The generation of Russians who are now in their twenties have a choice, a really defining choice for their country.
They can either go up the cul-de-sac of chauvinist nationalism, or they can seriously try and improve their country, its economy and its governance.
The Russian government is trying, through its management of Russian TV and through Kremlin-funded youth organizations like Nashi, to channel the nation’s attention away from the quality of its own political governance, and towards supposed threats or humiliations by the likes of Estonia, Georgia, Ukraine, the US, the EU, whoever.
They are trying to turn a war memorial in Estonia into, somehow, the defining issue for Russia’s youth. And for alot of Russia’s youth, even for well-educated young Russians, this IS the defining issue for them – how poor Russia is mistreated by Estonia, how poor Russia faces double standards in the EU, how poor Russia is stabbed in the back by the UK because we let Berezovsky live there, and so on.
Too many young Russians are much more content looking at these issues, fulminating over them, writing angry posts about them on LiveJournal etc, than they are looking at their OWN government, at the quality of governance in their OWN country, at a political system where TV news is completely manipulated and all criticism of the government is censored, where the biggest state companies are run by Putin’s cronies from the FSB, where private enterprise is crowded out by bureaucracy, where no senior politician has ever been arrested for corruption, although we all know it goes on, on a massive scale.
Rather than try to improve this situation, a situation which is actually under their control, they would rather spend their time tilting at windmills, barking at shadows, shaking their fists at distant powers.
This, I’m afraid, is political immaturity. It’s a sign of a politically immature people that they are much more content to blame everything on external powers rather than look at what they can do themselves to improve the situation in their
own country. Blaming everything on foreign powers is what grossly corrupt political elites in sub-Saharan Africa do. That’s how Russia is behaving, and its youth is accepting it, and even supporting it.
If you want to live in a mature country, a country which works, a country which people respect, then you need to grow up.
