Anxiety among young people in Russia is growing. And this could become a problem for Putin. Because the authorities will have a hard time dealing with a generation that does not understand whether there is a future in Russia, writes Tatyana Felgenhauer.
Recently, 26-year-old Russian actor Alexei Yarmushchik issued an address to President Vladimir Putin, in which he directly stated: "You are not my president!". The resonance on social networks was enormous, with millions of views and tens of thousands of comments.
In one of the many subsequent interviews, Yarmushchik admitted that his main motive for recording the video was anxiety. I also got the impression that the main feeling here was not protest, but rather disappointment.
How quickly everything can change
The Russian authorities have been raising young people for years who don't ask questions, but they have come to a generation that has had to ask too early.
These 20-year-olds didn't live in the Soviet Union. For them, duality is not a natural way of being. They can't simultaneously say one thing, think another, and live a third way. Their parents were taught this, their grandparents were even better at it, but today's young people have grown up in a completely different Russia.
They have managed to get used to the Internet as a natural environment of freedom. They have managed to feel part of the global world. They have embraced the opportunity to read any text, watch any film, communicate with people from other countries, and choose their own identity not as a privilege but as a basic element of the modern world. But then it became clear that all of this could quickly be undone. And no one has ever explained why.
Anxiety is growing
Even official Kremlin sociologists have found that young age groups talk about anxiety more often than others: 41 percent compared to the average overall indicator of 25 percent. Studies have also found that among young people between the ages of 18 and 24, one of the main sources of stress remains the war in Ukraine - much more often than among other groups.
The 26-year-old Russian actor Alexei Yarmushchik issued an address to Putin, in which he directly stated: "You are not my president!". The resonance on social networks was huge. Photo: Screenshot Instagram/@alexey_yarmushchik
This does not automatically mean political protest. And anxiety rarely starts with politics - it starts with the feeling that you are losing your planning horizon. Young people cannot understand where they will live in five years, whether they will be able to work in their specialty (and whether they will have a job at all), whether they will be able to leave the country, whether they will be able to return, whether they will be able to say what they think, and whether they will be able to build their lives at all without constant worry.
There is no alternative
Now the state offers young people an extremely poor choice. There are heirs to the right families, children of officials, of people from the security structures, of the rich, the main clans already have dynasties. The system has always provided them with special opportunities, while the majority has only two other options.
They must either demonstrate loyalty: participate in state youth projects, publicly support power, be ready to become part of the state machine or the stormtroopers. Or they must lead an existence under constant threat: from criminal charges, denunciations, mobilization, professional restrictions and restrictions on freedom.
The space for a normal life between these two poles is narrowing more and more. That is why the words "You are not my president" caused such a reaction - many recognized their own feelings. The feeling of no future.
And if the authorities could deal with an individual blogger, it will be much more difficult for them to deal with an entire generation that cannot understand whether there is a future.
The authorities have administrative resources, propaganda channels, power structures, the ability to ban, restrict, file cases and rewrite textbooks. But time is a resource that they do not have. Time today does not work for those who are trying to preserve the present. It works for those young people who are only now learning to ask questions.
Tatyana Felgenhauer is a Russian journalist, host of The Breakfast show and the YouTube channel "Mediazona".