Russians Born in the 1990s Never Knew the Soviet Union. What Do They Think About Who Becomes President?

They were born in the 1990s. They never lived under the Soviet Union, and the internet has shaped them deeply — those are the two labels that matter most. What do they think about who becomes president?

This is a family of four. The mother, a journalist who grew up in the Soviet era, plans to vote in this presidential election for Pavel Grudinin, the candidate put forward by the Communist Party of Russia. The father, also of the Soviet generation, has retired from his job as an engineer; he backs Grudinin too. The older sister, Varya, 28, has no interest in politics and knows the candidates through her mother — she reckons her mother's job gives her access to more of the truth. The younger brother, Dmitry, born in 1995, supports a man named Alexei Navalny.

Russia votes for president on March 18, 2018. We began with a question: why is Navalny so popular with young people? On December 25, 2017, Russia's Central Election Commission struck him from the list of presidential candidates as ineligible. He promptly urged voters to boycott the election and stay away from the polls — a call that won over a good number of young people.

Navalny is a lawyer. From 2008 he used his blog to expose corruption in the Russian government, and in 2011 he founded the Anti-Corruption Foundation. He is one of the fastest-rising and best-known internet figures in Russia.

Our question soon widened: what are young Russians thinking? The Soviet empire collapsed in 1991, and they never lived through any of it. What do they make of politics, of history? They are growing up in the same internet age as everyone else — so where are they different?

This family came to our attention through Varya, who is doing a PhD in Beijing and speaks fluent Chinese. Besides her studies, she works part-time for a friend's travel company, and guides tours in Russia over the winter and summer holidays. "Anything that pays, I'll do it," she says.

Politics leaves her cold; work matters more. "Life is hard on young Russians — you have to feed yourself, and after graduation there's the question of buying a place," she says. Russian parents expect their children to fend for themselves once they come of age, she adds, so many start working while still at university. She began in her fourth year; her brother Dmitry began in his third.

Dmitry is the only one in the family who supports the opposition leader Navalny. Varya says she does not really understand him, and that telling voters not to vote is "selfish." Rather than do nothing, she thinks there are other ways to let the state know what you think.

Navalny's appeal has landed with some young people all the same. Besides Dmitry, Nastya — born in 1996 and living in Moscow — has already made up her mind not to vote this year.

"Another Six Years? No! Thanks"

On January 28, 2018, Dmitry joined a protest in Moscow's Pushkin Square, where Tverskaya Street meets the Boulevard Ring, two kilometers from the Kremlin, the seat of Russian power.

Dmitry, 23, teaches high-school math in Moscow. It was minus four degrees Celsius that day. Around him stood plenty of people his own age in heavy coats, holding signs. One 20-year-old's sign read: "Another six years? No! Thanks."

The protest was called in the name of boycotting the presidential election, and the man who called it was Navalny.

Dmitry, who has followed Navalny for years, reaches for the word "down-to-earth": "He's not a billionaire, he lives with his family out in the Moscow suburbs, he uses the internet, he makes videos, and the main thing is he understands memes." Those, to him, are what set Navalny furthest apart from traditional politicians.

Dmitry keeps up with the reports on government corruption that Navalny posts on his blog. He believes the facts the authorities cover up are what hold Russia back. "Navalny is the only opponent right now who can mount a protest and run in a federal election. In the 2013 Moscow mayoral race he finished second."

Navalny, born in 1976, took a law degree at the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, then joined the Russian United Democratic Party, which later expelled him over ideological differences. In 2008 he started practicing law, blogging in earnest and writing for outlets including Forbes Russia and The Moscow Times.

On the blog and in the press, his subject was almost always the truth about government corruption. Several of his investigations drew wide notice. The one that made his name exposed corruption at Rosneft and other state oil and gas companies: Navalny showed that officials at Transneft, the state pipeline company, had skimmed US$4 billion off a pipeline running from Russia to Asia, setting up shell firms for the sole purpose of taking contracts on the company's 3,000-mile-plus line.

The reports traveled far, above all on social networks. Dmitry says he read them online eight years ago, when he was 15, and has followed Navalny ever since.

As the investigations piled up, more people noticed him. In 2013 Navalny ran for mayor of Moscow for the first time and, to general surprise, came second. His political career then hit one obstacle after another.

In 2014, Navalny wrote in a piece for The New York Times: "Last September I ran for mayor of Moscow as a pro-reform, pro-democracy opposition candidate. Despite being barred from state-run media, I won nearly a third of the vote. Today, after I called for friendly relations with Ukraine and adherence to international law, my blog was shut down on charges of 'extremism.' Until recently it had more than 2 million visitors a month."

On March 2, 2017, Navalny posted on YouTube a video about the vast property owned by Russia's prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev. It has been watched 26.37 million times.

His numbers on social networks are an indirect measure of his reach among ordinary Russians. More often, though, people simply call him "Putin's rival."

The New York Times once analyzed the Moscow mayoral result this way: "This was a referendum on Russia's future, a rare chance to say 'no' to Putin's continued rule by saying 'yes' to one of his most outspoken and best-known opponents."

Nastya admits that she is boycotting this year's election because she is unhappy with Putin, not because she genuinely supports Navalny. "Putin's government is fairly corrupt, and that's a big flaw. Apart from the two capitals, every other city is poor."

Svetlana, born in 1994, studied international relations at a Russian university, and politics is not a subject she shies away from. On the contrary, she follows where the government is heading very closely. Putin has been in office so long, she says, that his attention has shifted: "Now he cares more about his own power and about how the world judges him. Since the Crimea crisis we've had serious economic problems, but Putin doesn't pay much attention to that. He's focused on his own power."

Dmitry's distrust of Putin's government shows in how often he protests. Yet January's demonstration left him with a feeling he had never had before: "I was very disappointed that day. Mostly because the crowd was clearly smaller than at the last big protest, in 2012. For a city the size of Moscow, 5,000 people is nothing." Young people may be unwilling to come out, he thinks, because they believe less and less that change is possible.

"We Don't Really See What Else Could Change Things"

Forbes named Putin the most powerful person in the world three years running, with this comment: "Putin continues to prove that he is one of the few people in the world strong enough to do as he pleases, regardless of the consequences."

Last November, the Russian polling organization Levada Center surveyed cities and towns across the country, sampling 1,600 people aged 18 and over across 137 regions on what they think of Putin's rule.

Asked what they like most about Putin, 19% of respondents said he is "a real man" — strong, cool-headed, brave. That was the most popular answer. Another 18% praised his foreign policy, saying that by standing up to the West he has made Russia respected again, and 16% called him a strong statesman.

Asked what they like least, 20% replied that they simply like Putin and he has no flaws; 16% said he does not care whether ordinary people's lives are good or bad; 10% said he is far too "soft" on the people around him, handing them senior posts indefinitely — and that "he still hasn't fired Medvedev." The most common answer of all, though, was "that's just too hard to answer," from 33% of respondents.

On February 8, Russia's Central Election Commission published the list of eight candidates for this year's presidential election. Putin, the incumbent, is candidate No. 4. The commission had earlier made public the would-be candidates: 64 people applied. Since it screens applicants for eligibility, not everyone who files makes the ballot.

Eight candidates from eight different parties ought to make for a fierce campaign. This one is unusually quiet. The main reason is that the seven candidates other than Putin are far behind him in political strength and public standing alike. The polls say the same: nearly all of them show Putin coasting to another six-year term, which would leave him in "real power" in Russia for more than 24 years — the longest-ruling Russian leader since Stalin, counting his time as prime minister.

Nastya says her friends neither protest nor pay much attention to the election. "This election is fake, and most young people know it. We all know the next president will be Putin. There's simply no choice. There's still Navalny, or Ksenia Sobchak, but they don't have a chance."

The All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) recently released a survey showing Putin's approval rating running between 69.9% and 73.8% in January and February this year. In the week of January 29 to February 4, 71.4% of Russians said they would vote for him.

It is worth noting that Levada Center also ran a poll last November: only 24% of people were certain they would vote in the election, and 34% said they might or might not.

Which is why the Kremlin has lately been trying everything it can think of to drive turnout up. Officials have told the press they hope to take 70% of the vote this year. In the 2012 election, Putin won 63% of the vote on a turnout of 65%.

Varya told QDaily that groups have recently begun knocking on doors around Moscow. They put a set of questions to people, then remind them to vote on March 18. Her own family, she said, has had a visit.

In 2011, after the four-year interval of Medvedev's presidency, Putin — then prime minister — got another shot at the top job and announced his candidacy at once, only to face accusations that the vote was rigged, which tore the country open.

On December 10 that year, after the State Duma elections, Russians took to the streets. It started with a few thousand and grew into tens of thousands, spreading from Moscow to several major cities and turning from a protest over fraud into a protest against Putin. Ever since, scattered demonstrations have broken out every few months.

A child born in the year the Soviet Union dissolved turned 20 in 2011. That may have been the first vote of their life — or the first protest of their life.

Svetlana did not join the protests that year, but she remembers them clearly. "At the last presidential election people made their unhappiness with Putin known, and in the end it made no difference, because Putin was confirmed the winner. We don't really see what could change things."

The Political Influencer the Internet Made, and the Putin With No Phone

At 3 p.m. on February 25, Navalny shared a much-discussed meme post on VK, Russia's homegrown social platform, mocking the government's get-out-the-vote ad as stolen rather than made in-house.

Navalny updates his blog, VK, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter almost daily. Even allowing for followers who overlap across platforms, his official YouTube channel has 1.68 million subscribers and his Twitter account 2.18 million followers.

Foreign media have compared Navalny to all sorts of figures: the Chinese writer Han Han, whose blog carried enormous weight; the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who tried to challenge Putin for the presidency and was jailed for tax evasion; even WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

"Navalny is a particularly interesting phenomenon. He became an opposition star, an anti-corruption influencer, through the internet. Using an influencer's enormous pull on young people, he can cash his online reach in at offline political events. That is something entirely new in an internet society — he can set the Kremlin's nerves jangling with a single video," said Wu Dada, who runs the account Su'e Zhuanbo and has spent years studying Russian youth culture, in an interview with QDaily.

In January 2017 the World Economic Forum published a world map of social networks. Facebook is not blocked in Russia, but only 20% of people use it; the homegrown VK is far more popular with the young. According to VK's own website, it had 470 million registered users as of February 23.

VK is Russia's answer to Facebook. Its founder is Pavel Durov, and the platform took off in Russia from 2006.

While studying at Saint Petersburg State University, Durov built Russia's largest student web forum. Later, his friend Vyacheslav Mirilashvili saw Facebook for the first time while at Tufts University — the site had been built on the neighboring Harvard campus. Durov, Mirilashvili and one more friend then built what is now the hottest social platform in Russia.

In the second year of VK's rise, Navalny started his blog and began building an audience on social platforms.

VTsIOM's survey of VK users found that 78% of people aged 18 to 24 use VK every day. VK itself published a report last year on the habits of 100,000 users aged 14 to 25: 64% said they get their news through VK, and 62% watch video on VK every day. A quarter said they trust the opinion leaders and political stars they follow online.

Eason, born in 1995, thinks the channel you get your information through shapes which candidate you support. "My grandmother loves Putin, because all we have at home is a television, and all that's on television is Putin," he told QDaily.

Nastya thinks what is online is closer to the truth than what is in traditional media: "Young people are all online now, so it's easier to see what's actually going on." Dmitry says he gets most of his news from the online outlets Meduza and TV Rain.

The way the young and their parents take in information really is changing. VTsIOM found that the share of people getting their information from print — newspapers and magazines — fell from 77% in 2014 to 55% in 2017, while online media went from 58% in 2014 to 54% in 2017. The overall trend looks like a decline, but among 18- to 24-year-olds the figure is 70%.

Part of the reason Navalny lives on social platforms is that the Russian government keeps a tight hold on the national media. News about him rarely surfaces in traditional outlets, even when he has just put tens of thousands of people on the street.

In July 2017, on the television program Non-Children's Talk Show, Putin took questions from young people. One asked: "Do you use Instagram? Do you watch YouTube?" Putin replied: "After a heavy day's work it's hard enough to climb into bed, never mind looking at Instagram," and added: "I have no connection to any account on social media."

This February, when Mikhail Kovalchuk, director of the Kurchatov Institute, Russia's national research center, told a meeting how fast technology is moving and how widespread smart devices have become, he offered the example that most people now own a smartphone. Putin cut in on the spot: "You just said everyone has a smartphone. I don't."

Putin may not understand the first thing about how social media works, but he has no intention of leaving alone the place where young people spend their days. In January 2014 the Russian parliament passed a law letting the Kremlin shut down any website it dislikes, and quickly.

That March the Kremlin used its connections to engineer a takeover of VK. Pavel Durov sold 12% of the company to Ivan Tavrin, a business partner of Alisher Usmanov, the oligarch aligned with Putin. They meant to get their hands on the platform where young Russians organize and speak.

On that deal, The New York Times argued that Putin will never really grasp how the young think: "Their real hero is Durov — the entrepreneur who bought a server with money saved from freelance work and built it into a company now worth US$3.5 billion. And now that hero is leaving Russia."

Over the three years since, Putin's government has stopped at nothing to tighten its watch on the internet. On November 1, 2017, a new law on anonymous internet use took effect in Russia. It does not ban VPNs outright, but it restricts access to banned sites. Navalny's own website, for one, has been blocked repeatedly by Roskomnadzor, the federal agency overseeing communications, information technology and mass media.

None of this has dulled the appetite for the corruption documents and reports Navalny publishes. Whenever he posts, plenty of young people share it and argue about it underneath.

The Washington Post noted recently that in Navalny's videos on the vast fortunes of officials, many viewers see a second truth: some 25 million Russians still live below the poverty line. Even so, the latest release from the research and forecasting department of Russia's central bank says the Russian economy grew 1.5% across 2017 and has left the recession behind for good.

Talk of Russia's economy, and of the pressure on young people, leaves Eason glum. His family is not especially well off, and he did not grow up in a big city. Like Varya's description of her own generation, Eason left to work and support himself the moment he came of age, while helping with the family business.

"I'm not happy at all with how Russia's economy is doing. Russia never has any money, and the government ought to be concentrating on that. If Putin does another six years, it'll just carry on like this," Eason says.

A Generation With No Memory of the Soviet Union

When Eason talks about Russia's economic troubles, he tends to mention in passing how hard life was for his parents' generation — though he admits he knows nothing about what living in the Soviet period was actually like.

In September 2017, VTsIOM sampled Russians of different ages on how familiar they are with their own history. Asked about events of the Stalin era or about Soviet-era political figures and events, more than 60% of respondents aged 18 to 24 answered "don't know."

Levada Center has also surveyed nostalgia for the Soviet Union. Among 18- to 24-year-olds the nostalgia index is far below that of every other age group — and, naturally, the older the group, the higher it climbs.

For those born after the collapse, the first route into Soviet history usually runs through their parents.

"My dad loves the Soviet era, but my mom's thinking is more modern and she doesn't like it. My dad is 45 now, and I think what he misses is really nostalgia. That era was closed off, and people's minds were closed off and controlled too. I think they know that. But they were young then. I don't think they really miss the Soviet Union. They miss being young," Nastya says.

Whether in the surveys or in conversation, these young Russians freely admit the past does not interest them much. Compared with what came before, they seem to care far more about what comes next.

Nastya thinks life in Russia is better than it used to be, but that plenty is still wrong — how many university graduates find work, for instance. Eason says wages are too low. Svetlana points to economic stagnation. Dmitry names an unfair democratic system.

The January 28 demonstration, which wound down not long ago, drew a smaller crowd than the protests of 2012 and 2017, yet word of it spread quickly and quietly among people online. Navalny, briefly arrested and released that day, has kept his nationwide anti-corruption campaign going; by his own count, more than 200,000 volunteers have signed up in nearly a hundred Russian cities.

At the end of last year, the well-known Russian news site Meduza named young people its person of the year for 2017, arguing that this new generation may deliver a shock to traditional politics.

Today's young Russians, in other words, are caught between two opposite currents: indifference to big politics, and the politicization of youth culture. The first means traditional politics; the second grows out of personal taste.

"I'm not sure Russia has a nationwide opposition organization or a party system. Every street movement we see starts online. That is a place with no clear affiliation or obligation, and to me it looks more like an improvised political movement. To scale an improvised movement like that up and make it routine, instinctive emotion probably isn't enough — you may need more extreme factors to push it along." Wu Dada does not think the young are wholly indifferent to politics or to Russian society; they have simply found new ways to speak and to gather.

As election day nears, Varya's mother has started recommending Grudinin to the people around her. She told QDaily that the Anti-Corruption Foundation Navalny set up is a good thing in itself, but that Navalny the man is another matter: she does not think he has offered any substantive policies or proposals. Varya adds that her mother and Dmitry have clashed again lately.

"I don't think my parents believe this society will change, so I haven't talked much with them about supporting Navalny. Their life back then, in the Soviet Union, was hard — full of injustice and corruption — and that's why they don't believe in change, or that the future could be better," Dmitry says. "One thing I can say for certain: our generation does not want to live the way people lived in the Soviet Union."

Cover image from Navalny's official fan page.