ABSTRACT
The Soviet media reported on a number of occasions on public disquiet about the exploitation of glasnost and democratization by antidemocratic and anti-Western elements in Soviet society. A meeting between members of "Pamiat," an association describing itself as a historical-patriotic association, and Boris Eltsin, the first secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the cpsu, was apt to further aggravate such feelings. Pamiat and other similar organizations were criticized in the media for their preoccupation with a freemasons' conspiracy. In an article in Sovetskaia kultura, Andrei Cherkizov wrote that members of "a certain association" in Moscow had harassed and assaulted people whom they had accused of being freemasons. The Paris-based emigre newspaper Russkaia mysl claimed that Pamiat was a militant anti-Semitic organization, whose adherents denounced Christianity because of its Jewish origins and advocated a return to the old Russian pagan faith.
