Nashi (youth Movement) - Beliefs and Goals

Beliefs and Goals

Walking Together leader Vasily Yakemenko said in 2005 that the goal of the new movement is to put an end to the "anti-Fatherland union of oligarchs, anti-Semites, Nazis, and liberals." Several Moscow-based newspapers suggested the goal of the group is actually a bit more specific: to eventually replace the party of power, United Russia. Not all of its goals are politically motivated however. Nashi organizes voluntary work in orphanages and old people's homes, and helps restore churches and war memorials. It also pickets shops accused of selling alcohol and cigarettes to minors, and campaigns against racial intolerance.

Sergei Markov, a Kremlin adviser, stated in 2005 that Nashi " Russia to be a modern, strong and free country... their ideology is clear: it is modernization of the country and preservation of its sovereignty with that."

One of the movement's main goals is preventing the introduction of foreign control in Russia. Russian newspaper Moskovskij Komsomolets quoted Yakemenko as saying that "organizations in Russia are growing, on the basis of which the U.S. will create groups analogous to Serbia's Otpor, Georgia's Kmara, or Ukraine's Pora. These groups are Eduard Limonov's National Bolshevik Party and Avant Garde Red Youth." Yakemenko expressed his fears that Russia's fate may be similar to that of Ukraine which he considers to have become a "colony of the United States".