Neo-Nazi Russian beauty queen stripped of title.Olga Kuzkova can been seen performing a Nazi solute in photos uploaded to the popular Russian social media platform VKontakte.
Olga Kuzkova was photographed posing in front of graffiti reading “14/88,” a coded message among white supremacists. (photo credit:VKONTAKTE)
The official beauty Queen of Russian football has been stripped of her title following revelations that she adheres to a neo-Nazi ideology, local media reported.
The political views of Olga Kuzkova, who was recently chosen from among sixteen candidates representing teams in Russia’s Premier League as 2015’s Miss Charming, were discovered after she posted a series of anti-Semitic images on the popular social media platform VKontakte.
In one widely circulated image, Kuzkova can be seen performing a Nazi salute while standing in front of a wall covered in Nazi graffiti.
Other images, translated by the Moscow Times, called for the burning of Jews and promoted racial purity.
The Nordic spirit cannot live in the body of an Untermensch,” one post declared, using the German word for subhuman.
Kuzkova was promptly fired, with league director Sergei Cheban telling Sport Express that the sporting body does “not tolerate manifestations of fascism, nationalism and racism,” the Times reported.
Racism in Russian football has long been acknowledged as a problem, with one officials at FIFA, the sport’s international governing body, recently telling the BBC that he saw it as a “big challenge.”
Fans of Torpedo Moscow landed their team in hot water three months ago when they unfurled a banner containing Germanic runes popular among neo-Nazi groups, prompting condemnations from the Russian Football Union.
Responding to Kuzkova’s ouster, Rabbi Boruch Gorin of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia stated that he was not surprised by her attitudes, stating that while affiliation with national socialist groups was not central to Russian culture by any means, it was still popular among young people in some circles.
Neo-Nazism is a “hobby” of teenagers who eventually grow out of it, he explained.
“I cant say it scares us. These groups are marginal and small and much less Judeophobic than xenophobic in general.”
Late last year another beauty pageant in Russia also sparked Jewish outrage, with neo-Nazis calling for women to submit selfies online in order to be considered for the "Miss Hitler 2014” contest.
Participants were requested to submit Nazi-themed "selfies" to the competition organized by a neo-Nazi group on VKontakte - Russia's largest social networking service - along with a caption describing why they "love and revere the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler," the UK-based Daily Mail reported.
While anti-Semitic violence is very low, especially by western European standards, Russia has come under fire by critics for its use of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in propaganda aimed at discrediting the Ukrainian government.
According to anti-Semitism researcher Irena Cantorovich from Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center, both sides in the Ukrainian conflict have utilized such tactics, triggering “a phenomenon of ‘provocative antisemitism’–antisemitic incidents aiming to discredit the other side.”
While Russia does take steps to combat anti-Semitism, growing government control over the media has not retarded the use of anti-Semitic motifs or the use of “anti-semitic propaganda,” she wrote in a report earlier this year.
There was widespread outrage in the western press earlier this year when far right extremists, including groups accused of neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism, from across Europe congregated in St. Petersburg for a conference.
