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The Paradox of an Educated Russian

20 July 2009By Erica Marat

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Moscow attracts the crème de la crème of Russian society. Consequently, Muscovites face fierce competition for executive positions, while the capital also enjoys a wealth of professional knowledge and the country’s most elite educational facilities. Russia’s recent ‘fat’ years, fueled by oil and gas exports, produced a new class of young professionals in their 20s and 30s.

These young professionals take full advantage of Moscow’s fast-paced environment, putting their professional skills to good use. Unlike most Russians, they are Internet savvy and frequent travelers. This generation became fierce patriots and learned to care deeply about Russia’s future. They associate their success with a glorious Russia and blame their own failures on the difficulties their country encounters from time to time. Older generations, by contrast, blamed Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin for their troubles.

Yet this is the paradox of the educated Russian — education and professionalism do not translate into a wish for a greater democracy in Russia. Most Russian yuppies wholly embrace the Kremlin’s official interpretation of national ideologies. Critical thinking rarely equals a willingness to consider alternatives to state-controlled sources of information. They fail to apply their problem-solving skills to compare Kremlin and outside narratives of where Russia is heading.

This generation is also overtly nationalist — a real Russian patriot does not believe Western reporting of news. Most are convinced that Western media is biased, trying to persuade Russians to think in a certain way. But they rarely question the Russian media’s wish to fulfill this same goal of purposeful persuasion. Their stubbornness confirms that the Russian government has succeeded in linking the love-for-Russian instinct with suspicion of the West.

Many Russians are convinced that U.S. mass media outlets in particular are tasked with disinformation. For instance, Russians would trust the BBC slightly more than U.S. news outlets. The reflex of trusting British sources goes back to the Soviet period, when British English was taught in schools and children were made to memorize texts about Big Ben and Windsor Castle. In the meantime, the Unites States was depicted as the prime enemy in Soviet textbooks. More important, these Kremlin-created anti-American impulses were reinforced and invigorated under Vladimir Putin’s regime. Putin depicted the United States as the country’s greatest adversary.
A Russian professional today realizes that the Kremlin might not present all the facts. But such distortion is acceptable as long as it protects the national interests. National news produced by the television channels and newspapers can be entertaining, and the government’s definition of national interests is important.

Despite this propaganda, however, some young Russian professionals are still curious about how the West views Russia. At a focus group discussion held by the Moscow office of Insomar Institute of Social Marketing, a financial analyst and an engineer in Moscow said they didn’t mind English sources commenting on events in Russia as long as the reports also showed the “genuine Russian” view. In other words, Western reports must be accompanied by an acknowledgment of what Russians think of Russia.

Still this curiosity is more descriptive of professionals in their 30s — those who received their university education under the Soviet regime. They started careers during the tumultuous era of Yeltsin. Life was unpredictable, and opportunities unknown. Multiple sources of information broadened their understanding of the Russian leadership and Western influences. Putin’s more rigid rule, blessed by high oil prices, rapidly created opportunities for professionals while simultaneously curbing the media and public discussion. The state is more engaged in the private sector, establishing stronger control over national businesses and exuding a sense of continuous growth for aspiring specialists.

By contrast, 20-somethings are not as curious. They graduated from schools and universities in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their adult professional life began during Putin’s presidency. Their opportunities seemed unlimited, while media was highly controlled as they moved into mature life. They might have seen the difficulties of their parents and been glad that they have greater choices of food and fashion. Furthermore, they excelled in their careers faster than older generations as the economy grew. Their youth, energy and contemporary education were well-adapted to the needs of the 2000s.

Intellectuals in their 40s and 50s form yet another generation of scholars. They are the most skeptical of the bunch. They matured under the Soviet regime and saw the freedom of the late 1980s under Gorbachev’s glasnost. While cherishing their Soviet past, the Gorbachev and Yeltsin era brought them a sense of intellectual freedom. They valued the opportunity to read forbidden writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mikhail Bulgakov, whose writings in the 1970s could have led to readers’ imprisonment.

Under Yeltsin, they experienced an unaccustomed freedom of expressing provocative thoughts. Criticizing the rulers openly and fearlessly became a matter of daily lives. This liberty, however, was considerably narrowed under Putin. The tendency to rebel against the regime still persists among older professionals, with few of them moving into the foreign think tank community or academia.

The paradox of a Russian intellectual is therefore an intergenerational trait. But if those in their 30s are not disposed toward reading alternative media and considering the West as a partner instead of an enemy, those in their 20s will likely not either. The older generation, in the meantime, will also remain quiet under the current regime. As Insomar head Sergei Khaikin said, “I am certain that these days the majority of young managers in Moscow sympathize with the current regime.”

Erica Marat is a Eurasia research manager at the InterMedia Research Institute and a Nonresident Research Fellow at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center. The views expressed here are her own.
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