The Weird Death of Hope – særudgivelse på årsdagen for Aleksej Navalnyjs død

In Russia, there were two major waves of protest activity that shaped the political mindset of the people of my age — born around 2003. The first one was caused by the unfair presidential elections of 2018, to which Navalny was not allowed; the second was a result of the unfair Moscow municipal elections the following year. Though, in Russia, a sane person has not believed in the ability to change the political situation through elections since at least 1996, the elections gave an impulse to start caring about the country and for the civil society to unite. Every election was a point of reflection: how much more authoritarian/totalitarian had the regime become?

I should step away from discussing the second wave, even though it determined me personally a lot more in the sense of choosing education and starting to care about what I care for now, just because it is not relevant to my point here. However, the elections of 2018 do, as they became one of the major introductions of Alexei Navalny to the Russian youth.

I was in the 8th grade when my classmates, after school, went to — not home or McDonald’s, as they had been doing seven and a half years before and three years after — but to the campaign office of Alexei Navalny to get some free merchandise — usually, pens, pins, and stickers. The central symbol then was an exclamation mark, which was employed instead of ‘1’ in 2018. All was in red-and-white.

Why did my classmates and other school students all around the country do it? Many for fun, I am sure. Still, the fun was not in sticking the free pin to your backpack or jacket itself but in resistance.

This resistance should not be understood as resistance to the cruel regime of corruption that had been established in Russia by then. Even when the 8th graders were repeating the claim ‘Putin is a thief,’ the major resistance took place on a micro level rather than a macro.

It was a resistance against the authority of the old: parents, teachers, or zavuchs (a vice principal in Russian schools – presumably the most hated person by the pupils), or just random bystanders casting a contemptuous look at the Navalny pin. Those old enough who had the opportunity to vote for Putin and who usually exercised it or simply remained silent.

The generational conflict has been shaping Russian politics, or at least its perception, for quite a long time and is visible in one of the central pieces in the school literature curriculum in Russia: Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons — a novel revealing the generational conflict emerging in 19th-century Russia, in which serfdom was just abolished.

This novel is taught in school only for its ability to be straightforwardly interpreted: kid, do not contradict, you will lose anyway. Still, the kids don’t care: in a country with one of the strongest literary traditions — almost entirely taught in schools — no pupil reads the classics. But everyone watches YouTube.

That was a major factor in Navalny’s popularity among the youngsters. Every Thursday, the politician went live on YouTube to talk about politics, current events, and he responded to the questions and messages of the audience. Both the platform and his approach were understandable for the youth. Loving memes and Internet culture in general, Navalny was one of the few older people — even beyond politics — who spoke the same language as school and university students.

Perhaps being a good father of two kids helped him. Navalny became an important part of Internet culture both as a subject and object of it: he created memes and was a central image in the creations of others. Even though he was a full-fledged YouTube blogger, he was something more.

Starting to write this text, I wanted to share an idea that Navalny was the Russian Obama, but cooler — a young charismatic leader who provided hope. On the contrary to Obama, he did it not within a system, but beyond. Now, I understand that Navalny was a Russian mix of Obama and Trump, but cooler.

Remembering Navalny’s merchandise for the elections of 2018, where everything was red and white, as in Trump’s iconic MAGA cap. Or the popularity gained through social media, like Trump with Twitter. Navalny was cooler because he made young people care about politics; he made it trendy — since then, it was impossible to be a hipster from a Russian metropolis without being interested in current events.

Moreover, the figure of Navalny, at least from the youth’s perspective, contradicts the central aspect of Putinist Russia, which is an anti-Western sentiment. Having a politician like Obama and Trump, or even both, was just a simple proof that we are not worse than the ‘first-world countries.’

On the contrary to the official state narrative — in which post-Soviet Russia (thanks to Putin) was emerging despite Western reluctance and its accompanying decline — the Russian youth had been forming an image of the Western countries as potential friends, to whom we could potentially offer more than resources and confrontation. It was the first time in quite a long time when Russians started to consider themselves equal.

The Russian young people I know — who could have been characterised as progressive liberals when they were in Russia — now, after moving, have drastically shifted right. For a simple reason: in Russia, we were dreaming of what (as we believed) the Europeans had — the strong nation-state ensuring freedom and dignity to all.

Now, the Russian emigré’s image of the average European country as a heaven of liberty is collapsing. And I want to say: if in Russia, as Osip Mandelshtam wrote, we lived ‘without feeling the country beneath our feet,’ we had something else — something the European youth didn’t: a promise of a better future.

Today, as the anniversaries of Alexei Navalny’s killing and the invasion of Ukraine approach, no people of my age truly believe that there will be a better Russia: without war and dictatorship. Though, retrospectively, many understand that at least for a short time we — even in the situation of authoritarian leadership — were a real country. For now, however, the only question remains: is it better to live without hope at all, or with hope that has been killed?

Tekst: Azat Mazitov 

Visuelt: Mie Horsbøl Rasmussen

Redaktør: Peter Bitsch Hjortshøj og Regitze Bastue