Young People in Russia Turning to Internet to Find Their Ethnic Roots and Becoming More Radical as a Result, ‘Horizontal Russia’ Suggests

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 10 – In Russia today, many young people don’t know their ethnic roots because of the radical changes that have taken place there over the last 30 years and because in some cases their parents and extended families are not actively working to hand down their languages and customs, the Horizontal Russia portal says.

            That has left many young people without a clear understanding of their ethnic identity, but some of them are using the Internet to find themselves, a change that is also having a profound impact on the way in which ethnicity there is constructed, the portal continues (semnasem.org/articles/2024/07/10/zumery-v-poiskah-nacionalnoj-identichnosti-shest-istorij).

            Horizontal Russia considers cases of this from around Russia, asking young people what sites they are turning to and considering how this is changing the nature of identity. Perhaps the biggest take away is this: if the identities of the non-Russians were defined primarily in terms of primordial ties, now many are being defined in terms of their opposition to the Russian nation.

            Websites in many cases play up conflicts, highlight clashes, and thus prompt those turning to ethnicity in this way to define the “us” by focusing on a negative “them,” exactly the opposite of what Moscow would like and what might make the integration of these people into a broader civic nation.