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Russia's Nazis launch wave of racist attacks

WEARING camouflage and firing pellets from imitation AK-47 assault rifles, the Russians acting out battle scenes in the woods last week could have been mistaken for weekenders taking part in a game of paintball. But the secret military training exercise 70 miles southeast of Moscow was far more sinister. The three-day gathering was attended by 50 hardline neo-Nazis who worship Adolf Hitler and believe that dark-skinned immigrants living in Russia should be killed. The boot camp, which had taken months to organise, was planned to train them in combat skills and extremist ideology. Those taking part either support or have helped carry out a string of vicious racist attacks that have shocked Russia.

The delegates stayed in tents beneath the red and black swastika-like flag of the Nationalist Socialist Society. They fired mock firearms and trained with knives and clubs. At night, flanked by torches, they gathered around a bonfire exchanging Nazi salutes, chanting slogans celebrating Hitler and making speeches about a super-race made up of ethnic Russians.

We need to kill all dark-skinned immigrants, explained a young man renowned as one of Moscows most radical skinheads who introduced himself as Tesak, Russian slang for hatchet. Weighing 17 stone, shaven-headed and wearing a black bomber jacket, Tesak, 21, an unemployed building engineer, is respected by fellow neo- Nazis for his brutal attacks on non-whites. His hands are covered in deep knife wounds from a recent bloody clash with an armed man from Tajikistan. He walks the streets with a 10in hunting knife strapped to his side and boasts of having beaten immigrants to a pulp. Tesak recently launched his own neo-Nazi website, named in Hitlers honour, on which footage of attacks on immigrants is posted. He claimed his violent message was becoming so popular that he was asked for his autograph on the Moscow metro. We shouldnt just kill adults. We must get rid of their children too, he said. When you squash cockroaches to death, you dont just kill the big ones. You go for the little ones too.

The Soviet Union lost about 20m people in the second world war and in Russia which prides itself as the nation that did most to defeat Hitler the views of young men such as Tesak could be dismissed until recently as an aberration.

This is disingenuous at best ... blacks and others who came to the USSR to study found open racism.

No longer. Fuelled by rampant nationalism, racist attacks have become tragically common. Last month alone saw a record nine racial murders and 24 assaults, including the near-fatal stabbing of a nine-year-old girl. According to Sova, a non-governmental organisation that monitors the crimes, there were 28 racist murders in Russia last year. However, Amnesty International believes the true figure is much higher: the police play down the attacks by recording many of them as mere hooliganism. Last week Amnesty warned that racism in Russian cities was spinning out of control and attacked the Kremlin for failing to act.

President Vladimir Putin, whose elder brother died as an infant in the siege of Leningrad, has condemned racist attacks, but experts say the authorities are failing to crack down. No one wants to admit that the country which defeated fascism could possibly be a breeding ground for fascists, said Galina Kozhevnikova, of Sova.