The Rising Far Right in Russia

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THE subject matter of Walter Laqueur's pioneering new book, "Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia," is a phenomenon that is less marginal in today's Russia than the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society are in the United States.

The book helps to explain much that is otherwise inexplicable: why, for example, the Russian right has been sending hundreds of volunteers to help its Serbian brothers in their task of "ethnic cleansing" and why the weak government of President Boris Yeltsin has scarcely tried to inhibit them from doing so.

The hard-right groups that Laqueur describes favor authoritarianism, a strong state, collective rather than …