{"id":706,"date":"2021-10-23T13:53:39","date_gmt":"2021-10-23T17:53:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/?page_id=706"},"modified":"2021-10-23T13:55:06","modified_gmt":"2021-10-23T17:55:06","slug":"706-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/706-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Twenty-five years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, they crave the stability that the nationalist president represents."},"content":{"rendered":"

By Julia Ioffe,\u00a0National Geographic<\/em>, December 2016<\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t know where to take me when I meet him at the hotel by the train station, so we just start to walk down the dusty summer streets of Nizhniy Tagil, a sputtering industrial city on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains. His name is Sasha Makarevich, a 24-year-old cement worker, a blond ponytail falling down his back, a Confederate flag stitched onto his cutoff denim vest. \u201cI thought it just meant independence,\u201d he explains when I ask about it.<\/p>\n

We walk past a small, one-story cube of a building covered with images of red Soviet stars and the orange-and-black St. George\u2019s ribbon that holds imperial, Soviet, and Russian military medals. \u201cWe could go in here,\u201d Sasha shrugs. \u201cBut it\u2019s full of people who survived the Nineties.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sasha survived the Nineties too. In December 1991, just months before he was born, the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin and the Russian tricolor went up, ushering in the decade that hangs like a bad omen in the contemporary Russian psyche. The expectation that Russians would start living like their prosperous Western counterparts gave way to a painful reality: It would be a hard slog to turn a command economy into a market one, to make a democracy out of a society that had lived under absolute monarchy and totalitarianism for centuries.<\/p>\n

Alexander and Victoria Khlynin escape the everyday through cosplay (costume play) in their suburban Moscow flat. The 28-year-old banker and 25-year-old interior designer own several animal outfits. Many young Russians, shaped by the chaos of the 1990s and conformity of the Vladimir Putin years, seek stable jobs and families.<\/p>\n

I never got to see those Nineties. My family left Moscow in April 1990. When I first returned, in 2002, the era of President Vladimir Putin, the antidote to the turbulent Nineties, was in full swing. Since then I\u2019ve been back to Russia many times and lived there for several years as a reporter.<\/p>\n

Most of the Russians I know have, to some extent, been shaped by the 74-year Soviet experiment. We know in a deep, personal way our families\u2019 small histories and tragedies within the larger tragedy of that history. But this generation coming up knows only a Russia traumatized by the Nineties and then tightly ruled by Putin. This year\u201425 years after the Soviet Union\u2019s collapse\u2014I went back again, to meet these young people like Sasha. Who are they? What do they want from their lives? What do they want for Russia?<\/p>\n

Inside the windowless bar, all linoleum and fake-wood paneling, Sasha and I get some thin beer in thin plastic cups and find a seat among the heavily tattooed, red-faced men in tracksuits and sandals, blasting reedy Russian pop from their phones.<\/p>\n

Nizhniy Tagil, Sasha says, \u201cis all factories and prison camps.\u201d Once famous for manufacturing the Soviet Union\u2019s train cars and tanks, it\u2019s now famous for its idled factories, unemployment, and Vladimir Putin. When Putin announced, in 2011, his inention to return for a third presidential term, protests broke out in Moscow and other large cities. The protesters were largely from the young, educated, urban middle class, and that winter a factory worker from Nizhniy Tagil told Putin on national TV that he and \u201cthe boys\u201d were ready to come to Moscow to beat up the protesters. Putin demurred, but the city has come to be seen as the very heart of Putinland.<\/p>\n

[Supporters of the Other Russia, an opposition party, rally in Moscow, displaying flags and armbands with their symbol, a grenade. The Other Russia was formed by members of a banned ultranationalist political party in 2010, but it is not recognized by Putin\u2019s government.]<\/p>\n

At a sports and military camp, paratroopers teach children as young as 10 how to handle weapons. Putin has restored Russian pride in the country\u2019s military might by defeating rebels in Chechnya, seizing Crimea, invading Ukraine, and intervening in Syria. Young people in particular say they want Russia to be seen as a global power.<\/p>\n

Now Nizhniy Tagil has a new mayor, whom Putin sent in to beautify the city, and a local magnate has built a fancy health care clinic, but life is still tough here. Sasha went to school for welding and worked in a factory making good money until crashing oil prices and Western sanctions for the invasion of Ukraine sank the economy. Sasha stopped getting paid. He spent a year looking for work before he landed a job in a Boeing factory two hours away. Now he makes 30,000 rubles, or $450, a month\u2014about the local average.<\/p>\n

I meet Sasha after a long workday, and he is tired, his hands dirty. He doesn\u2019t feel totally comfortable\u2014or safe\u2014in this bar with the survivors of the Nineties. The city he describes is a violently conformist place. \u201cPeople here are very aggressive toward anyone who doesn\u2019t look like them,\u201d he says. It\u2019s a local, working-class uniform: tracksuit, buzz cut with a hint of bangs. His peers, Sasha says, are often children of ex-cons. \u201cThey don\u2019t respect the law,\u201d Sasha says. \u201c \u2018A real man is either in the army or in jail.\u2019 My sixth-grade teacher told us that.\u201d So Sasha learned to fight, with fists, with knives. Once he walked home after a fight covered in someone else\u2019s blood, and he is strangely, beatifically cheerful as he tells me all this.<\/p>\n

What Sasha really wants to do is escape to cosmopolitan St. Petersburg and open a bar. He\u2019s been there a couple times; it\u2019s where he feels most at home. But his girlfriend won\u2019t move unless he buys an apartment there. Between his salary and hers, his dream will likely remain just that.<\/p>\n

Vladimir Putin is widely viewed at home as the man who tamed a tumultuous post-\u00adSoviet Russia and the first leader in decades willing to stand up to the West. His strong personality, combined with near-total control over the Russian media, has helped him keep his standing, especially among the young. If reelected in 2018, he\u2019ll be Russia\u2019s second longest serving leader, trailing only Joseph Stalin\u2019s 30-year reign.<\/p>\n

With no powerful opposition, Putin has remained popular despite challenges, including the admission of three former Soviet republics into NATO, terrorist attacks, and a collapsing ruble.<\/p>\n

Term limits forced Putin from the presidency for 4 years, but he maintained power as prime minister.<\/p>\n

Putin benefited from tough economic reforms adopted by Boris Yeltsin and his predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as from increased oil revenue as prices rose beginning in 2003. Gross domestic product (GDP) per person has grown 70 percent under Putin, compared with 17 percent in the European Union.<\/p>\n

It is a common refrain in Nizhniy Tagil: young people with young-people dreams, locked out of them by the reality of Putin\u2019s Russia. They want to travel, but their salaries are in rubles, the value of which has been halved by the economic crisis. Some want to open their own businesses but don\u2019t know how to scale the dangerous slopes of local corruption. So they train their sights lower. They want a house or apartment, a car, and a family. The things they crave are also the things that many of them didn\u2019t have precisely because their families survived the Nineties.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Nineties were very hard for us financially,\u201d Alexander Kuznetsov, a 20-year-old from Nizhniy Tagil, tells me. \u201cIn 1998 my dad left the family.\u201d Alexander was three. \u201cMy mom\u2019s entire salary went to feed me. I didn\u2019t have many toys,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m alone in the family.\u201d That left its mark. \u201cFor me the most important thing is family,\u201d Alexander tells me as we sip coffee in a caf\u00e9 off the main square. \u201cI don\u2019t want to strive for high professional posts and have an empty home.\u201d<\/p>\n

His father fought in the first Chechen war, in 1994. \u201cDon\u2019t join the army, son,\u201d he advised Alexander. That was the sum total of his father\u2019s recollections of the Nineties. But Alexander isn\u2019t bothering to find a way out of the universal draft. \u201cI always wanted to join,\u201d he explains. \u201cEveryone in my family was in the military. My great-grandfather fought in World War II.\u201d Plus, military service opens up some of the more lucrative job prospects for a young man in Russia: work in the police or the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor to the KGB. The army would give him a shot at being a cop like his father. \u201cI really want to have a stable income,\u201d Alexander says.<\/p>\n

Students in Nizhniy Tagil celebrate \u201cLast Bell,\u201d the end of classes. Wearing sashes that say \u201cGraduate,\u201d they cavort on Lisya Mountain, an extinct volcano. The day, at the end of May, is a big event for students across Russia.<\/p>\n

As Alexander and I talk, his friend Stepan, a strapping, smiling young man with a blond buzz cut, bounces in to join us. \u201cSo,\u201d he says, flashing me a mischievous grin, \u201cyou\u2019re writing about what it was like in the Soviet Union? People lived a lot better then.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat!\u201d exclaims Alexander. \u201cLived better?! No, we didn\u2019t!\u201d<\/p>\n

They argue about what it was like to live in Soviet times, until Stepan, who was born in 1992, realizes he has a question for me: \u201cYou Americans are pressuring us, slapping us with sanctions,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat are you preparing for us? A war?\u201d He explains why it was right for Russia to annex Crimea and for Putin to stand up to the West.<\/p>\n

Stepan is reluctant to tell me his last name because I\u2019m an American journalist, but when it\u2019s time for me to go, he offers me a ride. \u201cReally, though,\u201d he says to no one in particular as we wheel through the city, \u201cI want to get out of here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Out of where? I ask. Nizhniy Tagil?<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d he says. \u201cRussia.\u201d<\/p>\n

After his patriotic bluster, this was unexpected. Why? I ask him.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s nothing to do here,\u201d he says without any bitterness. \u201cNo opportunities, no way to grow and develop and make something of yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s your backup plan? I ask.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s my backup plan?\u201d he repeats, smiling broadly. \u201cJoin the FSB.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u201cThose who were born in the U.S.S.R. and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience,\u201d wrote Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015. \u201cIt\u2019s like they\u2019re from different planets.\u201d]<\/p>\n

The Soviet Union drowned in a surge of optimism. Many believed Russia would quickly become a flourishing, Western-style democracy. But the optimism of 1991 dissipated in a decade of often depressing contradictions. With the end of the planned economy came untold riches or entry into a new middle class for some; for others it was a sudden plunge into poverty. Previously unavailable goods flooded store shelves, while the money to buy them periodically lost its value. Crime, especially in commerce, skyrocketed. Politics came out into the open, but many Russians came to see it as a dirty business.<\/p>\n

Russians struggled to adjust to this foreign reality. It was a time of unprecedented freedom, but many found it deeply disorienting. \u201cWhen these [Western] values encountered reality and people saw that changes came too slowly, these values receded into the background,\u201d says Natalia Zorkaya, a sociologist with the Levada Center, an independent polling organization in Moscow. Instead, she says, the younger generations are adopting \u201cthe pillars of Soviet society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sasha, Alexander, Stepan, and their cohort do live on a planet different from the one their parents and grandparents live on, yet they are in some ways becoming even more Soviet. It\u2019s a strange thing: These young men and women know little of the privations, habits, and cruelty of Soviet life. The Putin generation doesn\u2019t carry this wound. Their desire for staid normalcy\u2014intact families, reliable, if unsatisfying, jobs\u2014is their response to what they lacked in the Nineties and found in the Putin era.<\/p>\n

Yet they are profoundly insecure. Sixty-five percent of Russians between ages 18 and 24\u2014that is, the first generation born after the Soviet breakup\u2014plan their lives no more than a year or two ahead, according to the Levada Center. \u201cIt\u2019s a very egotistical generation,\u201d Zorkaya says, but adds, \u201cIt\u2019s a very fragile generation.\u201d They are also politically inert: Most don\u2019t know about news events the state doesn\u2019t want them to know about, and 83 percent say they have not participated in any kind of political or civil society activity.<\/p>\n

___________________<\/p>\n

Liza meets me in the glittering white lobby of one of the many glass towers\u2014some blue spirals, some coppery shards\u2014that make up Moscow City, a financial center that looks like a cross between London and Shanghai. I follow her through tunnels linking the towers underground with caf\u00e9s, shops, and an exhibit with paintings of Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. We order lunch, and Liza, a stylish young woman with long, curled blond hair, dimples, and an expensive watch, tells me her story as she slurps her borscht. She asks me not to use her last name because she doesn\u2019t want to upset her parents.<\/p>\n

She was born in Blagoveshchensk, in the Russian Far East, in 1992. A year before, her father, a history teacher, had been out in the streets of Moscow, cheering the arrival of democracy. But on returning home after the Soviet Union\u2019s demise, he was forced to find other ways to support the family. He began crossing the border into China and carrying back anything from clothes to appliances for resale in Russia. \u201cI remember him coming home with money sewn into his shirt so that he wouldn\u2019t get robbed,\u201d Liza tells me.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s a corporate lawyer at a large Western firm. It\u2019s fine, but it\u2019s not what she wanted to do. \u201cI always wanted to be a journalist; I was always writing,\u201d she says, noting that her grandmother kept all her short stories. \u201cBut my parents told me journalism isn\u2019t serious. It\u2019s a venal profession\u201d\u2014a relic of the 1990s, when journalism here was bought and sold like any commodity\u2014\u201cYou won\u2019t make a lot of money. You\u2019re the oldest and the smartest; you need to go into a solid profession so you can feed yourself and take care of your sister.\u201d Along the way her parents separated. Her father\u2019s business eventually took off, and Liza was able to spend a year of high school in Oregon and also study abroad in London.<\/p>\n

A modern Westernized woman, she tells her mother about her boyfriends and the drug-fueled parties she attends. But in some ways she is very, very Russian. \u201cPutin irritates me,\u201d she begins, sounding like many in the oppositional, educated milieu of Moscow. \u201cBut just let a foreigner try to criticize him! I will always defend Russia.\u201d When she was in London, she says, people constantly made fun of Russia and Russian women, mocking them as mail-order brides. \u201cIt was offensive to the point of tears, to sit there and hear outsiders making fun of us,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

This is as political as she gets these days. Back in 2011 Liza became interested in liberal politics, which was all the rage in Moscow. She joined Amnesty International and the liberal Yabloko party as an observer for the December parliamentary elections. She was assigned to the polling station at her little sister\u2019s school and was shocked to see teachers stuffing ballot boxes. When Liza tried to say something, they screamed at her and made her sit in a corner while the principal blocked her view. This was happening all over the country. Many election observers caught it on their phones and put the proof online, which sparked a mass protest movement in Moscow and major cities unlike any Russia had seen in 20 years.<\/p>\n

Liza, however, lost her nerve. \u201cI was hysterical,\u201d she tells me. \u201cI spent two hours crying.\u201d After that she decided, \u201cNo more politics. Ever. This doesn\u2019t concern me, and I\u2019m not strong enough to fight.\u201d It\u2019s a promise that she hasn\u2019t broken, even as the ruble has crashed, cutting into her ability to do the other thing she loves most: travel. \u201cYes, it\u2019s terrible; there are fewer opportunities,\u201d she says, but she refuses to seek an answer in politics. \u201cIt\u2019s a psychological block.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kseniya Obidina, Liza\u2019s law school friend, sees things similarly. Also the child of divorce, she says family and stability are of primary importance to her. She wants a secure, well-paying job. She wants to be able to afford travel and to support her mother and sister. This dream has become more remote, though, with the political and economic crisis: Kseniya wants to work at foreign law firms, but they are increasingly packing up and leaving the country. Like Liza, she refuses to think about politics. \u201cI don\u2019t see the point of talking about something you can\u2019t influence. Talk for talk\u2019s sake isn\u2019t interesting,\u201d she says as we sit in a Moscow Starbucks. As we leave, she adds, \u201cIt\u2019s better to know and be quiet. It\u2019s better not to speak up. Why spoil your mood?\u201d<\/p>\n

How did they come to be this way? Vladimir Putin is a big part of the answer. He came to power in 2000 as an anti-Nineties candidate just as this generation was becoming aware of the world around them. He promised to bring prosperity and security. Coasting on historically high oil prices and economic reforms implemented in the Nineties, Putin was able to fulfill much of that promise but at the expense of democratic freedoms.<\/p>\n

Stability and economic well-being became the ideology of the day, peppered with a heavy dose of nostalgia for the U.S.S.R. and a whitewashing of its sins. Putin called the disintegration of the Soviet Union \u201cthe greatest geopolitical catastrophe\u201d of the 20th century. Whoever didn\u2019t feel that, he said, \u201cdoesn\u2019t have a heart.\u201d Joseph Stalin became, in the business-friendly lingo of the day, an \u201ceffective manager\u201d who went a bit too far. Textbooks and television came to reflect this new, state-sanctioned nostalgia. Today 58 percent of Russians would still like to see a return of the Soviet order, and some 40 percent see Stalin favorably.<\/p>\n

The Putin generation wants intact families and reliable, if unsatisfying, jobs. It associates the Soviet Union with longed-for stability.<\/p>\n

Much of post-Soviet life has been a hapless search for a uniting idea. At first it was democracy; then consumerism became a stand-in for Westernization. \u201cModernization came through consumption, but that\u2019s not enough,\u201d says sociologist Zorkaya. Ikea, which came to Russia in 2000, became wildly popular among the new middle class as a way to affordably live in a stylish European\u2014that is, non-Soviet\u2014way. \u201cIt became a symbol of how you could civilize your life without a lot of money,\u201d she says, \u201cbut the fact that behind this decor is a totally different concept of human beings and values, somehow it doesn\u2019t connect for Russians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since the beginning of his third presidential term, in 2012, Putin has promoted an even more aggressive neo-Soviet ideology, both at home and abroad. He fought to keep former Soviet republics, like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, in Moscow\u2019s sphere of influence and flexed Russia\u2019s military power in distant Syria. A series of laws promoted traditional social values and made dissent even more dangerous. One result is a generation whose dreams are the embodiment of everything Putin desires them to be: conformist, materialist, and highly risk averse.<\/p>\n

Much is made of Putin\u2019s stratospheric popularity\u2014at the time I reported this article, Putin had the approval of 80 percent of Russians polled. But Russians between the ages of 18 and 24 approve of him at a higher rate than any other age group: 88 percent. More than any other generation, they are proud of their country and its stature in the world, associate its military prowess with greatness, and believe in its future.<\/p>\n

In a dark, narrow courtyard in Novosibirsk, between two 19th-century brick buildings, I find the local bohemians drinking beer and listening to electronic music. It\u2019s here that Filipp Krikunov, born in 1995, opened an art gallery. Ducking away from the gathering, he shows me around. One room is lit with a fluorescent pink light, the wall arrayed with shelves holding mini-busts of Lenin, painted in silly patterns. In the next room young artists have cobbled together mind-bending ways to take selfies: Stick your head into this cardboard box full of shattered mirrors. Stick your head in another to find the remains of a Burger King meal.<\/p>\n

One of Filipp\u2019s friends and partners in the gallery bounds up and shakes my hand. \u201cWe just found out that they didn\u2019t bury anyone under this space,\u201d he gushes. After Filipp rented the rooms, he and his friends realized that the building next door houses the FSB. In the 1930s it was called the NKVD, and it killed as many as 1.2 million people. Often the NKVD\u2019s victims were shot and buried on-site. But Filipp\u2019s gallery, Space of Modern Art, lucked out. No bones in the basement here. Just hipsters in the mild Siberian summer night.<\/p>\n

I had met Filipp earlier that day at a chic Novosibirsk caf\u00e9, surrounded by impossibly fashionable young women with very obvious lip jobs. Novosibirsk is Russia\u2019s third largest city, a center of industry and scientific innovation. There\u2019s a lot of money here. Filipp, though, didn\u2019t see much of it. He grew up without a father. Like many young Russians, he was raised by his mother and grandmother. His great-grandfather fought in World War II and was later purged by Stalin. His grandmother became a renowned chemist, and his mother also worked in science. But the women\u2019s passion was politics. \u201cAll the main hashtags at home are politics,\u201d Filipp says.<\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s young people have more freedoms than their parents and grandparents could ever have imagined.<\/p>\n

Filipp was 16 when the pro-democracy protests broke out in Moscow and spread to cities like Novosibirsk. Tens of thousands poured into the streets to demand free and fair elections, yet the protests felt more like block parties than demonstrations. Filipp too was fed up with Putin. \u201cMessages were being sent to him, messages of discontent, and yet there was no dialogue with those people,\u201d Filipp says. He didn\u2019t recognize the Russia that Kremlin-controlled television showed. \u201cThat was a different country,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn\u2019t know a single person like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI went to the protests. I tried to be politically active,\u201d Filipp tells me. \u201cIt was boiling inside me. I wasn\u2019t thinking about anything else. The whole country is rising in protest, and I\u2019m part of it.\u201d But he was soon disappointed. \u201cI looked around, and the people at the rallies weren\u2019t my people. I wasn\u2019t totally comfortable,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd it didn\u2019t lead to anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not quite true. The protests did change things, just not for the better. In May 2012 the Kremlin cracked down. Since then dozens of people who attended protests have been rounded up, tried, and jailed. The political situation in the country only worsened as Putin\u2014feeling betrayed by the middle class he felt he had created with his policies\u2014pursued an increasingly authoritarian line. He publicly labeled liberals who advocated for freedom and democracy \u201cnational traitors\u201d and \u201ca fifth column.\u201d<\/p>\n

The harsh response left a deep impression on the Putin generation: It taught them to stay out of politics. \u201cI decided that either I fight this system,\u201d Filipp says, \u201cor I live in a different system\u201d\u2014the world of art. \u201cThere\u2019s more good in it,\u201d he says. \u201cPolitics are nerve-racking. You\u2019re constantly unhappy; you\u2019re not enjoying your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Putin is up for reelection in 2018. There is little doubt that he will run again and even less that he will win another six-year term. That would mean he would be in power until 2024, if not longer. By then Filipp, who was five when Putin first became president, would be 29. Is he comfortable living with Putin until then? He shrugs. \u201cI\u2019ve lived my whole life with my right hand, and it\u2019s fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Akademgorodok, a small academic town built around Novosibirsk State University and its many labs, I meet Alexandra Mikhaylova. She\u2019s 20, with cutoff denim shorts and the dyed red hair of a punk rocker. Alexandra came from a family of scientists\u2014her mom is a geologist and her father a physicist\u2014who gravitated to this little town, which was founded in 1957 as an incubator for science and the engine of the Soviet Union\u2019s technological race with the West. Since the Soviet collapse, underfunded Russian scientists have fallen behind their Western colleagues. Both of Alexandra\u2019s parents have gone into business.<\/p>\n

Now, as a third-year journalism student, she is working on a documentary about the town and its lively intellectual history, specifically the underground of the 1960s. \u201cThey had their own system of government until 1966,\u201d Alexandra tells me as we stand in the gleaming hallway of the university\u2019s new building. Her eyes light up as she tells me about her research into this little corner of freedom and intellectual ferment in a sea of totalitarianism. In 1966 some of these free-spirited young scientists wrote a letter to Moscow, complaining about things they didn\u2019t like. The response, Alexandra says, was swift. Many were fired, and strict political control was put in place. But Alexandra\u2019s documentary picks up again in the 1980s, with the Soviet punk rock underground that spread all over the country.<\/p>\n

These days, Alexandra says, \u201cit\u2019s stagnant. Something\u2019s missing. People aren\u2019t politically engaged. When it comes to the government, young people are either neutral or positively disposed. No one stands up for their opinion, and there\u2019s a thin line between indifference and agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n

The government is again in the censorship business. A classic rocker from the 1990s had his concert canceled here because he spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine. \u201cYear after year they close another media outlet, the ones that show things more objectively,\u201d Alexandra says. More than anything, though, she is saddened that the Akademgorodok she lives in lacks the creative fervor of the Sixties and Eighties. The society around her, unlike the one her parents experienced, is cautious and stale. She longs for a change, a shake-up. But she knows it won\u2019t be her generation that brings it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019ll be the kids who are 13, 15 now,\u201d Alexandra says wistfully. When they are the age she is now, her generation will have other priorities. \u201cWe\u2019ll try to help, but if you\u2019re 30, you\u2019re not going to lead a revolution with a baby in your arms.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Julia Ioffe,\u00a0National Geographic, December 2016 He doesn\u2019t know where to take me when I meet him at the hotel by the train station, so we just start to walk down the dusty summer streets of Nizhniy Tagil, a sputtering industrial city on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains. His name is Sasha Makarevich, … Continue reading “Twenty-five years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, they crave the stability that the nationalist president represents.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":114,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-706","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/114"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":709,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/706\/revisions\/709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}