For my mother, as the Nazis invaded Poland, the choice was easy. She ran away, with the rest of her Jewish middle-class family. They left a modern apartment, relatives, friends, jobs, family photographs and documents, a prosperous life with its hard-won routines, and their plans for the future.

When I sat opposite Antonia Tsentalya and looked into her eyes, I saw the same refugee's story. It had been the same for her: neighbours turning up in her house, shouting that Kitauri was already on fire, the enemy was getting closer to Gochari, and why were they still there while the Abkhaz military was attacking Ochamchira district?

Antonia, her husband, and their five children, fled without much more thought. Did they at least have time to pack some essentials? Clothes, cosmetics, documents, those invaluable family photographs? She looked at me as though I had landed in Georgia from a different planet. They had taken nothing. There were stories about wild and cruel Chechens and other highlanders, fighting on the side of their Abkhaz kin, burning everything in their path.

The family's biggest problem was Antonia's sick and half-paralysed mother-in-law. They took turns carrying her and even the children did their bit.   Although she slowed them down, they never once considered leaving her behind. Finally, a man with a tractor agreed to give the ragged family a lift. Until then Antonia would never have believed how many desperate people could fit on one tractor. Maybe thirty, maybe even forty, clinging to the roof and sides, crammed onto each other's laps, every one of them praying there was enough fuel to get them to Gali, the capital of the neighbouring district.

Antonia Tsentalya helps her daughter Khatuna to run a kindergarten for children of refugees from Akbhazia

Listening to Antonia, I believed every word. She was the family matriarch, with her husband still ill after a stroke several years ago. Her black t-shirt and skirt adorned with flowers added a measure of feminine charm to her peasant looks. Even though she must have been sixty, Antonia radiated the energy of a woman used to working hard in life. Fifteen years after the war, she was still able to laugh about the tractor and its mountain of people. ‘It's a shame we didn't have a camera,' she exclaimed. ‘One photo of that tractor and its human cargo and we'd have had to send it to the editor of the Guinness Book of Records!'

The most interesting aspect of Antonia's story was her own ethnic background. She was Abkhaz, born into an Abkhaz family, and with Abkhaz as her native tongue. In the 1970s she was a student at Sukhumi medical school. That is where she met her Georgian husband, Gogla. At first they kept the wedding secret and spoke to each other in the Soviet lingua franca, Russian. When they finally let their families know, and moved into the house of Gogla's parents, she had no choice but to learn Georgian. It's not an easy language, and back then her Georgian was strewn with errors, but she felt it a moral obligation to learn the language of the family with whom she shared her food, house, emotions, dreams and plans.

Antonia's husband worked as a driver, while she made her living as a nurse. The jobs didn't bring in much money, but the family was comfortable thanks to a large piece of land that they inherited from the family's ancestors. Owning such land was something that marked out the republics of the warmer south Caucasus from the rest of the USSR. In contrast to the Central Asian republics, not to mention Russia itself, people in the Soviet Republic of Georgia could own substantial plots of land, and construct private houses with more than two storeys.

Antonia's husband's family added hard work to this inheritance, and were able to boast a good life by Soviet standards. They grew watermelons, maize, grapes and hazelnuts. In a shed in their yard they kept large jugs full of fermenting wine and chacha.

It was this contented life that filled Antonia's dreams after the escape to Zugdidi. A decade and a half later those dreams had become less frequent, but when she had them, the images were sharp in focus and vivid in colour. She remembered the family celebrations, with long successions of toasts; there were the family arguments, and the everyday challenges and joys of family life. Antonia wiped the tears away from her eyes as she remembered those days.

‘It was a good life. But who destroyed it?' she asked. ‘Who didn't want us to live in peace?'

Her answer was prompt, but hardly original. It's one that can be heard across all the countries of the former Soviet Union, mostly from the mouths of the old, for whom the unfolding of history has brought nothing but personal suffering and pain.

‘It was the politicians!' she exclaimed. ‘They play their games without thinking or caring about people like us.'

For eight months the refugee family lived in the crowded house of relatives in Gali, in the south of Abkhazia. But as the war went on, and Abkhaz forces recaptured the capital, Sukhumi, they had to flee once again. Together with thousands of others they crossed the Inguri River that separates Abkhazia from the rest of the Georgian republic. They settled in Zugdidi, a sleepy provincial town near the de facto border, and as close as they could be to their old home village.

I tried to imagine the scenes in Zugdidi as the refugees arrived en masse. The chaos of the evacuation, the shortages of food and accommodation, the lack of news about friends and relatives, and the desperation of local officials unable to deal with the sudden influx of refugees.  At the back of everybody's minds, usually unspoken, was the question of whether they would ever be able to return to the places their families had called home for centuries.

The refugees living in the ceramics factory in Chavchavadze Street are mostly from Abkhazia's Ochamchira district.

Zugdidi was still full of these Internally Displaced Persons. More than forty thousand were living there when we visited in August. Before we arrived at Antonia's flat we had seen two giant concrete buildings in Chavchavadze Street, which had originally been a ceramics factory. They had since become home to several hundred refugees. This was something that could never in their wildest dreams have occurred to the factory's original architects. The production halls had been crudely partitioned into living units with basic privacy afforded by boards of plywood. The bunker-like external walls had been drilled to make holes for windows and chimneys. Those chimneys ventilated primitive ovens, used for heating and baking bread. Two latrines had been dug in the earth outside. Several years after the refugees first moved in, money from international humanitarian organisations paid for two bathrooms with showers, sinks and a washing machine, all arranged in a little pavilion in the factory courtyard.  The refugees living in the ceramics factory in Chavchavadze Street were mostly from Ochamchira district. The homes that they feared they might never live in again were only an hour away by car.

At times of relative peace between Abkhazia and Georgia the families were able to get to their native villages, helping the handfuls of relatives who remained there to harvest walnuts and other crops, earning a few pennies extra to help them survive the winter. The Georgian government allowance for IDPs is 22 laris (around $15) per month. In Zugdidi most adults spent their time at the huge local market, desperately trying to earn a few extra laris.

Antonia and her daughter Khatuna both knew people living at the Chavchavadze Street compound, and counted themselves lucky to have found accommodation in an old medical clinic in the outskirts of Zugdidi. They were first brought there by distant relatives of her husband, and the staff at the clinic vacated two rooms for the family to move into.

The first years were incredibly hard. The only way to the city centre was on foot, a distance of about four miles, and the only chance to earn money was wheeling and dealing at the market. They soon realized that they could grow tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and carrots on the land surrounding the clinic. Later they bought a cow and some chickens. They worked hard to make their lives better, as they had in their old village.

‘Other people from Abkhazia followed us and moved into other buildings in the clinic compound,' Antonia remembered. ‘Now there are around fifteen hundred people living here.'

Antonia knew the story of nearly every family. The theme was always the same: they saw their houses set on fire and their relatives shot dead right in front of them; they remember the first nights after the escape, finding what shelter they could, in basements, tents, barracks, or anything they could improvise; they remember the taste of their own tears, and the feeling of helplessness, despair and abandonment. They were powerless in the face of this tragedy that changed their lives forever.

Antonia's daughter Khatuna tried to do something to help the children of the refugees, many of them born in exile. She had the idea of setting up a kindergarten in the old clinic. While the parents journeyed into the city for the chance to earn a few laris, the children were taken care of. They were fed well, learned songs and how to draw, and had the chance to play with dolls and toys, just like the children of normal families in normal countries. At first Khatuna ran the kindergarten as a volunteer. A year or two later, humanitarian organisations noticed her work and provided the funding to keep it going. Antonia also found work in the kindergarten as a cook.

So did Antonia still want to return to her home?

Twice in the last fifteen years she had visited her native village. Both times she was travelling to family funerals. The first time, the Abkhaz border guard didn't want to let her through. It didn't matter that she could speak fluent Abkhaz, was Abkhaz herself, and had a large cohort of relatives waiting on the other side of the border, including her brother. The only documents she carried were a new Georgian passport and her birth certificate. All other documents had been left behind during their escape. On that first occasion, and the subsequent one, only bribes had made getting across the de facto border possible.

‘Yes, we want to go back,' she said with resolve. ‘All our children are learning Abkhaz, and we tell them about our old life there almost every day.'

I told Antonia my own mother's story. She had ended up in Soviet Uzbekistan, deep in Central Asia, and lived there throughout the 1940s. During those years of cruel war that destroyed half the world, she dreamed only of going home. But when she did return, she could only weep at what had been lost. Her whole family had perished in the Holocaust. Her entire previous existence had also vanished, leaving a new one that looked and smelled differently, and not just because of the new Soviet domination of Poland.

‘It will be the same with us', agreed Antonia, nodding her head sadly. ‘But we should not be so divided. When I joined the Georgian family of my husband I was surprised how similar our cultures are. We eat similar dishes, dance similar dances. We shouldn't be fighting. Simple people are innocent.'

There was a glimmer of hope that her dream of return, however difficult, might happen. Abkhazia's leaders, including President Bagapsh, have spoken openly against allowing refugees to return to central Abkhazia, to cities such as Sukhumi, Gudauty, Pitsunda and Gagra. They argued that in the Soviet years Tbilisi kept sending Georgian settlers to Abkhazia, to change its demography and dilute the Abkhaz hold on their land. But in the south the politicians were more open to compromise, and did not rule out negotiating some form of return for the refugees.

It was also possible that Antonia would die as a refugee in Zugdidi, with her children and grandchildren exiled from Abkhazia forever.  From what she said, I understood that the most important thing for Antonia was that there should be no more fighting, no more war.

Zugdidi's colourful market boasts an abundance of delicious fresh food

After taking leave of Antonia, I walked around the centre of Zugdidi. The huge, colourful market boasted an abundance of delicious fresh food. I took an enjoyable stroll along an old boulevard lined with maple trees, reminiscent of pre-Soviet Tsarist days but named after Georgia's first post-Soviet president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. A section of the boulevard had been turned into a fountain, with streams of water spouting up into the air from paving stones painted in the colours of the Georgian flag. Children ran in and out of the jets of water, as mothers and fathers kept watch from a safely dry distance. I stopped in a local cafeteria for some kharcho, a soup of hot peppers and meat, accompanied by a glass of chacha. Honey coloured melons sat for sale in every local grocer's shop, alongside juicy tomatoes that had ripened under the Georgian sun. I noticed a puzzlingly high number of pharmacies and hairdresser salons in the city centre. If it were not for my bald head, I would have been tempted to enter one for a swift hair cut.

There were plenty of people on the streets, but the atmosphere in Zugdidi, so near the de facto border with Abkhazia, was calm, almost sleepy. Yes, they had watched television news reports about shootings and the rise in tension in South Ossetia, reported Nino, the young receptionist in our hotel. But, she argued, that is a long way from Zugdidi.

‘Anyway, we are used to tension. It will be okay here, even if it gets worse over in South Ossetia.'

Nino was wrong.  In less than a week after military action began in South Ossetia, more than one hundred Russian tanks crossed the Inguri River and occupied Zugdidi.

Zygmunt Dzieciolowski's travel to Georgia and Abkhazia last year was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting (http://www.pulitzercenter.org/)

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Also by Zygmunt Dzieciolowski:

Tbilisi: twenty hours before the war:  http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/tbilisi-twenty-hours-before-the-war

Sukhumi:  Cafe Lika on the brink of war: http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/sukhumi-cafe-lika-on-the-brink-of-war

I was surprised the moment he came to pick us up in the western Georgian town of Zugdidi. I had thought he would be young, like most of Mikheil Saakashvili's youthful administration. Shota Utiashvili was a senior government official, and I had expected him to be dressed in something more formal than shorts, trainers and a striped polo shirt. The Department Director at the Ministry of Interior Affairs looked as if he was on his way to a picnic, rather than accompanying foreign journalists in a high-risk conflict zone.

The Abkhaz capital Sukhumi never was just a Black Sea holiday resort, unlike the towns of Pitsunda and Gagra. It was always an administrative centre, capital of the region.

The Parliament, National Security Council and Ministry of Foreign Affairs occupy a block of buildings looking out over the sea. Once, a statue of Lenin adorned the square. While Lenin has gone, this part of Sukhumi still looks like a Soviet theme park, separated from the outside world as it has been for years.

My room in Sukhumi's Hotel Ritsa has a history dating back to those years. It was from the balcony of Room 307 that Leo Trotsky, Stalin's main rival, addressed a crowd at the ceremony marking Lenin's funeral on January 26, 1922. Local Abkhazian officials delayed his return in Moscow so that he could not attend the funeral and compete with Stalin for the party's top job.

Today, Abkhazia has its own national flag and anthem, though it is recognised by no country other than Russia. Foreigners have to apply for visas, though these are not stamped into their passports, as Abkhazians know passports with an Abkhazian visa would be unacceptable to the Georgians.

For currency, Abkhazia uses the Russian ruble. With a sizeable income from Russian tourists it is not short of cash. The country has its own army based on the Swiss model; that is to say, every adult male is obliged to keep his personal arms at home. But it trains its own police, army and security officers.

Meeting President

The Georgian war was only a week away when we went to meet the Abkhaz President Sergei Bagapsh. We arrived in Sukhumi to find the government buildings almost deserted and the head of state due to leave for Moscow the next morning. It looked as if we had missed him. But we were lucky. The parliament's Speaker Nugzar Ashoba was still in his office, and agreed to call the President on our behalf.

For years no foreign media or diplomats visited Sukhumi. But the situation has been changing. This spring, the Abkhazian conflict, frozen for years, became a good deal more tense when Georgia started encouraging western journalists to come. So Speaker Ashoba is keen not to miss this opportunity to present Abkhazia's view to the international press: it took him 30 seconds to negotiate a morning appointment for us, just before the president leaves for the airport.

Like Presidents Saakishvili of Georgia and Yushchenko of Ukraine, President Sergei Bagapsh won power against the will of the Kremlin in the Abkhazian election in 2004. Moscow supported Bagapsh's opponent, Prime Minister (and ex- Russian special services officer) Raul Khajimba.

For weeks the Kremlin refused to endorse the verdict of the Abkhazian Election Commission regarding Bagapsh's victory. Neither his early career in the Georgian section of the youth Komsomol organisation, nor his three years as prime minister of Abkhazia, were enough to gain him credibility in Moscow's eyes. He is not our man, Russia's emissaries kept telling high-ranking Abkhazian officials involved in the negotiations. In retrospect, it is clear that Bagapsh's main crimes were that his wife was Georgian, and that he refused to accept the Moscow's initial verdict against him.

He and his supporters did not give up, though. In the end Moscow agreed to a new round of elections with Bagapsh as the presidential candidate and his former rival Khajimba as his running mate. For the people of Abkhazia this turned out to be a dream ticket: in January 2005 they won 90% of the votes.

Bagapsh speaks Russian with no trace of a Caucasian accent. After three years in power he has won enough support to consider running for re-election in 2009. Moscow, despite its scepticism about him, has taken no overt steps to back a rival candidate. And from his perspective, the importance of Moscow's support for Abkhazia can not be over-emphasised.

He recalled that Abkhazia lived under conditions of economic and political blockade for years, not just from Georgia but also from the Russia-dominated Community of Independent States. This coalition of former Soviet republics imposed sanctions on Abkhazia in 1996. Russia lifted them unilaterally only a few months ago.

Bagapsh feels very bitter about the attitude of other countries toward Abkhazia. ‘Nobody cares about our need to import medicines,' he said. ‘For years nobody wanted to invest money in our economy. Only Russia was willing to help.'

In 1998 he met the Georgian president Edouard Shevardnadze in Tbilisi, in his capacity as Abkhazia's prime minister. During their negotiations he asked him to help resolve Abkhazia's passport problem. For years Bagapsh's fellow countrymen were unable to travel abroad, as no country was willing to issue passports to Abkhazians. According to Bagapsh, Shevardnadze angrily refused to issue them with Georgian passport and suggested that Abkhazians should make do with UN travel documents. To Bagapsh this was unacceptable: ‘We will ask Russia to help - and in five years most of our citizens will have Russians passports,' he remembers telling Georgia's leader a decade ago. And that is precisely what happened, albeit a little more slowly than Bagapsh predicted.

By comparison with other Abkhaz politicians, Bagapsh comes over as less militant, though perhaps this is because he speaks in a soft voice and avoids the aggressive rhetoric of war. But there is one issue on which he would be never willing to make concessions. Abkhazia will remain an independent state, he insists, one that will be recognised by the international community.

A week before the outbreak of war he expressed his concern that Georgia is getting so many armaments from the US, Israel and Europe. The very sight of all these armaments being delivered, he said, obliges you to be prepared for war. ‘I wonder whom Georgia is preparing to fight?' he asked. ‘We also have friends who help us to arm our troops, and we hold those troops in readiness. The Georgians would do well to remember that they do not have a lot of friends in the Caucasus. If we are attacked there are a lot of ethnic groups round here that will rush to our defence. And that would be the end of Georgia as an independent nation'.

Abkhazians would never agree to return to becoming part of Georgia, he said, however much autonomy they were given within the Georgian state. ‘The blood spilled in war in the early 90's war has separated us for ever,' he says, referring to the civil war after the break up of the Soviet Union that led the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to sever their ties with Tbilisi.

A week before the war Bagapsh appeared concerned about the growing tensions, but not seriously alarmed by the prospect of air strikes, or tanks and artillery full-scale operations. The US, he believed, would make sure that the Georgian government stopped short of war.

How about Russia? Was the Kremlin dictating to Sergei Bagaphsh what should be said and done? ‘Russia has legitimate interests in the Southern Caucasus,' he replied. ‘Its presence here is no less justified than the American presence in the Central Asia republic of Kyrgyzstan'. The Kremlin's major concern was peace and stability, he insisted: Moscow officials often asked him how they should react to Georgia's hostile actions. He was not afraid of Russians, Bagapsh said; for years they had been -- and would remain -- Abkhazia's best friends.

Russian puppets?

Now Bagapsh had run out of time. One of his bodyguards loaded his bags into the boot of his Toyota Lexus limousine and he was off for his Moscow flight. Left behind with his officials, I quizzed them further about Abkhazia's relationship with Russia.

Was it like the good old Soviet times, when all decisions had to be approved in Moscow, including appointments to the most important administrative jobs? Georgians referred to the present Abkhazian government as marionietki, puppets. Were they right?

Russia doesn't have just one centre of power, I heard from a high-ranking Abkhazian parliament deputy who doesn't want to be named. At the end of 2003 he was involved in the negotiations with Russia when a majority of Abkhaz citizens voted for Sergei Bagapsh as president, rather than the candidate supported by the Kremlin. The official said they tried to explain to the Russians that they need not worry - that any politician elected as president of Abkhazia was bound to support Russia. So why would they mind if Bagapsh got in, or somebody else?

I tried to find out who the Russian partner in those negotiations was: the Foreign Ministry? The Kremlin representatives? Parliament's deputies? The special Russian envoy? Who played the role of Russian puppet master, controlling the Abkhazian puppets? At this, my source got angry. For a start, he did not regard Abkhaz politicians as mere puppets. He well remembered how the high-ranking guy from the Federal Security Service yelled at him, demanding that they withdraw their support for Bagapsh and switch to the Kremlin's candidate.

‘We are not puppets, so we did not agree,' he said. ‘I told him I was not afraid of his threats. At the same time we talked to other Moscow emissaries. They trusted us. They were high enough to have access to Putin. We convinced them; they convinced him. In the end the Kremlin approved Bagapsh and gave up on their own candidate.

Abkhazians try to play several Russian instruments. They are friends with the heads of the local administration in the Russia's southern regions. They have their contacts with Russia's ruling party United Russia. They talk to the Russian business magnates, and they look after their Kremlin contacts. Above all they do their best to keep in touch with their northern Caucasus brothers -- the Chechens, Ossetians, Gabardino-Balkarians. They would be their natural allies in any war with the Georgians or any other enemy.

What about Europe? Abkhazia parliament speaker Nugzar Ashoba, told me about the recent pre-war visit to Abkhazia by European Union foreign policy representative Xavier Solana. He told Solana that Europeans should have come here a long time ago, he said. As an independent state we would be EU's neighbours -- Romania and Bulgaria are just across the Black Sea. According to Ashoba, Solana listened to the Abkhaz officials with great interest. In the end, he told them he believed they were Europeans too and that he saw no chance of a solution to their conflict with Georgia without Russia.

Knowing they have no other ally than Russia, Abkhaz officials can hardly risk an open confrontation with the Kremlin. But they are certainly interested in opening up communication channels with the outside world.

A week later, I find myself reflecting that Sergei Bagapsh must be relieved that the Georgia-Russia war touched Abkhazia so lightly. Abkhaz troops took advantage of the situation to push the Georgians out of the upper part of the Kodori valley. With Russian units still present in the border Georgian town of Zugdidi it is easier for the Abkhazians to control the situation in the explosive Gali district, where the majority population is still ethnic Georgian.

Perhaps now the international community that has ignored Sergei Bagapsh and other Abkhaz leaders for so long will listen to them with more attention. My guess is they will stick with the message they have delivered consistently for years: that there is no solution to this conflict that does not include Abkhazia's complete independence.

Two years ago Alissa Askalina was invited by a girlfriend to a Nashi meeting. She enjoyed this first encounter with members of the Russian youth movement: everybody there was young, their eyes were shining, they pulsed with fresh ideas about how to attract more young people to the organisation. Alissa, a slim 20-year-old with chestnut hair, lives in the city of Vladimir, 200 kilometres northeast of Moscow. She learned at school how, more than five centuries ago, Vladimir was a candidate to become Russia's capital but lost out to Moscow. Today, tourists are more likely to visit neighbouring Souzdal with its famous complex of Orthodox churches. This is provincial Russia; life in Vladimir, for young people especially, is slow.

Zygmunt Dzieciolowski is a Polish journalist and writer who has reported on Russia for leading German, Swiss and Polish newspapers since 1989. He is the author of Planet Russia, published in Poland in 2005Among Zygmunt Dzieciolowski's recent articles on openDemocracy:

"How Russia is ruled" (14 March 2007)

"New Russia, old Russia" (5 April 2007)

"Boris Yeltsin, history man" (24 April 2007)

"Russia's unequal struggle" (18 May 2007)

"Russia's immigration challenge" (15 June 2007)

"Tatyana Zaslavskaya's moment" (20 July 2007)

"Vladimir Putin for ever" (2 October 2007)

"Russia's festive days: tides of history" (2 November 2007)

In the 1990s, young people in Vladimir were starved of fun and entertainment. Even now, when the Russian economy has picked up, few can afford more than regular meetings in the dirty staircases or basements of the city's apartment buildings to drink beer, take drugs and flirt. Alissa, unlike many other young people, doesn't smoke and doesn't like alcohol. She has been meeting her boyfriend Stas for the last two years; some day she will for sure agree to marry him, but it is better (thinking of the difficult life of her parents) to wait. When she discovered Nashi ("Our Team", or simply "Ours") she was thrilled. They discussed serious matters, they could freely express their opinion. For the first time in her life she met young people of her age talking not about getting alcohol, sex or money, but about their own country: Russia, its past and future. A year and half later she was promoted to the higher rank of commissar. She matured, grew up and understood how much Russia owed to its president, Vladimir Putin:

"We were in a black hole before him. He made the Russian economy work again. We were no longer ashamed to feel a sense of national dignity. We demonstrated to the world that Russia is not and will not be a second-class country. We understood the importance of patriotic education for our youth."

Alissa and her colleagues know the circumstances surrounding their beloved leader Vladimir Putin's decision to abide by the constitution and leave the presidency in March 2008, while he prepares to exert influence in another role. But no matter what his future position will be, Nashi activists like Alissa cannot imagine Russia without him.

I came to Vladimir with a film crew of the American TV channel HD Net to make a documentary on Nashi, and Alissa was our guide during most of our time in the city. The first day of filming, however, was in Moscow on 7 October 2007, when 10,000 Nashi activists gathered in the Russian capital to celebrate Vladimir Putin's birthday. In seeing these youthful activists in action for the first time, I realised that in order to understand Nashi it was essential to get out of Moscow and head for the Russian provinces.

Thank you, Vladimir Vladimirovich

Most of the celebrants were 10-14 years old when Vladimir Putin was handpicked by the outgoing president Boris Yeltsin as his successor at the end of 1999. At that time, the shy KGB colonel looked much younger than the experienced statesman whose giant photo now decorates the centre of the stage built on the Shevchenko Embankment, next to the Ukraine Hotel's Stalin-era skyscraper. "What will be your reply to the president?", says the accompanying inscription in big red characters. "2 December - the election of the national leader", announces a huge banner on the left side of the stage (an important piece of information for those who might have wrongly thought that it was rather the date of the parliamentary election).

With 10,000 Nashi members in festive mood, nobody at the rally is willing to remember that 7 October 2007 is also the first anniversary of the murder of the dissident journalist Anna Politkovskaya. In the past, Nashi members have often tried to break up opposition meetings; today, with President's Putin's birthday being their top priority, Nashi this time allowed the Politkovskaya memorial rally to proceed undisturbed.

Among openDemocracy's many articles on Russia politics and society:

Alena V Ledeneva, "How Russia really works" (16 January 2002)

Geoffrey Hosking, "Russians in the Soviet Union: rulers and victims" (26 June 2006)

Christoph Neidhart, "Vladimir Putin, ‘Soviet man' who missed class" (24 October 2006)

Ivan Krastev, "'Sovereign democracy', Russian-style" (16 November 2006)

Oksana Chelysheva, "Russia's iceberg: a Nizhny Novgorod report" (25 April 2007)

Tanya Lokshina, "Russian civil society: an appeal to Europe" (30 April 2007)

George Schöpflin, "Russia's reinvented empire" (3 May 2007)

Armine Ishkanian, "Nashi: Russia's youth counter-movement" (30 August 2007)

Ivan Krastev, "Russia vs Europe: the sovereignty wars" (5 September 2007)

Mary Dejevsky, "After Putin" (21 September 2007)

Anna Sevortian, "Russia: seeds of change" (20 November 2007)

Even the awful weather could not extinguish their enthusiasm. As they waited for the official celebrations to begin amid a biting wind and pouring rain, many danced to the sound of loud, rhythmic and powerful rap:

"Fifteen years ago when the

Russian state was ruined

They mocked our morals

But now we rose from our knees

Now we'll go ahead, no problems

If they'd remain, we will be as strong

As our grandfathers during the war"

and....

"You will not sell and you will not flood Russia with booze".

The bloom of youth

As I watched the Nashi crowds at Vladimir Putin's birthday and listened to the rap anthem, I recalled the teeming Independence Square in Ukraine's capital Kyiv in December 2004. There, people were entranced by their rhythmic song Razom nas boghato ("Together we are many") - played so loud that even talking to a neighbour was impossible.

Those who inspired and initiated Nashi consciously decided to copy some of the "social technologies" applied successfully by protest movements in Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003-04), and Ukraine (2004-05). They understood - to take just one element - the importance of music for the youth movement. That is how "Nashi rap" was invented.

When I asked people at Putin's birthday-party where they came from, I heard the names of many different Russian towns and regions: Tula, Ivanovo, Voronesh, Volgograd, Saratov, Tambov, Kursk. Their faces and the way they were dressed conveyed their provincial origins; rich and decadent Moscow looks and behaves differently. In most cases they had been driven here in buses, spending the night in different hotels or holiday centres in the capital's suburbs where they were trained in what and how to chant in the next day's meeting.

"Today is a historic day. And in the history of Russia it is a bright and joyous day. Because 55 years ago, the world received a person who helped our country. And today we want to say thank you. Thank you Vladimir Vladimirovich, from the country. Happy Birthday!!!" Here, the crowd chants "Russia, Russia, Russia" - and the announcers on stage warm up the crowd before the speech of Vassily Yakemenko, the movement's founder and supreme leader.

Yakemenko is short, wears spectacles, and is dressed in a leather jacket. He doesn't look like an apparatchik from the dull Soviet-era youth organisation Komsomol. He is energetic and sharp, though at times over-intellectual for the occasion; he uses words and phrases ("postmodernism", or the "unipolar world" barely if at all understandable to most of his audience.

"I remember the 1990s, when (Boris) Berezovsky controlled the Duma. When together with (Mikhail) Khodorkovsky, in order to make their billions, they provoked the war in Chechnya. Young people like you were sent there and did not return. Our Russian national budget had to be approved by the International Monetary Fund in the United States. All of this has changed with Vladimir Putin."

The picture of the president that Yakemenko draws with his words is one of a hero, even a superman. Without Putin, Russia is doomed. The December 2007 election, Yakemenko explains, is not about the parliament: it is a vote for the supreme national leader. The whole world has to see that Russia is unanimous in its support for Vladimir Vladimirovich.

At the end of his speech, Yakemenko asks Nashi to divide into groups and visit different Moscow neighbourhoods to show people their enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin.

I am a patriot

The group I join has a different plan: it moves to the Estonian embassy to show solidarity with Nashi colleague Kostya Goloskokov, who has been there on hunger-strike for a week in protest against the Estonian authorities' refusal to give him a visa.

Kostya, who is 21, is clearly tired by living in a tent in the middle of the city. He has to switch off his cellphone to be able to talk to me; almost every moment his phone rings or he is sent an SMS message. "So many people want to express their solidarity", he says proudly. He has heard too that the Russian internet is full of declarations of support.

He is here in order to show to the Estonian authorities that Nashi did not agree with their decision to remove the monument of the Soviet soldier from the capital, Tallinn's, city centre. His hunger-strike had not attracted the media's attention on the same scale as that given to Nashi's protests in April 2007 when (following the monument's removal) they blocked the Estonian embassy for several days. In September, Kostya had submitted his application for an Estonian visa; his papers were all in order, all travel arrangements properly taken care of. But when the Estonians asked him the purpose of his visit, Kostya said openly that he planned to wear a Soviet military uniform and stage a protest at the removed monument's site. This way, he said, he wanted to pay tribute to the more than 250,000 Soviet soldiers who died liberating Estonia.

Kostya is not surprised to be refused a visa, but he still feels offended by the Estonian authorities' unwillingness to give legal reasons for their decision, and to talk to him during his hunger-strike. He is proud that the Estonian media said that ignoring him had worse political consequences than allowing him to go to Tallinn and do what he wanted.

Kostya has been with Nashi from April 2005, a month after its foundation. What surprises me is that he is a student at Moscow's Higher School of Economics, where many lecturers are well-known critics of Putin's regime. He regrets that only a few colleagues at the school share his political views.

"I am a patriot", he declares. He accepts that many young people now do not care about Russia. They believe it is the state which owes them: education, healthcare, housing, jobs, holidays. Kostya wants to serve Russia, and doesn't expect anything in exchange. This is what he thinks unites him with the patriots of the 1940s, willing to sacrifice their life for the motherland. For Kostya, patriotism is the ability to respond when the state says, "we need you".

The side-street where the Estonian embassy stands has remained quiet for most of Kostya's strike. But not today. Before the Nashi group arrives to greet him, a special unit of the Russian militia (Omon) is deployed to block its access to the embassy and to Kostya himself. But the communication between the group leaders and the militia chiefs is friendly. While Nashi members chant "Let us visit Kostya" or "Give a visa to Kostya" a compromise is negotiated: up to ten of them at a time are allowed to enter the fenced-off zone. The ones who pass through are mostly young girls in their late teens. Many bring Kostya flowers, and they hug him; in their eyes he is a real hero.

A movement's seeds

Nashi was founded in March 2005. Three years on the organisation has at least 100,000 members, activists and supporters. The average age of its commissars is 19.5 years. By most standards this is a remarkable success story. How has it happened?

It is believed that the initiative to create Nashi came from Vladislav Surkov, deputy head of the presidential administration in the Kremlin. A former public-relations executive at the Yukos oil company of the now-imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Surkov moved to the Kremlin and became Putin's chief ideologist and architect of the influential "sovereign democracy" theory.

The Russian journalist Yelena Tregubova - former Kremlin correspondent of Moscow's Kommersant daily, and now a political refugee in Britain - relates her conversations with Surkov in her book Tales of the Kremlin Digger. Surkov, she says, tried to present himself as a liberal in a presidential administration otherwise controlled by hardline former special-services employees. But his efforts to convince her that he represented a "lesser evil" ended with the series of "colour revolutions" in former Soviet states such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan.

Surkov and his associates - including the one-time Soviet dissident turned loyal Kremlin political spin-doctor Gleb Pavlovsky - started to consider ways of discouraging young Russians from following the democratic slogans promoted by the anti-Putin democratic opposition. The task of creating a mass pro- Putin youth movement was entrusted to Vassily Yakemenko, an ex-presidential-administration official responsible for state charity work. He had quit the Kremlin as early as 2002 in a first attempt to mobilise young people to support Vladimir Putin. But Yakemenko's first creation - "Walking Together" - was not persuasive enough as a response to the challenge represented by the "colour revolutions".

Surkov and colleagues felt they had to act urgently. Each year Russian 1.5 million school pupils graduate; young people aged 16-28 years old compose 20% of the Russian population. In short, millions of first-time voters would be eligible to vote in the parliamentary and presidential elections of December 2007 and March 2008. The Kremlin's strategists believed that they needed to win this generation to its side, counter the possibility of seeing it drift towards sympathy with any emerging opposition, and - in case of emergency - create loyal paramilitary youth units able to cope with dissident movements and demonstrations.

The founders of Nashi described it as a "democratic, anti-fascist youth movement". Its manifesto - which is now used to test the knowledge of all new members - says that Russia should become a global leader in the 21st century, be able to organise its life independently and reject attempts by the United States and Europe to impose their values on Russia. At the same time, Nashi founders well understood that to communicate with the generation of hip-hop and the internet, the language of the movement's official documents would not be enough. For teenagers especially, role-playing games, rap and fitness exercises, summer camps and access to modern computer labs were important parts of the project.

Kremlin PR specialists like Vladislav Surkov knew that post-Soviet generations of young Russians have limited knowledge of their country's history and barely understand such terms as gulag, collectivisation and censorship. But many of them had childhood memories of the hardships of the 1990s, after the Soviet Union's collapse, when members of their parents' and grandparents' generation lost their life-savings. "Nashi rap" say a lot about the deprivations of those years: the unpaid wages and pensions, the mafia wars, the wild privatisations. But Russia wasn't always like this, it has had its glorious moments. So the youngsters sing too about cosmonauts circling the earth and the heroism of soldiers in the "great patriotic war" against Nazism.

This was part of the fertile soil the Nashi movement cultivated, especially in the provinces. Here was a formula that explained who was responsible for the trauma, misery and sufferings of the youngsters' mums and dads; and offered a guide towards the promised land of welfare and prosperity. President Vladimir Putin, the sage in the Kremlin, became their supreme idol.

All who care about Russia, help us

When we arrive in Vladimir, Alissa Askalina takes us to the local Nashi headquarters at Lunacharsky Street. It is a new three-storey building, still under construction. But the scene inside is one of tiled floors, modern computer equipment, clean office furniture, and abundant storage space, filled with the smells of fresh paint. Where did they get money to build something like this?

"Companies and business managers who care about Russia help us", is Alissa's answer. Nashi's critics and opponents would prefer to speak about phone-calls from Kremlin instructing Russian corporations and businessmen to pay money to the friendly youth organisation, an offer they would find it difficult to refuse.

It is 6 p.m. and nearly every room in the building is full of young people. In one, on the first floor, more than six girls are engaged in lively discussion with an African student from the Central African Republic. He, like his fellow African students in Vladimir and across Russia, are now concerned about their safety. Racist groups in Russia have attacked dark-skinned people many times.

Nashi's "Antifa" department, driven by its members' idealistic feelings, is ready to help these African colleagues. "In Russian politics", says Anya, "our motivation is the same. We support forces of good, we fight forces of evil."

In a room on the second floor the entire local Nashi group of computer-science students are busy bringing up to date the section of their website (www.nashi.su) related to their activities in Vladimir. This is great, one tells me: she can practice here all the theoretical things she studies at university.

In nearly every room, Vladimir Putin's photos hang on the walls.

The weather on the next day, Saturday, is extremely bad, but Vladimir's Nashi cohort do not cancel their action - entitled "Double Standards" - in the city's main square. Well in advance the activists prepared more than ten stands with large photos illustrating their main idea: that the western media apply double standards when they present the situation in Russia and in their own countries.

Alissa's two colleagues have been busy repairing and polishing one of the exhibitions. "You have the photo of Saddam Hussein here", explains Alissa; he was sentenced and executed for murdering fewer than 150 people, she says, yet George W Bush is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands in Iraq.

Alissa gives other examples of western hypocrisy. The oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed for obvious financial irregularities: theft, corruption, tax avoidance. Yet the west claims that he is the victim of political repression, and mobilises human-rights organisation in his defence. Then there is Abu Ghraib; the illegal arrest of 17-year-old Mark Syrik in Estonia while defending the soldiers' monument; the distorted portrait of Chechnya in the western media.

If the exhibition attracts little interest from passers-by, Nashi members approach those waiting at the nearest bus stop and try to engage them in political discussion. "I am shy", says Alissa, "and so are the other girls. For some of them it is not so easy to stop strangers on the street. But we take special training for this, we learn how to talk to people."

In Vladimir, there is Nashi-organised public event almost every day. These involve community-service work as well as politics. For example, members visit war veterans and help them to cook and clean their flats, or promote blood donations. In the local orphanage on Lenin street its director is enthusiastic about Nashi help. "Girls come here to play with the kids, they bring them toys and candy. A few months ago they brought a truckload of disposable diapers, which will last for several months and save the staff time and effort."

Vladimir's mayor Alexander Rybakov is very happy to see Nashi activists picketing shops found to have sold alcohol to adolescents.

A roundtable discussion

I accompany Alissa to a meeting of Nashi's ideological department, and her colleagues allow me to observe their roundtable discussion. I want to hear what they have to say about their ideas, plans for the future, contemporary Russia, President Putin, the United States, patriotic values. When my questions seem too predictable, such as might be expected from a biased western visitor, they can only laugh.

Artur, the head of Vladimir's Nashi section, explains why Russia should oppose America. "I have nothing personal against the United States. But a unilateral world would be too dangerous." But Artur thinks that Russians could learn from Americans how to respect their own country and their national flag.

Makar remembers the dreadful 1990s when Russian citizens failed even to stand up when their own national anthem was played. Igor thinks the western media should stop lying about Vladimir Putin, and instead pay attention to what he has done for Russia.

Nastya, who has journalistic ambitions, thinks their generation has a unique chance to have an impact on history. "Nobody uses us", she says with genuine anger. "We want to help Putin. When he took over the presidency, Russia was in a state of decay, it was falling apart. He alone turned history around."

"Every country is ruled by 5,000 people", says Artur - the elite which makes the crucial decisions. "Nashi is preparing people to be future leaders. Perhaps not all 5,000, but at least 2,000 for sure."

Indeed, Nashi offers its most talented members free education at the Moscow High School of Management, which the organisation sponsors. They can attend rhetorics classes in order to learn discussion skills. The best students get internships with Russia's largest corporations or state structures at different levels; some could even work in the Kremlin's or Duma's administration.

At home with Alissa

On the last day of our stay in Vladimir, we drive to Alissa's home. She lives with her parents and brother in a tiny flat in an old, cramped Soviet-built apartment block far from the centre. Alissa sleeps on the couch in the living room; her mother, father and younger brother sleep together in the even smaller adjacent room. Alissa's mother is a professional musician, but she changed careers in the 1990s in order to make ends meet. Now she works in the human-resources department of a Vladimir company. Alissa's father is another survivor of the dark decade: unemployed then, he now runs a small auto service with a few friends.

"Our life is better now", says Alissa's mother Irina, offering a cup of tea. "Hopefully, their life" - she points to Alissa and Stas sitting on the couch - "will be more prosperous". Alissa agrees: "In the 1990s we had a weak leader and a bad economy. That is why foreigners could control us. Now our leader is a strong man, has his own view and vision of the Russia's future."

Stas is more pragmatic: "Nashi will pave the way for our generation to take over high government positions, to lead the country in the future. We will be prepared, we'll have skills, be trained to cope with problems."

Irina was at first sceptical about her daughter's membership of Nashi. She believed education should be her daughter's priority, and that Alissa's visit to France as an exchange student two years ago might expand her daughter's horizons. Irina remembered the times when every young person had to join the Soviet-era Komsomol, and feared that Nashi would equally prove a waste of time. But she soon realised Nashi were different, and came to support her daughter's choice.

There is no problem

Nashi's federal headquarters are located in Moscow's Yamskogo Polya street, close to the Byelorusskaya railway station. The building is a disappointment compared to the organisation's local offices in Vladimir and Tula: the building is small and cramped, with a musty Soviet aroma. Several large military tents in the courtyard are available for use by people visiting the capital from the provinces, Nikita Borovikov tells me.

Borovikov is one of Nashi's top federal commissars. A 26-year-old lawyer himself, and son of a lawyer who is a native of Vladimir, is the oldest Nashi member I met. He leads me to his personal office, whose chaotic appearance made it resemble an avant-garde artist's workshop. Nikita is a contender for the organisation's top job, now that its founder and president Vasily Yakemenko has moved on to become federal minister responsible for Russian youth problems. At the annual summer camp at Lake Seliger in the region of Tver in 2007 - Nashi's most important event - Borovikov received the largest number of votes in an election supposed to find the organisation's new leader. A day later, Yakemenko, said that the vote was just a game. But Borovikov, who is reported to enjoy the support of Vladislav Surkov, was elected Nashi chief at the movement's congress at the end of December 2007.

Now, Borovikov says, his major concern is to make Russia to pass through the election season without turbulence of the Ukrainian kind. Nor does he see anything wrong or embarrassing about Nashi's connection to the Kremlin. "The whole history of Russia shows that our government has been strong and has been fulfilling the interests of the people only when there was a strong government mechanism. And always the person who was succesful was the one who was directly connected with the government."

In the parliamentary elections of 2 December 2007, Nashi was strongly allied with the pro-Kremlin United Russia party. Its many commissars were members of the election commissions, and it sent thousands of well-trained election monitors to conduct exit polls. Nikita Borovikov had witnessed a dangerous pattern at key moments in the "colour revolution" countries: those who conducted exit polls there charged that the official results of national elections had been forged. This helped to spark the collective anger that led to the overthrow of the old regimes. In Russia, partly thanks to Nashi, the opposition had no chance.

The Putinjugend

In mid-January 2008, midway between the two election rounds, democratic Russia is still outraged by the heavy-handed parliamentary campaign of the pro-Vladimir Putin forces. The language used by the Putin propaganda machine has not been heard here since Soviet times. From the Mikhail Gorbachev era of perestroika onwards, only conservative pro-communist dinosaurs accused democratic groups and activists or human-rights organisations of serving American interests or being western puppets. Now, even the main television channels recycle such formulae. It is another Nashi victory.

Mikhail Kasyanov, a former Russian prime minister, has been targeted by a Nashi harassment campaign for months. "I feel physical pressure from pro-Kremlin youth organisations. They follow me, even try to force me into a car accident. They do not follow any original ideology. They have only one task, to support President Putin."

Masha Lipman, an analyst from the Moscow Carnegie Center, thinks that Nashi is more than a bunch of young people organising themselves to be politically active. "This is an organisation masterminded by the Kremlin and its loyalists, it is financed by sources loyal to the Kremlin and its activities are in large part guided by presidential administration officials." She even implies that young activists are brainwashed by the Kremlin's propagandists. "They are Putin's youth, that is what they call themselves."

After the December parliamentary election, Nashi joyfully celebrated the results on the streets of Moscow. Their presence also meant they were ready to react against any opposition public protests. They even mobilised "Mishkas", 8-to-15 year-olds led by Nashi sponsors.

But some Nashi activists' glee turned to astonishment at Vladimir Putin's decision to promote the Kremlin deputy prime minister Dmitry Medvedev - a decade younger than their idol and lacking his charisma - as his favoured candidate to succeed him as president. They find it hard to imagine Putin as subordinate to the head of state.

Natalia, author of the live journal blog, is one. She is a Nashi veteran, always loyal to Putin, who now feels cheated by the unexpected nomination of Dmitry Medvedev as United Russia's presidential candidate: "I was a member of Putin's fan club and I will remain like that. Let's elect Putin for a third term".

Natalia and her Nashi friends must be aware of the backroom political intrigues among the Kremlin's various factions. For the first time, talking to some Nashi contacts on the phone from Warsaw after my trip, I feel a sense of worry about the future. Their instincts tell them that perhaps the new political set-up emerging in Russia doesn't equate to a straightforward continuation of Putinism.

We are more than a product

Nashi activists seem unconcerned at the kind of criticism they receive from opposition activists or independent analysts. They have heard it all before. Kostya Goloskokov, the hero of the hunger-strike in front of the Estonian embassy, believes many people are simply afraid of the mass youth movement. He laughs at the concept of Nashi being only the Kremlin's project: "We have more than 100,000 members. Such a big organisation cannot be created just by PR specialists. PR creates artificial beings. And we are real. Even if power in Russia would change we would not vanish."

Alexei Levinson is a highly respected sociologist from Moscow's Levada Centre, who has studied Russian society for decades. He is concerned by the gradual elimination of democratic values from Russian life and politics. Yet to some degree his view of Nashi's future is similar to those of hunger-striker Kostya Goloskokov. He too thinks that even after the election season Nashi will not simply vanish. What worries him most is that nobody seems concerned about the movement's future. "(Nashi) is an important vehicle for the current administration to win the 2008 election. What will be its role and function in the future I don't know."

Levinson think that Nashi members are like soldiers: they can't just train, march and rehearse for months and end up inactive. "If you have thousands of people who are on alert to do something for years and then find they have no task to perform, it's dangerous. They have their roles, their positions, they are already organised. Nobody can just say to them, 'goodbye Nashi, thank you very much, perhaps we'll see you next time."

If Alexei Levinson is right - and many Nashi supporters would agree - the future of this movement may hold a surprise or two.