The Quest for an Ideal Youth in Putin's Russia I

II Background and Context

A study of Nashi is inevitably also a study of the official political sphere[6] in Russia. Since I, like many others, argue that Nashi is a government project, it is necessary to analyze the political background of the regime that created Nashi. This chapter therefore contextualizes the emergence and consolidation of the Putin regime in Russia. I argue that Nashi’s worldviews and values are part of a broader project during Vladimir Putin’s first two terms: the stabilization of Russia’s political system and the articulation of an official, government-sponsored political identity.

This book analyzes the process of political stabilization primarily on a discursive level, through the concepts of dislocation and hegemony developed by Ernesto Laclau und Chantal Mouffe (Laclau and Mouffe 2001). The notion of securitization (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998) is another key concept for understanding Russian politics before and under Putin. A special section of this chapter provides an introduction into Russian youth politics.

Possibly the most striking feature of this process has been Putin’s skillful use of symbolic politics, analyzed in the chapter’s final section. His government has placed strong emphasis on historical continuity. The commemoration of the Great Patriotic War has been at the center of efforts to foster pride in Russian culture and Russian statehood. Analysis of the official war narrative reveals how this commemoration has served Putin’s project.

This chapter thus serves two purposes. On one hand, it introduces the theoretical and methodological framework of this book. On the other, it applies the theoretical framework to analyze changes in Russia’s political identity since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the politics of history as it relates to the commemoration of the Great Patriotic War.

Focal Points and Sources

This book predominantly analyzes Nashi’s publications as well as speeches and position papers from Vladimir Putin and Vladislav Surkov. Putin’s utterances on Russian politics and Russian identity, as well as his speeches commemorating the Great Patriotic War, have received wide attention – both on the international stage and in Russia. Because Nashi has repeatedly emphasized that it is loyal to Putin specifically, his statements can be considered programmatic for the organization.

Vladislav Surkov, currently an advisor to Vladimir Putin after a brief fall from official grace following his dismissal as Deputy Prime Minister, is a less public figure. For a long time, many considered the former Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration and architect of the ideology of Sovereign Democracy to be the eminence grise of Russian politics. His ideas have not only been discussed extensively among political scientists and in the press but have also made their way into Putin’s policy speeches. In 2006, Putin officially endorsed Sovereign Democracy as the government’s official ideology (Edinaia Rossiia 2006). Furthermore, Surkov played a decisive role in the founding of Nashi. He was present at the organization’s secret inaugural meeting in the spa town of Solnechnogorsk in late February of 2005 (Loskutova 2008: 260).

Texts on the organization’s website (www.Nashi.su) serve as the main source for this analysis of Nashi’s ideas and worldview. Lassila understands these online writings as the crystallization of Nashi’s voice (Lassila 2012a: 106). Though they do not constitute official government positions, the analysis in the following chapters shows that they contain many of the same discursive demands. Nashi’s website confirms the organization’s close connection to official discourse: Nashi’s former «ideology» section contained speeches, articles and presentations by Putin and Surkov (Nashi 2009a).[7]

In spite of this closeness, it remains important to distinguish between Nashi and official discourse. One might say that Nashi provides a window into official discourse and adapts this discourse for the youth sphere. This transfer leads to a change in style and to contradictions, since government policy is not always well suited to mobilize youth. Lassila thus writes, «pro-Kremlin youth movements truly struggle with cogent expressions for their political ideologies.» (Lassila 2012a: 138) This struggle and the contradictions it engenders are an important topic in my book.

To complement the discourse analysis, I conducted two interviews with Nashi-commissars from St. Petersburg and Moscow. Within Nashi’s hierarchy, commissars are the cadres. They wear a special pin with the organization’s logo and undergo a vetting process that lasts two years. Commissars thus have privileged access to knowledge about Nashi and are treated as experts for the purposes of this book. The interviewees provide information about Nashi’s decision-making processes and routines that other, more official documents cannot. These interviews address two major difficulties in studying Nashi: secrecy about its inner workings and its hierarchical structure. The information it releases to the public is thus adapted to the organization’s political needs and not necessarily objective. Due to the sensitive nature of some of the interview material, I use pseudonyms («Andrei» and «Marina») instead of their real names.

The interview with the St. Petersburg commissar (Andrei) was conducted in person during a research trip to the city in spring of 2009. It followed the form of a guided expert interview (Meuser and Nagel 1994: 123f.). I asked a number of general questions that satisfied my scientific interest, at the same time giving Andrei room to develop his narrative. Conversations with the second expert (Marina) took place over a period of multiple months – in person in Moscow, and through online chats.

The interviews are primarily used to clarify facts and to illustrate how individuals within Nashi appropriate the organization’s ideas. The selection of experts is by no means representative, and not all of their opinions necessarily represent Nashi’s official positions. Their information is thus contextualized and contrasted with more official sources whenever possible (Kassner und Wassermann 2005: 109).

Chapter 4 on the «International Youth Forum Seliger 2010» makes use of a larger variety of materials than the parts that precede it. I gathered these materials as a participant observer during the youth forum. They include representations of official discourse in popular culture, thus providing hints about the reproduction of political identities in a broader cultural realm (Hansen 2006: 64). Specific methodological challenges will be addressed separately in chapter 4. Finally, this book uses a wide variety of secondary sources to locate Nashi within the context of contemporary Russian politics.

I cannot address all aspects of Nashi’s history and discourse. Instead, I use three case studies to illustrate important events and moments. In her methodological chapter on discourse analysis, Lene Hansen suggests that researchers focus their attention on time frames and issues that illustrate political processes in a «crystallized» fashion (Hansen 2006: 78). I selected three such «focal points», the subjects of subsequent chapters: the organization’s founding in the aftermath of Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, its response to the relocation of Tallinn’s Soviet war memorial in 2007, and Nashi’s summer camp at Lake Seliger in 2010. Based on these three case studies, I analyze the various moments of Nashi’s discourse and show which of them are emphasized over others in various contexts. First I expound on the historic and political background that made the emergence of Nashi possible. The best starting point is the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Collapse as Dislocation

The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the disappearance of a multinational empire whose influence had stretched from Eastern Europe to Central Asia and beyond. This signified a drastic reduction of Moscow’s sphere of influence and territory and a crisis in Russian identity. Even though ethnic Russians had not possessed their own national institutions during Soviet times, they played the leading political and cultural role in the USSR. Geoffrey Hosking even goes so far as to argue that Russian identity equaled Soviet identity in many regards (Hosking 2006: 2).

A discussion of the relation between Soviet and Russian identity would go beyond the scope of this book and has been discussed extensively elsewhere.[8] For the purposes of this book, this loss serves as a point of departure for understanding contemporary Russian political identities and their historical foundation.

To grasp this loss and its compensation theoretically, I use Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s terminology. Their discourse theory allows for a dynamic conception of social identities. Laclau and Mouffe see societies and nations not as natural, objectively existing entities, but rather as the results of discursive articulations. They draw their political terminology from Antonio Gramsci and their notion of discourse from Michel Foucault. Swiss historian Philipp Sarasin located Foucault’s notion of discourse as existing between things and words. Discourse is an entity with its own rules and elements that attributes meaning to items and statements within a specific societal context (Sarasin 2003: 34). According to Laclau and Mouffe, writes sociologist Urs Stäheli, discourses construct «realities» by arranging various elements in such a way as to form a significant whole (Stäheli 2001: 198). Practices and actions only become meaningful when embedded in a discourse and connected to other signifiers. Similarly, identities are not preexistent but socially and politically constructed.

Laclau and Mouffe call this «unfixity» of identities dislocation. Identities remain perennially unstable and are only temporarily arranged within a discourse, to create a measure of stability: «Any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre.» (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 112). This «centre» is constructed by arranging various discursive moments in a chain of equivalence around so-called «nodal points» – «privileged signifiers that fix the meaning of a signifying chain» (ibid.). These nodal points tie the different moments of a discourse together and provide it with a coherent meaning.

When this combination is successful, one can speak of a hegemonic discourse. A hegemonic discourse describes the world in a new, convincing manner by articulating and connecting norms, values and perceptions (Torfing 1999: 302). It presents a worldview that enjoys widespread acceptance within a social collective.

A hegemonic operation is always the result of discursive dislocation, as it stabilizes an entity that is inherently unstable. Laclau and Mouffe, however, attach a second meaning to dislocation: concrete events and political demands that undermine the stability of a hegemonic discourse because the latter cannot absorb and arrange them as part of the dominant worldview (ibid.: 301). Put simply, dislocations are discursive moments deeply at odds with the predominant values in a society.

German sociologist Philipp Casula argues that the demands and events that could not be articulated within Soviet discourse contributed significantly to the Union’s collapse (Casula 2010: 249). Demands for economic and social reforms beyond the socialist framework, declining living standards, the disaster at Chernobyl and Eastern European and Baltic states’ drive for national independence contradicted the dominant Soviet worldview. Official Soviet discourse presented socialism as the most progressive system in the world, as superior to capitalism, and as the home of a multitude of «brotherly» nations. Even if some Soviet citizens, particularly in the late USSR, had a critical and even cynical attitude towards official declarations, a different system was unimaginable for the vast majority.

According to Alexei Yurchak, Mikhail Gorbachev began the «deconstruction of Soviet authoritative discourse» by suggesting that the answer to the USSR’s economic and social problems might lie outside of socialist ideology and the Communist Party (Yurchak 2006: 291f.). His reforms, and particularly glasnost’ (openness), broke the hegemonic power of Soviet discourse and the Communist Party. In Laclau’s terms, Soviet discourse was dislocated by Gorbachev’s reform plans, which could not be convincingly connected with other «socialist» discursive moments.

The government’s decision not to use military force to maintain the Eastern European satellite states within the socialist system in 1989 and the worsening economic and political situation in the USSR finally provoked an attempted coup d’état by anti-reform Communists in 1991. The failure of the August coup, however, led to the establishment of a sovereign Russian state and sealed the fate of the Soviet Union. Political collapse followed discursive dislocation.

The Russian state that emerged in the 1990s lacked stable political and territorial foundations. Politicians struggled to articulate a common political identity. To a certain extent, this was intentional: the market ideology promoted aggressively by Russian reformers in the early Yeltsin period led to a limitation of the state’s involvement in social, political and economic affairs. Many considered any attempt to articulate and promote an official political identity to be reminiscent of Soviet methods and thus potentially totalitarian (Molchanov 2005: 19).

At the same time, Russians were faced with a dramatic deterioration of living standards. Chechnya declared independence in 1994, and the unsuccessful and costly war that followed demonstrated the Russian army’s severe limitations. The treaty of Khasaviurt, which provided Chechnya with de-facto autonomy, contributed to a widespread sense that the Russian state was losing control over large parts of the country. The collapse of the ruble in 1998, which resulted in the vast number of Russians losing their savings, constituted a further dislocation.

Official government discourse presented Russia as a democratic country with a market economy, yet this discourse failed to provide a unifying national idea.[9] Other discourses were simultaneously competing for hegemony. Olga Malinova identifies two main blocks: the «Democrats» around Yeltsin, and the «Popular-Patriotic Opposition» (Malinova 2009: 97). While the former, dominated by supporters of liberal market reforms, corresponded more or less to official government discourse, the latter united Communists and right-wing forces: «They combined traditional communist rhetoric with criticism of liberal