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.
ORTHODOX BATTLE GROUPS?
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]
A HISTORICAL PRECEDENT: KHRUSHCHEV’S DRUZHINY
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.
43
Daniil Eisenstadt, “Vertikal Druzhina RF,”
44
The full name of the Association is
45
“Nashi Looks to Expand Youth Militia,”
47
Cf. Lev Davydov, “Provoslavnye druzhiny ispugali pravozashchitnikov,”
48
“MVD obeshchaut rassmotret initiativu Tserkvi o sozdanii pravoslavnykh narodnykh druzhin,”
52
Cf. Condoleezza Rice, “The Making of Soviet Strategy,” in
53
Cf. Darrell P. Hammer, “Law Enforcement, Social Control and the Withering of the State: Recent Soviet Experience,”