7. Nicole J. Jackson, Russian Foreign Policy and the CIS: Theories, Debates and Actions (London: Routledge, 2003), 40.
8. Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 126.
9. CPRF Platform in Election Platform of Political Parties Participating in the Elections for State Duma, Moscow, International Republican Institute, (December 6, 1995), 44. (Quoted in Jackson, Russian Foreign Policy and the CIS, 41.)
10. Cf. Andreas Umland, “Toward an Uncivil Society? Contextualizing the Recent Decline of Extremely Right-Wing Parties in Russia,” WCFIA Working Paper 02–03 (Boston: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 2002). http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/555__Toward_An_Uncivil_Society.pdf.
Cf. also Andreas Umland, “Rechtsekstremes Engagement jenseits von Parteien: Vorkriegsdeutschland und Russland im Vergleich,” Forschungsjournal Neue Soziale Bewegungen, Heft 4 (December 2008), 63–66.
11. Umland, “Toward an Uncivil Society?” 10.
12. Umland, “Toward an Uncivil Society?” 10.
13. Umland, “Toward an Uncivil Society?” 10–11.
14. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 76.
15. Andreas Umland, “Rechtsekstremes Engagement jenseits von Parteien,” 65.
16. Marlène Laruelle, “Inside and Around the Kremlin’s Black Box: The New Nationalist Think Tanks in Russia,” Stockholm Paper (Stockholm: Institute for Security & Development Policy, 2009), 19.
17. Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, The Corporation: Russia and the KGB in the Age of Putin (New York: Encounter Books, 2008), 153. The authors added: “Then, in 2001, in response to a question about how he envisioned the Russia of 2010, he said: ‘We will be happy.’ If by ‘we’ Putin meant the people who would be in power in Russia, then he was telling the truth.”
18. Gregory L. Freeze, Russia: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 494.
19. “Putin: Ideologiey v Rossii dolzhen stat patriotism,” Gazeta (July 17, 2003).
20. “Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin: Nam nuzhno grazhdanskoe obshchestvo, pronizannoe patriotizmom.” http://www.lawmix.ru/content.php?id=182.
21. Putin, Vladimir. “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (December 30, 1999). http://www.ng.ru/printed/3681.
22. Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 5.
23. Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 5.
24. Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 6.
25. Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 5.
26. Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 6.
27. Sergei Medvedev, “The Role of International Regimes in Promoting Democratic Institutions: The Case of NATO and Russia,” NATO Research Fellowships 1994–1996 (Brussels: NATO, 1996). http://www.nato.int/acad/fellow/94-96/medvedev/02.htm.
28. Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 6.
29. John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal, with photographs by Robert Capa (London: Penguin, 2000), 26. Steinbeck’s Journal is a record of a forty-day trip to the Soviet Union between July 31 and mid-September 1947.
30. Vladimir Putin, “Poslanie Federalnomu Sobraniyu Rossiyskoy Federatsii” (July 8, 2000). http://archive.kremlin.ru/text/appears/2000/07/28782.shtml.
31. Putin, “Poslanie Federalnomu Sobraniyu Rossiyskoy Federatsii,” 4.
32. Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 7.
33. Putin, “Poslanie Federalnomu Sobraniyu Rossiyskoy Federatsii,” 4.
34. Roger Griffin, wanting to define the essence of fascist systems, came up with the following definition of the “fascist minimum”: “Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythical core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.” Ideas of national rebirth (palingenesis) were, according to him, essential for fascist movements. (Cf. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993), 26. See also Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia, Part II: The Specter of a Fascist Russia (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).)
35. Aleksandr Yeliseev, “Slavyanofil v Kremle,” Politicheskiy Klass 12, no. 60 (December 2009), 69–70.
36. The members were not the only ones who were “gray.” Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow and himself one of the founders of United Russia, said in an interview, “the leaders of that party are weak and gray in terms of their potential—organizationally, intellectually, and so on. . . . [Duma speaker] Boris Gryzlov, as the boss of the party—not the leader, but the boss—is a gray personality, a person who has always been a servant and who is incapable of having an independent position.” (Cf. “Moscow’s Bitter Ex-Boss Luzhkov Lashes Out at Kremlin, Calls United Russia ‘Shameful,’” RFE/RL (October 22, 2011).)
37. Vladimir Putin, “Zachem ya vozglavil spisok ‘Edinoy Rossii’” (November 13, 2007). http://www.kreml.org/media/165463628?mode=print.
38. Putin, “Zachem ya vozglavil spisok ‘Edinoy Rossii.’”
39. Cf. Paul Goble, “United Russia Party Now has 40,000 Apparatchiks, Moscow Analyst Says,” Window on Russia (May 10, 2010).
40. Laruelle, “Inside and Around the Kremlin’s Black Box,” 5.
41. Laruelle, “Inside and Around the Kremlin’s Black Box,” 7
42. “Boris Gryzlov: u ‘Edinoy Rossii krylev ne budet,’” Russkaya Liniya (April, 23, 2005).
43. “Boris Gryzlov: u ‘Edinoy Rossii krylev ne budet.’”
44. Robert Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century (London: Penguin, 2009), 127.
45. “Boris Gryzlov: u ‘Edinoy Rossii krylev ne budet.’”
46. Konstantin Kosachev, “Why Would a Bear Need Wings?” Russia in Global Affairs (June 20, 2005).
47. Quoted in Pavel Zakharov, “Yedinaya Rossiya sozdaet Russkiy proekt,” KM.RU (February 5, 2007).
48. “Yedinorusskiy proekt,” Obshchaya Gazeta.ru (February 5, 2007).
49. Aleksandra Samarina, Natalia Kostenko, and Ivan Rodin, “Yedinaya Rossiya razdelitsya na techeniya,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (November 2, 2007).
50. Konstantin Remchukov, “Liberalno-konservativnoe videnie budushchego Rossii,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (November 18, 2005).
51. Remchukov, “Liberalno-konservativnoe videnie budushchego Rossii.”
52. Lev Sigal, “Predlozheniya k platforme rossiyskogo sotsialnogo konservatizma,” Tsentr sotsialno-konservativnoy politiki. http://www.cscp.ru/about/manifest/41/.
53. “Politicheskaya Deklaratsiya Gosudarstvenno-Patrioticheskiy Klub Vserossiyskoy politicheskoy partii ‘Edinaya Rossiya,’” 1. http://www.gpclub.ru/news/0x1x2_p.html.
54. “Politicheskaya Deklaratsiya Gosudarstvenno-Patrioticheskiy Klub,” 2.
55. “Politicheskaya Deklaratsiya Gosudarstvenno-Patrioticheskiy Klub,” 4.
56. Laruelle, “Inside and Around the Kremlin’s Black Box,” 58.
57. Aleksandr Dugin, “The Post-Liberal Era in Russia.” http://arctogaia.com/public/eng/.
Chapter 8
The Nashi
Fascist Blackshirts or a New Komsomol?
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. Th
e 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.
“Walking Together”: Skinheads to Defend the Kremlin’s Message
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]
Founding the Nashi: A Kremlin Initiative
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 dif
ferent 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?
Putin's Wars Page 19