Sergei Markov said it was a coup aimed at breaking Ukraine away from Russia, and that Yushchenko triumphed only through falsification. ‘The Orange never came to power as the result of free elections. They came to power as the result of an anti-constitutional coup, being supported, of course, by the American administration and the Western observers. No matter how many American senators say that it was legal, it was anti-constitutional.’
Pavlovsky, the Kremlin’s main operator during the revolution, had to sneak away in disguise. ‘My departure from Kiev was quite funny. I was living in a hotel right in the centre of the city, in the middle of the orange crowd which was blocking the presidential administration. I was forced to change clothes – like Kerensky [Russian prime minister overthrown in the 1917 revolution], who our Soviet textbooks say escaped dressed as a female nurse. I went out through the crowd wearing an orange scarf and hat.’
The backlash
Few people can say they know very much about Vladislav Surkov, even though for more than a decade he has been one of the most influential people in the Kremlin. Hiding behind the innocuous title of deputy chief of staff to the president, he is in fact the architect of Russia’s political system – changing chameleon-like at his master’s command, thinking up ever new structures and ideologies to justify whatever twist or turn Vladimir Putin required. His most notorious coinage – the notion of ‘sovereign democracy’ – essentially meant that Russia would decide for itself, as a sovereign state, what kind of democracy it needed. If today it meant that parties needed 7 per cent of the vote, not 5, to get into parliament, Surkov was on hand to explain why. If a few years later, it was decided that 5 per cent was, after all, better, Surkov would justify that too. If governors should no longer be elected, Surkov would explain why appointing them was also democratic.
He was born in 1964, and for a long time concealed the fact that his father was Chechen (his name was originally Dudayev). He studied at a metals institute, did his compulsory military service in military intelligence, and then turned to the arts, training to become a theatre director before studying economics and going into business. He composed lyrics for rock bands, and still writes novels. This post-Soviet renaissance man worked with Mikhail Khodorkovsky as head of PR, before moving briefly to central television and then into Putin’s office as what the Soviets would have called ‘ideology secretary’.
Following the ‘catastrophe’ of the Orange Revolution, it fell to Surkov to devise strategies to prevent the contagion spreading to Russia (as the entire ruling elite believed it would). In doing so he was guided by the assessments of those who had been on the ground in Ukraine during those tumultuous events.
Gleb Pavlovsky, having safely escaped in his orange disguise, wrote in the press: ‘Kiev is a serious wake-up call for Russia. I believe that our political system is not ready for the new revolutionary technologies of the age of globalisation. The combination of the internal weakening of the political system and external pressures and provocations could lead to a new revolution, and a global revolution in Russia would not be a small thing. We avoided bloodshed in 1991, almost by a miracle. We avoided bloodshed in Russia in 1996 and 1999 everywhere except in Chechnya. But that doesn’t mean that another miracle is coming.’12
He told the BBC, looking back in February 2008: ‘This catastrophe was very useful for us. We learned a lot of valuable lessons. Putin started to take much more seriously the threats he faced. It very quickly became clear that they would try to export this to us. We needed quickly to prepare, to strengthen our political system and make it ready for a blow from the outside – a blow in a “velvet glove”, but a blow that would topple us nonetheless. Putin in 2005 very quickly prepared, consolidated the elite, the political system, the cooperation, so there could be no orange revolution in Russia. Within a year we had turned back the wave of coloured revolutions.’
Surkov and his comrades targeted two lurking dangers – the ‘unguided’ energies of young people, and foreign-funded NGOs. To tackle the first problem, it was decided to set up a mass youth organisation that would be totally loyal to Putin and the current regime. It was called Nashi – meaning ‘Our Own People’. The word has a strongly nationalistic or chauvinistic connotation, implying that all those who are not ‘nashi’ are ‘against us’, even traitors.
Sergei Markov describes himself as one of the ideological team, under Surkov, that begat this monster, which smacked so strongly of the Soviet communist youth movement, the Komsomol. In an interview, Markov stated without embarrassment: ‘The main aim of Nashi was to prevent an orange revolution in Russia. So the first guys who joined were super patriotic. And the first rule was geography. They had to live within ten hours’ drive of Moscow so that they could take the night bus and be in Moscow in the morning and occupy Red Square to protect the sovereignty of the state.’
Nashi quickly had its own website (www.nashi.su, using the still valid domain of the Soviet Union rather than Russia). Over the coming years they would hold patriotic summer camps at Lake Seliger, north of Moscow, dedicated to a healthy lifestyle, political education and paramilitary exercises; they would turn out regularly in their red T-shirts not just for their own demonstrations but to swamp opposition protests; and they mounted campaigns against any institution or individual they didn’t like – including Western ambassadors, critical newspapers and even a kebab shop unluckily named ‘Anti-Soviet’. Nashi describes itself as a ‘democratic anti-fascist youth movement’. Its membership soon grew to well over 100,000.
The Surkov team felt their mission was already accomplished on 15 May 2005 when Nashi mobilised its first large rally. Some 60,000 activists, mostly transported into Moscow overnight on thousands of buses, brought Leninsky Prospekt to a standstill. According to Markov, ‘after that the talk about orange revolution stopped’.
Mission accomplished, but role 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.