© Maxim Shipenkov/EPAA customer inspects a t-shirt printed with an image depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin, who now has an 84% approval rating.
Anastasia Zakharova's desk is a chaotic mess. Several images of Vladimir Putin are scattered across the surface, along with a few pictures of Russian Olympic women champions and old copies of the Soviet Union's Pravda newspaper. This week, the 18-year-old designer is working on a new collection of T-shirts called "For".
The meaning is "quite transparent", she says, in a country where
84 per cent of the population is for Putin. On one of the newly designed T-shirts, half of the president's face is visible. The words below read: "Iron Putin."
Zakharova is an enthusiastic and
active member of one of the fastest-growing organisations in Russia: a
youth movement of Putin's adoring admirers named Set, which in Russian means both "Network" and "Fishing Net". The movement's Moscow office recruits creative young people to produce stirring patriotic products with a hint of style about them. To enroll, members simply need to provide a positive answer to the key question: "Are you for Putin?"
In the early years of Putin's rule, artists felt comfortable satirising him. No longer. And his most eager fans can see nothing to joke about in the president's demeanour or personality. Like Zakharova, they are earnest and serious.
Born in Kaliningrad, a remote Russian city bordering Poland and Germany, Zakharova grew up without a father and without seeing her mother too often. The only true family she had was her grandmother, a devoted Stalinist who for the last 15 years of Putin's rule - most of Anastasia's life - had repeated the same words: "
Putin is Russia's saviour." So naturally, Zakharova, like so many of her generation, does not know a cooler superhero than Iron Putin.
Many of Network's members, who are mostly aged from 17 to 27, have been brought up by single mothers, missing out on a powerful male role model in their lives. "
To us, Putin is our father," Network's 30-year-old leader, Makar Vikhliantsev, tells me.
© APVladimir Putin puts a shawl on Peng Liyuan as they arrive to watch a fireworks show at the opening ceremony of the APEC summit. Putin is now a 'role model' and 'father figure' to many young Russians
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