Part II
The “Internal War”
Consolidation of Power
Chapter 6
Russia as a “Pluralist” One-Party State
When Yeltsin told Putin in the summer of 1999 that he had chosen him to be his successor and Putin had to prepare for the presidential elections of 2000, Putin was upset. “I don’t like election campaigns,” he said. “I really don’t. I don’t know how to run them, and I don’t like them.”[1] This exclamation would, in fact, become the profession of faith of Putin’s regime, because the realization of Putin’s imperial project was dependent on two conditions. The first of these was the unhampered continuation of his regime in order to be able to realize his long-term projects. The second condition was the necessity of upholding a formal democratic façade to facilitate the acceptance of his regime in the West, thus avoiding the West mobilizing against the emergence of a new “Russian danger.” This meant that he would strictly adhere to the letter (though not the spirit) of the constitution. He would maintain the external characteristics of a democratic regime, such as elections and a free press, but at the same time he would do anything to avoid an alternation of power from taking place, which is the litmus proof of democratic governance. The repression of opposition forces in Russia, therefore, was considered a necessary condition for the continuation of his regime. Winning this “internal war” was for Putin a precondition for winning his first war: the reconstruction of the empire. How Putin conducted this “internal war” we will analyze in this section.
A One-Party State with Four Parties?
Each time visitors from the West questioned the reality of Russian political pluralism, Putin reacted with visible irritation. During the Valdai conference in September 2009, for instance, a Western participant asked: “To what extent do you think the Western model for political and economic development would suit Russia? Or do you think Russia needs to adopt some other model, which would better suit local historical, geographical and geopolitical realities?” Putin answered—not amused—in a brusque tone: “Russia’s fundamental political and economic system is fully in line with international standards. If we are discussing the political system, I am referring to free election(s) and (an) effective multi-party system.”[2] Apparently, the Russian leadership did not consider reestablishing a one-party system to be a sensible strategy. The historical precedents—not only in fascist countries, but also the experience with the communist party in the former Soviet Union—had too negative an image.
East German Communist “Pluralism”:
A Model for Putin?
The former communist regime legitimized the existing one-party system by referring to the emergence of a “classless society” in which the old capitalist class cleavages would no longer exist. Interestingly, even in the former communist bloc there were still some countries, such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the German Democratic Republic, which did not follow the Soviet example, but maintained (quasi-)pluralist systems. In East Germany, for instance, alongside the SED, the official communist party, there existed four other political “parties.”[3] However, these parties were not allowed to compete with each other or with the communist party, nor to participate in elections as independent bodies. Candidates from all parties appeared on a prefabricated list of the so-called “National Front”[4] under the aegis of the communist party, and in the (obligatory) elections the only act expected from voters was to throw this list in the ballot box.[5] Putin lived and worked as a KGB agent in Dresden in the German Democratic Republic between 1985 and 1991. Asked about his activities there, he answered that he “looked for information about political parties, the tendencies inside these parties, their leaders. I examined today’s leaders and the possible leaders of tomorrow and the promotion of people to certain posts in the parties and the government.”[6] Putin might have been impressed by the astuteness of East Germany’s pseudo-pluralism.
Of the four parties that on December 2, 2007, were elected in the State Duma, United Russia got 64.30 percent of the vote, A Just Russia got 6.80 percent, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation got 11.57 percent, and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia got 8.14 percent. If we take into account that A Just Russia was an artificial construction, set up by United Russia to attract additional votes, the governing bloc collected as much as 71.1 percent of the votes (and 78.44 percent of the seats). This sweeping majority exceeded even the percentage the ANC got in the South African elections on April 22, 2009 (the ANC got 65.9 percent). The well-oiled and generously financed United Russia party machine was explicitly set up to support Putin, although Putin himself was not a party member. This did not prevent Putin accepting, on April 15, 2008, the position of chairman.
Not only did United Russia have a comfortable majority at that time, but, additionally, the two “opposition” parties, Zhirinovsky’s crypto-fascist Liberal Democratic Party and the Communist Party, had long since abandoned playing a serious opposition role. These parties, instead, fully supported the government. The resulting system, therefore, in practice came close to a one-party state. Richard Sakwa had remarked that already Unity, United Russia’s predecessor[7] was “neither a modern political party nor a mass movement but was instead a political association made to order by power elites to advance their interests. [It] . . . could become the core of a new type of hegemonic party system in which patronage and preference would be disbursed by a neo-nomenclatura class of state officials loyal to Putin. Unity could become the core of a patronage system of the type that in July 2000 was voted out of office in Mexico after seventy-one years.”[8] Unity’s successor, United Russia, indeed, succeeded in establishing itself as the inheritor of the old monolithic CPSU. Former president Gorbachev called it “the worst version of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”[9] This was a rather harsh accusation from the mouth of the last president of the Soviet Union, who made his career inside the defunct CPSU and knew better than anyone else how rotten the old system was. But Gorbachev made a mistake: United Russia was not a remake of the old CPSU. Because, quite simply, communism in Russia was definitively dead. The new pluralistic façade might hide the same monolithic political structure, but it was situated in a rather different environment: not the former environment of a communist, centrally planned economy, but the new environment of a state capitalist economy. This made a big difference and was one of the reasons not to look back to Soviet times for historical analogies.
The Use of Fake Political Parties
On October 28, 2006, a new party was introduced into the Russian party landscape. Its name was Spravedlivaya Rossiya, or A Just Russia[10] —at first sight a promising name, because many Russians deplored the loss of the former socialist model of the defunct Soviet Union and craved a more just and fair society.[11] What was A Just Russia? A new opposition party? A party that would challenge the near monopoly of United Russia? One should forget this illusion. According to the Moscow Times, “Russia . . . [has] become possibly the first country in history with a two-party system in which both parties share the same overriding principle, that the executive is always right.”[12] In a report for the American Congress, Stuart D. Goldman wrote: “The platforms of United Russia and A Just Russia consisted of little more than the slogan, ‘For Putin.’”[13] He added that the “second pro-Kremlin party, A Just Russia—[is] widely believed to have been created by Kremlin ‘political technologists’ . . . to draw leftist votes away from the Communists.”[14] Goldman was right. The instigator of the new party was Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s deputy head of the presidential administration and a prominent Kremlin ideologue. Surkov was the inventor of the new political concepts of the Putin era, such as the “power vertical” and “sovereign democracy” (which had nothing to do with democracy, but meant merely that no foreign power had the right to define what democracy is). Anna Politkovskaya characterized Surkov as follows: “The deputy head of Putin’s office is a certain Vladislav Surkov, the acknowledged doyen of PR in Russia. He spins webs consisting of pure deceit, lies in place of reality, words instead of deeds.”[15]
Surkov’s “master idea” behind the creation of A Just Russia was to establish a two-party system as existed in the United States, but with one important difference: neither party would embody political alternatives, nor would they lead to an alternation of governing elites. Instead, they would guarantee political continuity by supporting the Putin regime. The hidden aim was that A Just Russia, as the new “left wing” party, would draw votes away from the Communist party. However, even circles close to the Kremlin were not convinced. One of them was former prime minister Primakov, who wrote “proposals can be heard to create in Russia a two-party system. The center left party A Just Russia could aspire to the role of lead second party. But the realization of this project, the idea behind it being attributed to the Kremlin, presents great difficulties. When United Russia was created, the administrative potential was used to the maximum. Many regional and local leaders felt obliged to become members of this party. Might they this time take at least a neutral position, or even support A Just Russia at the Duma elections? And that while V. V. Putin has become leader of United Russia?”[16] Primakov’s skepticism was justified. In the December 2007 Duma elections the strategy did not work out as was planned. Although A Just Russia was secured a place in parliament, the Communist Party resisted better than expected. However, we have to take into account that the Communist Party, although an “opposition party,” did not play a serious opposition role. The party “knows its place” in the existing system and does not transgress its (narrow) limits, as it is dependent on the government for registration, fund-raising, and access to the state controlled TV channels. The same is true for Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democratic Party, of which it is said that “according to insider accounts [it] was established by the Soviet KGB to serve as a nationalist pseudo-opposition.”[17]
The Duma that was elected in 2007 exhibited another important defect: this was the absence of liberal parties, such as Yabloko and the Union of the Right Forces. The Kremlin wanted this anomaly to be “repaired” in the run-up to the Duma elections of December 2011. By the beginning of 2010 rumors were already emerging about a new initiative. In February 2010 Owen Matthews, the Moscow correspondent of Newsweek, wrote about “a new liberal pseudo-opposition party the Kremlin is rumored to be cooking up.”[18] However, in the regional elections of March 13, 2011, suddenly another party popped up. It was the Patrioty Rossii (Patriots of Russia). Founded in 2005 by Gennady Semigin, a former member of the Communist Party, it had until then led a mainly dormant existence. The party, using the slogan “Patriotism is superior to Politics,” managed to win nearly 8 percent of the vote in Dagestan. Its program was left-wing, nationalist, and anti-Western.[19] In a comment The Economist wrote: “Analysts say the party is another Kremlin product, tested now with a view to being deployed in the parliamentary election in December [2011]. . . . Its real purpose, it seems, is to act as a spoiler for the Communist Party and another party, Just Russia, which itself was originally created as a double for United Russia but has since become a genuine challenger. Engineering clone and fake opposition parties is one of the Kremlin’s favourite political ‘technologies.’”[20] All this confirmed what Anna Politkovskaya had written in 2004: “There is a great fashion at the present for bogus political movements created by a directive of the Kremlin. We don’t want the West suspecting that we have a one-party system, that we lack pluralism and are relapsing into authoritarianism.”[21]
Unequalled Election Fraud
A fake pluralist system cannot be maintained without massive election fraud. This fraud, however, must not transgress certain limits if it is to keep the pluralist system “credible.” On October 11, 2009, when local elections were held in seventy-five regions for seven thousand eligible posts, something unexpected happened. The strategy of the Kremlin’s “political technologists” of creating a fake two-party system seemed to be surpassed by a new reality: the total hegemony of United Russia, which obtained almost 80 percent of the votes. The other parties were completely marginalized in the local councils. The background to this new political fact was the greatest election fraud ever committed in post-Communist Russia. In the Moscow City Duma, for instance, United Russia got thirty-two out of thirty-five seats. However, exit polls by VTsIOM, the state-owned pollster, had predicted that support for United Russia in Moscow was only 45.5 percent. Strangely enough, the party got 66 percent of the vote.[22] According to observers “the campaign was called one of the dirtiest ever in Russia. . . . Almost everywhere parties complained of the abuse of absentee ballots and the rather old fashioned abuse of ‘carousel’ voting, in which buses ferry volunteers from one polling station to the next to vote several times.”[23] However, according to Novoe Vremya (New Times)—a weekly magazine critical of the Kremlin—the use of absentee ballots and the carousel system were only detskiye metody (children’s methods) of election fraud. They could change the results by only 5 to 7 percent. However, United Russia’s results were in many cases “improved” by up to 40 percent. The method used for this, wrote the weekly, was quite simple: it consisted in removing “troublesome observers” at the moment that the ballot boxes were opened and in presenting the “end results” directly.[24] Ex-president Mikhail Gorbachev on this occasion abandoned his usually prudent and discrete attitude vis-à-vis the leadership in the Kremlin. In an interview in Novaya Gazeta, of which he is one of the owners, he said that “in the eyes of everybody, the elections have turned into a mockery of the people.”[25]
Apart from this massive fraud committed during the elections, there was also the fraud committed before them. Parties outside the “official opposition,” such as, for instance, Drugaya Rossiya (the Other Russia—a coalition headed by former chess champion Garry Kasparov), could not participate. According to Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent political analyst with the Moscow-based Mercator research group, “they are on the periphery, marginalized. . . . They have no access to the media. They are not allowed to register as candidates or even as parties, as players in the electoral process. They exist outside the system that is called politics.”[26]
Putin’s goal, to create two pro-Kremlin parties and in this way to maintain a pluralistic political façade, began to run the risk of being drowned in the “electoral successes” of United Russia, which—helped by the careerism of the regional leaders, the manipulated media, excessive financial funding, and, last but not least, massive, nationwide, organized fraud—might become “the only show in town.” United Russia was in danger of becoming a victim of its own success, undermining the very democratic façade the leadership had been so carefully trying to construct over the years. That the Kremlin was really worried about the turn of events became clear after the regional elections, which took place on March 14, 2010. Despite widespread fraud,[27] this time United Russia did not repeat its success. It lost about 20 percentage points across the board. In Sverdlovsk the party got only 39 percent, and Irkutsk elected a Communist mayor with over 62 percent. One would have expected grim faces in the Kremlin, but the opposite was the case. “A happy defeat for the Kremlin,” wrote Julia Ioffe in Foreign Policy.[28] According to another Western observer it was a “Victory in defeat.”[29] The fact that the three “opposition parties” together had gotten more votes than United Russia seemed to be extremely good news for the Kremlin: the democratic façade had been saved without in any way jeopardizing United Russia’s power monopoly. Due to the fact that the biggest party gets extra seats in the regional legislatures, “loser” United Russia could quietly continue to rule the regions in tandem with the Kremlin-appointed governors.
Mikhail Prokhorov’s Revolt against
the Kremlin “Puppeteers”
The Kremlin’s efforts to build fake parties alongside United Russia, however, continued. The Kremlin needed a multiparty system, but only in the way the former German Democratic Republic needed it: as a democratic façade. It should by all means be prevented from developing into a real multiparty system and leading to what the Kremlin wanted to avoid at all cost: political alternation. However, creating even a fake two-party system could be risky for the Kremlin, because a big opposition party—even if it was originally set up as a fake opposition party—could eventually develop into a real opposition.[30] This theoretical possibility seemed almost to become a reality in the summer of 2011, when the Kremlin promoted the billionaire oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, president of the Onexim Group and third-richest man in Russia, to leader of the party Pravoe Delo (Right Cause). This party was founded in 2009,[31] but had no seats in the Duma. It was set up as a “liberal” party with the objective of capturing the votes of the liberal intelligentsia, the urban middle classes, and the business community. The Kremlin wanted the party to enter the Duma in the elections of December 2011 to make its managed “multiparty” system more credible to the most critical part of the electorate. Mikhail Vinogradov, director of the Petersburg Foundation “Petersburg Politics,” announced that Prokhorov, a talented business tycoon, was “a strong figure, not inclined to participate in imitation projects.”[32] His prediction came true. Prokhorov went to work energetically. He approached Yevgeny Roizman, who had made a name as an activist, leading a nationwide campaign against narcotics. The Kremlin administration was not pleased with this unexpected activism and advised Prokhorov to sack Roizman. Prokhorov refused. This show of independence could not be tolerated and on September 15, 2011, Prokhorov was forced out of the party. Prokhorov did not mince his words. In Kommersant he attacked Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of the presidential administration, head-on, calling him a “puppeteer” who “privatized the political system and disinforms the government of the country.”[33] Prokhorov asked for Surkov to be sacked—a rather provocative demand, because Surkov the “puppeteer” was not acting alone, but had the full backing of his two masters and “puppeteers-in-chief” Putin and Medvedev who, in reality, were pulling the strings. An analyst commented that Prokhorov, “by refusing to bend to the petty wishes from the Kremlin . . . has qualified as an ‘enemy of the state,’ and his fortune instead of shielding him from persecution, makes it more tempting for the greedy siloviki to go after the loot . . . . Prokhorov is guilty of revealing how rotten Putinism has grown.”[34]
The Prokhorov affair brought the Kremlin’s manipulation fully into the open, ridiculing its system of “managed democracy.” However, it was not to put an end to the Kremlin’s machinations. In May 2011, at the same time that Prokhorov was selected to become a party leader, Vladislav Surkov and his associates were already preparing another plan: the formation of an “All-Russia People’s Front” (Obshcherossiyskiy Narodnyy Front), in which United Russia would participate together with other parties and organizations. Putin officially presented the plan on May 6, 2011, at a conference of United Russia in Volgograd. One of the parties invited to participate in this Front was the successor organization of Rodina, an ultranationalist and xenophobic party. Its former leader, Dmitry Rogozin, who had become Russian permanent representative to NATO, was called back to Russia to organize its relaunch under the name Rodina-Congress of Russian Communities.[35] For small parties it was attractive to participate in the Front because, not hindered by the extremely high 7 percent threshold, they would get a guaranteed number of seats in the Duma. For United Russia this formula was interesting because, while keeping its absolute majority, it could plan in advance the “diversity” in the new parliament. Also representatives of Kremlin-friendly trade unions, agricultural associations, veterans’ organizations, and even car-owners organizations were mentioned as possible candidates for joining the Front.[36] On the website of “United Russia” the Front was welcomed as a “modernization” of the party, which would create a new, broad coalition around the party—some kind of “silent majority” representing different ideological positions: “left-wing people, right-wing liberals, [and] moderate nationalists.”[37] Up to 25 percent of the positions on the Front list would be reserved for these outsiders. It is certainly no coincidence that this new “All-Russia People’s Front” was a faithful copy of the “National Front” of the former German Democratic Republic. In the GDR it was the only list in the elections for the Volkskammer, the East German parliament.
Andrey Kolesnikov made another comparison in the Novaya Gazeta. “Putin’s Popular Front,” he wrote, “is Mussolini’s corporation: everything from Shmakov’s unions [Mikhail Shmakov was the chairman of FITUR, the Russian trade union federation which unites 49 trade unions and counts 25 million members, MHVH] to the women’s organisations, all under one roof. . . . In implementing the idea of a popular front, I see the principle enunciated by Il Duce in 1925: ‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’”[38] Putin’s Front, however, still left some place for other parties, thereby rescuing Russia’s “pluralism.” Real opposition parties, such as the Peoples’ Freedom Party (Parnas) of Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Ryzhkov, and Mikhail Kasyanov, were eliminated beforehand from this “pluralist” system. On June 22, 2011, the Justice Ministry refused to register the party.[39] The Duma elections of December 2011 came too early for the All-Russia People’s Front to play a role. But after the election ”victory” of United Russia, which was characterized by massive fraud and the growing estrangement of the urban electorate from this party, the Kremlin began to purge the party of its most corrupt elements. At the same time it began to build the All-Russia People’s Front as a political formation to capture the votes of the conservative and anti-Western segment of the Russian electorate in the next election. In order to give the—mostly provincial—representatives of this “silent majority” a chance to enter parliament, Vladimir Putin, on March 1, 2013, submitted a draft law providing for a restoration of a mixed electoral system in which one half of the MPs are to be elected in single-mandate constituencies.[40] By May 20, 2013, organizing committees of the All-Russia People’s Front were created in all Russian regions. It was telling that Moscow and St. Petersburg would be the last regions where the Front opened offices.[41] The founding congress of the Front, renamed into “People’s Front for Russia,” took place on June 12, 2013, the official “Russia Day” holiday. At the end the chairman of the congress said that he still had “a very stupid question.” He asked: “Who do we choose as leader of our movement?” In the room they started to chant: “Putin, Putin.” “Shall we vote? There are no other candidates? Vladimir Vladimirovich, I congratulate you with all my heart.”[42]
However, the new “People’s Front for Russia” was not the only safety valve, invented by the Kremlin, to save the system. When, at the Duma elections of December 4, 2011, the disaffected liberal intelligentsia of Moscow and Saint Petersburg turned away en masse from United Russia and neither did they vote for the fake “Right Cause” party (which, after Prokhorov left, only got 0.6 percent of the vote), Vladislav Surkov proposed in an interview a new fake party for “angry urban communities.”[43] In reality, however, the next Kremlin creation was not the promised party for “angry urban communities,” but a party for a quite different audience: the conservative Cossacks and their sympathizers. On November 24, 2012, the Cossack Party of the Russian Federation was founded. There are about 7 million Cossacks in Russia, mostly living in frontier regions. It is a nationalist electorate, deeply Orthodox, and dedicated to Putin, who, in 2005, was given the title of Cossack colonel—a title previously held by the tsars. According to the president of the party, Sergey Bondarev, a former United Russia MP and deputy governor of the Rostov region, “the party is not only for Cossacks, but for all citizens of Russia. We are not left-wing and not right-wing, we are straight ahead.”[44] The abbreviation of the new party, CaPRF, was almost the same as CPRF, the abbreviation of the Communist Party, which led to protests from the Communists, who accused the Kremlin of wanting to siphon off voters from their party.
After the Duma elections of December 2012, when the oppositionist blogger Aleksey Navalny denounced United Russia as the partiya zhulikov i vorov (party of swindlers and thieves), Putin is relying more and more on building the People’s Front, while letting Medvedev take on the job of purging and “modernizing” United Russia. One of Medvedev’s “modernizing measures” was a proposal to give opponents of United Russia the opportunity to express their views at the “Civil University,” a new educational project for party members, launched by him on March 27, 2013. “If these are people who criticize the party for some mistakes, tricks, lack of activism, for some issues or others, I believe that would only benefit us,” Medvedev said.[45]
This does not mean, however, that Putin was willing to give Medvedev a completely free hand to modernize United Russia. When Putin prepared to use United Russia as a machine for the presidential elections of 2012, Gleb Pavlovsky, head of the Effective Politics Foundation and a close ally of Putin,[46] said that United Russia needed “to develop a new level of management,” some kind of superstructure above the existing leadership. This new group would be a sort of personal cabinet of Putin’s. One might be tempted to compare this proposed new structure with the old Politburo of the CPSU, but that comparison would not be totally valid. The Politburo was a collegial organ of shared power that was formally controlled by the Central Committee. The superstructure, suggested by Pavlovsky, is not an organ of shared power, nor is it an organ that is formally controlled by the party. It would be the personal camarilla of Putin, who, although he resigned as chairman of the party in May 2012 and never was a member of the party, would stand above the party and avail himself of the party structures. The proposed personal cabinet would be an instrument in his hand to direct the party machine and use it for his own aims. Putin’s special position in the party, proposed by Pavlovsky, would come close to the Führerprinzip.
Gleb Pavlovsky belongs—with Vladislav Surkov—to the most influential “political technologists” behind Russia’s new “electoral democracy,” in which many techniques are used to achieve the preordained results: falsifying elections, erecting legal barriers, harassing opposition parties, monopolizing the media, absorbing other parties, and creating fake parties. These techniques are not new. Many are used by other autocratic regimes that want to maintain a more or less democratic façade. However, the way in which the Kremlin tried to manipulate existing parties by creating new parties, showed, indeed, an interesting resemblance to the “political technologies” used by Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy. According to Emilio Gentile, in post–World War I Italy, “the conquest of the power monopoly was achieved in different phases that coincided with the expansion of fascist supremacy in the country. In the first phase, Mussolini set up a coalition policy with the parties that were ready to collaborate; at the same time he did everything to disintegrate them.”[47] Renzo De Felice described Mussolini’s attempts “to ‘empty’ the traditional parties” by offering their leaders attractive positions in his government or in the state bureaucracy.[48] In the elections of April 6, 1924, Mussolini went so far as to present two lists, a broad “ministerial list” that also contained the names of non-fascist candidates, and a “list bis” of the fascist party. These two lists combined gave him an absolute majority of 66.3 percent.[49] This result is certainly impressive, but it is still 4.8 percent less than the combined votes (71.1 percent) of United Russia and its “list bis,” A Just Russia, in the December 2007 Duma elections.[50]
Another Pseudo-Pluralism: The Diarchy at the Top
Another interesting resemblance between Putin’s and Mussolini’s systems was the diarchy at the top. Mussolini was prime minister and Duce, but until the armistice in 1943 Italy was a monarchy and Mussolini had to deal with King Victor Emmanuel III, the Italian head of state. In Mussolini’s case this diarchy was not of his own making. It was forced on him by the specificity of the Italian situation. After the election of Dmitry Medvedev as Russian president in March 2008 and Putin’s appointment to prime minister, there was created, in Russia also, a diarchy, called the tandem. But unlike the Italian situation, where the diarchy was an unintended consequence of a historical situation, the diarchy in Russia was the result of a deliberate choice. In the beginning there was a lot of speculation about the reason for this construction. Some Western observers obstinately wanted to believe—even as late as the fall of 2011—that this diarchy did have some real substance. It did not. The reason for Putin installing the tandem was to guarantee Putin’s iron grip on power for at least another decade. The second reason was to hide this manipulated usurpation of state power behind a smokescreen of formal legality. The Russian constitution did not permit a president to run for a third term. Putin easily could have changed the constitution, but he chose to step down and leave his place to his young cabinet chief Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev was the ideal choice for Putin. He had no political experience, no apparent power ambitions, nor an independent power base in society, and he was, moreover, totally devoted to his boss. Playing the game of “the constitutional president,” who “scrupulously applied the existing legal rules,” Putin planned to become a “legal” ruler who would remain in office longer than any of his foreign colleagues.[51] Putin served as a prime minister under Yeltsin for almost five months, was subsequently president for more than eight years, remained prime minister for another four years, which already makes altogether twelve and a half years. During Medvedev’s presidency the presidential term for the next president was extended from four to six years. After his reelection on March 4, 2012, Putin had, therefore, theoretically the possibility of remaining at the apex of the Russian power system until 2024, which would make for a reign of almost a quarter of a century. This would bring the total time span of his reign close to that of an average Russian tsar (Alexander II, for instance reigned from 1855 to 1881 and Nicholas II from 1894 to 1917). It even comes close to the almost thirty years’ reign of Putin’s admired geopolitical genius, Joseph Stalin.[52]
Notes
1.
Quoted in Boris Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), 330.
2.
“Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Met with Members of the Sixth Valdai Discussion Club,” Ria Novosti (September 19, 2009). http://en.rian.ru/valdai_op/20090914/156117965-print.html.
3.
These were the Christian-Democratic Union, the Liberal-Democratic Party of Germany, the National-Democratic Party of Germany, and the Democratic Peasants Party of Germany.
4.
Apart from the political parties, also representatives of communist mass organizations (youth and women’s organizations, the communist trade union FDGB, etc.) were also on the National Front’s list.
5.
As a member of a delegation of the Dutch Social-Democratic Party, I personally had the opportunity to visit, on June 14, 1981, a polling station at the Alexanderplatz in East-Berlin, during the elections of the Volkskammer, the parliament of the German Democratic Republic. I was able to observe how all voters were given the “National Front” ballot paper and deposited it straight into the ballot box. In a corner was a voting booth covered with white sheets, but nobody entered it. On my question to the director of the polling station why nobody went into the booth, he said that voters “were free to go in the booth, delete some names on the list or even invalidate it.” When I said that entering the booth, “might, perhaps, attract some unwelcome attention,” he went to a table and came back with a booklet. It was the constitution of the German Democratic Republic. He leafed through the booklet, then read aloud a paragraph that said that elections in the GDR were “free and secret.” Next day the party paper Neues Deutschland published the results under the heading “Great Victory for the National Front.” In total 99.86 percent of the electorate had voted for the National Front. East German citizens told me the next day that entering the voting booth and deleting names would diminish your chances of getting an apartment, a promotion, or a permit for traveling abroad. Not one of my interlocutors had, himself or herself, ventured into the booth.
6.
Vladimir Putin, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 69–70.
7.
United Russia was formed in April 2001 from a merger between the Unity Party of Russia and the Fatherland-All Russia Party, led by the mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov.
8.
Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 2000), 187.
9.
“Gorbachev alarm at Soviet echoes,” BBC (March 6, 2009). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7927920.stm.
10.
“A Just Russia” was originally a merger of three parties: Rodina (Fatherland Party), Pensionery (Pensioners’ Party), and Zhizn (Russian Party of Life, led by Sergey Mironov, chairman of the Federation Council, the Russian Upper House). The Rodina party, led by Dmitry Rogozin, was the most important of the three: it got 9 percent of the votes in the legislative elections of 2003. Rodina was barred from the elections for the Moscow City Duma in 2005 for inciting racial hatred after it had broadcasted ads with the slogan “clear our city of trash,” showing a group of Caucasian people littering a park with watermelon rinds. Its xenophobic tradition seems to have been taken over by its successor, A Just Russia, which was accused by SOVA-Center, a Russian NGO, of having three anti-Semites on its list of candidates for the State Duma. One of them, Yury Lopusov, a leader of the youth movement Pobeda, quoted Hitler’s Mein Kampf in an interview published on the party’s website. (Cf. “‘Spravedlivaya Rossiya’ beret antisemitov, rogozintsev i lubiteley ‘Mein Kampf,’’” (A Just Russia is welcoming anti-Semites, Rogozin adepts and admirers of ‘Mein Kampf’), SOVA-Center (September 24, 2007). http://xeno.sova-center.ru/45A29F2/9DF6F26. In 2006 Dmitry Rogozin resigned as party leader of Rodina. His appointment in January 2008 to the important post of ambassador to NATO was a sign of his excellent relationship with Putin.
11.
The Gini coefficient, which measures the inequality in a country (0 = total equality and 1 = total inequality) was on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union 0.29. In 2006 it had risen to 0.41—which was above the average of the EU.
12.
The Moscow Times (October 30, 2006).
13.
Stuart D. Goldman, “Russia’s 2008 Presidential Succession,” CRS Report for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2008), 2. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL34392.pdf.
14.
Goldman, “Russia’s 2008 Presidential Succession.”
15.
Anna Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia (London: The Harvill Press, 2004), 282–283.
16.
Primakov, Le monde sans la Russie? À quoi conduit la myopie politique? 111. Primakov also criticized the fact that in the Federation Council “one could even find individuals with a criminal past or present.”
17.
Cf. Anatoly G. Vishnevsky, Russkiy ili Prusskiy? Razmyshleniya perekhodnogo vremeni (Moscow: Izdatelskiy dom GU VShE, 2005), 325: “The history of the emergence of the LDPR is surrounded by rumours according to which this party would be a creation of the KGB.” Cf. also Dimitri K. Simes and Paul J. Saunders, “The Kremlin Begs to Differ,” The National Interest no. 104 (November/December 2009), 42.
18.
Owen Matthews, “Moscow’s Phoney Liberal,” Newsweek (February 26, 2010).
19.
The party program can be found at http://www.patriot-rus.ru/#partyProgramm.
20.
“Attacks of the Clones,” The Economist (March 19, 2011).
21.
Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia, 282.
22.
Cf. Roland Oliphant, “Another Blow to Russian Democracy,” Russia Profile (October 13, 2009). According to Oliphant, “VTsIOM’s General Director Valery Fyodorov tried to anticipate the discrepancy in a press release, citing the experimental use of SMS technology and saying that such differences are ‘normal,’ because ‘the goal of the exit poll is not to check the work of electoral commissions, but to capture the general trends of the vote and report them to the public as soon as possible.’” “That may be so,” wrote Oliphant, “but a 20 percent margin of error is well beyond the generally accepted standard, as some commentators have already pointed out.” In the exit polls the Communist Party got 17.7 percent, Yabloko got 13.6 percent, and A Just Russia 8.4 percent. The two last parties were above the 7 percent hurdle and should, normally, have been represented in the city council. Cf. also “Oppozitsiya budet protestovat protiv itogov vyborov v Mosgordumu,” Newsru.com (October 16, 2009).
23.
Oliphant, “Another Blow to Russian Democracy.”
24.
Mikhai Tulsky, “Falsifikatsii: narusheniya i vbrosy v tsifrach i faktakh,” Novoe Vremya no. 37 (October 19, 2009).
25.
“Mikhail Gorbachev: Na glazakh u vsekh vybory prevratili v nasmeshku nad ludmi,” Novaya Gazeta no. 116 (October 19, 2009).
26.
“Regional Elections Go According to the Kremlin’s Script,” RFE/RL Newsline (October 12, 2009). http://www.rferl.org/articleprintview/1849659.html.
27.
According to Gazeta these elections were no cleaner compared with those of October 2009. Pressure was exerted on state-sector workers. There was also manipulation of absentee voting and early voting. (Cf. Kynev, Aleksandr. “Preodolevaya Vertikal,” Gazeta (March 15, 2010).)
28.
Julia Ioffe, “A Happy Defeat for the Kremlin,” Foreign Policy (March 16, 2010).
29.
Robert Coalson, “Victory in Defeat,” RFE/RL (March 15, 2010).
30.
There is a Russian joke that the only political alternation the country has known is between bald and not bald leaders. This is, indeed, striking, if one considers the following succession: tsar Nicholas II–Lenin (bald)–Stalin–Khrushchev (bald)–Brezhnev–Andropov (bald)–Chernenko–Gorbachev (bald)–Yeltsin–Putin (bald)–Medvedev–Putin (bald). As a matter of fact, this kind of alternation worked well over the last century.
31.
It was the result of a Kremlin-inspired merger of three parties: the liberal Union of Right Forces, Civilian Power, and the Democratic Party of Russia.
32.
Yekatarina Vinokurova, “Yo-Partiya: Mikhail Prokhorov gotov vozglavit ‘Pravoe Delo,’” Gazeta.ru (May 16, 2011).
33.
Maria-Luisa Tirmaste and Natalya Bashlykova, “Mikhailu Prokhorovu pora zanyatsya svoim delom,” Kommersant (September 16, 2011).
34.
Pavel K. Baev, “Moscow Dithers over New Scandal and Forgets the Old Tragedy,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 8, no. 171 (September 19, 2011).
35.
Cf. “Rogozin’s New Rodina Registered,” Moscow Times (August 22, 2011).
36.
Cf. Robert Coalson, “United Russia, Putin Prepare For National Elections,” RFE/RL (May 12, 2011).
37.
“Ignatov: Narodnoy front: modernizatsiya ‘Yedinoy Rossii,’” Yedinaya Rossiya ofitsialnyy sait partii (May 10, 2011).
38.
Andrey Kolesnikov, “Tea with Putin-2,” Novaya Gazeta (May 12, 2011).
39.
Cf. Ilya Kharlamov, “Court Refuses to Register Russia’s PARNAS Party,” The Voice of Russia (June 23, 2011).
40.
Cf. Jadwiga Rogoza, “The Kremlin’s New Political Project,” Eastweek, Centre for Eastern Studies (March 20, 2013).
41.
“All-Russia People’s Front Organising Committees to Be Created in All Regions by May 20,” Itar Tass (May 6, 2013).
42.
“Putin izbran liderom Fronta,” Interfaks (June 12, 2013).
43.
“Surkov and Prokhorov Spin Election,” Moscow Times (December 7, 2011).
44.
Julia Smirnova,“Wie Russlands patriotische Kosaken Moskau erobern,” Die Welt (November 28, 2012).
45.
“Medvedev Invites Opposition to Speak,” RIA Novosti (March 27, 2013).
46.
Cf. Aleksandra Samarina and Ivan Rodin, “Partiyno-politicheskiy modern,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (April 7, 2010).
47.
Emilio Gentile, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? Histoire et interprétation (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 41.
48.
Renzo De Felice, Brève histoire du fascisme (Paris: Éditions Audibert, 2002), 46.
49.
De Felice, Brève histoire du fascisme, 46.
50.
Possibly different clans are behind the launch of different pro-Kremlin parties. According to Philip P. Pan, Dmitry Medvedev was behind the launch of Pravoe Delo (The Right Cause), on February 18, 2009. The core of this new party was formed by a former liberal opposition party, the Union of Right Forces, which had been convinced by Vladislav Surkov to transform itself in a pro-Kremlin party. Leonid Gozman, one of the leaders of The Right Cause, “said he considered the effort an attempt by Medvedev to build a base of support.” But he immediately added that “he saw no serious differences between Medvedev’s and Putin’s policies.” (Philip P. Pan, “Stepping Out From Putin’s Shadow,” The Washington Post (February 9, 2009).)
51.
Roy Medvedev seemed to anticipate this scenario in a biography of Dmitry Medvedev. “[T]he power question in Russia has been resolved,” he wrote, “and not only for the next four years. One can say with certainty that this question has also been resolved for the next twelve [years], and, maybe, even more.” (Cf. Roy Medvedev, Dmitry Medvedev: Prezident Rossiyskoy Federatsii (Moscow: Vremya, 2008), 5.) That President Dmitry Medvedev was ready to play a subservient role in his relationship with his future prime minister was evident in the words he spoke before being elected: “As the President said, I will work with the government, according to its wishes, like clockwork. I am a man . . . who worked with the President for 17 years” (ibid.). Medvedev was exactly the kind of president Prime Minister Putin needed.
52.
This scenario was predicted by Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as Putin’s prime minister for almost four years until 2004, but has since fallen out with the leadership and now heads an opposition party. “I am convinced,” said Kasyanov in 2009, “that Putin will run in 2012 for two six-year terms.” “Putin’s bid,” he added, “[is] to become the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Stalin.” (Conor Humphries, “Russian Ex-PM Says Putin Will Rule to 2024,” Reuters (September 25, 2009).)
Chapter 7
Preaching the Ultranationalist Gospel
The Transformation of “United Russia”
The Putinist “dynamic of change” expressed itself not only in the manipulation of the “pluralist” party system by the presidential administration. It was also at work inside the parties. This dynamic was characterized by the emergence of an ultranationalist and chauvinist ideology in the ruling party United Russia, as well as in the tolerated “opposition” parties. This development was especially unexpected in the case of the CPRF, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which considered itself as the successor to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[1]
The Ultranationalism and Revisionism of the Communist Party
Immediately after its foundation, in February 1993, the party—while still clinging to the old communist symbols and keeping “leftist” demands in its program—took a chauvinist-nationalist course that was not much different from the Liberal-Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. In both cases the party labels were misleading. Like the Liberal-Democratic Party, which was not liberal and not democratic, the Communist Party was not communist. Outward-looking Communist internationalism had been replaced by inward-looking Russian chauvinism. Stephen D. Shenfield wrote that many observers declared that the “ideology dominant within what still goes under the name of the communist movement is no longer communist, but fascist or close to fascist. The most unequivocal of these observers go so far as to claim that ‘the CPRF is in effect a fascist party, both at the top and at the provincial grassroots’ . . . or that ‘the CPRF has for a long time been following the ideas not of communism and socialism, but of national-socialism.’”[2] This opinion was confirmed by Dmitri Furman, an analyst of the Gorbachev Foundation, who wrote: “In the ideology of the largest party, the CPRF, fascistoid features are so salient that one has to be blind and deaf not to notice them.”[3] In a report of the Moscow-based SOVA Center, the cooperation between the CPRF and the extreme right (and now forbidden) Movement Against Illegal Immigration, DPNI, has been amply documented. Aleksandr Belov, the leader of the DPNI, and one of the agitators of an anti-Caucasian pogrom in the Karelian town of Kondopoga in the summer 2006, was invited as a speaker by the CPRF.[4] On the list of the CPRF for the municipal elections in Moscow in 2008 were at least thirteen candidates who were members of extreme right organizations.[5]
Gennady Zyuganov, the general secretary of the CPRF, no longer seems to be interested in the world revolution or in the realization of Marxism-Leninism. Like Zhirinovsky, his sole interest has become the restoration of the former Soviet empire. Like the former Slavophiles he indulged in “Third Rome” fantasies. Moreover, could one imagine a general secretary of the former CPSU, opening his autobiography with the sentence: “I am Russian by blood and spirit and love my Native land”?[6] Certainly not. Zyuganov, however, had no problem with this exaltation of his “Russian-ness.” Nicole J. Jackson, referring to Zyuganov’s “extreme nationalist discourse,” wrote:
Gennady Zyuganov promoted a form of national socialism which argued that the class struggle had been replaced by a clash of civilizations between Russia and the West which threatened Russia’s existence. This mix of ideas allowed Zyuganov to promote an alliance of communists and nationalists, “the red-brown alliance,” which demanded that Russia be allowed to pursue its own unique path of development based upon spiritual values—although the content was mostly unspecified.[7]
In fact, Zyuganov was not the first to replace the class struggle inside a country by the struggle between countries. It was done before him by Enrico Corradini, the cofounder of the Italian nationalist association ANI, which would merge with Mussolini’s movement in 1923. According to Corradini “have” and “have-not” nations competed for economic advantage in perpetual war. “This new imperialist theory did not only legitimate fascist wars of conquest, but offered an alternative to Marxist class theories.”[8] At the same time the foreign policy objectives of the Communist Party were reduced to a mainly negative policy of systematically opposing the United States. The United States was considered to represent the main global power that could obstruct the reestablishment of the former empire. That the latter had become the ultimate goal became clear from the 1995 election platform of the party, which called on the peoples of the “illegally disintegrated Soviet Union to recreate a single unified state in good will.”[9] What is interesting here is the use of the expression “illegally disintegrated Soviet Union.” Zhirinovsky described the demise of the Soviet Union in similar words in his book Last Push to the South. It is an expression full of sinister consequences. If you consider the Belavezha Accords of December 8, 1991, in which Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine—the original three signatories of the Treaty of the Union of 1922—decided to dissolve the Soviet Union, to be illegal, this necessarily means that you consider all the subsequent treaties, signed by the Russian government with the new governments (e.g., on the delimitation of the frontiers), to be null and void. Despite the reassuring use of the words “in good will,” it is clear that if one follows the logic inherent in the expression “illegally disintegrated Soviet Union,” the use of military means to reintegrate these territories would not be an act of aggression, as defined in the Charter of the United Nations, but a legal act of a central government to reintegrate rebellious provinces.
The dominant Kremlin party United Russia has treated both the Liberal-Democratic Party and the Communist Party as extremes on a left-right scale with United Russia in the middle. This had the benefit that it attributed to United Russia the role of a “center” party. It was, as so often in Russia, a pure question of labeling. The “liberal-democrats” and the “communists” share essentially the same ultranationalist ideology and form an extreme right bloc in the Duma. The most important difference between the two parties is a difference in style. Zyuganov is a gray party apparatchik who lacks the personal charisma of Zhirinovsky. He is also less outspoken and does not share Zhirinovsky’s more extreme positions concerning a Russian expansion into Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan.
“
Unkulturaufstieg
”: The Spread of
Ultranationalist Ideas
In the first decade of the twenty-first century we can observe in Russia the spread of a new culture and the dissemination of new ideas in society. Sociologists usually describe this as a process of Kultursenkung, which means that “high” culture, starting in the elite, “trickles down” from the elite into the general population. However, such a top-down process does not seem to apply in this case. It is not so much elite culture, as rather Unkultur—a lack of (high) culture—that spreads in society. For this reason it is, perhaps, preferable to call this process Unkulturaufstieg: a bottom-up process in which nonculture spreads from the lower echelons of society to reach, ultimately, the elite circles. An interesting historical example of such a process of Unkulturaufstieg (without calling it so) is given by Andreas Umland. It concerns the spread of anti-Semitism in pre–World War I Germany.[10] Umland observed that the development of anti-Semitism in Germany was marked by a fundamental discontinuity.
At the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, the young German party system experienced a significant change by the descent of its most explicitly antisemitic components.[11] [This was surprising, because] only a few years before, some seemingly vigorous ultra-nationalist parties, founded during the 1870s–1880s, had been on the rise, and, together with the increasingly antisemitic Conservative Party, won a majority in the 1893 Reichstag elections. Also, a multitude of antisemitic literature had been circulating in Germany for more than two decades at this point.[12] [Yet, this did not prevent the fact that] the electoral fortunes of the antisemitic parties, other than the Conservative Party, declined in the first decade of the 20th century.”[13]
It could be said that this was good news. But was it? Apparently, it was not, because “the decline of the antisemitic parties was . . . not symptomatic of a decline in antisemitism, for these particular parties had already performed their historic role of moving antisemitism from the street and the beer hall’s Stammtisch into the electoral booth and the seat of parliament . . . . The antisemitic parties had rendered themselves moot. They could quietly disappear, leaving the political terrain to more potent successors who were fit for the next upsurge in antisemitic expression and activity.”[14] In fact, what Umland is describing here is a process of Unkulturaufstieg—the spread of uncivilized ideas “from the street and the beer hall’s Stammtisch [table]” to society as a whole—including its higher echelons. Umland also observed an interesting parallel between the situation in Germany in the first decade of the last century and the situation in contemporary Russia. In the second half of the 1990s we could equally observe a generalized rise of illiberal trends and anti-Western opinions in the Russian population. However, at the same time, “those anti-liberal Russian parties that in the middle of the 1990s still had relative success at the elections (for instance the Communist Party or the Liberal-Democratic Party), despite these tendencies, could not improve their attractiveness for the electorate.”[15] Umland rightly concluded that the German experience should be a warning against premature optimism concerning the state of affairs in Russia. As was the case in pre–World War I Germany, the present period in Russia is one in which chauvinist and ultranationalist ideas are permeating society. This process of Unkulturaufstieg is especially visible in the United Russia party, a party that has put so much effort into presenting itself as a moderate “center” party.
Putin’s “State of the Union”: Touting Patriotism
In Russia the mixture of racist street hooliganism, the presence of fascist parties in the Duma, and the spread of fascist and ultranationalist ideas by a multitude of groups, websites, and blogs, have led to a generalized climate in which ultranationalist chauvinism has become acceptable. During Putin’s first presidential term the political elite still tried to distance itself from this overzealous ultranationalist fervor. Responsible for ruling the country, United Russia and the leadership presented themselves as democratic, pragmatic, and middle of the road: not left, not right, trying to keep a safe distance from the LDPR and the CPRF, as well as from radical right wing groups. This neutral, pragmatic, technocratic attitude was, first of all, displayed by Putin himself. Marlène Laruelle, for instance, characterized Putin in this period as follows: “[T]he new president cast himself as a-ideological. He claimed to be working solely in accordance with technocratic objectives, necessary to promoting Russia’s stabilization and then revival.”[16] The same assessment was made by two other analysts, who wrote: “On the whole, however, Putin—as a staff employee of state security who had spent his whole adult life working for the KGB under the ideological control of the Communist Party—had no ideology or political program of his own. He confined himself to general populist phrases. Back in 1999, at the beginning of his tenure as prime minister, he had given the following response to a question about his potential platform in the presidential race: ‘My main objective is to improve people’s lives. We will work out a political platform later.’”[17]
However, was Putin really this a-ideological pragmatist he pretended to be? Another author wrote: “It seemed entirely natural when, asked at a town meeting ‘What do you love most?’ Putin instantly replied: ‘Russia.’”[18] Russia? It might seem strange for a man saying he loved Russia more than his wife and daughters. On another occasion Putin declared that “Patriotism must become the unifying ideology of Russia,” adding that “patriotism will be vital, when we, citizens of Russia, can be proud of our country today.”[19] Meeting with representatives of the youth movement Nashi, Putin said: “We need our civil society, but one that is permeated by patriotism, a concern for our country.”[20] Are statements like these, that Russia needs a civil society “permeated with patriotism,” compatible with the image of the pragmatic technocrat that Putin so carefully cultivates? It is time to have a closer look at Putin’s deeper self.
A very interesting document in this context is Putin’s programmatic declaration, published on the website of the Council of Ministers on December 29, 1999. At that time Putin still was Yeltsin’s prime minister. The timing was important: two days later Yeltsin would appoint him to be his successor as acting president of the Russian Federation. At the time of publication the declaration had the status of a prime ministerial document presenting the government’s program for the coming year. As such it would have been no more than a swan song. Yeltsin’s prime ministers were, as a rule, short-lived. Even if Putin could have stayed on to the end, his career as prime minister would have ended anyway a few months later when the presidential election took place. Putin’s appointment as acting president on December 31, 1999, changed everything fundamentally. The program he had presented was no longer the program of an ephemeral government shortly before being dismissed. Suddenly it became the State of the Union of the young, new president of the Russian Federation. Maybe it was even more: the solemn declaration with which a new tsar accepts the throne of the empire. A comparison that is not as far-fetched as it might seem at first glance, because—as in the case of a royal heir—the throne was literally offered to Putin.
The title of Putin’s programmatic declaration, “Russia on the Verge of the Millennium” (Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii), was up to the challenge.[21] This text must be considered as one of the most elaborated pieces of the Putin ideology. Although Putin might wish to be seen as a cool, analytical pragmatist, for whom “ideology” smacked of old-fashioned prejudice, his declaration deserves a closer look. After having described Russia’s economic woes, Putin wrote, under the heading “Lessons for Russia,” “the problem is not only economic. This problem is also political and, I am not afraid of this word, in a certain sense, ideological. To be more precise: ideal, spiritual, moral.”[22] He then went on to develop, what he called, his “Russian Idea.” The core of this “Russian Idea” was consensus. “The fruitful creative work that our Fatherland [tellingly, Putin wrote fatherland with a capital F] needs so much, is not possible in a society that is permanently divided and internally isolated.”[23] Putin denied that he wanted to return to the period after the October Revolution when consensus was created by “strong-arm methods.” He emphasized that “any consensus in our society can only be voluntary.” This consensus was vital, “because one of the main reasons behind our reforms proceeding so slowly and with difficulty, consists namely of the lack of civil consensus.”[24] However, he continued, “I am against the reintroduction in Russia of an official state ideology in any form.”[25]
Putin’s “Russian Idea”: State, State, and More State
So, what should be done? Putin came up with three ingredients for the “Russian Idea” that were expected to promote this consensus: patriotism, “great power” status (derzhavnost), and a strong state (gosudarstvennichestvo). Regarding patriotism, he went on to explain,
[T]his is the feeling of pride in one’s Fatherland, its history and great events. It is the endeavour to make one’s country more beautiful, richer, more powerful, happier. If these feelings are free from national megalomania and imperial ambitions, there is nothing blameworthy, conservative, in them. It is the basis of the courage, the perseverance, the power of the people. If we have lost patriotism, and the national pride and dignity that go with it, we lose ourselves as a people capable of great events.[26]
Although Putin paid lip service to democratic freedoms, he stated that the “universal principles of the market economy and democracy” should be “organically integrated with the realities of Russia,” because “every country, Russia included, is obliged to seek its own way of modernization.” To adapt the universal principles of democracy to “the realities of Russia” meant that Putin advocated a Russian Sonderweg, a “special course,” implying that these universal principles are in fact not universal, but in need to be adapted to the Russian situation. This, in essence, introduces the theory of “sovereign democracy” that some years later would be developed by Putin’s spin doctor Vladislav Surkov. This theory, therefore, was, perhaps, not so original: Surkov was only acting as his master’s voice.
Putin’s “Russian Idea” can be summarized as follows: state power, the aggrandizement of state power, and pride of the citizens in this accumulating state power. The three pillars are: great power status for the state externally (derzhavnost), a strong state internally (gosudarstvennichestvo), and patriotism: the pride of the citizen in this external and internal state power. On the first element, Russia’s great power status, a commentator wrote: “The undemocratic and even authoritarian nature of derzhavnost is self-evident. Foreign and security policy implication of this ideology has been so far the assertion of Russia’s national interests which in many fields are considered to be conflicting with those of the West.”[27] On the necessity of a strong state internally, Putin wrote:
Russia will not soon, if ever, become a second edition of, let us say, the U.S.A. or England, where liberal values have a long historical tradition. In our country the government, its institutions and structures, have always played an exclusively important role in the life of the country, the people. A strong government is for the Russian citizens not an anomaly, but, on the contrary, the source and the guarantee of order, the initiator and main force of any change.[28]
Putin’s ideology, therefore, begins with the state and ends with the state. The ultimate goal of every Russian citizen should be the aggrandizement of state power and not the aggrandizement of his or her personal freedom and well-being. Putin’s words remind us of the words of Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature John Steinbeck, who, after a visit to the Soviet Union, wrote:
It seems to us that one of the deepest divisions between the Russians and the Americans or British, is in their feeling toward their governments. The Russians are taught, and trained, and encouraged to believe that their government is good, that every part of it is good, and that their job is to carry it forward, to back it up in all ways. On the other hand, the deep emotional feeling among Americans and British is that all government is somehow dangerous, that there should be as little government as possible, that any increase in the power of government is bad, and that existing government must be watched constantly, watched and criticized to keep it sharp and on its toes.[29]
National Rebirth and Consensus Building
It is telling that Putin defined patriotism as the “endeavor to make one’s country more beautiful, richer, more powerful, happier”—as if happiness can be attributed to a country instead of being the exclusive domain of the human individuals who inhabit it. It is a clear indication of the personification of the state by Putin, for whom the state is the ultimate value, an object of worship and veneration. By paying lip service to democracy he conceals the fact that his ideal of a strong state inevitably clashes with the democratic freedoms of the citizens. He expects Russian citizens not to hamper the expansion of state power by political dissension (e.g., by voting for political parties that propose an alternative to Putin’s program). Instead they should remain unified and stand—as one bloc—behind the leader whose supreme task it is to enhance the power of the state, which is the incarnation of the mythical Fatherland (with a capital F). Therefore Putin continuously stresses the necessity of consensus building.
How important consensus and patriotism are for him is further clarified in the address read by him six months later on the occasion of the combined session of the Duma and the Federation Council.[30] In this text he stressed again “that the growth of society is unthinkable without consensus on common goals. And these goals are not only material. No less important are spiritual and moral goals. It is the patriotism, which is characteristic for our people, the cultural traditions, common historical memory, which strengthen the unity of Russia.”[31] In Putin’s exaltation of a strong state and in his emphasis on national consensus building we find a striking resemblance with Mussolini’s Italy. Like Putin, Mussolini wanted to overcome the internal divisions in the population and to build a national consensus around himself, Il Duce, who was the incarnation of a unified people. Only in this way did he think he would be able to build a strong, militarized, and centralized Italian state. It led in Italy to the suppression of political parties, the abolition of the free press, the persecution of political adversaries, and the introduction of a one-party state.
Apart from this emphasis on consensus building and the exaltation of state power, there is, furthermore, a third ingredient in Putin’s text that reminds one of Mussolini’s Italy. Two days before his appointment to acting president, Putin said: “Today we find the key for a rebirth and resurrection of Russia in the sphere of government and politics. Russia needs a strong and powerful government and must have this.”[32] In his address six months later, he spoke of “a new Russia” and “the beginning of a new spiritual elevation.”[33] Here we clearly recognize the palingenetic ingredient of a theory of national rebirth, which, according to Roger Griffin, is a fundamental element of fascist ideologies.[34] Curiously enough one can observe a parallel between the positions not only of Putin and Mussolini, but also of Putin and Stalin. According to Aleksandr Yeliseev, “It must be said that neither socialism, nor even the state were in themselves values for him [Stalin]. The leader of the USSR considered them instruments necessary to guarantee what was most important—national independence. . . . Socialism, in Stalin’s thinking, had to overcome the class divisions inside the nation and make her monolithic and unified in face of all possible foreign challenges.”[35] It is easy to recognize here Putin’s derzhavnost (great power status) and his stress on internal consensus. In the concept of “sovereign democracy” we find the same emphasis on national independence.
United Russia’s Electoral Success: A CPSU Effect?
In 2004 United Russia, the “Presidential Party,” had only one task: to reassure the reelection of Putin as president. Although it was the Presidential Party, Putin was not a member. It was a huge bureaucratic apparatus in the service of the president. The party soon became a victim of its own success. After Putin’s reelection in 2004 there was a great influx of new members—especially from amongst bureaucrats, civil servants, and regional leaders, who rallied to “the party of power”—just as they had done before, in Soviet times, when they adhered to the CPSU (though at that time the CPSU was the only choice). This “CPSU effect” had three consequences:
First, a majority of the new members was less driven by ideological considerations than by career prospects.
Second, the new mass basis made the party ideologically still more nebulous and colorless than it already was.[36]
Third, the influx of new members brought into the party people with different ideas and ideological backgrounds, which soon led to a pressure for the formation of “party wings.” These problems became more acute in 2008, when Medvedev succeeded Putin as president and Putin became prime minister. From that moment it was in Putin’s interest to change the “President’s Party” into “the Prime Minister’s Party” or better, into “Putin’s Party” tout court.
In November 2007, some months before the presidential elections of 2008, Putin began to criticize the party. He said: “Does it [United Russia] look like the ideal political structure? Of course not. There is still no established ideology, principles for which the overwhelming majority of the members of this party would be prepared to fight and to accept its authority.”[37] He added that “it is close to the state. And, as a rule, all kinds of criminals try to infiltrate into such structures . . . . The goal of these people is not the welfare of the people, but their personal enrichment. And, of course, by such actions, they compromise the state and the party.”[38] Putin formulated here two new objectives: first, the need for United Russia to develop its own ideology, and, second, the need to purge the party of unwanted, “criminal” elements. Shortly thereafter, on April 15, 2008, Putin accepted the position of chairman of United Russia. In 2010, however, the announced purge was still waiting to be implemented. The party membership had not diminished, but had grown from 1,980 million in April 2008 to 2,026 million in May 2010. United Russia had become a huge bureaucratic organization with 2,598 local divisions, employing 40,000 employees.[39] It was clearly on the way to becoming a clone of the Soviet-era CPSU. However, the other goal formulated by Putin in 2007: giving United Russia an ideology, was in full implementation. Marlène Laruelle wrote that
a new wave of Russian nationalism has been emerging that broadly exceeds the influence of older strains of nationalism, whether founded on Slavophilism, Soviet nostalgia, or Eurasianist theories . . . .[40] Western observers and political scientists have a tendency to reserve the label “nationalist” only for small extremist groups or political parties, such as Gennady Ziuganov’s Communist Party and Vladimir Zhirinovski’s LDPR. It prevents them from taking stock of the existence of an ideological continuum that encompasses the entire Russian political spectrum. Indeed . . . the presidential party United Russia is itself thoroughly permeated with ideological debates about the nature of the country’s national identity. Owing to its ability to co-opt doctrinaires, to finance them, and to broadcast their messages to media and public opinion, it has even become one of the major actors of the nationalist narrative.[41]
United Russia, far from distancing itself from the ultranationalist discourses of Zhirinovsky’s LDPR and Zyuganov’s Communist Party, had begun to develop its own version of a “patriotic” ideology. This “ideologization process” had three characteristics:
It was related to the formation of “wings” in the party.
It was led by the Kremlin.
It was not restricted to pure party politics, but embedded in a broader “Gramscian” strategy of securing an overall ideological “hegemony” in Russia.
The Bear Wants to Fly: How United Russia Got Different Party Wings
In 2005 a debate had already started inside United Russia over the possibility of organizing different ideological currents inside the party. The initiative for this was taken by Vladimir Pligin, president of the Constitutional Legislation Committee of the Duma. Pligin published a text, cosigned by some thirty colleagues, in which they asked for ideological platforms in the party. The party leadership, however, was not in favor of this initiative. Boris Gryzlov, speaker of the Duma and party leader, was categorically against. He declared “that there will be no organizationally formalized platforms or wings in United Russia. Discussion is not only natural and necessary . . . but discussion must not be to the detriment of party discipline.”[42] And he added: “We cannot and have not the right to divide ourselves into right and left.”[43] Gryzlov was acting in line with an established Soviet tradition of “democratic centralism.” He reminded his audience that already “Lenin sternly warned about the adverse effects of factionalism.”[44] Gryzlov went on to repeat the official party ideology, which was, according to him, located in the center. It was “social conservatism,” which intended “to maintain order, social stability, [and] unconditional defense by the government of legally acquired property.” This “social conservatism,” he went on, “was broader than any political current, because one can find elements of it in the traditional left and right.”[45] An ideology that finds its elements “in the traditional left and right” is necessarily centrist. In 2005, when Gryzlov wrote these lines, order and status quo were, indeed, still the most important objectives of the regime. This conservatism was logical for a party in power. Would it be enough, however, to stay ahead when competing against the parties and movements that were propagating a passionate brand of patriotism and were animated by great-Russian chauvinism and ultranationalist fervor? Konstantin Kosachev, a Duma member of United Russia, dared to challenge Gryzlov in an article titled “Why Would a Bear Need Wings?” Kosachev wrote: “What some hastened to call ‘wings’—something that, as party leader Boris Gryzlov said, a bear, which is the party’s symbol, hardly needs—should be more aptly seen as working groups . . . and not something generating internal conflict within the party.”[46] Kosachev won, because Gryzlov’s initial negative response could not prevent discussion groups being set up before long within United Russia.
One of these was the Center for Social and Conservative Policy. In 2007 this faction started the Russian Project, led by the popular TV presenter Ivan Demidov and Andrey Isaev, a Duma deputy. The project initiated a discussion on the Russian nation, national identity, and “Russianness” (Russkost). Thereupon the Kremlin decided that the time was ripe for ideological discussions in the party and in April 2008 United Russia formalized the authorization for clubs to be created, on the condition that they did not develop into factions. A Political Clubs Charter was signed by three clubs: the Center for Social and Conservative Policy, the Club of 4 November, and the State Patriotic Club. These three clubs were seen as expressing the new pluriformity in the party. The Club of 4 November—connected with (nonstate) business circles—was considered to represent the “liberal” wing, whereas the State Patriotic Club was more right-wing. The Center for Social Conservative Policy, supported by Gryzlov, took a middle position. But it soon became clear that despite these different labels the differences between the party clubs were only marginal and they all shared the party’s new ideology: ultranationalism (called patriotism). This did not mean that the old ideology centered on the keywords of “status quo” and “order” had been abandoned. These objectives were still present, but they were repackaged and recycled into a more marketable product of national grandeur, great power status, historical pride, and imperial ambition.
United Russia’s New Ultranationalist Course
This new ultranationalist course adopted by the leading political party was a consequence of the generalized spread of chauvinist ideas in Russian society that had been prepared by the activities of a multitude of extreme right organizations. The political elite’s pursuit of electoral success led to their embracing the prevailing mood of society. The political scientist Vladimir Pribylovsky, director of the critical Moscow-based center for social research Panorama, interpreted the metamorphosis of United Russia as follows:
A segment of the voters in Russia will turn or may turn to parties that do not support the president and the present policy. They are talking particularly about the nationalists. The proportion of the electorate who are receptive to nationalist ideas is, according to some estimates, some 30–40%. That is a significant part of the electorate, and a section of these people votes for the pro-presidential parties, but a section does not vote or votes for the opposition. In the following six months we will see attempts by the party in power to flirt with nationalist and even xenophobic tendencies in society.[47]
According to another source the stakes could be even higher. Leonty Vyzov, director of the state sponsored social-political research center VTsIOM, said: “Sociologists divide the nationalists into ‘soft’ ones, who limit their existing hatred to migrants, and ‘hard’ ones, worshippers of the slogan ‘Russia for the Russians,’ who are ready to express their views in public.” “The first . . . makes up 40–45 % of the total number of citizens, the second about 10%.”[48] This meant that, according to these estimates, in early 2007 ultranationalist feelings were prevalent in a majority of the Russian population.
But this adaptation of United Russia to the prevalent ultranationalist mood was not the result only of (electoral) pressure from below. We have seen that as early as 1999 Putin himself was a convinced protagonist of giving patriotism a central place in the new Russian ideology. The decision, taken on electoral grounds, to choose a more nationalistic course coincided with a strategy on the part of the presidential administration to ideologize United Russia. The Kremlin was the cockpit of this change: the captain on board was Vladimir Putin, and his copilots were Vladislav Surkov, the deputy director of the presidential administration, and Aleksey Chesnakov, the deputy director of the Department of Domestic Policy of the presidential administration. Another factor implicating the Kremlin’s central role was the fact that Ivan Demidov, who introduced the new nationalism in United Russia through his Russian Project and who was called by the Nezavisimaya Gazeta, “the incubator of patriotism,”[49] was in 2009 appointed director of the Department of Human Policy and Social Relations of the presidential administration.
This Kremlin-led policy to make United Russia into the nationalist party of Russia—leaving the other nationalist parties far behind—was a great success. With hindsight this transformation from a conservative law-and-order party into a nationalist party did not even need to be imposed from the top, because all the new clubs within the party, irrespective of whether they labeled themselves left, right, or center, indulged in the newly embraced patriotism. The so called liberal-conservatives, for instance, were organized within the Club of 4 November (Klub 4 Noyabrya). The name of this club was in itself revealing: it referred to November 4, a date that (in 2004) was made by decree into People’s Unity Day, a new national holiday on which Russia’s victory in 1612 over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was celebrated (the choice of this day was not really appreciated by the Poles). The club’s manifesto included the statement that “the real sovereignty of Russia is today, by far, the most important problem”[50] and that “patriotism is one of the most important values of Russian society.”[51]
Russia’s Frontiers “Are Not Eternal”
The second club, the social-conservatives, openly expressed the nostalgia of its members for the former Soviet Union. In their manifesto they wrote: “We all grew up in the USSR and consider the dissolution of that government a tragedy for all its peoples. We should not consider the current frontiers of our state to be eternal. We are ready to pursue any unification of states on the former territory of the Union, and even beyond its frontiers. However, from this it follows that our readiness to reach out to peoples who want to unite with Russia, is matched by a readiness to risk a relatively peaceful life or the present level of wealth. Of course, the more prosperous Russia becomes, the sooner neighbors will reach out to her.”[52] The fact that in the manifesto the present frontiers between Russia and her neighbors are not considered to be eternal, written in a program of the dominant group within Russia’s governing party, is in itself a cause for concern. Even more so, when it goes on to propose that a (re-)unification with the neighboring peoples on the former territory of the Soviet Union and “even beyond its frontiers” would require of the Russian citizens “the readiness to risk a relatively peaceful life.” It echoed openly the dangerous revisionism of the Liberal-Democratic Party and the Communist Party.
Russia’s Rebirth
Imperial ambition and ultranationalist fervor were even more prominent in the third club, the State Patriotic Club (Gosudarstvenno-patrioticheskiy Klub), which began its political declaration with the quote: “The state is not located ‘out there,’ outside of us, it lives in us, in the form of ourselves.”[53] Having thus defined the state as a quasi-biological ingredient of every single Russian citizen, as essential for the individual’s survival as his liver, stomach, and lungs, it might appear impossible to construct any opposition of interests between the state and the individual, as is the case in Western liberal political philosophies. This is also considered unnecessary, because patriotism is the glue that binds the citizen and the government together. “One of the most important tasks of the politics of the majority party,” one could read, “must be the permanent strengthening of the mutual link between the state patriotism (gosudarstvennicheskiy patriotizm) of our people and the government’s policy for the people, for its interests and national dignity.”[54] The club declared itself in favor of a “military-patriotic education” and wanted to promote “the propaganda of historical examples of military courage and heroism by the people in defense of the Fatherland.” It equally wanted “to strengthen the prestige of the military service” and was in favor of the adaptation of history books in schools, “with the purpose of providing a fuller and more precise account of events in the history of the Fatherland,” adding that “one of the most important objectives is to work with the young generation.”
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.
Notes
1.
Almost until the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia (then called RSFSR), unlike the other fourteen Soviet republics, did not have its own Communist Party, but fell directly under the CPSU. It was only in June 1990 that on the initiative of conservative circles inside the CPSU, a Communist Party of Russia was constituted. After the 1991 August putsch this party was banned, together with the CPSU and the local parties in the other republics. The party was refounded in February 1993 under the name Communist Party of the Russian Federation. (Cf. A. Shlyapuzhnikov and A. Yolkin, Est takie partii: putevoditel izbiratelya (Moscow: Panorama, 2008), 67–68.)
2.
Stephen D. Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Tradition, Tendencies, Movements (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2001), 51.
3.
Quoted in Shenfield, Russian Fascism, 51.
4.
Cf. Aleksandr Verkhovsky and Galina Kozhevnikova, Radikalnyy russkiy natsionalizm: struktury, idei, litsa (Moscow: SOVA, 2009), 25.
5.
Cf. “Ksenofobnye kandidaty KPRF na Moskovskikh munitsipalnykh vyborakh,” SOVA (February 22, 2008). http://xeno.sova-center.ru/29481C8/AA109CD.
6.
Gennady Zyuganov, My Russia: The Political Autobiography of Gennady Zyuganov (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 3.
7.
Nicole J. Jackson, Russian Foreign Policy and the CIS: Theories, Debates and Actions (London: Routledge, 2003), 40.
8.
Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 126.
9.
CPRF Platform in Election Platform of Political Parties Participating in the Elections for State Duma, Moscow, International Republican Institute, (December 6, 1995), 44. (Quoted in Jackson, Russian Foreign Policy and the CIS, 41.)
10.
Cf. Andreas Umland, “Toward an Uncivil Society? Contextualizing the Recent Decline of Extremely Right-Wing Parties in Russia,” WCFIA Working Paper 02–03 (Boston: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 2002). http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/555__Toward_An_Uncivil_Society.pdf.
Cf. also Andreas Umland, “Rechtsekstremes Engagement jenseits von Parteien: Vorkriegsdeutschland und Russland im Vergleich,” Forschungsjournal Neue Soziale Bewegungen, Heft 4 (December 2008), 63–66.
11.
Umland, “Toward an Uncivil Society?” 10.
12.
Umland, “Toward an Uncivil Society?” 10.
13.
Umland, “Toward an Uncivil Society?” 10–11.
14.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 76.
15.
Andreas Umland, “Rechtsekstremes Engagement jenseits von Parteien,” 65.
16.
Marlène Laruelle, “Inside and Around the Kremlin’s Black Box: The New Nationalist Think Tanks in Russia,” Stockholm Paper (Stockholm: Institute for Security & Development Policy, 2009), 19.
17.
Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, The Corporation: Russia and the KGB in the Age of Putin (New York: Encounter Books, 2008), 153. The authors added: “Then, in 2001, in response to a question about how he envisioned the Russia of 2010, he said: ‘We will be happy.’ If by ‘we’ Putin meant the people who would be in power in Russia, then he was telling the truth.”
18.
Gregory L. Freeze, Russia: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 494.
19.
“Putin: Ideologiey v Rossii dolzhen stat patriotism,” Gazeta (July 17, 2003).
20.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin: Nam nuzhno grazhdanskoe obshchestvo, pronizannoe patriotizmom.” http://www.lawmix.ru/content.php?id=182.
21.
Putin, Vladimir. “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (December 30, 1999). http://www.ng.ru/printed/3681.
22.
Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 5.
23.
Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 5.
24.
Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 6.
25.
Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 5.
26.
Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 6.
27.
Sergei Medvedev, “The Role of International Regimes in Promoting Democratic Institutions: The Case of NATO and Russia,” NATO Research Fellowships 1994–1996 (Brussels: NATO, 1996). http://www.nato.int/acad/fellow/94-96/medvedev/02.htm.
28.
Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 6.
29.
John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal, with photographs by Robert Capa (London: Penguin, 2000), 26. Steinbeck’s Journal is a record of a forty-day trip to the Soviet Union between July 31 and mid-September 1947.
30.
Vladimir Putin, “Poslanie Federalnomu Sobraniyu Rossiyskoy Federatsii” (July 8, 2000). http://archive.kremlin.ru/text/appears/2000/07/28782.shtml.
31.
Putin, “Poslanie Federalnomu Sobraniyu Rossiyskoy Federatsii,” 4.
32.
Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 7.
33.
Putin, “Poslanie Federalnomu Sobraniyu Rossiyskoy Federatsii,” 4.
34.
Roger Griffin, wanting to define the essence of fascist systems, came up with the following definition of the “fascist minimum”: “Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythical core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.” Ideas of national rebirth (palingenesis) were, according to him, essential for fascist movements. (Cf. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993), 26. See also Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia, Part II: The Specter of a Fascist Russia (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).)
35.
Aleksandr Yeliseev, “Slavyanofil v Kremle,” Politicheskiy Klass 12, no. 60 (December 2009), 69–70.
36.
The members were not the only ones who were “gray.” Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow and himself one of the founders of United Russia, said in an interview, “the leaders of that party are weak and gray in terms of their potential—organizationally, intellectually, and so on. . . . [Duma speaker] Boris Gryzlov, as the boss of the party—not the leader, but the boss—is a gray personality, a person who has always been a servant and who is incapable of having an independent position.” (Cf. “Moscow’s Bitter Ex-Boss Luzhkov Lashes Out at Kremlin, Calls United Russia ‘Shameful,’” RFE/RL (October 22, 2011).)
37.
Vladimir Putin, “Zachem ya vozglavil spisok ‘Edinoy Rossii’” (November 13, 2007). http://www.kreml.org/media/165463628?mode=print.
38.
Putin, “Zachem ya vozglavil spisok ‘Edinoy Rossii.’”
39.
Cf. Paul Goble, “United Russia Party Now has 40,000 Apparatchiks, Moscow Analyst Says,” Window on Russia (May 10, 2010).
40.
Laruelle, “Inside and Around the Kremlin’s Black Box,” 5.
41.
Laruelle, “Inside and Around the Kremlin’s Black Box,” 7
42.
“Boris Gryzlov: u ‘Edinoy Rossii krylev ne budet,’” Russkaya Liniya (April, 23, 2005).
43.
“Boris Gryzlov: u ‘Edinoy Rossii krylev ne budet.’”
44.
Robert Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century (London: Penguin, 2009), 127.
45.
“Boris Gryzlov: u ‘Edinoy Rossii krylev ne budet.’”
46.
Konstantin Kosachev, “Why Would a Bear Need Wings?” Russia in Global Affairs (June 20, 2005).
47.
Quoted in Pavel Zakharov, “Yedinaya Rossiya sozdaet Russkiy proekt,” KM.RU (February 5, 2007).
48.
“Yedinorusskiy proekt,” Obshchaya Gazeta.ru (February 5, 2007).
49.
Aleksandra Samarina, Natalia Kostenko, and Ivan Rodin, “Yedinaya Rossiya razdelitsya na techeniya,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (November 2, 2007).
50.
Konstantin Remchukov, “Liberalno-konservativnoe videnie budushchego Rossii,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (November 18, 2005).
51.
Remchukov, “Liberalno-konservativnoe videnie budushchego Rossii.”
52.
Lev Sigal, “Predlozheniya k platforme rossiyskogo sotsialnogo konservatizma,” Tsentr sotsialno-konservativnoy politiki. http://www.cscp.ru/about/manifest/41/.
53.
“Politicheskaya Deklaratsiya Gosudarstvenno-Patrioticheskiy Klub Vserossiyskoy politicheskoy partii ‘Edinaya Rossiya,’” 1. http://www.gpclub.ru/news/0x1x2_p.html.
54.
“Politicheskaya Deklaratsiya Gosudarstvenno-Patrioticheskiy Klub,” 2.
55.
“Politicheskaya Deklaratsiya Gosudarstvenno-Patrioticheskiy Klub,” 4.
56.
Laruelle, “Inside and Around the Kremlin’s Black Box,” 58.
57.
Aleksandr Dugin, “The Post-Liberal Era in Russia.” http://arctogaia.com/public/eng/.
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]
Founding the Nashi: A Kremlin Initiative
When, in the autumn of 2004, in neighboring Ukraine the Orange Revolution took place, this event fundamentally changed the way in which the Kremlin viewed the role of its youth organization. It was no longer perceived as a presidential fan club, but was to become the Kremlin’s bulwark against a color revolution in Russia. This meant, first, that the movement had to become more combative. Second, that, instead of concentrating on moral issues, it should focus more on geopolitical issues. And, third, that it should attack not only internal foes, but also foreign enemies, suspected of supporting opposition groups in Russia. On February 17, 2005—three weeks after the inauguration of Viktor Yushchenko as Ukraine’s new “orange” president—Vladislav Surkov met in secret with thirty-five to forty young people in St. Petersburg. The meeting was arranged by Vasily Yakemenko, founder of Walking Together. The goal of the meeting was to set up a new youth organization that would get the name Nashi (literally “Ours,” but its connotation is something like “Our Guys,” making a clear distinction between “us” and “them”—the outsiders, enemies, and foreigners).[7] Putin’s new militants were conceived as a defense against organized opposition groups, such as Kmara in Georgia and Pora in Ukraine, that were at the forefront of the popular color revolutions in these countries. These grassroots organizations, fighting for democracy, individual freedom, and respect for human rights, based their actions on nonviolent strategies, such as were described by Gene Sharp in his influential book From Dictatorship to Democracy.[8] The Nashi movement was the total opposite of these movements. Instead of a spontaneous organization that had its roots in civil society, it was a top-down initiative, conceived down to the smallest detail within the Kremlin walls. Its objective was not to foster democracy, but to support a nondemocratic, autocratic power elite. The new organization received generous funding, not only from the Kremlin, but also from the Kremlin-related company Gazprom.[9] In her diary Anna Politkovskaya commented on the Nashi:
The authorities rely on criminal elements to prop up the system of state power. That this really is their doctrine recently received further confirmation when the Presidential Administration created a clone . . . . It is called Nashi . . . . The stormtroopers of the Nashi youth movement are football hooligans armed with knuckle-dusters and chains . . . . They have two units, one consisting of thugs who support the Central Sports Club of the Army football team, and the other of thugs who support the Spartak team. They all have an impeccable record in street fighting.[10]
Nashi founder Yakemenko openly advocated recruiting skinheads, such as the Spartak fans, who called themselves “The Gladiators” and wore tattoos of a gladiator with a spear. In a Nashi conference in 2005, he told his audience: “Skinheads—they are the same people as you . . . . Skinheads sincerely believe [that] they are patriots of Russia.”[11] By 2009 the Nashi movement had grown into a nationwide organization with between 100,000 and 120,000 members. It was established in fifty-two towns and had a hard core of 10,000 activists. The members wore red jackets, waved Nashi flags (a diagonal white cross on a red background—mixing tsarist and Soviet symbols), and had their own buses to transport them to their demonstrations. In a country where opposition rallies and demonstrations are systematically forbidden the Nashi could demonstrate at any place and any time with the full cooperation of the police. The organization was drenched in Soviet-era nostalgia. Not only were the group leaders called “commissar”—as in old Soviet times—but also the official website, www.nashi.su, instead of having the usual country code ‘.ru’, ends with .su (from Soviet Union). As in the case of Walking Together, idealistic motives were not enough to inspire potential members to adhere. Therefore, visitors to the Nashi website were lured with promises “of becoming a new intellectual elite.” They were offered interesting study schemes (“Do you deserve to have higher education from the country’s best university teachers?”), as well as tempting career possibilities (“Nashi people are already in parliament, in the administration, in the strongest Russian companies”).[12] Aspiring members could choose between different sections, such as “Patriotism,” “Ideology,” and “Information.” Members of the Patriotism section had the task “to disseminate propaganda under the young generation based on the big victories of the Russian people,” and “to create models of patriotic education . . . based on the principles of sovereign democracy.” They also participated in “patriotic war games.”
Officially the movement presented itself as anti-fascist. It even had an “Anti-Fa” (anti-fascism) section. The main task of this section was not so much to defend migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia against racist and xenophobic attacks by hooligans and skinheads, but to be vigilant for any criticism of the official version of the history of the Great Patriotic War or any attempt to besmirch the honor of war veterans. On the Nashi website the “Ideology” section introduced itself with the words that “no government on earth can live without a concept of the state.” In Russia, the text continued, this is “the concept of sovereign democracy,” an idea that “must be spread among as many people as possible.” Everywhere in these texts the inspiration and, possibly, even the hand of Vladislav Surkov was recognizable. Surkov is generally regarded as the godfather of the Nashi. He is a popular speaker at Nashi meetings. In September 2009 he credited Nashi with having helped persuade Obama to scrap the missile defense plans in Eastern Europe. “You are the leading combat detachment in our political system,” he told the activists. “Dominance on the street is also a necessary advantage for us, an advantage that we have thanks to you, thanks to all those who are so brilliant at staging mass actions.”[13] Was it mere a coincidence that the title “combat detachment,” given by Surkov to his new Nashi troops, had a worrying resemblance to the fasci di combattimento, Mussolini’s combat squads?
“Patriotic Training” in Nashi Summer Camps
Every year, in July, the Nashi movement organizes a two-week summer camp in a pine wood near Lake Seliger, a popular holiday resort three hundred miles north of Moscow. Everything is done to make the camp attractive to young people: transport, food, and lodging are free. In 2006 there were five thousand participants; in 2007 this number had doubled to ten thousand. The camps mixed adventure with agitprop. In 2007 paintings were exhibited of internal and external foes of Russia, such as opposition leader Garry Kasparov, clad as a prostitute,[14] and the foreign minister of Estonia, Urmas Paet, with a Hitler mustache. Apart from geopolitics the future demographic development of Russia was high on the agenda. In 2007 the camp celebrated a mass wedding for about thirty couples. Red tents were arranged in the shape of a heart for the couples to celebrate their wedding night. Dmitry Medvedev and Sergey Ivanov, at that time both deputy prime ministers, called in. Ivanov called for the group to have more babies. One year later, in the summer camp of 2008, a baby was shown who had been conceived at the mass wedding of 2007. This openly proclaimed natalism is resonant of Mussolini’s call to the Italian women “to make babies for Italy.”[15] In 2008 the portrait of the Estonian foreign minister had been replaced by a pig in a wooden stall with the name Ilves—the name of the Estonian president.[16] The 2008 camp, however, attracted only five thousand participants. This diminished enthusiasm was partly due to the fact that in the summer of 2008 the Duma elections and the presidential elections had taken place. But also rumors of free love had made parents more wary. The government intervened. In 2009 the camp was organized directly by the state, paramilitary training was suspended, there was this time no “love oasis,” and also non-Nashi members were given free access.[17] But these cosmetic changes did not have a real impact on the camp’s core business. According to an observer, “the worry for critics of Seliger is that the older political generation uses it to transmit their own ideology to the new.”[18]
The Nashi Manifesto and “Megaproject Russia”
One of the Nashi movement’s objectives was, indeed, the transmission of the ideology of the ruling elite to the younger generation. Therefore, the Nashi manifesto” deserves a closer look. It is one of the rare Kremlin-inspired texts that gives a deeper insight into the ideology of the regime. The manifesto starts with inviting young Russians to participate in the “megaproject of our generation, the megaproject Russia.” And the text continues: “The development of the world involves competition between peoples.” In this competition “it is our goal to make Russia a global leader of the twenty-first century.” This leadership is possible, the manifesto continues, because, as one should not forget, “the twentieth century had been Russia’s century.” This was due to three events. The first event is the Russian Revolution, which was “an effort to modernize” the country (no mention is made of Stalinist mass murders and repression). The second event is the victory of Russia in the Second World War, which saved the world from “a global hegemony by another country” and which accelerated “the disintegration of the colonial empires.” (Here nothing is said about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, nor about the new colonization that took place after the war inside the Soviet bloc.) The third event that is mentioned is the end of communism at the end of the twentieth century. It is stressed that this process was “autonomous.”
The manifesto explains why Russia is destined to become a global leader. The text refers to the “Eurasian heartland” theory of Halford J. MacKinder, without, however, mentioning MacKinder’s name.[19] “Russia,” it states, “is the central military-strategic space of the Eurasian continent. Control over it is important for those who want to dominate Eurasia and the whole world. It was precisely for this reason that Napoleon and Hitler dreamed of conquering it. Today, it is the United States on the other hand that is trying to control Eurasia and the whole world, and international terrorism on the other.” Against these threats, the text continues, “a strong, independent Russian government” is necessary, which is based on the sound foundation of sovereign democracy. This sovereign democracy is threatened by two internal enemies: the liberals “who are ready to give up the country’s independence in the name of the freedom of the individual” and the communists and fascists who give up personal freedom in the name of a stronger government. There follows a severe criticism of the weak governments of the 1990s, and the next paragraph, entitled “Our Revolution,” praises Putin, who, “after having strengthened the government, was the first to really challenge the regime of oligarchic capitalism.” Because Putin brought the stability the country needed so badly for its modernization, Putin is the natural leader for the Nashi movement. The Nashi is Putin’s avant-garde, because “our task . . . is to be at the head of the modernization of the country.” This modernization is not the only task for the members of Nashi. Other tasks include “the defense of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia,” and to counter the “geopolitical games” of the West in the post-Soviet space, with their explicit goal of vydavlivanie: pushing Russia out of world politics. Further, the Nashi should fight “extremist organizations of fascist and liberal nature.” To accomplish these important tasks for the fatherland Nashi members should have special character profiles and competences. They are expected to be patriotic and optimistic, think strategically, have social responsibility, be constructive and open to new developments, and have leadership capabilities and great professionalism.
Harassing Diplomats and Internal Foes
This was the manifesto, but what was the practice? In practice Nashi’s activities were concerned less with the modernization of Russian society than with the persecution and harassment of imagined internal and external foes. The first case that gained media attention was that of Anthony Brenton, British ambassador in Moscow. After Brenton had spoken at a conference held by the opposition movement “The Other Russia” in August 2006, he was systematically harassed by Nashi militants. They picketed the British embassy and followed the ambassador for six months with a banner demanding that he apologize. According to The Sunday Times, “They shouted abuse as he shopped for cat food, obstructed his car, advertised his movements on the internet and disrupted him when he spoke publicly.”[20] The harassment only stopped temporarily when the British government officially protested, but was resumed after the Duma elections of December 2007, when fifty Nashi members again picketed the embassy with a portrait of the ambassador with the text “Loser” (referring to Kasparov’s political party, which had not managed to get a seat in the new Duma). The demonstrators handed a letter to the embassy guard destined for the British queen, demanding that she recall the ambassador.[21]
Another high-placed victim was the ambassador of Estonia, Marina Kaljurand. She was attacked when the Estonian government removed a Soviet-era war monument, the Bronze Soldier, from the center of Tallinn. Starting April 30, 2007, members of Nashi picketed the Estonian embassy in Moscow. They blocked the street on both sides, making it impossible for the embassy’s staff to leave. Rocks and paint were thrown at the embassy building and slogans painted on the walls, such as “We reached Berlin, we will reach Tallinn too.” Day and night Nashi members played loud music in front of the building. The embassy personnel noted that “the young people were equipped with everything necessary to maintain round the clock presence, including portable toilets, a field kitchen and electricity supply.”[22] Tents had even been erected in front of the embassy in which the protesters were taking turns to sleep. On May 1, 2007, the Estonian flag was torn down from the embassy and shredded into pieces. On May 2, the ambassador had to break through a Nashi cordon to give a press conference at the offices of the magazine Argumenty i Fakty. On her arrival, there were attempts to attack her physically in the press room and gas had to be used by the guards to set her free. On the street outside rioting youths attacked the ambassador’s car and tore off the Estonian flag. These attacks on the embassy were preceded by organized riots in the center of the Estonian capital Tallinn on April 26 and 27 by Estonian Russophones, led by Russian Nashi activists who had come over specially from Russia.[23]
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]
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.
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:
Who is to say that such youth movements as Nashi (Ours), Mestnye (Locals), and the Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard) will not go the same way as the nationalistic Rodina (Motherland) Party? After being likewise set up by the Kremlin, Rodina became a loose cannon because of the ambitions of its nationalistic leader, Dmitri Rogozin. The Kremlin had to remove the Motherland Party from the Moscow elections and expel some of its overambitious politicians. It might be more difficult to keep even the pro-Kremlin youth movements on a leash. The gangs of young Putin supporters created by the Kremlin in the wake of the Ukrainian Revolution started by harassing opposition politicians Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Kasianov and then went after foreign diplomats, attacking the British and Estonian ambassadors. The young are playing the game with evident enthusiasm, becoming more aggressive each time. They have already understood their strength and are eager to do “big projects.” The moment may come when the young wolves will feel they are manipulated and will want to become an independent force. And someone might emerge who will lead this destructive blind force that can be turned into a dangerous political weapon. The Russian authorities may never have read the story of Frankenstein and seem unaware of how experiments creating monsters may end.[58]
Unfortunately, sooner than expected, Shevtsova’s predictions seemed to come true. In an alarming article about the growth of racist neo-Nazi organizations in Russia, Newsweek wrote that “the growth of violent racism in Russia has been encouraged by the Kremlin’s dabbling with nationalist ideology and politicized youth groups. . . . The Kremlin’s ‘political technologists’ unwittingly trained a generation of cadres to be conversant in the dark art of rousing masses of young people, organizing demonstrations, manipulating the press, and cutting deals with the authorities.”[59] The magazine added that “[a] Newsweek investigation has revealed that many of the organizers of today’s extreme nationalist groups learned their tradecraft as ‘commissars’ of the Kremlin-sponsored youth groups Nashi, Walking Together, and the Young Guard.”[60] This might have raised some doubts in the Nashi leadership as concerns the desirability of the planned Nashi militias. In the spring of 2013 on the website of Rosmolodezh, the official youth agency, an article was published, announcing that at the end of 2013 the Nashi would be transformed into a new youth organization with a new name. The title commissar would disappear. The former commissars would get a new task: “they become managers, coordinating the movement’s projects.”[61] The objective of these projects would be “the social adaptation of youth.”[62] Aleksey Makarkin, a political scientist, commented that “after December 2011 it became clear that the Nashi were not effective in the struggle against the regime’s opponents. Therefore the emphasis is [now] on less ambitious local projects, that are, maybe, more effective projects.”[63] Does this mean the end of Putin’s druzhiny project? Not quite. Because in the meantime Putin had discovered another group of devoted supporters whom he considered more capable of this task: the Cossacks.
Notes
1.
Cf. “Istoriya voprosa: Saga o ‘Putinjugende,’” NEWSru.com (January 14, 2005).
2.
Novaya Gazeta of September 23, 2002. Quoted in “Istoriya voprosa: Saga o ‘Putinjugende.’”
3.
Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia (London: The Harvill Press, 2004), 282–283.
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.
5.
Yermolov, “Free Speech and the Attack on Vladimir Sorokin.”
6.
However, it would not take long before the movement itself would be implicated in a—this time real—mini pornographic scandal, when it came out that a leading figure of the Saint Petersburg branch produced pornographic cassettes, which he sold on the market. This scandal further tarnished the already tainted reputation of the movement. (Cf. “Lider ‘Idushchikh Vmeste’ poiman na rasprostranenii pornografii,” NEWSru.com (November 4, 2004).)
7.
“Kreml gotovit novyy molodezhnyy proekt na zamenu ‘Idushchim Vmeste.’” NEWSru.com (February 21, 2005).
8.
Some texts by Gene Sharp, such as “The Politics of Nonviolent Action,” can be freely downloaded from the website of the Albert Einstein Institution. http://www.aeinstein.org.
9.
According to Marie Jégo, Moscow correspondent for Le Monde, from 2008 to late 2010 the Nashi received—in addition to other gifts—11.5 million euros directly from the Kremlin. (Marie Jégo, “Fascistes ou fans de foot?” Le Monde (December 24, 2010).) The Kremlin has repeatedly accused Western NGOs and governments of having organized and financed the opposition groups that were active in the color revolutions. However, according to Parol Demes and Joerg Forbrig this support was rather restricted. In Ukraine “the Pora campaign was only sparsely supported by international donors. A mere $130,000 was distributed in foreign funding: by the Canadian International Development Agency, Freedom House, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. By comparison, Pora’s total financing was $1.56 million. In-kind contributions in the form of free publications, communications, and transportation exceeded an estimated $6.5 million.” (Parol Demes and Joerg Forbrig, “Pora: ‘It’s Time’ for Democracy in Ukraine,” in Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine’s Democratic Breakthrough, eds. Anders Åslund and Michael McFaul (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006), 97–98.)
10.
Politkovskaya, A Russian Diary, 270–271.
11.
Charles Clover, “‘Managed Nationalism’ Turns Nasty for Putin,” Financial Times (December 23, 2010).
12.
Official website of the Nashi (in Russian). http://www.nashi.su.
13.
Quoted in John Follett, “Russia’s Past Mobilised to Shape the Present,” Herald Scotland (October 16, 2009).
14.
Tony Halpin, “Winning Young Hearts and Minds: Putin’s Strategy for a New Superpower,” The Times (July 25, 2007).
15.
In his famous Ascension Day Speech of May 1927 Mussolini exhorted Italians to increase the population from 40 million to 60 million in twenty-five years. Italian women were called upon to have a dozen children each. Pro-natalist measures included a tax on bachelors, tax exemptions for large families, and restrictions on emigration. (Cf. Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 173–174.)
16.
Luke Harding, “Welcome to Putin’s Summer Camp,” The Guardian (July 24, 2008).
17.
Roland Oliphant, “Seliger Camp’s Growing Pains,” Moscow News (July 20, 2009).
18.
Oliphant, “Seliger Camp’s Growing Pains.”
19.
Halford J. MacKinder, an English geopolitician, developed the theory of a Eurasian heartland for the first time in a paper “The Geographical Pivot of History” (1904). According to him the power that dominated this heartland would dominate the world, a theory that became very popular in Russia. (Cf. Halford J. MacKinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” in Democratic Ideals and Reality, ed. Halford J. MacKinder (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1996), 175–193.)
20.
Mark Franchetti, “Putin’s Fanatical Youth Brigade Targets Britain,” The Sunday Times (September 2, 2007).
21.
“Vashe Velichestvo, pishet Vam kollektiv russkikh druzey” (Your Majesty, A Collective of Russian Friends Writes to You), Kommersant (December 6, 2007). When, on March 28, 2008, the Foreign Office announced that Brenton would be replaced by Anne Pringle, former ambassador to the Czech Republic, there was speculation on the website of Robert Amsterdam, Khodorkovsky’s lawyer, that this was done under pressure from the British energy giant BP that had billions of dollars invested in projects in Russia. http://www.robertamsterdam.com/2008/03/the_departure_of_uk_ambassador.htm .
However, the Foreign Office “rejected speculation the change was due to worsening ties between the two countries” (Cf. “Update 1: Britain names Russian envoy, hopes for better ties,” Reuters (March 28, 2008).)
22.
Estonian Review 17, no. 16–17 (April 18–May 2, 2007), 3.
23.
Even during these Russian attacks the Estonian government had the diplomatic correctness to receive, on April 30, a delegation from the Russian State Duma to discuss the events around the removal of the war memorial. This delegation was headed by the former FSB director Nikolay Kovalyov, who, on his arrival in Tallinn, bluntly called for the immediate resignation of the Estonian government—a more than ill-mannered intervention in the internal affairs of a neighboring state that awoke memories of a not so distant past. (Cf. Victor Yasmann, “Monument Dispute with Estonia Gets Dirty,” RFE/RL (May 8, 2007). http://www.rferl.org/articleprintview/1347550.html.
24.
Quoted in Ronald D. Asmus, A Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 246.
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,” Intelfusion (March 6, 2009).) http://www.intelfusion.net/wordpress/?p=544.
The name of this assistant was revealed later. It would have been Konstantin Goloskokov, a Nashi commissar. He told the Financial Times “that he and some associates had launched the attack.” (Charles Clover, “Kremlin-backed Group Behind Estonia Cyber Blitz,” The Financial Times (March 11, 2009).) Markov wanted to present the unprecedented massive cyber attacks on the government of a NATO member state as a kind of innocent “naughty boys” prank that, apparently, was organized from outside Russia. One might confidently assume, however, that this was an attempt at active disinformation aimed at hiding the likely real instigators of the attack: the Russian secret services FSB, GRU, and/or the Russian army.
26.
Cf. Evgeny Morozov, “What Do They Teach at the ‘Kremlin’s School of Bloggers’?” Foreign Policy (May 26, 2009).
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,” Kommersant (May 12, 2005).)
28.
Shaun Walker, “Pro-Kremlin Youth Group Blamed for Attacking Paper,” The Independent (March 6, 2008). http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/prokremlin-youth-group-blamed-for-attacking-paper-792074.html.
29.
Dmitry Sidorov, “A Mafia-Style Message on Russian Free Speech,” Forbes (April 7, 2009). http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/07/donkey-ears-press-freedom-opinions-contributors-nashi-medvedev.html.
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 ,” Ezhednevnyy Zhurnal (September 21, 2009).)
31.
Cf. Follett, “Russia’s Past Mobilized to Shape the Present.”
32.
These papers were the British The Independent, the French Le Monde and Le Journal du Dimanche, and the German Frankfurter Rundschau. The Nashi were demanding 500,000 rubles (11,500 euro) in damages from each of the newspapers. The group’s lawyer, Sergey Zhorin, confirmed on October 27, 2009, that four lawsuits had been filed at Moscow’s Savelyovsky District Court. (Cf. “Pro-Putin Youth Group Sues European Newspapers,” Euranet (October 27, 2009).) The first hearing took place on December 7, 2009. The correspondent of Le Monde, Marie Jégo, present at the hearing, said: “It is an opinion, it is not slander. To give your opinion is authorized by article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, signed by Russia in 1998.” (“‘Le Monde’ poursuivi par les Nachi,” Le Monde (December 9, 2009).) On April 21, 2010, the Court sentenced Le Journal du dimanche to pay the Nashi 250,000 rubles (6,400 euro), although the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, of which Russia is a member, had confirmed that the facts reported by the four papers, could, indeed, be described as harassment. (Alexandre Billette, “De jeunes nationalistes russes obtiennent la condamnation du ‘JDD,’” Le Monde, (April 24, 2010).) Although the probability that the sentence would be carried out in France was extremely low, the Nashi felt they had won an important propaganda victory in their home country.
33.
“Kashin-Yakemenko Feud Heats Up,” seansrussiablog.org (March 28, 2011).
34.
Cf. Tony Halpin, “Vladimir Putin’s Youth Army Nashi Loses Purpose,” The Times (July 22, 2008). Another British journalist, The Guardian’s Luke Harding, came to a similar conclusion two days later, when he wrote: “This year’s camp, the fourth, is smaller than last year’s—a sign that Nashi’s days may be numbered.” (Luke Harding, “Welcome to Putin’s summer camp,” The Guardian (July 24, 2008).)
35.
Cf. John Wendle, “Children’s Movement Fails to Draw Kids,” Moscow Times (December 7, 2007).
36.
Quoted in Chloe Arnold, “Russia: New ‘Teddy Bears’ Have Overtones of Soviet-Era Youth Groups,” RFE/RL (February 15, 2008).
37.
Jégo, “Fascistes ou fans de foot?”
38.
Anna Nemtsova, “Fear and Loathing in Moscow,” Newsweek (October 24, 2008).
39.
“Batting a Thousand,” Kommersant (August 31, 2005).
40.
Cf. Tom Balmforth, “Moscow Beefs Up Police Presence Amid Opposition, Pro-Kremlin Rallies,” RFE/RL (December 6, 2011).
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?” RFE/RL (December 13, 2011). The correspondent of the French Figaro reported having “witnessed similarly a scene at the end of the meeting where the organizers of the demonstration handed out bills of 100 rubles to adolescents who were queuing up, waiting for their payment.” (Pierre Avril, “Les manifestants sur commande de Russie unie,” Le Figaro (December 14, 2011).)
42.
Cf. Novaya Gazeta no. 18 (March 17, 2008).
43.
Daniil Eisenstadt, “Vertikal Druzhina RF,” Gazeta (August 3, 2009). http://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2009/08/03_a_3231369.shtml.
44.
The full name of the Association is Vserossiyskaya Assotsiatsiya Druzhin, abbreviated VAD.
45.
“Nashi Looks to Expand Youth Militia,” Official Russia (August 11, 2009). http://officialrussia.com/?p=6379.
46.
“Nashi Looks to Expand Youth Militia.”
47.
Cf. Lev Davydov, “Provoslavnye druzhiny ispugali pravozashchitnikov,” Utro.ru (November 21, 2008).
48.
“MVD obeshchaut rassmotret initiativu Tserkvi o sozdanii pravoslavnykh narodnykh druzhin,” Interfax (November 20, 2008).
49.
Davydov, “Pravoslavnye druzhiny ispugali pravozashchitnikov.”
50.
Peter Pomerantsev, “Putin’s God Squad,” Newsweek (September 10, 2012).
51.
Pomerantsev, “Putin’s God Squad.”
52.
Cf. Condoleezza Rice, “The Making of Soviet Strategy,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 652: “Many Bolsheviks were never completely satisfied with Trotsky’s Red Army, however. It was created as a temporary device in 1918, to be demobilized and replaced by the militia as quickly as possible after the Civil War.”
53.
Cf. Darrell P. Hammer, “Law Enforcement, Social Control and the Withering of the State: Recent Soviet Experience,” Soviet Studies 14, no. 4 (April 1963), 379.
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,’” Newsru.com (March 23, 2011).
56.
The official name of the Soviet youth organization Komsomol was VLKSM = Vsesoyuznyy Leninskiy Kommunisticheskiy Soyuz Molodezhi (All-Union Leninist Communist Union of Youth).
57.
Cathy Young, “Putin’s Young ‘Brownshirts,’” The Boston Globe (August 10, 2007).
58.
Lilia Shevtsova, Russia: Lost in Transition, The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007), 282.
59.
Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova, “Fascist Russia?” Newsweek (August 15, 2011).
60.
Matthews and Nemtsova, “Fascist Russia?”
61.
“Bolshe ne ‘Nashi,’” (no date), website of Rosmolodezh, http://www.rosmolodezh.ru/novoteka-rosmolodezh/1-novosti-rosmolodezh/1365-boshe-ne-nashi.html. Accessed May 27, 2013.
62.
“Bolshe ne ‘Nashi.’”
63.
“Bolshe ne ‘Nashi.’”
Chapter 9
Send in the Cossacks
In 2012 the Kremlin took steps to diversify its druzhina policy. After doubts emerged over the effectiveness of the Nashi groups, the Kremlin polit-technologists identified a new reservoir of public peacekeepers. They found this reservoir in a traditional group: the Cossacks. The Cossacks have a reputation for being independently minded, whip-wielding horseback warriors. Originally, they were runaway serfs, nomads, and adventurers who colonized the southern steppes near the river Don where they were not likely to be caught. The oldest historical records concerning their existence date from 1549, when Crimean Tatars complained to Ivan the Terrible that Cossacks living on the Don were raiding their territory.[1] Later the Cossacks acknowledged the sovereignty of the tsar. In exchange they got land and the status of a special military community with its own rights and freedoms. The different Cossack hosts (communities) served as buffers on the borders. They enjoyed great autonomy, had a local democracy with a general assembly (Krug) that elected a leader (ataman), and were recognized as a special estate (soslovie) between the serfs and the nobility. During more than two centuries they were engaged in the tsars’ armies, and their cavalry played an important role in the expansion of the Russian Empire into Siberia and the Caucasus. They brought their own horses and weapons. Service of the state was a lifelong affair. In the period 1835–1863, for instance, individual Cossacks served the state for thirty years, of which five years in active service and twenty-five years as reservists.[2] Their relative importance becomes clear if one considers the fact that during the war in Turkestan (1877–1878), the Cossacks provided 125,000 soldiers, which was 7.4 percent of the army, while they made up only 2.2 percent of the total population.[3] The Cossacks’ fortunes, however, were reversed during the Civil War (1917–1923), which followed the October Revolution. Though they fought on both sides, the majority resisted Bolshevik rule. This led to severe repression under communism. In 1919 the Soviet authorities even ordered the genocide of the Don Cossacks.[4] Thousands of Cossacks fled abroad and went into exile. The fate of those who remained was dramatic. “Their property and livestock were confiscated, over two million Cossacks were repressed, more than 1.5 million were killed . . . . Cossack institutions, laws, self-government and customs were abolished.”[5] However, before the Second World War Stalin made some conciliatory gestures toward the Cossacks. He even established a Cossack cavalry division in the Red Army, though a Cossack ancestry did not seem to be required to serve in this division. During the war the Germans also raised some Cossack units from among their prisoners of war and war deserters,[6] which only reinforced Stalin’s suspicions about this group.
The Rehabilitation of the Cossacks
The Cossacks had to wait for Gorbachev’s perestroika and the fall of communism to make a glorious comeback. In 1992 Yeltsin issued Decree 632 on the rehabilitation of the Cossacks, followed, in July 1994, by Decree 1389, establishing a Council for Cossack Affairs. At the end of 1994 Yeltsin went still further, supporting a new law on Cossacks that granted them the status of an archipelago state within Russia, consisting of twelve Federal Cossack Regions, each of which corresponded with a Cossack host.[7] This Cossack archipelago state was headed by a Council of Atamans (Cossack leaders), which was responsible not to the government, but to the president—mirroring the historical special relationship with the tsar.[8] Already in the 1990s the Cossacks began to be used as vigilantes, though only locally. In 1995 Mark Galeotti wrote:
Like the Tsars, today’s Russian leaders have turned to the Cossacks for internal and external security. Since 1990, Cossack vigilantes have patrolled the streets of many Russian cities, armed with clubs, sabres and nagaykas (traditional whips). The regional administration in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar went further, in 1992 hiring armed Cossack units to patrol the countryside on horseback and in armoured vehicles . . . . The section on law enforcement in the Law on Cossacks—drafted by the Interior Ministry—formalises this role, establishing the dubious precedent of giving full police powers of search and arrest to untrained, armed vigilantes responsible to their elders rather than the authorities.[9]
Yeltsin’s reforms led also to the creation of Cossack regiments, and some Cossack units were formed within the Border Troops.[10] Cossacks also got the right to set up security companies, and in 1997 several of these companies were working for the Moscow city government.[11] However, the rehabilitation of the Cossacks under Yeltsin still remained uncompleted, and their new status was only a pale reflection of their privileged position in the former tsarist Empire. Their real chance, therefore, came with the arrival of Vladimir Putin. The new president was highly appreciative of the Cossacks. He attached great importance to this group and wanted to restore the Cossacks to their traditional function of pillars of the regime. In 2003 he appointed Gennady Troshev, a Cossack general who had served as commander of the military operations in Chechnya, as special adviser for Cossack Affairs in his presidential administration. In 2005 Putin signed the bill “On the State Service of the Russian Cossacks,” which offered the Cossacks privileged entry to the state service.[12] Draft-age Cossacks would “gain the right to serve in traditional Cossack military units, as well as frontier and internal forces.”[13] Lev Ponomaryov, head of the NGO “For Human Rights” did not conceal his concern. “If they want to guard the borders,” he said, “let them do this . . . . [However], it is alarming that they may be given the right to maintain law and order within these borders. Experience shows that the Cossacks have their own interpretation of law and order.”[14] But the Cossacks were satisfied. They showed their gratitude by granting Putin the title of ataman—Cossack colonel—a title previously reserved for the Russian tsars. Putin himself became the highest Cossack leader. In 2005 a Cossack regiment was founded in the army together with Cossack military schools where pupils—ages seven to seventeen—attend classes in army fatigues. The curriculum includes military tactics, patriotism, and moral (i.e., Orthodox) education. In 2013 there existed thirty such Cossack schools in the Russian Federation.[15] The southern town of Krasnodar, the centre of the Don Cossacks host, became a testing ground for the new Cossack activities. In February 2012, during the presidential election campaign, Putin once more stressed the importance of the Cossacks in an article in Izvestia:
Now, a few words about the Cossacks, a large group counting millions of Russians. Historically, Cossacks served the Russian state by defending its borders and taking part in military campaigns of the Russian Army. Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Cossack community was subjected to brutal repression, which was actually genocide. But the Cossacks survived and retained their culture and traditions. The mission of the state now is to help the Cossacks, draw them into military service and educational activities for youths, involving a patriotic upbringing and initial military training.[16]
Touting “Cossack Values”
The comeback of the Cossacks into Russian public life after an absence of ninety years was accompanied by much publicity, culminating in a Cossack media frenzy in which their martial traditions and supposed virtues, such as courage, loyalty, patriotism, and observance of “traditional values” were touted. “Cossacks protected the Russian Orthodox Church and the Motherland during difficult times,” wrote Olivia Kroth in the pro-Kremlin paper Pravda.[17] “Today Cossacks continue doing so, educating children and young people according to their high ethical standards.”[18] Another author, Sergey Israpilov, saw in the Cossacks a bulwark against the decay of modern Russian society, characterized by individualism that “arrived in Russia from the West” and by a low birth rate. According to him, Russia needed to build “enclaves of traditionalists, who defend or create anew traditional society with its strong family and great fecundity.”[19] Improving the birth rate and “bearing children for Russia” is also one of the objectives of Putin, who, in his address to the Federal Assembly, in December 2012, said people should “believe that families with three children should become the standard in Russia.”[20] A BBC correspondent, who visited some Cossack villages in southern Russia, saw families there with seven children. He was told “that Cossack families should be as large as possible.”[21] He wrote that “Cossack family values are simple, rigid, and to a Western eye, seem to come from another era. The men build the home and provide an income; the women cook, clean and give birth to children. Traditional Russian values, culture, and Orthodoxy form the bedrock of their beliefs.”[22] Russian authors and intellectuals, touting the purported traditional values of the Cossacks, resemble the nineteenth-century narodniki, urbanites who idealized the supposedly high ethical standards and deep spiritual life of the simple Russian peasant. In 2009, in a speech before the Presidential Council for Cossack Affairs, Patriarch Kirill also contributed to this moral glorification of the Cossack. “Without faith, without spiritual eagerness, without true reliance upon spiritual and moral values,” declared the Patriarch, “it is not only impossible to revive the Cossacks, but the Cossack culture itself cannot exist.”[23] This culture, he added, is “a lifestyle, formed under the spiritual influence of the Orthodox faith.”[24]
The Role of the Cossacks in Post-Soviet Local Wars
However, are the Cossacks really these so-called white knights as depicted by their admirers? It is, for instance, a well-known fact that in the latter half of the nineteenth century the tsarist government used Cossack troops not only to repress uprisings against the state, but also to perpetrate pogroms against the Jews. An Israeli paper expressed its concern. “Famed for leading anti-Jewish pogroms and close ties to the czar,” wrote the paper, “the group is making a comeback with Vladimir Putin’s support.”[25] In a 1998 Human Rights Watch report the Cossack ideology is described as “virulently anti-ethnic migrant which often degenerates into a general hatred of all minorities.”[26] After the fall of communism Cossacks became active as mercenaries in conflict zones. They fought in the Georgian breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in Chechnya, in Transnistria (Moldova), and in the former Yugoslavia. During the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008 Human Rights Watch reported that “officials in Java [South Ossetia] also said that Russian Cossacks were fighting alongside Ossetian militias.”[27] This was confirmed by other sources. The Nezavisimaya Gazeta wrote on August 6, 2008, that Cossack atamans (leaders) had announced “that in case of necessity the Cossacks could send 10,000 to 15,000 volunteers to the war, and this will be fighters with lengthy experience in active service.”[28] This announcement was immediately put in practice. “[I]rregular Cossack paramilitaries, said by some reports to have numbered in the thousands, fought on the Russian/separatist side in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War.”[29] “Cossack volunteers . . . crossed the borders to engage Georgian forces. Cossacks in nearby North Ossetia apparently organized a relatively efficient and rapid system for clothing, equipping and transporting their paramilitaries into the breakaway province to feed them onto combat.”[30] “Cossack volunteers formed the second major paramilitary force in the war, the first being the South Ossetian militias. According to reports, the Cossack forces fought with dogged determination.”[31] Militias, active in South Ossetia in August 2008, have been accused of war crimes. Shortly after the war The Guardian’s Luke Harding wrote: “South Ossetian militias, facilitated by the Russian army, are carrying out the worst ethnic cleansing since the war in former Yugoslavia.”[32]
Cossacks Patrolling the Streets
Cossacks were not only active in the “frozen conflicts” in the former Soviet space. According to Israpilov, Russia needed “more urgently a filter against threats coming from within the country, than from the external borders.”[33] In effect, inside Russia’s frontiers also the Cossacks proved to be useful to the authorities, taking on tasks that the authorities preferred to outsource. In the southern Krasnodar province, a Cossack region that includes Sochi, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics, such practice was already long established. The regional government’s program “Cossack Participation in Protecting Public Order” allowed Cossacks “to be used as the main force for displacing the targeted ethnic minority of Meskhetian Turks. The Cossacks were not too picky about the means they used to do their job: ethnic Turks were subjected to mass beatings and ambushes, their gardens were destroyed, homes looted, and the goods and market stalls of Turkish traders were confiscated.”[34] The Cossacks’ efforts were successful, and the Turks left the Krasnodar region after the U.S. government granted them asylum. “The exercise in displacing the Turkish minority,” wrote Fatima Tlisova, “became an example of how effective Cossacks may be in dealing with the sensitive task of making people’s lives hell while maintaining the appearance of law and order and non-involvement on the part of the Russian government.”[35]
In the meantime Cossacks patrolling the streets have become a familiar sight in Krasnodar. Aleksandr Tkachev, the governor of the Krasnodar region, said the Cossacks were entrusted with “forcing out” from his region the unwelcome “intruders” (i.e., Muslim migrants) from adjacent Russian territories of the North Caucasus.[36] To clarify further, he went on to explain “that the Cossacks should act more freely than the police, whose operations are constrained by ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights.’”[37] “What they can’t do, he said, a Cossack can.”[38] After the mass demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg in December 2011 and the spring of 2012 it became clear that the Cossacks, with their sabres, high fur caps, epaulettes, and impressive, broad shouldered uniforms, could be useful also in the rest of the Federation. They displayed all the characteristics necessary for a pro-Kremlin militia with their militant tradition, their socially conservative attitude, their patriotism, their supposed strict observance of the Russian Orthodox faith, and their staunch support for Vladimir Putin. Moreover, they had still another additional advantage that the Kremlin could not neglect: they could more easily be controlled than Nashi hooligans, while in the population at large they enjoyed a rather positive image.
A New Praetorian Guard?
The potential of the new Cossack reservoir is impressive. About 7 million Russians consider themselves Cossacks, which is approximately 5 percent of the population.[39] This does not mean that the whole group will be engaged by the state. According to Alexander Beglov, the chairman of the President’s Council on Cossack Affairs, there are three ways to be a Cossack. The first is to be active as a member of a Cossack community in order to preserve its traditions; the second is more passive—to be “just a Cossack”; the third is to sign up on the state’s Cossacks register. Only by choosing this last option does a Cossack oblige himself to serve the state. In order to be accepted, a candidate must be a Russian citizen older than eighteen years, he must have no criminal record, drink no alcohol, “share the ideas of the Cossacks,” and be a Christian Orthodox believer, because “a Cossack cannot be an atheist.”[40] In 2012 the state register counted 426 organizations with a total of 937,000 active members.[41] At the end of 2012 the eleven existing Cossack armies were merged into a single All-Russian Cossack Army. The army leader (ataman) has his headquarters in Moscow and will directly report to the commander-in-chief, Vladimir Putin. In this way the Kremlin leader will have—like the tsars before him—his own army, loyal only to him. The Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church form the two pillars of this new praetorian guard, which functions as a “cordon sanitaire” around Putin. The haste with which Putin is building this personal army is a sign that, weakened after the mass protests of 2011–2012, he wants to strengthen his position in the “internal war” with the opposition. It is, furthermore, a sign that, due to growing dissensions amongst the political elite, he is placing less trust in the traditional vestiges of power: the military, the police, and even the secret service.
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