Government-sponsored Summer Camps in Russia – Engines for Conservative Civic Engagement

The paper's main theoretical argument is that government-sponsored and conservative youth engagement is indeed fostered and encouraged by the Russian state, but cannot be satisfactionally explained by reference to cooptation and manipulation efforts by state officials. It supposes that both modernization and neotraditional identity ideals are also promoted by actors, who are not directly connected to state and government-institutions. By exploring the symbolic and organizational texture of government-sponsored summer camps for young adults (18 - 30 years old) the paper seeks to indicate the close interrelatedness of educational institutions and state structures on the local level. Especially extra curricular activities at educational institutions are closely linked to state youth policies: The bulk of participants at the summer camps are organized in student clubs, student unions and student self-governments – not in the youth wing of the ruling party or in organizations that were induced by the Kremlin. Drawing on 40 interviews with participants at two regional summer camps in Siberia (in the Krasnoiarsk region and the Sakha Republic), the paper illuminates participants' engagement before their participation in the summer camp. It equally shows how narratives on historical periods such as the 1990s and the Soviet period that are retold by parents, grandparents or friends ensure the young activists in their support for a Third Position of the incumbent government– between so-called radical liberalism and state socialism. Moreover, the paper seeks to show how the summer camp experience, the camp's symbolic scenery, the educational program and the proposed funding for project proposals enables and restrains the young activists' engagement. The organizational form of the summer camp has been often used by modern states to strengthen identification with the state among youth and young adults. Detached from the family and everyday life, summer camps should strengthen the young participants' sense of we-ness. As political spectacles, summer camps communicate the boundaries of political legitimacy and enact national experience. Having a wider array of vehicles of meaning at their disposal than other institutions of cultural diffusion (the mass media and the educational system), summer camps may generate feelings of sameness and a sense of self-efficacy through behavioral, symbolic and cognitive mechanisms. In this sense, the paper explores summer camps as political spectacles and engines for conservative civic engagement. Yet, in some cases the summer camp experience did not enable further engagement, but led to a disillusion. The paper will explore both the enabling and restraining character of the event through the prism of the interviews with participants.