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This Generational Struggle for Russia's Soul
Link to tweet
…I’m not suggesting that Putin will fall because young Russians find it harder to post bathroom selfies. Not quite. Extrapolate it out, though, to a Russian future without iPhones, without Coke, without fashion labels, without western music, without Hollywood films, without international travel, and without the freedom to even complain about it, and you do wonder. Indeed, you also wonder if this isn’t, in a sense, precisely what Ukrainians are fighting for, and why they are fighting so hard. For 32 years, they have tasted the world. Now comes the old oppressor from the East, determined to wrest them out of it. Just like young Russians, but unlike many older ones, they know precisely what it is that they have to lose.
If there’s a historical parallel for this, I suppose you’d find it in those haunting black and white images of young Afghan women in miniskirts, or of hippy Iranians in flares before 1979. The more obvious parallel, of blue jeans and rock’n’roll ripping holes into the Iron Curtain, doesn’t quite work. Even when young East Berliners watched, say, Bruce Springsteen in 1988, they were seeing what they wanted, not what they’d already known but abruptly lost. What you do have though, clearly, is a familiar dynamic of young people who can see a future, and old men hellbent on dragging them back to the past.
We’ve grown accustomed, in the past decade, to projecting softness and fecklessness onto millennials, as if their very futurism — their social performances and their blithe connectivity; their internationalism and easy travel — comes, inevitably, with a lack of conviction, backbone and mettle. I’m not sure how many more young, Instagram-ready Ukrainian MPs we have to see, chopping off their nailjobs to better hold an AK-47, before we realise that this has always been nonsense.
Either way, there’s a new curtain coming down, whatever it is made of, and I don’t see much chance of Vladimir Putin convincing even the most politically apathetic of young Russians that they’re on anything other than the wrong side of it. Shirt off or shirt on.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/328b1cb4-a3d5-11ec-9909-6547dd4945b7?shareToken=61f1278b01782899a1aa19274a3bfac5
If there’s a historical parallel for this, I suppose you’d find it in those haunting black and white images of young Afghan women in miniskirts, or of hippy Iranians in flares before 1979. The more obvious parallel, of blue jeans and rock’n’roll ripping holes into the Iron Curtain, doesn’t quite work. Even when young East Berliners watched, say, Bruce Springsteen in 1988, they were seeing what they wanted, not what they’d already known but abruptly lost. What you do have though, clearly, is a familiar dynamic of young people who can see a future, and old men hellbent on dragging them back to the past.
We’ve grown accustomed, in the past decade, to projecting softness and fecklessness onto millennials, as if their very futurism — their social performances and their blithe connectivity; their internationalism and easy travel — comes, inevitably, with a lack of conviction, backbone and mettle. I’m not sure how many more young, Instagram-ready Ukrainian MPs we have to see, chopping off their nailjobs to better hold an AK-47, before we realise that this has always been nonsense.
Either way, there’s a new curtain coming down, whatever it is made of, and I don’t see much chance of Vladimir Putin convincing even the most politically apathetic of young Russians that they’re on anything other than the wrong side of it. Shirt off or shirt on.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/328b1cb4-a3d5-11ec-9909-6547dd4945b7?shareToken=61f1278b01782899a1aa19274a3bfac5