Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 2 – Kremlin
propagandists suggest there were two basic reasons why so many young people
took part in last Sunday’s anti-corruption demonstrations: supposedly, the
organizers paid them and young people are easier to mislead. But Igor Eidman points to five more
fundamental reasons why “Putin has lost the younger generation” now and
forever.
First of all, the Russian
commentator says, younger Russians “are group in the population least affected
by state television programming.” They watch television far less than their
elders, and some of them do not watch television at all, preferring to rely on
the Internet (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=58DE74ED87B58).
Second, younger Russians are more
put off than their elders by the officious and bombastic official patriotism
the Kremlin and its backers no often. They don’t accept the memes Putin offers
as necessarily true because he offers them; they want to form their own views on
the basis of their own experience.
Third, younger Russians are not
burdened by “the weight of the negative experience of the past as are those in
their 40s and 50s.” The latter suffered disappointment as a result of the unrealized
promises of perestroika, but the former in most cases weren’t even alive when
these promises were made. They are not as disillusioned because they haven’t
been illusioned.
Fourth, young Russians “didn’t take
part in the division of property” after 1991, and they are put off by the
emergence of two Russians, a hereditary wealthy set and an impoverished mass.
That strikes them even more than their parents as fundamentally unjust and
something that must be changed.
And fifth, young Russians like young
people everywhere generally react negatively to efforts by their elders to
impose the values of the latter on them. The more pressure the parental
generation imposes, the sharper and more negative young people turn away from
those ideas. As a result, “to protest against the regime is becoming
fashionable.”
There
are, of course, additional reasons that Eidman doesn’t mention including the
calculation of at least some young Russians that a change in the national
leadership might reduce the number of foreign conflicts Russia is involved with
and thus their chances of being dispatched to and possibly being wounded or
killed in such wars.
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