The Great Game

Yashin, 21, leader of the opposition Youth Yabloko group, and an undercover journalist had posed as delegates to get into the clandestine meeting near Moscow.

Without warning, the pair were pounced on by an organiser who dragged them to the front of the hall. 'These are the ones we have to fight against,' he told an angry crowd of 200 Nashi supporters. Five security guards seized Yashin, took him outside and pitched him into a snowdrift.

'I think what happened to me was the start of something,' says Yashin, a slender politics student whose unceremonious ejection from the training session made headlines across Russia.

As President Vladimir Putin's poll ratings have dived after the introduction of unpopular welfare reforms, battle lines are being drawn in a new struggle to mobilise young people, both for and against the Kremlin.

Youth movements are springing up, some of which are little more than fronts for thuggery in the name of patriotism. Pro-Westerners in their teens and early twenties are being pitted against nationalists determined to protect Russia from 'meddling' by America and Europe.

In the past two months a clutch of youth protest groups opposing Putin have been organised. One is 'Walking Without Putin', a skit on the well-established pro-Kremlin movement, Walking Together. Another is a chapter of the militant opposition group, Pora, which played a key role last year in neighbouring Ukraine's 'orange revolution'.

In response to the new movement, a worried Kremlin has scrambled its forces to set up Nashi, a shadowy youth group. Its pugnacious leader, Vassily Yakemenko, 33, said that its enemies would be those who saw Russia as 'a feeding trough for the global economy'.

In a sign of rising tension, Nashi has been accused of two violent attacks on the headquarters of an opposition party. For many, the group's name - Ours, or One of Us, recalling an extreme nationalist movement of the early Nineties - has a sinister ring.

But Yakemenko claims Nashi is a patriotic movement that is dedicated to anti-fascism. He predicted that its membership would swell by around 100,000 people, mostly aged17 to 20, by the end of the year.

Publicly Yakemenko has denied any Kremlin links, but during a secretly recorded speech to would-be members last month he claimed: 'The President knows such an organisation is being formed ... You'll be given millions of dollars to do it!'

Behind the rhetoric is a deep-seated fear that Western-sponsored revolutionary fervour could seep over the border from Ukraine and infect Russia's young.

Yakemenko's brother Boris, a small, bearded man who is chief ideologue of the pro-Putin Walking Together, said meeting the threat of a Russian orange revolution was a paramount task. 'One of the main aims of Nashi is to prevent a Ukraine scenario in 2008 when the President's term ends,' he said.

Although the Kremlin has denied all links with the group, few Russians doubt it is the brainchild of Vladislav Surkov, Putin's sly deputy chief of staff. In a rare inter view late last year, Surkov spoke of the need to mobilise social organisations against a growing coalition of 'false liberals and real fascists' sponsored from abroad.

One veteran radical group claims it has already fallen prey to thugs from Nashi. The National Bolsheviks - famous for lobbing mayonnaise at politicians and occupying the Health Ministry - say their headquarters was attacked twice this month.

To reach their bunker beneath a suburban apartment block in southern Moscow you must pass two steel doors and elaborate security checks.

'About 40 guys from Nashi came here and forced their way in,' said the 'NatsBoly' deputy leader, Vladimir Abel, as he led me through a warren of dank underground chambers. One man was badly beaten, he said.

What happens next, say analysts, depends on how rapidly the opposing groups can recruit members. So far, the Kremlin camp is ahead but Putin has taken a knock in popularity after countrywide protests over his controversial social reforms.

The opposition hopes it can fight back with public demonstrations. 'The streets are our strength,' said Yashin. 'The President knows that and fears it.' (Link)

# posted by Jacob @ 3/20/2005 07:41:00 p.m.