Nashi

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Nashi: “Ours,” As In “Not Yours”

A week in the woods with Vladimir Putin’s youth movement.

By Ilana Ozernoy

By Vladimir Putin’s second term, Russia was flush with oil money. Terrorists and liberals – “agents of the West” – had been crushed, the oligarchs brought to heel. Yet Russia’s leaders saw a remaining weak spot: its malleable youth. Enemies had to be stopped from exploiting them.

Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgystan, despite state-controlled armies and strong intelligence systems, fell when “Orange” banners swept across their streets. These former Soviet-bloc states could not stop young revolutionaries backed by the West. But Russia would.

In 2005, Putin created a countermovement called Nashi - literally “Ours,” and implicitly “Not Yours.” Soon it was 120,000 strong, and growing. After the elections in December 2007, the Russian press fueled rumors of Nashi’s imminent demise. The Kremlin’s “hooligans” and “marionettes” were no longer needed now that Putin had consolidated his power. But young zealots continued to gather, march, recruit, fundraise, and strike out at enemies.

Much like the rest of the country, Nashi seemed determined to go on with its business until Putin said otherwise, and it struck a chord that resonated deeply among Russian youth. So I went to see what it was all about and help peel a few potatoes.

It is 8 a.m. and the Russian national anthem crackles over camp speakers:

Russia – our sacred stronghold,

Russia — our beloved country.

A mighty will, a great glory —

Your heritage for all time!

Some 5,000 youth activists are in various stages of awake: sleepy-eyed, climbing out of tents, standing in line at the porta-potty, forming columns, waving their flags in the main camp square in sway to the Soviet-era hymn. Putin’s face is everywhere, a designer logo splashed across red jackets, red T-shirts, red hats, pins, stickers, flags, and posters.

Be glorious, country! We take pride in you!

Nashi calls itself a “Democratic Antifascist Youth Movement.” It defines fascism as the threat of “Orange” democratic revolutions and liberal opposition figures. The Nashists - tagged thus by the “liberal media” because it rhymes with fascists and because it evokes the Hitlerjugend - are in their late teens and early 20s. For the fifth straight summer, they have traveled from the farthest reaches of Russia to Lake Seliger, a night’s drive northwest of Moscow, to run, swim, learn, march, and procreate in the name of restoring their country’s great glory.

You are the only one in the world! You are the only one of a kind!

The dozen press department tents are still. The department handles the movement’s internal and external information flow, and its encampment shelters the brightest of the bright, the ones everyone else wants to be, the kids at the top of the food chain. They have a proud precedent: the previous press chief, Robert Shlegel, now backs Putin as Russia’s youngest Duma deputy. One of them could be next.

Our devotion to our Motherland gives us strength.

So it was, so it is, and so it will always be!

The camp speakers crackle again and the solemn anthem is followed by happy, snappy music from Soviet cartoons. Still, the press officers will not wake up, which means there is no fire and no breakfast, just unboiled lake water, uncooked oats, unopened cans of condensed milk.

Commissar Natasha – stout, tight blond braid, late 20s – appears with a clipboard. She takes in the situation and starts shouting questions at no one in particular. Why isn’t anyone up? Who is in charge of the fire? Where’s breakfast? She shakes tents, rips open zippers.

Commissar Lyosha, the foreman, barks a muffled reply from inside his tent: “We’ll take care of it!”

“Why haven’t you already taken care of it? Rise! Get up! That’s it! I won’t warn you again! Let’s go!”

A few rumpled heads appear, more shouting ensues, and soon the firewood is chopped, plastic buckets of water materialize, dishes are washed. Commissar Natasha, having fulfilled her function, stands awkwardly to the side. The clipboard drops and, with a few threatening words for good measure, she turns and leaves. A few middle fingers fly up in her wake. But breakfast is under way, and the group bonds in shared loathing of the enemy. They do not bother to go on the mandatory morning two-mile run.

“Hello Seliger!”

Nikita Borovikov, the movement’s new leader, is standing on a sound stage above a jacked-up crowd. He wears a red polo shirt with a white crucifix across the back. The kids wave flags, whistle, cheer; a few are propped up on their friends’ shoulders. It is what I imagine a Christian youth group rally would feel like, were it sponsored by Republican National Committee hardliners and held at a drug-free Woodstock.

“Wooooooh! Yaaaaaaaay!” The sun is shining, and there is a steady supply of sugar.

Borovikov looks weary. He waits for the crowd to simmer down, nods, pauses, then says, “Russia’s best youth is here!”

The youth scream in unison: “Yeeeeaaaah!”

Borovikov is a 27-year-old from the provinces who fell into the movement four years ago when he was still a law student. He is reticent and thoughtful; often he is defensive. People say he is not charismatic like his predecessor, Vasily Yakemenko, Nashi’s founder, who recently moved on to chair the Kremlin’s State Youth Affairs Committee. The kids in the press service who are loyal to Yakemenko have taken to calling Borovikov Forrest Gump.

“Since the last Seliger, we have solved our main problems,” Borovikov says into the mike. “Russia is sovereign. There is no more Orangeism.” His face looms above his audience on a Jumbotron next to the sound stage, then the camera pans the red swarm below.

“Wooooooh!” The Nashists jump up and down.

“Now our projects will shape Russia’s future!” To drive home this point, Borovikov calls out names of elevated alumni: regional Duma deputies, federal ministers, Kremlin advisers. He saves the legendary Vasily Yakemenko – known by all simply as “Vassya” – for last.

The crowd responds with a drumbeat, “Vas-sya! Vas-sya! Vas-sya!”

Yakemenko steps onstage like a middle-aged rock star-cum-preacher and asks for a minute of silence to honor the veterans of the Great Patriotic War, two of whom are standing behind him on stage, their suit jackets drooping with medals. When he looks up, his green eyes sparkle on the mega-screen, and his voice rumbles across the clearing. “Can we do that which hasn’t been done yet? Each one of us has to leave here with the answer to that question.”

“Yeeeaaaaah!”

He does not specify that which has to be done. One of the veterans steps forward. The kids chant spasibo – thank you – in unison.

“Spa-si-bo! Spa-si-bo! Spa-si-bo!”

“Dear friends,” the veteran begins. “You are here because you want to protect Russia from outside invaders! You are going to build a new Russia. Russia’s future depends on you. The veterans of the Great Patriotic War believe in you. We believe that in your hands Russia will be saved, will grow and prosper. Russia full speed ahead!”

Patriotic hip-hop booms through the forest. The congregation erupts in applause. Then the young people dance.

The author of this patriotic hip-hop is a lanky, bespectacled 19-year-old named Mark Novikov. I am told his tent is in the woods just left of the eternal flame and behind the Anna Shapovalova boutique, which sells ironic “designer” Nashi T-shirts for 50 bucks a pop. Sample slogans: “Love Russian”; “I am the reason for the population explosion”; and “It is fun and good for you to procreate.” (The procreation takes place in the encampment across the way, which Nashi has designated for “young families.”)

One evening at dusk, I find Mark hanging out by an unlit campfire with his friend and sometimes producer, Ivan Polyaninov. They tell me a disco party is going on later, but they don’t much feel like going and nothing else is happening so we stay by the unlit fire. Ivan pulls an iPod from his jeans pocket. He sticks one headphone in my ear and the other in his own and plays a song from the “Motherland” CD which Nashi helped fund. It is called “Children of the ‘90s.”

Mark’s music is about the sense of abandonment felt by Russia’s lost generation, those who came of age in the brief window between Soviet disintegration and Putin’s new order. “Rap in America came from the streets, so nothing reflects street trends like rap music,” he says. Ivan adds, “Our music is American form with Russian content.”

He tells me about growing up in a small provincial town built around a military factory. “It’s like another country compared to Moscow,” he says. He remembers how his mother gave him poetry books, and he remembers how it felt when the Soviet Union crumbled.

“Our world was split in two,” Mark says. “A small number became really rich, and there was everyone else who became really poor. We had to eat macaroni every day and wear old clothes. And people were walking around in these cheap baseball hats made in China that said ‘USA.’”

Ivan nods. “Yeah, I remember the macaroni, too,” he says. “It was all we ate. Every day. We didn’t even have margarine or butter for the noodles, we had this thing called ‘fat blend.’ If we put an egg in there, it was a holiday.” He shakes his head and flips through his iPod. He wants to play another song for me – this one called, “How Much Can We Take?” – but Mark cuts in.

“My girlfriend asked me today, ‘Why do you keep writing about the ‘90s? There’s so much other stuff to write about.’ I couldn’t answer. No matter what I sit down to write about, this is what I write.”

Ivan shoves the iPod back in his pocket; he’s getting fired up. “My parents were both engineers,” he says. “They had the highest education, and they were impoverished. Not just poor – impoverished.” His eyes burn bright in the twilight. “There were so many people like that! Everything around us was falling apart as we were growing up, and we thought it was normal because it’s all we knew. Only now we’ve started to understand that this was not normal.”

“It wasn’t normal,” Mark agrees.

“When I understood everything that happened, I joined Nashi,” Ivan says. “Because our generation was the generation nobody cared about.”

I ask Mark if he thinks the Kremlin cares about his generation.

“Look,” he replies, “It’s like this: I work for this organization, and it works for me. Nashi gave me a lot. I got money to go to college. For a kid from the provinces to be able to go to university, and in Moscow no less, that’s, like, unheard of. I am grateful to this movement for that, and I will never forget it.”

I ask him how far his gratitude goes.

“I go to all the demonstrations,” he says.

I am older than Mark and Ivan, and I was able to escape the troubles they speak of because my family immigrated to the United States in 1986. But I wonder as I listen to them speak what might have happened if we hadn’t left. Would I have joined this movement? Half of me does not know the answer to that question.

Soviet children, we are all of us bruised, wounded in the war this nation waged against itself. And lately it seems that when I sit down to write, I, too, can write only about Russia.

A young man walks a pig through the woods. He wears a stars and stripes top hat and a bodysuit covered in ersatz dollar bills. His pig is on a leash, and every few minutes he gives it a tap on the ass with a wooden stick. The young man pushing and prodding represents America; the pig is Estonian President Toomas Ilves.

Ilves is an “external enemy” because in 2007 he relocated a Red Army memorial – the “Monument of the Soldier-Liberator” – from the center of Tallinn to a military cemetery. The bronze, six-foot statue honors Soviet soldiers killed by Nazis in Estonia during The Great Patriotic War. Putin condemned Ilves for “desecrating monuments to war heroes” and severed diplomatic ties with Estonia to show that he was serious. Nashi reinforced his message with an “action.” Any time Nashists picket, harass, or dress piglets up as presidents, it is called an action.

Nashi is a loaded word. It was not invented by zealous nationalists; it defines a broader attitude. People use it to mean Russian. (“Is he ours?” they say instead of, “is he Russian?”) People also use it to mean homegrown. I am a native Russian speaker, but I grew up in the States so most Russians see me in terms of Yours. They say, what’s it like over in Yours? Do You have it better? Commissar Lyosha asks me one afternoon, do Yours talk about Ours as much as we talk about Yours?

These are mostly ordinary kids, who feel bored or lost or neglected. Some see this Kremlin-sponsored movement as a way into the system.

“An overwhelming majority in Nashi are just kids who see an opportunity,” Alexander Tarasov, a scholar who studies youth movements at Moscow’s New Sociology and Practical Politics Center, writes me in an e-mail. “They are practically ignorant of politics, kids plucked from the provinces – where there’s nothing to do and no prospects – and who are happy just because someone has taken an interest in them, is doing something for them, teaching them something and paying for it. The Nashi commissars are subjected to intense ideological brainwashing and among them there probably really are some fanatics. But even then, their fanaticism is merely a sincere loyalty to the leadership and inability to understand how it is possible to argue with their leaders. The closest analogy is the loyalty of mafia lieutenants to their capo.”

Within Ours, there is a further classification: svoyi, which means our own. The word Ours is used when facing outwards and against external threat, as a demarcation drawn between Ours and Yours. Inside, Nashi is splintered by divisions, clans, tribes, and groups, which see themselves in terms of svoyi and stick to their own. In other words, those who join the movement to vent their rage don’t mingle with the kids who are there to further their careers; the Chechens don’t mingle with anyone at all; and so on.

These detached particles brush up against one another and this creates a kind of polarized energy but, much like Russian society at large, there is nothing shared by the factions within Nashi except an allegiance to the leadership and the contempt and fear of outsiders.

After two days of sunshine, a storm sweeps over Lake Seliger. Shoes are soaked through, a press tent is swept away. Tanya Vihrova, a 20-year-old press officer from Nizhny Novgorod, is on lunch duty. But it is already 3:30. For the past hour, she has been trying to build a fire to boil a cauldron of lake water for soup. It is raining and the wind is blowing, and the kindling is wet and smoking. Tanya’s fire flares then dies.

Just adjacent is camp security. “Internal Control,” a young guard corrects me. He turns so I can see the back of his black T-shirt – their uniform – which shows Putin’s face with the words, “We see you are not working.” The guards are brawny military types, country boys adept at wilderness survival. They are hired hands – not Nashists – but they share a cooking area with the press service, and the separate campfires sit only one yard apart.

Internal Control’s fire is ablaze: yellow flames lick a boiling cauldron atop snapping red-hot coals. Two guards sit warming themselves. They watch Tanya struggling to light her pile of wet wood, and they say nothing.

Every few minutes, Tanya’s walkie-talkie crackles with one press officer or another demanding to know if lunch is ready. Kids come and go. They sit down to await the delayed meal, eat soggy cookies and probe cans of condensed milk with sticky spoons. After a while, they get up and go. Nobody offers to help Tanya. She fans the weak flame with cardboard. She blows on the wood. She burns her hand. “I need a man to help me,” she says. “I can’t get this damn fire to light!” No reaction.

She finds paper scraps in a pile of garbage left by the trash bag and stuffs them under the kindling. When that doesn’t work, she pulls big logs from the fire and rearranges them in a teepee. Flames catch for brief seconds before a gust of wind blows them out. “Damn it!” she says. Two boys from the press office stand behind her and watch passively. She does not look at them. “This is not a woman’s job,” she mutters. They walk away.

Tanya did not really know Soviet life, but her parents did. They knew what it meant to fear thy neighbor: you don’t stick your neck out unless you want to lose it. The previous generation learned to be wary of strangers, especially those who ask too many questions, and this is what they teach their children. They could not teach their children, these Nashists, the concept of a greater good because they did not know it. Now the young activists with their grand hopes of raising Russia from the ashes are pathologically unable to work together, even in their own interest.

“We won’t be eating lunch any time soon,” Tanya tells me. She can’t bring herself to ask anyone for help. When an hour later the potatoes finally boil, she announces over the radio that lunch is ready. Twenty kids descend with their aluminum bowls and spoons. After Tanya doles out the soup, she looks down to find there is nothing left for her.

“There’s none left,” she says flatly. The others pretend not to hear; they are busy emptying their own bowls as if someone might swipe their lunch, too.

The Nashi movement is an outgrowth of an earlier organization Yakemenko founded called “Walking Together.” He mobilized 10,000 kids in Red Square to celebrate the first anniversary of Putin’s inauguration in 2001, but the movement lacked a cogent ideology. Soon Yakimenko dropped the project to join Vladislav Surkov, deputy head of the Putin administration, in developing Nashi. His new movement’s activists, Yakemenko told the daily Izvestia, would have a “thorough understanding of whom they should fight and how.” Meanwhile, some members of the abandoned movement, who did not have this understanding, fell under the influence of the “fascists” and formed a counter-movement called “Walking Without Putin.”

The Nashists would not let this happen to them. In the months after the December parliamentary elections that solidified Putin’s power, Nashi responded to threats of disbandment (both real and imagined) by regrouping into a sort of al Qaeda-like structure. The top echelon formed an umbrella of commissars to oversee Nashi’s myriad projects. Each project became an autonomous cell responsible for their own recruitment and funding. One project promoted the Orthodox faith, another tourism, and yet another encouraged young professionals to get involved in construction. There was even a business school. This allowed Nashi to expand by recruiting kids from outside the narrow spectrum of political activism.

Nashi projects appeal to the “normal kids” who just want to get involved in their community, help build stuff, cure drug addicts. Once inside, kids can be gently but systematically indoctrinated and, finally, mobilized into action under Nashi’s brand. Such a cellular framework cannot be demobilized or disbanded.

The goals of the organization remain deliberately undefined; the kids sustain what they do not understand. They regurgitate the meaningless words they are given, and this engenders order and unity and strength unencumbered by free thought or ideology. In this way, as in many ways, Nashi is like the country that made them. It is how Putin wields the post-Soviet landscape: by manipulating vague, aimless nationalism to buttress his empire.

I am walking along Lake Seliger with Mark and Ivan. We pass a makeshift gym on the beach where boys lift weights in the sun. On the dock behind them stands a replica White House, Russia’s seat of government. We turn into the forest, which is littered with posters (“Tomorrow, there will be thousands of us and no one will be able to tell us what to do” and “Participate in the modernization of our country” and “Be better!”).

“Have you talked to Vassya?” Ivan asks me about Vasily Yakemenko.

“He’s Nashi’s ideological papa,” Mark says.

“I haven’t been able to track him down,” I say.

“You have to talk to Vassya,” Ivan says.

“Yeah,” Mark agrees. “You can’t write about Nashi without talking to Vassya.”

“He’s an amazing orator,” Ivan says. “When I heard him speak, I knew I wanted to join the movement. He’s just so … ” He thinks for a moment. “I don’t know, what’s the word?” he asks Mark.

“Charismatic,” Mark says.

“Yes, charismatic,” Ivan says. “He’s just got so much charisma.”

Ivan tells me about the first time Nashi convened at Seliger. Kids brought alcohol, and a lot of people got drunk. “I mean, wasted-drunk. It was crazy!” Ivan says. “Then Vassya gathers everyone in the main square and he comes on stage and he’s just got this energy – it’s amazing – and he says, ‘Those who’ve been drinking, you know who you are and I know who you are and I am going to find you.’ And it was like he was talking to you directly, you know?”

“Crazy,” Mark says.

“Yeah,” Ivan says. “It really made an impression on people. One of my friends went right back to his tent and dug a hole in the ground and hid his bottle of vodka in there. He was so afraid Vassya would find him, he actually dug a hole in the ground!” Ivan shakes his head. “He didn’t dig it up until the night before he left.”

“He still dug it up, though,” says Mark.

I am told Vassya lives “on the mountain” at the edge of camp beyond the VIP section. I go there one afternoon but Vassya is not there. Instead, I run into Nikita Borovikov.

The new Nashi leader is unshaven and in rubber sandals, gym shorts, and a T-shirt that does not hide his paunch. He answers my questions with questions. When I ask him about Nashi’s vilification of the opposition, he fires back, “Is your government 100 percent democratic?” When I ask what happens when Putin does something Nashi doesn’t agree with, he answers, “Does your government do everything you want it to with your tax money?” When he does answer my questions, he speaks mostly in parables and metaphors.

We are walking along a country road. A half dozen kids dive off a jury-rigged dock. In the distance, three canoes drift by on placid, coffee-colored waters. I ask about the campaign against Anthony Brenton, Britain’s ambassador in Moscow, who attended what Nashi termed “a fascist meeting” of the opposition. Brenton complained of “psychological harassment bordering on violence.” Borovikov nods like he’s been waiting for this one.

“Let’s pretend I come and visit you in your home in the U.S.,” Borovikov says. He looks up to make sure I’m following. I nod. “And imagine that in your home you have a problem with cockroaches. No matter what you do, you can’t get rid of them. And there are so many that they are aesthetically getting on your nerves. And on top of that you’re the mother of a young child, and these cockroaches spread disease.”

He pauses for reaction. “Okay,” I say. He nods. “So you invite me into your home for tea and right there in front of you I am feeding the very cockroaches you are trying to get rid of. As soon as you turn your back to feed the baby, I start feeding those cockroaches. What would you do? Would you tell me to leave?”

Borovikov looks me in the eyes, and waits for me to say something. When I don’t, he repeats: “Would you tell me to leave?” Another pause. “You’d tell me to leave, wouldn’t you?” Okay, I say, in this hypothetical instance, yes.

“Okay, so we agree!” he says, triumphant. “You would tell me to leave, and you might use rude words to do it. Because the most important thing for you is to protect your child from disease, right?”

Sure, I say.

“Good. Then tell me what’s worse, the person who might have used bad words or the person who is spreading disease? Who is more immoral? Because on the one hand, all we are talking about are some impolite words. And on the other hand, a crime.” I assume the crime he means is Brenton’s presence at a conference organized by Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and Putin opponent. The “impolite words,” then, must be the six months Nashi spent picketing the British embassy, tailing Brenton with a banner demanding his apology, disrupting his public speeches, and posting his whereabouts on the Internet.

“The point,” Borovikov concludes, “is that we don’t want people from other governments to come into our house and feed the cockroaches we’re trying to fight when we turn our back. And if they do, of course, we’re going to act like a hurt mother. Because that is who we are: a hurt mother.”

In the absence of real information, rumors are as good as truth in the local mindset. And rumor has it that the Kremlin (or certain factions within the Kremlin, or certain people, like Putin) dramatically cut Nashi’s funding this year, signifying that the group is no longer needed.

In January, after elections, the daily Kommersant suggested in an article the Kremlin wanted to distance itself from the movement’s antics. The Russian press picked up on it, and soon it was widely accepted truth that the movement’s days are numbered.

Nashi responded with an action to reassert its doggedness. It printed Kommersant’s logo on thousands of toilet paper rolls with the phone number of the article’s author. Nashists handed them out on Moscow streets, and a few rolls found their way into the toilets of the State Duma. Meanwhile, Nashi hackers shut down the Kommersant Web site for five hours and bombarded the editor with spam. The action reportedly cost the newspaper $155,000. It also reminded the Kremlin how quickly these youths can mobilize against an enemy.

The Voluntary Youth Militia, known as DMD, is Nashi’s vigilante group. DMD polices small-town streets to “keep order,” and it protects Nashi actions. One camp rumor has it that truckloads of trees for firewood caused a major gridlock until DMD swept in and unloaded the trucks within the hour. Another rumor – this one printed in the press – says the DMD is where Nashi funnels its “socially maladjusted” members.

At the DMD tents, I am told a kid named Artyom Kazlov is the best person to explain what DMD does. “Our job is to return patriotism to young people,” he says,” “to introduce them to new - oy, not new – I mean old, centuries-old ideology with the goal of increasing the population.”

Artyom is angry because he believes “fascism” is resurging. “After we beat it 60 years ago,” he says, incredulous. He is also upset that his country has become less Russian – less Ours. “People copy Western culture, listen to foreign music, and a lot of people want to go to America,” he tells me. I hear this a lot; two decades after the Cold War, the nation still suffers from an inferiority complex.

Artyom says he joined Nashi to help change things. “I want to belong to something big and powerful,” he says. “I want to realize myself, and I want to be able to say we’re good, and they’re bad.” He picks at his tattooed arm and adds as an afterthought: “You know, I was once a skinhead.”

At midday the camp is quiet. Under threat of expulsion, the Nashists are at lectures: “Human Capital and Social Capital,” “United Russia’s Party Projects,” “Sovereignty of the Soul and Russia’s Spiritual Leadership in the World.”

Vladimir Zhirinovsky is speaking in the central tent. Officially, he leads the LDRP opposition party; unofficially, he is a Kremlin puppet. His anti-establishment tirades in the Duma are so outrageous, so incendiary, as to invalidate themselves, but his presence helps maintain a veneer of plurality. He is, to date, the longest surviving post-Communist politician.

“People tell you you’ll be governors and presidents,” Zhirinovsky says to the sea of red T-shirts before him. The tent is hot and stuffy, and he is sweating profusely. “Well, you won’t be.” He fishes for a hanky and rubs a corpulent hand over his face. Some kids photograph him with their cell phones. “The elite is full, and the elite doesn’t take strangers,” he says. “I am telling you the truth. Better to have the truth than a sweet lie.”

A young girl in a red Nashi T-shirt, with a bandana tied around her neck, stands up and takes the mike. “What would you do to change the situation?” she asks.

“You can’t do anything to change the situation,” Zhirinovsky fires back. “In Iran, young people just like you are relaxing and having fun right now and by December they’ll be in their graves. You think you can change this? History is dirty and bloody and full of violence. Nothing has changed and nothing will change.”

The crowd boos; the kids put away their cell phones. The questions peter out. A few leave the tent early.

Tanya is telling me about last year’s Seliger. A record 10,000 activists showed up, twice as many as the year before and four times as many as the first summer in 2005. Nashi’s sister organization, Young Russia, was also invited last year, and one night the group staged an action. They marched on the main square, shouting and pushing people. DMD rushed in to establish order, and the confrontation got violent. “It was total chaos,” says Tanya, recalling how the Jumbotron got smashed. “Then Yakemenko comes on stage and says, ‘if you think this was bad, wait until you see what happens in December!’”

I ask if Yakemenko staged the Young Russia demonstration. “Yeah,” she says, shrugging like it’s no big deal. “He wanted us to be prepared for the elections.” I ask her about the violence. “Whatever,” she says. “I don’t care about it one way or the other. And, anyway, when you join a movement you have to adjust yourself to that movement. So, you learn to close your eyes at the things you don’t like.”

She busies herself cleaning the table. She wipes it down, moving around torn bags of sugar and cans of boiled meat. She stops to think over what she just said. She shrugs again. “If there was another movement to choose from then maybe I’d think about it,” she says and goes back to cleaning. “But for now, this one suits me just fine.” This is something I often hear people say about Putin.

Nikita Borovikov has an appointment with the Armenian delegation. He walks briskly through the forest, nodding occasionally at people he passes. He is giving me another parable. “We all have to go to a store when we need to buy something,” he says. “It would really nice to go to dictate the price to the shopkeeper, wouldn’t it?”

I say I guess so.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to buy things at the price you want?”

“Okay, yes,” I say.

“Well, we sell gas to Europe. And frankly I wouldn’t want to be in a situation where I am being told by the customer what the price is,” he says. “We’re not accustomed to being manipulated.”

I ask him who he thinks is manipulating him. “Our country and your country are fighting for the sphere of influence in geopolitics,” he says. “Nobody wants to be led.”

At the Armenian encampment, the leader sits at a log table surrounded by several boys in track pants. He wants to start a similar movement in Armenia and needs advice.

“Which of our projects are you interested in?” Borovikov asks after pleasantries. “Child development? Builders? Technology?”

The Armenian looks a little confused. “We want to be able to do what Young Russia does,” he says.

“Okay,” Borovikov says. He leans in and clasps his hands. “Young Russia is offense. They have methods for staging actions. There is also defense. That’s what DMD does. DMD has developed special techniques for breaking up other people’s actions and protecting our own from aggressors.”

“Great,” the Armenian says.

“Okay,” Borovikov says. He stands up and shakes the Armenian’s hand. “We’ll get you set up.”

In 2007, Putin visited the Nashists at Seliger, but this year he sends his first deputy prime minister, Igor Shuvalov. If that is a slight, the movement overlooks it (“He already came. What would coming again accomplish?” Borovikov says defensively). But the Russian press sees a sign that Putin no longer cares about Nashi.

I ask Alexander Tarasov about the rumors. “It is simply dangerous to abandon this many kids after yanking them out of the wilderness and into political activism,” he tells me. “I’ll repeat once more: I don’t believe they will be abandoned. The regime is flush with oil dollars, it doesn’t cost that much to maintain Nashi, so why would they do such a stupid thing? The Walking Together experience showed that disillusionment with Kremlin politics leads to youth movements like Walking Without Putin. The administration is not full of idiots.”

Shuvalov visits on the day that foreign reporters are also invited, but only a hundred or so handpicked guests can attend the “press conference.” The press is not invited. The VIP visit is not announced in camp, and most people don’t learn about it until it is over.

The tent is half-empty and airless. Shuvalov arrives three hours late. He cracks a few jokes but says not much of anything. This goes on for nearly an hour, and I find it difficult to concentrate. Then, instead of answering the last question, Shuvalov drops a warning: “We are developing quickly, so of course people are scared of us – we must be prepared for that. We have to show ourselves as a strong, equal partner, and we cannot have people thinking that we are bears who lash out any time the mood strikes us. It is our responsibility to project a better image.”

On the way back to the press office, I see a man in khaki pants on a Segway scooter in the middle of the woods. He is talking to two young women, heads upturned, eyes entranced.

Vasily Yakemenko? I ask. The girls thank him and run off.

“That’s not me,” the man says. His ID badge is turned inward, and I don’t know if he is telling the truth.

You’re not Vasily Yakemenko? I ask again.

“And who are you?” he says. I tell him.

“You speak Russian very well,” he says. “Are you a spy?” He laughs like he’s joking, but his eyes are not sparkling now; they are dead and cold. I explain that I was born in Russia but grew up in America.

“What do you need from me?” he says. I say that I’d like to talk to him when he has some time.

“What do you want to talk about?” I say I want to ask him about Nashi.

“I don’t have any connection to Nashi,” he says.

“But you’re on stage here everyday.”

“There are many youth movements in Russia,” he says. “If I am quoted commenting on one, the others will get upset.” His lips curl upwards into a crooked smile, as if to say he knows he’s bullshitting me, and he knows that I know he’s bullshitting me.

I ask him if we can talk about youth movements in general.

“I tell you what,” he says. “You submit a list of questions to me and if I think they are appropriate, I’ll answer them.” Then he wheels off. I never get around to submitting a list of questions, and he never answers them.

Valeria, a pretty young woman who works for Internal Control and wears a gold cross and sparkly blue eye shadow, finds me at dinner and asks me to follow her. I wonder if I am about to be kicked out. She says nothing and leads me through a maze of tents to Nikita Borovikov’s base camp. Two Internal Control guards sit on plastic lawn chairs around a plastic table with a kid who says his name is Jefferson. They need help translating.

Jefferson says he is a “Kenyan from Delaware.” He came here to take part in a cultural exchange. He is very upset. He tells me he was talking to a girl on the beach when two muscular young women came up and asked if he had anything in his pocket. “I told them, no, and then they started pushing me in the river,” he says. Jefferson picks up a pink cell phone from the table and shows me that it won’t turn on. “They were big girls, really fat girls. They just threw me in the water. And now my phone is dead.”

Valeria examines the phone and says to a guard, “This looks old. It was probably dead before they threw him in the water.” The guard asks me to tell Jefferson that Internal Control will find out who was responsible. “Make sure to tell him he’ll be compensated for the phone,” he says.

“I don’t care about the phone,” Jefferson says. “I want a written statement that they are sorry. If not, someone will pay for this. One day, I will find some Russian somewhere, and I will throw him in the ocean.” He shakes his head.

It has been raining for days, but this evening the sun is out and though the grass is wet everyone is happy to crawl out of the tents and gather for the evening rally.

I am with Karina, a 19-year-old who recently joined the movement. She considers herself lucky because she got a job in the press center writing and editing for the Nashi website, which means that she is “in the headquarters and not a soldier.” Karina tells me – with a little disgust and a little fear – that if it had not been for Nashi, she would be at a department store promoting perfume. “It would have just been a job,” she says. “This is a career.”

A video is blasting across the Jumbotron, a montage of scenes that flash back to hard metallic rock music. The footage shows an action at the Estonian embassy. A protest sign reads, “Hands off our grandfathers.” In other actions, demonstrators beat drums, picketers fire tear gas canisters. Finally, a large human dummy is set on fire, and the body burns and smokes and the youths shout with rage.

Karina is crying. I ask if she is upset by the sight of the burning effigy. She covers her mouth with a hand and nods. She is still a child, all baby fat and wet eyes. “But we had truth on our side,” she says, trying to convince herself. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. “You have to draw attention to yourself somehow.” After a moment, she takes a breath and collects herself. Then she says, “The Estonian president called our grandfathers drunkards and grave robbers.” This time, she sounds angry.

After the video, I spot Jefferson in the main square with some other Kenyans. He tells me Internal Control bought him a new phone, but he is seething. The prank hit a nerve, or maybe it just confirmed to Jefferson what he had already assumed. “If Russians are not ready to receive visitors, they should not have asked me to come here,” he says.

I ask him if he is still planning on throwing a Russian into the ocean. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s inhuman to attack someone and throw them in the water. It was not a true welcome, it’s just a mask. Their gates are open, but their hearts are not open. When I saw those girls later, they were talking as if nothing had happened. It’s just a small thing for them. They don’t care if another nigger dies. It’s like they pushed a dog in the water.”

Two boys in military fatigues from Nashi’s army project and two girls come up to Jefferson. The girls giggle softly and ask if they can take a picture with him. They are wearing pink lipstick and sunglasses that are too big for their faces and they pose like sexy pinups, their knees bent, their chests pushed forward. Jefferson stands in the middle of them and looks annoyed. “You see what I mean?” he says. The boys offer him a handshake and walk away.

It is dusk and a kid in aviator glasses and stovepipe jeans is playing the guitar and Mark is free styling and Ivan is taking pictures. Mark’s lyrics are heavy on God and patriotism and when he’s done, I ask him if he’s a believer. He says, yes, but he looks uncomfortable. I ask him what it is he believes in. He pulls me off to the side and whispers, “I haven’t told this to anyone, but I’m a Jew.” He looks to make sure no one heard him. I ask him why he hasn’t told anyone. “It’s an uncomfortable situation,” he says.

I ask him if Ivan knows he’s Jewish. “Yeah, he knows,” Mark says, “But he’s cool. He doesn’t give me a hard time about it.”

“But what about your lyrics?” I say. “They’re all about faith and God.”

“Yes, but did you notice I didn’t say which god?” he says proudly. “My lyrics are about God in general, not specific. And they’re about Babylon.” Just then, a large, stubbly kid called Makar interrupts us. He is a friend of the kid with the guitar. He knows Mark, too, and by way of greeting, he says, “Hey! Where’s the faith?”

“Faith in Orthodoxy!” Mark shoots back with a slightly raised fist. Then they hug.

The lyrics to another Nashi rap song:

Our road is taking us out of the darkness and into the light.

The plan is clear and we don’t need any more advice.

You can’t buy what we have with money –

It’s Our world, Our way, Our time, Our hour!

Out of the camp gates, the pitted road to Moscow passes military memorials and the gilded cupolas of Orthodox churches. An incandescent mist floats above the rolling green on summer mornings, and the road twists through golden wheat fields, and fields of red and white wildflowers, and forests of birch trees, which stand in crooked rows like rawboned soldiers.

This tranquil land, these sunken farms and crumbling houses of worship, once terrorized, once starved, now hide secrets this nation cannot confront. The children strap on their boots and take to this road because they, too, cannot look back. The last victory they know is the victory of their grandfathers. Now they want a victory of their own. They are ready to be led – it doesn’t much matter by whom – and they will fight.

Because they are tired of insecurity. They don’t want to hear that elsewhere is better. They believe that their world, their way, and their hour has come. And they will not be told otherwise.