Generations Matter in Russia but They Aren’t the Same as in the West, Radayev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 5 – The theory of generations and generational succession was developed by Karl Mannheim for Western countries, and the divisions those who followed in his footsteps have proposed “baby boomers,” “millennials,” “generation X” and “generation Y” inform much Western discourse and analysis.

            Russian scholars say that life in their country is defined by generations and their succession but that the generations in Russia do not correspond to those in Western societies, Natalya Fedorenko says in a review of their latest research (theoryandpractice.ru/posts/17730-ot-bebi-bumerov-do-chernykh-bumerov-primenima-li-teoriya-pokoleniy-v-rossii).

            Vadim Radayev, a sociologist at the Higher School of Economics, says in a new book: Millenials: How Russian Society is Changing (in Russian, Moscow, 2019; publications.hse.ru/books/272881038) that Russians divide generationally in the following groups: “the mobilization generation” (born before 1938), “the generation of the thaw” (born between 1939  and 1946), “the stagnation generation” (born between 1947 and 1967), and “the reform generation” (born between 1968 and 1981).

            Following “the reform generation,” he continues, are the millennials who were born between 1982 and 2000. On the one hand, Russian millennials share many of the characteristics of their Western counterparts; but on the other, they so far at least seem far less fearful of not being able to find a job.

            Indeed, one Russian researcher, Elena Omelchenko of the Center for Youth Research in St. Petersburg says that Russian millennials often view their difficulties in finding a job as a resource which give them time to acquire the skill sets and habits that will be useful for them later in their careers.

            But Yekaterina Schulmann, a Moscow analyst says, that Russian millennials are less inclined to get involved in entrepreneurial activities and are more interested in finding stable work in state corporations than are their coevals in the West (youtube.com/watch?v=n-2wv6ktwsI).

            It isn’t so much that Russian millennials do not want to get involved in business, she argues. Rather they fear instability and risks and are “more conservative than Western ones” not only in that way but also in regard to issues like sex freedom. But because of globalization, the Russian ones are converging on the Western ones in that way as well.

            There is also a convergence between millennials living in villages and those in major Russian cities with each other as well as with the West.  Millenials living in Russian villages, Radayev says, “also marry later, are more involved in sports, consume less alcohol, more often seek entertainment outside the home, get their first jobs later, and constantly use the internet.”

            But Omelchenko argues that those in particular jobs are more like on another between urban and rural communities of millennials in Russia and between Russian millennials and their counterparts abroad that are any of them with millennials wherever positioned who have different jobs – and that goes for millennials in the siloviki as well.