If various terms are used to describe the new generations, today it is increasingly evident to Russians that a “Putin generation” is being formed. It is worth asking what future is being prepared for it, although in reality it is difficult to appreciate a true social and ideological convergence. Rather they are reminiscent of the “silent” ones of the years of World War II.
Towards the end of the 2010s, people who until then had lived under the regime of Vladimir Putin, who assumed the presidency in 2000, began to come of age in Russia. Although various terms are used to describe new generations (Boomer, a of the latest articles in signal of Medusa.
Some Russian sociologists explain that approximately half of this social group believes in good relations with the West and with the entire world, and hopes for a “happy future for Russia”, the most popular expression of the late Alexei Navalny, the alternative leader who had achieved mobilize many young people between 2012 and 2020, trusting in the values of democracy and not placing their trust in the upper echelons of Putin’s regime. But the three years of war are changing the balance and orientation of young Russians, who are increasingly leaning toward the worldview of older generations who remain marked by the Soviet past, with a general apathy that translates into support silent to war and the propaganda of patriotic ideals.
In reality, there is no true social and ideological convergence among the members of the “Putin generation”, beyond the instrumental use that is attempted to be made of this expression. It is unrealistic to attribute to the mass of Russian youth obvious characteristics of politicization or rather distancing from politics, conformism or rebellion or others. The terms of the “generational” categories are often just advertising tools rather than scientifically based sociological theories. It is clear that the period between 17 and 25 years of age constitutes the most sensitive stage to external events in the personality of each individual, and major social shocks such as war, revolution or other fractures in the course of life, They leave deep marks on the mind and soul.
At the beginning of the 2000s, the Russian sociologist Yuri Levada had identified six generations of Soviet Russians, referring them to the various historical contexts that occurred in the seventy years of the totalitarian regime: the revolution and the civil war, the Stalinist mobilization, the patriotism, the Khrushchev thaw, the Brezhnevian stagnation and Gorbachev’s perestroika. In the last thirty years, it was followed by the Yeltsinian generation, which grew up in the search for freedom, and now the Putin-jugend, from whom only loyalty and obedience to the regime are asked. Another sociologist, Iskender Jasaveev, speaking to journalists from signalwarns that specialists use the category of “Putin generation” with great caution, because youth politics has changed several times in recent years.
Even the same group that is defined as “youth” has undergone modifications, going from the group of people between 14 and 30 years old, then up to 35 and currently up to 38, considering the mobilization needs for the “special military operation.” Especially after 2010, with the increasingly aggressive turn of Putinism, the State has tried to take control of the younger population, with quite contradictory results. The navalnist protests of 2011-2012 provoked in reaction the relaunch of “patriotic programs” in schools of all types and levels, and teams of specialists were also formed to work with young people on the Internet and social networks. Obviously, with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, these programs acquired an increasingly militaristic character, as is evident in the youth policy plans approved by the Kremlin for the period 2016-2020, intended “to times of peace and war”.
Sociologists note that it is not at all easy to consider the effects of “patriotic education,” and it cannot be taken for granted that young Russians today are convinced supporters of power, considering that surveys have difficulty revealing the thinking of individuals. , while they make evident the availability to share or not the dominant thought. The general support for Putin is an effect conditioned by the war in Ukraine, which has imposed a particularly careful attitude with what can be said in public, hiding one’s own opinion as much as possible. Levada Centr specialists point out that external pressure on Russia today plays a different role than before, because the vast majority of young Russians today have never been abroad, and will hardly live this experience, except in “friendly” countries. and exotic, which prevents them from knowing the differences between worlds in reality.
On the other hand, the war has greatly changed the relations of the Western world with Russia, and this is reflected in culture and the media, with significant effects on the orientations of the youngest people, who feel rejected by the world and, therefore, Therefore, they grow up with the “culture of resentment”, further fueled by state ideological propaganda. As happened in the Soviet Union, a dvoemysliea “doublethink”, as Jasaveev observes: “This happens when the values that want to be conveyed are produced by official rhetoric, while in real life they become less and less credible and lived.” Indeed, a very faded patriotism is spreading in consciences, if not totally devoid of content that is related to daily life.
In 2021, another sociologist, Grigory Judin, said that members of the generation that grew up under Putin are waiting for “events that will turn them into a particular generation,” because they feel excluded from the previous world and do not find meaning in the current world. . That is why the war in Ukraine has given answers to today’s young Russians, making them feel like protagonists of a revolution of universal dimensions, and that is also why many are passionate supporters of the tsar. A few months ago, an institute of experts very close to the Kremlin published a monographic study on Russian youth, which found that “young people have a confusing and fragmentary representation of what Russia really is.” Consequently, assessments of the orientations of young people in Russia remain suspended, among the many contradictions.
The LevadaCentr also observes that young people are anyway the most “Westernized” of Russia’s citizens, due to the use of global communication instruments and the numerous products of mass culture, despite the obsessive state propaganda against Western “disvalues.” Beyond patriotic war enthusiasms, young people are generally tolerant of the much-maligned “LGBT community,” which new Russian laws define as an “extremist organization.” And despite numerous state calls to increase the birth rate and exalt “traditional” and family values, the average age for marriage and having children continues to rise in Russia, without actually managing to modify the increasingly negative standards. of recent years.
The column signal proposes a parallel with the “Franco generation” of Spain, which grew up during the political and economic crisis of the 1930s and then led to the civil war. In that case, a strong indoctrination in a national-religious ideology based on traditionalist Catholicism was also imposed from above, and the polarization due to that period influenced the subsequent development of Spanish society, among those who adhered to the structures of the regime. and those who tried to organize clandestine movements against the dictatorship. Franco’s regime ended with the natural death of the dictator, and the generation that grew up under his power was able to ensure a peaceful transition to democracy. The Spanish have avoided the nostalgia of Franco’s regime thanks to a great social debate about the period of the dictatorship, which is what Russia lacked after the end of the Soviet Union, and those who feel nostalgia for the values of that time are only those who did not live it. Perhaps those who will be nostalgic for Putin will be the men of tomorrow, those who never suffered the repression and grotesque ideological forcing of those years.
Those who lived through the tragedy of World War II, before the baby boomer generation, were often called the “silent ones,” often considered conformist and apolitical, having experienced the horror of the destruction of the world they lived through. surrounded them when they were emerging into adulthood. Later these same people became the “innovators” who began to build a new world, in Europe and on earth. Perhaps among the Russians subjected to the crusher of wars and Putinist concentration camps there are some who today are forced to silence, but one day they will help Russia rise from the ashes.
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