Putin’s Children

More than two and a half years after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation” in Ukraine, the disproportionate effects on Russian youth have become clear. At home, young people face ubiquitous indoctrination and greater constraints on their freedom. Many try to distract themselves from this new reality, not paying too much attention to it; the very few who express their discontent openly—or do things like trying to set fire to a military recruitment center—are sometimes punished with harsh prison sentences despite their young age. 

Military service, which applies to all Russian men between the ages of 18 and 30 who don’t have an exemption from the army, has become especially fraught. Although by law conscripts (as opposed to volunteers, contract soldiers, and those who have been specifically mobilized) cannot end up in a war zone, not everyone now believes that the military maintains this restriction. In other words, a fundamental feature of the conflict is that Putin and his aging Politburo are deciding for the younger generations not only how to live but also how to die.

Observers outside Russia have often assumed that young Russians are bridling under the Putin regime and that any real change in the country’s political culture will require a generational shift in its power structure. These youth never experienced life in the Soviet Union, the thinking goes, having grown up with open borders and market capitalism in an era in which individual rights and freedoms were normalized. If young people could only take the reins of power, everything would be different.

The reality is more complicated. For one thing, young Russians have never known anything other than Putin: they have not experienced normal democracy or even a qualitatively different leadership. They have also learned the advantages of conforming. Along with growing repression, the Putin regime has used an extensive array of rewards to keep young Russians loyal—including offering special privileges to those who serve in the army, work in the military-industrial complex, or otherwise show themselves to be diligently toeing the line. It has also sought to use patriotic youth movements and social media to shape their attitudes and build their loyalty.

The cumulative effect on young people of this mix of brutal repression and aggressive courtship is, for the moment at least, silence: among Russia’s youth today, there are few signs of any meaningful currents of resistance. Instead, many of them seem to be passive or active conformists, seizing on the opportunities that the still-present market economy or big enterprises provide for young careerists. They are sometimes far from the Kremlin’s ideal, for which young people would consist of obedient workers in the military-industrial complex, soldiers, and mothers with many children, adherents of traditional values. But even these archaic prospects do not seem meaningless to many. Although outward behavior may be only one part of the story, it suggests how great may be the challenge of breaking with Putinism.

INVOLUNTARY LOYALISTS

The story of Russia’s youth in the two and a half decades since Putin came to power is in many ways contradictory. Until about 2018, younger Russians, especially those in the youngest adult cohort (between the ages of 18 and 24), were generally the most loyal to the regime, according to survey data collected by the independent Levada Center. This finding is paradoxical only at first glance. At the beginning of Putin’s rule, when today’s 20- and 30-year-olds were still at a tender age, Russia was benefiting from strong economic growth—a result of the market economy built in the 1990s and high energy prices in the early years of this century. Thus they grew up in a more comfortable era of booming markets, new means of communication, open borders, and consumerism.

Yet this generation was hardly exposed to democracy, which was relentlessly curtailed by the government. Having become ultramodern consumers, many young Russians—and many of their older counterparts, as well—never became full-fledged modern citizens. They did not understand the value of the rotation of power and thus of free elections: the regime already delivered consumer benefits as it was. For most Russians, loyalty to the system was evident not in their active support for Putinism but rather in their indifference to politics.

Beginning around 2018, however, there was a noticeable shift. Russia was becoming more closed, and this was disconcerting for a generation that had grown up in a modernized and relatively open society. The very style of the government and of Putin—who began to be called, and not for endearing reasons, “granddad”—seemed hopelessly outdated. Young people became more aware of Russia’s shrinking political space and grew more skeptical of the regime.

The changing attitudes were also influenced by a new fashion for protest, which took root among the young. Although the lawyer and activist Alexei Navalny had been one of the figureheads of the mass protests of 2011–12, his emergence as opposition leader and inspiration to young people came later in the decade, when he built an effective organization and began to set the tone for a new kind of political commitment. More than just a symbol of Russia’s future, he served as a model of behavior and speech. He spoke in a modern, informal, youth-friendly language that was very different from the bureaucratic speech of Putin and the ruling class, and he raised problems, including corruption, that were understandable to many, naming and shaming specific members of the government. 

At the same time, for young Russians in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other large cities, the spread of an advanced capitalist economy and exposure to global cultures and ideas encouraged a growing diversity of opinions and behavior, including in politics. This made them more likely to question the values promoted by the state.

Young people became more aware of Russia’s shrinking political space.

For the regime, these developments were not an immediate threat. Russia’s aging demographics meant that older generations were more numerous than their younger counterparts; they also were more likely to vote in elections. More concerning, however, was the potential for young people to spearhead political activism. After 2018, sociological research made clear that younger Russians, especially teenagers and young adults, were thinking differently about the state: they were less supportive of the government, more unshackled, more open to the world and new information, and more likely to support the kind of opposition that Navalny represented.

The Kremlin, now increasingly authoritarian, could not allow this youth culture to flourish. It began to compete with the opposition for this new generation by, among other things, actively indoctrinating with “patriotism,” offering tools for self-development in youth organizations, and stimulating interest in military service as a springboard for a future career. And when it couldn’t coax compliance, it used the fist: the Kremlin’s brutal crackdowns on protests and free media—which were still active at the time—and the direct tightening of repression made any protest activity dangerous. 

After it began the “special military operation” in 2022, the regime took these steps further. Authorities simply blocked or banned independent media, such as Novaya Gazeta, Meduza, Ekho Moskvy, and TV Rain, as well as social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram; in 2024, it also slowed down YouTube. Russians can now access these platforms only by using virtual private networks. And perversely, the emigration of many of the most politically active young people has made it easier for Russian authorities to enforce quiet.

CAPTIVE MINDS

The war itself has given the regime new reason to cultivate its youth. Russia needs soldiers, IT specialists, workers for its military-industrial complex, and an obedient rising generation that has been indoctrinated in the revanchist and simplified history propagated in the new textbooks. The Kremlin is now less interested in targeting older generations with propaganda—state television can handle that. A significant part of the efforts and power of the state are now being thrown at their children. The result is that while younger cohorts are not particularly enthusiastic about the war, they are mostly going along with it.

Consider the legions of volunteers and contract soldiers who now go to the trenches for money or out of a false sense of duty to their homeland. In the first half of 2024 alone, according to official data, 190,000 people signed service contracts; although the statistics are not broken down by age, and many older men are signing up, it can be assumed that there are many young people among the volunteers. Since the summer, regions throughout Russia have been competing to offer the highest payouts for new enlistees. 

In Moscow, the richest city, someone who voluntarily enlists can now receive up to 5.2 million rubles in their first year of military service—about $55,000, including a signing bonus and then a monthly salary of around $2,700. For young adventurers or even new fathers, that is a lot of money. But the rising scale of payments also indicates that men are not prepared to sell their bodies cheaply.

Schoolchildren and students have also been co-opted into the war effort. Many are tasked with weaving camouflage nets and making candles for use in the trenches, for example. Some Russian high schools are now assembling drones, which means that kids are learning this particular skill starting around the age of 16. (Putin recently met with some of them.) Significant are the large youth organizations that the state has built to unite young people behind the regime. These include the Yunarmia, or Young Army; the Movement of the First; and the I’m Proud student clubs, which now include millions of young and very young Russians. 

Young Army was established two years after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, when Putin’s Kremlin had already begun its totalitarian turn. The start of the “special military operation” sharply accelerated this process, with the formation of the Movement of the First in 2022. Although young Russians are not yet required to join them as they were in Soviet times, these organizations draw on Soviet models such as the Young Pioneers and the Little Octobrists, which aimed to incorporate and indoctrinate all youth.

COMPLACENT COMRADES

If Russia’s younger generation has become a growing presence in the state’s patriotic displays, it has, for now, noticeably avoided acts of resistance. Young actors, writers, and artists have remained silent as the state has systematically destroyed the old theater, the old cinema, and independent literature. They have stood by as educational and cultural institutions and schools that took years to build are destroyed or when outstanding professionals who were admired for decades are stigmatized and persecuted. 

Young actors remained silent in the spring of 2023, when state prosecutors forced the legendary actress Liya Akhedzhakova, who is 86, to resign from the once famous Sovremennik Theater, where she had performed for decades, for speaking out against the war. Nor did they object in July 2024, when the state imposed harsh six-year prison terms on the stage director Yevgenia Berkovich and the playwright Svetlana Petriychuk for allegedly promoting extremism in a play that had won the country’s highest theatrical award just two years earlier.

The same has been true in Russia’s professional and economic life. Hardly any young people employed in state corporations, courts, ministries, or departments dare disagree with top management about government policies; many put their heads down and continue to work for the regime, insisting that they are just following orders. Until now, only one person has publicly taken such a stand against the state: the Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev, who explained his dissent in Foreign Affairs in 2022. Moreover, Bondarev, who is in his 40s, is already older than the 18–24 and 25–39 cohorts that the sociologists consider “young.”

It is a paradox: at the start of the war, many young people were murmuring and scratching their heads in shock; now they are serving the regime. And the longer the war lasts—the more it seems that what is happening may continue indefinitely—the more eagerly they seem to serve. Once upon a time, in the heyday of Putinomics, many ambitious young people dreamed of getting a job at Gazprom, the state energy company, or some similarly powerful firm, where they could pursue promotions and wealth. This was the economic conformism of the still relatively peaceful era when the fossil fuel economy reigned supreme. To get a coveted job today, however, it is no longer enough to be a good or ordinary professional: it is also necessary to show absolute political loyalty and sometimes to even show it publicly. As many young people see it, it is better to shut yourself off from real information and embrace the logic of learned indifference.

Since 2022, Putin has continued his practice of staging meetings with pleasant young patriots around the country: nuclear physicists, innovators, defense industry workers, entrepreneurs, students, and even schoolchildren. In turn, these bright young people are not at all embarrassed by who they meet. They do not let themselves think too much about what their president has done to the country and the world. 

Take Judge Yuri Massin, who handed down the brutal sentences against the director Berkovich and the playwright Petriychuk. Massin was two years old in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and began opening up the Soviet Union. He was nine when the reforms that built the Russian market and finally fed the country began and 13 when Putin came to power. By the time Putin returned to power in 2012, after the presidency of his close ally Dmitry Medvedev, the future Judge Massin was 29 years old. Since his teenage years, he has been a pure product of Putin’s system. And there are millions of other such judges, investigators, officials, corporate employees, and simply indifferent or fiercely loyal young people, many of them not even old enough to remember the Soviet Union.

Since the fall of 2023, the regime has intervened more directly in the education system, with its new unified history textbook for high schoolers and its required course on “Foundations of Russian Statehood” for college students. Even so, some ideologues close to the regime think this is not enough. Alexander Dugin, the ultraconservative head of the Ivan Ilyin Higher Political School, an institute at the Russian State University for the Humanities that was established in 2023, has claimed that most Russian universities follow curricula that were established under the “direct control” of Russia’s Western enemies in the 1980s and 1990s. To eradicate this liberal virus, he has called for no less than a full “militarization of education.”

THE LIMITS OF REPRESSION

For all the worrying evidence, it is dangerous to generalize about Russia’s youth. There are millions of wonderful young people in the country who do not accept Putin’s unnatural policies and who are horrified by the war: they understand that they are being asked to die for their homeland rather than live for it, that they are being taught to hate their neighbors rather than be friends with them. They yearn for a different life. And occasionally, they show real heroism, even when taking a stand means destroying their prospects—and being sent to the army or even to prison.

There are even occasional attempts at civil resistance, showing that collective action is possible despite a harshly repressive environment. One such episode is connected with Dugin’s Ivan Ilyin School itself, which is named after a well-known early-twentieth-century Russian émigré philosopher who held ultranationalist and even fascist views and whom Putin likes to quote. In April 2024, less than a year after the school’s founding, more than 5,000 people, primarily students but also outraged intellectuals of different ages, immediately signed a petition against the school’s name. 

When news of the petition began to spread, the number of signatures quickly leaped to more than 25,000, as people outside the student body of the Russian State University for the Humanities and those who had no connection with the university joined in. The response from the university’s rector and from Dugin was predictable and in line with current political mores: they irritably speculated that the petition had been orchestrated by pro-Ukrainian forces, “foreign agents,” and supporters of “unfriendly countries.”

Although younger Russians still support the “special military operation,” they do so to a lesser extent than their older counterparts: in July, for example, the Levada Center found that 80 percent of respondents who were age 55 or older supported the actions of the Russian military, whereas only 66 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 24 did. (A full quarter of respondents in the latter category said they do not support the actions of the military.) Young people in general were also more in favor of peace talks to end the war—in Levada’s August survey, 64 percent of them said they were, versus the national average of 58 percent. Cautious generalizations are possible here, but young Russians, just like those of any generation, clearly have a broad range of views and attitudes. Among this generation are the beneficiaries of Putinism but also those who have lost everything, including their freedom.

Here is what is indisputable: a generational shift in Russia will not automatically change the political atmosphere in the country or the character of its leadership. That would be too simple. The transformation that is required goes far deeper than age. It is about thinking and behavior. It is about the human environment. In two and a half years of this morass, the regime has brought Russia back to the habits and mindset of the Stalinist era. But the Putin regime will never be able to achieve total control of Russia’s younger generations, including those who are still schoolchildren today.

The most realistic hope, then, is that many young Russians will learn to do two things simultaneously: adapt to the rules of the system but still think another way. Eventually, the external political environment will change, and when that happens, this widespread double consciousness could allow them to reject the stifling system they have known. However rosy and distant this scenario seems now, it is probably more plausible than any simplistic theory of generational change. One day, it might also lead to the normalization, if not the democratization, of Russia.