https://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-07-18-russia-putin-youth_N.htm
Ten thousand young commissars — their title borrowed from the Communist Party leaders of the Soviet era — came here to learn to be Russia's next generation of tycoons and political leaders. Equally important, they came to prepare to stamp out any challenge from opposition groups to President Vladimir Putin's government.
All were summoned by Nashi, a pro-Kremlin organization that pays homage to Putin and seeks to promote Russia's resurrection as a superpower capable of frustrating what leaders call Western "imperialism."
"In 10 years, we will have a huge network of people who share our ideology and who know that is Russia's proper place in the world," Vasily Yakemenko, the founder of the group, told reporters at the camp Tuesday.
Now from October 2016........ten yrs later
Last weekend a group of young activists turned out on a Moscow street to protest against western decadence. They were a hard-faced bunch, standing defiantly in military poses and wearing uniforms bearing the logo ‘Officers of Russia: Executive Youth Wing’ as they blocked access to an exhibition by American photographer Jock Sturges that featured images of nude adolescents.
‘We are here to protect people from paedo-philic influences,’ one Officer of Russia told journalists — while another protester sprayed the offending photographs with urine. At the same time, Russia’s state–controlled airwaves filled with senators, priests and government officials denouncing the wickedness of the exhibition (which shut down immediately after the protests) and calling for the organisers to be prosecuted. The outcry came just days after the Russian government banned two popular porno-graphy sites, youporn and xhamster, also on the grounds of protecting public morality
Putin’s puritanism has grown hand-in-hand with the personal influence of two key conservative ideologues: his personal confessor Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov and the mystical geopolitical thinker Alexander Dugin. Bishop Tikhon is one of Russia’s highest-profile critics of the decadence of the modern western world — and his Every-day Saints and the Other Stories was the best–selling Russian book of 2012
The influence of the Russian Orthodox church on public life is growing fast, thanks to Kremlin patronage. The church’s preferred instrument of control is a draconian law criminalising ‘offending the feeling of religious believers’ that was passed in the wake of a protest by the feminist punk group Pussy Riot in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral in 2012. Prosecutions under the law have kicked into high gear this year. In March in Stavropol, south Russia, criminal charges were brought against Viktor Krasnov after he wrote ‘God does not exist’ on the VKontakte social network, Russia’s version of Facebook. Krasnov was ordered to spend over a month undergoing examinations in a psychiatric ward before he was finally deemed sane enough to stand trial, and the case continues.
A month ago, 20-year-old blogger Ruslan Sokolovsky was arrested and sentenced to two months in jail after he posted an online video of himself playing Pokémon Go in a church. He could eventually spend five years behind bars if his action is classed as a ‘hate crime motivated by religion’. ‘I decided to catch some Pokémon in church because why not? I believe it’s both safe and not against the law,’ said Sokolovsky in his online video as he walked into Ekaterinburg’s Church of All Saints. ‘Who could be offended if you walk in a church with a smartphone in your hand?’
Apparently, the answer is: most Putin-era Russians.
Polls show that most ordinary Russians hold deeply illiberal views on social issues (for example, 21 per cent want to see homosexuals ‘liquidated’, and another 37 per cent advocate ‘separating them"
Dugin, once a marginal figure, has come closer to the political mainstream as Russia has veered deeper into isolation and nationalism in the wake of the annexation of Crimea in March 2014. The Tsargrad team played an important role in encouraging and fomenting the pro-Russian rebellion in eastern Ukraine. Dugin and Malofeyev have both been named in the US sanctions list for their role in the conflict — a rebellion that was spearheaded by two of Malofeyev’s former employees, Igor Strelkov and Alexander Borodai, who became defence minister and prime minster respectively of the break-away (and Russian-backed) Donetsk People’s Republic.
‘This is a state that cynically uses Orthodox Christianity as a surrogate ideology to prop up its authority,’ argues Brian Whitmore, author of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s influential blog The Power Vertical. ‘It’s a state where fealty to the Orthodox church, or at least publicly proclaiming fealty, becomes a surrogate for patriotism… and it’s a state where challenging the authority of the church is akin to an act of treason
Now the wheel has turned full circle. In the wake of last weekend’s Sturges protest, liberal Russians posted images of another group of morally indignant officers mounting a boycott — members of the Union of German Officers blocking the door of the Jewish-owned Woolworth’s in Berlin in 1930.
Rise-of-fascism analogies are usually facile and often inappropriate. But it is true that Putin’s regime is making closer common cause with Russia’s religious, ultranationalist right. And it’s also true that the space for debate and dissent in Russia’s media is becoming vanishingly small. In that environment, with state television whipping up ever crazier conspiracy theories
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/revealed-putins-covert-war-on-western-decadence/
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