Strongman, The

far from over. Nashi became the self-appointed voice of public outrage, a potent political force that purported to be independent but in fact enjoyed the absolute protection of the state, however lawless or thuggish their behaviour became. Their activities had little to do with preventing a coloured revolution in Russia. The British ambassador, Tony Brenton, would find himself in their sights after he attended a conference held by The Other Russia, a coalition of opposition groups, in July 2006. Brenton recalls the incident in the self-deprecating manner of a British diplomat: ‘I went along to this Other Russia conference to express our support for Russian civil society, which I did in a deeply dull speech. I wasn’t the only ambassador there, but for some reason the Russians picked me out. And this youth group, Nashi, which is a ruling-party youth group, so in effect works for the Kremlin, demanded an apology for Tony Brenton’s interference in Russian politics. Now there was no way I was going to apologise, so then they said, well we are going to hassle Tony Brenton until he does apologise. It was my job to put up with it, which I did.’ 13
    What he and his family had to endure, however, bordered on the criminal. Hooligans from Nashi camped outside his house, waving banners, followed him around town and shouted abuse at the back of public meetings he addressed. When his wife drove out to go shopping, they hammered with their fists on the roof of her car. Brenton complained about this intimidation, which clearly violated the Vienna Convention on the status of diplomats (not to mention laws against harassment), but it took half a year before the foreign ministry took action to force Nashi to back off.
    Nashi undertook similar actions against the Estonian ambassador to express the ‘outrage of the Russian people’ against her country’s decision to remove a memorial to Soviet ‘liberators’ of Estonia (considered occupiers by most Estonians) from the centre of the capital, Tallinn.
    Whenever complaints were made, Kremlin spokesmen would shrug their shoulders, claiming it was nothing to do with them, almost laughing it off as a bit of harmless fun. But the link with the Kremlin is explicit. The Nashi website is full of articles by Surkov, Putin and Medvedev, all of whom also attend their conferences and summer camps. Putin’s party, United Russia, also has its own official youth wing, Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard – another Soviet-era term), which is rather more disciplined than Nashi.
    Surkov’s second line of attack, to ward off the orange ‘contagion’, was aimed against non-governmental organisations, particularly those which received funding or support from abroad. These had been identified by the paranoiacs in the Kremlin not just as factors in the revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine (and a third grass-roots revolt in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan in February 2005) but as the means by which the United States was allegedly plotting the downfall of the Putin regime.
    Civil society had burgeoned in Russia ever since Gorbachev’s glasnost policies had allowed the first ‘informal organisations’ to be registered. Now there were hundreds of thousands of them, and about 2,000 dealt with human rights and democracy issues. Organisations such as the Carnegie Centre provided independent expert analysis of Russian politics; Memorial chronicled the crimes of the past and kept alive the memory of the victims of communism; the Helsinki Group monitored human rights abuses. And some of them received grants or subsidies from Western governments or from parent NGOs abroad.
    Less than a year after the Ukraine revolution the State Duma introduced legislation to rein them in. The law, which would severely hamper the activities of foreign-supported NGOs operating in Russia, caused an outcry in the West, and President Bush, among others, successfully lobbied for some of its terms to be softened. Nonetheless, the version signed into law by President Putin on 10 January 2006 required all Russian NGOs to disclose their finances and sources of funding, and ensure that their activities complied with Russian ‘national interests’ or risk closure. It became considerably more difficult for foreign groups to fund and support their partners in Russia. (By October, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Danish Refugee Council and two branches of Doctors Without Borders had been forced to halt their work