For Older Russians, Soviet Borders Remain ‘Natural,’ But for Younger Ones, Current Ones Are, Makarkin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 10 – The generational divide in Russia is intensifying – and in few places more than over the issue of the proper borders of the country, Aleksey Makarkin says. For older generations, “’the natural borders’ of the country are the Soviet ones … for the young, the current borders are normal.”

            The young who did not grow up in Soviet times – and that includes most under the age of 40 – simply do not understand the anguish their elders feel about Ukraine or the Baltic countries, the Moscow political analyst says. For young people, these places have always been beyond the borders of Russia and thus foreign (rosbalt.ru/posts/2021/11/10/1930233.html).

            Generational divides exist in all countries and at all times, Makarkin continues. But for the aging Soviet-raised generation, they seem almost inexplicable. That is because under Soviet conditions, they were less marked. People of all ages lived together, watched the same television, and were isolated from the rest of the world.

            That pattern had the effect of giving older people who had survived the ravages of collectivization, industrialization and the war enormous authority over the young, something today’s older generations continue to expect but no longer have at least not to the same extent, the analyst says.

            On the one hand, “the protests of the end of the 1980s against the nomenklatura under conditions of a universal deficit did not have a clearly expressed generational character: In 1989, 90 percent of the residents of the capital of all age groups voted for Yeltsin.”

            But on the other, “now, the generational problem is intensifying,” Makarkin says. “Young people ever more live in a global world, not simply borrowing its elements but ever more often viewing them as normative and mainstream values.” Older people may use cellphones and the Internet, but unlike the young, they don’t turn off the television.

            Members of the generations increasingly live apart physically and mentally, something the young see as entirely natural given that such arrangements are a normal part of life in much of the world but that their elders, including people in their 50s and 60s like the upper reaches of the Putin regime, reject, find unnatural and threatening and want to reverse.