Today’s Russian Pensioners were Yeltsin Voters 30 Years Ago, Makarkin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 11 – Russians who are now in their 60s and 70s were, thirty years ago, supporters of Boris Yeltsin and many of the reforms of the end of Soviet times, Aleksey Makarkin says. They were not the died in the wool Soviet citizens that many people now assume they were on the basis of what they are today.

            In fact, the Moscow analyst says, there has been a significant evolution in the views of the older generation, one that reflects both disappointment that the changes of the early 1990s did not lead to a better life for them, one that they saw as a return to normal but with a higher standard of living (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=63457B981779F).

            Instead, many of them faced a continuing decline in their standard of living; and so they have reacted with a kind of repentance before their parents and grandparents who at least improved things for them. Now, they see no hope and aren’t the pro-reform voters they were when they were in their 30s and 40s.

            Their psychology, Makarkin argues, remains rooted in the industrial world and so they have not viewed changes and improvements in the banking sector or information technology as important because they are not impressed with them the way many expect them to be. Those things don’t affect them directly.

            Instead, they focus on what they have lost, the industrial and Soviet civilization of the post-war years, an era when factories were opening rather than as now closing. And because of their experiences, they now see the last decades of Soviet power in a positive way and the post-Soviet ones negatively.

            Russian pensioners are thus not what they always were but what they have become because of these experiences, a pattern that few talk about when they discuss generational change in Russia but an aspect of that which may prove more important than many tend to assume, the analyst concludes.