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.
THE NASHI: KOMSOMOL, RED GUARDS, OR HITLERJUGEND?
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:
54
Boris Yakemenko, “Vernyy Put” (February 21, 2008). http://boris-yakemenko.livejournal.com/2011/02/21/.
55
“Sledstvie podtverdilo, chto glava Rosmolodozh osnoval firmu dlya banditov iz ’29-go kompleksa,’”
56
The official name of the Soviet youth organization Komsomol was VLKSM = Vsesoyuznyy Leninskiy Kommunisticheskiy Soyuz Molodezhi (All-Union Leninist Communist Union of Youth).