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20 years of Putin: How Russia's younger generation have lost the capacity to imagine another future
This was first published in December 2019 and is republished in light of the Russian government resigning.
For 28-year old pro-Kremlin activist Yegor Litvinenko Russian President Vladimir Putin is “perfect” to the point where a future without Russia’s strongman is almost unthinkable - after all, he has known no other leader in his living memory.
Mr Putin has been in charge at the Kremlin, one way or another, for the last 20 years and constitutionally he is not allowed to seek re-election when his current term expires in four years’ time.
“It’s a shame he can’t run again,” the smartly dressed deputy chairman of the Kremlin party’s youth wing told The Telegraph in an interview at their trendy loft office. “His behaviour and attitude to people are impeccable.”
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Like many Russians, Mr Litvinenko finds it hard to talk about political landscape in Russia after 2024 when President Putin’s last term runs out: will Mr Putin stay on in a different role? Will he find a trusted placeholder? Or will the authoritarian system of power he has built crumble?
An entire generation was born and came of age under Mr Putin who assumed office on Dec. 31, 1999, after President Boris Yeltsin resigned in a New Year’s address and named him a successor.
Across the political divide - from the squeaky clean open-space office of the Kremlin’s Young Guard movement to a crammed student cafe with dingy wallpaper - Russia’s youth struggle to picture politics after Mr Putin.
Two years ago, Armen Aramyan, a 22-year old postgraduate history student, and a couple of other students from the Higher School of Economics, one of Moscow’s most prestigious and liberal universities, founded Doxa, an online journal that initially focused on university issues.
But over the recent months, Doxa, which only has unpaid staff, started covering news stories that the students found impossible to ignore: opposition protests in Moscow, the subsequent police clampdown and court proceedings against the protesters, one of whom was a star HSE student.
As the government cracked down on the summer protesters and bloggers, Doxa found itself in a tight spot as well: the journal earlier this month lost whatever modest university funding it had after a university board accused it of being unethical and harbouring a political agenda.
On a recent evening Mr Aramyan and several other student contributors gathered in a shabby but lively cafe in central Moscow popular with students to discuss fundraising and eat soup and kebabs after classes or part-time jobs.
Someone suggested printing T-shirts with the slogan “the Higher School of Extremism” in reference to HSE undergraduate Yegor Zhukov who earlier this month was given a suspended sentence for inciting extremism over a series of rambling, somewhat naive videos recorded in his bedroom.
Many HSE students and young people from other universities thronged Moscow’s streets this summer to protest the disqualification of a group of opposition candidates for the Moscow city council.
The protests soon embraced a broader, anti-Kremlin agenda, with “Russia without Putin!” as one of its most popular slogans. Yet to many who would talk about it, a country without the sitting president is hard to even imagine.
“I’m like any citizen of Russia: I can’t really imagine anything else,” said Maria Menshikova, a bespectacled 25-year old with a long plait of red hair who grew up in the country’s north-west. “Our political imagination has atrophied over the past 20 years.”
Mr Aramyan echoed the thought, saying that profound political transformation in Russia is hard to picture “because this government is blocking the very thinking about change” by going after independent media and opposition activists.
The struggle to imagine a future without Mr Putin does not mean that Russians are crazy about him.
Mr Putin’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014 fed into national pride, pushing up his ratings but the euphoria has long worn off.
While the president’s approval rating stands at about 68 percent, according to the Levada Centre pollster, only 39 percent of those polled in another Levada survey name him as a politician that they trust. In the age group of 18 to 24, his rating of trust comes to just 20 percent.
“I don’t think Putin fans exist anymore,” Mr Aramyan of Doxa said, quoting widespread reports of public servants and municipal workers coerced into attending pro-government rallies. “Three years ago, I’d say it was just my social circle. Now it’s practically impossible to find a fervent supporter of Putin.”
To Ms Menshikova members of pro-Kremlin youth groups are “careerists who are building their careers through explicit loyalism.”
Mr Litvinenko and his peers at the Young Guard, the youth wing of the ruling United Russia party, insist that their support of the president and government is genuine.
Many of them recall hardships growing up in the first post-Soviet decade and credit Mr Putin for impressive economic growth in the 2000s.
According to Mr Litvinenko’s view, President Putin “laid massive groundwork” for the country’s development that his generation needs to build on.
Young Guard members, who are involved in charity work and volunteering, have experienced people’s disillusionment with the political status quo first-hand.
Mr Litvinenko spoke about convincing voters to back him in a municipality in Moscow where United Russia no longer fields candidates on the party ticket in tacit recognition of just how toxic the brand of Mr Putin’s party has become.
Stas Kosach, a regional coordinator for Russia’s north-west and a masters student at the Moscow State University, experienced online harassment after recording a video message, calling on people to vote in the presidential election last March after opposition figures, including Alexei Navalny called for a boycott of the poll, saying that participation only legitimizes what many say was a ‘one-man show’.
Mr Navalny himself was not allowed to run because of a suspended sentence in a trial that the European Court of Human Rights ruled to be arbitrary.
Mr Kosach, who did not even mention Mr Putin’s name in that video, dismissed suggestions that online vitriol and hate messages were an expression of genuine discontent with the status-quo and blamed it on paid internet ‘trolls’.
While Mr Putin’s approval ratings remain high, indifference to the president is growing, opinion polls show.
There may be no visible surge in the number of opposition supporters but people are generally getting weary of Putin, said Konstantin Mitroshenkov, one of Doxa’s contributors.
“The number of those who passively approve (of Mr Putin) is getting smaller and they gradually move to the group of those who begin to doubt and think that things are going in the wrong direction,” said Mitroshenkov. “That’s what’s happening in my family.”
Mr Putin has been in power so long that many, especially young people who have no recollections of another president, do not stop to consider the possibility of alternatives.
“For the majority, he is part of the landscape, and people feel no emotions about it,” Denis Volkov, deputy director at Russia’s only independent pollster Levada Center, told the Telegraph.
Most of the Putin generation are not political, Mr Volkov said, and they accept the political system “as it is since they see no reason to cast doubt on it.”
While opposition-minded young people see little room for fundamental change in the rigid system built over the past 20 years, ardent Kremlin supporters acknowledge that change, whatever form it will take, is overdue.
“The United Russia was a party of stability for many years, and now people want change and development,” Mr Kosach admitted. “And as young people we will drive those changes.”