In yet another indication that Russian President Vladimir Putin has dictatorial inclinations, there’s news that he’s starting a Putin Youth group.
This is chilling and here’s why: according to the Telegraph (linked above), the group has been set up specifically to counter anti-government demonstrations at a time when Putin’s popularity is plummeting — and it has already shown itself to be violent.
Note this:
Hundreds of youths, many belonging to the president’s cultural society “Walking Together”, held a meeting in a house owned by the Kremlin Property Department to launch the group at the weekend. The organization, which leaders hope will attract 300,000 members, was christened “Nashi” [Ours], a word which in Russian has chilling nationalist overtones.
When two outsiders – one from an opposition party, the other a journalist – sneaked into its founding conference, they were humiliated and one was beaten.
The latest move by the Kremlin to shore up its rule comes after claims that it has been using infiltrators to stir trouble at anti-government rallies, giving the police an excuse to disperse them.
In other words: some in Russia believe the government is trying to find a reason to clamp down on demonstrators so it’s provoking reasons for a clamp down.
All of this is highly troubling if you put it within the context of what Putin has been doing in recent months. He has consistently taken stances at odds with U.S. policy and curtailed some of Russia’s hard-won new democratic freedoms in the name of order. And he has gotten away with it.
Never forget that dictators throughout the years (Adolph Hitler, Spain’s Francisco Franco, etc) used “anarchy” and the need to establish “order” as a pretext to perpetuate themselves in power. And today all signs suggest that Putin is working hard to systematically inch back post-Communist Russian democracy and reconstitute aspects of the old Soviet Union in terms of foreign policy and autocratic rule.
What is Putinism emerging as? Answer: A movement to turn Russia into a quasi-KGB state with just enough democracy to escape being labeled as undemocratic. Will this latest ploy work?
Writes Glenn Reynolds:”This seems unlikely to succeed. And that Putin thinks he needs it tells us a lot about where things may be heading.”
Indeed, in terms of world p.r., this will be viewed as a creepy revival of the old Hitler Youth. It’ll also give ammunition to Putin’s critics who don’t see this group being set up as a kind of Putin-style Boy Scouts but to keep the established government order established:
Andrei Pointkowsky, director of the Centre for Strategic Studies, said: “Putin is behind this. Scared by the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Kremlin is trying to form a Putin Jugend to suppress future opposition.
“Putin has had a catastrophic loss of authority. People are finally beginning to realise that the emperor has no clothes.”
Ilya Yashin, youth leader of the opposition party Yabloko and one of the two liberals who gatecrashed the conference, said: “Our apprehensions about the Kremlin’s intentions to form assault units to fight the opposition have been confirmed. Under the Nashi slogan the Kremlin is forming brigades of storm-troopers so that they can use force against the opposition.”
BOTTOM LINE: All signs point to a continued clampdown in Russia — and for Russia to continue to work counter to U.S. interests.
(Linked to OTB Traffic Jam)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.