The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (27 page)

Even today, the students won’t say entirely what they had planned for that night and the next day. It had been Barrios’s responsibility to plan the student movement’s counterresponse in the event that the regime tried to steal the election. And at a few minutes past one o’clock in the morning, with the government still silent on the referendum’s result, the moment they hoped would never come had arrived: the student movement had to go out and defend its votes. “It was a scenario we had prepared for,” recalls Barrios. “I remember we all started
leaving the room. We only had six bulletproof vests, so we gave them to the most recognizable of our leaders that were going to be out there protesting. And I remember there were not enough for me.”

As Barrios was about to leave, he stopped for a moment to call his parents. His mother picked up the phone.

“How are you doing, honey?” she said.

“Mom, shit got complicated,” he replied.

“What happened? Did we lose the election?”

“No, we won, but they might want to take it away.” And then Barrios remembers that his mom said the “cutest thing ever.”

“Don’t worry, honey, these things happen sometimes. We’ll get them next time.”

“No,” Barrios told his mom. “We’re not going to get them next time. I mean, we won the election, and we are going to push through.”

“What does that mean? When are you coming home?” his mom asked.

“I don’t think I’m coming home today, Mom.”

“So that means you are coming home tomorrow? When?”

“I don’t think I am coming home at all, Mom,” he replied. His mother dropped the phone and started crying. His father picked it up, and Douglas told him what he had told his mother. His father demanded that he tell him where he was. He heard his father repeating, “Where are you? Where are you?” as he said good-bye and hung up. Barrios then took the battery out of his cell phone. He put it in one pocket and the phone in another as he headed outside. He climbed onto a motorcycle, heading for the next location, where they would activate their plan. Just as he started to pull out, someone yelled, “Douglas, Douglas, wait, wait! They’re going to announce the results.”

Barrios jumped off the bike and ran back inside.

They had won. At 1:20 a.m., the vice president conceded the election. It would be several hours before Chávez would face his own supporters. To this day, the final vote tally from December 2, 2007, has never been released. And although it is impossible to say, it might never have happened if Chávez hadn’t closed down RCTV.

It looked like a party: young men and women dancing to rock music and belting out songs. Wearing orange hats, scarves, armbands, and ribbons, tens of thousands of Ukrainians, many of them young people, lived in the streets of Kiev for nearly three weeks. They had flooded Independence Square and other corners of the capital to protest a stolen election and stand up for their candidate. As the November temperatures fell, they bundled up, had a little more to drink, and joined together in chanting, “Together, we are many! We cannot be defeated!” Before the end of the year, this outburst of “people power” had overturned a fraudulent election and returned Ukrainians to the voting booth, where they democratically elected the country’s leading opposition candidate.

The colorfully named Orange Revolution was hailed as a peaceful democratic uprising. And it was. But the youth activists who had played a role in organizing the street protests in Kiev that winter had not worked from an entirely blank slate. The Ukrainian youth movement, known as Pora, had benefited from consultations and advice from Serbia’s Otpor, the youth who had helped bring down Miloševic in 2000. They had also had conversations and shared ideas with Kmara, the young leaders who helped propel the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003.
And if you looked closely at the sea of orange in Kiev’s “tent city” that November, you would have seen that others had come to learn from the Ukrainian experience. Young Kazakhs had come to see the protests firsthand. Belarusian activists mingled in the crowd and even hoisted their national flag in support of their new Ukrainian friends. Young people from across former Soviet republics were there to see what it meant to make a “color revolution.”

The Kremlin did not need to wait until it saw Russian youth in the streets of Moscow or St. Petersburg to learn its lesson. Having witnessed the role that opposition youth groups played in Serbia, Georgia, and especially in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution, the Kremlin decided to manufacture a youth movement of its own. The result is Nashi. The group, which struck a militant nationalistic tone from the beginning, is today one of the key instruments for intimidating and harassing opposition leaders, civil society activists, and Kremlin
critics. On the day I arrived in Moscow in April 2010, Nashi (which literally means “Ours”) was celebrating its fifth anniversary. The celebration’s keynote speaker was none other than Putin’s right-hand man, Vladislav Surkov, then the Kremlin’s leading ideologist who is believed to be behind Nashi’s creation. Surkov stirred a raucous crowd of Nashi delegates, roughly two thousand twentysomethings. “
We see what’s happening in Kyrgyzstan—that means we are needed and have to be at our posts,” Surkov told the crowd at a high-end Moscow conference hall, referring to the near civil war that had recently broken out on Russia’s border. “Those who chose for themselves the political fight will never be able to relax again.” His remarks were followed by Vasily Yakemenko, Nashi’s leader and official founder. “
The Nashi movement is the movement of those who feel outraged and mad by what they see around them,” Yakemenko told the assembled. “Our movement knows no authority except the authority of the policies of Medvedev and Putin.”

One Kremlin official who regularly meets with Nashi leaders described the origins of the organization as something akin to a preemptive strike. “
After the Orange Revolution, all the opposition here started to talk about taking control of the streets and making an Orange Revolution here. We understood very well that an Orange Revolution would be awful, it would destroy the country.” So the government set out to recruit young people, mostly between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, from the country’s provincial universities and vocational schools. “For some of them, so-called patriotism came more naturally,” he explained. “They can be organized and say Americans want to destroy our country, Americans want to make revolution, so let’s go to protect our country.”

And they made their presence felt almost immediately. On May 12, 2005, more than fifty thousand Nashi members occupied the streets of Moscow in a massive show of support for President Vladimir Putin and his regime. Although most Russian activists at the time thought the government’s fears of a homegrown revolution were exaggerated, any talk of an Orange Revolution stopped. The message to anyone who may have been inspired by the events in Ukraine was simple: You think you will own the streets?
We
own the streets.

Five years on, the Kremlin continues to nurture the youth movement
it founded. The group is one of the largest recipients of government aid allocated for Russian civil society organizations.
In 2008, Nashi was awarded more than $500,000, or roughly 1 percent of the government’s budget for NGO grants.
It receives an even greater share of its funding from private businesses that are prodded by the government to be generous with its pet project. A large portion of this money goes to support the pro-Kremlin youth movement’s summer camp on the banks of Lake Seliger, about five hours northeast of Moscow. Members enjoy the same activities young people might enjoy at any sleepaway camp. The daily schedule is filled with opportunities for kayaking, swimming, rafting, and long bicycle rides. But these summer sessions also serve as an ideological boot camp. The Nashi youth attend political lectures praising Putin’s leadership, and they are taught that members of the political opposition and the human rights community represent threats to the motherland. In 2007,
the organizers made headlines for a part of the camp called “the red-light district.” There campers could view the faces of opposition leaders like Garry Kasparov and the former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov superimposed on posters of scantily clad women stuffing money into their underwear. (They were called “political prostitutes.”)
During the 2010 summer retreat, the camp put together an exhibit that included photographic montages of the impaled heads of some of the country’s leading political activists, including the eighty-four-year-old former Soviet dissident Ludmilla Alexeeva and the political opposition’s Boris Nemtsov. Despite these displays, Nashi’s funding has never come into question; it has only grown.

For many people, Nashi is no less than a modern incarnation of the Soviet Union’s Komsomol, the former youth wing of the Communist Party. The ideological emphasis, demands of strict loyalty, even the colors and symbols, are reminiscent. And the Kremlin has enticed many to join by holding out membership as a way to get ahead. “
Have you heard of Komsomol? Nashi is approximately the same,” says Ilya Yashin, a member of the Solidarity opposition movement. “You have to be loyal. If you want to have a career, you have to put on a T-shirt with a Putin image on the chest and then march all together along the Lenin Prospect. If you don’t, then you are marginal.”

I met Yashin and another member of the Solidarity movement in
a bohemian restaurant in downtown Moscow, a short walk from the Kremlin. When I asked him about Nashi, Yashin’s colleague started to laugh, saying, “He’s an expert.” That’s because Yashin, who is only twenty-eight years old, is a frequent target for the Kremlin youth group. He was an early critic of Nashi’s activities, and the group’s members have responded to his criticism by harassing him, vandalizing his car, and coming out to jeer during his speeches before supporters. They have also tried to smear him online. A few weeks before we met, a video clip appeared on the Nashi Web site supposedly showing Yashin paying a police officer a bribe to avoid receiving a traffic ticket. Yashin is adamant the video was doctored and he hasn’t bribed anyone. A few days after we met, another video surfaced showing several prominent opposition figures having sex with the same woman. It was later learned that the woman, named Katya, had seduced these and other opposition figures and taken them back to the same apartment, where they were unknowingly filmed. Although he didn’t have sex with the woman, Yashin quickly came forward and admitted he too had been seduced by Katya and led back to her apartment. When he got there, she offered him cocaine. Realizing that it was a honey trap set by the regime (and incidentally, right from the old Soviet espionage playbook), Yashin left immediately. He claims Nashi organized the whole operation against him and others, and he filed a complaint with the state prosecutor’s office for invasion of privacy and distribution of pornography.

There is admittedly something farcical about operatives from a Kremlin youth league trying to make sex tapes to discredit opposition leaders. But there is another side of Nashi and similar pro-government youth groups that makes people far more nervous. From the beginning, Nashi had a clear paramilitary purpose. Members who want to advance in the organization are required to participate in boot camps, pass a military assault course, and spend time on the shooting range. They run drills on how to defend against an Orange Revolution.
A similar youth group, tied to United Russia, known as the Young Guard, even practiced attacking a “tent city” like the one that sprang up in Kiev during the Orange Revolution. In the exercise, these young shock troops broke up the makeshift village with baseball bats.

The only trouble was, there was no Orange Revolution to squelch. Having created an organization of roughly 120,000 angry youth, the
Russian government didn’t seem to know what to do with them. The regime trained, motivated, and politicized this muscular movement and then risked leaving it without a purpose, without a mission to fulfill.
When such a force is created and then left to its own devices, a tragedy like the one that occurred in the early morning of Saturday, November 6, 2010, should hardly come as a surprise.

On that morning, the thirty-year-old journalist Oleg Kashin returned to his apartment after a late dinner party.
When he arrived home, two men brutally attacked him with steel rods. He was left a bloody heap in the street. They fractured his skull, broke both halves of his jaw, and crushed one leg. He was rushed to a Moscow hospital and left in a medically induced coma for days. As has happened to other Russian journalists who have been assaulted, his attackers broke his fingers, tearing several fingers from their joints. One finger had to be amputated. Although no one knows who perpetrated the attack,
the focus of Kashin’s reporting is well-known: pro-Kremlin youth groups. In August, the Young Guard had published Kashin’s photograph on its Web site. Across the image were the words “Will be punished.”

Of course, the Kremlin’s strategy for engaging its youth cannot be all force. As useful as battalions of young loyal militants might be, it is equally important for the broad swath of Russian youth to be either supportive of the regime or, at the very least, not interested enough in politics to raise a dissenting voice. Here Putin—both in his image and in his rhetoric—had long been successful. After experiencing the country’s declining fortunes in the 1990s, young Russians took immense pride in Putin’s effort to restore international respect to their country. Polling data consistently showed that Russian youth are some of the most supportive backers of Putin’s hard-edged, tough-talking nationalistic style. While they may have no memory of life in the Soviet Union, they craved for their country the recognition and great-power status that the Communist state enjoyed. Indeed,
one poll conducted in 2007 indicated that 63 percent of young Russians believe that the “collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

A comparison between Ukrainian and Russian youth was telling.
In Ukraine, people younger than thirty were three times more likely to join the Orange Revolution than any other age-group. Meanwhile, in Russia, a large majority of young people accepted Putin’s explanation of the revolution in Ukraine as a Western conspiracy directed at weakening the motherland.
The same 2007 poll indicated that 89 percent of young people did not want an Orange Revolution in Russia. Rather than political change, they wanted a Russia that is strong, stable, and powerful on the world stage. The none-too-subtle images of a macho Putin riding a three-wheeled Harley-Davidson, hunting big game while shirtless, or wearing his judo black belt as he throws some unfortunate sparring partner to the floor are the embodiment of what many young Russians want their country to be. Putin was, in a word, cool. “
You really have to admit that Putin and his rhetoric is very popular in Russia,” says Dmitri Makarov, a twenty-eight-year-old Russian human rights activist. “You simply cannot deny that, especially among my generation, which is more conservative, more nationalistic, more Stalinist than the generation before it.”