Thread by @polidemitolog

Has the Russian society succumbed to the cult of violence and war or did it passively hibernate until negative collective emotions, already present, were awakened by state propaganda? A 🧵

I recently read an interview with the head of the new separate entity of the Yandex company in Israel, Elena Bunina, and one thing stuck with me - how children starting school can be mesmerized by the lowest forms of state propaganda, the ones that big parts of society laugh at.

She speaks about her earliest experiences in the Soviet elementary school in the mid 80s. These were the final years of pure Soviet propaganda, in urban circles of society there was hardly anyone left to believe in it, yet Bunina claims that she absolutely believed.

She believed her teachers and she was too young to distinguish truth from propaganda. Her parents only talked to her after she had succumbed to it and shown clear signs of being corrupted. Propaganda is again switched on in Russia. And new generations may succumb to it.

Not everyone has educated parents with clear minds, not everyone's parents are involved enough in their children's lives to fight the tide. There is a long-term danger (if the regime survives long enough) in creating a new generation of militarized Komsomol drones in Russia.

This is the generational split. It also exists between the generations which were born in the new millennium and the others. The young Russians are mostly passive and disinterested, this goes for the urban population and the ones that make it out of the provinces to universities.

They will mostly not support the war or the new wave of antimodern isolationism in Russia, but they will not raise a revolution either. They've formed in early Putin's Russia which strived to pretend it's a democracy without actually supporting open dialog in society.

Democracy in Putin's Russia was to have a shopping mall with Western technology and clothing. Democracy was travelling to Europe. Democracy was absorbing all of the superficial wealth the West has to offer, while remaining deaf to the principles of modern open society.

One lesson that late communist nomenclature had learned (Putin among them) is that the people wanted to be able to achieve the Western standard of living, at least in the big cities. That's what the new elites gave them - crony capitalism without democracy.

The generations most critical of the regime in Russia are the millennials. People who have no attachment to communist propaganda and grew up in the chaotic, but the free 90s. They are the most likely to lead protests or to emigrate from the country.

Russian big city millennials are the people who have the most to lose from the new course that Russia is on. They have young families, thriving carriers and mortgages. Their livelihood is at stake. They also remember a time before Putin, when you weren't jailed for speaking out.

The big city millennials are the main potential carriers of clear democratic ideas in Russia. The life in the 90s has also beaten the passivity out of them, they are not a product of Putin's "bread and circuses" autocratic state capitalism.

This also goes to show that freedom breeds freedom and for the society to completely democratize it needs a stable period of democracy. For autocracy to fall, all that is necessary is to break the illusion of its invulnerability and the idea that it brings prosperity.

Older generations are most likely to support the regime, but also passively. There is little fervor left in them. The most curious generation is the one which was young in the 80s and despised the grey, dull life of the late communist era. Many of them are now Z fans.

They believed in creating a paradise in Russia quickly and painlessly, yet what they strived for was not democracy, but a comfortable life. They did not find this in the 90s. They didn't understand what the West was about, not only sex, drugs and rock and roll - the principles.

To answer the initial question, Russian society is fragmented and different depending on the level of education, standard and place of living and in which political climate that particular generation was formed.

Russian society was never democratized as a whole, so it wasn't enslaved by Putin. He just returned and improved the default settings (a bit of comfortableness to go with the autocracy). No railings were taken down, no principles crushed.

It's true that Putin has now taken away this comfort, but for the older Brezhnev generations it's just more of the same - back to the war path with the "decadent West", the end of the "Mr. Nice Guy period", the iron gloves are back.

The idea of the evil "other" was there already, it never left. Autocracies always thrive on being in an "existential struggle" with the forever "other" - the Jews, the capitalists, other faiths, other ethnicities or races. The West as Russia's "other" is back in play.

The neocolonial matrix of Russian culture being superior than all its neighbors never took a day off. Combined with the Western "other", it's easy to explain why many Russians see Ukrainians as "zombified" by the West, as people being exploited, used without them even knowing.

How do those "damned Khokhols" not realize that it's not about them, they are "dirt", "peasants, "nobodies", it's about the "heroic struggle" of the "great Russian civilization" against the "wicked West" that has been going on for a millennium.

That's the way of thinking of a regular Russian authoritarian imperialist. And there are plenty of them in Russian society. They are not extremists, but an everyday phenomenon. They will not vanish with Putin gone or with defeat.

Only a generational change, combined with democracy, will transform the Russian society fundamentally. Even then, the negative principles will remain as elements rooted in culture, which will have to be critically challenged and dismissed time and again.