The National Interest
5th January 1996
A century ago, the youth of Russia were notorious for their radicalism. By the end of the 19th century, their most extreme representatives had pioneered strategies of political terrorism against the Tsarist state; led an ill-fated "crusade to the people"; and embraced versions of Marxism that demanded the total reconstruction of society. In the Bolshevik revolution, this student generation came to power under the leadership of Lenin, Bukharin, Trotsky, and Stalin-all former student activists who had been expelled from college or otherwise punished for their radicalism.
As Russia navigates its current time of troubles, the identity of its youth, especially the elite in higher education, takes on greater importance than at any time since 1917. If the political attitudes and behaviour of today's young people prefigure the political complexion of Russia in the first decades of the next century, we should take a great interest in knowing whether they are likely to form the vanguard of nationalist extremism or a bulwark of liberal democracy. My guess-based on recent experience living and teaching in Russia-is that the current generation will promote democracy, not through conscious political action, but rather through their own economic activities, which will establish a solid foundation for an autonomous Russian bourgeoisie-the great missing link in the evolution of political pluralism in Russia.
During the 1994-95 academic year, I taught at Kuban State University in Krasnodar, Russia, a city of about 1m in the northern Caucasus, 400 miles from Chechnya. Although my students were unusual in that they spoke English, they were in most other respects not unrepresentative of Russian students in general, or even of the larger population of young people.
My contact with these students left me with conflicting feelings about Russia's future. On the one hand, the cogency with which they evaluated their own and their country's predicament was little short of brilliant. Yet their profound sense of fatalism, and their corresponding unwillingness to take political action or to consider politics as anything other than a realm of self-interested corruption, was dismaying. To the extent that they were convinced of the desirability of liberal democracy, they believed that Russia's transition to such a system would take centuries; the immediate future will be dominated by bad habits learnt over centuries in order to deal with Tsarist oppression and Bolshevik tyranny: keep your head down, grab what you can when you can, and hope for the best. Above all, they share a reluctance to do anything that might draw the wrath of the authorities down upon them. Missing from their expectations is any sense of normal politics, where incremental reforms may be achieved through moderate forms of political action.
Few, if any, Russian students are opposed to democracy as such, or attracted to extremist ideologies. Many educated Russians have been immunised against totalitarian ideologies. The majority of students see Vladimir Zhirinovsky as a dangerous ma-niac, and the old communists as even worse.
Most students associate liberal democracy and markets with economic and political progress; they want Russia to move in this direction. They know the west has become rich by relying on markets and are attracted to democracy as a means of protecting individual rights and controlling state power. But these views are tempered by a conviction that although democracy is good, the Russians may not be good enough (yet) for democracy. Most are persuaded that Slavs in general, and Russians in particular, suffer from a cultural disposition that prevents them from wholeheartedly embracing democracy. The students display a peculiar form of self-contempt in this respect, often arguing that Russians have an innate desire to be told what to do. They ruefully conclude that a non-ideological, non-totalitarian form of authoritarianism is their best bet.
An example of the peculiarities of Russian democracy occurred during elections in November 1994 for city and regional assemblies in the Krasnodar region. Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic party did well-a large part of the voting population were pensioners who have suffered most from the collapse of the old order. When I asked my students if they had voted, they replied that they had gone to the voting booths, but had defaced their ballots instead of casting a vote. It turned out that this was intended as a protest against an effort by the university to force students to vote, with the threat to cancel their monthly stipends if they did not. This effort backfired; in one sense it revealed the student's latent liberalism. They were convinced that they had the right not to vote. But instead of collectively protesting against the university, they committed individual acts of defiance. When the election delivered a victory to a rogue alliance of right wing and left wing crazies, they all agreed this showed that democracy cannot work in Russia.
Even those students who think that democracy is sustainable in Russia are unlikely to actively defend it. While they overwhelmingly opposed the war in Chechnya, they seemed to regard protesting against it in public as inconceivable. Indeed, there has yet to be a single student protest in all of Russia against the war in Chechnya, even if collective political action probably could improve their situation markedly-by, for example, changing laws on conscription and improving their living conditions in the universities.
The mentality of university students in Russia flows partly from the unremittingly paternalistic manner in which they are treated. If modernity is largely defined by the idea of individuals as autonomous moral agents with the capacity to direct their own lives, then Russian higher education remains thoroughly unmodern. All important decisions about their programme of study are made for them, not by them. The amount of ritualised deference and hierarchy in the university is also extreme. When a professor enters a lecture hall, all students stand until the professor tells them to be seated. Professors reprimand students for sitting on the tops of their desks, for talking too loudly, and for dressing improperly. Most western colleges and universities present a buzzing atmosphere of energy and excitement; Russian universities are boring places. There are few public lectures, evening film shows, plays, or sporting events. There is no student government, no student association.
It is often suggested that substantial numbers of Russian youth are gravitating toward nasty forms of nationalism, as the crews of young men at Zhirinovsky's rallies seem to imply. But in my experience, the only kind of nationalism that appeals to most students is an inclusive, civic variety, which seeks to preserve Russia's cultural heritage and advances its economy and national security. Students have no trouble distinguishing between "negative nationalists," who "try to unleash wars and deepen conflicts," and "positive nationalists" who just want "to keep and develop their language, traditions, culture, and history." My students showed no interest in reincorporating the Ukraine or the other former Soviet republics into Russian control, or in launching campaigns to rescue Russian minorities in the newly independent states.
But for all their political passivity, students' criticism of Russian culture has its limits. At times, they fall back on the traditional Russian distinctions between west and east. The temptation is to argue that despite poverty and backwardness, the Russian soul is not only different, but superior to the shallow and individualistic west. Some students even argued that the greatest mistake Russia could make was to mix American and Russian cultures. One student said: "Now we live somewhere in between communism and capitalism, but the situation around us seems like anarchy."
For many it is religion rather than nationalism that provides a new source of psychic gratification. For some it is a rekindling of interest in Russian Orthodoxy, but many students are fans of the lively Protestant churches, which, they think, speak more to their needs than the traditional hierarchy of Russian Orthodoxy (and which are just plainly more fun). More disturbing to tradition-minded Russians is the popularity of the late L Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology and the ever persistent "Unification" church of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. It almost seems as if the old Russian penchant for skipping stages of social development is at work once again; just as Russia had tried to skip directly from absolutist monarchy to socialism, so now many Russians seem intent on skipping from communist tyranny to a New Age California metaphysics-bypassing liberal Enlightenment rationality altogether.
Despite their Russian pride, most students do believe that the west, and the US in particular, offers new beliefs and practices that would make Russia a richer and freer nation. They couch their critique of communism in terms that would warm the hearts of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher-two much admired figures. "We should change this attitude toward wealth inside people's brains. We were depraved by 70 years of communism when wealth was synonymous with crime."
Such comments reflect the wisdom of a generation that has travelled far from the allure of 19th century nihilism and revolution. They are deeply disillusioned and profoundly sceptical. Their concerns now are far more prosaic; they do not want to be avant-garde intellectuals or social scientists, but businessmen and professionals. Even while at university, the more adventuresome students miss class because they go on business trips to Turkey or the United Arab Emirates, where they purchase toiletries, candies, or consumer electronics in bulk to sell on the streets of Krasnodar. Such activity reflects the entrepreneurial spirit that has been unleashed among the young-many of whom are now opening their own kiosks and forging their own distribution links and, inevitably, reaching their own terms with the local mafia.
In the consolidation of a new property-owning class of young people may well be laid a more solid and lasting basis for an autonomous Russian civil society than has ever existed before. And, compared to the legacy left by their 19th century forebears, this one would be far from a shameful one, especially for a confused but realistic generation, cast adrift from all stable moorings.
