The form of a summer camp as a mobilizing event is by itself a borrowing from the socialist past. In contrast to this, teaching sessions eclectically combine post-political morals with market liberal reasoning. Trainers convey the principles of project management, foster grant writing skills and commend Steve Job’s career. Nevertheless, the government's current authoritarian policies appear as modern and as a dignified continuation of the past in this ideological patchwork.
The thrilling question is how such claims to the past resonate with participating youth. How do they relate to the nationalization of Soviet achievements? What are their imaginaries of the macropolitical community’s past? How does remembrance shape their relationship to what some of them might call homeland?
A further complication to these questions brings the multinational set-up of the Russian Federation. One of the two cases is located in the national republic of Sakha. Its participants identified themselves by the majority with the history of the nationalities, who inhabited the region long before the Russian empire became the sovereign of the area. The national republic was also the first subject in the Soviet Union to experience Stalin’s purges and suffered greatly from the compulsory resettlements during the Second World War.
