https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFo-hbTGbPY
"Nashi [Our Boys]"- Alexander Nevzorov's propagandistic documentary of the Latvian and Lithuanian Soviet OMON, fighting off the local independence movement in early 1991
Perestroika
1991
In 1990-1991, Perestroika’s increasingly democratic parliamentary structures at the all-Soviet and the republican levels led to conflicts of power between the former and the latter. In Russia, this conflict powered the rise of Yeltsin; in many republics– especially Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia– the new political landscape led to successful campaigns by anti-Soviet national parties that won majorities and then declared independence from the USSR. In Moscow, members of the Party high command felt that these republican rebellions would have to be put down by force, and that the source of the problem was Gorbachev’s commitment to democracy and reluctance to use state violence. In January 1991, the Party authorized OMON forces (similar to American SWAT teams) to take control of press, executive and other essential organs in Latvia and Lithuania. The Baltic states’ republican governments called upon their citizens to defend their national independence. The stand-off resulted in violent confrontations, with both sides claiming the other to be at fault.
In Russia proper, the events unfolding in the Baltics led a number of rightist-inclined figures and their audiences to declare support for the Soviet OMON. Alexander Nevzorov, a young journalist who came to prominence thanks to his Leningrad-based criminal round-up TV show 600 Seconds, traveled to Lithuania and Latvia to record a series of pro-Soviet reports, titled Nashi [‘Our Guys’]. The present clip captures well the moving parts of contemporary Russian imperialist discourse– specifically, its capacity to unite Tsarist and Soviet-era historical topoi in support of Russian military aggression. In this case, Nevzorov compares the valiant, but doomed Soviet OMON troops to the White Army that refused to walk away from its call of duty in 1917. Meanwhile, the ethnonational polities opposing Soviet power are marked off as “fascists” who threaten the Russian communities living in their midst, which gives Russia the right to interfere on their behalf. Putin’s regime will deploy precisely this argument during its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.
After the events in the Baltics, Nevzorov will go on to found a “national-patriotic organization” under the name Nashi, which will bring together at its rallies a kind of ‘red-brown’ coalition, composed of Communists, Monarchists, and the far-right Russkaia Partiia (Russian Party) and Obshchestvo Pamiat’ (the Memory Society). Nevzorov and Nashi will cheerlead GKChP in August 1991 and the anti-Yeltsin forces in October 1993. In 2005, the Putin regime will coopt the Nashi brandname in the service of an astroturf (fake-grassroots) Putinist movement. The same word root will appear in the slogan celebrating the annexation of Crimea- “Krym nash.” By then, Nevzorov will already be styling himself as an oppositionist of sorts, hosting shows on the independent liberal media outfits Dozhd’ and Ekho, and running his own popular YouTube channel (while privately remaining close to the higherups at the Putinist Channel One). In March 2022 he will leave Russia and a few months later will even apply for Ukrainian citizenship while under “absentee arrest” for spreading “fake news” about the “special military operation.”
Leningrad
Nevzorov, Aleksandr (Alexander)
Latvia and Lithuania
NTK "600", 1991