Back to the Future?(Homeland Party, Russia)

Russian nationalism usually wears a beard and carries a cross. Not these days. The new face of the centuries-old phenomenon is Dmitri Rogozin, the well-educated, well-spoken and well-connected man who drove his brand-new Homeland party to sudden prominence in the Dec. 7 parliamentary elections.

That success--at the expense of Communists and liberals--worries Russia's neighbors, scares the country's ethnic minorities and has gotten the Kremlin to sit up and pay attention. The United States, too, is watching to see if Rogozin's anti-American rhetoric translates into a tougher foreign policy, especially if (as a long shot) he gets the foreign-minister spot in Vladimir Putin's new government after the March presidential election.

Rogozin speaks five languages and heads the Duma's foreign-affairs committee--and is keenly aware of the unease he inspires, especially among East Europeans. Like an earlier generation of German leaders who harped on the plight of their countrymen stranded abroad, Rogozin talks about the nearly 1 million ethnic Russians ostensibly trapped in the new EU members of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, denied their culture, language and proper citizenship. He speaks about the 6 million Chinese who have swarmed into Siberia, threatening Moscow's grip on the vast region. Other Homeland-party members insist that Russia's boundaries aren't limited to its current borders but by a "cultural space" that covers the old Soviet Union.

Some Russian liberals brand Homeland a party of fascists. After its strong showing at the polls, surging from zero to 9 percent of the electorate in three months and grabbing a big chunk of seats in Parliament, they loudly pronounced it a threat to democracy. Rogozin dismisses such talk as the hyperbole of sore losers. Immediately after the vote, he reached out to the West, asking the Italian ambassador to host a lunch at which he reassured representatives from 25 European countries that he was a political moderate, not a hotheaded hatemonger. "If I hadn't appeared, some other person would have," Rogozin explains. "And that person would have said, 'The Jews are to blame for this problem. The Azerbaijanis are to blame for that one. The Americans are to blame for yet another'."

Rogozin's deeds do give pause. Recently he exacerbated a potentially dangerous territorial conflict with Ukraine by taking a group of uniformed Cossacks to a disputed spit of land in the Sea of Azov near the Crimea. Rogozin has also accused America of dirty tricks in Georgia, where a peaceful "Rose Revolution" recently toppled the former Soviet republic's leader, Eduard ...