1970s Generation was Too Old and Too Young to Change Russia’s Direction, One of Their Number Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, September 12 – Moscow historian Vasily Zharkov in applying Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s theory of generational cycles of 30 years to Russia, says that his own, those born in the 1970s “turned out to be too young to take part in the reforms of the 1990s and risk being too old when Russia will enter a new era of change.”

            “Our naïve dreams, connected with freedom and social justice and with the ideas of Gorbachev’s perestroika … have already been shot down and trampled upon,” he says. “Up to now, we have not been able to offer anything in politics and instead have withdrawn into private life, enjoying the fruits of a consumer society and panic-like avoiding political participation” (gazeta.ru/comments/column/zharkov/12638497.shtml).

            Zharkov continues: “we are sadly serving the privatizers of the 1990s and the restorers of the vertical of the 2000s, and to all appearances we will ingloriously complete our path in that way.” Happily, there is a better but smaller rising generation, but the generation which seized “the commanding heights” two decades ago isn’t ready to give them power anytime soon.

            The Moscow historian’s discussion of the situation now follows on his suggestion that in the last 100 years, there have been three key generational breaks at intervals of 30 years, in 1986, 30 years after 1956, and in 1956, 30 years after 1926, changes complicated by the fact that many of those in power were in each case holdovers from the previous one.

            “Gorbachev’s perestroika began in 1986, exactly 30 years after the 20^th CPSU Congress at which Khrushchev unmasked Stalin’s cult of personality;” and that event came 30 years after 1926, the year when at the peak of NEP, Stalin had “already succeeded in inflicting decisive strokes at the opposition within the party.”

            Each of these dates marked “in its own way,” a turning point in the history of the country” that left it virtually unrecognizable a decade later, Zharkov says. In each case, a new generation pushed for change; but members of the older generation remained within the power elite and affected the outcomes.

            The first fully Soviet generation achieved total power only when it forced the retirement of Khrushchev in 1964 and Mikoyan in 1965, “the last representatives of ‘the old guard’ of Bolsheviks’ with pre-revolutionary experience.”  But this Brezhnev generation faced a rising generation which called itself “children of the 20^th Congress” although in fact “they were children or other relatives of de-kulakized peasants and party members repressed by Stalin.”n

            Because of this background, the rising generation viewed the “complete overcoming of Stalinism and the democratization of Soviet life” as being at the top of its agenda, Zharkov says. Unfortunately for it, power until the mid-1980s remained in the hands of those who favored a hard line.

            The generation of the 1960s looked “very young and healthy” compared to those they replaced, but in fact, because they had to wait so long, they came to power relatively late: “Gorbachev became general secretary at 54 and Yeltsin was elected president of Russia for the first time at 60.”

            According to Zharkov, in the 1990s, the next generation appeared, the children of the baby boom of the 1950s and early 1960s who, being the offspring of those who took part in the first five-year plans and the war wanted stability above all else. Those attitudes opened the way to the rise of the security officers of the 1980s after 2000.

            They have now been in power for 20 years, Zharkov says. In anther decade, they will face the same challenge of challenge and survival that all the other generations have. What direction Russia will then take is unknown but it is likely t be different just as all the other shifts at 30-year intervals have been.