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These young activists love their government

Or at least Russia hopes they'll say so, now that they're part of a new state-backed movement to counter icky protest groups.

By VANESSA GEZARI
Published November 28, 2005

MOSCOW - The day Maxim Kuvshinov got the call that would change his life, his first question was: Where did you get my number?

The girl on the other end of the line had been asking around. At the university where Maxim studies law and serves on the student council, plenty of people know him. His cell phone number is not a secret.

We're creating this new movement, she said. We thought you might be interested.

That's how Maxim, a smugly handsome 18-year-old whose mother still does his laundry, became one of the first commissars of Nashi, a fledgling political youth movement backed by the Russian government.

A few months later, he was making tea for visitors in a fifth-floor walkup with a view of the Kremlin. Teenagers and 20-somethings sat hunched over computers, and the walls were plastered with pictures of activists in matching red and white T-shirts.

"If you eat a spoonful of black caviar, it'll be okay, but if you have a big bowl, a vat, you'll be sick," Maxim said, sounding more like a seasoned bureaucrat than a college student. "There is a measure for everything. Democracy must be measured. Everything in moderation."

This is the voice of the Kremlin's handpicked youth brigade, kids who listen to Jimi Hendrix and The Doors, yet agree with President Vladimir Putin that too much personal freedom is bad for the country.

Nashi was born after the Ukraine's Orange Revolution drew thousands of young people onto the streets last winter and put power in the hands of a pro-Western opposition leader. Putin and his administration feared the same thing could happen in Russia, so they set out to capture young hearts and minds before someone else could.

But the group, whose name means "Ours," is more than a sign of Russian leaders' insecurity. It is part of a growing wave of activism among young Russians who see a chance to shape their country's future after decades of powerlessness.

"This year is different in terms of the feeling of the youth," said Nikolay Petrov, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Center in Moscow. "It is much more active now, not only due to all the Kremlin moves, but to very intensive processes of youngsters talking about the situation, actively participating in political life, as well as elections."

Perhaps the key question for young Russians is whether revolution is necessary, or even possible. Russia is a country of revolutions whose people were so traumatized by the upheaval of the 1990s that they remain sharply divided over what price they are willing to pay for political change.

That anxiety fuels Putin's popularity, and Nashi's. The pro-Kremlin group pushes slow change under the mantle of authority, while opposition youth movements like the National Bolshevik Party and Oborona draw inspiration from Lenin and Che Guevara, the Argentinian-born Marxist.

Lev Lurie, a historian in Russia's St. Petersburg, thinks there will be another revolution in Russia, but not right away.

"Revolution is against parents, and in our country, parents are defeated absolutely," he said. "It's a country ruled by young people. Probably the children of today's young people will revolt."

The 1990s turned Russian society on its head. Adults who had mapped their futures in the Soviet Union suddenly found themselves struggling to survive. Today, fresh college graduates score highly paid jobs at big multinational firms while parents with years of experience are passed over.

This newfound confidence is fueling political activism among the young. Communist and prodemocracy youth groups stage protests over the war in Chechnya, the abuse of Russian soldiers and changes to pension benefits for the elderly. Young people say they want to live in a different Russia, one dominated not by the self-absorption of the 1990s, but by a sense of collective responsibility.

"I want that something should depend on me," said Igor Yakovlev, 18, a rosy-cheeked activist with Oborona, or Defense, an opposition youth movement. "I want to be helpful to my country."

For Mikhail Kostyaev, a 23-year-old activist with the National Bolshevik Party, helping the country meant handing out anti-Putin leaflets during the 2004 presidential election in his home city of Kaliningrad. Kostyaev even urged people not to vote.

"I see a way out sooner in revolution than by participating in government," Kostyaev said.

The National Bolshevik Party, or NBP, is Nashi's archenemy. This month, the Russian Supreme Court upheld a ban on the party, whose activists occupied the president's box in the Bolshoi Theater on the day of his inauguration last year.

They took over the health ministry to protest changes in pension benefits and threw a picture of Putin out the window. In 2003, they squirted mayonnaise on the elections commissioner while he was giving a speech.

"The Kremlin is in a state of hysteria because they cannot kill us," Eduard Limonov, a radical writer and the leader of NBP, said in an interview. "We don't give them a pretext to kill us, but at the same time we are damaging their image, and despite not having a free press, some Russian media are reporting on us."

NBP has none of Nashi's glossy finish. Its activists prefer body piercings, punk music and plain clothing, usually black. Although Limonov says the party is moving toward the mainstream, its younger members are itching for a fight.

"We are not satisfied with everything," said Kostyaev, the activist from Kaliningrad. "Everything is bad. I can speak about it for hours."

Among the things that are bad, he said, is the loss of Russian land and power. His city, Kaliningrad, is on a slice of Russian territory cut off from the mainland between Lithuania and Poland on the Baltic Sea. There is an ongoing, whispered argument over whether it belongs with Europe or Russia.

"We want it to be part of Russia," he said.

Recently, he stood outside the Moscow courthouse where 39 NBP activists were on trial for staging a sit-in at a presidential administration building last winter.

He wore a gray T-shirt and sandals and the tough, weary face of an older man. He said he doesn't get paid; he lives at home and his father supports him. He's not interested in money, he said. Not like the kids at Nashi.

"They have a strange patriotism, because they know how they are paid for participation," Kostyaev said. "It is a kind of patriotism for state money."

The Nashi activists have heard that before. They say they aren't paid, either. They don't deny that Nashi has money, but they say it doesn't come from the Kremlin. It comes from rich Russian businessmen.

Yet Nashi is anything but grass roots. What youth group recruits its leaders by cold-calling their cell phones? During a camping retreat this summer, hundreds of commissars listened to lectures on the dangers of revolution. Some activists even visited Putin at his dacha.

Igor Yakovlev, the activist from Oborona, sneaked into the Nashi summer camp with a few friends to spy. They were discovered and led away by security guards. Yakovlev said he felt sorry for the Nashi kids.

"When young people are ruled from above, they're given directions, told what to do," he said. "The government imposes the ideology of the regime on them."

But Nashi activists say they know enough not to be taken in. They think the Orange Revolution was financed by America. They say that in the square in Kiev, where students protested the results of an election the country's supreme court later said was rigged, music played and someone handed out vodka.

"You can't find free food, free music, free events nowadays," Dmitri Thugunov, a 19-year-old Nashi activist, said. "It means somebody organized all this stuff to gather people."

But get them away from their Kremlin handlers and they don't think the country is perfect. When the girl called his cell phone months back, Maxim was already worried about the health of the Russian polity. His father quit a government job after corrupt fellow officials urged him to sign documents that would have granted them kickbacks. His parents don't share his politics - they support a liberal opposition party - but the family agrees some kind of change is needed.

"We usually argue," Maxim said. "From time to time, my mother says, "If you continue to participate in this, I won't feed you."'

He and other Nashi activists might want to lead the country someday, but they see few avenues for young people with such aspirations. They say the bureaucracy is full of defeatists, people who lost hope in the 1990s.

"The citizens are poor and many people, even young people, drink a lot, and the demographic situation goes down and all this happens with the silent agreement of high authorities," said Robert Schlegel, a 20-year-old Nashi member. "And the first person who tried to change the situation is our current president."

Robert and the other activists listen to classic rock and Russian rap. They eat sushi and they eat at McDonald's. Like all young Russians, they disagree about what "Nashi" really means. What belongs to Russia? What defines it? What is ours?

"Those people I trust," Maxim said. "Those who share my desires, my picture of the world."

"We believe we'll be able to create a future for our country," Robert said.

"There is nobody except us to do it," said Dmitri.

Nobody except them and the kids from NBP and Oborona and all the other youth groups. But the Nashi activists are so focused on what divides them that they miss the common ground.

For the moment, they know who their enemies are. They are Putin's enemies too. The Chechen terrorist. The opposition oligarch. And Limonov, head of the Bolsheviks.

Their photographs are blown up and taped to the floor. You have to walk over them to get from one end of the office to the other.

--Times researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report. Vanessa Gezari can be reached at 727 893-8803 or vgezari@sptimes.com

[Last modified November 28, 2005, 01:05:08]