Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 28 – Surveys of
university-age Russians over the last decade show that these young people
quickly accept the regime’s list of enemies but almost as quickly shift when
the regime’s outlets do and that these shifts have little impact on the way in
which young Russians view their country’s place in the world.
The Center for Youth Research at the
Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg has been conducting surveys of the
attitudes of young Russians since 2008, and Alina Mayboroda these conclusions
on the basis of its surveys in an article on the Polit.ru portal this week (polit.ru/article/2016/11/27/mayboroda/).
Mayboroda, a researcher at the
center, writes that over this period, the surveys have asked young people in
various higher and secondary educational institutions about their attitudes
toward other countries in an effort to identify those with whom they sympathize
and those they do not like.
In 2008, she continues, “it turned
out that among the countries eliciting the greatest antipathy were Georgia and
Afghanistan,” two countries with which Russia had problems because of its
military actions in the former and the continuing fighting in the latter. But seven years later, few students mentioned
these as among those they felt hostility to.
Instead, students in 2015-2016 said
they felt hostility to the US and Ukraine, a reflection of government coverage
of events in Ukraine and American support for Kyiv. But given this shift in opinion, Mayboroda
says, “one can assert that the effect of the rhetoric of the authorities is
limited and not long-lasting.”
“When a theme passes from the
political arena,” she argues, “the new generation already doesn’t support the
old trends that were promoted but more often follows the new agenda.” But there are continuities, negative and
positive: Young Russians continue to be hostile to migrants, and they retain
their identification with larger cultural communities such as Europe or Asia.
“If the antipathies of respondents
are situational and change depending on political and media ‘agendas,’”
Mayboroda points out, “then the sympathies of young people have practically not
changed.” Those who were oriented toward
Europe are still oriented toward Europe, and those who are oriented toward the Muslim
world remain oriented in that way.
In all four cities where research
was carried out – St. Petersburg, Kazan, Ulyanovsk and Makhachkala, attitudes
toward the United States were very much divided. “On the one hand, America
firmly leads among those viewed with antipathy, but on the other hand, it is
also listed among the ten countries that elicit the greatest sympathies of the respondents.”
Among the four cities, “there exist
differences connected with religiosity and ethnicity,” she says. “If an
orientation toward European countries is a global trend, manifested in all four
cities, then in Makhachkala,” sympathy for the Arab world is equal to that for
European countries. In Kazan, in contrast, “Arab countries are in practice not
mentioned.” And the Tatars show an orientation to Europe “almost identical” to
that found in St. Petersburg.
St. Petersburg and Kazan students identified
with Europe as oppose to Asia by almost exactly two to one, 64.2 percent to
24.2 percent in the former, and 65 percent to 21.2 percent in the latter. Ulyanovsk and Makhachkala also were dominated
by those oriented toward Europe, but in both cases, this leaning was less
pronounced.
Summing up, Mayboroda says that
young people may change their identification of enemies in response to
propaganda but that they haven’t shifted their identification away from Europe.
Instead, “young Russians as a whole want to see themselves as part of the
Western world,” whatever Russian television suggests.
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