The politicisation of Russian youth

Photo: Putnik (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

This discussion, in my view, is important for two reasons. First of all, it places young people as the object and subject of political debate on civil politics – on possible change and the future course it takes. In other words, the debate could lead to framing the youth not just as a special social group, but also as a potential political agent of social change. Secondly, and related to this, the debate allows us to understand something about society in general. The very phenomenon of young people’s participation in politics, especially teenagers, can be a reflection of the changing attitudes in society towards politics.

Next generation

Young people, including teenagers, are on the border between childhood and adulthood. On the one hand, like children, they are partly dependent on adults, who try and determine their futures “for their own good”, while on the other hand, society begins to expect them to make independent, adult decisions. In this sense, society’s attitudes towards the political participation of its youngest members serve as a litmus test of social attitudes towards grassroots public policy as a whole. Moreover, young people are the future and the way in which society raises them has a direct impact on the politics of tomorrow.

A study on the participation of adolescents in protest politics, which I conducted within the framework of a larger project for the Public Sociology Laboratory in 2012-13, can offer some initial hypotheses for future sociological research. This study was based on interviews with underage supporters of the Bolotnaya rallies in Moscow and St Petersburg. In addition, it included interviews with high school students, teachers and parents who took part in protests for the restoration of unjustly dismissed directors of secondary schools in St Petersburg and Saratov, as well as interviews with young participants of the EuroMaidan in Kyiv.

The research revealed that in Russia in 2011-2012, when politics returned to the streets after a long period of de-politicisation, protest actions became attractive to teenagers. In the school conflict, adolescents conducted radical and vivid acts of disobedience. However – and this is an important clarification – this was the case only as long as they discussed and co-ordinated the action plan among themselves. They would afterwards appeal to adult activists, teachers and parents, who also fought with the district and city administration to reinstall the directors, and who would respond in the following way: “do not interfere, you are not adult enough for politics, your participation is being used against us; we will take care of your interests, your task is to study.”

Surprisingly, the students internalised the messages of non-participation transmitted to them by the adults. They began seeing themselves as too immature for the protests. They viewed their own original ideas on how to protest as childish pranks. A similar trend was also observed in relation to adolescents at the Bolotnaya rallies. Schoolchildren considered themselves to be adherents of the movement, strongly supporting it and following the developments online. Many of them went to the rallies. At the same time, they considered themselves to be inferior participants. They internalised how adults viewed them and believed they were still not mature enough for weighted political judgments. The young people wanted to be adults and considered themselves to be adults in their daily private lives, yet in regards to politics, they remained small children – and perhaps that was how society wanted to see them as well.

Finding a voice

The situation during the protests on the Maidan in Ukraine in 2013-14 was different. The youngest participants of the protest movement considered themselves to be full-fledged members, sometimes even more significant and competent than their parents’ generation. “It seems to me that the concept of what it is good and what is bad is better developed among minors,” Ukrainian teenagers told me during an interview, “because they are not so influenced by all the news media. They have the possibility to view [things] from different perspectives. For adults, when they use big words, it usually means that they are right. But this is alien to a child.” At the same time, young people who were on the Maidan were able to recognise the authority of adults in the private sphere, however in public they viewed themselves to be on equal terms with adults.

In this sense, the anti-corruption rallies in the spring and summer of 2017 in Russia are reminiscent of the events in Ukraine three years prior. The youngest participants of the Russian protests do not hesitate to speak on their own behalf. They consider themselves to be agents of change and, in some cases, even lead their parents by hand to the rallies. Are these protest actions the beginning of a new spiral of interest in public policy in Russia? Сould it be that protesting will become popular again and the youth will become full-fledged participants? Can we say that today, after the EuroMaidan in Ukraine, the “electro-Maidan” in Armenia and the anti-corruption rallies in Russia, civic participation is finally becoming normal for post-Soviet youth? Did these mass protests affect their basic values, their ideas about the future of the country or about their role in this future?

The first part of my response to these questions can be given in the following way: despite the new wave of politicisation of youth, the dilemma of self-reliance and the infantilism of the young and radical still remain prevalent today. Russian sociologists close to the authorities, such as Valery Fyodorov, the director of the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre, have already called for the need “to prevent those who are encouraging teenagers and young people to openly antisocial behaviour”.

What is more, the media which sympathise with the protesters have a tendency to infantilise young people. The online opposition media TV Dozhd (or TV Rain) invited high school students together with their parents to a programme to discuss political issues. The programme’s host, for reasons unknown, would address the adults with the respectful form of “You” (in Russian – vy) while turning towards the high school students and addressing them with the informal “you” (in Russian – ty). It seemed that Russian teenagers were finally given a voice, however, the attitude was not one of equals, but more like the tenderness of parents hearing their children speak for the first time.

What is missed in all this is that the views young people have on politics are not that much different than those of the adult activists. Similar to the adults, the teenagers said they did not come out so much to support Alexei Navalny, the leading opposition figure in Russia, but rather against the overall corruption of the authorities. While Navalny’s online documentary, which highlighted high levels of corruption among state officials, attracted their attention to the problem, they also spoke about politics in terms of injustice and deception. They attended rallies with creative, self-made posters.

Naturally, young people are a unique group in the sense that they are only beginning to explore the public sphere, but this does not mean their words and opinions should be perceived as inferior or illegitimate. On the contrary, this attitude should be overcome if we are counting on the emergence of a vibrant, new and politically-engaged generation.

Rally of schoolchildren

The second part of my response to the above questions may seem trivial, but it does not become less valid: young people are different. Understanding this is critical in approaches to researching the youth. Instead of describing the “youth” as a monolithic construct, researchers should study and record the various tendencies in the socialisation of the younger generation.

Illustration by Andrzej Zaręba

Let’s take for example young people in Russia. After the first anti-corruption rally, which took place on March 26th 2017 in a variety of Russian cities, the majority of observers argued that minors constituted a significant part of the protesters, at least in Moscow and St Petersburg. Social media dubbed the event the “rally of schoolchildren”. Other commentators, on the contrary, argued that attention on high schoolers is nothing more than a media effect; they were chosen by the media as a symbol of the protest, but in reality the number of schoolchildren out on the streets did not exceed that of the Bolotnaya protests.

However, after the second anti-corruption rally, which took place two and a half months later, it became clear that younger people were in fact attending. During this protest my colleagues and I at the Public Sociology Laboratory collected interviews from the protesters. The vast majority of our respondents were people under 20. In order to find someone older than 30, I really had to make an extra effort. Moreover, it was not the first protest for many of these youngsters. Some of them even brought their parents with them. Does that mean that a new generation of politically active youth has emerged?

Not quite. Within the younger generation, a politically sensitive “subgroup” (as sociologist Karl Mannheim would argue) has formed and has been growing since 2010. It is not only Putin’s generation, but also the generation of Navalny and YouTube. It is the generation that experienced the mass protests of Bolotnaya at the age of 10-15 years and the generation that at least has heard something about civil and opposition politics. Navalny’s domination on social media platforms like Vkontakte and YouTube was an important factor as well. As I was told by one teenager, who participated in the anti-corruption rally on June 12th, “Half [of our class] tries to stay out of politics … The second half knows who Navalny is, well, maybe they exchange memes about Navalny.”

Another participant at the rally, an 18-year-old female student, explained that one of the reasons for her interest in Navalny was an active discussion about politics among her peers. Elements of politics penetrate into adolescent and youth culture in which, as noted by sociologists, traditional “style” subcultures are replaced by solidarities – polarised according to value vectors around topics such as gender, xenophobia, patriotism and healthy lifestyles. For example, among the 80 first-year students I taught this year in one of the Russian non-capital cities, I met several girls who publicly identified themselves as feminists and several students as supporters of the opposition. These young people, yesterday’s high school students, were able to form an active civic position already in their senior classes (by the age of 17 and 18).

Also evident from our interviews with the young people attending the anti-corruption rally in St Petersburg is that growing up for them means something more than just personal development and how one’s private life is lived, but also how one engages within in the public space. While the young protesters at Bolotnaya considered themselves to be adults in everyday life but underage in the sphere of politics, today’s politically active adolescents understand that being an adult means being more savvy and active in politics. “I grew up,” said one freshman student when explaining his decision to go to an anti-corruption political rally. “My attitude has somehow changed and I began to think for myself and not succumb to the propaganda. When I was a small child, I did not understand anything. Putin was on TV, Putin was in the street; Putin was everywhere.”

Not just media images

At the same time of course, it would be incorrect to generalise the entire generation. For example, among the same 80 freshman students that I taught, many, if not most, were not interested in politics. They also have conservative world views (not to be confused with conservative political views). They believe it is necessary to preserve traditional values and they completely reject all that we often associate with the “angry youth” – such as drugs and alcohol. Despite the fact that politics is becoming part of the socialisation of a new generation of young people in Russia, who have consciously matured in the wake of the Bolotnaya protests, not everyone’s interest in politics goes beyond the exchange of Navalny memes.

We still have a lot to study in order to precisely understand what causes the differences in political socialisation within the same generation. Media attention to the youth can play into the hands of researchers, stimulating their interest and working to attract new ideas, both from the side of the state and from civil society. However, this same attention can be deceiving, thus causing temptation to offer simple and neat answers to complex questions.

Needless to say, there is no “youth” in general, there are pupils, students and young adults. There are young people living in large cities and some living in less populated towns and in villages. There are different sub-groups within the same generation who, in different ways, familiarise themselves with the public sphere and participate in civil politics.

In addition, it must be understood that young people, adolescents and schoolchildren are not just exotic media images. These are the people who will tomorrow enrol in universities and enter the workforce, and they will face the economic realities that the leadership of our country is currently constructing. In countries with more advanced civil societies, high school and university students become a symbol of not only radicalism, but also of social issues, such as inaccessible education, unemployment and loans for housing.

During the recent anti-corruption rallies in Russia, young people spoke out not only against the dishonesty of power and the lack of political freedom in the country, but also against the unfair distribution of income between different groups, the inaccessible medical services, the high fees for student housing and growing food prices. Perhaps throughout the post-Soviet space, young people will soon become a symbol of such problems and hopefully the agents of transformation for their own future. 

Translated by Yulia Oreshina

Svetlana Erpyleva is a Russian sociologist based at the School of Advanced Studies at the University of Tyumen, Russia. She is also a researcher with the Public Sociology Laboratory. She is a PhD candidate of the European University at St Petersburg.   

protest movement, Russia, Russian youth