Russia’s top human rights official and activists on Friday expressed alarm about plans to repeat last year’s ultranationalist march in which thousands of extremists shouting Nazi and nationalist slogans paraded in the center of Moscow .

The Associated Press news agency quoted Vladimir Lukin, the country’s human rights commissioner, as saying that it was not possible to ban the event under the law but urged the city authorities to crack down on illegal symbols and slogans.

“In the previous demonstration by groups espousing this ideology, there were slogans that clearly broke our laws,” Lukin said. “I would quite strongly advise (the Moscow city administration) to pay special attention to this event.”

Last year on Nov. 4, right-wing political groups used a new national holiday celebrating Russian unity to stage a rally protesting illegal immigration.

Several thousand people marched under extremist banners and some gave the Nazi salute and shouted “Heil Hitler.” The police did not intervene.

Human rights groups say that the authorities are turning a blind eye to the growing wave of xenophobia and racially motivated attacks in Russia that target dark-skinned foreigners and immigrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus.

This year, 39 people have been killed in apparent hate crimes and a further 308 attacked, according to the Sova rights center which monitors xenophobia.

“This march is a particularly glaring example of a systematic failure to tackle this problem,” said Galina Kozhevnikova from Sova.

The Moscow Bureau for Human Rights called on the City Hall to prevent the event.

“Can it really happen once again that homegrown neo-Nazis will be allowed to stage their criminal rally?” it asked in a statement.

About 30 ultranationalist groups are to take part in a series of marches on Nov. 4 organized by the far-right Movement Against Illegal Immigration.

Its leader Alexander Belov said that demonstrations that could attract tens of thousands are planned in 15 cities including Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, Nizhny Novgorod and Krasnoyarsk.

Belov told The Associated Press that the authorities in Moscow had not yet authorized the march but vowed to stage it regardless. “If we don’t go onto the streets, we wouldn’t be able to respect ourselves as men,” he said.

A popular nationalist lawmaker, Dmitry Rogozin, who used to head the Motherland party _ which has seats in parliament _ before he was replaced in a reshuffle widely attributed to Kremlin pressure, is taking part in organizing the Moscow event and has promised it will not feature any Nazi symbols or chants.

Nationalist ideology has an increasingly wide appeal in Russia where the turmoil since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union has fueled hostility toward dark-skinned foreigners.

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