Nashi, Youth Voluntarism and Potemkin NGOs: Making sense of civil society in post-Soviet Russia

This article tracks the aftermath of international development aid in post-Soviet Russia socialist space by interrogating Putin-era civil society projects. State-run organizations such as the pro-Kremlin youth organization Nashi (Ours) are commonly read as evidence of anti-democratic backlash and confirmation of Russia’s resurgent authoritarianism. Contributing to recent scholarship in the anthropology of postsocialism, this article seeks to account for Nashi by locating it in the context of fifteen years of international democracy promotion, global processes of neoliberal governance and the disenchantments they gave rise to. Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic research project with scholars and students in the provincial city Tver’, I show how Nashi is a curious hybrid. At the same time as it advances a trenchant critique of nineties era interventions and the models and paradigms that guided democracy assistance, it draws on them too. These resources are re-spun to articulate a robust national-interest alternative that is persuasive to many young people. Finally, I show how this political technology project is not static, but negotiated by its participants as they pursue their own individualized agendas

Youth Politics in Putin\u27s Russia: Producing Patriots and Entrepreneurs

Julie Hemment provides a fresh perspective on the controversial nationalist youth projects that have proliferated in Russia in the Putin era, examining them from the point of view of their participants and offering provocative insights into their origins and significance. The pro-Kremlin organization Nashi (“Ours”) and other state-run initiatives to mobilize Russian youth have been widely reviled in the West, seen as Soviet throwbacks and evidence of Russia’s authoritarian turn. By contrast, Hemment’s detailed ethnographic analysis finds an astute global awareness and a paradoxical kinship with the international democracy-promoting interventions of the 1990s. Drawing on Soviet political forms but responding to 21st-century disenchantments with the neoliberal state, these projects seek to produce not only patriots, but also volunteers, entrepreneurs, and activists

Redefining need, reconfiguring expectations: the rise of state-run youth voluntarism programs in Russia

This article investigates the restructuring of the Russian social welfare system by interrogating Putin-era state-run projects to promote youth voluntarism. Set up in the aftermath of liberalizing social welfare reform, these organizations are interesting hybrids: at the same time as they honor the Soviet past and afford symbolic prominence to Soviet era values, they simultaneously advance distinctively neoliberal technologies of self-help and self-reliance. In dialogue with recent studies in the anthropology of neoliberalism and the anthropology of postsocialism, I consider the implications of these intertwined logics. Focusing on the interpretive work undertaken by one provincial voluntary organization, I argue that it offers a symbolic salve and a measure of recompense to those most disaffected by neoliberal reform, while at the same time inculcating new models of subjectivity and citizenship. In so doing, it encodes a new vision of the common good that has interesting hybrid features and draws on the models the Putin administration ostensibly disparages

Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belonging: Defining \u27Violence Against Women\u27 in Russia

This article contributes to scrutiny of feminist transnationalism by providing an ethnographic investigation of one of its most prominent campaigns. Thanks to the efforts of feminist activists, violence against women is now an international development issue, backed by the UN and prioritized by international donors and NGOs. I consider this success from the perspective of postsocialist Russia, where the first crisis centers have been set up in recent years. I argue that the campaigns have troubling effects: the framing of violence against women screens out local constructions of events, and deflects attention from issues of social justice. Presenting insights gained in the context of an action research project undertaken with one group, this article highlights local contestation about the campaigns, exploring the competing conceptions of the “crisis” facing Russian women that they have displaced. In highlighting these alternative constructions, it examines the extent to which activists have been able to translate the issue and to root it in their concerns