Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

Other Nashi attacks were targeted at supposed internal foes, such as independent Russian media, opposition politicians, and journalists daring to criticize the regime. They were all categorized as fascists.^[27] One of these attacks concerned the paper Kommersant, one of the few remaining bastions of the free press in Russia. On March 3, 2008—as a reaction to a critical article on the Nashi movement in this paper—people posing as employees began handing out rolls of toilet paper, emblazoned with Kommersant’s logo, outside various Moscow metro stations. The rolls contained the mobile phone number of the reporter who wrote the critical article. Russian websites published a leaked e-mail, written by Nashi’s press secretary, Kristina Potupchik, with the following order: “Block their work. Psychologically and physically pester them. Revenge is essential.” The e-mail suggested buying up the entire print of the paper and destroying it, picketing its presses, and using hackers to bring down its website.^[28] Editors of the opposition paper Novaya Gazeta received a box containing the severed ears of a donkey with a note “from the presidential administration.”^[29] Then, in October 2009, a persecution campaign started against Alexander Podrabinek, a fifty-six-year-old former Soviet dissident, who had published an article on September 21, 2009, in the online paper Ezhednevnyy Zhurnal (Daily Paper), in which he criticized Soviet veterans who insisted that a Moscow restaurant with the name Antisovetskaya (Anti-Soviet), change its name to Sovetskaya (Soviet).^[30] Podrabinek had suggested that those who were proud of being Soviet veterans, seemed to be proud of the repressive, KGB-led gulag system of the former Soviet Union. Nashi activists picketed his house with placards demanding his apology for offending the veterans. They also “visited” the editorial offices of one of the newspapers for which he worked. After receiving phone calls with death threats, Podrabinek went into hiding.^[31] Foreign papers that had dared to suggest that Nashi’s activities resembled those of the Hitlerjugend were sued by Nashi for defamation.^[32] Suing, by the way, became one of the preferred weapons used by Nashi to harass its opponents. Nashi has filed suits against Yevgenia Albats, Boris Nemtsov (more than once), Garry Kasparov, radio station Ekho Moskvy, the papers Kommersant and Novaya Gazeta, as well as the online paper Gazeta.ru.^[33]

Preparing for More Muscled Actions: The Nashi Battle Groups

In 2008 some foreign observers thought that the Nashi movement was running out of steam and was gradually losing a sense of purpose.^[34] The reality, however, was different. Shortly before this, the Nashi had set up a junior organization, the Mishki (Teddy Bears). This group had the objective of strengthening the ideological grip of the Kremlin on a still younger generation: children aged seven to fifteen. “If Nashi can be likened to the Komsomol, the Soviet era organization of high school and university students” wrote the Moscow Times, “then Mishki is a throwback to the Pioneers, the children’s group of the same period . . . . Their essential purpose, just like Nashi, is to support Putin. ‘I love the Mishki! I love Russia! I love Putin! Together we will win.’”^[35] How these young children were manipulated became clear, when, during the conflict over the removal of the Soviet war memorial in Tallinn, a group of Mishki was brought to the Estonian embassy in Moscow and started to color in a giant poster of a statue of a soldier outside the embassy. Masha Lipman, from the Moscow Carnegie Center, expressed her concern. She considered it an alarming development and reminiscent of Soviet-era groups like the Young Pioneers and the Little Octobrists. “I think any youth organization directed and guided from above brings back very unpleasant associations with the Soviet days. And also Nashi, I think, is a very unsavory organization, given their record of harassing officials, of enjoying complete impunity . . . . So [the fact that they are] ideological guides to still younger kids—to me it’s a very unpleasant trend.”^[36]