International
Nashi: Is It Really The End?
By Sean Guillory, eXile 22/4/08l
May 1, 2008 - 1:47:37 PM

But the situation is not so simple as merely shutting down Nashi. As a new president comes to power in Russia, some are speculating that Nashi’s task is done and they’re no longer needed. This is perhaps wishful thinking for a host of reasons. In order to understand where Nashi is going in the post-Putin era, it is necessary to understand where they came from, and what role they have played.

  "Do you want to realize your plan? Do you want to change the world around you? Do you want to influence your country’s future? Do you want the world to remember you? Are you searching for your place in life? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, don’t despair, there is an answer."

  In America, a pitch like that would signal a "Tony Robbins" alert, but in Russia, a far more sinister organization offers the answers to your prayers: the Antifascist Democratic Youth Movement "Nashi," waiting for you with open arms.

  All you have to do is, first, click onto their site and fill out your online application. A few days after you fill it out, Nashi promises to invite you to a "get-to-know-you" pow-wow. If accepted, Nashi promises to give you "a chance to change your life, influence world politics, and become a member of the intellectual elite."

  Given the demanding, competitive environment in Putin’s Russia, it’s easy to see how Nashi’s offer would look attractive. Its flashy website, spectacular rallies, and lock-step marches produce images of power and success. Through spectacle, it projects an image of unity and devotion to a cause. Nashi considers itself the vanguard for protecting the moral, political, and cultural fiber of Russia. For most people around the world, an organization like this evokes the worse aspects of totalitarianism—where youth are mobilized to blindly fulfill the whims of a repressive regime.

  But Nashi is much more than that. It is emblematic of a new kind of youth movement that is neither a grass roots organization, nor one that is linked officially to a political party. Instead, Nashi is a creation of the Russian state, specifically of the office of the President, to serve as a counterrevolutionary force hell-bent on protecting Putin’s "national idea." Through its activism, ideology, and political and professional training, members learn that Putin’s Plan is indivisible from Nashi’s plan. Put simply, Nashi is an attempt to fulfill Martin Luther’s maxim: "Who has the youth, has the future!"

  Our Origins

Nashi was formed out of an earlier pro-Putin youth group, "Walking Together," in February 2005 by Putin’s own Karl Rove in the Kremlin, Vladislav Surkov. A few months earlier, the last in a wave of "colored revolutions" had brought Ukraine to a standstill. Youth in Ukraine, along with the youth in Kyrgyzstan and Georgia, were on the front lines against those nations’ entrenched regimes. Russia was damned if it would be next in line. So Surkov and Vasilii Yakemenko carried out a preemptive strike. They formed their own anti-colored revolution movement from above.

  Once formed, Nashi immediately branded itself as a fighter against "fascism." But its "fascists" are not the ones their grandparents fought. Its fascist evildoers are the harbingers of colored revolution: exiled oligarchs, liberals, oppositionists, foreign states, Western NGOs, and anyone else willing to challenge Putin’s hegemony. As Nashi’s manifesto reads, "The struggle against fascism today is integral to the struggle for Russia’s integrity and sovereignty." Nashi’s formula for identifying its enemies is beautiful in its simplicity, genetically imprinted into its very name. There are "ours," or nashi, and there are "theirs," or ne nashi.

  Nashi has grown modestly over the last three years. Its membership is estimated between 60,000 to 100,000. It has at least 3,000 to 5,000 full and part-time activists. Its rank and file is centered in Russia’s two capitals, and the provincial centers Tula, Ivanovo, Vladimir, Voronezh, and Yaroslavl. Nashi’s total budget is unknown, but it must be a nice paper stack considering its spending. Kommersant reported last July that its summer camp Seliger 2007 cost over $20 million. Even its smaller campaigns are expensive. Its "Christmas Father Frost" action was estimated cost around $1.5 million to stage. Nashi officials call these numbers exaggerations, and they probably are, but I don’t think by much.

  Where the bulk of Nashi’s money comes from is also shrouded in mystery. Most of it is assumed to flow from Surkov’s office, probably laundered through a few state agencies. Corporations like Gazprom and foundations like the Civic Club are also sponsors. The latter is a fund set up by United Russia that has already granted Nashi $400,000 for Camp Seliger 2008. Nashi’s financial future appears secure as well. It has well placed allies in two state agencies that fund youth groups. Boris Yakemenko—Nashi’s ideologist and the brother of Nashi leader Vasily Yakemenko-- and Irina Pleshvheva, a Nashi commissar, are members of Russia’s Public Chamber, which controls $62 million in grants to develop Russian "civil society." Nashi also has direct access to the over $6 million allotted to the Committee for Youth Affairs. The Committee’s leadership is lead by former Nashisti Vasilii Yakemenko, Pavel Tarakanov (chairman), and Sergei Belokonev (deputy chairman). Given these sweet ties and access to state funds and power, Nashi’s fortunes look bright indeed.

  Our Muscle

Nashi may be a creature of the state, but it’s on the ground, it’s got genuine street muscle. It commands a cadre of street fighters who’ve been implicated in a number of violent attacks against its "fascist" youth rivals—the National Bolsheviks, Red Youth Vanguard, and even the Communist Youth League. The most infamous incident occurred in August 2005, when 40 club-wielding Nashisti in masks raided a joint gathering of the National Bolsheviks, the Young Communist League, and Red Youth Vanguard at a Communist Party office in Moscow. The attacks left scores of young left-wing activists hospitalized with concussions and broken bones.

As the Nashisti left the scene on a hired bus, local police, clearly not informed in-advance of the attack, arrested 24 of the attackers, only to let them go a few hours later. "A call came from above ordering us to release the detainees," a policeman told Kommersant. "They told us when we were questioning them that it wasn't worth the effort, that they would soon be released."

  This attack was followed by another in January 2006, when thirty suspected Nashisti attacked a National-Bolshevik rally with clubs and pellet guns. The Russian media have cataloged scores of other attacks. To date, not a single Nashist has been charged.

  Its rivals, however, haven’t fared so well. A few weeks ago seven of anti-Kremlin youths—Roman Popkov, Nazir Magomedov, Vladimir Titov, Elena Parovskaya, Aleksei Makarov, Dmitri Elezarov, and Sergei Medvedev—were sentenced to 18 to 36 months for defending themselves against Nashi attackers in April 2007.

  nlike the Komsomol’s Civil War generation, who were cut down, tortured, and imprisoned by real enemies, Nashi fights its adversaries via proxy. It’s suspected when Nashi wants to stomp its rivals, it hires soccer hooligans eager to lend their bone-breaking services. Vasilii Yakemenko admitted as much in an interview with Novaya Gazeta in 2005. When asked if he would use football hooligans against protesters, he responded, "If a group of a few thousand people with physical strength [had been] brought in from Moscow to counter the demonstrations in Kiev [during the Orange Revolution], there would be no trace left of the demonstrators. . . . If we need [football hooligans] for some reason, I do not see any problem in this." Though Yakemenko claims he’s against violence, he has no problem reaching out to those who aren’t. For this "antifascist," skinheads are "simply socially maladjusted guys," with whom one can and should work."

  Last fall, Nashi organized some of their "socially maladjusted guys" into the Voluntary Youth Militia (DMD). DMD’s official purpose is to patrol the streets with the police, keep public order, and organize sport events (rugby appears to be a favorite). The DMD serves as the de facto security during Nashi events and rallies. Its unofficial purpose is to act as Nashi’s muscle. As a disgruntled Nashi member named "Ivan" explained in an interview with Kommersant last summer:

  [The] Voluntary youth militia, well, [are] sort of "cleaners." There have already been cases when they’ve beaten people who have spread information against Nashi. They can probably catch you anywhere. They are football fanatics, athletes, and ordinary thugs. They enforce the ideology and they fulfill their duties with pleasure.

  [Their duties include] keeping order in the movement and its borders, creating chaos in those meetings and marches which haven’t been approved by the Kremlin. In the spring DMD arranged provocations in practically every anti-Kremlin "Dissenters’ March." They provoked the police and threw smoke bombs and planted [the bombs] in the bags of the marchers.

  There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of "Ivan’s" testimony, especially considering that DMD’s Federal Coordinator is Roman Verbitsky. According to witnesses, Verbitsky was involved in the violent August 2005 attack on the Communist youth gathering. At that time, Verbitsky led the Gladiators, a football hooligan gang that follows Spartak.

  The Voluntary Youth Militia (DMD) has grown steadily over the last six months. It claims to have nineteen chapters with an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 members. Documents provided by "Ivan" show that the DMD was heavily funded in the run up to the Duma elections. The budget for the DMD’s Moscow branch for August 2007 was around $30,000 per month. Funding of its regional branches was about ten times smaller.

  Black pr 101

Nashi’s actions of choice are protest and "campaign." It has launched several of these "campaigns" over the last three years. Nashi’s actions can be irritating, as with their constant hounding of British Ambassador Anthony Brenton; or downright embarrassing, like the Bronze Solider campaign against "Estonian state fascism"; and even witty, like their presentation of the cookbook "1000 Recipes for Cabbage Soup" to the American embassy. The thrust of most of Nashi actions is to become a gnat in their enemy’s ear.

  Attention-grabbing public campaigns are the ace in the hole for any youth organization. Among other things, they can be damn good fun for the youths involved. You get to march around the big city, shout, hang out, meet people, and, most importantly, feel like you’re making a difference. Fawning media attention turns hyped up boys into mini media stars. Nashi’s actions are often staged as carnivalesque spectacles, combining elements of humor and the whiff of violence with high-stakes politics. But political comedy doesn’t come easy. Comedians are needed. And Nashi is just the place to train Russia’s future masters in the arts of black PR.

  Ironically, these tactics are taken directly from the playbook of Nashi’s "fascist" opponents, the color revolutionaries. In Belgrade, Tblisi and Kiev, youth movements employed carnivalesque spectacle to discredit the entrenched regimes; here in Russia, Nashi has turned this on its head, using youths and comedic spectacle to discredit the opposition.

  Nothing shows Nashi increasing use of the black PR arts more than its recent action against Kommersant. Over the past year, the popular business daily has published a number of articles exposing Nashi’s darker side. After Kommersant published an article titled, "Nashi has become alien," in late January, Nashi decided it was time for some payback. What offended them most about the Kommersant article was its suggestion that Kremlin officials had grown weary of Nashi’s antics and were ready to abandon them. For Russia’s political elite, Medvedev’s victory signaled a change in the political winds. "Colored revolution" was no longer a threat, making Nashi’s "jubilant thugs unnecessary," in the words of one anonymous Kremlin official. As a result, word of Nashi’s impending doom spread throughout the Russian press. The organization’s very future was at stake, at least in the public’s eye.

Nashi wanted to avenge this "slander." According to an internal letter from Nashi’s press secretary, Kristina Potupchik, they decided to wage a campaign that would "create intolerable conditions for Kommersant. To block their work. To psychologically and physically ruin them. Revenge is necessary." The aim was to soil the paper’s highly regarded reputation.

  On March 4th, a thousand Nashi activists hit the Moscow streets posing as Kommersant employees. passing out tens of thousands of rolls of toilet paper stamped with Kommersant’s logo, a fake letter from its editor, Andrei Vasiliev announcing the new toilet-paper format, and the mobile number of Yulia Taratuta, a co-author of the offending article. Nashi activists told passersby that the rolls were part of a campaign to market the daily’s new multipurpose format. Activists even planted them in the bathrooms of the State Duma. I’m sure there were more than a few deputies happy to christen the new product. The action also came with a well coordinated media campaign. Twelve Kommersant billboards were placed on Moscow’s major avenues reading, "Don’t fear the new. Now on toilet paper!"; "Everything for our money"; "Everything is in our power"; and "We don’t hide secret companies."

  Nashi’s scatological assault didn’t stop there. Its hackers launched a "Denial of Service" attack on Kommersant’s website, shutting it down for five hours, bombarded Vasiliev with spam, and perhaps in a display of Nashi comedic genius, dropped a link bomb. A search on Google or Yandex for the word zasrantsy (assholes) lists the Kommersant website first. The cyber attack cost the business daily about $155,000.

  Our Present, Our Future

Why would anyone join Nashi? What is its future in a post-Putin Russia? Most Nashi members aren’t violent thugs, but rather ambitious careerists. One such Nashist is Maksim Novikov, 18, a student at Moscow State Institute for International Relations. In an interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Novikov, appears as a model student and a model Nashist, carries a copy of Vladislav Surkov’s Russian Political Culture: A Utopian View, which he marks up with a pen.Though he agrees with the basic principles of Survkov’s so-called "sovereign democracy," he displays no emotional attachment to it. He hopes to someday study abroad, but when asked if he will remain abroad once he gets out of Russia, he says he would like to serve his country. "I am after all a patriot."

  But Nashi wasn’t his first choice or really on his radar for youth groups. Novikov explained that at first he thought about joining the Communists, but was turned off by their hostility to the free market. He found Nashi "almost by chance." He found Vasilii Yakemenko’s email on the net, who promptly arranged a meeting between Novikov and one of Nashi’s Moscow commissars. After some discussion, he joined. Now Novikov speaks about Nashi in terms of "we."

  For careerist-oriented youths like Novikov, joining Nashi is a no-brainer. The organization has already proved its powerful connections with The Man. But now it’s moving a step further into the realm of career-advancement-opportunity. Just like its Komsomol predecessor, Nashi is beginning to develop programs for training elites. Some of its new "projects" include developing a business school, a political institute, and programs to recruit recent graduates for business ventures. One example of the latter is a project called "Our Builders," where students and young professionals are employed to work in construction projects for the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. Other Nashi projects focus on promoting Orthodox Christianity, patriotism, paramilitary training, tourism, and even a brand of Nashi clothing lines developed by designer and commissar Antonia Shapavolova.

But young Nashisti like Novikov are not the only types signing up for the organization. He belongs to the "ones who get it," according to Andrei Dmitrievsky, a Natsbol who went undercover in Nashi in 2006. Dmitrievsky discovered three types of Nashi members: The "ones who get it" are youth who join Nashi in order to get an education and build a career, but also buy into its politics. Next are the "careerists." They are similar to the first group except they don’t buy any of the political bullshit. For them Nashi is purely a means to an end. Lastly there are the "scenesters." They agree with the politics, but mostly see Nashi as a social club for hooking up, hanging out, and taking advantage of all the perks.

Given its expanding infrastructure, it’s clear that Nashi isn’t going to fade away in the foreseeable future, as some media had speculated over the past couple of months. It’s casting its net wide enough to include all types, whether they’re Putin fanatics, career-driven go-getters, warriors for sovereign democracy, the "socially maladjusted" street thugs, or the horny teenager looking to get laid. (They need these too. One of Nashi’s slogans is "I want three," as in three kids.) Like with every youth movement, in order to stay in business it needs to evolve. This means creating new methods, new wars and new enemies to fight. Especially enemies. Without internal enemies, Nashi has no raison d’etre.

In this sense, articles like Kommersant’s are a blessing in disguise. They allow Nashi to spin a negative article into a war, rallying the faithful to battle, launching a full fledged "media campaign" to inflict "blows" on the "political system of Russia," as one of the Novaya Gazeta documents read.

Since the elections, Nashi’s new enemy has an even more ominous whiff than before. In an eerie revival of the Stalinist concept of "enemies with a party card," Nashi’s new enemies are from the "intellectual elements of the political elite" who participated in the presidential campaign, but want to reverse Putin’s course. Nashi is defining a new mission for itself in a post-Putin world. The struggle now is for a new kind of purity or orthodoxy: Hold true to Putin’s Plan, build a new elite, and continue the fight against Russia’s internal and external enemies. The purpose of all this is to send President-elect Medvedev a clear message. "Without Nashi, nothing is possible."