Cathy Young is right. After Stalin’s death (and possibly already before) the Komsomol
had become a bureaucratic organization that lacked the ideological zeal of its beginnings.
The Maoist Red Guards had a similar structure, but they had a different function.
They were a weapon in the internal power struggle between different factions in the
Chinese Communist Party. This seems not to be the case in Russia, where the opposition
is nonsystemic, that is, outside the existing power structure. If the Nashi cannot
be compared with the Komsomol or the Red Guards, are they a new variant of the Hitlerjugend? Here we must first clarify what kind of Hitlerjugend (HJ) we are referring to, because there are big differences between the HJ before and after Hitler’s rise to power. In both cases the organization was, of course, a huge indoctrination
machine. But before Hitler’s appointment to chancellor in January 1933—and also for
some time afterward—membership of the Hitlerjugend was voluntary (from 1936 on it would become compulsory). These voluntary members
(and/or their parents) were, undoubtedly, ideologically more motivated. Equally important
was the fact that since 1926 the HJ had been a part of the paramilitary SA (Sturm Abteilung). Each year on November 9 (the date of the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch) members
of the Hitlerjugend who had reached the age of eighteen went over to the SA in an official celebration
ceremony. The task of the SA was to train street fighters to intimidate political
opponents. After the so-called Röhm Putsch in 1934 members of the Hitlerjugend no longer went to the SA, but joined Hitler’s party, the NSDAP, directly. Moreover,
the paramilitary exercises of the Hitlerjugend changed in character: they were no longer intended to prepare streetfighters for
the National-Socialist Party, but to train aspirant soldiers to fight in the wars
of the Reich. The Nashi, therefore, although it is supporting a regime in power, resembles
in its structure and objectives more the Hitlerjugend during the phase in which the NSDAP still was an opposition party: it aims to create
an ideologically motivated youth. However, a further differentiation may take place
when the druzhiny are completed. As a nationwide organized gang of streetfighters, tasked with intimidating
civil society, they will be more and more comparable to Mussolini’s blackshirts or
Hitler’s SA. Creating such violent gangs of street thugs to intimidate and harass
political opponents carries also, however, big risks, as the Russian sociologist Lilia
Shevtsova rightly remarked:
Who is to say that such youth movements as Nashi (Ours), Mestnye (Locals), and the Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard) will not go the same way as the nationalistic Rodina (Motherland) Party? After being likewise set up by the Kremlin, Rodina became a loose cannon because of the ambitions of its nationalistic leader, Dmitri
Rogozin. The Kremlin had to remove the Motherland Party from the Moscow elections
and expel some of its overambitious politicians. It might be more difficult to keep
even the pro-Kremlin youth movements on a leash. The gangs of young Putin supporters
created by the Kremlin in the wake of the Ukrainian Revolution started by harassing
opposition politicians Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Kasianov and then went after foreign
diplomats, attacking the British and Estonian ambassadors. The young are playing the
game with evident enthusiasm, becoming more aggressive each time. They have already
understood their strength and are eager to do “big projects.” The moment may come
when the young wolves will feel they are manipulated and will want to become an independent
force. And someone might emerge who will lead this destructive blind force that can
be turned into a dangerous political weapon. The Russian authorities may never have
read the story of Frankenstein and seem unaware of how experiments creating monsters
may end.[58]
