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 II)
My first few classes gave me insights into what these Russian students thought and how they chose to hide their own personal views. When I asked them to comment about some observations that I made about democracy, they did not respond. The room was completely silent. One of the faculty members who attended my class told me afterward that Russian students were never asked what they thought. They were hesitant to respond because all of their previous experience had taught them to remain silent and unobtrusive. When I finally was able to coax them into a discussion, I discovered an overwhelming sense that they had little hope for the future of their country – and that they felt there was nothing they could do about it.
After dealing with democracy as an ideal and a concept for the first two weeks and emphasizing the relationship between democratic institutions and the moral values of society, I then introduced my students to the principal institutions of American democracy – the Congress, the presidency, the judicial system, American political parties, and state and local governments. I repeatedly emphasized that I did not come to Russia with answers for all their political problems but wanted to teach about America’s 200-year experience with democracy. My challenge to them was to evaluate whether America’s political system was a possible model for Russia and what aspects of it would be transferable to the Russian context.
The students and faculty were genuinely interested in learning about American democracy. I never once was faced with a hostile audience. Several times, students would ask pressing questions about how democracy today in America seemed to be different from its earlier manifestations, but these were honest questions as they tried to understand contemporary America.
During the last two weeks of the course, it was time to get the students more engaged in the issues and to discuss with them their views on the relevance or attractiveness of democracy. I warned them several times that these last two classes would be primarily discussion sessions, not lectures, and that they should come prepared. The warning did little good.
When asked to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of American democracy and then to discuss whether, in their opinion, its strengths were applicable to Russian life, they clammed up. Even when I waited in silence for a response, a wait that seemed like hours, they did not answer my questions. There was a nervous shuffling of feet and many bowed heads, but no interaction. I dismissed the class and told them we would try again in our next class. Finally, after much delay this second time, a discussion began. The students and faculty were unanimous in their response, which was shared by one professor who said, “Thank you, Dr. Bernbaum, for your course on American democracy and moral values. We found it to be a very honest and frank discussion of your country’s political experience. But, of course, it has little relevance to our context.”
When I asked them the reason for this response, a common reply was “We have no hope. Democracy will not work here – we are used to authoritarian forms of government. That has been our experience for hundreds of years. In America, you have a tradition of respect for individual rights based on your religious heritage. That is not true in Russia. Democracy just doesn’t fit here.”
At the end of the semester, all final course evaluations had to be individual oral examinations with only one major question, which was a surprise to me. I tried one more time by asking my students to evaluate how the experience of democracy in America might be relevant to the struggles underway in their own country. During her final exam, one student articulated the perspective of many of her classmates when she said: “Being realistic, I must say that Russia is not ready for democracy yet . . . American-style democracy cannot be permitted to operate for it would lead not just to a change in government, but to the disintegration of the state. Without a strong central government, our nation would not hold together.”
My teaching experience at Nizhni Novgorod State University was similar to that of Professor Taylor Dark from the University of California at Irvine, who spent the 1994-95 academic year teaching at Kuban State University in Krasnodar, a city of one million located 743 miles south of Moscow. He noticed a profound sense of fatalism and futility in his students and an unwillingness to take political action or to consider politics as anything other than a realm of corruption. If they had any hope that Russia would change and become a democracy, they seemed convinced that this would take centuries, not decades. In their minds, bad habits learned over centuries of tsarist oppression and Bolshevik tyranny would not change quickly. From their perspective, “Generation Nyet” needed to “keep their heads down, grab what you can when you can, and hope for the best.” In addition, do not do anything that will draw the wrath of the authorities.
These young people were uncompromising in their hostility toward the past Communist regimes and its venerable leaders who they now knew were tyrants and murderers. While they thought democracy to be a good system, they were surprisingly critical of their fellow citizens who they saw as unfit to take part in democratic institutions. Many saw Slavs in general and Russians in particular as culturally committed to following an authoritarian leader. Professor Dark’s students believed that immature Russia would turn democracy into anarchy, which was even worse than authoritarianism.
I was getting a clear message about Russian university students – they were not going to become agents for political reform. The hoped-for changes that were inspired by the failed coup in August 1991 were not of interest to Russia’s university students even in the spring of 1992. The next generation of the country’s leadership had no hope for the future, no vision for how things might be different now that the power of the Communist Party had been marginalized. This was troubling, and it seemed to be true on other Russian campuses I visited in the early 1990s. This was a warning sign, significantly shaped by traditional Soviet cultural values, that many foreign commentators simply ignored. It made me wonder about how our new Christian university, if we could get it licensed and registered, might bring in students from Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox communities who were people of hope, people who wanted major political reform to reshape their country.