“Young Guard of United Russia” launches a discussion youth club “Politics in Detail”

The Young Guard of United Russia (MGER) is launching a new project, the youth discussion club Politics in Detail. The organization believes that now young people have a request for education and participation in the political life of the country. True, the club’s first event, held on Tuesday, took place rather than in a discussion, but in a lecture and ideological vein: in several reports, students were told about the heroes of the special military operation (SVO). On the other hand, the invited experts argued a little about whether it is worth punishing teachers for an insufficiently patriotic approach, or whether the problem is that the state itself refuses to work with ideological youth.

The meeting of the discussion club was held at the headquarters of the MGER, located in a trendy loft on Rochdelskaya Street. About 40 young people attended the meeting. “This is not our asset, look – there are no symbols on them,” representatives of the organizers drew the attention of the Kommersant correspondent. According to them, the young people were students of Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov, MGIMO and the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation.

All these young people were bombarded with a stream of lectures and speeches on the topic of heroism – in the vein, as MGER sees it. As expected, heroes were primarily understood as members of the NWO and volunteers working in new territories. “Historical Parallel: The Feat of the Heroes of the Great Patriotic War and the Feat of Our Contemporary Activists”, “The Phenomenon of Russian Patriotism in the 21st Century: Stories of the Feats of Young Heroes of the NWO”, “Problems of Covering the Feats of Heroes in the Media”, “The Necessity of Restructuring Information Policy in the Context of the NWO” — this is how the speakers’ reports were titled. Of course, these topics did not imply any disputes or wide discussion. However, they still arose, although not among students, but among the ranks of invited experts.

Thus, political scientist Sergei Markov raised the topic of Russian elites, who, in his opinion, are still often far from ordinary people. The expert drew an analogy with the Patriotic War of 1812: “When Napoleon came, the Russian elite was defranchised and Russified. And she united with her people.” By analogy with this important historical event, Mr. Markov concluded that now the Russian elite needs “de-Americanization.” Moreover, he proposed to achieve it by very harsh methods: “If some young guy expresses contempt for the SVO, and his father is a deputy minister or a big banker, he should be immediately removed from his posts. And it should be broadcast on all channels.”

“I was graduating from the MGIMO master’s program,” recalled, in turn, the deputy director of the Institute for Strategic Studies and Forecasts of the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Victoria Fedoseeva. “We had a teacher – to the question of the sixth column and what their speculations are. What did she tell me during one of the seminars? She told me that we are educating professionals here, not patriots.” Ms. Fedoseyeva also lamented that now some of her classmates are working for foreign think tanks and developing strategies against Russia. “Remove, remove immediately!.. If you remove five, then five hundred will change their thinking!!!” Sergey Markov immediately reacted.

However, the vice-speaker of the Moscow City Duma, journalist of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company Andrei Medvedev, suddenly came to the defense of the teachers, albeit in a very specific manner. He stated that the teacher is just a function that carries out the given policy of the state, and this policy in Russia for many years was characterized by the task “not to form an ideology.” “Can you imagine two years ago someone talking about the Russian army or discussing the things that we are discussing?” the deputy asked. But now, of course, the situation is better than it was in previous years, when people were not given an understandable “coordinate system” – as was the case in Soviet times, when people understood that “the Motherland is above all,” Mr. Medvedev added.

The students who came to the event answered Kommersant’s questions about their impressions of him rather sparingly: “the speakers argued their positions well”, “it was interesting”, “acquaintances invited”, “I liked Andrey Medvedev most of all.” One young man, a student at a pedagogical university, also said that the meeting was useful for him in order to understand how to talk with future pupils.

It should be noted that, according to Kommersant’s information, youth and students are considered by the presidential administration to be a rather problematic audience in terms of conveying the ideas of patriotism to it: young people are often too cosmopolitan, and the establishment of various competitions and projects for them does not automatically lead to an increase in patriotic youth among young people. sentiments. It was with the aim of changing this situation with the support of the administration that the project “DNA of Russia” appeared, within the framework of which a special course “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood” was developed. It is also worth recalling that in 2011, an attempt by the student union of Moscow State University to join the All-Russian People’s Front caused a negative reaction from students. And since then, organizations associated with the authorities have been trying to work with university youth less straightforwardly and more accurately.

As MGER chairman Anton Demidov told Kommersant, during their trips around the country, representatives of the organization saw that young people have a request for educational projects in the field of politics. “This is a request of active youth, students to gain knowledge in the field of political science, military journalism, the basics of debating, oratory,” Mr. Demidov explained. Therefore, he is confident that the new MGER project will be in demand.

Andrey Vinokurov