I was at Nashi’s summer camp this weekend in Seliger, where 3000 activists gathered for sport, music and political indoctrination. Nashi is a youth organization set up by the Kremlin, in response to youth NGOs like Otpor in Serbia and Pora in Ukraine, which played a role in resisting the attempts by authoritarian regimes in those countries to steal elections.

Nashi is a similar kind of organization to Otpor and Pora. It clearly uses the PR and team-building techniques of those organizations. But while they were dedicated to civil disobedience, Nashi is dedicated to civil obedience. It’s a classic Kremlin tactic – take a force potentially threatening to the ruling power, such as the politicized youth or nationalist groups, and create a puppet organization to channel that potentially destabilizing force and, as it were, emasculate it. Nashi is to youth politics what Rodina is to nationalist politics.

So Nashi gives the kids a bit of what they want – the feeling of being in a progressive youth movement engaged in civil society – while actually serving the interests of the state. What surprised me at the summer camp was how blatantly the organization is serving the state. I heard Gleb Pavlosvky, of all people, telling the kids gathered round him that Nashi’s job was to “defend the constitutional order” in Russia from any Orange-style revolutions, because such revolutions were US-financed coups.

Just as their grandparents had defended Russia from Nazi Germany, so they should defend Russia from nasty US-sponsored revolution. In return, the Kremlin spent $1 million making these 3000 kids feel special, like members of a kids’ Nomenklatura. Support the government, kids. In return you get a private concert by Zemfira. Welcome to the world of Soviet privilege.

I see certain glaring misconceptions of the world behind Nashi, which have somehow become conventional wisdom. I want to take issue with a few of them now.

1) The US government caused the coloured revolutions in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan

This is a classic, age-old fallacy that you always come across in the history of small countries like Serbia or Georgia. The only way larger foreign countries can ever really become interested in them is in terms of them being a ‘pawn in a great game’ played between great powers. Merely on their own, they are uninteresting. Who cares about poor, mountainous countries with populations of 10 million? Nobody cares.

The only way of interesting editors, readers, politicians, and the general public in the West or Moscow is to describe the goings-on in these countries as part of some bigger picture involving big countries like Russia and the US, countries we actually know about and care about. So the history of these countries is constantly told and written from the point of view of great powers, because it is uninteresting from any other perspective.

Usually, a much more convincing reason for mass disturbances like the Rose Revolution can be found domestically. For example, Shevardnadze’s government had by 2003 become totally ensnared in corruption. Such was the theft that the public sector ceased to function at all. State wages and pensions went unpaid. Nothing worked. That’s a far better explanation for the Rose Revolution than ‘the US ordered it’.

Such a theory both over-estimates the power of the US, and under-estimates the ability of Georgians to decide their own destinies and make rational decisions for themselves. But who cares about the internal politics of Georgia? It’s too specialized a subject for global consumption. ‘The US ordered it’ is a much better story.

2) The coloured revolutions have increased US and NATO influence in the region, putting puppet US-backed regimes in power

Have they?

In Serbia, the fall of Milosevic has left Vojislav Kostunica in power, a nationalist who still refuses to hand over leading war criminals to the Hague Tribunal. In Georgia, it’s not as if a Russia-friendly president was deposed. Shevardnadze was an open critic of Russian support for Abhkazia, and many believe Russian forces were behind his attempted assassination in 1998. He had even suggested joining NATO in 2000. The difference between Shevardnadze and Saakashvili is not in their attitude to Russia or the US. It’s in their age, their energy, and their ability to change anything in Georgia.

In Kyrgyzstan, where US support for the revolution was perhaps most obvious, the revolution has left a president in power with a Russian wife, and a prime minister who used to be a member of the KGB. The new government has already asked the US to leave its Kyrgyz military base, and invited more Russian troops to go to their military base.

In Ukraine, clearly the new government is more pro-Western than Yanukovich’s government would have been. However, president Yushchenko’s main foreign policy imperative is to join the EU, not get closer to the US. Good relations with the US may be important from a security point of view, but from an economic point of view, EU accession is far, far more significant. That was perhaps one of the main reasons behind the Orange Revolution.

Secondly, the Orange Revolution swept Yuliya Tymoshenko to power, who is not particularly pro-Western or liberal. If anything, she is a socialist nationalist, playing to domestic political interests rather than to the West. After constitutional reform changes the role of the prime minister in Ukraine in September, she could become the most powerful person in the country.

3) A coloured revolution in Russia would be a blow to Russian sovereignty

This was repeated endlessly to the Nashi kids –‘it’s your job to defend Russian sovereignty from foreign interference’.

But what does this actually mean? The revolutions in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were all triggered by the ruling elite’s attempt to steal the election.

Where does sovereignty lie in a democracy if not in the will of the people, expressed through open and fair elections? So if those elections aren’t fair, then that is tampering with the sovereignty of the country.

So what the Kremlin really means when it tells Nashi to protect the sovereignty of Russia is not ‘protect the will of the people’. Far from it. It’s ‘protect the right of the ruling elite to rig the elections as it sees fit’. That’s why 3,000 kids gathered at Seliger this week – to protect the sovereign right of the KGB to defraud to its own people in any future elections.

4) Foreign enemies of Russia are gathering to prepare a revolution

I heard this quite often at the Nashi camp too. One of Nashi’s founders, Boris Yakemenko, told me: ““Now is a critical moment. Many enemies are gathering inside and outside Russia. That’s why we should help Putin.”

Let’s just imagine the scene briefly. George Bush junior sits in the White House, looking at a map of the world. Only one thought goes through his mind –‘what to do with Russia’. Tony Blair rings up. ‘Hey George. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’‘I sure am, Tony. How can we start a revolution in Russia.’ They conference-call Condoleezza Rice and Akhmed Zakayev, and together plot how they can cause the downfall of Putin.

This sometimes seems to be many Russians’ views of global affairs. It is, above all, an utterly Russo-centric view of the world. But the fact is, the fate of the Russian people, the future of democracy in Russia, is not the thought in everyone’s minds in Washington, Tokyo, Paris, London.

The people in these countries are mainly worried about… their own countries. British people are busy worrying about terrorist attacks in London. Japanese are worrying about their economy. Americans are worrying about Karl Rove. The French are worrying about protecting their farmers. If their minds ever turn, briefly, to world affairs, they turn to the Middle East, to Israel and Iraq. Or they turn to China, and the looming prospect of a new superpower.

The great drawback of a paranoid view either of one’s self or one’s country is it usually vastly exaggerates one’s importance in the world. It is similar in Serbia – many Serbs really seem to believe the world is out to get them. The world doesn’t give a damn about Serbia. Harsh but true.

Some Russian friends of mine sometimes express surprise when they see the BBC or other foreign media, and there are no news stories about Russia. No news on Russia?! Yes, no news on Russia. As a journalist who pitches news stories on Russia to London editors, I can tell you, their interest in the country is limited. The criminal investigation into Kasyanov did not interest them. Vladislav Surkov’s leaked speech did not interest them. The election reforms did not interest them.

The idea that, in this large world, foreign governments are devoting all their time and money to plotting revolution in Russia is simply wishful thinking. Russia needs to let go of this paranoiac self-absorption, and accept it’s just another country in a big world.

5) These foreign enemies want to make Russia weak, because they fear a strong Russia

I hear this point of view so often, particularly from political thinkers close to the Kremlin. Gleb Pavlovsky came out with similar remarks at the Nashi camp.

Let’s just go through this argument:

- The West wants to promote democracy in Russia. This much is true.

- Western countries like the US or UK are stronger than Russia economically and militarily. They are more successful countries than Russia. This is also true.

- Western countries are democracies.

- Therefore, by trying to promote the economic and political model which made them MORE successful and MORE powerful than Russia, they are trying to make Russia… weaker?

If the West really wanted to make Russia weaker, it would encourage it to return to a Soviet planned economy, with closed borders, a fearful and passive population, a brutal, corrupt and unaccountable government, and an environment poisoned to breaking point.

Why do Russians think the West wants a weak Russia? This isn’t the nineteenth century anymore. It’s not the case that one country being stronger means another being weaker. The growth of China, for example, is actually supporting the growth of the US, because Chinese investors are buying American debt, just as Japan did in the 1980s.

6) Civil society is an illusion

This is the last misconception evident in Nashi. The Kremlin seems to believe that all independent NGOs are, as Nikolai Patrushev of the FSB suggested, mere puppets of the CIA. Civil society is an illusion, behind which states and security services battle each other. Thus, if the kids want an NGO, the state sets one up, and tells them what to believe and do, in case they start thinking for themselves.

What kind of view of human beings is evident from such a view? This kind of view: most human beings are incapable of rational action. They are incapable of creativity, or self-organization. They don’t even exist, in any real or autonomous way. There is only the state. Human beings are mere puppets, moved around by state elites. If an NGO comes up with an independent idea, or criticizes the Russian government, then that NGO must work for a foreign government because… because no genuine thought or creativity is possible separate from the state. Without the support of the state elite, humanity simply collapses, like a paraplegic without his wheelchair.

This is the view of human beings behind Nashi, and behind much of the Russian government’s actions.

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow. The article is written specially for "Eurasian Home".

July 20, 2005