by Stefano Caprio

If various terms are used to describe the new generations, Russians today are increasingly seeing the ‘Putin generation’ emerge. One wonders what fate is in store, although in reality it is difficult to discern any real social and ideological convergence. They are rather reminiscent of the ‘silent ones’ of the Second World War years.

Towards the end of the 1910s, people began to come of age in Russia who had so far lived their entire lives under the regime of Vladimir Putin, who assumed the presidency in the year 2000. If various terms are used to describe the new generations (Boomer, X, Z, Millennials and others), Russians are now increasingly seeing the ‘Putin generation’ emerge, and one wonders what fate is being prepared for it, as the commentators of one of Meduza's latest Signal columns reflect.

Some Russian sociologists explain that about half of this social group believes in good relations with the West and the world at large, and hopes for the ‘happy future of Russia’, the most popular expression of the late Aleksej Naval'nyj, the alternative leader who had managed to mobilise many young people between 2012 and 2020, trusting in the values of democracy and not putting their trust in the upper echelons of the Putin regime.

However, the three years of war are changing the balance and orientation of young Russians, who are increasingly settling on the dimensions of previous generations still marked by the Soviet past, in a general apathy that translates into silent support for the war and the propaganda of patriotic ideals.

In reality, there is no real social and ideological convergence among the members of the ‘Putin generation’, beyond the instrumental use they try to make of this expression. It is unrealistic to attribute to the mass of young Russians obvious characteristics of politicisation or rather distance from politics, conformity or rebellion or others.

The terms of ‘generational’ categories are often merely tools of publicity, rather than scientifically grounded sociological theories. It is clear that the period between the ages of 17 and 25 expresses the phase most sensitive to external events in one's personality, and major social shocks such as war, revolution or other ruptures in the course of life leave deep traces in the mind and soul.

At the beginning of the 2000s, Russian sociologist Jurij Levada identified six generations of Soviet Russians, referring to the various historical contexts that followed one another in the seventy years of the totalitarian regime: revolution and civil war, Stalinist mobilisation, patriotic war, the Khrushchevian thaw, the Brezhnevian stagnation and the Gorbachev perestroika.

This was followed in the last thirty years by the Yeltsin generation, which grew up in the pursuit of freedom, and now the Putin-Jugend, whose only demand is loyalty and obedience to the regime. Another sociologist, Iskender Jasaveev, speaking to the editors of Signal warns that specialists use the category of ‘Putin generation’ very cautiously, youth policy having changed several times in recent years.

Even the bracket defined as ‘youth’ itself has changed, from 14 to 30, then up to 35 and currently to 38, considering the mobilisation requirements for the ‘special military operation’. Especially after 2010, with the increasingly aggressive turn of Putinism, the state tried to take control of the younger population, with rather contradictory results.

The naval protests of 2011-2012 prompted as a reaction the revival of ‘patriotic programmes’ in schools of all 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 until the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 these programmes have taken on an increasingly militaristic character, as is evident from the Kremlin's approved youth policy outlook for 2016-2020, intended ‘for times of peace and war’.

Sociologists note that it is by no means easy to consider the effects of ‘patriotic education’, and it cannot be taken for granted that today's young Russians are staunch supporters of power, considering that polls struggle to reveal the thinking of individuals, while they make clear the willingness to share or not to share the dominant thinking.

The general support for Putin is a conditioned effect of the war in Ukraine, which has imposed a particularly careful attitude to what one can say in public, hiding one's opinion as much as possible. Specialists at the Levada-Centre point out that pressure from outside Russia plays a different role today than before, as today's young Russians have to a very large extent never been abroad, and are unlikely to experience this, except in ‘friendly’ and exotic countries, without knowing the real differences of worlds.

After all, the war has greatly changed the Western world's relations with Russia, and this is reflected in the culture and the media, with significant effects on the orientation of the younger generation, which feels rejected by the world, and thus grows up with a ‘culture of resentment’, further fuelled by state ideological propaganda.

As was the case in the Soviet Union, a dvoemyslie, a ‘double-think’ is thus formed, as Jasaveev observes: ‘This happens when the values to be conveyed are produced by official rhetoric, while in real life they become less and less credible and lived. A very faded patriotism spreads in the consciousness, if not totally devoid of content that has to do with everyday life.

In 2021, another sociologist, Grigory Judin, said that the generation that grew up under Putin is waiting for ‘events that will make them a special generation’, feeling excluded from the former world and not finding meaning in the present world. This is why the war in Ukraine has given answers to today's young Russians, making them feel that they are protagonists of a revolution of universal dimensions, and why many are passionate supporters of the Tsar.

A  few months ago an institute of experts very close to the Kremlim published a monographic study on Russian youth, which found that ‘young people have a confused and fragmented representation of what Russia really is’. Thus, assessments of youth orientations in Russia, among many contradictions, remain pending.

Still the Levada-Centr notes that young people are the most ‘westernised’ of Russia's citizens, by virtue of their use of global communication tools and the many products of mass culture, despite the state's obsessive propaganda against Western ‘disvalues’.

Beyond the war-patriotic enthusiasm, young people are generally tolerant of the much reviled ‘LGBT community’, which the new Russian laws define as an ‘extremist organisation’.

And despite the many state appeals to increase the birth rate and exalt ‘traditional values’ and family values, the average age of divorcees and first time parents continues to rise in Russia, without actually succeeding in changing the increasingly negative standards of recent years.

The Signal column proposes a parallelism with Spain's ‘Franco generation’, which grew up during the political and economic crisis of the 1930s, later leading to the civil war.

In that case too, a strong indoctrination of a national-religious ideology was imposed from above, relying on traditionalist Catholicism, and the polarisation due to that period influenced the subsequent development of Spanish society, between those who adhered to the structures of the regime and those who tried to organise underground movements against the dictatorship.

Franco's regime ended with the natural death of the dictator, and the generation that grew up under his power then managed to ensure a peaceful transition to democracy.

The Spaniards have avoided nostalgia for Francoism thanks to a great social debate on the dictatorship phase, which is what Russia lacked after the end of the Soviet Union, and only those who did not live through that period are nostalgic for the values of that time. Perhaps those who will be nostalgic for Putin will be the people of tomorrow, those who never experienced the repression and grotesque ideological forcing of those years.

Those who lived through the tragedy of the Second World War, before the baby-boomer generation, have often been referred to as the ‘silent ones’, often considered conformist and apolitical, having experienced the horror of the destruction of the world around them as they entered adult life. Later, they became the ‘innovators’ who began to build a new world, in Europe and around the world.

Perhaps even among the Russians subjected to the meat grinder of the Putin wars and lagers there will be those who are forced into silence today, but will one day help Russia rise from the ashes.

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