Young Russians’ About-Face From the West

When the Berlin Wall collapsed, most young, educated Russians aspired to what could broadly be described as Western values: democracy, free speech, anti-imperialism. Teenagers were infatuated with Western music and clothes (all the more attractive because they were forbidden), while older Russian intellectuals echoed their Eastern European dissident colleagues in calling for a reckoning with the past, the turning of a new leaf and building an open society. Everything about Soviet society, from its clothes to its ideas, seemed drab and clunky compared with the vibrant, thriving West.

What a difference a few years make. Central and Eastern Europe have slipped largely into Europe's cultural and political fold. But in Russia, thanks to a decade of anti-Western fervor propagated by the Kremlin, a new generation is growing up strikingly out of sync with the West. "Back in the perestroika years, young intellectuals sincerely believed in certain things, like freedom of speech and transparency of the state," says Maria Lipman, a fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. "The generation who grew up in the Putin era have a completely different mentality. Modern pro-Kremlin youth groups are so well fed by the state that they've grown faithful as tame dogs." The result is a generation that not only buys into the Kremlin's world view, but is also deeply distrustful of anybody who thinks differently.

 

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Denis Volkov, of the Moscow Levada Center, has studied the attitudes of Russia's youth toward the West and its values and uncovered a scary picture. Over the past decade, numbers have been falling. A poll last month showed that 40 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have a "negative" attitude towards the U.S., not far behind those over 55, a Soviet-era generation that has long been steeped in anti-Western propaganda. And in a kind of demented historical throwback, Stalin is once again in favor. More than half the older crowd said they felt "positively" about the Soviet leader, while more than a quarter of young people agreed, up from just over 15 percent at the turn of the millennium. A generation after their forebears hankered after blue jeans and tapes of Western music, young Russians now wear the same clothes and listen to much of the same music as their Western counterparts. But while they may look more Western, there is a deep and widening divide in their attitudes, according to the Levada Center's statistics.

The rollback of pro-Western attitudes is largely a direct result of a concerted state policy aimed at shaping the hearts and minds of Russian youth, led by Putin and executed by his chief ideologist, Vladislav Surkov. Across Russia, state-created youth groups are stepping up efforts to shape the hearts and minds of Russian youth by organizing camps, congresses, and talent competitions, just like the Komsomol, the youth branch of the Soviet Communist Party, did once upon a time. By no means are all of them sinister, but they are all political. The youth-led Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 and 2004 came as a deep shock to the Kremlin, which suddenly feared that a similar grassroots revolution could destabilize Russia. In response, Putin's regime unleashed the mind-warping assault, says Stanislav Belkovsky of the Moscow-based National Strategy Institute, who worked with the Kremlin on promoting pro-Russian candidates in the 2004 Ukrainian election.

Surkov and other top Kremlin ideologues quickly ordered a slew of anti-Western television propaganda casting George W. Bush's campaign to spread democracy in the Middle East as an attack on Russia. Surkov characterized Ukrainian democracy as chaotic and the Georgian leadership as corrupt. He also created several state-funded youth groups, such as Nashi ("Ours") and the Young Guards. At the height of the regime's paranoia about the possibility of an Orange Revolution in Russia, circa 2005 to 2006, these youth groups numbered up to half a million members and dominated campuses with a strongly nationalistic, anti-Western philosophy. "Putin's television anti-Western propaganda has done its dirty business," says Lipman. "Young Russians are cynical people who believe that Russia is surrounded with enemies, that the West does not want Russia to grow stronger." The last generation of liberals now tend to be older, people who are now between 25 and 35. Everybody younger, says Lipman, "is a proud patriot who dislikes the West."

Ella Panfilova, an adviser to President Dmitry Medvedev on human-rights issues, underscores the problem. "The state should not participate in youth movements at all," she says. "Most young people in Kremlin-organized youth movements still have a Cold War mindset. It is not right for Russian authorities to divide young people into those who are members of Nashi and the rest."