alone in Russia there has been a catalogue of killings linked to race-hatred.

February 2004 Khursheda Sultanova, a nine-year-old Tajik girl, is knifed to death in St Petersburg after returning from an evening sledging with her father and cousin. Just as the three of them turn into the darkened courtyard of their apartment block, they are attacked from behind. The dozen or so young men who kill the young girl stab her 11 times. They are reported to scream: ''Russia for Russians!'' as they strike.

March Abdul

Wase Abdul Karim, a

28-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan, is brutally beaten to death by skinheads near the Chertanovskaia metro station in the south of Moscow. He never regains consciousness after the attack and dies six days later.

April Another Afghan dies in Volgograd after a mob rampages through a market, attacking traders from central Asia.

May Human-rights groups report that a neo-Nazi gang has beaten a Pakistani student to death in Ulyanovsk.

June A group of neo-Nazis kill an Azeri passer-by in Saratov, and the son of a Libyan diplomat is knifed to death.

September A man dies after skinheads armed with chains and baseball bats attack three ethnic cafes in Yekaterinburg, burning one down. Three youths from the central Russian city of Voronezh are sentenced to 17, ten and nine years in prison respectively for stabbing a student from Guinea-Bissau to death. A few days later a Kenyan is attacked by a group of high-school students in the same vicinity.

October The body of Vu Ang Tuan, a 20-year-old Vietnamese student, is found near the dormitory of a medical institute with multiple stab wounds, prompting fellow students to hold a demo in protest.