Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 29 – The three most
important news items last week, two URA.ru journalists say, is that
unemployment among Russians aged 15 to 24 has risen 500 percent this year, that
one in every three of them is ready to leave the country, and that ever more of
them are animated by a sense of injustice about the way things are being done
in Russia today.
Yelena Zhurvaleva
and Kristina Busarova say that the explosive and unprecedentedly rapid growth
of unemployment among young Russians is hitting those who come from poor
families, those with many children or one parent missing as well as those who
have recently graduated from school or left orphanages (ura.ru/articles/1036265708).
One young unemployed Russian told
them that he had not been able to fine work for more than six months and that
he fears even though he is “a qualified specialist” he won’t be able to get
anything better than a low-paying job unless he can come up with the money for
a bribe to get one for which he is qualified.
This young man added that
dissatisfaction and anger are growing among young people like himself.
According to him, the freeing of Yevgenya Vasiliyeva was the straw that broke
the camel’s back: “Those who steal billions return to their state jobs,” but
those who are law-abiding can’t even get a position after sending out “dozens
of resumes.”
Gennady Gudkov, a former Duma deputy,
said that it is clear that “the people has been impoverished, something
especially obvious in regions where there is now a high level of unemployment,
low incomes and a difficult situation in families with children. The purchasing
power of citizens has fallen,” and stores are closing.
He told the URA.ru journalists that
young people driven to desperation are given to “revolutionary” ideas and that
“under certain conditions,” they will “take part in protest actions and seek to
use radical means to express their dissatisfaction.”
Therefore, Gudkov said, “actions
could occur in Novosibirsk, Tomsk, St. Petersburg, and locally in Moscow.
Yekaterinburg is also a city known for its large number of students.” And
according to him, they are angry about the Vasilyeva case, something he called
the latest “public expression of [the authorities’] contempt for the people.”
Denis Volkov, a sociologist at the
Levada Center, suggested that the regime might be able to avoid such protests
for the time being because there is still a widespread sense that Russia is
again “’a great power.’” But “if the current negative trend continues, the
situation may be radicalized by 2018,” when he said he expected Russian
dissatisfaction to reach its “peak.”
But he agreed that the freeing of
Vasilyeva has added to popular anger about the destruction of food and
convinced more people that the existing system is rigged against them and
unjust.
A third expert with whom the URA.ru
journalists spoke, Yaroslave Ignatovsky of the Polit Generation Analytic
Center, said that one must keep in mind that there are two groups of young
people now: those who are able to get good jobs and are pursuing advancement,
and those who can’t and increasingly sense they have no future.
Ignatovsky says that those who are
on the losing end will chose “internal emigration” in the short term, moving
from one place to another in the hopes of finding work. But “if this continues
for decades, a whole class of people will grow up who will not view the state
as a form [within which they must live] and a generation of people who in
general will spit on everything.”
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