Sergei Belokonev, head of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs (Rosmolodezh), said that the Selinger summer camp would be held in one European and one US location in addition to the original Russian one. He named Strasbourg, where the European Court of Human Rights is located, as a possible European site.

The agency has already set up a special commission and working group to organize Selinger abroad. Organizers say the basic goal of the camp is “to rally fellow countrymen living abroad.”

There are an estimated 35 million Russians currently living abroad.

“We are actively working towards this and are planning to initiate work with our compatriots, especially those who did not personally migrate, but were moved out of the country when they were still children,” Belokonev said. “I’ve talked to people who are abroad but are bigger patriots than people here of their same age.”

The agency chief denied that the camp’s expansion was an attempt to bring young émigrés back to Russia. On the contrary, he insisted that it was necessary for Russians to “build up the country’s economic power” from abroad.

“We need to attract our people to economic projects in Russian so that they become intermediaries, earn money working on these projects, get technology and investment into Russia and send products and services overseas,” Belokonev explained. The camps abroad, then, are needed for émigrés to develop projects to aid Russia, he said.

Belokonev also stipulated that Rosmolodezh would not be organizing the overseas camps by themselves.

Dmitri Sablin, a State Duma deputy involved in relations with the Russian diaspora, said that such camps can help the Russian government exercise leverage over foreign policy towards Russia.

“This is a relevant necessity, our compatriots abroad are defending their rights,” he said. “We need to understand that they’re still Russian even if they have passports from different countries.”

“If Russians living abroad are brought together in some sort of organized form, then European countries and the United States are undoubtedly going to think harder and choose more careful statements when making decisions that go against Russian interests. Then we won’t have things like the Magnitsky Act, which doesn’t do anything but satisfy someone’s ambitions. It has no meaning besides to foment hostility,” Sablin explained.

Nadezhda Nelipa, executive director of Verrus, an organization that supports the Russian-speaking population in Europe, suspects that the camp is destined to fail if run by the Russian side.

“There’s a bunch of people in Germany who deal with the organization of such events, but the style of work and life differs so greatly in Europe that none of it was successful,” Nelipa explained. “Even the ones in the consulate don’t understand it, they look at it like this is Soviet territory. There’s an entirely different approach to things here: if they need a lot of students to participate in the camp, it requires a lot of time, you can’t do it in 3-4 months. These students have their own rhythm of life, they study very hard. They don’t have any vacation time before summer; sometimes they can allow themselves a couple of weeks in the summer. They plan their semesters a half year in advance.”

Political analyst Mikhail Vinogradov believes that Rosmolodezh is simply leeching off of the recent popularity in Russia of support for the Russian diaspora. He was also certain that Rosmolodezh’s strategy to stimulate entrepreneurialism among young Russians only has potential in Russia and will not be successful in the West.

“Rosmolodezh has a choice right now between two strategies: it can continue stressing political, ideological projects or it can attract young people by supporting their business projects. The agency has recently been drifting towards the second direction,” Vinogradov said.

The youth camp Seliger was first held at a lake by the same name in Tverskaya region in 2005. Founded as a training camp for Nashi, it only allowed non-members to participate starting in 2009. The camp has been heavily criticized for indoctrinating young Russians with a paranoid Kremlin ideology and comparing human rights advocates to Nazis, as well as for leaving a great deal of garbage at the lake.

Last March, Russian state-controlled television channel NTV aired an anti-oppositionist hack program called “Anatomy of a Protest.” The show came in the wake of the largest anti-governmental demonstrations Russia had seen since the fall of the Soviet Union, and accused those demonstrators, without any evidence, of getting paid for their efforts. Although the accusations were highly absurd, had no basis in reality (renowned TV host Vladimir Posner said it initially looked like a “spoof”), and led to numerous NTV journalists resigning in protest, the majority of Russian citizens get their news from television, so a negative impact on the image of the opposition was inevitable.

Now, NTV has released a follow-up program entitled “Anatomy of a Protest 2.” The program, which aired last Thursday, accuses Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov of conspiring with Georgia to obtain foreign funding to aid with anti-Putin protests in Russia. While Udaltsov denies the conspiracy, federal investigators are taking the matter seriously to a surreal extent. The film also alleges that leading Russian oppositionist Garry Kasparov holds US citizenship – a charge that has been debunked so many times that it has almost become cliché. In his latest op-ed, Kasparov puts the accusation against him in larger context of the Russian leadership’s insulated conspiratorial mindset.

Forced Americanization: Made in NTV
By Garry Kasparov
October 7, 2012
Kasparov.ru

In a country where parliament has long since ceased to be a place for discussion, and the participation of the top leadership in pre-electoral debates is seen as damaging sovereign democracy, it’s inevitable that television would turn into a mouthpiece for radical state propaganda. Since losing one’s reputation among “official” journalists has long since ceased to be a relevant factor, and the libel law is well known to be used only against people who criticize the current government, federal television has armed itself, with no misgivings, against the opposition with Putin’s favorite tool, “wasting [them] down the toilet.”

“The Anatomy of a Protest 2,” yet another of NTV’s masterpieces of incrimination, fully corresponds with the Kremlin’s conception of opposition leaders as foreign agents conspiring evilly against their homeland. And, of course, in their anxiousness to expose this insidious plot, generously funded by foreign security services, they couldn’t help but revisit the hackneyed myth of “American citizen Kasparov.” This time, the source isn’t an anonymous Nashi leaflet, but solid, trustworthy Public Chamber member Georgy Fedorov, head of the social and political research center Aspekt (“Garry Kasparov is a man who can go into any US governmental office whenever he wants, because he’s a US citizen.” 34 minutes into the film). In the biography of this zealous public guardian of the foundations of the state, there’s a mention of a thank-you letter from the Central Electoral Commission, which in today’s Russia means that the recipient has an exceptional ability to disseminate information that has nothing to do with actual reality.

Surely, the appropriate Russian agencies haven’t lost so much of their professionalism that they aren’t in a state to verify such elemental pieces of the biography of a Russian citizen. So it’s logical to assume that the Kremlin’s propaganda machine acts according to the well-known principle that “the dregs will remain.” So, for instance, the information about how Kasparov asked NATO to bomb Russia that appeared on Infox.ru was immediately replicated by all other mass media. But, naturally, the redaction that Infox.ru was forced to publish after my lawsuit did not enjoy such publicity.

The history of my “Americanization” has old roots. Back in 1975, when my teacher Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik tried to put together a small stipend for me, a number of chess managers felt it was pointless to invest in my training because “Kasparov will run abroad sooner or later.” High-level party leaders used this same argument during my confrontation with Anatoly Karpov, which justified his need for administrative support. I also recall that, at the beginning of the 2000s, a journalist writing about chess asked if I planned to leave Russia. When I said no, he looked at me strangely and said heatedly: “If I had a hundred thousand dollars, there’s no way I’d stay here.”

This honest admission is the most accurate possible reflection of the mentality of today’s so-called Russian elite, which, indeed, attempts to hide its own complete integration with the Western world with cheap patriotic rhetoric. The idea that anyone with the means to get an American passport (or at least a green card) wouldn’t jump at the chance simply doesn’t occur to them. And, like always, the only explanation for events that don’t correspond with their primitive views of the surrounding world is that it is a mythical conspiracy theory.

Of course, such conspiracy theories won’t prevent a libel suit, although anything’s possible in Putin’s courts. My previous lawsuit against Nashi, in 2008, was turned down because the court didn’t find sufficient basis to confirm the fact that plaintiff Garry Kimovich Kasparov was the same “American citizen Kasparov” mentioned in the Nashi leaflet.

The film “Anatomy of a Protest 2” won’t leave the judges with that same room for doubt. So it’ll be interesting to see what explanations citizen G. V. Fedorov and his co-defendants from NTV bring with them to court.

According to a source close to Yakemenko, “Vasily announced that the structure of the Nashi movement is being disbanded and that he says ‘thank you to everyone, you’re all free to go,’ and that something will be formed later but for now nobody knows what it’s going to be.”

Yakemenko allegedly explained his decision as the result of the fact that “the movement was heavily compromised before the elections and there’s no point in continuing it in this form.”

One source said that in Nashi’s place there will be a different organization to be headed by Artur Omarov, former head of the Stal movement. Stal was the group responsible for a controversial display of Russian opposition figures juxtaposed with Nazi symbolism at a Nashi summer camp in 2010.

Sources close to Yakemenko in Russia’s youth affairs agency, Rosmolodezh, told Gazeta.ru that there was talk of either a total freeze on the Nashi project and a cessation of funding or possible restructuring of the movement. The sources agreed that Nashi’s brand image will be cast aside and did not rule out the possibility that a political group based on the movement might be formed.

A public announcement of this decision is expected to be made in about two weeks.

Another source added that Nashi employees are concerned that they may not be paid for pre-electoral projects that have already been completed: “The organization’s equipment might be inherited by Vasily Grigorievich’s [Yakemenko’s – ed.] new organizations, but the organization’s debt won’t be taken up by anyone.”

Gazeta.ru had previously reported that Yakemenko might step down as the head of Rosmolodezh since his influence has drastically fallen with the recent reassignment of Kremlin ideologue Vladislav Surkov.

“Many participants of the forum, including myself, were confronted with the fact that mobile phone service entirely disappeared at the entrance to the camp in the Khimki Forest,” Belyakov said on the website of A Just Russia on Tuesday. “Certain police officers told me under condition of anonymity that ‘jammers’ are definitely being used. They even told me where one of them was.”

Belyakov added that he took photographs and video footage of the devices used to jam cell phone service.

“I’ve already sent Ministry of Internal Affairs Chief Rashid Gumarovich Nurgaliyev a deputy inquiry demanding an explanation of the goal of the operation to suppress the mobile phone signal in the Khimki Forest,” he said.

ITAR-TASS reported late on Tuesday that the Ministry of Internal Affairs is denying that any jamming devices were used at Anti-Seliger and accused Belyakov of speaking “rubbish.”

The forum, dubbed “Anti-Seliger,” was held in the Khimki Forest outside Moscow from June 17-20. According to organizers, the goal of the event was to give oppositionist, environmental, and other activists an opportunity to share their experiences and learn from one another. Approximately 3000 people took part.

Over the course of the forum, lectures were given by prominent journalists, political analysts, and human rights activists, including Leonid Parfyonov, Artemy Troitsky, Stanislav Belkovsky, Oleg Kashin, Aleksei Navalny, Yelena Panfilova, Valery Panyushkin, and Igor Chestin.

Anti-Seliger was organized as an alternative to Seliger, an annual forum held by Russia’s Federal Agency for Youth Issues (Rosmolodezh) and the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi. Seliger is notorious for its grotesque displays of anti-oppositionist propaganda; past targets of harassment have included United Civil Front leader Garry Kasparov, leading human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva, and Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Nashi leaders have admitted that the group – and, by extension, the forum – were created “to prevent an Orange Revolution” ahead of Russia’s 2008 presidential election. According to public records, Rosmolodezh head Vasily Yakemenko plans to spend no less than 178 million rubles ($6.37 million USD) on Seliger 2011.

As the Telegraph points out, the group has recently became much more officially deserving of that nefarious title: Nashi activists in Yaroslavl were found to have plagiarized the writings of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to “inspire young Russians to greater patriotic heights.”

The full report:

Activists from the ‘Nashi’ youth group drew up a list of eight commandments meant to inspire young Russians to greater patriotic heights, a Kremlin priority.

Anti-Kremlin activists however spotted that the text was a lightly edited version of an infamous list of commandments that Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, composed to steer National Socialists in the right ideological direction.

The Nashi activists, who were based at a branch of the youth group in the town of Yaroslavl 150 miles east of Moscow, had removed Goebbels’ advice to beware Jews and punch anyone who insulted the motherland. But they otherwise seem to have substituted the word Russia for Germany.

“The enemies of Russia are your enemies,” they wrote mimicking Goebbels’ phrase “Germany’s enemies are your enemies; hate them with all your heart.”

Critics said they were not particularly shocked by the content of the new commandments but disturbed by what the act of plagiarism said about the activists.

“It is strange that they did not find any other way of expressing themselves other than copying fascists,” wrote Anton Orekh of the Ejednevny Jurnal news portal. “In order to copy it they had to find it. To find it, read it, and really get into it. And understand that to say it better than Goebbels is just not possible.”

Ruslan Maslov, the activist who penned the commandments, said he could not understand what was so bad about their content. Another activist, Artyom Kozlov, said the scandal was an attempt to blacken the group’s name. He said that not everything about Nazi Germany was bad.

“The roads in Nazi Germany were well built,” he told gazeta.ru. “But that does not mean they should be destroyed. The good things should be preserved.”

Nashi, which means ‘One of Us,’ enjoys support from the Kremlin. It has courted controversy in the past, however, by mounting an aggressive campaign of harassment against the former British ambassador to Russia and, more recently, by displaying the heads of its ‘enemies’ hewn from papier-mache on spikes donning Nazi caps.

“The Commandments of Honour”

1. Your fatherland is Russia. Love it above all others and in deed more than word.

2. The enemies of Russia are your enemies.

3. Every compatriot, even the lowliest, is part of Russia. Love him like you love yourself!

4. Demand only duties of yourself. Then Russia will regain justice.

5. Be proud of Russia! You must honour the fatherland for which millions gave their lives.

6. Remember, if someone takes away your rights, you have the right to say “NO!”

7. Uphold what you must without shame where Great Russia is concerned!

8. Believe in the future. Then you will become the victor!

Update 11/11/10: Fuller context added to Pleshcheyeva’s remarks.

Members of Russian law enforcement, mass media, government agencies, advocacy groups, and pro-Kremlin youth organizations spoke yesterday during a Public Chamber session dedicated to the ghastly beating of Kommersant journalist Oleg Kashin. While most presentations denounced the attack and focused on the need to step up efforts to prosecute assailants of Russian journalists, one speaker accused the journalists of bringing these attacks on themselves.

According to the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, passions ran high during the two-hour session, with journalists, lawyers, and activists decrying Russia’s chronic failure to solve cases of attacks on journalists. Editor-in-Chief Yevgeniya Albats of the New Times magazine spoke directly to representatives of law enforcement present in the auditorium, saying that the government has provided vast amounts of support to large organizations that have long been hounding Kashin and numerous other journalists.

The editor was referring to government-sponsored pro-Kremlin youth movements that routinely harass journalists whose views contradict their own, some of whose representatives were present at the session. Nashi Commissar Irina Pleshcheyeva turned out to be an actual member of the Public Chamber, and issued a sharp rebuke against those who she felt practice “political terrorism.” Noting that she did not consider Kashin to be a talented journalist, the commissar argued that the journalists themselves are responsible for such attacks:

When a journalist is attacked or murdered per order, when he’s dealing with some case, then journalists take it, come together, and continue the case. They don’t need to provide reasons to murder them. Not everyone is going to be killed. If a person – the people who commit crimes – they don’t think they’re going to be caught. None of the criminals think they’re going to be caught. But if their goal is to change the situation – so that a person doesn’t write, doesn’t investigate – he should know that, in the future, the journalists are going to take the case and continue it. The editorial staff will take it. All the journalists will take it. I don’t know. But that investigation will continue. Then there won’t be any necessity to explain to people that fists don’t solve anything.

Pleshcheyeva went on to say that she herself feared being attacked for what she wrote on blogs and other Internet media, and that this is a problem shared by Russian society on the whole. Moreover, she argued, lots of people get killed in Russia while fulfilling their professional duties – soldiers, businessmen, teachers, doctors – so journalists are no exception. While the commissar briefly touched upon the importance of investigating such attacks, she stressed that society has to focus on the fact that “they don’t let us speak,” and not “that somebody got crippled.”

The speech was disturbingly reminiscent of remarks by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in August that opposition protesters intentionally provoke the police into “bludgeoning them upside the head.”

Also present at the session was Andrei Tatarinov, a leading member of the pro-Kremlin youth group Young Guard and member of the Public Chamber. He supported Pleshcheyeva and added that while his organization has not always been on great terms with Kashin, its website has posted condolences and denounced the attack. He did not explain, however, why this page was accompanied by what Nezavisimaya Gazeta described as “staged photographs mocking people expressing sympathy.”

A presentation by Moscow’s chief investigator, Vadim Yakovenko, provided an abrupt summary of Kashin’s case: the work is ongoing; 30 witnesses have been questioned; there is a wealth of information.

Vladimir Vasiliev, head of the State Duma Committee on Safety, told Nezavisimaya Gazeta that the auditorium was clearly unsatisfied with Yakovenko’s laconic speech. Therefore, Vasiliev spoke about the lack of sufficient budgetary funds for the needs of Russia’s law enforcement system, which results in complex cases being doled out to “boys” to solve. According to the newspaper, Vasiliev’s remarks were taken as evidence that we shouldn’t count on seeing any results from the investigation in the foreseeable future.

After undergoing two operations on his skull and a partial amputation of one of his pinky fingers, Oleg Kashin awoke from a coma Wednesday morning in a Moscow hospital. Doctors say his condition is critical but stable, and that he should be able to talk in the coming days. Colleagues and supporters continued calling for his perpetrators to be found and brought to justice for the fifth day in a row.

While city authorities had originally sanctioned the event, they then announced that there was no legal way to hold both a protest and a concert at the same time.

Regardless, Pushkin Square on Sunday was jam-packed with activists, environmentalists, and fans of the participating musicians.

As the Moscow Times reports:

While the three-hour rally ended peacefully, police earlier Sunday detained three prominent opposition activists who had planned to attend and blocked vans carrying the musical equipment of other musicians from the square.

Many demonstrators said they came to voice their opposition of both the deforestation in Khimki and of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

“The Khimki forest is the occasion, but if oil prices drop, there will be more people to protest here,” said Vladimir Kondrashyov, a 41-year-old driver wearing a T-shirt reading, “Putin, step down.”

Despite the concert ban, Shevchuk, frontman for rock band DDT, sang his hits “Osen” (Fall) and “Rodina” (Motherland) on an acoustic guitar standing on an improvised stage on a truck, surrounded by scores of journalists, police and demonstrators, including Yevgenia Chirikova, leader of the Khimki forest protest movement. Shevchuk made headlines in May when he criticized Putin in a televised exchange at a charity dinner in St. Petersburg.

Many more bands and singers, including Alexander F. Sklyar, Barto, Televizor and OtZvuki Mu, were expected to perform but could not enter the square. Cars with concert equipment were barred by the police from entering the site.

The police presence was massive and included city law enforcement officers, OMON riot police, and internal military forces. More than thirty police buses lined Tverskaya Ulitsa and the square itself was entirely cordoned off. According to the Moscow Times, more about 1,500 officers had been deployed for the event. Musicians were barred from bringing any audio equipment besides megaphones onto the square.

“This undermines the idea not only of a concert, but of a rally in general,” said Mikhail Kriger, one of the event’s organizers.

Another organizer, Nikolai Lyaskin, told Kasparov.ru that motorcyclists had attempted to attack the minibuses carrying audio equipment to the protest. The masked assailants, he said, rode up to the buses and began beating their wheels with iron bars. The buses managed to escape undamaged.

The Kremlin-founded and notoriously overzealous youth movement Nashi attempted to disrupt the protest-concert by bringing three buses to Pushkin Square and asking those gathered to come to the forest to collect garbage.

“In order to defend the forest you need work gloves, trash bags, and people, not songs, rallies, or incendiary speeches,” said Nashi Commissar Maria Kislitsyna. “Whoever really cares about the forest is going to go clean it up and whoever doesn’t will stay at the concert and listen to songs in its defense.”

While noble in theory (albeit ironic, since the forest that they’re cleaning will soon no longer exist), environmental activist and protest organizer Yaroslav Nikitenko explained that the Nashi event was nothing more than a provocation. “If they actually wanted to defend the Khimki Forest, they would have done this earlier,” he said. Moreover, that Nashi got involved at all indicates that the federal authorities are becoming anxious over the sizeable movement in defense of the forest, Nikitenko added.

On Saturday, the day before the protest-concert, the state-run news channel Vesti reported that it had actually already been held. While airing a report on Nashi’s garbage-collecting event, a Vesti commentator said that “in this way, the members of the youth organization expressed their attitude towards the concert in defense of the forest that was held on Pushkin Square.” Whether the channel corrected the remark was unclear.

Photos of the protest-concert are available at Gazeta.ru by clicking here.

A group of youth activists attending Seliger 2010, a summer-long camp that was founded as a training ground for the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi but is now run directly by the federal government, erected a row of 13 plastic heads on sticks. Each head has a hats bearing Nazi symbols and a picture of a different Russian public figure, including former Soviet dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva, musician Yury Shevchuk, and jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The installation was originally thought to be organized by Nashi itself, but was later found to be the work of a smaller pro-Kremlin youth group called Stal (“Steel”). According to the group’s LiveJournal page, Stal is a “patriotic movement created for the unification of thinkers and prepared for decisive action for the sake of its country, for the sake of Russia, of youth.” They also call themselves “the weaponry of Russia.”

According to Ekho Moskvy radio, Russian Human Rights Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin is deeply enraged by the installation. He said that it would be hard to do more damage to Russia’s reputation and that the organizers should be severely punished.

Russian bloggers immediately pointed out that the installation violates a federal law banning the public demonstration of Nazi symbolism.

Members of the Public Chamber, a federal body meant to foster dialogue between civil society and the government, called for a full boycott of the camp.

“I am deeply outraged that our best human rights advocates and well-known public figures – Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Nikolai Svanidze – are compared to Nazis,” said Alla Gerber, Public Chamber member and president of the Interregional Holocaust Foundation. “The authors of this installation are irresponsible hooligans, absolutely insane people who don’t know what Nazis are.”

Nashi defended Seliger 2010 for allowing different youth movements to express different points of view, Stal’s being no exception. In a statement posted on its website on Wednesday, Nashi said that the camp’s administration “does not subject participants’ statements to censorship, does not participate in the preparation of installations, does not pay for art objects that delegations bring along.”

Lyudmila Alexeyeva told Ekho Moskvy that public figures would do best to ignore such incidents, and thus she does not plan to file suit for slander against the installation’s organizers.

“Things like this don’t offend me,” said Alexeyeva. “And really, if they originate with Nashi, then excuse me, who is there to be offended by – those who make do without any human qualities, decency, or intelligence? Let them amuse themselves in this ugly fashion. Put up a caricature of an old woman who already looks sufficiently morose. If my grandchildren did this, then I would explain to them that good children don’t do this. But here I’m not going to explain anything.”

President Kadyrov’s debut as an official predator of press freedom comes as no surprise following last year’s surge in violence against journalists in the North Caucasus. The report cites 5 journalists killed in that region in 2009 alone, and 22 since 2000:

Often referred to as “Putin’s guard dog,” Ramzan Kadyrov shares the Russian prime minister’s taste for crude language and strong action. President and undisputed chief of this Russian republic in the North Caucasus since April 2007, he has restored a semblance of calm after the devastation of two wars. A high price has been paid for this superficial stability, the introduction of a lawless regime. Anyone questioning the policies of this “Hero of Russia” (an award he received from Putin in 2004) is exposed to deadly reprisals. Two fierce critics of the handling of the “Chechen issue,” reporter Anna Politkovskaya and human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, were both gunned down – Politkovskaya in Moscow in October 2006 and Estemirova in Chechnya in July 2009. When human rights activists blamed him for their deaths, Kadyrov was dismissive: “That’s bullshit, that’s just gossip,” he said.

The report blames the Kremlin for buying Kadyrov’s loyalty and for using government-run media outlets to create the veneer of a legitimate press. The analysts were equally scathing of the prime minister himself:

“Control” is the key word for this former KGB officer: control of the state, control of the economic and political forces, control of geopolitical strategic interests and control of the media. The national TV stations now speak with a single voice. …The Nashi (Ours), a young patriotic guard created by the Kremlin in 2005 at the behest of Putin and others who lament Russia’s imperial decline, sues newspapers critical of the Soviet past or the current government when it is not staging actual manhunts. As well as manipulating groups and institutions, Putin has promoted a climate of pumped-up national pride that encourages the persecution of dissidents and freethinkers and fosters a level of impunity that is steadily undermining the rule of law.

Putin and Kadyrov found themselves among fifteen other presidents and prime ministers condemned as predators of press freedom, including Chinese President Hu Jintao, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. All over the world, says the organization, 9 journalists have been killed since the beginning of 2010, and another 300 are sitting behind bars. In Russia alone, the Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that 19 journalists have been murdered as a direct result of their work since 2000. A murder conviction has only been handed down in one of those cases.

Nashi Celebrates Fifth Year With Kremlin Support
April 16, 2010
By Alexander Bratersky

Pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, best known for harassing ambassadors and opposition leaders, celebrated its five-year anniversary Thursday with a major show of support from the Kremlin, which said the activists remained a vital force in Russia.

Kremlin first deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov — who is widely believed to have organized the group while an adviser to then-President Vladimir Putin in 2005 — spoke to the raucous crowd of 2,000 delegates, as did Nashi’s founding father, Vasily Yakemenko.

Created to resist revolutions like those in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, Nashi has taken a back seat to other youth groups in recent years as the threat of widespread public unrest dwindled.

But Surkov told members Thursday that he “would always support” them.

“If we all go on vacation, the consequences won’t wait. We see what’s happening in Kyrgyzstan — that means we’re needed and have to be at our posts. … Those who chose for themselves the political fight will never be able to relax again,” Surkov told the crowd. “I’m calling on you to remain in that fight,” he said, before conveying greetings from Medvedev.

Putin said in a letter to the congress that the movement “unites people who love their motherland and are trying to make a serious contribution to the resolution of the current problems of the state and society.”

Yakemenko, now director of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs, restated the group’s allegiance to Russia’s two leading politicians.

“The Nashi movement is the movement of those who feel outraged and mad by the things they see around them. Our movement knows no authority except the authority of the policies of Medvedev and Putin,” Yakemenko said.

The congress, held in an ornate Moscow business center, also elected a new ruling board, in which a previously low-profile activist, Marina Zademidkova, 25, collected three times more votes than her nearest competitor, Anton Smirnov.

The State Duma’s youngest member, Robert Shlegel of United Russia, known for his initiatives to restrict media freedoms, was also elected to the five-member board. Nashi will elect its new formal leader from the group on May 15.

Incumbent leader Nikita Borovikov, 29, did not run for a spot on the board.

Political expert Stanislav Belkovsky said the movement’s future would depend on financing from the Kremlin. “The movement doesn’t have a solid ideological base,” he said.

Ilya Yashin, a member of the Solidarity opposition movement who is a frequent target of Nashi attacks, said the group would still come in handy as the state tries to deflect the growing “protest mood.”

“It’s possible that the experience of movement’s managers would be needed when people hit the streets,” the former Yabloko youth leader told The Moscow Times.

While Nashi members in the regions have also been involved in less political activities, such as charity work, the group’s radical fight against the Kremlin opponents will continue to be its focus, members said Thursday.

“We thought that we have defended our sovereignty, but we shouldn’t forget that they are trying to occupy us,” Borovikov said, referring to Western powers and the “agents of the ideological influence.”

He said they were behind Russian opposition leaders and liberal-leaning media, which he accused of “promoting drugs and providing a tribune to terrorists.”

Before Borovikov’s speech, the group was shown a 15-minute film about Nashi, highlighting its opposition to the “organizers of color revolutions” and “liberals and fascists.”

To illustrate the message, the film showed former chess champion Garry Kasparov and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov — both members of the Solidarity movement.

Without naming names, the film also attacked “losers” in government and the media who are trying to block the country’s modernization, a key initiative by Medvedev to close Russia’s technological gap with the West.

“The task to create civil society has been completed. The new task is to defend modernization and sovereign democracy,” the film narrator said in a robotic voice.

But not all of the delegates said they supported the hard-hitting ideology, which has discredited the movement with some of the public.

“We often don’t have concrete ideas to express,” said Artyom, who asked that his last name not be used because he was not authorized to speak to the media.