Putin's Wars (23 page)

The objective of Putin’s internal war was to avoid a democratic alternation of power.
This meant that he would not allow nonsystemic opposition parties to develop. These
were simply denied official registration. The systemic opposition parties, such as
the Communist Party and the Liberal-Democratic Party, were allowed to participate
in the elections on the (unwritten) condition that they mounted no real opposition
and supported the government in parliament. Other potential independent power centers,
such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oligarch who threatened to become Putin’s political
rival, were removed and jailed. At the same time an ideological offensive was initiated
in which the values of the regime were emphasized. These were a strong state, ultranationalism,
and the “rebirth” of Russia. The undivided support of the population for these values
became, in effect, a value in itself in the much touted objective of national consensus.
In the Soviet Union the communist youth organization Komsomol had been an important
vehicle for spreading communist ideas. In Putin’s Russia, however, such a government-sponsored
organization was lacking. Putin knew how important it was to inculcate the values
of a regime in the younger generation. Founding the Kremlin’s own youth organization
would, therefore, soon become one of his priorities.

On July 14, 2000, only four months after Putin had been elected president, a youth
organization was registered at the Ministry of the Interior with the name
Idushchie Vmeste
(Walking Together). The president of this new movement was a young man, Vasily Yakemenko,
who worked in Putin’s presidential administration as chief of the department for relations
with civil organizations. Yakemenko’s boss was Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of
the presidential administration.
^[1]
Walking Together planned to have 200,000 to 250,000 members and to be represented
in Russia’s largest cities. The organization had the structure of a pyramid: each
new member was obliged to bring five new members with him or her over whom he or she
became “commander.” Becoming a member was made very attractive: students from outside
Moscow were offered free travel to the capital. Also free tickets for the movies and
for swimming pools were made available, as well as free access to sports centers and
the Internet. The movement had its own travel agency with extremely low prices. According
to Sergey Shargunov of the
Novaya Gazeta
, in the first two years there were “many links between this pro-Presidential youth
organization and skinheads. In the first place, leaders of skinhead groups were officials
in the movement, bringing their ‘troops’ into action at different events. In the second
place, in the movement ‘Walking Together’ there were elements of the skinhead subculture,
such as high laced boots and the outstretched arm salute.”
^[2]
The core of the group consisted of the “Gallant Steeds” football gang, supporters
of the Moscow football club CSKA, which was headed by Aleksey Mitryushin, the bodyguard
of Vasily Yakemenko. Anna Politkovskaya wrote:

There suddenly appear groups called “Marching Together,” or “Singing Together” or
“For Stability” or some other latter-day version of the Soviet Union’s Pioneer Movement.
A distinctive feature of these pro-Putin quasi-political movements is the amazing
speed with which, without any of the usual bureaucratic prevarication, they are legally
registered by the Ministry of Justice, which is usually very chary of attempts to
create anything remotely political.
^[3]

Walking Together achieved its first great publicity success with an attack on the
writer Vladimir Sorokin, whom they accused of pornography because of an ironic description
of a sexual encounter between Stalin and Khrushchev in his novel
Blue Fat
. In the center of Moscow members of the group tore up books by Sorokin, which were
thrown into a huge papier-mâché toilet bowl that they had installed on a sidewalk.
A member of the movement brought a case against the author, which was taken over by
the prosecutor’s office. The publicist Fedor Yermolov wrote: “The first image that
springs to mind is the destruction of ‘dangerous’ books by fascists in the 1930s.”
^[4]
He added that there were “deeper roots to the Sorokin scandal. The need to create
a new state ideology means that the ruling classes are faced with the task of defining
the extent and the possible ways in which individual key figures of Russian culture
can influence the public consciousness. In this respect, what is happening to Sorokin
may be seen as a sounding of public opinion, a test of society’s reaction to the encroachment
of ideology into the cultural process.”
^[5]
Vasily Yakemenko, the leader of Walking Together, told Radio Ekho Moskvy that the
case was “a first sign of the regeneration of our society” and “a sign that the era
of the marginal characters, who use filthy language to describe all kinds of perversions
. . . is coming to an end.”
^[6]

When, in the autumn of 2004, in neighboring Ukraine the Orange Revolution took place,
this event fundamentally changed the way in which the Kremlin viewed the role of its
youth organization. It was no longer perceived as a presidential fan club, but was
to become the Kremlin’s bulwark against a color revolution in Russia. This meant,
first, that the movement had to become more combative. Second, that, instead of concentrating
on moral issues, it should focus more on geopolitical issues. And, third, that it
should attack not only internal foes, but also foreign enemies, suspected of supporting
opposition groups in Russia. On February 17, 2005—three weeks after the inauguration
of Viktor Yushchenko as Ukraine’s new “orange” president—Vladislav Surkov met in secret
with thirty-five to forty young people in St. Petersburg. The meeting was arranged
by Vasily Yakemenko, founder of Walking Together. The goal of the meeting was to set
up a new youth organization that would get the name
Nashi
(literally “Ours,” but its connotation is something like “Our Guys,” making a clear
distinction between “us” and “them”—the outsiders, enemies, and foreigners).
^[7]
Putin’s new militants were conceived as a defense against organized opposition
groups, such as
Kmara
in Georgia and
Pora
in Ukraine, that were at the forefront of the popular color revolutions in these countries.
These grassroots organizations, fighting for democracy, individual freedom, and respect
for human rights, based their actions on nonviolent strategies, such as were described
by Gene Sharp in his influential book
From Dictatorship to Democracy
.
^[8]
The
Nashi
movement was the total
opposite
of these movements. Instead of a spontaneous organization that had its roots in civil
society, it was a top-down initiative, conceived down to the smallest detail within
the Kremlin walls. Its objective was not to foster democracy, but to support a nondemocratic,
autocratic power elite. The new organization received generous funding, not only from
the Kremlin, but also from the Kremlin-related company Gazprom.
^[9]
In her diary Anna Politkovskaya commented on the Nashi:

The authorities rely on criminal elements to prop up the system of state power. That
this really is their doctrine recently received further confirmation when the Presidential
Administration created a clone . . . . It is called Nashi . . . . The stormtroopers
of the Nashi youth movement are football hooligans armed with knuckle-dusters and
chains . . . . They have two units, one consisting of thugs who support the Central
Sports Club of the Army football team, and the other of thugs who support the Spartak
team. They all have an impeccable record in street fighting.
^[10]

Nashi founder Yakemenko openly advocated recruiting skinheads, such as the Spartak
fans, who called themselves “The Gladiators” and wore tattoos of a gladiator with
a spear. In a Nashi conference in 2005, he told his audience: “Skinheads—they are
the same people as you . . . . Skinheads sincerely believe [that] they are patriots
of Russia.”
^[11]
By 2009 the Nashi movement had grown into a nationwide organization with between
100,000 and 120,000 members. It was established in fifty-two towns and had a hard
core of 10,000 activists. The members wore red jackets, waved Nashi flags (a diagonal
white cross on a red background—mixing tsarist and Soviet symbols), and had their
own buses to transport them to their demonstrations. In a country where opposition
rallies and demonstrations are systematically forbidden the Nashi could demonstrate
at any place and any time with the full cooperation of the police. The organization
was drenched in Soviet-era nostalgia. Not only were the group leaders called “commissar”—as
in old Soviet times—but also the official website,
www.nashi.su
, instead of having the usual country code ‘.ru’, ends with .su (from Soviet Union).
As in the case of Walking Together, idealistic motives were not enough to inspire
potential members to adhere. Therefore, visitors to the Nashi website were lured with
promises “of becoming a new intellectual elite.” They were offered interesting study
schemes (“Do you deserve to have higher education from the country’s best university
teachers?”), as well as tempting career possibilities (“Nashi people are already in
parliament, in the administration, in the strongest Russian companies”).
^[12]
Aspiring members could choose between different sections, such as “Patriotism,”
“Ideology,” and “Information.” Members of the Patriotism section had the task “to
disseminate propaganda under the young generation based on the big victories of the
Russian people,” and “to create models of patriotic education . . . based on the principles
of sovereign democracy.” They also participated in “patriotic war games.”

Officially the movement presented itself as anti-fascist. It even had an “Anti-Fa”
(anti-fascism) section. The main task of this section was not so much to defend migrants
from the Caucasus and Central Asia against racist and xenophobic attacks by hooligans
and skinheads, but to be vigilant for any criticism of the official version of the
history of the Great Patriotic War or any attempt to besmirch the honor of war veterans.
On the Nashi website the “Ideology” section introduced itself with the words that
“no government on earth can live without a concept of the state.” In Russia, the text
continued, this is “the concept of sovereign democracy,” an idea that “must be spread
among as many people as possible.” Everywhere in these texts the inspiration and,
possibly, even the hand of Vladislav Surkov was recognizable. Surkov is generally
regarded as the godfather of the Nashi. He is a popular speaker at Nashi meetings.
In September 2009 he credited Nashi with having helped persuade Obama to scrap the
missile defense plans in Eastern Europe. “You are the leading combat detachment in
our political system,” he told the activists. “Dominance on the street is also a necessary
advantage for us, an advantage that we have thanks to you, thanks to all those who
are so brilliant at staging mass actions.”
^[13]
Was it mere a coincidence that the title “combat detachment,” given by Surkov to
his new Nashi troops, had a worrying resemblance to the
fasci di combattimento
, Mussolini’s combat squads
?

Every year, in July, the Nashi movement organizes a two-week summer camp in a pine
wood near Lake Seliger, a popular holiday resort three hundred miles north of Moscow.
Everything is done to make the camp attractive to young people: transport, food, and
lodging are free. In 2006 there were five thousand participants; in 2007 this number
had doubled to ten thousand. The camps mixed adventure with agitprop. In 2007 paintings
were exhibited of internal and external foes of Russia, such as opposition leader
Garry Kasparov, clad as a prostitute,
^[14]
and the foreign minister of Estonia, Urmas Paet, with a Hitler mustache. Apart
from geopolitics the future demographic development of Russia was high on the agenda.
In 2007 the camp celebrated a mass wedding for about thirty couples. Red tents were
arranged in the shape of a heart for the couples to celebrate their wedding night.
Dmitry Medvedev and Sergey Ivanov, at that time both deputy prime ministers, called
in. Ivanov called for the group to have more babies. One year later, in the summer
camp of 2008, a baby was shown who had been conceived at the mass wedding of 2007.
This openly proclaimed natalism is resonant of Mussolini’s call to the Italian women
“to make babies for Italy.”
^[15]
In 2008 the portrait of the Estonian foreign minister had been replaced by a pig
in a wooden stall with the name Ilves—the name of the Estonian president.
^[16]
The 2008 camp, however, attracted only five thousand participants. This diminished
enthusiasm was partly due to the fact that in the summer of 2008 the Duma elections
and the presidential elections had taken place. But also rumors of free love had made
parents more wary. The government intervened. In 2009 the camp was organized directly
by the state, paramilitary training was suspended, there was this time no “love oasis,”
and also non-Nashi members were given free access.
^[17]
But these cosmetic changes did not have a real impact on the camp’s core business.
According to an observer, “the worry for critics of Seliger is that the older political
generation uses it to transmit their own ideology to the new.”
^[18]