The Ministry of Sports and Tourism, the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs spoke about extremism

On April 7, 2011, the Ministry of Sports, Tourism and Youth Policy of the Russian Federation published a document prepared jointly with the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, entitled "Methodological recommendations for preventing and countering extremism among young people."

The document consists of ten pages of text, according to which it is very felt that there were several co-authors, and the editor did not bother to bring everything under one denominator. Along with sound reasoning, assessments and suggestions, there are outdated, incorrect, and simply harmful ones in the text.

In particular, assessments of the danger of nationalist movements, proposals for working with football fans, creating uncensored youth media, supporting social pedagogy, etc., can be attributed to true and sensible ones.

Unfortunately, in our opinion, there are more contradictions, wrong ideas and harmful suggestions in the text. Without commenting on each, we highlight the main and most striking ones.

The very understanding of the nature of extremism, in our opinion, is too broad in the document and clearly goes beyond the limits of legislation. The authors consider almost all protest and/or informal movements and groups to be extremist.

Many commentators have drawn attention to a paragraph in which one can hear the fears and accusations that have become firmly established in the conservative discourse since the Orange Revolution:
"Attempts by foreign non-governmental non-profit organizations and international organizations to use youth to carry out activities aimed at transforming the political system of Russia have noticeably intensified."

Assessing the role of the Internet in the dissemination of "extremist ideas" seems to us alarmist and potentially dangerous for freedom of speech. Meanwhile, the Internet cannot be considered as an independent threat, it is only a tool, a way of disseminating information.

At the same time, as the only example, the authors cite the impressive, but already somewhat outdated "Big Game" - a network project, information about which was updated regularly in 2008-2009, and the alleged organizer of which will soon begin trial .

It also seems exaggerated and far-fetched that the authors fear actions organized using the technology of flash mobs: a lot of space is devoted to this in the document. In our opinion, the authors misunderstand the very essence of the flash mob technology, calling this word any unofficial public events organized through social networks. In addition, they clearly overestimate both the degree of danger of such events and their level of prevalence in Russia.

Perhaps the most dangerous thing seems to us to talk about youth subcultures in a language that is more suitable for a spy novel or a textbook on intelligence. The authors see them as the main source of extremist danger and propose, in particular, to destroy the "administrative core" of the carriers of the subculture, as well as to create and introduce into the "youth field" new subcultures that "are socially positive or imitate extremist activity" (italics ours).

Sources

• Guidelines for the prevention and counteraction of extremism among young people (developed by the Ministry of Sports and Tourism of Russia together with the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia and the Federal Security Service of Russia) // Website of the Ministry of Sports and Tourism. 2011. April 7th.