Putin's Wars (25 page)

A second subdivision of Nashi that was to contribute to its planned transformation
into a tough organization was the DMD (
Dobrovolnye molodezhnye druzhiny).
These “volunteer youth squads” were led by Roman Verbitsky
.
This Nashi section had the task of providing volunteers to help the local police in
keeping order. In March 2008 Verbitsky declared that “the voluntary youth squads operate
in 19 regions and comprise 5–6 thousand people. Their main activity is patrolling
the streets together with law enforcement authorities.”
^[42]
This organization was intended to become the core of a new, federation-wide system
of volunteer squads which in three years would become a force that would be present
in more than half of Russia’s regions and comprise at least a hundred thousand volunteers.
^[43]
As the godfathers of this new, ambitious project, Vladislav Surkov and Vasily Yakemenko
were again mentioned. Both Kremlin confidants would have taken the initiative during
the 2009 Nashi summer camp.

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]

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.

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 organization.

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: