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The idea behind these volunteer law-enforcing druzhiny is not new. In 1913, on the eve of the First World War, they could already be found in tsarist Russia. And the October Revolution, four years later, was made possible by an uprising of spontaneously formed, armed militias of peasants and workers. After the Revolution there even emerged a competition between these militias and the new regular Red Army, organized by the People’s Commissar for War, Leon Trotsky. This power struggle—which resembled the competition between the SA and the Reichswehr in Nazi Germany—was in Russia ultimately decided in favor of the army.^[52] Under Stalin the role of the militias was further reduced, and it was—ironically—in the period of Khrushchev’s thaw that the idea resurfaced. In 1958—during the Khrushchev era of de-Stalinization—the criminal law was revised to allow the accused certain procedural guarantees, which would lead to a more liberal punishment regime. Uncertainties concerning the impact of this liberalization effort led to initiatives to accompany this more permissive policy with measures of enhanced preventive social control. As a consequence the 21st Party Congress of the CPSU in 1958 called for the reintroduction of the druzhiny volunteer squads,^[53] and on March 2, 1959, the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers issued a joint resolution, “On the Participation of the Workers in the Maintenance of Public Order,” in which the druzhiny were reintroduced. These militias were independent from the police, but worked often in cooperation with police officers. Its members came from the trade unions, the Komsomol, and the local soviets. This civil police force was especially active in factories and collective farms to fight drunkenness and hooliganism and enhance workers’ discipline.

The initiative to introduce nationwide Nashi volunteer squads was certainly inspired by these former Soviet examples. However, between the Krushchev-era druzhiny and the Putin-era druzhiny there exist two important differences. The first and most important difference is that in Khrushchev’s time they were introduced as a measure of a liberalizing regime that intended to replace the totalitarian control of civil society of the Stalinist era, characterized by repression and draconic punishments, by a more relaxed and normal authoritarian society. The druzhiny were a symbol and an expression of this liberalizing regime, substituting prevention for state repression. Putin’s Nashi militias are, on the contrary, the expression of exactly the opposite development: they are the expression of a society that becomes less democratic and more repressive. A second difference is that Khrushchev’s druzhiny were rather bureaucratic: they lacked an ideological drive. Its members were, as a rule, appointed. The new Nashi squads, on the contrary, have ideologically driven leaders, who are convinced of the importance of their mission: fighting the internal and external foes of the fatherland.

The Nashi: Komsomol, Red Guards, or

Hitlerjugend

?

How should we assess the development of Putin’s youth organization? In fact we can distinguish three stages. It started with the organization of Walking Together. This was followed by its incorporation into a bigger, nationwide follow-up organization, the Nashi, which subsequently broadened its scope to include younger children in a new club, the Mishki (Teddy Bears). Finally, Nashi gave birth to a possibly armed youth militia. Walking Together was still a more or less loosely organized Putin fan club. Its transformation into the Nashi had a threefold aim. It was, first, a deliberate attempt by the Kremlin to create an ideological vehicle for the regime. Second, it was set up to create a new elite. Third, it was meant to prevent a Ukrainian-style Orange revolution in Russia. While the organization seemed to have the capacity to achieve the first two objectives, the Kremlin had doubts about Nashi’s ability to counteract broad popular protest movements. After the beginning of the financial and economic crisis of October 2008, when there was a real danger that the opposition might build on popular disaffection, this last role became more urgent. This led in the summer of 2009 to plans to build nationwide Nashi militias. We can, therefore, observe a clear, Kremlin-led dynamic, gradually transforming a loose, nationalist, presidential fan club into a tightly organized, ideologically homogeneous, ultranationalist, paramilitary organization.