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 series of essays, I 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 III)
When I thought about recruiting students for the Russian-American Christian University (RACU), which we hoped to launch in 1995 or 1996, I wondered if our students would be any different than those in Nizhni Novgorod or Professor Dark’s students in Krasnodar, as noted in my previous essay. RACU’s students, who made up the first classes in 1996 and 1997, were born in 1979 and 1980. They were seven years old when Gorbachev’s speech revealed the crimes of Stalin and his colleagues; eleven years old in 1991, when the August coup collapsed and resulted in Yeltsin replacing Gorbachev as Russia’s top leader; twelve years old when the coup leaders were tried in court for their treasonous activities. Like most Russian youth of their age, these events were of no interest to them. Our students reflected many of the same attitudes of “Generation Nyet” by focusing mostly on the educational opportunities that allowed them to improve their lives. Like their peers, they also had no interest at all in politics or any form of public protest. Many came from families that suffered at the hands of the Communist regimes, and some of their parents and grandparents had been imprisoned because of their faith. This, added to the revelations about their country’s true history, made them wary of any societal engagement.
Over the course of my three or four trips a year to Moscow in the mid-1990s, it became easier for me to understand the attitudes of Russian university students. At the end of Gorbachev’s presidency, the possibility of a new future for Russia quickly gave way to a return to political chaos and widespread disappointment with the populist Yeltsin, who insisted on being an independent leader with no plans for building a new system of governance. As early as the fall of 1992, a series of scandals plagued Yeltsin’s administration. His appointees abused their power and stole resources from the state treasury. As the presidential election of 1996 approached with the Communists gradually gaining in power, Russian students – who had much to lose – were strangely silent, apathetic, and totally disillusioned, proving again why they were called “Generation Nyet.”
By the late 1990s, many of Russia’s university students were drawn to post-modernism, which they picked up from the West. After years of listening to party ideologues dishing out “The Truth” in required classes on Marxism-Leninism, and then witnessing the total collapse of the Communist regime that so regulated their lives, it is not surprising that these young students were drawn to post-modernism. In sharp contrast to official proclamations of “Truth,” articulated by Communist spokesmen who themselves knew the party line was a smokescreen, post-modernism was an attractive alternative. Post-modernism emphasizes that there is no truth, only competing “claims” to truth. In post-modernism, everything is relative; a person’s view of what is right is grounded in their experience, which may or may not be relevant to another person’s experience.
This approach appeared to fit in a world where no one had any answers, where no one knew what it would take to reconstruct a society after seventy years of Marxism-Leninism. For these young people, no other ideology seemed adequate to meet the complex challenges facing the new nations of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. I began to understand why “Generation Nyet” was so cynical, so hesitant to commit to any new “truth.” It was clear that these students were not looking for easy answers or for simple formulas generated in Russia or in the West.
In the decade following Vladimir Putin’s election as president of Russia in 2000, the size of the Russian economy doubled and living standards soared. This economic turnaround, together with Putin’s dramatic leadership style in sharp contrast to Yeltsin’s deteriorating health, changed the attitude of Russian university students. Scholars began calling them the “Putin Generation.” Surveys documented that Russian young people, ages 16 to 29, had now become enthusiastic supporters of Putin, and his popularity was unmatched anywhere in the West. Unlike young people in Eastern Europe, for example, who became committed to democracy and human rights after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, young Russians supported the values and aspirations of their new president.
Despite the president’s popularity in the decade after his election, young Russians continued to show little interest in getting personally involved in political affairs and were skeptical of the ruling elite and state institutions, just like the previous “Generation Nyet.” Putin was proving to be a strong leader with a successful economic record, and he was re-establishing the pride of Russia – and Russia’s youth were enamored by a sense that their country would once again be a great power respected and feared globally. Surveys also noted that the “Putin Generation” believed that money was the most important value and any means to achieve it was acceptable. They also believed that social protest was not a priority, because political rights were much less important than economic success.
The first substantial evidence of change in the “Putin Generation’s” overwhelming support of the president began in 2011 and continued into 2012 and 2013. Massive protests began to grow demanding freedom for political prisoners, new elections because of obvious fraud, and the registration of opposition parties and new legislation on parties and elections.
The growing lack of social mobility for middle class youth, which happens in authoritarian regimes with rising levels of higher education, caused a “brain drain” in Russia. A major spike in out-migration from Russia in the wake of the 2011-2012 demonstrations tripled (122,751) with Putin’s return to the Kremlin, and then tripled again from 2012 to 2015 (353,233). This exodus of young Russians aided to the weakening of the pro-democracy movement. Instead of voting for pro-democratic candidates and organizing resistance movements, these highly educated, highly skilled university graduates moved abroad to find employment and opportunity for advancement. This creative class of young leaders, instead of marching alongside like-minded democrats to protest the political repression in Russia, left the country in droves -- and the Putin regime made their exit as easy as possible. This was true of many of RACU’s best students who headed to western Europe, Canada, and the United States.
During my years in Russia, as I talked to university students both at the Russian-American Christian University (RACU) and at state universities where I visited or lectured, it occurred to me that part of the reason Russian students were less engaged in civic life is that they never had any significant exposure to a vibrant democracy. Unlike university students in Belarus, Ukraine or the Baltic republics, who could easily cross borders into countries where people were demanding human rights, political freedom, and the right to religious belief, Russian students rarely experienced democracy in action. The secularization that accompanied the collapse of Marxism-Leninism, aided by a post-modernist perspective that opposed any belief in truth, contributed to a weakened movement for democratic change in Russia.
The lights were going out on university campuses all across Russia, and university students were clearly not going to be in the vanguard for democratic reforms. When the Kremlin closed down RACU in 2012, forcing us to sell our brand-new campus, I wondered what it would be like when my work in higher education shifted to Ukraine in 2015. Would Ukrainian students reflect the same attitudes as the Russians or form a key part of the movement for democratic reform? I was anxious to find out.