Angry Planet - Russia's Fascist Youth Groups

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

Dictatorships of the last century had some famous youth groups. Hitler had his Youth, Lenin had his Young Pioneers, and Mussolini had his Opera Nazionale Balilla.Such groups once attracted huge followings but have largely fallen out of favor in the West. But, like so much else with the irredentist Vladimir Putin, he’s bringing it back.To help us understand this new youth movement and what it means for the future, we have the perfect guest.Ian Garner is a historian and analyst of Russian culture and war propaganda. He’s got a new book that’s coming out this spring Z Generation Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth. He’s also a professor. Queens University Kingston Ontario.Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I am Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. dictatorships of the last century had some famous youth groups. Hitler had his youth, Lenin had his young pioneers, and Mussolini had his opera Nacionali Balila. I apologize for my Italian pronunciation. Such groups once attracted huge followings,

but they've largely fallen out of favor in the West. Unfortunately, like so much else with the irredentist Vladimir Putin, he's bringing it back. To help us understand this new youth movement and what it means for the future, we have the perfect guest. Ian Garner is a historian and analyst of Russian culture and war propaganda. He's got a new book that's coming out this spring, which is Z generation, into the heart of Russia's fascist youth. And he's also a professor at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. Thank you so much for joining us.

Well, thank you for having me. Let it be good to just sort of start at the absolute beginning, if you don't mind. Can you tell us a little bit? What's the name of Putin's group? What's the point of this group? And when did he start it? So we talk the question asks about one group. And one of the ways in which Putin has built support over the last few years is by not just having one group.

It's not like things were in Nazi Germany when it was the Hitler youth, that was it. Even in the Soviet Union, there were really two groups that existed. And that was the pioneers, which was very much like sort of Cub Scouts, girl guides. It was pretty military free in terms of what it was doing. Almost everybody was in it. And to be honest, as far as the Soviet Union goes, it was pretty harmless stuff. Of course, the ideological components. And of course, the Consommol as well was the Communist Youth League.

That was the slightly older teenagers and youth adults. And that was your path into ultimately becoming a party member, getting a good place in a university, opening up careers, and therefore getting access to a car, a better apartment, and all sorts of perks that you wouldn't have if you were on the outside. But today, Putin's running a number of youth groups, as he has been doing for the last 20 years or so, and maybe we can dig into the history of a little bit.

The most prominent group, the most visible group today, is what's called the Youth Army. And it is an army, its members are talked about as young soldiers, you and that I'm yet to see. You might have seen them in Russian propaganda, PR shots. They dress in this very distinctive khaki trousers or khaki pants, I apologize if I'm talking to Americans, khaki pants and red t-shirts and red berries. And that group is open to kids aged six to 18 years old. It was founded in 2016 by the Defence Minister Sergei Schuygel, and it essentially has a number of goals that relate to physical training,

physical preparation, that relate to knowledge of Russia's history. And of course, the knowledge of history that they're teaching is not really reflective of reality, to put no finer point on it. Moral and ideological preparation, there is a sense of spiritual preparation that links to the Orthodox Church in particular that runs through the work this government does. And lastly, most importantly, military preparation. This is preparedness in terms of firearms, knowledge, in terms of being able to use grenades, knowing what to do in a chemical warfare attack, practice at

tactical training exercises. The explicit intention of the goal is to prepare young Russians for war. To make young boys want to join the army, they receive career lectures and incentives to go off and join the army, and to make young girls, because Russia is a highly gendered society today, want to become good citizens in other ways. The girls are not expected to go and fight, even though they get the same training as the boys as children, they're expected to become doctors and teachers or indeed mothers. That's what... That is old-fashioned.

That's very old-fashioned. It's extremely old-fashioned, the so-called traditional values of the state. And this group has taken off in a big way. So having started in 2016, they had 350,000 members within three years. They had a million members at the beginning of 2022, and they had 1.29 million members by the end of 2022. And from folks I've spoken to who work within that movement,

they tell me these regional leaders out in the provinces in Russia, they can't cope with the demand. There are too many people trying to sign up and they're deluged in paperwork and they don't have enough uniforms, enough space, and so on and so forth to actually be able to run the organization as they would like. Do we have any idea if that's an organic demand,

or is this something that, that you do because the state sees you, and it is a way for you to begin to interact with, like, Russia's various social services, if that makes sense. Yeah, so there are a number of motivations for joining the group. So let's talk about the ways in which the state forces people to participate in an obvious way. Well, firstly, there is an incentive. If you're in the youth army, there is clearly a path into certain scholarships, paths to, and so on and so forth. There is a benefit there. It looks good on your resume, just as membership

in some of the older youth groups. You might have heard of groups like Mashit and walking together was a good career opportunity. So this is the sort of the Soviet era, Comsomol, the Youth League. Certainly there has been some more nefarious activity on part of the state. There was a lot of criticism before independent journalism completely died in Russia that the state was targeting orphanages, for example, marginalized children, the children of the homeless, the children of alcoholics, and offering to step in, and this is the explicit language of the state, to step in as a kind of a surrogate family, which is a highly fascist idea, the idea that the state can take the place and will do the raising of the children. The state knows better than individuals.

But there is also, and this is what's proving so effective and what I think is so alarming for the ways in which the group operates, but also youth movements might begin to operate elsewhere around the world. Membership is in the group is increasingly being incentivised through very savvy and well-done digital campaigns. And that means running outreach on TikTok, on VK, which is this social network that's like the Russian Facebook, but more popular. I would say with Russian kids than Facebook is today. So to talk about TikTok, for example, the youth army has broken down into regional groups.

It has an overall command structure based in Moscow, but each province has its own sort of subdivision and subdivisions within those. And you might find that your regional group is running a TikTok account, although they're moving away from TikTok a little bit to domestic alternatives because of the difficulties around foreign social media and the suspicion of it, but the principles still apply.

But these regional groups run their own TikTok account, that they produce these little snippets of videos of basically how cool it is to be in the youth army. They get ordinary kids to, you know, show off their firearms prowess, to literally do TikTok dances on Red Square. This is a real video. Do a dance on Red Square,

all kit it out in uniform, saying, the youth army is great. We're learning to be physically stronger. We've made so many friends. And the beauty of it is that then the young users who are following this stuff produce their own TikTok videos, you know, wearing their uniforms, doing ordinary day-to-day stuff, I'm off to the youth army. Hashtag self-love, hashtag, you know, self-realization, all this sort of Instagram, friendly, positivity sort of language. I'm not making it up.

It sounds wild. It really does. It's appealing. And here is why this is so dangerous. Because traditionally, the way the state, any totalitarian state, sold these sorts of groups, was to have, well, you know, once a week,

we've got Monday night, it's the consa-mole gathering, it's the pioneers, it's the Hitler youth gathering. We'll register you in schools. But now this process, this sort of the fascist rally goes on 24-7. You can log on any time and see what a great time everybody else is having. And if you're a young Russian who is not in a movement like this, it can begin to look quite appealing, even though the whole thing is, if you're excuse my language, monumentally fucked up. We very much excuse your language. but it makes me ask one more question, which is, do you have any idea what the parents think of this?

I don't know if they have to give permission even, but what do you think? So I'll tell you, my book is very much driven by stories of people. I went out and I interviewed people who were involved in the various youth movements that are getting more and more extreme in Russia today. So I taught some really scary and weird people. But the interesting thing about some of these youth army parents is that they're not very interesting or weird people. They're quite boring. And so I spoke to the parent of one young girl, Maria, she's about 14, 15 years old. She lives out in the provinces. We're not talking about some liberal metropolitan Muscovite parents. Pretty ordinary background. Her dad's some sort of a

cabinet maker, I think he makes furniture from what I remember. He doesn't really care about politics. He's not interested in Ukraine. He's not really opposed to Putin, but he's not, you know, a sort of flag-waving, Ukraine-hating fascist either. And the way that Maria got involved is that she'd seen her friends joining the youth army and thought, well, I'd like a bit of that too. And so she was the one to approach her parents and say, can I join this? Because she wanted to belong. They were like, well, yeah, sure. Sure, you can do it. Off you go. So do whatever you want. You know, we're going to close their eyes and we don't mind.

And nowadays, it's so easy to join. But they told me all they had to do was you download an app. You fill in your application to join on an app available for iPhone or Android. Takes five minutes. I did it myself because it's that easy. So I'm technically now a member of the youth army. So, you know, come here for your fascist youth group advice. You join, you know, you download the app.

You can go to a website, Wild Berries, which is sort of huge online, you know, Ali Express or Amazon-style website. You can order all the kit, costs a few thousand roubles. It's actually not that cheap, but there are scholarships and subventions available if you need them. And that's that. And so it can kind of happen without the parents needing to be involved at all. There is no element where you need the permission. and the parents just close their eyes. They go to work.

They're busy. And here you are engaging with this youth group. Constantly, if you want. And Maria has produced a series of these videos, sort of diary-style videos on TikTok, that might be any normal team sort of TikTok feed. You know, here I am getting dressed up to go out to the youth group. Now I'm off to school and doing this and doing that,

and I'm falling in and love. in and out of love with boys and whatever else. But off we go, I've got a gun. I'm going to use it. And she posted increasingly scary stuff as time went on, because the beauty of the social media thing is that you can see this diary being written in real time. Posting this stuff, you know,

I love our boys out at the front. I'm glad the police are beating protesters in Moscow. And to be clear, these organizations, they are run by the Kremlin, or is it one of these, they are explicitly run by the Kremlin? Yeah, so this is entirely state-funded, and they are throwing huge amounts of money behind it. So I think the budget, I believe, per year is going to be $80 million per year for the next three years. Plus, there is the so-called sort of public-private partnerships where banks and other other large enterprises donate money to causes like this in Russia, making it look like it's

less of a state thing. But of course, those banks are owned by who, by people that are suspiciously friendly and close to the Kremlin. So it really all comes back to the state and back to this singular point within the Kremlin. So Russia is a, it's a conscription society. when you turn, if you're a man and you turn 18, you have to join. Obviously, there's ways to bribe your way out of that. But I'm wondering, if you remember one of these organizations and you turn 18 and it's time for you to join the military, is there any kind of preferential treatment? Does being in one of these groups set you, mark you in a different way as soon as you join? What does that transition look like for someone? So certainly, you know, if you want to

go and join up, then it gives you a better chance of becoming an officer. Because you're better trained, you are less likely to end up in one of these sort of cannon fodder type of units that we've seen being thrown towards the front in recent months. And one of the goals from the state over the last few years has been to improve the quality of soldiers coming into the Russian army because they know that even their professional soldiers are not well trained. They're not well disciplined. And this sort of organization is beginning to provide large numbers. And we don't have exact numbers because, unsurprisingly, with the Russian state,

they won't reveal to us. And despite my best attempts to desperately beg people to tell me, they won't tell us how many people from the youth army are actually going and joining the Russian army. But some of the young Russians I spoke to said, despite all the disasters of the last year, I want to go sign up. I'm interested in this. Some of them wanted to join the army on a more permanent basis. Others thought, well, I can become what's called contract. I will get a contract, which is well paid for a year or two. And then I'll come back and go off to university. Right. So this is just beginning to be seen as a sort of

a stepping stone in life, almost a right of passage for young men. And it is very convenient for the state to train these young men up in particular in these sorts of skills. Of course, the question is, are those people who are mostly older, mostly sort of former Soviet men in their 50s and 60s who are leading the units on the ground way out in the provinces and teaching these kids the skills. Are they doing a good job of it? Probably not, if anything, no, rush for it. General behavior and applies in this case, which it does. It's probably pretty shambolic on the ground. I guess I have two questions. I hate when I have two questions because they both pop and they want to come out at once. But I was thinking, does

alcohol play a role in this as it does in so much of Russian society? I mean, is that, or is that just a non-factor? Do you go out and get drunk with your, you know, your buds and part of the, you know, the group activities? The Russian state is very interested in really, genuinely, this is one of the actual real achievements of the Putin state over the last few years. in improving a situation with alcoholism. And I've introduced all sorts of laws about you can't have a kiosk that's too close to a school,

for example, selling alcohol and cigarettes. Back when I lived in Russia, anybody of any age could go and buy any alcoholic drink they wanted from a store. That was no problem. Nowadays, if you're a child, it's not impossible, but it's much harder. you can't just go into the local supermarket and pick up three bottles of vodka as a 12-year-old. And within the space of the youth army, the emphasis is very much on clean living,

imitating men like Putin, who famously doesn't drink, and men like, and this is just such a fascinating story, men like the so-called leader of the youth army, and I call him Sokol because he's really a figurehead rather than real director or anybody in administrative control, who is a man by the name of Nikita Maguire, N-A-G-O-R-N-Y. And I recommend everybody, stop listening to the podcast. Go Google this guy now, Nikita Nogorani. He isn't an Olympic and world champion gymnast. He's still only in his mid-20s.

He's 25 or 26. And he is a handsome boy, right? He is a clean-cut, very good-looking young man. Of course, he's a gymnast, so he's also got, you know, the rippling physique. white Russian beautiful teeth never stopped smiling and he has a huge following on social media this is really the reason that he was appointed in 2020 as the leader of the youth army and he posts on his TikTok and his Instagram feeds workout videos dietary advice videos material about you know how hard he's training and how well he's living so it's like the sort of clean living Instagram trend, but applied to the fascist youth group, which, of course, when you look back at Nazi Germany, when you look back at the Komsomol and the pioneers, was all about honing clean bodies.

And of course, clean bodies in the Russian propaganda world, and this is where it gets very disturbing, clean bodies are opposed to diseased bodies. And diseased bodies are equated with Ukrainian bodies in particular. And of course, homosexual and queer bodies of all sorts. ethnic minority bodies. Much of the politics in Russia today is about the idea of cleansing the country, cleansing Russia from disease. All of these influences, in particular the influence of the West, are seen as diseased, and therefore these young Russians are taught through this clean living.

You need to become better. You can become a better Russian by being clean physically, but also mentally and ideologically. It's fascinating you mentioned this because I put. I pulled up the picture of Nikita, and Jason, I just sent it to you. And it's, I'm looking at it, you're mentioning this, this kind of obsession with cleanliness and the idea of clean living. I noticed that the uniform for this group, the gloves are white, white gloves that would show any stain and must be presented perfectly or they're going to show everything. And I think that's kind of fascinating. Just an observation.

No, that's a really, really good observation. Right. There's just this real sense of sort of, and when you look at the marketing materials for this group and similar groups in Russia, it is all clean, perfect, blonde little Russian children. And I mean ethnically Russian, because Russia is, of course, a state that has huge minority populations of various sorts. and these people may occasionally figure in the propaganda and the marketing as a sort of token, but only when they have learned to Russify themselves, by behaving in the way that they're supposed to by putting on the uniform, by training in the right way, by attending history lessons,

learning about the Russian version of the world, and being able to recite it. If they do that, then they're considered it exactly. exemplary minorities, exemplary people of color because they've somehow become Russian. They've cleansed themselves. You're listening to Angry Planet. We'll be right back. And we're back. What does it mean, what is this movement's conception of a Russian? What does it mean to be Russian? Well, this is where we can start to link what's going on, as I guess we've started to do, already, what's going on in this youth group with what's going on in Ukraine and what's going on

with Putin's ideology more generally. What we see is roughly, if you look back to about 2012, when Putin came back to the presidency, because we always forget that Putin hasn't really been in power for 23 years, because he did the old one-two step with Medvedev back 2008 to 2012. But when he was coming back to the president, He was alarmed by a number of events around the world and at home. Around the world, the Arab Spring and the financial crisis had left him very much weakened and paranoid that the West was funding pro-democratic movements, all these sort of CIA, sci-ops, conspiracy theories.

It's all garbage, but he genuinely believed this, and this is pretty well researched. At home, by a series of very large protests in Moscow, started. in the fall of 2011. They were the last real big protests against his rule. That was when people like Alexei Navalny came to prominence. And his response was to introduce a much more ideological form of education into schools and to basically narrow down what we as academics call identity pathways. An identity pathway is the sense that what you can construct a sense of yourself in Canada here, for example, where you can be a Canadian, and you can be Christian and you can also be gay, right?

But you could also be Canadian and Muslim and straight. And so on and so on and so forth. You get myriad opportunities of being lots of different stuff. That's a hallmark of liberal democracy. Well, less so in Florida. I think we need to put that out right here. It's not Canada, but. Or you want to stage a drag show in Tennessee.

Is it Tennessee? Yeah, it is Tennessee. Yep. Well, good luck if you're listening from Tennessee. So he started to narrow these identity pathways down and essentially carve out a division in society between the Russian and the non-Russian. On the inside you have the Russian, and that is to be Russian, to be a good citizen and a good member of the community means to be Orthodox Christian, and of course a very skewed,

fundamentally blasphemous version of Orthodox Christianity that the Russian Orthodox Church preaches today, and the Orthodox Church is essentially indivisible from the state, to be Russian, to be Orthodox, to be masculine and macho, to believe in so-called traditional values, which means man and woman are meant to be together, and we have these traditional gender roles, and lastly, to be violent, to be ready to fight, to wage war in some way, whether that is battling people in school, belittling them and bullying them because they're homosexual, whether that is fighting online on the internet. And when you look at the comment threads under Nikita Nagornois posts on social media,

often they break out into these miniature battles as one person will poke their head above the parapet and say, guys, maybe we shouldn't kill Ukrainians. And, you know, a hundred people will pile on saying, go fuck yourself. get out of here, all sorts of racist terms against Ukrainians. And all of this means that Russians are being prepared to sort of seek out the other, to be aware of this diseased other that falls outside of this very narrow identity and say this is wrong, this is deleterious, it's degenerating society in some way. And of course, there are great many Russians who still don't believe this.

If you don't want to believe it, who do look for alternate sources of information. But my real interest is in this much younger generation of children who are growing up in an increasingly isolated and narrow environment who were being introduced to these youth groups really subtly online through social media in schools, who are being exposed to increasingly patriotic propaganda lessons in schools, who don't remember a time in the 2000s in Russia before 2012, when, you know, you could be,

now things weren't great, don't get me, wrong. But when I lived in St. Petersburg in the 2000s, you could go to a gay bar. There were open gay bars, no problem. You wouldn't want to go out and wave pride flag necessarily too loudly, but there were pride marches. There were pride marches in Moscow. Could you do it today? Absolutely not. It's illegal, if nothing else. So if you're a young gay Russian today, you're being taught that you need to cleanse yourself. You need to fight yourself. Break apart your psyche in order to make yourself a good person. This kind of goes along with what they're doing in Ukraine, stealing children from Ukrainians

and sending them off to Russian families, right? I mean, to sort of purify them and turn them into good, clean Russians, is that? Well, according to the logic, these are children who are Russian children. Of course, they're not, but, you know, bear with me in this journey into this wild. irrational world. These are Russian children and they have been dangerously distorted by Ukrainianism, as it's called. And Ukraine wants to join Europe. Ukraine is increasingly full of Nazis, increasingly full of transgender people, the so-called, you know, the number of genders that they mock inflates every time they mention it. So, you know, 57 genders in

Ukraine. These are people who have been degenerated and diseased by the CIA by psychological operations. And what we find is that the world of the outside is synonymously bad. On the inside, these good Russians are orthodox macho and violent, right? Everybody else, Nazis, Ukrainians, queers, Jews, Americans, the West, these are all almost synonymous enemies. And that's why you can end up with these ridiculous ideas that, you know, Zelensky can be a Nazi Jew. Doesn't make sense, does it? And so these children, and the supporters of the war see these children not being kidnapped. They see the destruction as necessary to save kids.

And we know that the most effective propaganda line that the Russian state has an entirety of the war is the one where they tell Russians we are doing this. We regret destruction. We don't want the war, but we're saving the next generation of Russians. We're saving them from this existential threat that promises to completely deform society in the world. I want to just really quick, I want to emphasize here that some of this stuff sounds like in America what is like a culture war fodder that we're kind of fighting right now, but as in listen to any Putin speech, he hits these beats. He talks about degeneracy and his views of like this, what he views is like a Western ideology of the impure and domestically has enforced these norms violently.

People die. People die in state sanctioned ways. are imprisoned for being gay, for being different. And it's been going on a long time. And this is not like a, I just, I really need people in America to understand, uh, how bad things have gotten in Russia domestically around these issues. Um, right? This is like, this is, you cannot be out in Russia now and talk about it. You can be arrested for this, right?

Yeah, so last fall, they introduced a new anti-homosexual propaganda bill. The one that was introduced that some folks might have heard of 10 years ago solely related to propaganda targeting minors. And of course, it was used as an excuse to target people who were not talking to minors at all. But now the new bill is any homosexual propaganda of any sort. Now, what's homosexual propaganda? of course they don't say. Therefore, you know, you go out and you happen to be carrying a bag that has a rainbow on it. Well, look, you're an opponent of the state.

We want to make an example of you. You have to be carrying a bag with a rainbow. Rainbow is a symbol of pride, even if it's not a pride flag. Therefore, we're going to charge you. And we're going to make your life help. And if you make enough noise, then eventually we'll class you as a foreign. agent, which lands you in even more trouble. And one of the Russians I spoke to for my book, Ala Chikinda, who is an activist in Yucatidimborch, which is a very large city, way out where in

middle of Siberia, she spoke about being able to be out in the 2000s, increasingly not, increasingly being harassed by the state, being worried about violence, and indeed, as of last week, they're now going to make her a foreign agent. And of course, this status of being a foreign agent in Russia, like all other words in Russia is meaningless. It doesn't really relate to your work with anybody who is foreign. It simply means you've been officially labeled an enemy of the state. I have to be honest, when I saw the subtitle of your book, I really thought fascist was going to be hyperbole. It doesn't sound like it's at all hyperbole. I mean, this is, and I just echo what Matthew said, I don't think people really understand exactly what's going on.

I think we're seeing this is, you know, just a national war, but it's beyond nations. I think people in America specifically have a nasty tendency to view everything through the rubric of American domestic politics. And so when they hear Putin say, you know, they hear he, they hear he. him say stuff like about this in a speech. They're like, oh, he's signaling to us. Like, this is a message for for Americans that Russia is standing up for our values. And like, no, he's, this is domestic signaling. And he means it. You know, he's, he's saying something very specific about his own country. And I, and I think we need to pay attention to that. And we, like, we here in America specifically have to get out of our own heads about this

stuff and listen to when people talk. Sorry. A little bit of a rant, but it bothers me. No, you're absolutely right. That's such an important point that most of potent speeches are directed to his public. And a lot of the time, he says exactly what he means. And it's becoming increasingly clear that whether it's because of the advisors around him or because of his own paranoies and fears, that he is driven by this completely irrational, or nonsensical ideology, that somehow if we can keep destroying, we can build something new.

And now, as I said earlier, that of course there are huge amounts of Russians who just think that this is madness and wish that they could find places and spaces to speak to each other to protest. But the state holds such sway over, of course, the media, but also digital media. and social media, that it is increasingly hard to find any ways to oppose this. Can you talk a little bit more about the digital aspect of this? I think it's kind of fascinating. There was this dream in the 90s and the early aughts that, I think that we kind of saw it's nadir with the Arab Spring, where these technologies were going to free us, right?

These technologies were going to help us get to the truth of everything, and we're going to help us, that we're going to help people in countries with authoritarian governments topple them. We saw early organizing for protest movements on spaces like Twitter and on VK, and on Facebook, obviously. The story is certainly shifted now, right? And it seems like the authoritarian regimes have certainly figured out how to use these technologies to entrench themselves.

And it seems like if you are targeting. youth in your country, you have to be in these places and you have to be good at it, right? The Russian state's got a lot better. When you look back to 2011, those mass protest movements that emerge, the reason they broke out was that there was a parliamentary election in fall 2011 and the state cheated and cheated badly, as they always did. But they didn't really account for the emergence of the smartphone. And what activists did was record all the very flagrant violations of proper electoral conduct. They rapidly spread on social media.

People were mad. And then the opposition organized themselves, mostly using Facebook, actually, and managed to throw these mass rallies in Moscow, but also elsewhere in the country. And they did it really quickly. And this was really Navalny's contribution was being a blogger and being some of the somebody who was on social media and he got it. He understood how it could work to link people together quickly across spaces. And the state didn't really have a response at the time. They just didn't really see it coming. So all they could do is take the blunt instrument of

trolling attacks and DDoS attacks. And they couldn't create at that time. That was the problem that the state had. But they recognized this as an issue. As with everything in the Russian state, however. It took them a long time to figure out really how to begin the creation of new identities and new movements online, which is why, you know, when I'm talking about hiring Nikita Nagorni as an influencer to lead the youth army, that only happened in 2020. And the launch of the youth army and parallel movements as digital movements has really only taken place in the last three or four years. But they finally realized that social media can be a space where you can create values. Why? Because it is such a distorting environment, an environment that is open to

manipulation, as well as being an environment, I should say that the reason that's so important, the distortion of information is, of course, the effect of bubbling, right? We know about this already. But it enables the state and its supporters, and of course there are great many supporters as well as opponents, people who are genuinely engaged with this stuff and really believe it. Hookline and Sinker. They can create these spaces where they live in entirely alternate realities, where they can occupy this space where up means down and killing Ukrainians means saving Ukrainians. And some of the people I spoke to in the book, some of the sort of social media entrepreneurs and influences, you know, they're telling me, yeah, we're doing the right thing.

What we're doing is really, really good. I genuinely believe it. Also, the reason this is important is once again the fact that the state doesn't necessarily need to be involved. It can give things a push and then on social media they can take on a life of their own. And that means for children, if you're tempted by the regime's material, you can go join the youth army or similar groups. You can find a place of belonging and harmony. And if you're looking at the opposition and looking at how can I connect with Navalny or the next Navalny or whoever it's going to be, even somebody in the same city as me who opposes this very narrow form of identity, you are afraid that somebody is watching. And the terrible fear that young

Russians have is this sense that somebody's watching. I spoke to for the book, a young teacher from Vladivostok out in the east, and she's ethnic Korean. There is a large ethnic Korean population in Russia. And she lives in Moscow now. And she went to protest last year, and the protest died down. And she's so terribly worried about everything that she keeps her down at work. She tries not to speak, tries not to say anything to anybody. And after we'd spoken, we did our first interview, she called me back the next day in a panic. And even though, you know, I'd followed some really rigorous protocols to make sure that she couldn't be tracked by the state and the fact that she was the one in the book because I anonymized all of my sources

unless they wanted to be identified. She called me back in a panic. saying, well, what if this? What if that? What if something else? She's living within this headspace where the state, thanks to social media and digital media, is constantly able to sort of force that battle, that fight within to the forefront of people's minds. What you're saying makes me think also about the youth groups themselves. Are they being used to, let's say, turn in other people? Are they being used as spies in their own homes? I mean, this is sounding like Stalinism.

It's sounding like 1984, which is, of course, both vastly overused. And I apologize for that. But, I mean, is it also, are these youth groups an instrument of control? Yeah, to a certain extent, we are seeing some denunciations, denunciations of other children, denunciations of teachers in particular. And this is something that could be very easily taught through these sorts of groups. but so far the denunciations doesn't seem to be a mass scale kind of phenomenon. Rather, the state functions because it just doesn't have the capacity to monitor digital technology or even to gather denunciations and prosecute them effectively.

Rather, it will pick out skatecoats. So, for example, there was a case a few weeks ago of a young, fashion blogger on Instagram who'd written something vaguely anti-war, but it was pretty neutral stuff. They pulled her up for it for no particular reason, hadn't had a huge impact and stuck her before the courts. Another court case yesterday of a young person who was just in his early 20s, I think, who criticized the war online, bang, eight and a half years in jail. Now, the thousands of people who are making these comments, and there are many of them, they're not all going to jail or being denounced, but that fear exists in their minds. And the longer that this goes on for, the more

that they will fall silent because the fear will begin to be more and more pervasive. I'm curious about, so the Soviet Union is something that exists in living memory for a lot of people alive in Russia today, right? Obviously not for the youth that are in these groups, but they may have parents or probably more likely grandparents that lived through it. Is there a divide in the minds of these people? How do people who live through the Soviet Union view all of this? Or did you get a sense of that? So I think what's really interesting to me is not just the return of the Soviet Union,

which loans large in our imagination, because we're also living in this sort of post-Cold War mindset. But the idea that people want to return to or create a space in which Russia is great again, hello Donald Trump supporters, right? And this is almost the language. They love this language. And that means parts of the Soviet past. It means parts of the Tsarist past. Parts of a sort of folk tale, almost fairy tale, imagined mythical past of, you know,

sort of the equivalent of King Arthur, that kind of stuff. All of that can come true. The utopia is promised if we just fight. If we're willing to defend ourselves, if we're willing to wage war. And this is a very fascist logic, right? That is the promise of Hitler, right? The Teutonic Knights, the fairy tales. And yet also the modernists elements, the modernist architecture,

and modernist ideas, this sort of weird aesthetic mishmash. So it's less about creating something real or even longing for something real and more about the yearning for creating a future which somehow creates the past. And that actually leads to one of the huge problems that we're going to have in that, you know, let's assume that the Russian state doesn't completely collapse as a result of the war, which doesn't look likely, but you never know, right? Well, when the war inevitably fails in the sense that it will not create this glorious future, because it just cannot, no matter how they do on the battlefield,

well, where do we turn to next? There has to logically be another group to attack, whether it's somebody within or somebody without. We just don't know. But if you follow the logical train as much as it's logical at all, the attention must turn from Chechens to homosexuals to Ukrainians to something or someone. I think that's the kind of dire note we like to strike at the end of an episode. Jason, do you have another question? No, I couldn't agree more.

That is scary, vaguely unpleasant. I feel slightly nauseous. Yep. Vigly unpleasant? I think it's just straight up unpleasant. Ian, thank you so much for coming on the show. and enlightening us. I mean, I don't always feel like I've learned that much. I really feel like I learned a lot this time. Cheers. Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to another episode of Angry Planet. The show is produced with love by Matthew Galt and Jason Fields with the assistants of Kevin Medell. This is the place where we ask you for money. If you subscribe to us on substack.angryplanet.com It means the world to us. The show, which we've been doing for more than seven years now, means the world to us, and we hope it means a lot to you. We're incredibly grateful to our subscribers. Please feel free to ask us questions, suggest show ideas, or just say hi.

$9 a month may sound like a big ass, but it helps us to do the show on top of everything else that we do. We'd love to make Angry Planet a full-time gig, and bring you a lot more content. If we get enough subscriptions, that's exactly what we'll do. But even if you don't subscribe, we're grateful that you listen. Many of you have been listening since the beginning, and seriously, that makes it worth doing the show.

Thank you for listening, and look for another episode next week. Stay safe.