Sean's Russia Blog

Vasilli Yakemenko is back. The former head of Rosmolodezh, ex-founder of the short lived Walking Together and former all-father of Nashi is starting a new group, Sincerely Yours. According to Vedomosti, the group will renew a youth base for the Putin’s fourth term. Yakemenko, or at least his sponsors, sincerely believe that Putin ruling until 2024 is inherently a good thing. “According to Yakemenko,” writes Vedomosti, “former Nashi commissars are still loyal to Putin and have faith in course of modernization and innovation Putin’s team declared for the country’s development in 2005. In [Yakemenko's] opinion, the country’s leadership has lost its way and it needs to evolve from control (kontrol) to promoting people’s creativity.” This is downright Surkovian, and no wonder, Yakemenko’s ties of the former grey cardinal are well known. Also, moving beyond kontrol, something I’ve argued defines Putin’s third term, is exactly what Surkov said in London. “The system must change” and it “has to adapt to changing conditions.”

Sincerely Yours won’t be a political organization, says Yakemenko. Rather it will work on “social projects” with names like “Reading,” which will encourage youth to, well, read and discuss books. The first text will be Eric Berne’s 1964 bestseller, Games People Play, which is a psychological treatise on human interaction. Think of it as an Oprah book club for Putin. Several “blocs” will outline other projects: housing, municipalities, education, and propaganda. Membership in Sincerely Yours will prove costly. Monthly dues will average 5000 rubles ($160) a month. Does Yakemenko really think that young people will join such group with such steep dues? Apparently he does. He promises a membership of a million in ten years. And it seems he’s already ahead of the game finance-wise. Yakemenko boasts a budget of 5 million rubles. As for where the cash came from, Yakemenko doesn’t say.

Sincerely Yours comes virtually out of the blue. Sounds like a year after Yakemenko left Rosmolodezh, declared the creation of a new project, the Party of Power, which never materialized because of lack of funding, and a running a restaurant, Eat Pirogi, the youth leader has lost his way too. Hence a Nashi rebound.

The Sincerely Yours announcement follows a meeting Yakemenko organized at Seliger last weekend.. Initially, Yakemenko invited up to 3,000 former Nashists to gather at the camp to discuss the future of Nashi. The meeting and the organization are not without controversy. Most former activists gave their dear leader the cold shoulder. Only 500 showed up. “I don’t understand what Yakemenko wants,” an unidentified Nashist told Izvestiia. “He wants to gather people together and show them something new, perhaps, his own power. But Nashi objectively no longer exists, it split into projects and these were based on agreements with particular Nashi commissars. The majority of members agrees with this and don’t want to go meet with Yakemenko.”

Another former commissar, Artur Omarov, concurred. “I personally don’t want to get together at Seliger. We accepted this decision and I don’t see any meaning in commissars deciding to ‘discuss the movement’s future.’ Our project was created several years ago to support Vladimir Putin’s course. And Putin hasn’t presented us with a new task.”

Sounds like Yakemenko, not Putin, has taken it upon himself to present Putin loyalists with a new mandate. Or has he?

Hence the question whether this is yet another Kremlin project to reenergize youth for Putin. As I said above, though so far Sincerely Yours sounds more Nashi-lite, it recalls Vladisalv Surkov’s attempts to drag in segments of Russian youth into Putin’s coalition. But a Vedomosti source says that Yakemenko’s new pet project is on his initiative and doesn’t have sanction from above. As of now, Surkov’s fingerprints are surprisingly missing.

Without Kremlin approval and the infrastructure and finances that come with it, I predict, as many also are, Yakemenko’s latest attempt get back into politics will amount to sincerely nothing.

Photo: Maksim Shemetov/Itar-Tass

This week’s Russia Magazine! column, “The Kids Aren’t Alright,”

“Who has the youth has the future!” Martin Luther declared. As object-subjects of modern states, youth serve as the key to reproducing of the means of reproduction. They perpetuate the nation and its institutions. Adults, therefore, seek, to play on Marx, to create youth after their own image. Yet, Russian youth defy capture. According to a recent study by Olga Kryshtanovskaya, Russian youth remain unmoored, disorientated, and incapable of finding their footing in present day Russia. Twenty years after the collapse of communism, “they have no established sense of Russian society and their place in it.” When young Russians look across the political landscape and peer at its various parties, movements, and personalities, they feel a profound sense of alienation. “This is one of the signs that the Russian political system finds itself in crisis,” says Pavel Salin, the director of the Center of Political Research.

Or is it? They certainly threaten the stability of Putin’s political corporatism. But they speak directly to the other side of Putinism: neoliberalism. And their experience with an economic structure that requires an unmoored, apathetic, cynical, and individuated citizenry places them on par with destabilized educated young people the world over. Like their Western counterparts, the respondents in Kryshtanovskaya survey are urban, educated, “middle class,” and politically liberal yet socially and economically adrift. The system doesn’t represent them, and they don’t have or desire a collective social identity to represent themselves.

If there is one word that characterizes the neoliberal experience of Russian youth it’s paradox. Kryshtanovskaya’s report is suffused with it suggesting a cohort split between pathos and reason, present doom and future salvation, and heralds of the nation and its discontents. Statements like “many working youth consider themselves unemployed;” “parties in the present Russian political system don’t correspond to their ideological labels;” young people talking of social calamity but don’t see “a national catastrophe as a serious danger;” and they are politically apathetic but speak of a “revolutionary apocalypse” suggests a non-place in Russia’s current conjecture. Russian youth inhabit the crevices of a paradoxical present.