These updates on the Russian-Ukrainian war, which I began writing in February 2022, are grounded in 25 years of working in Russia, followed by 7 years of involvement in Ukraine. My years in Russia involved commuting between Moscow and Washington, D.C., more than a hundred times. When the Russian-American Christian University was forced to close down in 2012, my focus shifted primarily to Ukraine, though I also engaged with educational partners from other post-Soviet states in Eurasia.
In this next series of essays, I am going to share what I learned from my experience working with Russian students from 1996-2012, and then compare these insights with the current generation of Ukrainian university students. The lessons that I learned in Russia continue to serve as a context for my work in other post-Communist countries in Eurasia.
Russian Students - A Warning Sign (Part I)
In the spring of 1992, the Board of Trustees of the Coalition for Christian Colleges & Universities made a decision that senior staff could take a four-month sabbatical. My wife Marge and I decided to avoid Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg) because of the substantial populations of Westerners and their large size. We thought a wiser choice would be to live in a city further in the “heartland,” so we could get a truer picture of life in Russia during this country’s time of transition.
I accepted an invitation to be a visiting scholar from the president of Nizhni Novgorod State University (NNSU), which I had briefly visited in 1991. Nizhni Novgorod, the third largest city in the Russian Republic in 1992, is located 230 miles east of Moscow on the junction of the Volga and Oka Rivers. During the Soviet period, the city became a major base for defense-related industries, particularly the production of MIG aircraft and nuclear-powered submarines and, as a result, the city was closed in 1932, which meant that no foreigners were allowed to enter it. We were the first American family to live in the city since it became closed.
When Marge and I arrived in Nizhni Novgorod, one of the biggest surprises we faced was the lack of any political activity on the part of the Russian students. The revolutionary events of 1991 and 1992 were very exciting to us, and the collapse of the August 1991 coup and the abrupt ending of the USSR in December indicated dramatic changes in the lives of average Russians, especially university students. I had read about Russian youth who were intensely involved in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Many former student activists, expelled from their universities or otherwise hounded by the tsarist authorities for their radicalism, led the Bolshevik Party. This did not happen 70 years later.
The passivity of Russian university students was jarring to us, especially in comparison with the young people in America protesting the war in Vietnam, the students in South Korea battling government troops in Seoul, or the Chinese students who protested their government and were fired upon by security forces in Tiananmen Square. The seeming indifference we observed among young people in Russia made us wonder if this was a symptom of a deeper problem and whether our hopes about Russia’s future might be short-lived. If Russian university students had no interest in civic participation and only wanted to focus on their own lives, then perhaps our expectations needed to be adjusted.
The root of the passivity among young Russians—labeled “Gorbachev’s babies” by journalist Ellen Barry—was a “thorough exhaustion with all things political.” Russian twenty-somethings grew up in a world where the Communist Party controlled every aspect of their lives, and this had resulted in a deeply ingrained cynicism.
The twenty-year-olds we were observing belonged to the “Generation In-Between,” a generation caught in the transition between Marxism-Leninism and an unknown future. I assumed when we arrived on the NNSU campus that these unexpected changes in Russia would provide an exciting context for my course on “Democracy and Moral Values,” which the president asked me to teach. Of all the institutions in Russian society, I thought the university would be a hotbed of political debate and dialogue concerning Russia’s future. During all the hardships caused by the collapse of its political and economic institutions, I assumed the university would be the center where intellectuals debated complex and pressing topics, such as: Would Russia follow the path of its Eastern European neighbors, or Sweden’s example, or that of the United States?
I imagined arriving in the middle of a campus brewing with controversy. I expected my class would be able to attend political rallies and symposiums on these subjects, a helpful complement to my lectures. I was dead wrong. There were no rallies, no symposiums. No lecture series on campus during my semester addressing these issues.
When I inquired about this lack of interest, I was told it was not always like this. In 1989, 1990 and 1991, the university almost closed because people were glued to their television sets watching the debates in the Russian parliament. Newspapers were gobbled up as residents excitedly read about the new revelations of Stalinist crimes and the stagnation of the Brezhnev years. But that was then.
Now frustration and cynicism had set in. Political weariness was the dominant disease. “We had hope when Gorbachev began but look where it has gotten us after three years” was a common refrain. We were told stories of student activities, of student rallies, but they were from earlier days under perestroika. No rallies were evident now. The only student crowds were around kiosks that sold Western music.
We also found the same disinterest among the other residents of Nizhni Novgorod. People were stoic, very accustomed to hard times. Hardly anyone had anything good to say about the country’s leadership, either Yeltsin or Gorbachev, and they saw no one on the horizon whom they trusted. They were deeply suspicious of democracy, and distrustful of a capitalist system where only the greedy win. Unlike Moscow or St. Petersburg, there was little democracy at the grassroots level. In fact, there was little political activity at all in this regional capital.
The more I thought about what these university students had lived through as children and young adults, the more I began to understand why this “in-between generation” was also labeled “Generation Nyet” (Generation No). When they were young, Soviet children were never told the true story of their country’s history because the Communist Party leadership, especially under Joseph Stalin, manipulated human memory by creating a narrative that bore little relationship to the reality that Russians actually experienced.
Russia’s youth watched as their parents were consumed from 1985 through 1990 by the revelations of injustices and mass repression of innocent people and the gross indifference of the Party’s leadership to the plight of the average Russian. Suddenly, everything they had been taught in school about their country’s leaders, particularly Lenin and Stalin, were now revealed to be lies. The under-thirty generation quickly adopted a hostile view toward the men who governed their country in the twentieth century and became convinced that more harm than good had been done not only by Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev, but also by Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
The label “Generation Nyet” stuck because for these young people the future of their country was bleak, and they expressed no interest in helping to change this. While many had confidence in their own personal futures with reforms underway, they adopted a fatalism about the future of Russia in general and a hostility toward an ideology of any type. Their response was “No!” to any effort to mobilize them in support of societal change. Russian youth wanted to be left alone to own some land and make a living—hopefully a good living, much better than what their parents knew. By the mid-1990s, Russian young people had had enough of Boris Yeltsin, did not want a return to Communism, and could find no viable alternatives. For them, escape from societal engagement was the only answer.
When my focus shifted to Ukraine in 2015 after I was declared a “foreign agent” by the Russian government, my work in Moscow and other cities like Nizhni Novgorod basically ended. I wondered what kind of university students I would find in Ukraine and if they would also share the same values, the same sense of fatalism about the future as Russia’s “Generation Nyet.” More than twenty years had passed since my teaching in Nizhni Novgorod, but I did not know what to expect. I had much more to learn in Russia, and the insights I gained by observing the impact of culture on these students had a powerful impact on me.