From BBC in 2001.

Stalin and the Betrayal of Leningrad

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On Tuesday, it looked as if the Anna Politkovskaya trial would be open to journalists.  Today, the judge Yevgeny Zubov, decided at the last moment that it would be closed.  The reason he gave was that the jury refused to participate if the trial was open to the media.  Zubkov had already warned that he would close the proceedings if “a juror made a single request.”

Nevertheless, there are those that smell something rotten in the Moscow Military District Court.  Karinna Moskalenko, the non-poisoned lawyer for the Politikovskaya family, was disappointed, but not surprised. Is anyone? He says that the Zubkov had “not offered convincing evidence of the need to bar the public for the safety of the jury.”  “I could expect this is there were a threat to the jury,” she told reporters.  Novaya gazeta noted that,

It’s notable that a day earlier when the jurors were sworn in, not a single one spoke out about their safety or suspicions regarding concern for future pressure or threats.  Moreover, none of the 12 jurors said anything about having facts on that nature.

The procecution deined that the closing of the court had anything to do with government pressure from above.  After all, its representatives, Vera Pashkovskaya and Iuliia Safina were all prepared to address the media, which had been assembled for a press conference a mere forty minutes before the trial opened.

So who knows?  The truth of the matter is that some will believe that someone above intervened, others will say that there is a real possibility that jurors could be threatened.  Both are possible, though I have the say the latter is more probable given the nature of the case and the type of people involved.  The funny thing is that the same people who think there is a government hand in the court’s closing are the very same people who would blame the government if a juror was threatened, or worse, ended up dead.  Either way, a conspiracy will be conjured. Given this and the amount of international attention this case is getting, if I was Zubkov I would probably play it safe too.

The Politkovskaya trial is not the only incident hitting the Russian media world. This week, Moscow prosecutors sent a warning to Newsweek Russia over the possibility that its September 29-October 5 issue might incite interethnic and religious strife between Christians and Muslims.  The articles is question are “Who Goes to Mosque with Us” and “Mosque Carriers.”  The complaint was filed by the Russian Mufti Council because the issue contained a reprint of the cartoon of Mohammed which sparked proetsts in 2005.
One wouldn’t think that ethnic strife is a real problem given the results of Levada Center’s recent poll on multi-ethnic tension in Russia.  According to its findings, 26 perecent rarely and 58 percent never feel any ethnic hostility woward others.  Similar percentages were given for the question: Do you at the present moment feel any hostility toward people of a different nationality?”
Still, the visage of the Prophet Mohammad is not the only thing the Russian media has to be careful reporting about.  Apparently, so is the economic crisis.  In Sverdlovsk, the prosecutor began a check of their local media for disseminating information that might “destabilize the [economic] situation in the region.”  Namely, according to Timma Bobina, the head assistant to the prosecutors office, “We were assigned to check information about media attacks via the Internet on credit organizations in Yekaterinburg.  If we establish evidence that the law was broken, we can follow up with disciplinary measures, and even criminal punishment against the perpetrators.”

Sverdlovsk isn’t the only region going through such a “check.” Kommersant reports that all of Russia’s regions will look into how local media is reporting on local banks. According to prosecutors, customers in the Far East received an SMS saying that Dalkombank and Vladivostok banks were going bankrupt.  In three days, clients withdrew $2.4 million rubles. In Yekaterinburg local media started a panic when it reported that Severnaya Bank, Bank 24.ru, and Ural Bank were to undergo “reconstruction and development.” Apparently the economic crisis has sent many Russians into a panic to withdrawal their savings from banks.

Something must be up because there has been a rash of muggings of people carrying large sums of cash in Moscow.  The Moscow Times reports,

City police on Tuesday alone registered four separate thefts from car drivers of amounts ranging from 300,000 rubles ($10,900) to 3 million rubles ($109,000), state-run Vesti-24 said in a report posted on its web site.

“Police have noted that since the start of the crisis, such crimes have become more common,” Vesti-24 reported. “This is because people are carrying large amounts of cash. Criminals are taking advantage of this.”

Four people attacked the driver of a Jeep Grand Cherokee that had stopped at a traffic light at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday on Aviamotornaya Ulitsa in southeastern Moscow, injuring him with a hammer and baseball bats before taking a bag containing 300,000 rubles, police said.

At about the same time, three men grabbed a bag with 3 million rubles in it from a 32-year-old sitting in a car on Denisovsky Pereulok, near Baumanskaya metro station in central Moscow, before making off in a getaway car, according to police.

On Tuesday evening, three men stopped a car on Slavyansky Bulvar in central Moscow and snatched a bag containing 500,000 rubles from the 45-year-old driver.

Finally, the near death beating of Mikhail Beketov is hitting the international press, as it well should. Provincial reporters bear the brunt of the violence against journalists in Russia. They’re easy targets because they have few resources, little notoriety, and most importantly, less of an international spotlight. A glance at the Defense of Glasnost’s list of attacks on and killings of Russian journalists shows that the vast majority occur in the provinces.

Beketov has had his legs amputated and now lies in a coma with peices of his skull stuck in his brain.  According to a friends Beketov had been recieving threats weeks before his beating.  “He told us about a week before he was attacked that he had been informed that an order to kill him had been taken out,” says Lyudmila Fedotova, a close friend. The hospital doesn’t seem to be a safe place for him either.  Fedotova also said that despite being in a coma, “he was receiving telephone threats even as he was being operated on.”  Callers promised that they would eventually kill Beketov.

If there is anything good out of this, it’s that the brutal attack on Beketov has woken up the Public Chamber.  In response to the attack, the body plans to create a center for the defense of journalists.  Whether this will actually do anything to protect journalsists or even raise Russia’s low standing among international organizations that monitor media freedom remains to be seen.  Given the lackadaisical manner the Russian government tends to have toward violence against journalists, we should be happy that at least this time they took some notice, and perhaps even some action.

The Ossetian War is now three months past, but the battle over the war’s narrative continues.  There has been a turn around in the Western media over the last few weeks.  Whereas Russia was lambasted during the war as the evil villain and poor little Georgia the innocent victim, mostly thanks the Georgia’s use of Beligian PR firms, now Georgia is now blamed for a reckless attack, and even war crimes.  To suggest anything of the sort three months ago would have been considered madness and laughed off as Putinist apologia.

The reevaluation of the war culminated today with the publication of a 76 page report by Amnesty International.  The report, which declares a pox on both Russia and Georgia, details how Georgia carried out “indiscriminate attacks” on civilians and with Russia committed “serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.”

As a whole the Amnesty reports doesn’t reveal any new information but rather corroborates what was already known with more testimony.  The one part I was hoping to see more information on was the role of South Ossetian militias in the conflict.  The report only devotes 3 of its 76 pages to this topic.  From this it is still hard to evaluate the extent of Ossetian revenge violence against their Georgian neighbors.

Sadly, all of these journalistic correctives are now hopelessly academic.  The war is over.  The propaganda served its purpose at the moment when it was most needed.  Journalists may be asking questions like: Why did the West ignore the truth about the war in Georgia? and running to pump out corrective articles by “talking to civilians” and getting the “facts” from the ground to salvage their credibility, but the real truth was that those “civilian accounts” and “facts” were always there.  Not to toot my own horn, but I was able to see them.  I didn’t even have to go to South Ossetia or Georgia to do so.  All I did, like so many others who now feel vindicated, simply read the Russian press, (though I did fall victim to Russia’s claims of 2,000 civilian deaths.  The revised number is a 159.) or the independent media.  Granted, there is something to the “fog of war” and how that might obscure truth.  Nevertheless, much of the Western media were either incompetent, or, because they are always willing to play their role in the war machine, simply just chose to ignore them.

As American automakers prepare to lobby the US government for their share of the $700 billion rescue corporate redistribution fund, GM, who is heading the effort, opened a new $300 million factory in Russia “to compensate for slumping sales in western Europe and North America.”  Carl-Peter Forster, the head of GM in Europe, predicts that the plant, which will employ 981 people, may increase to 1,700 next year.  Such predictions come as autoworkers in the US wonder what will happen to their jobs and pensions if America’s Big Three aren’t deemed to big to save.  Once again the transfer of labor from one country to another should be a reminder of the real face of globalization: to drive down wages and increase corporate profits.

Russia looks to be a perfect place.  It has a skilled labor force and a weak union movement.  It is not only that, in the words of Forster and that “Russia emerged [as a market] long ago.” It is also that international capital can get away with things that it can’t as easily in the United States and Western Europe, i.e. violently attack and threaten union and other social activists activists. I wonder is this is what Medvedev had in mind when he ordered police to be ready to quell any signs of social unrest connected with the economic crisis.

Well the use of violence is exactly what happened to Alexei Etmanov, the chair of the union at the Ford-Vsevolozhsk plant on 8 November.  According to Chto delat,

[Etmanov] parked his car in a lot and headed for his house. On Heroes Street three men jumped in his path and without uttering a word attacked Alexei. They were armed with knuckledusters.

During the tussle, Alexei managed to pull a stun gun from his pocket and get off a shot. The cloak-and-dagger types beat a hot retreat.

The next day his deputy Vladimir Lesik got a phone call warning that the attack wouldn’t be the last. The assailants kept their word.  Etmanov was attacked again by an unknown man wielding a metal pipe on 13 November. Etmanov escape again by firing rubber bullets at the assailant.

This of course is neither the first or the last attack on Russian union activists.  As Chto delat reminds us,

Over the past two years such attacks have happened more than once: labor activists have been savagely beaten in Kaliningrad, Togliatti, and Taganrog. Each time the targets were union activists who challenged the complete sway of their employers and thus all employers who recognize no one’s rights other than their own sovereign right to dictate the work conditions and the lives of “their” workers.

Each time the reprisals followed a heightening of conflict at the respective factories. Despite the fact that police investigators have still not managed to solve any of these crimes, there can hardly be any doubt as to the names of the people who really commissioned them since it is much too obvious whose interests were threatened.

The recent attacks on Etmanov have been followed by several other attacks on Russian social activists.  On 13 November, Sergei Fedotov, the leader of Deceived Land Shareholders, was attacked in the village of Mikhalevo.  Two young men beat Fedotov with baseball bats as he exited his car.  That same day, Mikhail Beketov, a editor-in-chief for Khimkinskaya pravda was beaten half to death.  Beketov has been an outspoken opponent of efforts to prevent the clearing of the Khimki Forest. Finally, since three is the magic number, French sociologist and activist Carine Clement was assaulted in Moscow after she participated in a round table discussion at Bilingua Club.  According to her, two men ran up to her and stabbed her with a syringe containing an unknown substance.  This was the third attack on Clement this month.  She was beaten and mugged two weeks ago near her Moscow home. The second occurred on 12 November when she was verbally assaulted and spat upon by an unknown assailant.  Clement is the director of the Institute of Collective Action in Moscow which fights for housing and labor rights.

Is this part of a growing trend?  Merely the sign of the times?

A statement (translated by Chto delat) from Collective Action in response to the series of attacks explains them as follows:

Recently, criminal attacks against the leaders of trade union and social movements have clearly increased. Among the latest such incidents, we should note the attacks against Carine Clément, a member of the working group and a leader of the Union of Coordinating Councils; Alexei Etmanov, leader of the labor union at Ford-Vsevolozhsk; Mikhail Beketov, leader of the movement to defend the Khimki Forest; and Sergei Fedotov, leader of the deceived land shareholders of the Moscow Region. In addition, a great many activists fighting the infill construction that is happening in all our cities have been attacked. There have been murders, in particular, of antifascist activists.

This is not a random phenomenon, but a clear trend: active citizens who try to restore justice and defend their legal rights are more and more often subjected to brute force. With no other arguments at its disposal, the opposite resorts to criminal methods. While it is clear that in each situation it is a different group of people who commissions these crimes, the overall tendency demonstrates that excellent conditions for the further escalation of this brutal method of “social dialogue” have been created in Russia today. These conditions include lawlessness, the lack of criminal liability for violations of the law by state officials or members of the ruling elite, universal corruption, and the hypercentralization of authority in the absence of any form of control from below. Many cases of “political” attacks on activists have still not been investigated, and the guilty parties not be found, which gives the assailants a sense of impunity and thus provokes further crimes.

We say, Enough!

We demand a maximally thorough and swift investigation of all assaults against all social activists, the transfer of these cases into a separate category, and the creation of a special investigative group within the Ministry of the Interior. We also demand that the public be kept informed about the course of these investigations.

We demand that the assailants be punished according to law whatever high-ranking patrons might support them.

We declare that we will not be intimidated by the method of violence and terror. We will continue our struggle for the social rights of our country’s citizens.

We appeal to the state authorities, who position themselves as the guarantee of “public order,” to make sure that “public order” is not violated by government officials. As it is, all we observe now is the arrests of old women and young activists at various assemblies, demonstrations or strikes, while we hear very little about arrests of corrupt state officials or unscrupulous employers. Down with this politics of double standards!

We declare that, given the situation, we consider it our right to use methods of self-defense and that we will use all possible means to assist and protect our comrades.

Putin’s statement to Nicholas Sarkozy, “I’m going to hang Saakashvilli by the balls” is making the rounds in the news.  Putin’s crude words, which he is known for, has prompted questions over how much he really detests Saak, and whether this hatred figured in how Russia dealt with the Georgian leader.  Whatever Putin said or not, and if he did what it means for Kremlin policy is besides the point.  The image of Saakashvilli hanging from his balls wasn’t the only image of humor in Putin and Sarkozy’s exchange.

“I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Mr Putin declared.

Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. “Hang him?” — he asked. “Why not?” Mr Putin replied. “The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”

Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: “Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?” Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: “Ah — you have scored a point there.”

Even Saak found the incident funny.  “I knew about this scene, but not all the details. It’s funny, all the same,” he said on French radio.

Putin’s “hang’em by the balls” quip reminded me of similar statement made by none other than Stalin. In a note attached to V. I. Mezhlauk’s 1930 sketch N. P. Briukhanov (above), Stalin wrote:

To the members of the PB:

For all the sins, past and present, hang Briukhanov by the balls.  if the balls hold out, consider him acquitted by trial.  If they do not hold, drown him in the river. I. S.

Briukhanov’s balls must have held.  In April 1931, he was rehabilitated and appointed Deputy of the People’s Commissariat of Supplies.  Unfortunately for him, his oppositionist past caught up with him and he was arrested in 1938.  His balls, now eight years older, must not have been able to stand the tension.  They snapped.  Briukhanov was shot.

Both pictures come from Piggy Foxy and the Sword of the Revolution: Bolshevik Self-Portraits.

Kommersant Vlast‘ made an funny observation about the websites of Russian political parties.  Apparently the verbosity and the brevity of a party’s website is connected to their political orientation.  Those on the left are more verbose while those on the right are more terse.

The most verbose is the main page for the KPRF, a whole 2273 words.  Yabloko is in second place with 1237 words.  United Russia and Just Russia are almost twins with 875 and 840 words respectively.  The most concise site is the LDPR (unlike this party’s leader) with 409 words in all.

Forget what this says about the political spectrum.  I wonder what it says about how each party perceives the attention span of its supporters?

The KPRF might want to consider turning off the verbal valve.  Their site is a wordy mess. Clearly they’ve learned little about political technologies of the day.  The best way to appeal to voters is not to inundate them with stuff they have to read.  The days of crammed broad sheets like are over.  If they really want to look at an effective site, they should check out Barack Obama’s.  Bright colors, smiling faces, lots of graphics and, most importantly, few words.  In fact, the thing that dominates the President-elect’s page most is merchandise. Create an image. Brand it. After that what you actually say is an secondary.  Now that’s political technology of the 21st century!

“I’m out of it for a little while and everybody gets delusions of grandeur.” Now I understand how Han Solo felt after being defrosted from carbonite. I go into the basement for two weeks and there are rumors of me being in a post-election hangover, or worse, murdered.  Well, I assure you dear readers that I’m alive and well.  Los Angeles may be ablaze (again) but I’m safe from the rings of fire, that is until I kick the bucket and meet the dark lord.

For the past few weeks I’ve been devoting my Bolshevik will and strength to finishing a dissertation chapter.  “Bolsheviks can storm any fortress” read the Stalinist slogan, and I did. I do have to finish this damn dissertation at some point. And well if I have to pick between you my dear reader and my career, well my petite-bourgeois sensibilities win out every time.  Just don’t hate the player, hate the game.  So over the next few months expect more periods where I go underground . . .

But the delusions of grandeur aren’t about me and my rumored doom. They have more to do with what’s been going on in Russia over the last few weeks.  Well, not in Russia exactly, but more how it’s being interpreted by the gatekeepers of English language reporting.  As we know, Obama was elected President of the United States, and Dima Medvedev instead of showing the proper deference to the new Emperor decided to address the Duma where he blamed the US for the global economic crisis (he’s right) and threatened to put missiles in Kaliningrad to match American intentions of putting missiles in Poland.  Was this the challenge to Obama’s “lack of experience” that everyone predicted?  The New York Times thought so.  It called Medvedev’s move “a cold-war-tinged challenge for President-elect Barack Obama.”  After all, the Times reasoned, “Russia’s leaders know full well that the American missile defenses pose no real threat to their huge nuclear arsenal. But playing the victim is an easy way to divert attention from Russia’s shrinking democracy, and now from declining oil prices.” A new President but the Times plays the same old record. So much for hope and change. Russia’s just the same old big bully, they say. Sigh.

But digging at the US wasn’t all, or even the real focus of Mr. Medevev’s speech. Sorry to disappoint my fellow Americans, but sometimes you aren’t at the center of everyone’s existence. To quote the NY Times again, “The dark flashbacks didn’t end there.”  Surprise! Medvedev isn’t the liberal everyone hoped, prayed, and sacrificed small animals and virgins for.  He’s a Putinist of perhaps a lighter shade, but still a Putinist.  Dima’s most recent affront to Western democratic sensibilities was his proposal that the Russian presidential term be extended from four to six years.  Immediately, pundits cried “authoritarianism” and revived the corpse of Putin’s impending return to Russia’s top job.  The logic goes that since Putin didn’t want to risk international condemnation for changing the Constitution when he was President (as if there wasn’t enough condemnation already), he sent is little bear to do the dirty work.

The changes were submitted to the Duma on Friday and they passed without a hitch. No surprises there or in the Guardian’s Luke Harding usually predictable analysis: The changes entrench “the Kremlin’s grip on power and paving the way for an early comeback by Vladimir Putin.”  In fact, rumor has it that Putin will be back as early as 2009! For the life of me, I can’t figure out why this signals Putin’s “early comeback” especially since people like Harding believe that he never went anywhere in the first place.  After all, isn’t Putin the de facto President anyway? Is Medvedev Putin’s puppet or not?  Make up your damn mind.

In addition to extending the presidential term, Medvedev also proposed extending the terms of Duma reps from four to five years. This will certainly make representatives of United Russia happy.  Since the majority of Duma seats are based on lists and not direct candidate elections, this will solidify their place for one more year.  Rest easy, comrades.  But not too easy . . .

Medvedev also made some other interesting proposals in his speech that went virtually unnoticed in the Western press.  One is to change appointments for governors.  Instead of being appointed by the Kremlin, candidates for governor would chosen by their parties and be elected by a majority vote in their respective provincial Dumas.  Ekspert called this move “the most radical of all presidential initiatives.”  If this is implemented, governors would be more accountable to the regions they represent rather than to the Kremlin.  True, the Kremlin will certainly have a hand in the process via the back door–United Russia, after all, dominates every regional parliament–but it is a move toward some semblance of political decentralization.

The question, however, is why?  Why extend terms of President, Duma reps, and propose altering regional politics?  Many have pointed out that it’s all about the boys in the Kremlin tightening their grip.  Perhaps, but I have a different take.

Taken together, Medvedev’s proposals are a gift and a check to bureaucratic power.  Extending Duma terms gives reps a bit more time to rest on their laurels. Score one for the national political elite. Making governors accountable to locals is feather in the cap of local elites. Score one for them.  Extending the presidential terms to six years, however, is a potential check against this transfer of power.  The President will be in power longer than any one Duma member and given more time to put pressure on regional governors and their parliaments.

Extending the presidential term also suggests something else. In his speech, Medvedev spoke of “effective government.”  In one sense, his proposals are exactly about effective government.  They potentially, and I say potentially, increase the President’s effectiveness in influencing governance.  But this doesn’t mean that it’s about the Kremlin strengthening itself.  Quite the opposite, in my view.  Extending the top dog’s term says to me that the center still can’t trust its regions to implement its agenda. Therefore the President needs two more years to ram it down their throats.

Political power in Russia is indeed centralized because the history of regional politics from the Tsars to Putin have been one of autonomy, localization, stonewalling, foot dragging, or worse, exploiting the center’s directives.  Russian rulers’ solution has been to centralize its power.  But here is where the inner contradiction of centralization rears its ugly head.  The center must weaken the periphery to run the country as effective as it can, but in that weakening it makes itself the only real political force of reform, negating the power local need to prosecute the center’s policies.  The center is thus weakened by its very effort at becoming more effective.  The question then becomes how do you rule effectively and subordinate the machinations of regional boyars without giving them too much power to muck up your agenda?  It sounds as if Medvedev, with his proposed changes, is faced with the same conundrum.  Whether they will provide some semblance of an answer remains to be seen.

To think people believe that Putin wants this job back?!

I usually don’t cheerlead the work my adviser and friend, J. Arch Getty, but if you have any interest in his new book Stalin’s Iron Fist, read Simon Sebag Montefiore’s review in the Telegraph. If you’re not familiar Getty’s work, over the last two decades he has single handedly rewritten the history of the Terror as we know it. In Stalin’s Iron Fist, he explores the meteoric rise of the modest, hardworking Nikolai Ezhov from a worker in the famed Putilov factory to the head of the NKVD.  In many ways, Ezhov’s rise and fall is an archetype of the inner dichotomies of the Stalinist new man: he was a benefiary, shaper, power player, perpetrator, and victim of the very system that created him.

But I’m hardly an impartial critic of Getty’s work, so instead I’ll let Montefiore sing its praises:

J. Arch Getty, an American professor, and Oleg Naumov, deputy chief of Moscow’s Communist Party archive, have produced this fascinating and essential biography, which tells us more about the Kremlin and Soviet Russia than most history books.

The authors show how personal politics was in the 1930s; how responsibility and power was greater than we realised; how a form of real politics continued even under the dictatorship. If you want to understand how Stalinist Russia worked, read this book.

Yezhov was, in fact, an impressive and indefatigable bureaucrat, not a secret policeman: tiny, genial, hardworking, ruthless, shrewd.

By about 1930 he was the leading personnel expert in the Bolshevik Party Central Committee. By 1934, he was hugely important, one of the Party Secretariat under Stalin, a member of many of the overlapping Party organs.

He was liked, regarded as honest, he sang nicely and had good manners but as one of his patrons remarked: ‘If you want something done, no one can do it better than Yezhov. The only trouble is he doesn’t know when to stop.’

If that’s not a ringing endorsement from a well respected researcher of Stalin, then I don’t know what is.

The Putin cult continues.  Even though he’s no longer President, he’s still the man. Russians are still curious about Putin’s many movements, appearances, and events reports the Moscow Times.  Where will he be today?  What did the vozhd say on his working trip to Kazakhstan?  Just who are those lucky personages graced with his exalted presence? What a better way to follow the goings on of “Mr. Erotic Dream” than to give him his own website! To quote, Italy’s Gay TV host Alfonso Signorini, “Won-der-ful!”

Putin’s web site, which will be located at www.premier.gov.ru, promises to offer detailed information on Putin’s activities. For example, visitors will be able to click on a horizontal timeline to find out where Putin is at that moment and what he is doing, while an interactive map of the country will show where he has been and where he is planning to go, Peskov said.

“It will be a modern site with good anti-hacker protection,” he added.

Putin will not address Russians regularly like President Dmitry Medvedev has started doing through a new video blog launched this month on the Kremlin web site, Peskov said. But Internet users will be able to send questions to the prime minister.

What’s next a 24/7 Putin webcam?

The Russian media is abuzz with reports on the 90th Anniversary of the Komsomol.  Local celebrations, museum exhibits, and conferences are planned all over the country to commemorate the youth organization. In Pskov, the local office of the Committee for Youth Policy and Sport has organized festival called “My Komsomol Youth.”  Arkhangelsk has a series of events planned through November 4 “to give an objective judgment of the activities of the League, remember old friends, and impart our experience to young people,” says Arkhangelsk governor Ilya Mikhalchuk. “On these days we will celebrate the organization, which without exaggeration, gave us admission into life.”  The Volgograd provincial museum will host an exhibit titled “Milestones Glorious Path of the Komsomol.” Other cities holding events include Nizhni Novgorod, Cheliabinsk, Amur, Novosibirsk, Kursk, and Irkutsk, to name a few.  The biggest event was held on Sunday in the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow where Komsomol Congresses used to be held.  The event, titled “Soviet Russia,” was a who’s who of the new Russian elite.  There are also a few NTV reports: here and here.  Celebrations weren’t just confined to Russia. Even Belarus’ Aleksandr Lukashenko took a moment honor the Komsomol’s history.

It is estimated that almost two-thirds of Russian adults have been members of the Kosmomol, and most have fond memories of it.  Zhores Alferov, the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics, told RIA Novosti that “The Komsomol was an absolute organization of the masses. It educated people in a lot of things, including management and ethics.” Vladimir Sungorkin, the editor of Komsomolskaya pravda, said that “Lots of people today say that they hated the Komsomol, that they knew they had to keep as far away from it as they could. But that’s just rubbish. The Komsomol was founded on Christian, humanitarian ideals, the ideas of equality and brotherhood.”  Some agree with this idea that the Kosmomol was founded on Christian ideals.  In an interview with RIA Novosti, Nikolai Mesiatsev, a Komsomol veteran who was in the league in the 1930s, said that Patriarch Aleksei I told him in 1957, “You know, my boy, that the ethical norms of your League coincide with those of Orthodox Christianity.”  You don’t have to dig into so-called “Komsomol ethics” that deep to see that he’s right no matter how much the League’s founders would have been aghast at the thought.  By the late 1920s, ideas of sexual monogamy, family values, social conformity, and conservative mores were at the center of the League’s unwritten “code of conduct.”

Even more interesting is that by the 1980s, the organization had become a center of primitive capitalist accumulation.  The Komsomol was Gorbachev’s vanguard in economic reforms which eventually allowed people like Mikhail Khodorkovsky to make millions. Such is the irony.  Perhaps this is why Daria Mitina could write the following about the “Soviet Russia” event on Sunday,

On this day, all they gather in one hall: governors and ministers, former governors and former ministers, oligarchs and pensioners, functionaries and managers, bankers and scientists, cosmonauts and engineers, left and right, red, white and blue polka dotted, and all they extol the organization that made them real people.
…

There’s something mystical when bankers and oligarchs, highest officials and people of power come to the stage and with fiery eyes, in a voice trembling from tears, talk about the battles for the Soviet power, about feats of labor, about the tents on the construction site of the Bratsk power station… Today all they are the veterans of the Komsomol. (Translation Dmitri Minaev.)

While most agree that reviving a Komsomol-like organization that would dominate youth politics is no longer feasible, there appears to be a consensus among Russians that youth organizations are a positive thing. True, much of the perceived need comes from the usual older generation’s belief that youth are on a downward slope to utter corruption. “I’m very concerned about the situation [of Russia's] youth,” says Nikolai Mesiatsev.  He went on to lament the typical influence of television and its dangers to children and teenagers.  You could find the substance of Mesiatsev’s statements uttered repeatedly over the last 150 years.

Enter state sponsored organizations like Nashi, Molodaia gvardiia, and Mestnyi.  While lacking the scope and power that the Komsomol had, these organizations, especially Nashi, look to trained Russian youth in the ideological-economic mores of the day: capitalism, business, and nationalism.

How does an old Komsomol view the youth of Nashi?  Here are a few excerpts from an exchange between Viktor Mishkin, the former First Secretary of the Komsomol and Irinia Pleshcheva, a commissar from Nashi published in Moskovskii Komsomolets:

MK: The Komsomol and the Nashi movement are often compared.  To what extent is such a comparison pertinent?

Viktor Mishkin: I don’t see anything in common.  The Nashi movement has only just been formed.  To call it an organization which would united a large part of youth is in my view too early. It is not because when I worked in the Komsomol it was an organization of 42 million people and Nashi is considerably smaller.  The main distinction is that the Komsomol had a history, it was an organization that was present everywhere, and Nashi this is a small project.  It carries out actions and then disbands.  After half a year it carries out the next, and then disbands again.  There is only one thing in common between the Komsomol and Nashi.  They are organizations of the party in power.

Irina Pleshcheva: I disagree.  You had in your charter that you were the fighting helper and reliable reserve of the KPSS.  And we have nothing like this.  Yes, there were very many komsomols. But then almost everyone joined. If not then your life ended up on the side of the road.  Who wants to join [Nashi], joins, and who doesn’t . . . and we are not forged as cadres for United Russia.  We are forged to be cadres for various spheres of society.

Viktor Mishkin: But your organization was created to support United Russia.

Irina Pleshcheva: We support the course of the President.  When Putin was president, it means his course, Medvedev, it means his.  And whoever will be there [we will] still support. . . providing that he will stick to a course of sovereign democracy, the building of civil society, and the making of Russia into a leader in the 21st century.

Viktor Mishkin: And how do you prepare cadres?  There was the seminar at Seliger (the Nashi’s yearly summer camp–Sean).  I read a report from it that said that the main theme was to build a future elite for Russia.

Irina Pleshcheva: Yes, our purpose is to bring up an elite for Russia.  And there are various ways.  I’m, for example, a member of the Public Chamber, but I don’t want to be any kind of deputy or politician.  In the future I want to work as a journalist.  For me there has been definite growth troward my future profession.

Viktor Mishkin: For you this is interesting.  But the program, the organization must work for all youth.  Yes for the President–that’s great.  You will personally be in the elite.

Irina Pleshcheva: Your words are music to my ears!

Viktor Mishkin: And what kind of results are there for the rest of youth?

Irina Pleshcheva: There are programs to fight against the illegal sale of alcohol to children.  For example, we have in Voronezh guys who picket stores where they sell vodka to minors.  After this an agreement was made that these stores would not sell hard alcohol.  four stores were almost closed, but now any parent can send their child for bread and not be afraid that he will buy something else.  Also there is a program devoted to young families.

Viktor Mishkin: And what does that give?

Irina Pleshcheva: In the three years that this program has been running we’ve had eight couples marry.  They already have three children.

Viktor Mishkin: Here is your impart–eight couples.  All of these are isolated cases.  Today to compare Nashi with the Komsomol is absolutely impossible because the scale of Komsomol work was collossal.  Not to idealize the Komsomol, but I want to remind you about the Komsomol housing complexes which built residences for young families.

One can go to Seliger three times and meet with the President twice but this does not make you a leader.  Its not possible to train cadres with two seminars.  And the Komsomol trained and routinely led from the simple to the complex.  It was the best school for managers!

A bit of generational rivalry for sure.  I’ll provide more of this interview tomorrow.