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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]