Photo: Yekaterina Savina/Agence France-Presse

Youth groups created by Kremlin serve Putin’s cause

A little over a week ago, the pro-Putin, anti-Western youth movement, Nashi, announced that it is planning to double its membership this year, and scoffed at reports of its "imminent demise", reports Michael Ireland,

chief correspondent, ASSIST News Service.

According to Russian Ministries' Anita Deyneka, "After the United Russia party's overwhelming victory in the December State Duma elections, some speculated that the Nashi movement was becoming obsolete. Nashi leaders, however, declared that, 'No one can stop us.'"

Deyneka says the group has plans to establish regional centers and to promote a patriotic children's club called "Mishki" or bear cubs.

She adds: "Nashi members support the presidential campaign of Dmitry Medvedev in the March 2 presidential election. Medvedev is Vladimir Putin's handpicked successor, and the Nashi movement maintains its loyalty to Putin and his agenda."

Youth groups created by Kremlin serve Putin’s cause

An article by Steven Lee Myers published in the New York Times on July 8, 2007, to which Michael Schwirtz and Joshua Yaffa contributed reporting, says Nashi is the largest of a handful of youth movements created by Mr. 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.

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

He writes: "It has organized mass marches in support of Mr. 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."

Myers says 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.

Myers writes: "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.' 'hy 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.'"

According to Myers, 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 Mr. 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," Myers explains.

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

Says Myers: "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."

Myers writes that Nashi’s ideology is contained in a manifesto, based on the writings of Vladislav Y. Surkov, Mr. Putin’s chief political adviser, who has been called the Karl Rove of the Kremlin. At Nashi events and in interviews like Ms. Kuliyeva’s, members cite the manifesto’s passages, or “Surkov’s text,” like cant.

Nashi’s platform is defined by its unwavering devotion to Mr. Putin and by the intensity of its hostility toward his critics, including his former prime minister, Mikhail M. 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.

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.

Myers writes "Like Mr. 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, says Myers.

“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, Myers says, Nashi and the others owe their financing and political support to their status as creations of Mr. 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.

Myers says that 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 O. Potanin, is a Putin loyalist. Nashi repays Mr. Potanin’s support in its literature by distinguishing him from the “oligarchs” who are widely reviled in Russia.

He writes: "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 Mr. Limonov."

Myers writes that politically, at least, Nashi has become a powerful instrument to express the Kremlin’s dissatisfaction. When the governor of the Perm region, Oleg A. 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 G. Yakemenko, accosted Estonia’s ambassador, Marina Kaljurand, at a news conference in early May. Her guards had to use pepper spray to defend her," Myers said.

He reports that Mr. Yashin, the Yabloko leader, said the Kremlin ran a risk of unleashing a wave of activism that could spread beyond its control, especially as Mr. 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.”

Meanwhile, in Kaluga, where Nashi youth recently vandalized two churches, Russian Ministries' Next Generation Christians and their churches celebrated the birth of the Prince of Peace by reaching out to needy children and their families.

"In the Kaluga region, a total of 400 gift boxes were handed out as part of Russian Ministries' Project Hope: the Great Gift Exchange. Each box not only contained gifts and treats but also a Bible," says Anita Deyneka, adding: "In addition to the presents and festivities, the children heard the good news that God had sent His Son to earth."

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[02/14/2008]

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