Scouting in Russia

April 17] 1909, a young officer, Colonel Oleg Pantyukhov, organized the first Russian Scout troop Beaver (Бобр, Bobr) in Pavlovsk, a town near Tsarskoye Selo, St. Petersburg region.

From 30 December 1910, Baden-Powell was in Russia for a week or more,[1] and visited Nicholas II in Tsarskoye Selo; they had a very pleasant conversation, as the Tsar remembered it.

In 1914, Pantyukhov established a society called Russian Scout (Русский Скаут, Russkiy Skaut).

The organization then went into exile, and continued in many countries where fleeing White Russian émigrés settled, establishing groups in France, Serbia, Bulgaria, Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay.

A much larger mass of thousands of Russian Scouts moved through Vladivostok to the east into Manchuria and south into China.

The Scout movement began to reemerge and was reborn within Russia in 1990, when relaxation of government restrictions allowed youth organizations to be formed to fill the void left by the Pioneers, with various factions competing for recognition.

At the end of the 1990s, several of the associations formed the All-Russian National Scouting Organisation (ARNSO) (Всероссийская Национальная Скаутская Организация (ВНСО), Vserossiyskaya Natsionalnaya Skautskaya Organizatsiya (VNSO)), guided by WOSM.

Russia is served by at least ten different nationwide Scouting organizations and about 30 regional and local associations.

[5] Most of the nationwide organizations consist of both regional associations and directly served units - in some cases even in the same cities.

RAS/N is active in Amur, Astrakhan, Bryansk, Chelyabinsk, Irkutsk, Kaliningrad, Kaluga, Kirov, Kostroma, Lipetsk, Magadan (which has a relationship with the Western Alaska Council of the Boy Scouts of America), Moscow, Murmansk, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov, Tambov, Vladimir, Voronezh, and Yaroslavl Oblasts, and in Altai and Primorsky Krais.

[15] The affiliation of the following associations is unknown, or they are independent regional bodies: The Scout Motto is Будь готов (Bud' Gotov, Be Prepared in Russian.

As Разведчик also carries the connotation of spy, now often perceived as negative in the post-Soviet period, many now refer to themselves as Скаут or Навигатор, the more neutral term for the original meaning, an advance party sent to reconnoiter the terrain, similar to pathfinder or explorer.