Two rallies in Moscow weekend – one by the new opposition movement called The Other Russia, the other by the Kremlin-funded Nashi youth group – provided a stark contrast.

I was walking up Tverskaya, through Pushkin Square, when the police started. A long, long row of Ministry of Interior (MVD) police, the foot-soldiers of the Russian state, which seemingly has an infinite number of them to dispose of at any given time. They were standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a green line stretching 600 metres to Mayakovskaya, where an opposition rally was taking place.

I walked along, feeling smaller and smaller as more and more police appeared. Next came the OMON riot police, in their white and grey camouflage, and their big, black boots, standing around in fours or fives, feeling elite compared to the MVD grunts, talking into headpieces or comparing truncheon techniques.

And all along the street were parked state vehicles – not just riot vans and meat wagons, but also fire engines, even bulldozers and street-cleaning machines – everything the city authorities could lay their hands on, for the purpose of controlling the deadly threat.

The deadly threat turns out to be about 1,500 protestors, mainly quite young or quite old, milling around Triumph Square in front of the statue of the Bolshevik poet Mayakovsky. This is the first public rally of the ‘Other Russia’ movement, a motley and controversial union of liberal forces, led by former chess champion Garry Kasparov, and various radical nationalist groups, whose best-known leader is Eduard Limonov, geriatric punk novelist and leader of a youth movement called the National Bolsheviks, or Natbols.

The square is small, and looks about three quarters full. On one side are the black and red flags of the Natbols and the Red Youth Vanguard (AKD), whose symbols are a hand grenade and a Kalashnikov, respectively. The AKD look like proper thugs, the Natbols look like half thugs and half white-collar boho misfits. This is how Limonov described a typical Natbol, in his Mein Kampf-esque manifesto (called, by the way, The Other Russia): “a strange, unorganized person living on society’s margin, a talented pervert, fanatic, psychopath, unlucky fellow.”

I see Aleksander Averin, the Natbols’ press secretary, among the group. I interviewed him a couple of months ago, in his boho flat in the north of Moscow. He is a pale, sickly looking boy of 23, with long, Byronic hair and a twitching, nervous face. He sat at his desk talking to me, in front of a pick-axe hanging on his wall, under a sign saying ‘God is with us!’. His young wife is in prison for storming the health ministry in 2004, and throwing a portrait of Putin out of a window. She was 22, a university student, but desecrating a portrait of Putin was deemed sufficiently grave to merit a three-year sentence.

I see his wife’s paintings all over the flat – one of a sea of flames, another in a Futurist style of her looking beautiful and heroic in a Natbol red armband, against a brooding city landscape. And then I see a photo of her, standing on a small shrine next to a pair of handcuffs, and she looks plain, a little geeky, the kind of girl you wouldn’t notice at school. A marginal person. I asked Aleksander why he, a lapsed engineering student, and his young wife were willing to risk beatings, torture, prison and possibly death for the Natbol movement. “We are like Limonov”, he said, face twitching. “We are Romantics. We want to lead remarkable lives.”

The young Natbols, of whom there are perhaps 30,000 across Russia, fervently admire Limonov, who in turn seems to narcissistically adore their immolations. An undeniably trendy figure in Russia, he represents an unfortunate nexus between avant-garde punk and Fascism. I once asked him why his movement went in for all the quasi-Nazi symbols – the red flags and arm-bands. He shrugged and giggled: “The kids like it.”

Over the other side of Triumph Square are some white flags, belonging to followers of Garry Kasparov’s United Civil Front, and some red and white flags of the People’s Democratic Union, led by Mikhail Kasyanov, who was president Putin’s prime minister from 2000 to 2003. There’s also a few members of some hitherto-unheard-of youth movement called SMENA, or Change, that seems to want to ape the Ukrainian youth movement PORA, which helped cause the Orange Revolution of 2004. But SMENA only seems to have eight members so far, and no leader. There’s also a few elderly Communists, two people of unspecified political allegiance from the International Union of Esperanto, and a woman wearing a severe Orthodox burqua-esque outfit, with an icon and a sign saying ‘God Save Russia From Putin’.

There’s a sudden scrum of photographers at the front, and Garry Kasparov appears, and steps up onto a van, on which are two speakers and a ragged sign saying ‘Other Russia’. He looks confused and mutters something to an assistant. “Is that Limonov?” asks an old woman in front of me, also in Orthodox garb. “He’s great. He’s a nationalist.”“It’s Garry Kasparov”, I say. An old man in a big fur shapka turns round and looks at me suspiciously. “And you, where are you from?” he asks. “England”, I say. “Oooh, England, that is not good”, he says, wagging a finger at me. “England is a little Uncle Sam.” He’s an old Communist, and occasionally shouts ‘Down with Putin!’ with surprising vehemence. “England’s OK”, says a middle-aged woman behind me, a member of Kasparov’s United Civil Front.

She’s called Olga, she’s middle-class, a human rights worker. In the dreams of the US Congress, Russia is filled with people like Olga, all being brutally oppressed by the evil Putin. In fact, there are about nine people in her group. “We must save Russia before it is destroyed!” she says. We watch as Kasparov tries to switch on the microphone. “You know why the Kremlin is scared of Kasparov?” she asks. No, I say, I really don’t. “Because there is no kompromat (compromising material) on him.” I ask her how she feels about being in a union with Limonov, a Fascist? She shrugs. “He’s not a Fascist, he’s just a showman. We all need to band together right now.”

Kasparov is joined on the van by the other leaders of the opposition movement. Whether by chance or design, they are aligned in order of progressive illiberalism. Starting from the right, there is Yevgenia Albats, the doyen of the Moscow liberal press; Vladimir Ryzhkov, practically the only independent, liberal and honest MP in the entire Duma; Irina Khakamada, a leftover from the 1990s liberal movement; next to her is Mikhail Kasyanov, who gets a cheer from his supporters when he appears. He’s the political heavyweight of the alliance, though there’s also plenty of kompromat on him – he’s on trial as we speak for privatizing and buying his government dacha as he left office. He’s in his 40s, tall, good-looking, charismatic, a favourite with the ladies – everything Putin isn’t. Putin fired him in 2003, replacing him with Mikhail Fradkov, who is short, moon-faced, dumpy and dull.

Next comes Limonov, black spectacles and greying Trotsky beard, wrapped up in a big coat, with Aleksander Averin next to him, face twitching as if he was muttering some incantation on the crowd. Then finally, on the far left of the van, there are three genuinely scary looking skin-head members of the AKD.

Garry Kasparov gets the speechifying going, but he’s not a natural rabble-rouser. He looks embarrassed when his speech gets interrupted by the crowd’s enthusiastic chant of ‘Russia Without Putin!” Limonov leans over and tells him to chant with them. He does, but he chants with an ironic expression, and out of time, as if it pains his intellectual sensibilities to chant in unison with the mob.

Mikhail Kasyanov speaks next, and he immediately gets the crowd going. “They call us extremists, but who banned regional elections?”“The Kremlin!” shout back the crowd joyously. “Who took away social benefits?”“The Kremlin!”“Who silenced the press?”“The Kremlin!”“So who are the extremists?”“The Kremlin!”

In actual fact, the state newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta recently defined extremist as ‘anyone who would consider attending a street demonstration’, so in point of fact, everyone there in Triumph Square is an extremist, including me. Still, it feels good, hearing the crowd shouting ‘Freedom!’ around me. There’s that tingle of excitement, that you hardly ever feel in Putin’s Russia – the excitement of direct democracy, of street rallies, of young people shouting freedom. “There will be freedom!” shouts Kasyanov. “There will be social benefits for all! There will be apartments for all!” And dachas, Misha?

Then Limonov steps up, to a cheer from his mob of supporters. He looks all of his 62 years, and his voice is strained and hoarse. “The Kremlin are criminals”, he cries. “They should resign! The head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, should resign. And so should the head of the electoral commission, Aleksander Veshnyakov. And so should the minister of health, what’s he called, you know, the uneducated one…er…”“Zurabov” says someone from the crowd helpfully. “Yes, that’s the one. He should resign!”

Then the skin-head leader of the AKD steps up and hollers into the microphone for a while, getting everyone excited. The liberals on the platform eye him uneasily.

A few other speakers come up after him, including some representatives of the oil workers union from the oil town of Surgut. They want the government to share out more of its oil billions, rather than storing it up to pay back the IMF. Most liberal economists actually approve of the government’s fiscal prudence, but you can’t be a liberal economist if you want to win democratic power in Russia. You have to shift to the left, and shout, like Kasyanov, “apartments for all!”

Several speakers mention the silencing of the press and the killing of Anna Politkovskaya, but it is notable that not one speaker mentions the death of Aleksander Litvinenko, even among this gathering of hardcore Kremlin-haters. No one in Russia cares about his death.

Then Kasparov takes the mike, and says everyone will walk to Belorusskaya, about 800 metres away, for another rally. This is a potentially dangerous walk – the city has forbidden the protestors to march. Kasparov says they are not marching, just going from one authorized rally to another. He sets off down a small street towards Belorusskaya. SMENA begins setting up a tent-city in the square, like PORA did in Kyiv, except SMENA’s tent city consists of two tents, which never get assembled, because hordes of AKD march through them and off down a side-street towards Belorusskaya.

Then the Natbols line up. I follow them as they walk out of the square and down the side-street, chanting ‘Revolution!’ past the dull faces of the MVD troops. After about 50 metres, we are no longer going forwards but backwards. A wall of OMON riot police are pushing us back. Then the MVD troops form a cordon around us – there are 150 of us or so – and push us back onto the steps outside an antiques shop, which hastily closes its shutters. I duck between two OMON goons and clamber up on a wall to watch. The OMON are plunging into the crowd and dragging out Natbols one by one. Two big OMON guys pull a kid past me, with his arms twisted behind his back, he can’t be more than 15 but he doesn’t look scared, and they throw him into a meat wagon. A Jewish bespectacled student girl with dyed red hair is the next to get thrown in. About 30 other people are arrested and locked in the vans. I see another row of OMON jogging up to join in the clean-up, their faces jolly and smiling. They look a bit like the AKD thugs, also up for a ruckus. I’m reminded of Alex’s droogs in A Clockwork Orange, how they move effortlessly from a street gang to the police force.

After about thirty minutes, all that is left of the Other Russia demonstration is a few abandoned Bolshevik banners, and rows upon rows of police, so many police, thousands of police just in this square, and beyond, throughout Russia, perhaps two million MVD troops and OMON toughs and drilled army conscripts and FSB suits and dumb municipal militsia. Who could ever overcome them?

*****

The next day, another rally takes place. This time, it’s a rally by Nashi, the Kremlin-connected youth group. Nashi are usually described as the ‘Putin Youth’ by the western press, partly because their previous incarnation, called Moving Together, used to march around Moscow in Putin T-shirts, literally singing his praises.

I take a cab down to Prospekt Akademik Sakharov, where the rally is taking place, but have to get out and walk the last two hundred metres because of the crowds. Akademik Sakharov is a broad street, perhaps 500 metres long and 40 metres wide, and the entire street is filled with about 70,000 Father Christmases.

To be precise, around 35,000 male students are dressed as Dyed Moroz, or Grandfather Frost, Russia’s version of Santa Claus; and about 35,000 female students are dressed as Snegurochka, or Snow Girl, Father Frost’s little granddaughter. The conceit of the rally is that Nashi, described as a ‘democratic anti-fascist patriotic youth movement’ has gathered in Moscow to celebrate the beginning of the WWII defence of Moscow (the anniversary of which was actually two weeks previously) and to hand out presents to veterans of the war. Hence the Father Christmas outfits.

The scale of the event is staggering. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people gathered in one place, let alone so many people dressed as Santa Claus. There’s a huge stand in the middle of the Prospekt, with a big banner of smiling Santas hugging veterans and fifteen-foot speakers on either side. Fifty metres further down the road is another enormous speaker, blaring out house music.

Everything bears the Nashi logo. Everyone is wearing either a Father Frost outfit, or a Snow Girl outfit, or a trendy-looking Nashi jacket, which comes in red or navy blue. Everyone is carrying red Nashi-logoed sacks of presents for the veterans. They are divided into groups, and follow a leader bearing a banner saying where they are from. A group of about seventy march past me, shouting ‘Sa-ma-ra!’, the Volga town where they’re from. I meet other groups from Belgorod, Tula, Rostov, even a group from Novosibirsk in Siberia, who had travelled three days by train to get there.

I ask one of the group, a fresh-faced 21-year-old student called Oksana, why they’re prepared to travel six days on a train to take part. Were they paid to do so? “Oh no”, she smiles. “They paid our travel expenses but that was it. We’re patriotic. We want to help the veterans.”

For others, it was their first time in the capital. A group of students from Kazan, also on the Volga, gathered round me excitedly. “You’re from London? Woooow! We’re from Kazan! You’ve been there? Woooow! This is the first time we’ve been in Moscow! It’s huge!” For them, it was mainly the trip itself that was exciting, not to mention the fun of going round the city in fancy dress, feeling like you were doing good at the same time.

The foreign press like to compare Nashi to the Hitler Youth, and the British Ambassador, Anthony Brenton, recently complained of being harassed by them (Nashi objects to the fact Brenton went to an Other Russia conference, where Limonov was speaking). Certainly, there’s something sinister about Nashi – I remember going to their summer camp last year, where Gleb Pavlovsky, one of the Kremlin’s spin-doctors, told the assembled kids that if anyone tried a Ukraine-style revolution in Russia it was their responsibility to take to the streets to “defend the Constitution”.

One can certainly say that the Kremlin-connected adult organizers of Nashi are rather sinister people, happy to exploit the patriotism of youth for PR purposes. But Nashi as a genuine civil organization doesn’t really exist – it’s just a very well-funded theatrical spectacle.

The kids who take part are not politically sophisticated. They are not committed members of Nashi or supporters of Putin. They are not racist – I saw groups from Dagestan and Tatarstan. They are just clean-cut, rather square kids enjoying a freebie ride around the capital, while feeling like they are doing good by helping veterans. OK, they’re naïve, but that might even be a good thing, considering how cynical, depressed and politically apathetic elder Russian generations have become.

They see themselves as the modern heirs to the Soviet pioneer movement, which was itself genuinely popular. Russian kids like to march around en masse feeling like they are doing good and serving their country. Weird but true, and Putin understands that and taps into it. If anything was close to the Hitler Youth, I would have to say it was the Natbols with whom the British Ambassador saw fit to align himself.

I was struck above all by the sheer expense of the operation. The Kremlin has so many petrodollars, it can waste them on a big, stupid PR stunt like this, just to show up the previous day’s opposition rally. As one enthusiastic Nashi member said: “We are not a political organization. Putin helps us, but he helps us as an individual, not as the president.” Yes, well, Nashi’s big business backers – the likes of state-owned Gazprom and Rosneft – are clearly generous.

I suppose you could say it’s a symbol of Putin’s Russia – thousands of Santa Clauses going around Moscow giving out gifts funded with petrodollars, and totally outnumbering any ragged opposition rally. That, I’m afraid, is the state of Russian politics, and while we may not like it, I can’t say the state of Russian youth plunges me into complete depression. These were young, likeable people who were interested in the West and who genuinely wanted to improve their country. Maybe when they are a bit older they will be less eager to be taken for a ride.

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

December 18, 2006