Yesterday, a Moscow court slapped the wrists of ultranationalist leader Alexander Belov with an 18 month suspended sentence for hate speech at a rally of his Movement Against Illegal Immigration.

Belov, whose name fittingly means ‘White’, agitates to cleanse the country of non-Slavs under the slogan of ‘Russia for Russians’ (his movement’s logo, a black cross with a white border on a red background, closely recalls Nazi insignia).

The authorities’ kid glove sentencing of Belov illustrates their nonchalance about surging race crimes. “In 2008, Russian police registered 460 extremist crimes committed by youth groups, but in the first quarter of 2009 alone, 187 have been registered,” according to a state prosecutor quoted yesterday.

Indeed, “around 200 extremist groups with over 10,000 members have been identified in Russia, many of which are involved in race-hate crimes”, he said.

Notwithstanding these harrowing official statistics, however, authorities appear to be much more concerned with dissident political action than violent race crimes.

Compare, for example, the courts’ treatment of the neo-Nazi Alexander Belov with that of opposition political leader Eduard Limonov, the National Bolshevik who along with Kasparov and Kasyanov had headed the liberal ‘Other Russia’ coalition.

Limonov, a radical left wing intellectual and civic activist, has served more than 4 years in prison for protesting Putin’s abuses of power, despite declaring that “in the West [the National Bolsheviks] would occupy a place between Greenpeace and Amnesty International, being a legal party and real political force”.

In January of this year, he was once again detained at a rally protesting the government’s handling of the economy. By contrast, Moscow City Hall ‘has authorized nationalist Russian Marches — where Belov made his incendiary comments — three out of the past four years’.

Even Robert Amsterdam, hardly a supporter of Limonov’s far left populism, noted that “the Natsbols are numerically the largest group of prisoners being persecuted by the authorities with political motives. And although many, including human rights advocates themselves, may have issues with [their] motives…the persecution of this group of people who do not agree with the course of Putin’s regime is taking place precisely with political motives”.

So for all the Kremlin’s concerned talk about race crimes, it is clear that it views the real extremists to be the political opposition, not the skin-heads.