Ilya Yashin Loses His Mind?
23 Mar 2010
Ilya Yashin
Ilya Yashin has set the new standard in weird blog posts. This is quite a feat, considering that he seemed to have managed this achievement just last week, when he responded twice to a circulating YouTube video that captures him offering traffic cops a bribe to get out of a ticket.
The first response was a simple denial (he claims the video is recut to take his words out of context). And – though it’s clear that the clip is edited – there doesn’t seem to be any ambiguity in Yashin’s words when he asks an officer “are there any alternatives?” The second response addressed the fact (revealed in the video) that he drives a Lexus. Titled “Yeah, a Lexus. So what?” Yashin’s follow-up post made it clear that he was set on doing exactly what his tormentors almost certainly hoped he would: embark on an endless, unattractive campaign of self-defense. “Yes, I bought a five-year-old import. The crisis lowered the prices, plus my father helped,” Yashin pleads with his readers.
In both these posts, Ilya Yashin argues loudly and repeatedly that he’s not the bad guy. “They took my words out of context!” “The Lexus was on sale!” “Yakemenko [Nashi founder] is the real thief!”
What could have been a silly, little candid-camera moment, where a semi-popular youth leader was caught in the most prosaic of crimes, has turned into an ugly display of the self-promotion and sanctimony that has for years plagued Russia’s liberal activism.
And that was all before Katya and Nastya.
‘Wait, who?’ you might be asking. Katya Gerasimova and Nastya Chukova are the two 20-year-old women Ilya Yashin has identified as special forces agents, whom he accuses of trying to capture him in a compromising situation (компромат). (See his blog for spicy pictures of these young ladies, which he pinched from their вконтакте pages.)
It was when the dildos came out that Yashin first “smelled a provocation.” He halted an in-progress threesome to demand that his companions abandon all plastic toys. When Katya ran off to the porch to smoke in protest, Nastya joked that Ilya was acting as though he worried he was being filmed. His paranoia was supposedly confirmed when Katya returned and laid out some cocaine. Yashin immediately ran away, once he could wrestle away his keys from the two naked suitors.
And here’s his grand finale:
“So in general, friends, be careful and watch after yourselves. Those bastards in power aren’t shy about using the filthiest methods. Operative measures, hidden cameras, pretty girls – it’s all in the arsenal of the Kremlin’s protectors. Any one of us is at risk.”
So what to make of this?
One thing is certainly clear: Ilya Yashin should not ever run a PR firm. Consider that this story about the threesome hasn’t even made news yet. Yashin is literally breaking the news himself, in some demented effort to get ahead of “it” before “they” can. Once again, he has taken some banal black PR and turned it into an Internet destination for humiliation. Maksim Kononenko wasted no time reposting excerpts from Yashin’s post, calling it the “post of the millennium.”
So why on Earth is the man dumping fuel on the fire by writing about his missteps so much on his blog? There are several possibilities here. Maybe he’s trying to ‘draw attention to bribery as a social problem,’ was something people floated earlier. But more and more it looks like he’s just a paranoid, self-obsessed weirdo. The reason he decided to ‘let the cat out of the bag’ this time is because his bribing buddy Mikhail Fishman was recently implicated in another YouTube video, where he appears to be snorting coke with a half-naked lady. Yashin says he recognized the lady’s exposed leg/foot in the clip – it belonged to Katya, of the Katya-and-Nastya duo. So, ‘reading the writing on the wall,’ he decided to put everything in the open and blog about his aborted threesome.
It could very well be that the persecution of liberal activists in Russia has gotten to the point that this chased and frightened caste of individuals is so broken down that they now feel compelled to publicize their every indiscretion, for fear that agents of the state will distort the truth via YouTube. If that’s indeed the case, then shame on me for laughing at what seems to be the very strange, unnecessary behavior of Ilya Yashin.
Update: As of 8pm Eastern time, Yashin’s post has over 700 comments. One begins to consider the possibility that he’s playing the public fool simply as a way to attract more Internet traffic…
Mar 24, 2010 @ 09:06:57
It’s a sad world indeed when liberal activists can’t drive around in Lexuses, snort coke, and engage in threesomes. Putin is worse than we could have possibly imagined!
Mar 24, 2010 @ 12:48:16
Well said, sir.
Mar 24, 2010 @ 09:38:45
Summarizing, the FSB persecutes HR activitists in Russia by sending them a blonde and a brunette chick for a threesome, instead of sending the activist to Siberia. I suppose this the meaning of “soft authoritarianism”.
Or perhaps it’s just Yashin’s way to recruit people in his movement, “Join the opposition, you’ll get sex for free!”.
Mar 24, 2010 @ 16:53:44
And — don’t forget — you’ll get some serious traffic on your blog.
Mar 24, 2010 @ 12:41:32
A friend sends along the following comment:
It seems pretty silly to me, despite Yashin’s deep conviction, to assume that this was the work of the FSB. Until a video about his threesome emerges, it remains entirely possible that Katya and Nastya weren’t even recording him. In the likely event that they were, however, the odds are that, as Michael Idov suggests, “an off-the-script underling” is by far the most realistic perpetrator. I imagine that some people suspect police involvement because the bribery footage from before was filmed in what looked like a police car. But, again, there is no proof that those uniformed men were actually law enforcement. It’s not at all far-fetched to suppose some Nashi pranksters dressed up like cops and borrowed a patrol car. The ГИБДД, to my knowledge, denied any involvement and affirmed that its officers don’t carry video cameras in their cars.
The only thing Yashin says about the girls’ connections to the police is “Она […] сотрудничает с российскими спецслужбами.” No explanation. No proof. His readers are expected to believe this because … he’s Ilya Yashin, after all – important enemy of the state.
The problem I have with the Daily Beast piece is that it treats this as a Kremlin-inspired event. We’re supposed to believe that Nashi’s “flunkies’ blind guesses as to what would please their bosses in the Kremlin” are to blame here. This assumes that Vladimir Putin and the siloviki are directing everything in Russia, whereas it seems equally possible (and at times very likely) that the Kremlin is actually just doing what it can to keep the various factions and institutions in Russia from fighting an internecine war.
Sure, Nashi might be orchestrating this campaign of black PR against some of the liberal movement’s darlings. But that is hardly evidence of some Red Square conspiracy to either (a) whip up the masses or (b) nip modernization in the bud.
Your other point about the компромат being stupid (because Russia isn’t a public-morality culture) highlights an important aspect of this story. It’s true that these scandals won’t do much to discredit these men in the eyes of their Russian supporters. Yashin’s and Fishman’s fans are primarily young people, and Oreshkin caters to that aging liberal enclave that fondly remembers voting for Yavlinsky (and then Yeltsin) in the 1996 election. These people simply won’t believe their eyes and ears. As for Russia’s culture of public-morality, I think we need to keep in mind that Russia’s liberal community is hyper public-morally conscious. It is practically all these guys think about, as they dig through their old poetry and samizdat scribbles, in search of the philosophical electricity that saw them through perestroika.
But the more Yashin and company protest and blog about the secret police conspiracies against them, the more ridiculous and unprofessional they appear to that most important interest group: Western observers.
Not only is foreign support an important meal ticket for full-time activists like Yashin (though apparently he finds the time to be a student, too), but it’s also an invaluable measure of liberal-credibility. Russians may not care that some nobody-organizer was caught on film doing drugs and sleeping with young girls, but, from the perspective of a Western NGO, things would be a whole lot simpler to just work with, sponsor, or host a less “complicated” individual.
On the other hand, Yashin might be able to spin the thing to such a degree that everyone thinks Putin personally ordered his assassination. In that event, maybe he could come out on top, and achieve that career-making persecuted reputation every activist wants. Perhaps this is why he decided to post such an unusual, revealing piece on his blog.
Mar 24, 2010 @ 15:47:51
“But the more Yashin and company protest and blog about the secret police conspiracies against them, the more ridiculous and unprofessional they appear to that most important interest group: Western observers.”
Oh, really?
Mar 24, 2010 @ 15:53:40
I’m thinking more of the moneyed interests, but — you’re right — Westerners might unite behind these horny, hungry guys, all the same.
Jun 02, 2010 @ 03:57:23
As one of those Westerners, my only disappointment is that Ilya did not post a semi-naked picture of himself on the blog. He should not underestimate the amount of support Western women (and some men) will be prepared to give him for free, simply for being open about himself.
Mar 26, 2010 @ 13:34:54
http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2010/031/18.html
Here comes a good piece of porn, the easy-girls told him that he is paranoid and that they will cure him, when Yashin suspected a hidden camera in the room…
The Meaning of Contemporary Russian Kompromat « A Good Treaty
Apr 26, 2010 @ 21:02:30
[...] Yashin, hoping to get out in front of his next kompromat, published the lurid details of his possible encounter with provocateurs Katya Gerasimova and Nastya Chukova. If a video of his [...]