Daily Archives: April 26, 2007

Of all the obits I’ve read on Yeltsin in the last few days, Mark Taibbi’s “Yeltsin: An Obit of a Drunken, Bloblike Train Wreck of a Revolutionary Leader” captures the man’s life and career best. I think he rightly sums up the Yeltsin period in this passage:

Yeltsin, in other words, single-handedly created a super-gangster class to defend his presidency against an electoral challenge. He had also restored a system of despotic government-by-tribute that had reigned in Russia for centuries, even throughout the worst years of Soviet rule. In Russia there survives a style of leadership dating back to the local Khans of the East in which the leader is a pathologically greedy strongman who takes everything for himself, and then rules by handing out “gifts” to an oligarchy of ruthless underlings devoted to his political survival. Stalin himself, an ethnic Georgian, used to physically re-enact this political ..read more

It is quite difficult to assess the influence, let alone the political impact of Russian youth organizations. The vast majority are rather small with memberships in the hundreds and, if they are lucky, the thousands. According to estimates from 2005, Nashi has around 100,000 to 300,000 members. The National Bolsheviks claim 15,000 to 20,000 members. Still these organizations, especially Nashi, are only in their infancy.

If a recent poll by the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) is any indication, Russian youth organizations have a lot of PR work ahead of them. According to the poll, when respondents were shown a list of twelve youth organizations, “the majority of respondents (60%) said they had never heard of any one of them.” This was only a little better among the organizations’ constituency. 47 percent of respondents under the age of 35 claimed they never ..read more