A Challenge For The Kremlin

We're seeing a huge response on social media again.

The appeal by 26-year-old actor Alexei Yarmushchik to Russian President Vladimir Putin seems, at first glance, to be just another “Victoria Boni case.” And while Bonya addressed Putin with the message “they’re afraid of you,” Yarmushchik said outright: “You’re not my president!”

Once again, we’re seeing a huge response on social media, with a million views and tens of thousands of comments. Once again, the media are discussing the video and highlighting the key phrase in their headlines: “You’re not my president!”

The events that followed the video’s release—a new, enthusiastic video, this time with declarations of love for Putin—might lead us to think that the young man wanted attention and got it. But I think we’d be mistaken to settle for this explanation as the only one.

For what?

In one interview, Yarmushchik admitted that his main motivation for recording the video was anxiety. And after watching his first appeal, I also got the impression that the main emotion here isn’t protest. The main emotion is confusion.

For many years, the Russian government has been raising young people who don’t ask questions, but the result is a generation that had to start asking questions far too early.

These twenty-year-olds never lived through the Soviet Union. For them, doublethink is not a natural way of life. They don’t know how to say one thing, think another, and live a third way all at once. Their parents were taught that skill. Their grandparents mastered it even better. But today’s youth grew up in a completely different Russia.

They’ve had time to get used to the internet as a natural environment of freedom. They’ve had time to feel like part of a global world. They viewed the ability to read any text, watch any movie, correspond with people from other countries, and choose their own identity not as a privilege, but as a fundamental feature of the modern world. Then it turned out that all of this could be quickly taken away. And no one explained exactly why.

Anxiety Is Rising

Even official Kremlin sociological surveys show that it is precisely the younger age groups who speak of anxiety more often than others. In a VTsIOM study on the emotional state of society, younger millennials turned out to be the most anxious age group: 41% fall into the “anxious” category, compared to an average of 25% across the sample. Another VTsIOM poll shows that among young people aged 18–24, the war in Ukraine remains one of the main sources of stress more often than for most other groups.

This does not automatically mean political protest. Anxiety rarely stems from politics in the first place. It begins with the feeling that your ability to plan for the future is disappearing. Young people cannot figure out where they’ll be living in five years, whether they’ll be able to work in their chosen profession (or whether there will even be jobs at all), whether they’ll be able to leave the country, whether they’ll be able to return, whether they’ll be able to speak their minds, or whether they can even build a life without constantly looking over their shoulders.

There Is No Alternative

Right now, the state offers young people a surprisingly limited choice. There are the heirs to the “right” surnames—the children of officials, security forces personnel, and the owners of vast fortunes—and the major clans have already established their dynasties. For them, the system always reserves a separate fast track. For the vast majority of the rest, there are essentially two options.

Either ostentatious loyalty: participation in state-sponsored youth projects, public support for the authorities, and a willingness to become part of the state apparatus or a shock troop. Or a constant existence under threat: of criminal charges, denunciation, mobilization, professional restrictions, or restrictions on freedom.

Between these two extremes, the space for a normal life is growing ever narrower. That is precisely why the words “You are not my president!” sparked such a reaction—many recognized their own feelings in them. A sense of having no future.

Perhaps that is exactly why the authorities react so nervously to stories like this. Not because of a single video, and not even because of one particular young man. Any system can deal with an individual blogger. It is much harder to deal with a generation that is beginning to wonder whether it has a future at all.

The authorities have administrative resources, propaganda channels, and law enforcement agencies; they have the power to ban, restrict, initiate legal cases, and rewrite textbooks. But there is one resource they do not have. Time. Today, time is not on the side of those who are trying to freeze the present. It is on the side of those young people who are still just learning to ask questions.

Tatyana Felgenhauer, “Deutsche Welle”

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