Young Russians Aren’t Protesting War Because They Fear Being Sent to Fight, Veteran of Soviet and Russian Protest Movements Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 6 – When Aleksey Navalny returned from abroad and was arrested, young Russians dominated the massive protests against the Kremlin’s actions against them. But today, Elena Pavlova says, the young aren’t taking part in demonstrations against the war because they fear being sent to fight there.

            “Unfortunately,” the 70-year-old veteran of protests going back to the 1960s, says, “I do not see young people at the anti-war protests. The young came out when Navalny was imprisoned, but now, when they themselves could be sent to the front, they don’t.” Only their elders are there (semnasem.org/articles/2022/04/07/pochemu-vyhodit-na-akcii-v-rossii-slozhnee-chem-v-sssr-otvechaet-novgorodskaya-dissidentka-s-60-letnim-opytom-protesta).

            The absence of young people at such protests, Pavlova continues, is one of the reasons why the anger many Russians feel about the war is not manifest in the streets. Typically, young people are more inclined to protest – in most cases, they have less to lose. But now, they fear they have a great deal to lose and so are staying away.

            The Novgorod resident has enough experience to make such a judgment. Her first protest meeting was in December 1965 when she joined a small group of Russians demonstrating against the arrest and trial of dissidents Yuliy Daniel and Andrey Sinyavsky. She later took part in the perestroika-era protests and now opposes the war.

            Pavlova says that protesting in the last years of Soviet power was not more difficult than now because then no one was charged with a crime for doing so and only a relative handful of people were confined in psychiatric prisons. But the real difference is not in the level of repression but in what people expected.

            “What was integral to socialist totalitarianism,” she says, “is completely unacceptable for a state that has proclaimed itself to be a law-based one.” Consequently, the survivors of the dissident movement from Soviet times will continue to protest even though they are aging and even though at least with respect to the war in Ukraine they aren’t joined by the young.