Russian President Vladimir Putin was yesterday expected to speak at a youth festival launched in the Soviet era, in his latest effort to appeal to young Russians ahead of a presidential election next year.
The World Festival of Youth and Students was initiated by the USSR and the Eastern Bloc after World War II, and Russia was holding the 19th festival yesterday in Sochi’s Olympic park on the Black Sea, following a Soviet-style parade in Moscow on Saturday that boasted 10,000 foreign guests.
Putin, who is widely expected to run for re-election next year though has not formally announced his participation, was to visit the opening in Sochi along with Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov and other officials.
Photo: AFP/TASS/ World Festival of Youth and Students
The festival, which uses Argentine Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara as a symbol, has the motto “For Peace, Solidarity and Social Justice, We Struggle Against Imperialism.”
The event’s Web site says organizers expect 20,000 guests in Sochi from 150 countries.
The Russian embassy in Pyongyang said North Korea would also send a delegation of Komsomol — the Soviet youth movement.
The festival first took place in Czechoslovakia in 1949 and was hosted by communist states around the world in the second half of the 20th century.
Six events have been held since 1989, with North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela among the host nations.
The USSR hosted the event twice: Once in 1985 shortly after former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev became leader and most famously in 1957, when thousands of foreigners descended on Moscow for the first time during then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s political thaw.
Sixty years later, this year’s student parade in Moscow echoed the 1957 festival, which Russians remember as marking the beginning of a new, more open USSR.
On Saturday, students walked through central Moscow with flags of different countries.
The rainy weather kept some people away and the spectators consisted mainly of people over 50, some teary-eyed with nostalgia.
“I finally have the chance to see this as I lived in the Far East and didn’t have the chance to see it in Moscow,” said 71-year-old Valentina Rogova. “All nations should be friends. We used to have more events like this in Soviet times.”
The 1957 festival “was a breakthrough for the West and for the East,” Russian historian Alexander Shubin said. “The West saw that normal people live in the USSR while Soviet citizens saw what foreigners look like for the first time.”
This year’s festival is to have a different vibe. While hosting an exhibition on the lessons of the 1917 October Revolution, the leftist festival’s program also includes workshops on how to set up a business and a display of Dutch tulips.
“It’s a borscht of contrary ideas,” political analyst Konstantin Kalachev said. “Che Guevara does not fit in with the protectionism of the conservative government.”
Putin is expected to use the platform to get young Russians on his side ahead of next year’s vote. The Kremlin has been trying hard to appeal to the under-30 crowd and Putin’s presidential campaign is widely anticipated to be centered around youth policy.
“He wants to show that he’s not only the president of the pensioners, but also the president of the future,” political analyst Aleksey Makarkin said.
The Kremlin’s campaign to woo young Russians was accelerated by the participation of youngsters, including many underage teenagers, in anti-Putin protests this year, galvanized by Internet-savvy opposition politician Alexei Navalny.
“The government was worried when young people took to the streets,” Kalachev said. “They realized that a whole generation of non-conformists could soon come of age.”
The festival was planned before the opposition protests took place, but also falls within the Kremlin’s agenda to boost Putin’s popularity.
“They are trying to form a loyal pro-presidential youth or at least minimize the political activity of youths,” Kalachev said.
However, the problem is that the Kremlin’s youth policy often copies the old Soviet methods, analysts said.
“They organize meetings that last for hours, they speak at chess competitions — this is all very Soviet,” Makarkin said.
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