Ioffe Julia, “Why Many Young Russians
See a Hero in Putin: Twenty-five years after the breakup of the
Soviet Union, they crave the stability that the nationalist president
represents.”, December 2016 issue of National Geographic
See full article: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/12/putin-generation-russia-soviet-union/
He doesn’t know where to take me when I
meet him at the hotel by the train station, so we just start to walk down the
dusty summer streets of Nizhniy Tagil, a sputtering industrial city on the
eastern slope of the Ural Mountains. His name is Sasha Makarevich, a
24-year-old cement worker, a blond ponytail falling down his back, a
Confederate flag stitched onto his cutoff denim vest. “I thought it just meant
independence,” he explains when I ask about it.
We walk past a small, one-story cube of a
building covered with images of red Soviet stars and the orange-and-black St.
George’s ribbon that holds imperial, Soviet, and Russian military medals. “We
could go in here,” Sasha shrugs. “But it’s full of people who survived the
Nineties.”
Sasha survived the Nineties too. In
December 1991, just months before he was born, the Soviet flag came down over
the Kremlin and the Russian tricolor went up, ushering in the decade that hangs
like a bad omen in the contemporary Russian psyche. The expectation that
Russians would start living like their prosperous Western counterparts gave way
to a painful reality: It would be a hard slog to turn a command economy into a
market one, to make a democracy out of a society that had lived under absolute
monarchy and totalitarianism for centuries.
I never got to see those Nineties. My
family left Moscow in April 1990. When I first returned, in 2002, the era of
President Vladimir Putin, the antidote to the turbulent Nineties, was in full
swing. Since then I’ve been back to Russia many times and lived there for
several years as a reporter.
Most of the Russians I know have, to some
extent, been shaped by the 74-year Soviet experiment. We know in a deep,
personal way our families’ small histories and tragedies within the larger
tragedy of that history. But this generation coming up knows only a Russia
traumatized by the Nineties and then tightly ruled by Putin. This year—25 years
after the Soviet Union’s collapse—I went back again, to meet these young people
like Sasha. Who are they? What do they want from their lives? What do they want
for Russia?
Inside the windowless bar, all linoleum
and fake-wood paneling, Sasha and I get some thin beer in thin plastic cups and
find a seat among the heavily tattooed, red-faced men in tracksuits and
sandals, blasting reedy Russian pop from their phones.
Nizhniy Tagil, Sasha says, “is all
factories and prison camps.” Once famous for manufacturing the Soviet Union’s
train cars and tanks, it’s now famous for its idled factories, unemployment,
and Vladimir Putin. When Putin announced, in 2011, his intention to return for
a third presidential term, protests broke out in Moscow and other large cities.
The protesters were largely from the young, educated, urban middle class, and
that winter a factory worker from Nizhniy Tagil told Putin on national TV that
he and “the boys” were ready to come to Moscow to beat up the protesters. Putin
demurred, but the city has come to be seen as the very heart of Putinland.
Now Nizhniy Tagil has a new mayor, whom
Putin sent in to beautify the city, and a local magnate has built a fancy
health care clinic, but life is still tough here. Sasha went to school for
welding and worked in a factory making good money until crashing oil prices and
Western sanctions for the invasion of Ukraine sank the economy. Sasha stopped
getting paid. He spent a year looking for work before he landed a job in a
Boeing factory two hours away. Now he makes 30,000 rubles, or $450, a
month—about the local average.
I meet Sasha after a long workday, and he
is tired, his hands dirty. He doesn’t feel totally comfortable—or safe—in this
bar with the survivors of the Nineties. The city he describes is a violently
conformist place. “People here are very aggressive toward anyone who doesn’t
look like them,” he says. It’s a local, working-class uniform: tracksuit, buzz
cut with a hint of bangs. His peers, Sasha says, are often children of ex-cons.
“They don’t respect the law,” Sasha says. “ ‘A real man is either in the army
or in jail.’ My sixth-grade teacher told us that.” So Sasha learned to fight,
with fists, with knives. Once he walked home after a fight covered in someone
else’s blood, and he is strangely, beatifically cheerful as he tells me all
this.
What Sasha really wants to do is escape to
cosmopolitan St. Petersburg and open a bar. He’s been there a couple times;
it’s where he feels most at home. But his girlfriend won’t move unless he buys
an apartment there. Between his salary and hers, his dream will likely remain
just that.
It is a common refrain in Nizhniy Tagil:
young people with young-people dreams, locked out of them by the reality of
Putin’s Russia. They want to travel, but their salaries are in rubles, the
value of which has been halved by the economic crisis. Some want to open their
own businesses but don’t know how to scale the dangerous slopes of local
corruption. So they train their sights lower. They want a house or apartment, a
car, and a family. The things they crave are also the things that many of them
didn’t have precisely because their families survived the Nineties.
“The Nineties were very hard for us
financially,” Alexander Kuznetsov, a 20-year-old from Nizhniy Tagil, tells me.
“In 1998 my dad left the family.” Alexander was three. “My mom’s entire salary
went to feed me. I didn’t have many toys,” he says. “I’m alone in the family.”
That left its mark. “For me the most important thing is family,” Alexander tells
me as we sip coffee in a café off the main square. “I don’t want to strive for
high professional posts and have an empty home.”
His father fought in the first Chechen
war, in 1994. “Don’t join the army, son,” he advised Alexander. That was the
sum total of his father’s recollections of the Nineties. But Alexander isn’t
bothering to find a way out of the universal draft. “I always wanted to join,”
he explains. “Everyone in my family was in the military. My great-grandfather
fought in World War II.” Plus, military service opens up some of the more
lucrative job prospects for a young man in Russia: work in the police or the
Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor to the KGB. The army would give
him a shot at being a cop like his father. “I really want to have a stable
income,” Alexander says.
[…]
A modern Westernized woman, she tells her
mother about her boyfriends and the drug-fueled parties she attends. But in
some ways she is very, very Russian. “Putin irritates me,” she begins, sounding
like many in the oppositional, educated milieu of Moscow. “But just let a foreigner
try to criticize him! I will always defend Russia.” When she was in London, she
says, people constantly made fun of Russia and Russian women, mocking them as
mail-order brides. “It was offensive to the point of tears, to sit there and
hear outsiders making fun of us,” she says.
This is as political as she gets these
days. Back in 2011 Liza became interested in liberal politics, which was all
the rage in Moscow. She joined Amnesty International and the liberal Yabloko
party as an observer for the December parliamentary elections. She was assigned
to the polling station at her little sister’s school and was shocked to see
teachers stuffing ballot boxes. When Liza tried to say something, they screamed
at her and made her sit in a corner while the principal blocked her view. This
was happening all over the country. Many election observers caught it on their
phones and put the proof online, which sparked a mass protest movement in
Moscow and major cities unlike any Russia had seen in 20 years.
Liza, however, lost her nerve. “I was
hysterical,” she tells me. “I spent two hours crying.” After that she decided,
“No more politics. Ever. This doesn’t concern me, and I’m not strong enough to
fight.” It’s a promise that she hasn’t broken, even as the ruble has crashed,
cutting into her ability to do the other thing she loves most: travel. “Yes,
it’s terrible; there are fewer opportunities,” she says, but she refuses to
seek an answer in politics. “It’s a psychological block.”
Kseniya Obidina, Liza’s law school friend,
sees things similarly. Also the child of divorce, she says family and stability
are of primary importance to her. She wants a secure, well-paying job. She
wants to be able to afford travel and to support her mother and sister. This
dream has become more remote, though, with the political and economic crisis:
Kseniya wants to work at foreign law firms, but they are increasingly packing
up and leaving the country. Like Liza, she refuses to think about politics. “I
don’t see the point of talking about something you can’t influence. Talk for
talk’s sake isn’t interesting,” she says as we sit in a Moscow Starbucks. As we
leave, she adds, “It’s better to know and be quiet. It’s better not to speak
up. Why spoil your mood?”
How did they come to be this way? Vladimir
Putin is a big part of the answer. He came to power in 2000 as an anti-Nineties
candidate just as this generation was becoming aware of the world around them.
He promised to bring prosperity and security. Coasting on historically high oil
prices and economic reforms implemented in the Nineties, Putin was able to
fulfill much of that promise but at the expense of democratic freedoms.
Stability and economic well-being became
the ideology of the day, peppered with a heavy dose of nostalgia for the U.S.S.R.
and a whitewashing of its sins. Putin called the disintegration of the Soviet
Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Whoever
didn’t feel that, he said, “doesn’t have a heart.” Joseph Stalin became, in the
business-friendly lingo of the day, an “effective manager” who went a bit too
far. Textbooks and television came to reflect this new, state-sanctioned
nostalgia. Today 58 percent of Russians would still like to see a return of the
Soviet order, and some 40 percent see Stalin favorably.
Much of post-Soviet life has been a
hapless search for a uniting idea. At first it was democracy; then consumerism
became a stand-in for Westernization. “Modernization came through consumption,
but that’s not enough,” says sociologist Zorkaya. Ikea, which came to Russia in
2000, became wildly popular among the new middle class as a way to affordably
live in a stylish European—that is, non-Soviet—way. “It became a symbol of how
you could civilize your life without a lot of money,” she says, “but the fact
that behind this decor is a totally different concept of human beings and
values, somehow it doesn’t connect for Russians.”
Since the beginning of his third
presidential term, in 2012, Putin has promoted an even more aggressive
neo-Soviet ideology, both at home and abroad. He fought to keep former Soviet
republics, like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, in Moscow’s sphere of influence and
flexed Russia’s military power in distant Syria. A series of laws promoted
traditional social values and made dissent even more dangerous. One result is a
generation whose dreams are the embodiment of everything Putin desires them to
be: conformist, materialist, and highly risk averse.
Much is made of Putin’s stratospheric
popularity—at the time I reported this article, Putin had the approval of 80
percent of Russians polled. But Russians between the ages of 18 and 24 approve
of him at a higher rate than any other age group: 88 percent. More than any
other generation, they are proud of their country and its stature in the world,
associate its military prowess with greatness, and believe in its future.
In a dark, narrow courtyard in
Novosibirsk, between two 19th-century brick buildings, I find the local
bohemians drinking beer and listening to electronic music. It’s here that
Filipp Krikunov, born in 1995, opened an art gallery. Ducking away from the
gathering, he shows me around. One room is lit with a fluorescent pink light,
the wall arrayed with shelves holding mini-busts of Lenin, painted in silly
patterns. In the next room young artists have cobbled together mind-bending
ways to take selfies: Stick your head into this cardboard box full of shattered
mirrors. Stick your head in another to find the remains of a Burger King meal.
One of Filipp’s friends and partners in
the gallery bounds up and shakes my hand. “We just found out that they didn’t
bury anyone under this space,” he gushes. After Filipp rented the rooms, he and
his friends realized that the building next door houses the FSB. In the 1930s
it was called the NKVD, and it killed as many as 1.2 million people. Often the
NKVD’s victims were shot and buried on-site. But Filipp’s gallery, Space of
Modern Art, lucked out. No bones in the basement here. Just
hipsters in the mild Siberian summer night.
I had met Filipp earlier that day at a
chic Novosibirsk café, surrounded by impossibly fashionable young women with
very obvious lip jobs. Novosibirsk is Russia’s third largest city, a center of
industry and scientific innovation. There’s a lot of money here. Filipp, though,
didn’t see much of it. He grew up without a father. Like many young Russians,
he was raised by his mother and grandmother. His great-grandfather fought in
World War II and was later purged by Stalin. His grandmother became a renowned
chemist, and his mother also worked in science. But the women’s passion was
politics. “All the main hashtags at home are politics,” Filipp says.
Filipp was 16 when the pro-democracy
protests broke out in Moscow and spread to cities like Novosibirsk. Tens of
thousands poured into the streets to demand free and fair elections, yet the
protests felt more like block parties than demonstrations. Filipp too was fed
up with Putin. “Messages were being sent to him, messages of discontent, and
yet there was no dialogue with those people,” Filipp says. He didn’t recognize
the Russia that Kremlin-controlled television showed. “That was a different
country,” he says. “I didn’t know a single person like that.”
“I went to the protests. I tried to be
politically active,” Filipp tells me. “It was boiling inside me. I wasn’t
thinking about anything else. The whole country is rising in protest, and I’m
part of it.” But he was soon disappointed. “I looked around, and the people at
the rallies weren’t my people. I wasn’t totally comfortable,” he says. “And it
didn’t lead to anything.”
That’s not quite true. The protests did
change things, just not for the better. In May 2012 the Kremlin cracked down.
Since then dozens of people who attended protests have been rounded up, tried,
and jailed. The political situation in the country only worsened as
Putin—feeling betrayed by the middle class he felt he had created with his
policies—pursued an increasingly authoritarian line. He publicly labeled
liberals who advocated for freedom and democracy “national traitors” and “a
fifth column.”
The harsh response left a deep impression
on the Putin generation: It taught them to stay out of politics. “I decided
that either I fight this system,” Filipp says, “or I live in a different
system”—the world of art. “There’s more good in it,” he says. “Politics are
nerve-racking. You’re constantly unhappy; you’re not enjoying your life.”
Putin is up for reelection in 2018. There
is little doubt that he will run again and even less that he will win another
six-year term. That would mean he would be in power until 2024, if not longer.
By then Filipp, who was five when Putin first became president, would be 29. Is
he comfortable living with Putin until then? He shrugs. “I’ve lived my whole
life with my right hand, and it’s fine.”
In Akademgorodok, a small academic town
built around Novosibirsk State University and its many labs, I meet Alexandra
Mikhaylova. She’s 20, with cutoff denim shorts and the dyed red hair of a punk
rocker. Alexandra came from a family of scientists—her mom is a geologist and
her father a physicist—who gravitated to this little town, which was founded in
1957 as an incubator for science and the engine of the Soviet Union’s technological
race with the West. Since the Soviet collapse, underfunded Russian scientists
have fallen behind their Western colleagues. Both of Alexandra’s parents have
gone into business.
Now, as a third-year journalism student,
she is working on a documentary about the town and its lively intellectual
history, specifically the underground of the 1960s. “They had their own system
of government until 1966,” Alexandra tells me as we stand in the gleaming
hallway of the university’s new building. Her eyes light up as she tells me
about her research into this little corner of freedom and intellectual ferment
in a sea of totalitarianism. In 1966 some of these free-spirited young
scientists wrote a letter to Moscow, complaining about things they didn’t like.
The response, Alexandra says, was swift. Many were fired, and strict political
control was put in place. But Alexandra’s documentary picks up again in the
1980s, with the Soviet punk rock underground that spread all over the country.
These days, Alexandra says, “it’s
stagnant. Something’s missing. People aren’t politically engaged. When it comes
to the government, young people are either neutral or positively disposed. No
one stands up for their opinion, and there’s a thin line between indifference
and agreement.”
The government is again in the censorship
business. A classic rocker from the 1990s had his concert canceled here because
he spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine. “Year after year they close
another media outlet, the ones that show things more objectively,” Alexandra
says. More than anything, though, she is saddened that the Akademgorodok she
lives in lacks the creative fervor of the Sixties and Eighties. The society
around her, unlike the one her parents experienced, is cautious and stale. She
longs for a change, a shake-up. But she knows it won’t be her generation that
brings it.
“It’ll be the kids who are 13, 15 now,”
Alexandra says wistfully. When they are the age she is now, her generation will
have other priorities. “We’ll try to help, but if you’re 30, you’re not going
to lead a revolution with a baby in your arms.”
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