Putin's Wars

by Marcel H. Van Herpen

  According to this new plan an All-Russian Association of Militias (VAD)[44] would be formed. The existing Nashi branch DMD would be incorporated into this association. The Nashi militias would be put under the authority of the local police. Yakemenko, who, in August 2008, had been appointed head of the Federal Youth Agency Rosmolodezh, a division of the Ministry of Sport, Tourism and Youth Policy, promised that the government and local authorities would provide the necessary start-up funds. The State Duma would be asked to pass a law “[o]n the participation of RF citizens in securing law and order.”[45] This bill would require militias to have uniforms and carry identification, and it would grant members the right to check citizen’s documents, search private cars, and use physical force and handguns for self-defense. According to Sergey Bokhan, the leader of the Nashi militia project, “We find kids, who are practically living on the streets, who don’t know how to occupy themselves, and who don’t have money or interests. We provide them with gyms, teach them combatant and competitive sports. We work with the at-risk group, who would potentially break a bottle over someone’s head, or throw rocks through windows.”[46] The prospect of a hundred thousand marginal and potentially aggressive young men on the streets in order to control citizens and maintain order was considered by many Russians a frightening idea. An additional anxiety lay in the fact that these new militiamen could eventually be armed with so-called stun guns. These are electrical Taser guns capable of paralyzing opponents with a voltage of between 625,000 and 1.2 million volts. In some cases these weapons proved to be lethal.

  The debate on the introduction of druzhiny (squads) took a special turn in November 2008, when Vsevolod Chaplin, deputy head of the (Kremlin-related) department of external relations of the Russian Orthodox Church, proposed the organization of Orthodox militias. “Now alongside many church communities, parishes, there exist military-patriotic groups who have had good athletic training. They could undertake an active civic role,” he said.[47] His proposal was received positively by the leaders of Nashi and by Valery Gribakin, spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior, who said that the Ministry was prepared to support the initiative. He added that in the territory of the Russian Federation the police already cooperated with 36,000 civil movements that provided 380,000 volunteers.[48] Yevgeny Ikhlov, spokesman for the NGO “For Human Rights,” called the initiative dangerous. The militias would attract primarily “boys and girls from militarized party structures,” as well as veterans of regional conflicts, whose nerves “are strongly overwrought.” Furthermore, such faith-based militias might jeopardize the secular character of the state and the initiative could lead to Islamic militias in Islamic regions.[49] The Orthodox militias, however, were set up—alongside those run by the Nashi. Newsweek reporter Peter Pomerantsev described how he met with one of these vigilantes on Moscow’s streets:

  “The enemies of Holy Russia are everywhere,” says Ivan Ostrakovsky, the leader of a group of Russian Orthodox vigilantes who have taken to patrolling the streets of nighttime Moscow, dressed in all-black clothing emblazoned with skulls and crosses. “We must protect holy places from liberals and their satanic ideology,” he tells me. . . . [T]he vigilante sees himself in a fight against cultural degradation. “When I came back from serving in the Chechen War, I found my country full of dirt,” he says. “Prostitution, drugs, Satanists. But now, religion is on the rise.”[50] Pomerantsev commented: “[A]s Vladimir Putin’s third presidential term comes into focus, the cross-wearing thugs are now right in line with the ideology emanating from the Kremlin—and from the Russian Orthodox hierarchy. . . . [T]he new incarnation of Putin’s rule resembles less a thought-out program than a carnival where spooks dress up in cassocks and thugs adorn themselves with crucifixes, shouting snatches of medieval theology, Soviet conspiracy theories, and folk-metal choruses.”[51]

  A Historical Precedent: Khrushchev’s Druzhiny

  The idea behind these volunteer law-enforcing druzhiny is not new. In 1913, on the eve of the First World War, they could already be found in tsarist Russia. And the October Revolution, four years later, was made possible by an uprising of spontaneously formed, armed militias of peasants and workers. After the Revolution there even emerged a competition between these militias and the new regular Red Army, organized by the People’s Commissar for War, Leon Trotsky. This power struggle—which resembled the competition between the SA and the Reichswehr in Nazi Germany—was in Russia ultimately decided in favor of the army.[52] Under Stalin the role of the militias was further reduced, and it was—ironically—in the period of Khrushchev’s thaw that the idea resurfaced. In 1958—during the Khrushchev era of de-Stalinization—the criminal law was revised to allow the accused certain procedural guarantees, which would lead to a more liberal punishment regime. Uncertainties concerning the impact of this liberalization effort led to initiatives to accompany this more permissive policy with measures of enhanced preventive social control. As a consequence the 21st Party Congress of the CPSU in 1958 called for the reintroduction of the druzhiny volunteer squads,[53] and on March 2, 1959, the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers issued a joint resolution, “On the Participation of the Workers in the Maintenance of Public Order,” in which the druzhiny were reintroduced. These militias were independent from the police, but worked often in cooperation with police officers. Its members came from the trade unions, the Komsomol, and the local soviets. This civil police force was especially active in factories and collective farms to fight drunkenness and hooliganism and enhance workers’ discipline.

  The initiative to introduce nationwide Nashi volunteer squads was certainly inspired by these former Soviet examples. However, between the Krushchev-era druzhiny and the Putin-era druzhiny there exist two important differences. The first and most important difference is that in Khrushchev’s time they were introduced as a measure of a liberalizing regime that intended to replace the totalitarian control of civil society of the Stalinist era, characterized by repression and draconic punishments, by a more relaxed and normal authoritarian society. The druzhiny were a symbol and an expression of this liberalizing regime, substituting prevention for state repression. Putin’s Nashi militias are, on the contrary, the expression of exactly the opposite development: they are the expression of a society that becomes less democratic and more repressive. A second difference is that Khrushchev’s druzhiny were rather bureaucratic: they lacked an ideological drive. Its members were, as a rule, appointed. The new Nashi squads, on the contrary, have ideologically driven leaders, who are convinced of the importance of their mission: fighting the internal and external foes of the fatherland.

  The Nashi: Komsomol, Red Guards, or Hitlerjugend?

  How should we assess the development of Putin’s youth organization? In fact we can distinguish three stages. It started with the organization of Walking Together. This was followed by its incorporation into a bigger, nationwide follow-up organization, the Nashi, which subsequently broadened its scope to include younger children in a new club, the Mishki (Teddy Bears). Finally, Nashi gave birth to a possibly armed youth militia. Walking Together was still a more or less loosely organized Putin fan club. Its transformation into the Nashi had a threefold aim. It was, first, a deliberate attempt by the Kremlin to create an ideological vehicle for the regime. Second, it was set up to create a new elite. Third, it was meant to prevent a Ukrainian-style Orange revolution in Russia. While the organization seemed to have the capacity to achieve the first two objectives, the Kremlin had doubts about Nashi’s ability to counteract broad popular protest movements. After the beginning of the financial and economic crisis of October 2008, when there was a real danger that the opposition might build on popular disaffection, this last role became more urgent. This led in the summer of 2009 to plans to build nationwide Nashi militias. We can, therefore, observe a clear, Kremlin-led dynamic, gradually transforming a loose, nationalist, presidential fan club into a tightly organized, ideologically homogeneous, ultranationalist, paramilitary organizatio
n.

  This development was also openly advocated by the Nashi leadership, which echoed the Kremlin’s hard approach to dissent. During the Libyan revolution of 2011, for example, Boris Yakemenko, the leader of the Orthodox wing of the Nashi, praised Libyan leader Mouammar Kadhafi. At a time when the International Criminal Court was preparing to investigate Kadhafi for possible crimes against humanity, Yakemenko wrote in his blog that Kadhafi “showed the whole world how one ought to treat provocateurs who pursue revolution, destabilization and civil war. He started to destroy them. With missiles and everything that he has at his disposal.”[54] This solidarity with an international outcast and instigator of terrorism appeared in a new light when it became known that his brother, Nashi founder Vasily Yakemenko, who had become Putin’s director of youth policy, was mentioned in a state business database as cofounder, in 1994, of a company called Akbars, together with five convicted members of the Complex 29 mafia group. This mafia group, based in Tatarstan, with over one thousand members, controlled local businesses, factories, and the port of Odessa. Between 1993 and 2001 the gang had been responsible for fourteen murders, cutting off the hands and heads of vendors at street markets who refused to pay.[55] This episode indicates how thin the line had become between the Nashi on the one hand and thuggish soccer fans and violent organized crime on the other.

  The question is: what is Nashi? Is it a new version of the old Soviet Komsomol?[56] Is it a reinvention of the Chinese Red Guards? Or are those critics right who consider it a variant of the Hitler Youth or Mussolini’s blackshirts (or Hitler’s SA)? According to the Russian-American journalist Cathy Young, who grew up in Soviet Russia and knows the Komsomol from within,

  [S]ome have compared Nashi to the Komsomol, the Soviet-era Communist Youth League. But in a way, Nashi is much more frightening. By the 1960s, the Komsomol was largely devoid of genuine ideological zeal, unless you count rote recitation of party slogans. Membership in the organization, while not mandatory, was practically universal, and joining it at 14 was largely a formality. Even Komsomol activists, with few exceptions, were interested in career advancement, not political causes. Today’s Nashi undoubtedly have their share of cynical careerists, but they also include a large number of true believers.[57]

  Cathy Young is right. After Stalin’s death (and possibly already before) the Komsomol had become a bureaucratic organization that lacked the ideological zeal of its beginnings. The Maoist Red Guards had a similar structure, but they had a different function. They were a weapon in the internal power struggle between different factions in the Chinese Communist Party. This seems not to be the case in Russia, where the opposition is nonsystemic, that is, outside the existing power structure. If the Nashi cannot be compared with the Komsomol or the Red Guards, are they a new variant of the Hitlerjugend? Here we must first clarify what kind of Hitlerjugend (HJ) we are referring to, because there are big differences between the HJ before and after Hitler’s rise to power. In both cases the organization was, of course, a huge indoctrination machine. But before Hitler’s appointment to chancellor in January 1933—and also for some time afterward—membership of the Hitlerjugend was voluntary (from 1936 on it would become compulsory). These voluntary members (and/or their parents) were, undoubtedly, ideologically more motivated. Equally important was the fact that since 1926 the HJ had been a part of the paramilitary SA (Sturm Abteilung). Each year on November 9 (the date of the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch) members of the Hitlerjugend who had reached the age of eighteen went over to the SA in an official celebration ceremony. The task of the SA was to train street fighters to intimidate political opponents. After the so-called Röhm Putsch in 1934 members of the Hitlerjugend no longer went to the SA, but joined Hitler’s party, the NSDAP, directly. Moreover, the paramilitary exercises of the Hitlerjugend changed in character: they were no longer intended to prepare streetfighters for the National-Socialist Party, but to train aspirant soldiers to fight in the wars of the Reich. The Nashi, therefore, although it is supporting a regime in power, resembles in its structure and objectives more the Hitlerjugend during the phase in which the NSDAP still was an opposition party: it aims to create an ideologically motivated youth. However, a further differentiation may take place when the druzhiny are completed. As a nationwide organized gang of streetfighters, tasked with intimidating civil society, they will be more and more comparable to Mussolini’s blackshirts or Hitler’s SA. Creating such violent gangs of street thugs to intimidate and harass political opponents carries also, however, big risks, as the Russian sociologist Lilia Shevtsova rightly remarked:

  Who is to say that such youth movements as Nashi (Ours), Mestnye (Locals), and the Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard) will not go the same way as the nationalistic Rodina (Motherland) Party? After being likewise set up by the Kremlin, Rodina became a loose cannon because of the ambitions of its nationalistic leader, Dmitri Rogozin. The Kremlin had to remove the Motherland Party from the Moscow elections and expel some of its overambitious politicians. It might be more difficult to keep even the pro-Kremlin youth movements on a leash. The gangs of young Putin supporters created by the Kremlin in the wake of the Ukrainian Revolution started by harassing opposition politicians Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Kasianov and then went after foreign diplomats, attacking the British and Estonian ambassadors. The young are playing the game with evident enthusiasm, becoming more aggressive each time. They have already understood their strength and are eager to do “big projects.” The moment may come when the young wolves will feel they are manipulated and will want to become an independent force. And someone might emerge who will lead this destructive blind force that can be turned into a dangerous political weapon. The Russian authorities may never have read the story of Frankenstein and seem unaware of how experiments creating monsters may end.[58]

  Unfortunately, sooner than expected, Shevtsova’s predictions seemed to come true. In an alarming article about the growth of racist neo-Nazi organizations in Russia, Newsweek wrote that “the growth of violent racism in Russia has been encouraged by the Kremlin’s dabbling with nationalist ideology and politicized youth groups. . . . The Kremlin’s ‘political technologists’ unwittingly trained a generation of cadres to be conversant in the dark art of rousing masses of young people, organizing demonstrations, manipulating the press, and cutting deals with the authorities.”[59] The magazine added that “[a] Newsweek investigation has revealed that many of the organizers of today’s extreme nationalist groups learned their tradecraft as ‘commissars’ of the Kremlin-sponsored youth groups Nashi, Walking Together, and the Young Guard.”[60] This might have raised some doubts in the Nashi leadership as concerns the desirability of the planned Nashi militias. In the spring of 2013 on the website of Rosmolodezh, the official youth agency, an article was published, announcing that at the end of 2013 the Nashi would be transformed into a new youth organization with a new name. The title commissar would disappear. The former commissars would get a new task: “they become managers, coordinating the movement’s projects.”[61] The objective of these projects would be “the social adaptation of youth.”[62] Aleksey Makarkin, a political scientist, commented that “after December 2011 it became clear that the Nashi were not effective in the struggle against the regime’s opponents. Therefore the emphasis is [now] on less ambitious local projects, that are, maybe, more effective projects.”[63] Does this mean the end of Putin’s druzhiny project? Not quite. Because in the meantime Putin had discovered another group of devoted supporters whom he considered more capable of this task: the Cossacks.

  Notes

  1. Cf. “Istoriya voprosa: Saga o ‘Putinjugende,’” NEWSru.com (January 14, 2005).

  2. Novaya Gazeta of September 23, 2002. Quoted in “Istoriya voprosa: Saga o ‘Putinjugende.’”

  3. Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia (London: The Harvill Press, 2004), 282–283.

  4. Fedor Yermolov, “Free Speech and the Attack on Vladimir Sorokin” (August 13, 2002). Published on Sorokin’s website. http://www.srkn.ru/
criticism/yermolov.shtml.

  5. Yermolov, “Free Speech and the Attack on Vladimir Sorokin.”

  6. However, it would not take long before the movement itself would be implicated in a—this time real—mini pornographic scandal, when it came out that a leading figure of the Saint Petersburg branch produced pornographic cassettes, which he sold on the market. This scandal further tarnished the already tainted reputation of the movement. (Cf. “Lider ‘Idushchikh Vmeste’ poiman na rasprostranenii pornografii,” NEWSru.com (November 4, 2004).)

  7. “Kreml gotovit novyy molodezhnyy proekt na zamenu ‘Idushchim Vmeste.’” NEWSru.com (February 21, 2005).

  8. Some texts by Gene Sharp, such as “The Politics of Nonviolent Action,” can be freely downloaded from the website of the Albert Einstein Institution. http://www.aeinstein.org.

  9. According to Marie Jégo, Moscow correspondent for Le Monde, from 2008 to late 2010 the Nashi received—in addition to other gifts—11.5 million euros directly from the Kremlin. (Marie Jégo, “Fascistes ou fans de foot?” Le Monde (December 24, 2010).) The Kremlin has repeatedly accused Western NGOs and governments of having organized and financed the opposition groups that were active in the color revolutions. However, according to Parol Demes and Joerg Forbrig this support was rather restricted. In Ukraine “the Pora campaign was only sparsely supported by international donors. A mere $130,000 was distributed in foreign funding: by the Canadian International Development Agency, Freedom House, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. By comparison, Pora’s total financing was $1.56 million. In-kind contributions in the form of free publications, communications, and transportation exceeded an estimated $6.5 million.” (Parol Demes and Joerg Forbrig, “Pora: ‘It’s Time’ for Democracy in Ukraine,” in Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine’s Democratic Breakthrough, eds. Anders Åslund and Michael McFaul (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006), 97–98.)