CYBER ATTACKS
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]
PREPARING FOR MORE MUSCLED ACTIONS: THE NASHI BATTLE GROUPS
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]
24
Quoted in Ronald D. Asmus,
25
The attacks were distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in which hundreds of thousands of “zombie” computers overwhelm the target network. According to an Estonian spokesperson the attack on Estonia originated in 178 countries. The Kremlin denied being implicated in the cyber attacks. Afterward, however, direct Russian implication was conceded through two incidents. The first involved Duma deputy and Kremlin pundit Sergei Markov, who, on March 3, 2009, in a panel discussion with American experts on information warfare, said: “About the cyber-attacks on Estonia… don’t worry, that attack was carried out by my assistant. I won’t tell you his name, because then he might not be able to get visas.” The assistant was thought to have been in “one of the unrecognized republics.” Later it was stated that he was in the Moldovan breakaway province of Transnistria—outside the territory of Russia. (Cf. “Sergei Markov Says He Knows Who Started the Estonia Cyber War,”
The name of this assistant was revealed later. It would have been Konstantin Goloskokov, a Nashi commissar. He told the
26
Cf. Evgeny Morozov, “What Do They Teach at the ‘Kremlin’s School of Bloggers’?”
27
In 2005 the movement distributed a brochure titled “Program for Combating Fascism” in secondary schools and universities. The “fascists” named in the brochure included Ilya Yashin, the leader of the liberal Yabloko youth organization; Yukos shareholder Leonid Nevzlin; and the democratic opposition leaders Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Ryzhkov. It is telling that Dmitry Rogozin, who at that time was chairman of the nationalist Rodina party and, maybe, the only representative of the extreme right on this list, was later appointed ambassador to NATO by Putin. (Cf. Oleg Kashin and Yuliya Taratuta, “Obyknovennyy antifashizm,”
28
Shaun Walker, “Pro-Kremlin Youth Group Blamed for Attacking Paper,”
29
Dmitry Sidorov, “A Mafia-Style Message on Russian Free Speech,”
30
In his article Podrabinek attacked Soviet veterans. “Your fatherland,” he wrote, “is not Russia. Your fatherland is the Soviet Union. You are Soviet veterans, and your country, thank god, has not existed for eighteen years. The Soviet Union is not at all the country that you described in the school books and your liar press. The Soviet Union—it is not only political leaders, Stakhanov workers, communist superproductive workers, and cosmonauts. The Soviet Union—it is also peasant rebellions, victims of the collectivization and the Holodomor, hundreds of thousands of innocent people who are shot in the basements of the Cheka and millions who are tortured to death in the Gulag…. The Soviet Union—it is permanent confinement in psychiatric hospitals for dissidents, treacherous murders, and in countless Gulag cemeteries the anonymous graves of my friends, the political prisoners who did not live to see our freedom.” (Alexander Podrabinek, “Kak antisovetchik antisovetchikam,”
32
These papers were the British
34
Cf. Tony Halpin, “Vladimir Putin’s Youth Army Nashi Loses Purpose,”
35
Cf. John Wendle, “Children’s Movement Fails to Draw Kids,”
36
Quoted in Chloe Arnold, “Russia: New ‘Teddy Bears’ Have Overtones of Soviet-Era Youth Groups,”
40
Cf. Tom Balmforth, “Moscow Beefs Up Police Presence Amid Opposition, Pro-Kremlin Rallies,”
41
They were each paid between 200 and 500 rubles (respectively approximately €5 and €12.50). Cf. Daisy Sindelar, “How Many Demonstrated For The Kremlin? And How Willing Were They?”