The promotion of martial virtues and patriotism, it continued, should lead to a “rebirth of Russian state power” (vozrozhdenie rossiyskoy derzhavy). The members of the State Patriotic Club, like the social conservatives, do not hide their neoimperialist ambitions. The declaration spoke about “the historical unity of the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and other brother republics” and stressed the fact that “our peoples are bound by many millions of ties: family and kinship ties, friendship bonds, business contacts, creative relationships. Not to mention a shared language, culture, shared holidays and symbols. For precisely these reasons any attempts to draw frontiers not only on the map, but also in society, to split not just property, but a historical heritage, is considered by all of us a tragedy and a great injustice.” The declaration continued: “Today it is Russia in particular that is the most committed guarantor of real sovereignty and democracy for the countries of the CIS, the real defender against external interference and economic crises.”[55] It remains to be seen, however, if all CIS members would agree with the statement that Russia is the guarantor of their “real sovereignty” and “democracy.”
This ultranationalist chauvinism of the party in power, however, does not appear in the official discourse of the Kremlin and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As Laruelle remarked: “So, notably, even the institutions most attached to the state apparatus can propound discourses that are regarded as relatively radical in their conceptions of national identity, and that do not correspond to the official state narrative.”[56] This discrepancy, far from being a reassurance, is rather a reason for concern. Aleksandr Dugin, the founder of Russia’s Eurasian Movement, had already advised the Russian leaders to play a double game: “The authorities will actively and on a large scale play a double game, outwardly continuing the declaration of adherence to ‘democratic values,’ but inwardly restoring little by little the base for the global autarchy.”[57] We may conclude that the “dynamic of change” that has taken place in United Russia during the first twelve years of Putin’s reign has moved the party farther away from its supposed center position in the direction of chauvinist ultranationalism and revisionism.
Chapter 8
The Nashi
Fascist Blackshirts or a New Komsomol?
The objective of Putin’s internal war was to avoid a democratic alternation of power. This meant that he would not allow nonsystemic opposition parties to develop. These were simply denied official registration. The systemic opposition parties, such as the Communist Party and the Liberal-Democratic Party, were allowed to participate in the elections on the (unwritten) condition that they mounted no real opposition and supported the government in parliament. Other potential independent power centers, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oligarch who threatened to become Putin’s political rival, were removed and jailed. At the same time an ideological offensive was initiated in which the values of the regime were emphasized. These were a strong state, ultranationalism, and the “rebirth” of Russia. The undivided support of the population for these values became, in effect, a value in itself in the much touted objective of national consensus. In the Soviet Union the communist youth organization Komsomol had been an important vehicle for spreading communist ideas. In Putin’s Russia, however, such a government-sponsored organization was lacking. Putin knew how important it was to inculcate the values of a regime in the younger generation. Founding the Kremlin’s own youth organization would, therefore, soon become one of his priorities.
“WALKING TOGETHER”: SKINHEADS TO DEFEND THE KREMLIN’S MESSAGE
On July 14, 2000, only four months after Putin had been elected president, a youth organization was registered at the Ministry of the Interior with the name Idushchie Vmeste (Walking Together). The president of this new movement was a young man, Vasily Yakemenko, who worked in Putin’s presidential administration as chief of the department for relations with civil organizations. Yakemenko’s boss was Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of the presidential administration.[1] Walking Together planned to have 200,000 to 250,000 members and to be represented in Russia’s largest cities. The organization had the structure of a pyramid: each new member was obliged to bring five new members with him or her over whom he or she became “commander.” Becoming a member was made very attractive: students from outside Moscow were offered free travel to the capital. Also free tickets for the movies and for swimming pools were made available, as well as free access to sports centers and the Internet. The movement had its own travel agency with extremely low prices. According to Sergey Shargunov of the Novaya Gazeta, in the first two years there were “many links between this pro-Presidential youth organization and skinheads. In the first place, leaders of skinhead groups were officials in the movement, bringing their ‘troops’ into action at different events. In the second place, in the movement ‘Walking Together’ there were elements of the skinhead subculture, such as high laced boots and the outstretched arm salute.”[2] The core of the group consisted of the “Gallant Steeds” football gang, supporters of the Moscow football club CSKA, which was headed by Aleksey Mitryushin, the bodyguard of Vasily Yakemenko. Anna Politkovskaya wrote:
There suddenly appear groups called “Marching Together,” or “Singing Together” or “For Stability” or some other latter-day version of the Soviet Union’s Pioneer Movement. A distinctive feature of these pro-Putin quasi-political movements is the amazing speed with which, without any of the usual bureaucratic prevarication, they are legally registered by the Ministry of Justice, which is usually very chary of attempts to create anything remotely political.[3]
Walking Together achieved its first great publicity success with an attack on the writer Vladimir Sorokin, whom they accused of pornography because of an ironic description of a sexual encounter between Stalin and Khrushchev in his novel Blue Fat. In the center of Moscow members of the group tore up books by Sorokin, which were thrown into a huge papier-mâché toilet bowl that they had installed on a sidewalk. A member of the movement brought a case against the author, which was taken over by the prosecutor’s office. The publicist Fedor Yermolov wrote: “The first image that springs to mind is the destruction of ‘dangerous’ books by fascists in the 1930s.”[4] He added that there were “deeper roots to the Sorokin scandal. The need to create a new state ideology means that the ruling classes are faced with the task of defining the extent and the possible ways in which individual key figures of Russian culture can influence the public consciousness. In this respect, what is happening to Sorokin may be seen as a sounding of public opinion, a test of society’s reaction to the encroachment of ideology into the cultural process.”[5] Vasily Yakemenko, the leader of Walking Together, told Radio Ekho Moskvy that the case was “a first sign of the regeneration of our society” and “a sign that the era of the marginal characters, who use filthy language to describe all kinds of perversions… is coming to an end.”[6]
2
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.
6
However, it would not take long before the movement itself would be implicated in a—this time