Translated material
Don't rush to bury us
“Ours” are trying to survive the change of Russian president
Commissioners of the pro-Kremlin youth movement “Nashi” held a press conference last Friday to declare that the information that appeared in a number of media outlets about the liquidation of this movement was not true. According to them, “Nashi” will suffer not liquidation, but reorganization.Conversations that the Kremlin is curtailing the Nashi project have been going on for a long time - ever since the Kremlin began to admit the obvious: no “Orange Revolution” threatens the Russian authorities, which means that there is no need to spend huge amounts of money on maintaining an army of anti-Orangeists. Necessarily. This structure became especially irrelevant after the end of the Duma elections. The main signal was the departure of Nashi leader Vasily Yakemenko for a formal promotion to the government - he took the bureaucratic post of head of the newly created State Committee for Youth Affairs with extremely vague powers. Last week it became known that Nashi will cease to exist in its usual form and will undergo reorganization. According to unofficial data, the Kremlin has decided to abandon the use of this movement as a political extras.
Last Friday, the leader of Nashi, Nikita Borovikov , who replaced Mr. Yakemenko in this post, told reporters that the reason for the rumors was information about the future division of the movement into several independent public projects. “The projects that the movement implements in the regions are becoming cramped within the regional headquarters,” said Mr. Borovikov. At the same time, he noted that “the movement will maintain a centralized federal management structure, but in each region it will be represented not by one headquarters, but by ten headquarters for the implementation of large projects.”
At the same time, according to Mr. Borovikov, “Nashi” will continue to hold large-scale actions and in the summer they will again traditionally go to the annual forum “Seliger-2008”. It is also planned that 10 thousand movement activists will travel to places of military glory in the Leningrad region and travel by train to Grozny.
Nikita Borovikov also disagreed with the assertion of some experts that there is no place for movement in the presidential election campaign. According to him, movement activists will work in the election headquarters of presidential candidate Dmitry Medvedev. “They will do what they are good at: holding various public events, they will work with young people as the target audience,” said the leader of the movement.
The former head of the “Our Elections” movement, and now State Duma deputy Sergei Belokonev, said that in the long term the “Nashi” movement could even become a party. Moreover, it is oppositional. Because transformation into a party will happen only if “if we feel in a few years that the elite is erasing the slogans that it supported and with which President Vladimir Putin came out,” Mr. Belokonev said. If this happens, the Nashi commissars will be forced to initiate the creation of a new party that will guard the president’s tasks,” Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Youth Policy Sergei Belokonev assured journalists.
“Ours” are ready to actively continue the fight against “enemy” states, for example, Estonia. In the spring, they actively protested at the Estonian embassy against the movement of the Bronze Soldier in Tallinn. Now, according to Nikita Borovikov, they are forming blacklists of Estonians who should be prohibited from entering Russian territory. This measure should be a response from Estonia, which has banned the entry of commissars of the Nashi movement into its territory. “Then we will submit the blacklists to the Foreign Ministry. We will try to get a personal reception. Regardless of whether it succeeds or not, it will be a major action that is difficult to miss. If we don’t get a personal reception, we’ll send the lists by mail,” Mr. Borovikov promised.