Putin's Wars (24 page)

One of the Nashi movement’s objectives was, indeed, the transmission of the ideology
of the ruling elite to the younger generation. Therefore, the Nashi manifesto” deserves
a closer look. It is one of the rare Kremlin-inspired texts that gives a deeper insight
into the ideology of the regime. The manifesto starts with inviting young Russians
to participate in the “megaproject of our generation, the megaproject Russia.” And
the text continues: “The development of the world involves competition between peoples.”
In this competition “it is our goal to make Russia a global leader of the twenty-first
century.” This leadership is possible, the manifesto continues, because, as one should
not forget, “the twentieth century had been Russia’s century.” This was due to three
events. The first event is the Russian Revolution, which was “an effort to modernize”
the country (no mention is made of Stalinist mass murders and repression). The second
event is the victory of Russia in the Second World War, which saved the world from
“a global hegemony by another country” and which accelerated “the disintegration of
the colonial empires.” (Here nothing is said about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, nor
about the
new
colonization that took place after the war inside the Soviet bloc.) The third event
that is mentioned is the end of communism at the end of the twentieth century. It
is stressed that this process was “autonomous.”

The manifesto explains why Russia is destined to become a global leader. The text
refers to the “Eurasian heartland” theory of Halford J. MacKinder, without, however,
mentioning MacKinder’s name.
^[19]
“Russia,” it states, “is the central military-strategic space of the Eurasian continent.
Control over it is important for those who want to dominate Eurasia and the whole
world. It was precisely for this reason that Napoleon and Hitler dreamed of conquering
it. Today, it is the United States on the other hand that is trying to control Eurasia
and the whole world, and international terrorism on the other.” Against these threats,
the text continues, “a strong, independent Russian government” is necessary, which
is based on the sound foundation of sovereign democracy. This sovereign democracy
is threatened by two internal enemies: the liberals “who are ready to give up the
country’s independence in the name of the freedom of the individual” and the communists
and fascists who give up personal freedom in the name of a stronger government. There
follows a severe criticism of the weak governments of the 1990s, and the next paragraph,
entitled “Our Revolution,” praises Putin, who, “after having strengthened the government,
was the first to really challenge the regime of oligarchic capitalism.” Because Putin
brought the stability the country needed so badly for its modernization, Putin is
the natural leader for the Nashi movement. The Nashi is Putin’s avant-garde, because
“our task . . . is to be at the head of the modernization of the country.” This modernization
is not the only task for the members of Nashi. Other tasks include “the defense of
the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia,” and to counter the “geopolitical
games” of the West in the post-Soviet space, with their explicit goal of
vydavlivanie:
pushing Russia out of world politics. Further, the Nashi should fight “extremist organizations
of fascist and liberal nature.” To accomplish these important tasks for the fatherland
Nashi members should have special character profiles and competences. They are expected
to be patriotic and optimistic, think strategically, have social responsibility, be
constructive and open to new developments, and have leadership capabilities and great
professionalism.

This was the manifesto, but what was the practice? In practice Nashi’s activities
were concerned less with the modernization of Russian society than with the persecution
and harassment of imagined internal and external foes. The first case that gained
media attention was that of Anthony Brenton, British ambassador in Moscow. After Brenton
had spoken at a conference held by the opposition movement “The Other Russia” in August
2006, he was systematically harassed by Nashi militants. They picketed the British
embassy and followed the ambassador for six months with a banner demanding that he
apologize. According to
The Sunday Times
, “They shouted abuse as he shopped for cat food, obstructed his car, advertised his
movements on the internet and disrupted him when he spoke publicly.”
^[20]
The harassment only stopped temporarily when the British government officially
protested, but was resumed after the Duma elections of December 2007, when fifty Nashi
members again picketed the embassy with a portrait of the ambassador with the text
“Loser” (referring to Kasparov’s political party, which had not managed to get a seat
in the new Duma). The demonstrators handed a letter to the embassy guard destined
for the British queen, demanding that she recall the ambassador.
^[21]

Another high-placed victim was the ambassador of Estonia, Marina Kaljurand. She was
attacked when the Estonian government removed a Soviet-era war monument, the Bronze
Soldier, from the center of Tallinn. Starting April 30, 2007, members of Nashi picketed
the Estonian embassy in Moscow. They blocked the street on both sides, making it impossible
for the embassy’s staff to leave. Rocks and paint were thrown at the embassy building
and slogans painted on the walls, such as “We reached Berlin, we will reach Tallinn
too.” Day and night Nashi members played loud music in front of the building. The
embassy personnel noted that “the young people were equipped with everything necessary
to maintain round the clock presence, including portable toilets, a field kitchen
and electricity supply.”
^[22]
Tents had even been erected in front of the embassy in which the protesters were
taking turns to sleep. On May 1, 2007, the Estonian flag was torn down from the embassy
and shredded into pieces. On May 2, the ambassador had to break through a Nashi cordon
to give a press conference at the offices of the magazine
Argumenty i Fakty.
On her arrival, there were attempts to attack her physically in the press room and
gas had to be used by the guards to set her free. On the street outside rioting youths
attacked the ambassador’s car and tore off the Estonian flag. These attacks on the
embassy were preceded by organized riots in the center of the Estonian capital Tallinn
on April 26 and 27 by Estonian Russophones, led by Russian Nashi activists who had
come over specially from Russia.
^[23]

On April 27, cyber attacks started, aimed at paralyzing the web servers of the Estonian
government. These attacks originated from Russian state IP addresses. Due to the attacks
access by foreign users of the government web pages had to be restricted.
^[24]
Nashi also seemed to be involved in cyber attacks on the Georgian government’s
website before and during Russia’s war against Georgia in August 2008. In a report
of the Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence in the Estonian capital Tallinn,
the authors wrote: “In the case of possible Russian government involvement with the
cyber attacks on the Georgian government website in July and August 2008, the available
evidence supports a strong likelihood of GRU/FSB [respectively, the Russian military
and the internal secret service] planning and direction at high level while relying
on Nashi intermediaries and the phenomenon of crowdsourcing to obfuscate their involvement
and implement their strategy.”
^[25]
The close, almost symbiotic cooperation between Russia’s secret services and the
youth movement is particularly interesting. In this context the project of the “Kremlin
School of Bloggers,” set up in 2009 by the Fund for Effective Politics of Kremlin
ideologue Gleb Pavlovsky, should also be mentioned. The “Kremlin School of Bloggers”
sells the Kremlin’s policies to the young Internet community by writing blogs, attacking
opposition websites, and posting ideological YouTube videos.
^[26]
The name of its website (liberty.ru) is Free World (
Svobodnyy Mir
), and its motto is—why not?—“Freedom is better than no freedom.”

Other Nashi attacks were targeted at supposed internal foes, such as independent Russian
media, opposition politicians, and journalists daring to criticize the regime. They
were all categorized as fascists.
^[27]
One of these attacks concerned the paper
Kommersant
, one of the few remaining bastions of the free press in Russia. On March 3, 2008—as
a reaction to a critical article on the Nashi movement in this paper—people posing
as employees began handing out rolls of toilet paper, emblazoned with Kommersant’s
logo, outside various Moscow metro stations. The rolls contained the mobile phone
number of the reporter who wrote the critical article. Russian websites published
a leaked e-mail, written by Nashi’s press secretary, Kristina Potupchik, with the
following order: “Block their work. Psychologically and physically pester them. Revenge
is essential.” The e-mail suggested buying up the entire print of the paper and destroying
it, picketing its presses, and using hackers to bring down its website.
^[28]
Editors of the opposition paper
Novaya Gazeta
received a box containing the severed ears of a donkey with a note “from the presidential
administration.”
^[29]
Then, in October 2009, a persecution campaign started against Alexander Podrabinek,
a fifty-six-year-old former Soviet dissident, who had published an article on September
21, 2009, in the online paper
Ezhednevnyy Zhurnal
(Daily Paper), in which he criticized Soviet veterans who insisted that a Moscow restaurant
with the name
Antisovetskaya
(Anti-Soviet), change its name to
Sovetskaya
(Soviet).
^[30]
Podrabinek had suggested that those who were proud of being Soviet veterans, seemed
to be proud of the repressive, KGB-led gulag system of the former Soviet Union. Nashi
activists picketed his house with placards demanding his apology for offending the
veterans. They also “visited” the editorial offices of one of the newspapers for which
he worked. After receiving phone calls with death threats, Podrabinek went into hiding.
^[31]
Foreign papers that had dared to suggest that Nashi’s activities resembled those
of the
Hitlerjugend
were sued by Nashi for defamation.
^[32]
Suing, by the way, became one of the preferred weapons used by Nashi to harass
its opponents. Nashi has filed suits against Yevgenia Albats, Boris Nemtsov (more
than once), Garry Kasparov, radio station Ekho Moskvy, the papers Kommersant and Novaya
Gazeta, as well as the online paper Gazeta.ru.
^[33]

In 2008 some foreign observers thought that the Nashi movement was running out of
steam and was gradually losing a sense of purpose.
^[34]
The reality, however, was different. Shortly before this, the Nashi had set up
a junior organization, the Mishki (Teddy Bears). This group had the objective of strengthening
the ideological grip of the Kremlin on a still younger generation: children aged seven
to fifteen. “If Nashi can be likened to the Komsomol, the Soviet era organization
of high school and university students” wrote the
Moscow Times
, “then Mishki is a throwback to the Pioneers, the children’s group of the same period
. . . . Their essential purpose, just like Nashi, is to support Putin. ‘I love the
Mishki! I love Russia! I love Putin! Together we will win.’”
^[35]
How these young children were manipulated became clear, when, during the conflict
over the removal of the Soviet war memorial in Tallinn, a group of Mishki was brought
to the Estonian embassy in Moscow and started to color in a giant poster of a statue
of a soldier outside the embassy. Masha Lipman, from the Moscow Carnegie Center, expressed
her concern. She considered it an alarming development and reminiscent of Soviet-era
groups like the Young Pioneers and the Little Octobrists. “I think any youth organization
directed and guided from above brings back very unpleasant associations with the Soviet
days. And also Nashi, I think, is a very unsavory organization, given their record
of harassing officials, of enjoying complete impunity . . . . So [the fact that they
are] ideological guides to still younger kids—to me it’s a very unpleasant trend.”
^[36]

Nashi, at the same time, prepared another plan to strengthen its grip on Russian civil
society. At the core of this new development was Stal, a subdivision of Nashi that
was in charge of organizing street protests. “Stal” not only means “steel” in Russian,
but it has the additional advantage that it evokes the name of Russia’s “man of steel,”
Joseph Stalin. According to
Le Monde
’s Moscow correspondent Marie Jégo, “the group Stal . . . has just endorsed the theses
of Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda of the Hitler regime. The militants
of Stal are asked to know them by heart.”
^[37]
It is not surprising, therefore, that the leader of Stal, Nadezhda Tarasenko, proudly
declared that “one thousand activists in my movement are not afraid of using tough
methods to stop America’s influence on Russia.”
^[38]
Tough methods? Yes, because the movement was still considered too soft for its
masters in the Kremlin. While Nashi was used for pro-Kremlin rallies, Stal was used
as Nashi’s “tough vanguard.” Before, such tough actions had often been outsourced
by Nashi to external groups. In August 2005, for instance, violent members of the
Spartak soccer fan club The Gladiators attacked leftists of the National Bolsheviks
in Moscow with stun guns and baseball bats, after which four of their victims had
to be hospitalized. A Gladiators member told the paper
Kommersant
that “the Gladiators work closely with Nashi and provide security for their events.”
He added that “the guys receive $400–$600 for their services.”
^[39]
This kind of outsourcing of violence seemed to be happening with more frequency.
However, the leaders of Nashi were also determined to set up a pool of fighters
inside
their organization. Stal was one of them. When, for instance, on December 6, 2011,
opposition rallies were organized in Moscow to protest against the rigged Duma elections,
a counterdemonstration was organized by Stal, backed by 50,000 police and 11,500 Interior
Ministry troops.
^[40]
However, the rank and file of Nashi was more difficult to mobilize. Nashi members
attending a second demonstration for Putin, organized on December 12, 2011, had to
be paid.
^[41]