MOSCOW -- The Communist Party newspaper Pravda said Monday a right-wing Russian nationalist group claiming tens of thousands of followers is trying to fan anti-Semitic hatred in the Soviet Union.
Pravda attacked the Pamyat association, named after the Russian word for memory, in a critique of grass-roots groups that Sunday concluded a two-day conference in Moscow.
'The (group's) present leadership almost openly calls for extremism and tries to stir up anti-Semitic sentiments among the Soviet people,' Pravda said in a commentary.
Pravda also criticized as extremist a separate dissident group attempting to stretch the limits of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's program of 'glasnost,' or openness, but the newspaper saved its fiercest language for Pamyat.
Pravda praised most of the 30,000informal groups it says have sprung up to combat ecological and other social problems in the comparatively relaxed environment under Gorbachev's reform program.
'But there are groups (that are) blatant, with ambitious strivings, sometimes unfriendly toward the Soviet power, the policy of the Communist Party,' Pravda said. 'The most notorious is Pamyat.'
Official records list about 2 million Jews in the Soviet Union.
More than 130,000 Jews were allowed to emigrate in the 1970s, with the annual total peaking in 1979 at 50,000, but the number fell off sharply in this decade. It began to increase last year after Gorbachev announced an easing of restrictions, when 8,011 Jews received exit visas, the most since 1981.
Pravda, in the strongest official attack to date on Pamyat, said former Soviet journalist Dmitri Vasilyev and companions took over the association after Soviet historians, scientists and engineers founded it several years ago to investigate why old Russian villages were losing population, a common theme of some popular Soviet writers.
Pravda said 'drastic changes began happening about two years ago' after Vasilyev and his associates gained control of Pamyat. 'They just stole the name.'
The newspaper said Vasilyev, who has claimed that there is an international plot by Jews and Freemasons to poison Russian culture, 'has only an eight-year education' and is 'on the record of a psychiatric hospital for treatment.'
Valery Yemelyanov, another Pamyat leader, dismissed the newspaper's charges.
'We get more adherents with every attack against us,' Yemelyanov said.
He said the group used a recruitment program based on the circulation of cassette tapes describing its beliefs to gain 'tens of thousands of adherents from Moscow to Sakhalin Island' in the Sea of Okhotsk off the eastern Soviet coast.
Yemelyanov, a former Arabic language teacher, lost a prestigious position at the Maurice Thorez Institute in Moscow after the 1980 publication abroad of his book, 'De-Zionization,' in which he said the Soviet Union must be rid of the alleged Zionist-Masonic conspiracy.
Yemelyanov was later sent to an insane asylum after he was accused of murdering his wife. Released last year, he recently appeared at a writer's trial wearing a T-shirt with 'De-Zionization' printed in Slavic letters on the front and in Hebrew letters on the back.
Pravda levied a tamer attack Monday on the dissident Glasnost association, which deliberately named itself after Gorbachev's liberalization program. The group publishes an unauthorized magazine with the same title, in which it advocates the release of political prisoners.