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7 - Occupy Youth!

State-Mobilized Movements in the Putin Era (or, What Was Nashi and What Comes Next?)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2020

By
Julie Hemment
Edited by
Grzegorz Ekiert ,
Elizabeth J. Perry  and
Xiaojun Yan
Grzegorz Ekiert
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Elizabeth J. Perry
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Xiaojun Yan
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
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Summary

One frigid December morning, I struggled out of bed at 5 am to join several hundred local youth at the Tver’ railway station. I was joining a campaign organized by the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi (Ours). We were traveling to Moscow to meet with World War II veterans, bearing gifts and best wishes for the New Year. Our train was one of many traveling from the provinces to Moscow that morning. Kirill, my Nashi activist contact (a “komissar” in the movement who had participated in our research project), explained that the campaign, entitled “A Holiday Returned,” was timed to coincide with the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Moscow – to give back to surviving veterans the New Year’s holiday celebration that had been cruelly snatched from them by the Nazis during the winter of 1941. Kirill had explained that the campaign would bring 100,000 young people from across the Russian Federation to the capital in specially commissioned trains. Each group of 100 was to meet with a group of veterans and present them with a New Year’s gift.

Type
Chapter
Information
Ruling by Other Means
State-Mobilized Movements
 , pp. 166 - 192
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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