In other words, according to the Old Russian tradition of forgeries and Potemkin villages they used the administrative resource and money from the budget. They sent an order to schools and universities: send students to a one-day trip to Moscow. For free. The students from the regions gladly accepted the trip. The invited veterans, as Kommersant explains, were fooled: “Actually, they didn’t know that they are taking part in an action of the Nashi movement. The Nashi federal commissar Alexander Gorodetsky explained the political meaning of the action to the journalists: ‘We gathered here to show that the neo-fascists under the NBP flags will never be able to march on the streets of Russian cities.’ ‘And the Yavlinskys won’t either,’ someone from the veterans supported the young man. ‘Exactly, only us,’ the commissar assured.
Such a gloomy mockery of good sense is possible only in Russia. Meanwhile the media continued to investigate the Nashists. On 07.13 Gazeta.ru wrote in the article “They love soccer”: “The Nashi movement, into which all the leaders who headed the first pro-Putin youth organization went after the Walking Together collapsed, present a special interest considering the informational inaccessibility. The figure of Vasily Yakemenko himself is secondary because more interesting are the informal leaders who brought with them the participants of Moscow’s largest fan groups first to the Walking and then to the Nashi. Already five years passed since the time Walking Together was created and until the opening of the Nashi camp on Seliger in 2005, five years during which Alexey Mitryushin became the Nashi’s unofficial regional leader, pushing aside less successful leaders. Today Alexey Mitryushin holds the modest post of technical director of Nashi’s Moscow department, simultaneously heading Gallant Steeds, one of the largest informal associations of CSKA fans. Initially forming a separate unit in the Walking, headed by Mitryushin the fans went into the Nashi and now hold regular training exercises on the OMON training bases in the Tver region. (Governor Zelenin turned out to be useful! - E. L.)
Mitryushin himself does not deny his soccer fan past, but declares that this was a long time ago. However his organization took part in a mass battle on the Kitay-Gorod subway station in March 2001, which resulted in 11 people sent to reanimation and in a large confrontation between delinquents on May 10th 2004 in Moscow on the Prospekt Mira station. The paradox of this situation is that in both cases the confrontations happened between the delinquents of informal organizations of CSKA and Spartak fans and from both sides there were leaders of first the Walking Together and then the Nashi movement. For example, Roman Verbitsky who is responsible for the regional development in the Nashi and Vasily Stepanov who directed the security service in the Walking Together and then transferred to work in the White Shield security organization (By the way this is a racist name! - E. L.) that provides security service during the actions of the Nashi movement, they both simultaneously head the Gladiators, the largest association of Spartak fans in Moscow. All the leaders, Mitryushin, Stepanov and Verbitsky were present on the meetings of the Nashi commissars with the head of Kremlin’s administration Vladislav Surkov and they all figure in the special files of Moscow’s 5th police department that works with soccer hooligans and skinheads.
The Nashi prefer not to speak about the soccer component of their leaders’ life. ‘Even though a few years ago Alexey Mitryushev was a soccer fan, this was a long time ago and he left this, the movement’s press secretary told Gazeta.ru. The press service did not comment Vasily Stepanov and Roman Verbitsky’s involvement in the movement, confirming the information that Mitryushin is presently one of the leaders of the camp on Seliger. According to the information obtained from the editors of NBP-Info, both Verbitsky and Stepanov were arrested by the police in one of the raids on the NBP headquarters in Moscow and criminal cases were opened against them.”
As we remember Vasya Yakemenko promised the summer camp already on February 10th. On July 11th 2005 he kept his promise: the Seliger-2005 all-Russian youth camp was opened on Seliger Lake on the lands of governor Zelenin. It closed on July 25th. Over 3 000 young people from 45 Russian cities took part in the activities of the camp. A journalist of the Moskovskie Novosti testifies on July 22-28th 2005. “However we discovered those whom the Nashi leaders intend for Russia’s intellectual and administrative elite. They mostly look like 12-16 years old girls and young men a little older. There are adults of course but the general membership of the Nashi is extremely young. During an informal conversation it appeared that a part of them arrived simply on vacation and ‘also to hear those we see on TV’. The gentlemen who looked more severe are the camp’s security. Actually they don’t annoy the residents of the camp with their presence. Outside the Nashi’s settlement the keen eye of the paparazzi notices scores of vehicles with tainted windows and antennas. There are cars and microbuses and we can only guess at what hides behind these tainted windows. /…/ The workday of the Seliger camp’s commissar is saturated and versatile. There are conferences given by political technologists and trainings on various directions: political leadership, psychology, organization of mass actions, public relations, electoral technologies, etc. There is choice between sports clubs, master classes on journalism and many other things. /…/ Hundreds of sport bikes and dozens of motorboats and kayaks, a few yachts, an Internet-center for 30 computers, in the evening there are shows of pop stars such as Uma Thurman, Zemphira, the Animals, etc. I have to say that the journalists who heard enough passionate stories about the poor people were wondering: why is all this magnificence available only for 3 000 selected individuals and not children from orphanages, for example?”
Among other things the Nashi – Seliger-2005 Center says: “In 14 days the commissars and supporters of the Movement have listened to 870 hours of conferences, taken part in over 400 master classes, seminars and trainings. They were lectured by: Anatoly Utkin (deputy director of the USA and Canada Institute), Tatyana Evgenyeva (Moscow’s State University’s professor), Vyacheslav Sherbin (professor of the highest school of economics), Gleb Tyurin (expert of the European association for the development of the civil society), Alexander Solovyev (MSU professor) – in all over 70 teachers from the best universities. /…/ The representatives of the country’s modern intellectual elite were sharing their experience and knowledge with the commissars /…/ (Gleb Pavlovsky, Sergey Markov, Vyacheslav Nikonov, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Alexander Tsipko, Andrey Parshev, father Vsevolod Chaplin, sheikh Muhammad Karachay and others) as well as State functionaries of the highest rank (Vladislav Surkov, Dmitry Zelenin, Alexander Tkachev, Andrey Kokoshin, Mikhail Margelov and others).”