Hacked emails that are believed to show correspondence between Nashi’s first leader, Vasily Yakemenko, its spokesperson Kristina Potupchik and other activists and bloggers, appear to reveal the notorious Kremlin youth group’s goals, priorities, means and concerns.
Many of the emails concern how to boost positive coverage on the internet. One includes payments, noting that 200 pro-Putin online comments left on 60 articles cost 600,000 roubles (£12,555). It also details paid-for coverage.
Two posts about Nashi’s annual summer camps that appeared on one of Russia’s most popular blogs, run by photographer Ilya Varlamov, received 300,000 hits and cost R400,000, according to the email said. Contacted by the Guardian, Varlamov denied being paid by Nashi to cover pro-Putin events. Another email showed that Nashi doled out more than R10m (£210,000) to buy a series of articles about the Seliger summer camp in the popular Russian tabloids Moskovsky Komsomolets, Komsomolskaya Pravda and Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta denied that its journalists took money for articles.
Nashi has long targeted people it considers “enemies”, such as Russian journalists and foreign ambassadors. In an email to Potupchik on 27 October one Nashi activist attached a list of 168 well-known human rights activists, writers, journalists, bloggers, film directors, poets and others. “These are the most vile enemies,” the activist writes. “Because they have personally gone after us or V.” It is unclear to whom the V refers: Putin, Yakemenko or Vladislav Surkov, the recently deposed ideologue who dreamed up Nashi.
One of the group’s top concerns is the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. In an email sent on 11 November, another Nashi activist writes to Yakemenko with a plan for “a series of 40- to 50-second cartoons of a day in the life of the fascist Navalny”, comparing him to Hitler, showing him making uncontrollable Nazi salutes and forming swastikas. “Let’s do it, make it funny,” Yakemenko replies, with a smiling emoticon. A similar video went viral in December.
Several other activists write to Yakemenko with ideas on discrediting Navalny: from having “10 to 15 people change their first and last names to Alexei Navalny and start doing lots of things, joining every party and movement, talking at protests and in the press, so in this mess people stop reacting to news about him”, to a suggestion to dress people up like him to beg for money outside the US embassy. Most of those suggestions are declined.