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Every year, in July, the Nashi movement organizes a two-week summer camp in a pine wood near Lake Seliger, a popular holiday resort three hundred miles north of Moscow. Everything is done to make the camp attractive to young people: transport, food, and lodging are free. In 2006 there were five thousand participants; in 2007 this number had doubled to ten thousand. The camps mixed adventure with agitprop. In 2007 paintings were exhibited of internal and external foes of Russia, such as opposition leader Garry Kasparov, clad as a prostitute,^[14] and the foreign minister of Estonia, Urmas Paet, with a Hitler mustache. Apart from geopolitics the future demographic development of Russia was high on the agenda. In 2007 the camp celebrated a mass wedding for about thirty couples. Red tents were arranged in the shape of a heart for the couples to celebrate their wedding night. Dmitry Medvedev and Sergey Ivanov, at that time both deputy prime ministers, called in. Ivanov called for the group to have more babies. One year later, in the summer camp of 2008, a baby was shown who had been conceived at the mass wedding of 2007. This openly proclaimed natalism is resonant of Mussolini’s call to the Italian women “to make babies for Italy.”^[15] In 2008 the portrait of the Estonian foreign minister had been replaced by a pig in a wooden stall with the name Ilves—the name of the Estonian president.^[16] The 2008 camp, however, attracted only five thousand participants. This diminished enthusiasm was partly due to the fact that in the summer of 2008 the Duma elections and the presidential elections had taken place. But also rumors of free love had made parents more wary. The government intervened. In 2009 the camp was organized directly by the state, paramilitary training was suspended, there was this time no “love oasis,” and also non-Nashi members were given free access.^[17] But these cosmetic changes did not have a real impact on the camp’s core business. According to an observer, “the worry for critics of Seliger is that the older political generation uses it to transmit their own ideology to the new.”^[18]

The Nashi Manifesto and “Megaproject Russia”

One of the Nashi movement’s objectives was, indeed, the transmission of the ideology of the ruling elite to the younger generation. Therefore, the Nashi manifesto” deserves a closer look. It is one of the rare Kremlin-inspired texts that gives a deeper insight into the ideology of the regime. The manifesto starts with inviting young Russians to participate in the “megaproject of our generation, the megaproject Russia.” And the text continues: “The development of the world involves competition between peoples.” In this competition “it is our goal to make Russia a global leader of the twenty-first century.” This leadership is possible, the manifesto continues, because, as one should not forget, “the twentieth century had been Russia’s century.” This was due to three events. The first event is the Russian Revolution, which was “an effort to modernize” the country (no mention is made of Stalinist mass murders and repression). The second event is the victory of Russia in the Second World War, which saved the world from “a global hegemony by another country” and which accelerated “the disintegration of the colonial empires.” (Here nothing is said about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, nor about the new colonization that took place after the war inside the Soviet bloc.) The third event that is mentioned is the end of communism at the end of the twentieth century. It is stressed that this process was “autonomous.”