This film shows the parallel world of Putin’s youth movement

When I look at news images of the war in Ukraine, I find myself frantically looking for comparison material. I feel uneasy about that, because this is not the time to look for excuses in history, let alone in art, poems or stories. But what should I do? My head may have no other choice, I’m programmed to look for parallels, to make a story out of the chaos.

Hoping I don’t hide in a parallel world, and knowing I will as long as I “live” the war remotely through news reports, I remember Nashi †The Ours), a 2007 film by artist Daya Cahen about the Putin-affiliated ‘anti-fascist’ youth movement of the same name. Founded in 2005 in response to the revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, Nashi hosted an annual summer camp until 2013 where ten thousand recruited youth were trained to become good patriots and crush future uprisings.

The youths Cahen filmed here say in Nashi in almost identical fashion: “I believe Russia should be the global leader of the 21st century. Our goal is to make Russia the global leader of the 21st century.They look straight into the camera. Sometimes they look nervously to the side, as if to check if they said it correctly. Cahen films the young people from a low camera angle, using a visual language that is clearly borrowed from Leni Riefenstahl’s propagandistic films for the Nazis. Cahen shows how the patriots-to-be like to see themselves: glorious and important. It emphasizes that individuals are interchangeable, decoupling what they say from their face. It doesn’t matter who says what, because they all say about the same thing.

When I saw the film fifteen years ago, the threat of organized patriotism was obvious, but — because the movement’s goals lay in the future — not immediately dangerous. The youth in Nashi are now adults. It is chilling to allow the thought that it is these guys who crossed the border with the invasion of Ukraine.

deception

Daya Cahen (1969) has built up an impressive and close-knit oeuvre of work in various media. In photography, installations and investigative films with a documentary slant – which are above all layered works of art – she is always looking for the source of fascist regimes. In her work she unravels cumbersome systems and power structures, through these – often from within, as embedded artist – to analyze and show in such a way that they come close to the viewer’s skin, and the viewer has to draw his own conclusions. Her visual language is balanced and often pleasing to the eye, and arouses enormous tension due to the contrast with the heavy themes that are addressed.

Her work prompts one to question every image, including that of the news, I realize when I look on the internet at UATV, a Ukrainian state-funded, foreign-focused news channel. Here you can see films, made on mobile phones, that bring the information closer than with a more neutral camera system. On display are Russian soldiers expressing regret for the invasion. The youngest say they have been misled, that they have been used as cannon fodder under the guise of a military exercise. Some say they did not know they had crossed the border. Those in leadership positions say they are shocked that people in Ukraine were not waiting for their arrival. “We were told something very different in Russia,” muttered a man with wounds on his head.

When they are asked by someone from behind the camera what they want to pass on to their compatriots, it sounds again and again: ‘Stay at home, we have no business here. Stay in Russia.’ The imprinted, identical way in which they say this and looking away from the camera suggests that these words were put in their mouths. It is striking that the camera angle is often high. The boys have to look up at the camera, from a position that makes them humble.

A war is not only the arena of physical violence, but also of conflicting (media) stories. The Russian soldiers featured on UATV may mean what they say, but depending on Ukraine, how much choice do they have for care, food and shelter?

The disturbing thing about seeing Nashi is that at first it seems that the young people do have a choice in what they say. The images of campfires are reminiscent of camping and evoke associations of freedom. The youngsters look fresh, cheerful and strikingly beautiful. There is something attractive about the togetherness that expresses their behavior, until it turns into a specter of fascism-in-the-making. The young people do their best to fit into a system that has been rolled out for them. Their pride in being part of a movement that will make Russia great appears to have been carefully orchestrated by Putin and his followers.

To free

“They are the future elite of Russia, who as ‘the great Russia’ will liberate the rest of the world from fascism. Those young people really believed that”, says Cahen when I speak to her in her studio in Amsterdam, about how she now looks back on her film. “It was the system of indoctrination that intrigued me the most. From a fellow student at the Rietveld Academy, who had completed an internship at the Moscow Times, I had heard about Nashi’s camp. From my background as a child of Jewish parents who lived through the Second World War, I have always been convinced that life can change from one moment to the next.

“I’ve always been looking for answers to questions like: can you see fascism coming? How does one group turn against another? How do those processes work? How does it look? How is that built up? How does that information go? How is that slowly but surely spreading?”

In 2007, after a state-organized press day, Cahen managed to infiltrate the camp that was officially closed to outsiders with an interpreter and a second camerawoman (her sister, Danila Cahen). “It was difficult to get information. If you asked someone who was not authorized to do so, they would say, “No sorry, I am not ideologically prepared† Then they pointed out who I was allowed to talk to. I panicked at first. I thought: how am I ever going to know anything? But at some point I knew it was this docile, programmed behavior that would define the core of my film.”

Cahen filmed Nashi’s summer camp, which was held annually for two weeks in the forests around Lake Seliger, in the summer of 2007 with multiple cameras, so that certain situations are captured from different angles. Gym exercises, military exercises, marching sessions, gatherings around speeches, interrupted by quiet ‘portraits’ zooming in on a face, until the perfect pose starts to falter, with the blink of an eye, an unprescribed smile.

Just like in other movies she made, like Birth of a Nation (2010), about an education that should make girls ideal Russian patriots, who can iron well and also shoot well, Cahen uses several frames, so that different perspectives are shown simultaneously.

“For Nashi I used two cameras, so I could always put the crowd against the individual, the big against the small. But also because I had no idea when they would send me away. I wanted to register as much as possible. We ended up staying eight days. The last week no one was allowed in, because, young people told us off the recordthen they would practice putting down demonstrations.

“They wanted to give me an example of how they did that. Then you see those boys, hooked together like in a dance. They all bump in one direction, pushing and thrusting, with all those bodies like a big tangle, a multi-headed monster that perhaps depicts what fascism is, cumbersome but unbelievably strong.

“It is also a refined monster, tightly and hierarchically organized. ‘Commissioners’ presided over small groups. They were peers who had been given that position because they were the most fanatic, or could recite the manifesto best. They were rewarded for that. The more loyal you were, the higher your position.

“It was very special to be allowed to go to that camp. Prior to the camp, young people who excelled in anything from sports to music or chess were scouted across Russia to reach and nurture an elite of all ranks. Companies then came to the camp to scout young people for good jobs, so they were really offered a future perspective.”

By the end of Nashi looms a strange kind of theater. Behind barbed wire, Western leaders and Russian renegades misbehave, played by actors wearing caricatural masks. There are also guards in American security uniforms, who are supposed to keep the prisoners in check. They patrol inside the barbed wire, which gives them a strange, ambiguous position.

“The security was also outside the theater. The security youths didn’t guard anything, but they played an important role. There were also young people walking around in a uniform from the Second World War. Whoever you spoke to, everyone was convinced that Russia had defeated the Nazis in World War II. The rest of Europe did not appear in their history. They said, ‘We are the anti-fascists and we come to liberate the world from the Nazis. And if you asked who the fascists were, they were all of Putin’s opponents, including everyone in the West. They also dismissed all opponents as fascists then, just like they do now.

“Fifteen years later, some of them are at the helm. The media has been killed, people have been cut off from information from abroad. If you dare to criticize the Russian regime, you will spend 15 years in prison.

“A surveillance expert I spoke to for my new project on the genocide of Uyghurs currently taking place in China described how the control state in China has been built up insidiously. People are kept in line by constantly watching them. This kind of surveillance has become entwined with culture and seems self-imposed, making it very difficult to rebel against, a form of absolute control, a dictatorship of fear like Putin’s Russia.”

seductive

It’s the hiccups that make it clear how much the youth in Nashi have to step in step, like a girl who struggles with her words as she tries to remember what will make her an ideal member of the Nashi movement:’A strong leader and… a really smart and intellectual person† Then when she wonders, “Didn’t I come across as too stupid† she is informed that her answer does not appear in the manifesto.

Daya Cahen’s visionary work provides a background to the war in Ukraine and Russia’s distorted self-image. The unmistakably seductive images, of a wry beauty, make it impossible to look away from the here and now.