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"Nashi"—Pooty-poot's version of Hitler Youth?

Posted by Olog-hai on Thu Aug 16 02:07:00 2007

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Youth groups created by Kremlin serve Putin's cause

By Steven Lee Myers
Published: August 8, 2007

MOSCOW: Yulia Kuliyeva, only 19 and already a commissar, sat at a desk and quizzed each young person who sat opposite her, testing for ideological fitness to participate in summer camp.

"Tell me, what achievements of Putin's policy can you name?" she asked, referring to Russia's president since 2000, Vladimir Putin.

"Well, it's the stabilization in the economy," the girl answered. "Pensions were raised."

"And what's in Chechnya?" Kuliyeva asked, probing her knowledge of a separatist conflict that has killed tens of thousands and, although largely won by Russia's federal forces and Chechen loyalists, continues.

"In Chechnya, it's that it is considered a part of Russia," the girl responded.

"Is this war still going on there?"

"No, everything is quiet."

Kuliyeva is a leader in the Ideological Department of Nashi, the largest of a handful of youth movements created by Putin's Kremlin to fight for the hearts and minds of Russia's young people in schools, on the airwaves and, if necessary, on the streets.

Nashi, which translates as "ours," has since its creation two years ago become a disciplined and lavishly funded instrument of Putin's campaign for political control before parliamentary elections in December and a presidential election next March.

It has organized mass marches in support of Putin — most recently gathering tens of thousands of young people in Moscow to send the president text messages — and staged rowdy demonstrations over foreign policy issues that resulted in the physical harassment of the British and Estonian ambassadors here.

Its main role, though, is the ideological cultivation — some say indoctrination — of today's youth, the first generation to come of age in post-Soviet Russia.

To Nashi, young people are neither the lost generation of the turbulent 1990s nor the soulless consumerists of Generation P (for Pepsi) imagined by the writer Viktor Pelevin in 2000. They are, as Nashi's own glossy literature says, "Putin's Generation." "Why Putin's generation?" Nashi's national spokeswoman, Anastasia Suslova, asked at the group's headquarters. "It is because Putin has qualitatively changed Russia. He brought stability and the opportunity for modernization and development of the country. Thus we, the young people — myself, for instance, I am 22, and these eight years were the longest part of my conscious life when we were growing up, and the country was changing with us."

Nashi emerged in the wake of youth-led protests that toppled sclerotic governments in other post-Soviet republics, especially in Ukraine in 2004. It was joined by similar groups, like the Youth Guard, which belongs to the pro-Putin party United Russia; Locals, a group created by the Moscow region government that recently launched an anti-immigrant campaign; and the Grigorevtsy, affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church.

The groups, organizers and critics say, are part of an effort to build a following of loyal, patriotic young people and to defuse any youthful resistance that could emerge during the careful orchestration of Putin's successor in next year's election. Nashi, the largest and most prominent of the groups, now claims 10,000 active members and as many as 200,000 participants in its events.

"The Kremlin decided that youth organizations can be exploited," said Nikolai Petrov, a scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center. He compared the youth activists to "Landsknechts," medieval foot soldiers hired to carry out military campaigns.

Russia's youth, like their parents, remain largely apolitical, seeing what passes for politics here as something remote from their daily lives. Nashi's goal is to change that, spurring youthful activism, although within the careful limits of the Kremlin's sanction.

Nashi's ideology is contained in a manifesto, based on the writings of Vladislav Surkov, Putin's chief political adviser, who has been called the Karl Rove of the Kremlin. At Nashi events and in interviews like Kuliyeva's, members cite the manifesto's passages, or "Surkov's text," like cant.

"I want Russia to be a leader of the 21st century," Yuri Venchekov, 18, said at a recent Nashi rally at the All-Russia Exhibition Center that was intended to promote harmony among Russia's many ethnic groups.

Nashi's platform is defined by its unwavering devotion to Putin and by the intensity of its hostility toward his critics, including his former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, the former chess champion Garry Kasparov and a nationalist writer, Eduard Limonov. Nashi's members denounce the opposition leaders as fascists with a fervor that can be disquieting.

One of Kuliyeva's applicants to Nashi's summer camp — two weeks of sports and ideological lessons beside Lake Seliger outside Moscow — noted that in Russian the first two letters of each man's name spelled out the past tense of the verb to defecate.

"So this troika sounds nicely," the young man, Vitaly Chubarov, answered. Kuliyeva chuckled.

Nashi's ideology extends beyond the purely political. It promotes ethnic tolerance and opposition to skinheads; participation in the army, whose draft is widely evaded; support for orphans and pensioners, and respect for veterans of World War II. On social issues, it campaigns against drinking and smoking and advocates a conservative view on issues like abortion and birth control, warning against the use of condoms, for example.

Like Putin himself, who recently seemed to compare the foreign policy of the United States to the Third Reich, Nashi also laces its campaigns and literature with an undercurrent of hostility to Europe and the United States. At the rally promoting ethnic harmony, a poster denounced American adoptions: "In 2005, 3,966 Russian children became citizens of America."

"Putin's Generation" is growing up with a diet of anti-European and anti-American sentiment that could deepen the social and political divides between Russia and the West for decades to come.

"Today the United States on one hand and international terrorism on the other strive to control Eurasia and the whole world," Nashi's manifesto says. "Their gaze is directed at Russia. The task of our generation is to defend the sovereignty of our country as our grandfathers did 60 years ago."

Although Kremlin officials have tried to portray the groups as independent players, Nashi and the others owe their financing and political support to their status as creations of Putin's administration. They are allowed to hold marches, while demonstrations by the opposition are prohibited or curtailed. Their activities are covered favorably on state television, while the opposition's are disparaged or ignored.

Although Nashi's financing is opaque, the group receives grants from the state and big businesses like Gazprom, the state energy giant, and Norilsk Nickel, whose principal owner, Vladimir Potanin, is a Putin loyalist. Nashi repays Potanin's support in its literature by distinguishing him from the "oligarchs" who are widely reviled in Russia.

"We have to admit that for a long time we did not have any youth policy at all," Surkov said in a rare news conference last year. "Sooner or later, we realized, we had to." While he acknowledged supporting Nashi, he added, "It is very important not to take too strict or rigid control of these movements, not to repeat the experience of having the old type of organizations."

Nashi's opponents, in fact, deride the organization as a modern manifestation of Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The colors and symbols are similar; members carry red books to record their participation in rallies and lectures. And, like the Komsomol, membership in Nashi is viewed as a stepping stone to jobs in government and state corporations.

More ominously, opponents say, Nashi has conducted paramilitary training in preparation for challenging those who take to the streets to protest the Kremlin. Ilya Yashin, the leader of the youth wing of Yabloko, the liberal political party, said the goal was "direct intimidation of opposition activists," citing an attack attributed to Nashi supporters against the headquarters of the banned National Bolshevik Party, led by Limonov.

Politically, at least, Nashi has become a powerful instrument to express the Kremlin's dissatisfaction. When the governor of the Perm region, Oleg Chirkunov, a Putin appointee, allowed a member of an opposition party to attend a youth conference last year, hundreds of Nashi protesters picketed his office despite bitterly cold weather, demanding that he apologize. He promptly did.

After Estonia relocated a Soviet-era war memorial in late April, Nashi laid siege to the Estonian Embassy in Moscow, throwing rocks, disrupting traffic and tearing down the Estonian flag. Nashi members, including the group's leader, Vasily Yakemenko, accosted Estonia's ambassador, Marina Kaljurand, at a news conference in early May. Her guards had to use pepper spray to defend her.

Yashin, the Yabloko leader, said the Kremlin ran a risk of unleashing a wave of activism that could spread beyond its control, especially as Putin's loyalists fight for control after he steps down, as promised, next year.

"The authorities may face serious problems," he said, "because all the young people whom they teach today, in whom they invest, whom they teach to organize mass actions, may find themselves in the real opposition when they see that their interests are violated."

"Today they are loyal, but tomorrow they may become the opposition," he added. "And this may not be the young Red Guard's Cultural Revolution, like in China, but something much more serious."

Michael Schwirtz and Joshua Yaffa contributed reporting.

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