Youth in Regime Crisis: Comparative Perspectives from Russia to Weimar Germany (Oxford Studies in Democratization) [Illustrated] 9780198826842, 0198826842

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Y O U T H IN R E G I M E C R I S I S

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OXFORD STUDIES IN DEMOCRATIZATION Series editor: Laurence Whitehead

........... Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES Democratic Accountability in Latin America Edited by Scott Mainwaring and Christopher Welna Democratization: Theory and Experience Laurence Whitehead The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism Andreas Schedler The Politics of Accountability in Southeast Asia: The Dominance of Moral Ideologies Garry Rodan and Caroline Hughes Segmented Representation: Political Party Strategies in Unequal Democracies Juan Pablo Luna Europe in the New Middle East: Opportunity or Exclusion? Richard Youngs Turkey’s Difficult Journey to Democracy: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back İlter Turan Foreign Pressure and the Politics of Autocractic Survival Abel Escribà-Folch and Joseph Wright Legislative Institutions and Lawmaking in Latin America Edited by Eduardo Alemán and George Tsebelis The International Politics of Authoritarian Rule Oisín Tansey Building Trust and Democracy: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Countries Cynthia M. Horne Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective: Minority Presidents in Multiparty Systems Paul Chaisty, Nic Cheeseman, and Timothy J. Power Democracy in Small States Persisting Against All Odds Jack Corbett and Wouter Veenendaal

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Youth in Regime Crisis Comparative Perspectives from Russia to Weimar Germany ...........

FÉLIX KRAWATZEK

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Félix Krawatzek 2018 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938238 ISBN 978–0–19–882684–2 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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........... Contents ........... List of Figures List of Tables Notes on Translations Acknowledgements

vii ix xi xiii

PART I. THEME S AND SCOPE 1. Setting, Concepts, and Theory

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2. Interpreting Text as Discourse or Using Text as Data

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3. Youth as a Political Force in Twentieth-Century Europe: An Overview

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PART II. YOUTH DURING R EGIME C RISES 4. The Russian Federation after the ‘Colour Revolutions’: Consolidating an Authoritarian Regime

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5. The Soviet Union during Perestroika: Youth amidst Authoritarian Regime Breakdown

129

6. The Weimar Republic and Roads Not Followed: Breakdown of an Unconsolidated Democracy

167

7. France around 1968: Consolidating a Democratic Regime

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PART III. COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES 8. Youth and Crisis: Discourse and Mobilization across Space and Time Appendix: Coding Scheme Bibliography Index

247 277 279 316

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........... List of Figures ........... 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 4.5. 4.6. 4.7. 4.8. 4.9. 5.1. 5.2. 5.3. 5.4. 5.5. 5.6. 5.7. 6.1. 6.2. 6.3. 6.4. 6.5. 6.6. 6.7. 6.8. 6.9. 6.10. 6.11.

Discourse analysis research procedure Bipartite network BRIM modularity division of a bipartite network Russian Federation: corpus structure Russian Federation: discourse network Russian Federation: frequency per discursive formation Pro-Kremlin: centralities Pro-Kremlin: discourse network Discordant: centralities Discordant: discourse network Violent: centralities Violent: discourse network Perestroika: corpus structure Perestroika: discourse network Perestroika: frequency per discursive formation Soviet-Leninist: centralities Soviet-Leninist: discourse network Victim & Threat: centralities Victim & Threat: discourse network Weimar Republic: corpus structure Weimar Republic: discourse network Weimar Republic: frequency per discursive formation Pro-Democracy: centralities Pro-Democracy: discourse network Youth & Future: centralities Youth & Future: discourse network Victim: centralities Victim: discourse network Threat: centralities Threat: discourse network

36 45 48 93 96 97 100 100 111 111 121 121 138 141 142 144 145 156 156 173 176 178 180 180 188 189 195 196 200 200

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viii 7.1. 7.2. 7.3. 7.4. 7.5. 7.6. 7.7. 7.8. 7.9.

List of Figures France: corpus structure France: discourse network France: frequency per discursive formation Transnational Contestation: centralities Transnational Contestation: discourse network France & Future: centralities France & Future: discourse network Disoriented: centralities Disoriented: discourse network

214 216 218 220 220 227 228 233 234

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........... List of Tables ........... 1.1. 1.2. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 4.1. 5.1. 6.1. 7.1.

Case selection Theoretical schema for youth mobilization in regime crisis Multi-level discourse analysis Typology for newspaper selection Newspaper corpus Russian Federation: newspapers Perestroika: newspapers Weimar Republic: newspapers France: newspapers

4 24 32 37 38 92 137 172 213

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........... Notes on Translations ........... Quotations in this book are given in my English translations unless otherwise indicated. Key foreign language terms are left in their original and translated when first mentioned. References to Russian language sources are transliterated using a system adopted from the BGN/PCGN system. Exceptions are made for well-known people where a different spelling has become conventional.

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........... Acknowledgements ........... The world surrounding me during the time I have spent working on this book has left its imprint on the final result. Concepts and ideas have travelled across time and space, shaped by the people I have talked to and the texts I have read. The bibliography conveys much of the intellectual context of this book. However, it contains only half of the story. Thanks to the unbureaucratic and generous support of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes I had the fortune to avoid conflicts between undertaking research and being able to pay rent. Nuffield College funded part of this research as did the Deutsche Historische Institut Paris and the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. A number of scholars read and commented upon drafts of various parts of this research. Giovanni Capoccia, Sudhir Hazareesingh, Elizabeth Fraser, and Dan Healey all provided helpful advice at an early stage. I am thankful to Dan Healey for the time he took to exchange ideas about the perestroika period and beyond and to Liz Frazer for her overall guidance on translating the DPhil thesis into a book manuscript. Nancy Bermeo and Laurence Whitehead took the time to engage with early drafts of different parts of this research and offered valuable insights. I owe a great debt to Laurence Whitehead and Tomila Lankina who examined this research as a thesis and offered valuable criticism and suggestions for turning it into a book. Part of this research was undertaken at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales at Sciences Po Paris. Anne de Tinguy was always interested in discussing the latest developments in Russia and hearing about and reading my research. Exchanges with Kathy Rousselet and Gilles Favarel-Garrigues also helped me to better understand Russian society present and past. The academic community at Nuffield College has been a vital part of this research project. I am particularly thankful to James Hollway for guiding my initial explorations of network analysis and contributing to the transformation of my vague ideas of discourse as networks into R-code. Over the years, many other colleagues at Oxford have offered ideas on this research and I am grateful to everyone who took the time to send encouragements and comments. If this book reads well it is thanks to Alexander Gard-Murray and Alice Bloch who helped me to make it fluent and eradicate some unnecessary jargon. I am thankful to Martin Hadley for some final touches to produce the visualizations.

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xiv

Acknowledgements

Amongst the most important circles of intellectual exchange over the last few years has been the Frechener Kreis. What began as a seminar series in 2007 has led to intense engagement with research on collective memory since 2009. Making academic writing a joint exercise has contributed to my progress from student to researcher. The forum has offered me the unique opportunity to discuss my ideas in a supportive environment at the earliest stage. I am looking forward to many more years of research and heated discussions with Friedemann Pestel, Gregor Feindt, Rieke Trimçev (née Schäfer), and Daniela Mehler. Since I arrived at Oxford in 2010, Gwendolyn Sasse has provided extremely generous support for my research. She knew how to help me shape my analytic capacities, critical thinking, and ability to express my ideas in academic language. The confidence she has expressed in my capacities has contributed to my development as a young scholar and I am thankful to have her as a colleague and friend. The ups and downs of writing a book had to be borne most directly by my family. My wife Florentine had to sit through Russian films—not all of which were in colour, not all of which had subtitles, and not all of which were from the second half of the twentieth century—and discussions about gender and neformaly during candlelit dinners, and my thoughts about the logic of comparative enquiries before falling asleep. Fortunately enough, these discussions were sometimes interrupted by our two children who reminded me of the importance of the stages before youth and the beauty of the present time. Their enthusiasm and love has helped me through moments of doubt, and their laughter and cheerfulness pulled me out of the complexity of comparative historical analysis with three languages. Having had my family at my side gave meaning to these years beyond research. I am grateful for their passion and the time we have spent together in Oxford and the countries studied in this book.

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Die Problematik der heutigen Jugend besteht in der ungelösten Problematik der Zeit (und nicht umgekehrt); die Krise der Jugend ist nur eins der sichtbarsten Symptome der allgemeinen Krise unserer Kultur. Nicht die Jugend ist krank, sondern die Zeit ist krank; nicht die Jugend taumelt verwirrt, sondern unser ganzes Kulturgebäude schwankt und steht dicht vor dem Auseinanderbrechen. The problem of today’s youth consists of the unresolved problems of our time (and not the other way around); the crisis of youth is only one of the most visible symptoms of the broader crisis of our culture. It is not youth that is ill, but our time; it is not youth that is staggering around in a state of confusion but it is the entire culture construction which is staggering and is at the point of breaking apart. Werner Deubel, novelist, 1930 Такое впечатление, что больше всего власть боится молодежи. С одной стороны - понятно, почему. Молодежь - такая специфическая аудитория, что если она действительно станет политизированной и выйдет на улицы, с ней сложно будет договориться. С другой стороны, по большому счету никаких серьезных массовых волнений с активным участием молодежи до сих пор не было. Тем не менее основную угрозу своему благополучию и реализации проекта ‘преемник-2008’ почему-то видят именно в молодежи. Seemingly it is youth that the authorities are most afraid of. This is understandable on the one hand. Young people are such a specific audience that if they really become politicized and take to the streets, it will be very difficult to come to an agreement with them. On the other hand, there has been by and large no serious large-scale unrest which involved the active participation of young people. Nevertheless, it is youth which is seen as the main threat to the realization of the project ‘successor 2008’. Ilya Yashin, leader of Yabloko, 2005

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.................... PART I .................... THEMES AND SCOPE

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Setting, Concepts, and Theory 1.1 D IS COURSE AND M OBIL IZATION IN R EGIME C RISIS In April 2005, Roman Dobrokhotov, then 22 years old, went to Moscow’s Red Square with friends. Together, they tried to cover the square in orange balloons. Also wearing orange scarves, they underlined their desire to export the Ukrainian ‘Orange Revolution’ of 2004 to neighbouring Russia. Dobrokhotov and his friends were soon described as the ‘official distributor of the “Orange Revolution” in Russia’.1 However, Ukraine’s revolution failed to be replicated and instead, Russia’s authoritarian regime structures consolidated from 2005 to 2011. Achieved by a number of means, this consolidation included the physical and discursive mobilization of youth. The decisive role played by youth in this key moment of crisis for the Russian regime is the core motivation for this book. However, Putin’s Russia cannot be fully appreciated when considered in isolation. This book therefore looks at the role of youth during regime crises in a broader historical context. It then proposes that the Russian case underlines that an authoritarian consolidation can be effective by restructuring the discourse on youth, physically mobilizing young people, and isolating oppositional youth movements. What can analyses of regime crisis and resilience gain by attending to the concept of youth? What is the symbolic significance of youth at times of great political insecurity? How does the discursive mobilization of youth relate to the physical mobilization of young people themselves, during times of upheaval? This book seeks to answer such questions and to understand regime resilience, showing how discursive structures around youth condition political protest by young people in moments of potential change. Rather than seeking to explain the stability of a political regime by focusing on its leaders, or on their manipulation of public opinion, this book explores how moments of regime crisis are lived from within society itself. By analysing the public meaning of youth and the political mobilization of young people during

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Tema nomera. Partii zelenykh, in Ogonek, 10 October 2005.

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Youth in Regime Crisis

such moments, I introduce a discursive dimension to our understandings of regime change. By definition, the ‘young’ do not have the experiences of the ‘adults’ in a society, but they are nonetheless the ones who become a highly desirable social category in moments of crisis. Politicians craft their own ideas to appeal specifically to youth, as the public backing from young people has the power to legitimize whole political systems. If done successfully, this co-optation of youth has far-reaching implications and can be at the very heart of a regime’s strategy to overcome a moment of crisis. Through the perspective of youth in four pivotal episodes in Eastern and Western European history since the First World War, this book investigates times of crisis, leading to regime resilience, and breakdown. The comparison of these episodes, across time and space, demonstrates that regimes lacking popular democratic support compensate for their insufficient legitimacy by trying to mobilize youth symbolically and politically. Further to the authoritarian consolidation in contemporary Russia, three other cases of regime crisis are analysed in depth. Added to the Russian case is a paired comparison with the perestroika years in the USSR. This particular episode of authoritarian crisis took place in a similar political and geographical space, though with a different overall outcome. Developing this paired comparison further, I include the late Weimar Republic, which serves as a first control case. This democratic regime lacked popular support and experienced intense youth mobilization. The fourth example of regime crisis is France in the period around 1968; this serves as the most different control case, which possesses an ‘out-of-sample’ status given the consolidated nature of its democracy. In this case, French democracy benefited from popular backing, but an intense period of youth mobilization briefly challenged its stability and the legitimacy of the government. The resulting analysis refines our understanding of these crises. By exploring how the discursive construction of the meaning of youth conditioned the political mobilization of young people I argue that the struggle over the meaning of youth reveals the dynamics of regime change during crises. Table 1.1 provides a schematic representation of the cases selected. Table 1.1. Case selection Step 1 Authoritarian regimes in crisis Paired Comparison Step 2 Democracies in crisis Control Cases

Regime Survival Yes No Russian Federation Perestroika (RSFSR) (2004–11) (1984–91) France (1968–9)

Weimar Republic (1929–33)

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In the twentieth century, the emergence of youth as a discrete socio-political group had a profound political impact. Over time, the voting age was lowered around the world (Cultice 1992) and youth movements arrived at the centre of the political stage at key historical moments. Notably, the experience of the First World War triggered a generational consciousness amongst young people. The impact of ‘war pedagogy’, which aimed at mobilizing a unified group of young people for the benefit of the state, sustained their collective identity ‘as youth’ (Donson 2010). In the aftermath of the war, elites across Europe endowed youth with virtually mythical capabilities (Nipperdey 1974: 87). During the interwar period a fundamentally delegitimized older generation contributed to the rise of youth as a discrete category across Western countries (Wohl 1980). But the interwar period ought not to be seen in isolation. Ever since the late nineteenth century, moments of crisis have been characterized by a struggle over the meaning of youth and by attempts to co-opt the political power of its mobilization. As a political symbol, youth relates simultaneously to the past (signifying those without responsibility for the present crisis) and the future (with young people being future adults, symbolizing the time after the crisis has passed). The analysis presented in this book, of the discursive struggle over the meaning of youth and of instances of the political mobilization of young people, emphasizes both continuity and rupture in what youth has meant for regime resilience in different political systems. The investigation goes beyond static explanations of regime change and focuses instead on the dynamic interaction between ‘elites’ and ‘the masses’, as pioneered by Linz and Stepan’s attention to ideas, actions, and strategies of elites (1978). Such a focus has inspired Capoccia’s agent-centred analysis of democratic survival in interwar Europe (2007) and other recent contributions (Ansell and Samuels 2014; Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán 2014). Concentrating on youth, this book responds to the acknowledged lacuna in understanding the role of ‘ordinary citizens’ when analysing regime change (Bermeo 2003; Della Porta 2014). The quasi absence of youth in studies of political crises is at odds with the large-scale mobilizations of young people that nonetheless do occur during those moments. Some authors have justified this neglect by arguing that the so-called masses, including youth, are irrelevant for evaluating moments of crisis, since the central players are elites (Dogan and Higley 1998; Higley and Burton 2006). Whilst I am not suggesting that elites are irrelevant, I contend that the concept of youth offers a useful prism through which we can elucidate what elite confrontations come to signify for normal citizens during moments of crisis. Indeed, I argue that the importance of the symbol of youth in moments of crisis goes far beyond the mere physical presence achieved through its political mobilization.

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The analysis of the public discourses establishing the meaning of youth, as presented in this book, enables an understanding of how an elite struggle is expressed and eventually constructed for the wider public. Conducting discourse analysis with attention to instances of the political mobilization of young people allows us to trace the mobilizing effects of the discursive context. I argue that the struggle over what youth means to the public both constrains and drives the political mobilization of young people. Indeed, the concept of youth captures and reflects competing socio-political visions in times of crisis and is particularly suited to being turned into such an absorbent signifier, given that youth as a demographic group undergoes constant renewal; being ephemeral individually but durable collectively means that the very notion of youth possesses a particular semantic flexibility. A multitude of actors therefore engages in shaping the discursive construct of youth. The term youth also has a unique temporal flexibility: it can be employed to reconstruct a country’s past but also to imagine its future. The reinterpreted past and the anticipated future tend to merge in discussions about youth: politicians, journalists, and other actors cite the glorious contributions of past youth to national advancement and thereby endow contemporary youth with a historic mission, whilst the notion of a ‘lost’ young generation discursively transforms youth into a threat to the society’s future, and may delegitimize an entire political system. The media plays a crucial role in shaping social reality by constructing, reconstructing, and mirroring such shared meanings (Humphreys 1994: 2; Schildt 2001: 178–9; Schudson 1995: 31). My investigation into the negotiation of the meanings of youth therefore involves a comparative analysis of media sources, specifically of leading newspapers available for a wide audience.

1 . 2 CR I S I S : P O T E N TI A L C HA NGE AN D MO B I L I Z A T I O N Crisis is typically understood as the unfolding of dramatic events with the possibility of far-reaching change. The term thus describes a situation in which some obstacles for political change appear to be removed. Youth movements are amongst those actors that can capitalize on the perception of a crisis, and can advocate for a degree or form of political change that may have seemed unreasonable prior to the crisis. Accordingly, scholars have emphasized the political importance of young people in moments of crisis in general (Cohn and Markides 1977; Farnell 1977; Goldstone 2016; Moller 1968). In this book, my use of the term ‘crisis’ emphasizes that the significance of youth-led social movements is potentially increased in such moments. The

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media frequently reports on such forms of mobilization, and politicians are in turn required to respond to activists’ demands. During times of crisis, rational calculations fail to account for boundaries to activism; the contingency that a crisis creates thus has the potential to overcome the everyday structural constraints and limitations on what is possible and perceivable. Weyland demonstrates this enabling feature of perceived crises in his study of democratic contention, in which he emphasizes the interplay of internal and external conditions, notably the role of iconic events (2014). GilcherHoltey (1998) similarly emphasizes the importance of the Bourdieusian ideas of ‘critical events’ and ‘critical moments’ during 1968. As defined in this book, a crisis emerges when actors perceive events abroad as being relevant for their own domestic situation in which the governing elite is deemed illegitimate in the eyes of a proportion of youth. This combination of external encouragement and internal delegitimization is a characteristic shared by all four cases included in this book; in each, young activists mobilized for fundamental change of the political state of affairs, in a context of crisis. Conversely, changes in external conditions, whether gradual or rapid, do not sufficiently modify structural constraints upon the nature and likelihood of mobilizations in ‘normal’, non-crisis periods (constraints which are, for example, the result of institutional solidity or the popularity of a political leader). However, when the political regime at home appears delegitimized, for instance due to splits amongst elites or to incumbent weakness, an external precedent that activists can frame as being relevant for the domestic context has the potential to entirely reset calculations about political outcomes and induce political mobilization. Whilst political crisis offers a moment of possibility for transformation, not all actors are equally able to take advantage of it. It is therefore important to ask which actors are able to use the potential of political crisis. Studying the 2011 regional and municipal elections in Spain, Hughes explores how the youth-led social movement M15M/Indignados was able to confront the political and economic elites that had run the country since the 1970s, describing how the activists’ youthful demographic came to be a seen as standing in symbolic opposition to the old establishment (2011). In moments of crisis, the symbol of youth indeed provides an alternative to delegitimized and old ruling elites. By associating with youth at such times, a regime can thus significantly boost its perceived legitimacy and potential continuity. In this book, the term crisis is employed to frame the comparative analysis, as the concept conveys the gap between what actors (such as mobilizing youth, journalists, or politicians) have experienced and what they expect. To empirically trace this gap between their knowledge of what happened in the past and what they anticipate in the future, I ask about the interpretations that

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youth movements and the media of the era had of the crisis periods in question. Analysing this level of interpretations leads to a consideration of the impact of memory, narrative, and hope in the making of crisis (Jessop 2012). I therefore approach the term crisis as a category of experience; a term that was also used explicitly in the contemporary discourse of each of my four cases (Sewell 1996). This understanding of the concept draws on an emerging literature in the social sciences which has forcefully argued that crises are not the mere expression of objective forces. Brute facts do not come ‘with an instruction sheet’ (Blyth 2003). A fall in GDP, an increase in unemployment, or a rapid succession of governments, for example, have little significance outside of an interpretive framework that guides precisely which events come to be seen as a crisis (Broome et al. 2012: 11). A period of perceived crisis becomes particularly powerful if it is embedded in narratives illustrating the break of the present with a country’s past and extrapolating ideas about a deeply changed future. Widmaier and colleagues, for example, underline that crises ‘cannot be defined simply in terms of their material effects, but that agents’ intersubjective understandings must first give meaning to such material changes. In short, agents act upon such understandings rather than their materially telegraphed interests’ (2007: 748, emphasis in original). Moments of crisis are important both for what they are and what they leave behind, be it change or continuity. Crises unfold and have consequences over time and upon our perspective on social change in light of the importance of decisions taken in moments of restructuring (Pierson 2004: 6). Gamble summarizes: ‘It matters a great deal how a crisis is interpreted and framed, because that determines non-agendas as well as agendas, the options for action, and the appropriate response’ (2014: 32). First, as a crisis unfolds, the possible futures expand; a society might credibly move from one socio-political contract to another.2 Then, as a crisis develops, decisions gradually limit the ‘windows of opportunity’ (Keeler 1993). In other words, the limitation of the range of possible future outcomes defines the end of a crisis. Second, decisions taken during this gradual limitation set parameters beyond the horizon of a crisis itself, since these decisions generate a process of path dependence. Expressing the previously possible futures, a crisis thus also becomes relevant in terms of ‘futures past’ and potentially turns into an iconic event, providing Hay underlines this opening of possibilities: ‘Crisis is the moment in which the unity of the state is discursively renegotiated and, potentially, reached and in which a new strategic trajectory is imposed upon the institutions that now (re-)comprise it. During moments of crisis, indeed, during the very process of crisis identification, the state is discursively reconstituted as an object in need of decisive intervention and as the object of strategic restructuring’ (1999: 331). 2

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references for future discourse.3 This definition of crisis draws our attention to the discursive framing of political mobilization. Through attending to this discursive level, the social construction of ideas can be linked with actual political mobilization on the ground. Emphasizing frames, social movement research has downplayed consideration of a movement’s more complex discursive setting as Benford (1997) or Jasper criticize (1997: 76). Steinberg underlines that frame analysis frequently thinks too statically and simplistically about the discourses used in framings (1998). Despite the importance of frame theory for understanding how activists construct their movements’ representation (Tarrow 2011: 156), as recently demonstrated with regard to the Spanish M15M/Indignados movement (Fominaya and Jimenéz 2014), such criticism ultimately draws our attention to the need to carefully consider the broader discursive setting within which movements operate. A crisis is a particularly forceful interpretation of events, involving the attribution of responsibilities and possible ways forward (Boin et al. 2009). Conceptually, crisis conveys a change in temporal relations. Defined by this gap between Erfahrungsraum (space of experience) and Erwartungshorizont (horizon of expectations), crisis merges the historical times of past, present, and future; it becomes a temporal concept (Koselleck 2004 [1985]).4 Koselleck locates this shift in the meaning of crisis in the Enlightenment period, when experience and expectation disjoined (1973) and when socio-political contestations triggered broader changes on the conceptual and linguistic level (Edwards 2006).5 When contemporaries of a given time period understand their time as a crisis, they express the fundamental contingency of their present, remake their past, and deliberate about possibilities for future developments (Koselleck 2002: 244). If the present is incongruent with what had previously been known or was expected to happen, judgements about the 3

Samman identified a number of ways through which the mobilization of past crisis impacts on the production and negotiation of later crisis periods (2015: 21). 4 Koselleck introduced these terms to account for the disjuncture emerging during modernity of past experiences and future expectations, which created the possibility to understand modernity as a new epoch (1985 [1979]: 359). Beyond the specific empirical context Koselleck offered, the two concepts are helpful for the present study, to underline the anthropological dimension of time. Erfahrungsraum refers to the ‘present past’ which is embodied and remembered, conscious or unconscious, and includes by being embedded in a social context the experiences of others. The Erwartungshorizont represents the ‘present future’; it is also personal and interpersonal, by including what is not yet experienced. 5 Koselleck illustrates how the term’s Greek and Latin polysemy multiplied with the translation of ‘crisis’ into various national contexts throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (2006).

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feasibility of possible futures evolve. Options for the future thus multiply and are not rationally confined but are rather distorted by hopes and fears. These temporal characteristics of crisis make for ideal conditions in which to investigate the two separate concepts of youth and generations, as these express distinct temporal relations. As the prevailing discursive setting of a present time, crisis emphasizes uncertainty and the need to act. A crisis thereby opens the space for historical imagination. Episodes of crisis challenge established political and cultural norms and oblige society to develop new heuristic frames, eluding ‘established patterns of representation’ (Meiner and Veel 2012: 2). When mobilized, youth can coherently claim that their course of action might bring about major changes in a country’s regime structure and when the media echoes this claim, the perceived gap between experience and expectation receives its mobilizing potential. Youth and crisis are thus strongly linked. An understanding of crisis that centres on actors’ interpretation of their lived reality ought also to transcend exclusively negative definitions of crisis. Indeed, Burckhardt’s theory of ‘historical crisis’ which inspired Koselleck’s own work,6 sees crises as periods when ‘[t]he historical process is suddenly accelerated in terrifying fashion. Developments which otherwise take centuries seem to flit by like phantoms in months or weeks, and are fulfilled’ (1979 [1943]: 214). Crises allow the destruction of the old, thereby clearing the way for something new, ‘[t]he infection flashes like an electric spark over hundreds of miles and the most diverse peoples [ . . . ] all men are suddenly of one mind, even if only in a blind conviction: Things must change’ (Burckhardt 1979 [1943]: 226). I will therefore not limit the definition of crisis to the alleged ‘dark side’ commonly associated with the term, but will instead concentrate on the unifying and mobilizing impact enabled by a heightened awareness for possible change, induced by times of crisis.7 If crisis is defined by an uncertainty that unites different parts of society, it is worth also including cases of crisis that preserve the status quo ante (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007: 352). What qualifies as crisis depends on historically changing criteria of cultural relevance (Nünning 2012: 69). Crises are ‘an invitation to ex post facto rationalisations’ (Knight 1998: 30). Analytically privileging the term ‘crisis’ therefore deviates from using a concept such as ‘critical juncture’ (Capoccia 2016; Collier and Collier 1991: 29). Indeed, as Mahoney points out, studies 6

According to Koselleck, Burckhardt’s account is the main nineteenth-century crisis theory (2006: 207). 7 This open meaning concurs largely with the Greek use of the term; krísis implied the obligation to take an irrevocable decision under pressure of time (Koselleck 2006: 203–17); krísis is seen as moments of truth when the meaning of men and events became clear (Starn 1976: 5).

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using the term ‘critical juncture’ tend to neglect the contingency of the events that set in motion the path dependency proceeding from moments of crisis (2000, 2001). By contrast, I wish to emphasize that agents do not respond in a predetermined way to material shifts; this methodological focus on the discursive dimension also underlines the view that actors attempt to strategically shape the meaning of events ‘as crisis’ (Widmaier et al. 2007: 748), rather than simply finding ‘crisis’ in any pre-existing, predetermined form.

1 . 3 YO U T H: ID E A L I Z A T I ON AN D M O B IL I Z A T IO N For each individual, the experiences that occur between childhood and adulthood are of remarkable importance. For many, youth is a period in which parents stop embodying the social order, as the young individual comes to realize that many constraints have social origins stemming from outside the family. Youth is an undoubtedly critical phase. Looking beyond definitions that rely on biological markers, or how the period of transition is individually lived, this book explores the importance of youth as a social-discursive reality, approaching it as a fascinating and highly contested space in which a given society’s competing self-understandings come into conflict, particularly during moments of societal reorientation. This contestation is manifest in the way in which this process of fundamental personal development is publicly represented. It would be a gross misrepresentation to reduce youth to a homogeneous group and to emphasize only its troublesome impact on political stability. Youth mobilization is not always disruptive, nor outward-looking and progressive. Throughout this book, the term youth is therefore understood as a social construction, as an objectification, rather than as an actually existing homogeneous and biologically defined group. According to Berger and Luckmann, different objectifications shape our apprehension of the everyday world: ‘The reality of everyday life appears already objectified, that is, constituted by an order of objects that have been designated as objects before my appearance on the scene’ (1966: 35). Within that it is language that provides each of us with ‘a ready-made possibility for the ongoing objectification of my unfolding experience’ (1966: 53). With this in mind, I use ‘youth’ to refer to a socially constructed symbol mobilized in discourse, and ‘young people’ to refer to actual individuals mobilized—or potentially being mobilized—in person. The concept of mobilization thus has two components. First, the discursive mobilization of youth by politicians, intellectuals, or young people themselves

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as conveyed by the media; second, the physical mobilization of young people taking to the streets. These two aspects of mobilization interact and the discursive enables and at the same time restricts the possibility for actual protest. The political mobilization of young people has puzzled scholars for decades: ‘Exaggerating slightly, one might say that young people are the first active individuals in history’ (Levi and Schmitt 1997: 10). Numerous studies share this starting point from which to investigate the reasons for young people’s mobilization and explore the values they defend when taking to the streets (Goldstone 2016). A classic amongst them is Feuer’s work in the aftermath of the student mobilization of 1968. He emphasizes the capacity of student movements to mobilize other social groups; a phenomenon that he traces back to the early nineteenth-century German War of Liberation against Napoleon (1969: 3–22). At the heart of youth as a symbol, lies a fundamental tension. On an individual level, youth is transitory and ephemeral, but on the social level, it is enduring; there always is a group that can be referred to as youth. Individual impermanence distinguishes youth from other social groups, such as gender or socio-economic categories, the membership of which does not necessarily expire over time. Moreover, those who dominate and control the discursive ascriptions placed upon youth are usually older and thus external to it; they are not young people themselves. However, during moments of crisis, young people themselves engage with and contest the meaning of youth, as argued in section 1.2. The mobilization of young people and the transformation of the meaning of youth at such moments thus makes for a deeply contested symbolic space: ‘Hors des crises, les jeunes sont ignorés’.8 The understanding of youth evolves in any given society and at any moment in time there are differences between and within societies. ‘La jeunesse n’est qu’un mot’ (‘Youth is nothing but a word’) as Bourdieu famously phrased it (1978); whatever youth means depends on the context of the word’s use (Hamel 1999). Given constant inter-societal exchange, contemporary societies are never hermetically sealed entities and the meaning of youth within a country is itself embedded in transnational structures. It is thus fundamental when analysing youth to be aware of its socially constructed meaning, established through the interplay of wider political, economic, judicial, or educational structures. Given that we all experienced youth once, there is a risk that researchers might implicitly conceptualize youth in a way that fits with their own experiences and preferences, or even the particular argument that they wish to

8

‘Outside of crises, youth is ignored’. See La Croix, 26 March 1969.

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defend. This can be perceived in Feuer’s work on students who are part of the broader category of youth: This is a book about the working of the ethical, idealistic spirit in human history. For of all social movements, those composed of students have been characterised by the highest degree of selflessness, generosity, compassion, and readiness for self-sacrifice. (1969: 3)

During the 1970s in particular, studies about youth tended to present unified and programmatic images of youth or students disrupting existing regimes. Moller, for example, presents ‘youth as a force in the modern world’ (1968: 256–7) and Altbach argues: For more than a century, student movements have had an important place among the agents of social change. In some nations, students have succeeded in toppling governments or changing politics. In others, they have been instrumental in various kinds of cultural revivals. (1967: 76–7)

Research still struggles to provide a robust definition of youth; purely agebased approaches are particularly problematic from a comparative perspective (Fahmy 2006; Furlong and Cartmel 2007; Leaman and Wörsching 2010). Age-based definitions cannot account for the expanding and contracting age brackets that correspond to the category of youth over time; they also fail to accommodate the plurality of self-understandings that the term ‘youth’ may express.9 Just as Butler regards gender as constructed through the repetitive performance of gender roles (1999), youth is understood in this book as a result of performing ‘as youth’. Adopting this approach, I follow the lead of those studies which investigate how the meaning of youth has changed radically in brief moments of crisis, and which ask what such shifts in meaning imply for those considered to be ‘youth’. Gillis (1974) illustrates how youth in Europe turned into a distinct cultural entity during key episodes in the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and the emergence of a middle class between 1770 and 1870. As one consequence of these overlapping processes, male middle-class youth in particular began to enjoy some sociability during leisure time, though it was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that an understanding of youth as detached from class background emerged; it was even later, during the interwar years, that political youth movements gained mass support (Gillis 1974: 155). It was the A striking example is a ‘Justizwachmeister’ explaining in the Deutsche Rundschau that his ‘youth’ prevented him from being a member of the federal court at the age of 43; see Psychoanalyse der Reichsjustiz, in Die Weltbühne, 1930: 44, p. 643. 9

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relative independence of youth—perceived as an agent of social change—that characterized such movements (Kahane and Rapoport 1997: 35). By understanding the meaning of youth in differing moments of crisis, the significance of youth as a political actor is enriched. In her perestroika-era ethnography of a Muscovite tusovka (a group of like-minded young people), Pilkington investigates the interplay between the group’s self-understanding and the external social ascriptions given to it (1994). Similarly, Stambolis captures the interplay between the public representations and self-perceptions of Weimar youth (2003), as does Bantigny (2007) for France just prior to the events around May 1968. All three contributions underline how adults—those who stand outside the category of youth—nonetheless shape its meaning. In this process, young people negotiate, internalize, and distort these diverse meanings, which in turn affects how adults reason about youth. The body of scholarship in this field highlights that youth is not a fixed and universalistic entity that can be simply observed, but rather a complex social artefact invested with competing symbols. This book takes this constructivist approach to youth as its point of departure and undertakes a systematic and comparative empirical investigation. Its focus is on contemporary Russian youth mobilization, which I embed in a comparative frame spanning the time after the First World War, a period during which an increasingly self-affirmed youth started to play an ever more visible role as a social actor across Europe (Wallace and Kovatcheva 1998).10 As this book’s Chapter 3 will discuss in some detail, it was in interwar Europe that youth became an important social actor and a distinct participant in public life.

1.4 GENE RATION: CHANNELLING EXPERIE NCES AND EXPECTATIONS Over the last three decades, the concept of generation has gained in prominence in the social sciences. This focus carries with it the questioning of older collective identities, the disappearance of central social conflicts along class lines, and the withering of socialism as an alternative model (Beck 1986). However, turning exclusively to the past runs the risk of missing a decisive component of what it means to be part of a generation. If we simply aim at identifying shared foundational experiences, the Erfahrungsraum, we fail to grasp the actual 10 This is not to deny or devalue sporadic acts of youth resistance such as in late Tsarist Russia (Morrissey 1998).

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everyday relevance of the term ‘generation’. I thus propose instead to focus on the relationship between Erwartungshorizont and Erfahrungsraum as providing the critical space in which generational membership is and can be negotiated. The youth of a given time identifies as a generation not only when it can draw on shared past experiences, a united Erfahrungsraum, but when it shares a convincing and coherent collective Erwartungshorizont. These expectations are of different kinds, including collective hopes or fears, a desire to preserve what exists or to change perceived faults. The concept of a ‘generation’ can thus be refined via Koselleck’s work on the theory of time. As a conceptual historian, Koselleck emphasized the inherent entanglement of past, present, and future, and the pivotal role of language in creating and maintaining the temporal relationship between them.11 By considering the dynamics of historical time—acceleration, deceleration, or rupture—we can begin to better address the fact that people are of course born continuously, thus making a simple distinction between generations impossible. However, despite such insights, an exclusive past-orientation and linearity continues to underpin the dominant scholarship on generations.

1.4.1 Reading the Literature on Generation Considering the literature on generations, four approaches can be distinguished. (1) Psychological: As individuals we are all part of multiple generations, which psychological scholarship interprets in terms of family roles. We all combine multiple generational affiliations, such as grandchild, child, and perhaps mother or father. These roles imply specific relations, involving certain norms and expectations. This family-centred understanding has been applied for understanding collective age-based identities, notably for analysing the conflictual nature of familial transmission as pioneered by Davis (1940). Drawing on psychoanalytical categories, such as the Oedipus complex, authors like Mendel have established a parallel between the individual parent–child conflict and social conflicts between generations (1969). Such a family-centred framing similarly underpins Eisenstadt’s theory of social change through generational succession (1956). Such understandings of generation have for long been part of popular culture. The famous novels of Ivan Turgenev (1818–83) convey the conflictual 11 See Koselleck (1985 [1979], 2003) and Olsen’s intellectual biography as a useful English language introduction (2012), as well as Jordheim (2012).

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nature between ‘Fathers and Sons’12 in Tsarist Russia. There, generational confrontations became politically significant with the 1825 vosstanie dekabristov (Decembrist Uprising). Early writings about the dekabristi interpreted the uprising in generational terms, and the memory of it inspired later generations of revolutionary martyrs (Beer 2013: 549). Early scholarship further strengthened the psychological view of a generation of disaffected youth in conflict with its parents, finding similarities across Europe (Mirsky 1925). Lovell, however, forcefully deconstructs the dekabristi label, noting that it ‘implies a high degree of retrospectivity’ (2008: 579). Indeed, many post hoc interpretations run the risk of linearity and embrace the notion of teleology in contingent historical processes. (2) Political Sociology: Political sociologists are interested in the divergence and transmission of values between generations; they navigate between the concepts of generation and cohort to describe the effects of age group upon political choice. Ryder pioneered this approach and advocated for ‘the cohort as a concept in the study of social change [ . . . ] successive cohorts are differentiated by the changing content of formal education, by peer-group socialization, and by idiosyncratic historical experience’ (1965: 843). Numerous studies on electoral behaviour investigate such effects and generally confirm the importance of age group effects, for instance on voter turnout (Bhatti and Hansen 2012; van der Brug and Kritzinger 2012: 248). But Neundorf and Niemi (2014: 4) underline that it is extremely difficult to systematically disentangle age, period, and generational effects. However, recent advances in statistical methods, plus the increasing availability of individual-level datasets might nonetheless help quantitative studies to explore generational identities in greater depth. (3) Social History: Despite the founding fathers’ positivist impetus, the social history approach remains prominent in historical studies. In the aftermath of the First World War, Mentré in France (1920) and Ortega y Gasset in Spain (1928) attempted to determine an objective generational rhythm and to define its periodicity. Mannheim’s refined theoretical account of such generational understandings became a classic (1928). In particular, generational theories at the time emphasized the specific conditions of the Weimar Republic, whose youth was perceived as a historic agent in its own right (Weinrich 2013: 38). However, scholarship has tended to simplify and decontextualize the complex debate on generations that took place during this 12 The Russian original of this novel is Otsy i deti which should translate as ‘fathers and children’ and remains a popular read in contemporary Russia. Other novels by Turgenev deal with the generational phenomenon such as Dvoryanskoe gnezdo (A Nest of Gentlefolk) and Rudin (Oleinikov 2005).

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interwar period. Meanwhile, Burnett unravels the intellectual history of the concept of generation (2010). She emphasizes the diversity for which the generational tag was used in the interwar period, for phenomena as wideranging as literature (Petersen 1926; von Müller 1928), art (Pinder 1926a, 1926b), and music history (Lorenz 1928). Indeed, after the First World War, the alienation of youth became a ubiquitous topic, expressed in the prominence of the generational frame, which resonated with contemporaries of the era (Mommsen 2003: 116). However, the persistence of these early perspectives is problematic. By drawing on Mannheim today, many authors apply a past-oriented and potentially deterministic or homogenizing perspective, traits of which can be found in Bloch’s famous description of a generation as communauté d’empreinte (imprinted community) (1949: 94). Herbert, for instance, defines three distinct political generations of Germans during the twentieth century (2003) and Roseman (1995: 4) studies the unifying consequences of ‘key experiences’ when delimiting generations in German history between 1770 and 1968. Similarly, Guieu falls victim to a homogenizing and programmatic generational understanding, focusing on the period between 1920 and 1950 in his discussion of ‘European militants’ (2010). Such conceptual work that draws on Mannheim typically defines generational belonging in terms of shared and integrative experiences, ‘which is to provide them with a collective memory that serves to integrate the cohort over a finite period of time’ (Eyerman and Turner 1998: 93). (4) Cultural History: More recent approaches depart from the aforementioned schools of thought, and instead investigate the cultural significance of the use of the term generation, and its social effects. This approach is therefore of value for the study at hand. Lovell, for example, highlights the importance of scrutinizing when, how, and why people use the label to make sense of political, social, or cultural differences (2007: 9). Similarly, I investigate the role of the idea of ‘generation’ but throughout the study it becomes clear that the politicized use of this term applied during the unfolding of a crisis is frequently lost when the meaning of that event is negotiated in its aftermath (Feindt et al. 2014). The acceptance of a generational interpretation, I propose, often suggests a significant discursive effort by those who witnessed or participated in a past crisis (Krawatzek 2017a). From a cultural history perspective, it can be argued that the visibility of the generational label after the First World War expressed the emerging selfconsciousness of youth as a distinct group. Youth formulated and organized its interests, which were unlike those of children and adults. Increasingly, youth was organized in specific movements, either managed by adults or based on initiatives from young people themselves. Gradually, the dialectical process

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between the self-consciousness of youth and its public recognition as a distinct social category led to its participation in public life specifically ‘as youth’. Deriving a definition of generations from the language used in different historical periods, Fürst illustrates the importance of the formative experiences of young people during the Second World War in shaping late Stalinist socialism (2010). Similarly, Neumann investigates the precise meaning of youth during the early years of the Soviet Union (2011, 2012). These four approaches form the contours of the academic debate on the subject of generations.13 This book is rooted in the cultural history perspective, to which it contributes an emphasis on the importance of the future for grasping the prominence of the generational label at any given historical moment. The prominence of the generational concept in the public arena, I advance, is a very specific expression of the discourse about youth. Youth as a symbolic space conveys a society’s temporal orientation, since discursive rules about present youth entail speaking about past and future. Because of this temporal flexibility, the social group of ‘youth’ lends itself to acquiring the social label ‘generation’. However, youth and generation are not synonymous. It is not uncommon for there to be a specific social group identified as youth even though people at the time refrain from applying the label of generation. Indeed, the latter often reflects retrospective ascriptions and is thus enshrined in later struggles over the meaning of particular episodes. Analysing the use of ‘generation’ therefore requires an understanding of its changing meaning over time, to consider the inherent temporal layers of past and future.

1.4.2 Generations from Russia to Weimar: An Overview I argue that the four historical episodes studied in depth in this book enable an understanding of when and with what purpose actors used the generational label, when it was successful in dominating the interpretation of a particular episode, and when it failed to do so. Let me briefly foreshadow the arguments that I will make.

1.4.2.1 Contemporary Russia Since the 2004 Ukrainian ‘Orange Revolution’ a number of scholars have started to speak of a new post-communist generation, to explain the value 13

One could add oral history, which needs to deal with the retrospective nature of such accounts. Raleigh uses this method to reconstruct a generational narrative of Soviet baby boomers (2012) and Gildea et al. draw on life-history for the ‘May 68’ generations across Europe (2013).

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changes that seemed to emerge some twenty years after the fall of communism (Diuk 2012; Levada and Shanin 2005). Indeed, Nikolayenko (2007) draws on the generational label to demarcate a transition from Soviet times. In the context of the youth-driven ‘Colour Revolutions’ across the post-communist space (Kuzio 2006), the concept of generation has turned into a fiercely contested symbol. In Russia, supporters of presidential policies try to monopolize the use of the term ‘generation’, hoping to unite youth in its support for the political elite. But those movements that are not supportive of the state also try to capitalize on the generational label, in order to unite their supporters. Such acclamations of generational unity are, I suggest, aimed at discursively reducing the diversity that characterizes the lived reality of young people in contemporary Russia.

1.4.2.2 Perestroika Russia In Marxist ideology, generations were acknowledged historical actors, but there was no space for a separate youth culture; the unity of the people transcended time. Over time, generations differed only in their inherited level of economic and societal development (Ikonnikova 1974: 22–3). As theory had it, at any moment in time, everyone shared one socialist way of life and youth therefore needed to be integrated in a harmonious generational succession. The ideological purification of young people in this context was crucial for the leadership; acknowledging generational conflict would have questioned the proclaimed logic of historical progress. In the late Soviet period, by the 1980s, the idea of an identifiable and clearly delimited generation had lost traction, though politicians continuously referred to the generational succession of history, in order to sketch the path towards developed socialism. Popular culture, films, and newspapers still contained traces of the previously popular use of generation.14 Filmmaker Karen Shakhnazarov, born in 1952, was one of many who captured changing generational relations, in works such as his 1984 My iz dzhaza (We are from Jazz) or 1987 Kur’yer (Messenger Boy). The latter conveys young people’s sarcasm and disaffection towards working life and the parental generation in general. Some academic analyses at the time also advanced generational interpretations, speaking about a ‘Gorbachev generation’ or the pokolenie glasnosti (glasnost’ generation) (Coulloudon 1988; Zacek 1989). Indeed, Merridale refers to a new generation of historians that united around the movement Memorial in the 1980s and conducted 14

In the Soviet Union and in the West; for instance Keller’s: A Perestroika Generation, in The New York Times, 1 October 1988; Zdravstvui, plemya mladoe, neznakomoe . . . , in Ogonek, 9 January 1988; Po vsem adresam, in Ogonek, 20 May 1989.

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research into the repressions of the Soviet era (2003: 19). However, with subsequent post-Soviet reinterpretations of perestroika, identification as pokolenie glasnosti disappeared. Current analyses of this period with reference to generational ideas are also rare. Instead, there are competing generational constructions for the post-perestroika era, such as Pelevin’s (1999) prominent Generation ‘P’ referring to those who underwent their socialization during the tumultuous years of Russian savage capitalism after the USSR’s downfall.

1.4.2.3 Weimar Republic Following the First World War, the use of the generational label broadened. Those born after 1918, scholars, and the public, have since enshrined this association between the interwar period and generational dynamics (Mommsen 1985). Indeed, the largely uncontested generational label has guided interpretations of this period, notwithstanding ongoing debates about the precise delimitation of generational boundaries (Peukert 1987b). During this time, people across Europe drew significantly on the idea of a generation, as Wohl exemplifies in looking at high culture (1980). Its prominence and link to youth was particularly visible in the Weimar Republic, and media discussed the special political importance of youth in numerous texts on the political and cultural attitudes of the young generation (Gründel 1932). Later scholarship drove this generational paradigm forward. Academic analyses interpreted Weimar’s ‘Promise and Tragedy’ (Weitz 2007) as a generational phenomenon, attempting to explain the specificity of the period. Laqueur writes: ‘This generation preferred drums to speeches and parades to long and inconclusive discussions; eventually it decided that the elected leaders were incapable of coping with the crisis’ (2000: 16). Similarly, Brandenburg refers to the Irrwege (wrong tracks) of German youth (1982 [1968]) and von Hellfeld refers to the ‘deceived generation’ that sought salvation in fascism (1985). Indeed, numerous explanations account for Germany’s particular political trajectory with reference to the collective subject ‘generation’, reproducing the contemporary discourse as an explanation for the dynamics of that historical episode (Kretschmann 2009).

1.4.2.4 France in the Period around 1968 In the month of May 1968 itself, the generational label was not overly prominent. However, as the mobilization unfolded, and in the period that followed, the protests were increasingly interpreted as being simply youthbased. With this interpretation, conservatives unsupportive of the movement were able to reduce the demonstrations to a mere generational quarrel, thus

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emptying the mobilization of its serious political demands (Krawatzek 2017a).15 This labelling of 1968 as a mere generational phenomenon has since continued, and remains highly controversial for those who accuse conservative journalists or intellectuals of retrospectively depoliticizing ‘May 68’ and diminishing its significance.16 Such labelling can also be seen in cases beyond that of France, ranging from Italy (Passerini 1996) to broader comparative analyses of ‘the West’ (Fraser 1988; Marwick 1998) and Eastern Europe (von der Goltz 2011).

1.5 D EVELOPING A COMP ARA TIVE HISTORICAL FRAME This book positions itself within a renewed strand of work in comparative politics, using controlled comparisons inspired by comparative-historical analysis, recognizing that probabilistic statistical significance does not represent the only way of achieving external validity (Slater and Ziblatt 2013: 1314). By conducting a detailed study of four cases, within the broader universe of instances of political youth mobilization in moments of regime crisis, it is possible to operate on a less abstract level than would be the case with a large-N comparative study which looks for patterns in a large number of cases primarily through statistical means. This also allows me to more properly consider context-dependent specificities (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003: 9). Such an approach implies both careful engagement with the historical debates surrounding each individual episode and an in-depth country-expertise; these are requirements that are difficult to meet in large-N studies. The small number of cases also allows for a close and systematic consideration of primary historical sources, rather than exclusively secondary material, which means that analytic categories can respond to the specific characteristics of the case set and therefore travel between cases. However, disagreement exists amongst scholars as to whether interpretive approaches are sufficiently rigorous, valid, and reliable. Some researchers— typically those of a positivist orientation—express concerns about the subjective nature of interpretive work and question the confidence that one can have in their results (King et al. 1994). Such criticism challenges interpretive 15 E.g. Charles Flory: La rupture entre générations, in La Croix, 29 June 1968; or Raymond Aron: La révolution introuvable, in Le Figaro, 12 August 1968. 16 In 2008 the acting French president Sarkozy blamed the ‘generation of 1968’ for ‘French society’s current ills’: Nicolas Sarkozy blames the generation of 1968, in The Telegraph, 29 April 2008.

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researchers to account for the fact that one might simply perceive patterns that conform to one’s own personal assumptions or ideals, which might reasonably undermine the very validity of findings derived from qualitative interpretive work. Recognizing the shortcomings of work that is either purely quantitative or qualitative, this book develops a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative interpretive analysis with quantification derived inductively from primary sources, which suits the needs of cross-temporal comparison as conducted here. I suggest that the mixed-method approach of discourse network analysis, introduced in Chapter 2, can help to address criticism typically levelled at interpretive research. This method allows for consistency, comprehensibility, and, within certain limitations, replicability. If we wish to understand the place of youth in the consolidation of the contemporary Russian regime, a within-case study is the best means for achieving this, as it enables us to carefully unravel the complexity and contradictions involved in the unfolding of events. Looking in depth at the Russian case makes it possible to move beyond the idea of a simple cause and effect, of the influence of an independent upon a dependent variable. Instead, looking at regime crisis through the prism of youth, this study explores the structural conditions and the interaction between actors that contribute to the unfolding of these crises. Identifying how structural conditions, such as regime type or historical legacies, interact with the political mobilization of youth helps us to understand what young people are mobilized for when their country’s political foundations become questioned. Nonetheless, critics of qualitative small-N comparative research tend to also focus on the impossibility, notwithstanding theoretical reasoning in case selection, of holding all potentially relevant variables constant. Indeed, proponents of statistical, large-N approaches even question the utility of making small-N comparisons at all (Goldthorpe 1997). According to such a line of criticism, selection on the dependent variable—that is, based on the presence of the phenomenon under investigation—leads to false causal inference (Geddes 1990; King et al. 1994).17 This is a fair criticism. However, the dismissal of qualitative comparative work downplays the considerable selection problems that large-N comparisons face. Indeed, hardly any social science research can successfully draw a random sample from a complete universe of cases. There is always profound and justified disagreement over what exactly constitutes the relevant population at stake: how many people are needed for mobilization and whose counting should be used? What ages does youth include?

17 Reference to Skocpol’s (1979) work on social revolutions became ubiquitous to illustrate this worry.

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This form of comparative historical analysis is useful because it enables a dialogue between theoretical assumptions and empirical evidence (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003: 13). Comparison allows a systematic investigation of shared but also distinctive features across the cases, without claiming that these are identical. Above all, the case studies aim at exploring variation within each case rather than at preparing a broad generalization across a hypothetical universe of cases. Nevertheless, systematic case selection improves the prospect for cautious generalization beyond the cases analysed, which will be discussed in the concluding chapter. The sampled cases of youth mobilization during periods of crisis vary along two crucial dimensions: the initial political conditions of the country, and the outcome of crisis. However, to ensure that comparability is still possible, the four cases share important structural traits, primarily their political, social, and economic uncertainty. Contemporaries of each of these episodes of crisis perceived their political and social futures as highly uncertain, producing debates that divided the political and social landscape. Moreover, the episodes all took place in the context of pluralistic public discourse, reflected in media outlets with distinct ideological orientations and the possibility to intervene in public discourse. During the episodes under study, these countries’ political systems also possessed some degree of political competition and scope for the public expression of dissenting opinions—factors that are crucial for the possibility of youth mobilization.18

1 . 6 YO U T H I N R E G I M E C H A N G E : A T HE O R Y OF T H E PRO C E S SE S A T W OR K Through a structured and focused comparison of the four cases in question, this study identifies ways in which our understanding of the outcomes of regime crises changes when studied through the prism of youth and its mobilization (Table 1.2). Each of the cases studied is an episode of crisis, in which politicized youth was a visible element of the regime crisis in question. Across these cases, politicians regarded mobilized young people on the streets as important for the country’s political course, therefore leading to the symbol of youth occupying a key space in public and political discourse. 18 When the beating up, imprisonment, or killing of activists is habitual, citizen activism might occur, but under extremely specific circumstances. Youth resistance existed in some of these cases, e.g. the Weiße Rose in Nazi Germany or youth opposition during late Stalinism (Fürst 2002, 2003; Kuromiya 2003, 2004).

Contextual variables (crisis) Domestic situation

External precedent

• delegitimization of older generation

• constitutes a relevant precedent

– economic decline affecting youth

– comparable political setting

– contested historical reference points

– constructed connectivity (media, politicians, and other actors)

• perceived possibility of political change

• direct flow of finances or people

– splits amongst elite – weakness of incumbent

Initial political conditions Democratic

France (1968–9)

Weimar Republic (1929–33)

Authoritarian

Russian Federation (2004–11)

Perestroika (RSFSR) (1984–91)

Regime outcome

Hypotheses Discourse about youth

Co-optation of youth

Generalization of protest

centralization, hegemonic position of state actors

government directed youth mobilization, prevention of dissent youth activism

isolated contestation, specific youth demands

disintegration, dominance of non-state actors

unsuccessful attempts by governments to mobilize youth, independent youth activism

mobilization of other age cohorts, change cross-societal demands

consolidation

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Table 1.2. Theoretical schema for youth mobilization in regime crisis

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Contemporaries of the Weimar Republic, France in the late 1960s, the last years of the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation between 2005 and 2011 all interpreted their era—albeit short-lived in some cases—as one of crisis. In interpretations of events unfolding around them, youth understood the experiences of the past as no longer providing sufficient guidance to imagine their respective futures. The cases are chosen from the many potential cases of European political youth mobilization, discussed in Chapter 3. Centred on the case of contemporary Russia, the comparative frame spans East and West, and thus overcomes simplistic reductions to various Sonderwege (lit. special paths). Driven by the assumption that political youth mobilization and the discursive structures that construct and support the concept of youth differ between democratic and authoritarian regimes, the variation in the comparative frame lies in the initial political conditions. This book proposes that two interrelated processes are conducive to young peoples’ interpretation of a situation as one of crisis. In moments of crisis, activists, politicians, and the media construct the possibility of change irrespective of underlying constraints, even though they had previously excluded such domestic change from their imaginary. First, crisis in this sense requires a destabilized domestic situation, which is expressed, for instance, by a delegitimized older generation in general or the political leadership in particular. Such a lack of legitimacy may have many conceivable origins, ranging from high youth unemployment, to educational reforms, to historical reference points which the young generation contests. Furthermore, for Erwartungshorizonte to evolve and sustain a situation of crisis, the possibility of change must appear credible and plausible, for instance due to a seemingly weakened domestic political elite or to splits within it. Second, there must be an external precedent that young people, political leaders, and the media all perceive as constituting a salient example or template for their country’s own future trajectory. Here, the media plays an eminent role in shaping this connectedness with the outside and diffusing ideas of political change, but the actual exchange between people, whether physical or virtual, also contributes to a perceived interconnectedness between countries (Givan et al. 2010; Hale 2013; Starr 1991; Whitehead 2001). Seeing political change unfold elsewhere, contemporaries perceive it as being possible ‘at home’ if the external example is framed and perceived as being relevant (Beissinger 2002, 2007). Importantly, during crises, the feasibility judgements that actors make are likely to change. Youth movements might, for instance, come to perceive those changes as realistic that they had previously excluded from consideration; such a shift in perception in turn changes how and what young people actually mobilize for. Analytically distinguishing between the domestic situation and

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the external precedent provides one productive way for thinking about how a crisis can be empirically thought to emerge in a given situation. Once these two dimensions appear in combination, youth movements in particular, I argue, take to the street to convey their changed perspective on the political status quo and challenge those in power. Of course, these two dimensions are interrelated, given that domestic conditions shape how external precedents can be diffused and communicated to the public. In the same vein, a delegitimized older generation is not itself sufficient to lead to the political mobilization of youth, since domestic constraints can effectively limit mobilization. Nevertheless, in a situation of imperfect information, distorted also by actors’ own personal expectations, an external event can have a disproportionate impact, leading to drastic reassessments of opportunities and risks in any given political context.19 The four cases studied here all qualify as moments of crisis according to the definition outlined above. The cases differ when it comes to the ‘initial political conditions’ that existed in each episode. The conditions created through the crisis enable political mobilization due to changes in the relationship between experiences and expectations; we would thus expect that differences in the initial political conditions in each case affect the discourses surrounding youth and the public mobilization of youth movements, in particular the extent to which such movements are co-opted by the state and the extent to which such movements can broaden beyond the specific group of youth. Accordingly, this study’s research design includes democratic and authoritarian political settings, which are not frequently compared in a single study. Civic activism depends on the institutional setting’s ‘political opportunity structure’, the importance of which Eisinger emphasizes (1973) and which Tilly formalizes (2010). Meyer discusses the impact of political conditions on the emergence of political mobilization. He argues for a dynamic approach to political opportunity, combining institutional aspects and leadership. This combination allows for an assessment of how political opportunity aids or hinders the forging of different types of mobilization (2004: 140). In the context of Eastern European opposition, Osa illustrates that when mobilization is restricted as in authoritarian regimes, a more diverse set of people with grievances have an interest in close cooperation to oppose the government (2003). On the other hand, when mobilization can flourish, as in democratic 19

Weyland similarly emphasizes the importance of diffusion during moments of regime change in nineteenth-century Europe: ‘Tapping in the dark in their own country, oppositionists are easily impressed by a shining example elsewhere. The unexpected fall of a foreign autocrat suggests to disaffected groups in other polities that the time has come for the decisive move’ (2010: 1152).

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regimes, we can expect a more heterogeneous field, with various demands and smaller coalitions. In democratic settings, numerous opportunities for participation and the chances of it paying off exist, which leads to ad hoc coalitions (Dahl 1956). Given the important differences in socio-political and ideational context, I am not suggesting that the cases studied here are causally homogeneous; every historical situation is of course multifaceted in its own way. In order to respond to this challenge of comparison, this book thus advances an argument that concentrates on uniting questions and processes. Moreover, contemporary Russia is studied as the central case of this book, and the comparative setting enables us to appreciate the dimensions along which Russia between 2005 and 2011 stands out as a distinct case, or rather one that shares similarities with other historical episodes if looked at through the prism of the discursive and physical mobilization of youth throughout significant moments of crisis in Europe’s twentieth century. The comparative setting therefore leaves room for different causal processes, as required for a crosstemporal comparison.

1. 7 H YPO T H E S E S : Y OU T H I N RE G I M E CR I S I S The aim of this research is to contribute to our understanding of the outcomes of regime crises by attending to the concept of youth and its mobilization. Through an initial exploration of the political significance of youth mobilization in contemporary Russia, the study’s hypotheses were generated. Russia thus served as a test case for the comparative research design. The three remaining cases did not inform the formulation of the guiding hypotheses. Instead, the external validity of the latter was tested, in a controlled manner, through analysing the episodes of perestroika, the Weimar Republic, and France in the period around 1968. H1: Under conditions of crisis, a political regime consolidates its power by dominating the discourses that surround and support the concept of ‘youth’. Is political leadership able to centralize discourses about youth and to establish its own interpretation as hegemonic in public discourse? In each episode, I analyse the extent to which political consolidation is matched by the capacity of political elites to structure the discourses which shape the meaning of youth. If youth is at the centre of a country’s self-understanding, the way in which that discourse about youth is ordered in moments of crisis is highly relevant,

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as the conditions of crisis entail a renegotiation of the societal bases. We would expect the discourse to be the result of intense power struggles on various societal levels, which expresses itself in conflicting utterances. Gaining a central position in this discourse should therefore be relevant to the consolidation of a political regime’s power; a failure to structure the discourse would be a factor in regime change. If a regime succeeds in dominating the meaning of youth, this domination is one causal element contributing to regime consolidation. The discourse about youth captures competing visions about a country’s past and future. It increases regime legitimacy if the political elite can associate itself with the powerful symbol of youth. But if the discourse about youth disintegrates, I expect this disintegration to contribute to regime change. Given the symbolic importance of youth for sustaining political rule, a failure to control the discourse about youth may thus accelerate the disintegration of the incumbent political regime. For Charles Tilly, public discourse and civic participation are intimately entwined and are both part of democratization: ‘A regime is democratic to the degree that political relations between the state and its citizens feature broad, equal, protected and mutually binding consultation’ (2007: 13–14). The discursive dimension is therefore an important aspect for understanding moments of crisis and policy-making more generally (Schmidt and Radaelli 2004). My approach takes this assumption one step further and conceptualizes discourse as having transformative power in more than one direction. Expanded publicness and democratization do not necessarily go hand in hand but instead, an unrestrained discourse might well be in conflict with democratization (Clemens 2010: 380). H2: Under conditions of crisis, a political regime consolidates its power by mobilizing young people to display popular support for the regime. Along with striving for a hegemonic position in the discourse shaping the meaning of youth, a consolidating regime may mobilize young people as a means for expressing support of its policies. Government-initiated youth movements benefit from disproportionate resources and youth opposition is eventually silenced in the process of regime consolidation and effectively dispersed. I expect that if the incumbent government can successfully co-opt youth mobilization, it will help regime consolidation in cases of youthinitiated regime crisis. If these efforts succeed, youth mobilization may become a cornerstone of the consolidating government itself. Indeed, authoritarian consolidations across the globe have seen youth movements turn into extensions of the state’s police power, suppressing opposition and increasing a state’s coercive capacity (Levitsky and Way 2010: 58–62). However, if governments fail

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to harness youth mobilization, such mobilization reinforces the likelihood of political change, making the general population perceive it as more likely. In such cases, independent youth activism can flourish and voice its desire for a new political order. H3: Under conditions of crisis, young people fail to challenge the existing regime if their mobilization does not expand to other social groups. Can a contestation of the regime initiated by young people spread beyond the realm of youth itself? Youth mobilization can be a successful initiator of governmental change only if it spreads to other age groups. By itself, youth mobilization is isolated from the wider population and tends to be perceived as specific to the age cohort: a mere generational revolt. If youth mobilization is to effectively challenge political power it therefore has to overcome this boundedness, as the regime will only be sufficiently pressured if contestation is dissociated from youth alone. When youth mobilization broadens to include the wider population, its contestation is amplified, which helps to explain why incumbents are put under considerable strain. As Goldstone notes, the behaviour of youth cohorts may change the mobilization behaviour of society as a whole (2016: 137–8). Bourdieu’s notion of ‘critical events’ (1988) is helpful here, and Gilcher-Holtey productively employs it in her study of May 1968, to discuss the way in which protest can become generalized (1995). Critical events are decisive moments of mobilization that lead to the spread of protest beyond young people themselves, as societal actors other than youth come to perceive the protest as meaningful. If, however, contestation remains limited to youth, it will eventually be possible for regimes to ignore this and dismiss it as a generational revolt lacking wider socio-political legitimacy; no such critical event will therefore occur.

1.8 OVERVIEW O F T HE BOOK With the scope of this book and the logic of the historical comparison laid out, Chapter 2 offers a detailed methodological discussion. Special attention is granted to recent developments in text and discourse analysis across the social sciences and humanities. I first discuss the current challenges facing discourse analysis and the concerns arising from a social science perspective. Thereafter, I present a new multi-level investigation of discourse that combines qualitative content analysis with network analysis and introduce several conceptual clarifications to argue for an understanding of discourse that lends itself to

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network analysis. Having established this, I describe my sources, the sampling procedure, the undertaking of the qualitative content analysis, and the logic of the applied coding scheme. A final section of Chapter 2 critically discusses the state of text and discourse analysis to illustrate the added value of studying discourse as a network. This mixed-methods approach integrates the valuable insight of human reading and the structural insights derived through the rigor of network analysis. By relying on human interpretations, this approach can pre-empt some of the concerns that critics have voiced about new quantitative approaches to analysing text. Chapter 3 finishes the introductory part and presents the relevance of youth during pivotal periods in twentieth-century Europe with the aim of situating the case studies in their broader historical context. The idea of youth acquired political relevance over time, which itself changed the way young people mobilized politically. During the twentieth century, youth became established as a socio-political group; it was no longer seen as a primarily age-based group. In the aftermath of the First World War, generational identity found new ways of being expressed. It is important to note that the emergence of a public and political interest in youth as an independent actor and cultural symbol in fact spans the often-stated East–West divide; youth organizations existed across Europe during this period, and politicians tried to win over young people, irrespective of political systems. After the Second World War, a societal disillusion with young people in the West replaced previous utopian political visions of their power and potential. During this time, media across the continent’s Western part initially reminded the public of the link between youth movements and fascism. Nonetheless, youth became simultaneously an idealized cultural symbol meant to put an end to the war years. But it was only with the mobilizations that occurred around 1968 that post-war elites acknowledged once again that young people were of political relevance. Across communist Europe, the war experience was officially constructed as having no problematic connotations. Lastly, the chapter turns to the most recent period to show how young people have proven their political significance through non-conventional forms of political involvement during the East European ‘Colour Revolutions’, the Arab Spring, and the Southern European opposition to austerity policies. Part II of the book, encompassing Chapters 4 to 7, explores the four case studies individually. I follow the thematic and non-chronological order described above, beginning with the Russian Federation to derive the study’s guiding hypotheses. The perestroika episode adds variation, which is further increased by the ensuing cases of the Weimar Republic and France around 1968. The treatment of each case proceeds in three steps. First, I contextualize the episode by drawing on secondary literature to qualify the extent to which

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the case corresponds to the definition of crisis; I also consider the specific historical conditions for youth and its political mobilization. Second, I analyse the discourses which shaped the meaning of youth at the macro level, before exploring in more detail individual discursive formations, specific utterances, and the interlinked political mobilization of youth. Third, I sketch out the fundamental components of each case, as preparation for the concluding comparative chapter. Part III (Chapter 8) develops the comparative perspective on the country cases, by placing them in the context of a history of European youth mobilization since the First World War. This chapter summarizes the contributions of the book in three steps: first, a comparison of the political importance of youth mobilization and discourses about youth in moments of crisis; second, a conceptualization of youth and generation across the cases studied; and third, an analysis of the temporalities of crisis as expressed through the symbol of youth.

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....................

2

....................

Interpreting Text as Discourse or Using Text as Data This book develops and applies a new method to enable a systematic interpretation of large bodies of text. This technique aims to increase the confidence in findings from interpretive work by complementing qualitative with quantitative insights. At the same time, it does not sacrifice the task of qualitative interpretation by deriving meaning exclusively from quantitative measures. My combination of discourse and network analysis captures the competing discursive structures around the concept of youth as contained in individual utterances across the corpus, analyses their temporal development, and sets them in relation to one another. I propose a conceptualization of discourse that works around three interrelated levels. The macro-scopic level is the historical context, established through secondary sources, such as writings by social scientists and historians; the meso-scopic perspective is derived from the quantitative analysis of discourse networks which allows insights into discursive formations; and the micro-scopic analysis is done by detailed analysis of language games and their individual utterances (Table 2.1). The interpretations between these levels are reiterative, i.e. there is constant navigation between the historical contextualization, the discursive networks, and individual utterances.

Table 2.1. Multi-level discourse analysis Analytic level

Objective

Function

Source Historical context and overall corpus

Macro

Discourse

Contextualization and structuration of corpus

Generation of hypotheses

Meso

Discourse networks

Formations in the discourse network; longitudinal analysis of discursive formation

Refinement and verification of hypotheses

Relations between coded text snippets

Micro

Language games

Content and argumentation analysis

Substantiation of hypotheses

Individual text sections

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Approaching the discursive constructions of youth through these three layers enables us to identify the frames that media developed in its discussion of the political mobilization of youth. Such an approach allows us to ask: How does youth mobilization shape the image of youth? How do young people react to the meaning that is attributed to them? Following the lead of social movement researchers, I contextualize documents from the individual organizations within the discursive structures to reveal patterns of member mobilization and group identity construction (Ruggiero and Montagna 2008). I argue that by looking at how the discursive level and mobilization interact, we can understand the meaning of political youth mobilization and its impact on the trajectory of the crises analysed.

2.1 T HE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL REALITY Discourse refers to the set of socio-linguistic practices that structure meaning in a given context.1 Whenever agents engage in communication, they create and reshape previously existent meaning by drawing on material and immaterial symbols (Burr 2015: 73–92; Fairclough 2010; Wodak and Krzyżanowski 2008). Those who are able to follow discursive rules can communicate about a given topic. Discourse conditions the production of knowledge based on the social rules for using its respective symbols, such as language. It also governs the way a topic can be talked and reasoned about by establishing versions of the social world and identities. Beyond doubt, discourse is of paramount importance for understanding political processes (Crawford 2002; Partington 2003). It is language about political events and developments that people experience; even events that are close by take their meaning from the language used to depict them. So political language is political reality; there is no other so far as the meaning of events to actor and spectators is concerned. (Edelman 1985: 10)

However, meaning as expressed through discourse is evidently ambiguous. It is only by attending to context that a researcher is able to determine the meaning of a statement. This context is partly created through language itself; for example, the words being used around a term such as youth 1 The heading of this section is an allusion to Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966).

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(Harris 1954; Lenci 2008). This localized context provides the terrain in which the contestation of meaning occurs (Steinberg 1999: 748), and I use network analysis to identify discursive formations within the overall discourse network. These formations are the fields of contestation where actors endow symbols such as youth with meaning. Discursive formations are specific clusters of meaning that constitute the overall discourse. Echoing Foucault, I suggest that discursive formations encompass individual constellations of meanings with similar discursive rules (2008 [1969]: 47–58). The meaning of, and knowledge about, things such as youth are represented and altered within discursive formations, such as considering violent hooligan youth as a societal threat (Pearson 1983) or seeing student youth as bringing about societal progress (Feuer 1969). Lastly, I define language games with reference to Wittgenstein (2009 [1953]), as a collection of speech acts embedded in a communicative situation. This book identifies the particular language games about youth in each case and traces the transitions from one language game to another. This analytical microlevel provides the ingredients for identifying the argumentative structure in which actors embed their words. Implicit in this conception is an inherent link between language and action; words are embedded in a wider net of social practices and rules. Through the compliance with such rules, continuity in meaning exists, which is evolving in each repetition and contradictory given the infinite number of language games possible (Krawatzek and Trimçev 2014). Without following linguistic rules, there would be no meaning to our material world; a language game unites individual utterances. This terminology, as developed from Wittgenstein, emphasizes that speech acts cannot be considered in isolation but are embedded in a socio-linguistic set of rules. This understanding of discourse is a methodological move and enables, for the purpose of this research, the identification and delimitation of the object of study. The method is explicit and systematic in its interpretive undertaking, i.e. the interpretive steps are based on a transparent procedure, which is applied across all four cases. I certainly do not deny the importance of strategy or materiality, but advocate that we can gain an important insight into the role of youth in moments of crisis by studying the discursive element, as contained in newspapers. Such a multi-layered conceptualization of discourse is interwoven with network analysis as a method for its investigation. Understanding the changes in discursive rules and subsequent transitions between language games is the primary aim of discourse analysis, which network analysis complements by adding technical rigour to the interpretation process. Both approaches, however, share an emphasis on relations and interactions between different actors and formations of the network. For discourse analysts it is critical

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to identify the actors who are ‘allowed’ to speak from particular discursive positions, since only certain subjects are audible in a language game, able to become visible and to shape social reality. Network analysis meanwhile explores the interrelatedness of entities (Carrington and Scott 2011; Prell 2012), for instance speakers and the concepts that they use when referring to youth. This is not to say that the act of interpretation becomes redundant: the researcher’s encounters with the corpus remain the first and most important task for comprehending the sources. On a metaphorical level, discourse analysts have used the language of ‘networks’ for a while. Indeed, such ideas figure prominently in the language used by Foucault in the Archaeology of Knowledge when he introduces the term ‘discursive formations’: But what is unique about a discursive formation and what allows defining the group of concepts, disparate as they are, that are specific to it, is the way in which its different elements are put in relation with one another. (2008 [1969]: 83)

In discursive confrontations, various constellations of concepts make individual utterances meaningful and refer to earlier constellations of utterances. Meaning changes when it is updated and embedded in new constellations of concepts. The meaning of an utterance thus depends on the relations it exhibits with other concepts present and past. Foucault’s approach to analysing discourse is characterized by an investigation into how within a discourse certain énoncés—not linguistic but meaning units—become dominant over others in time and space. Unravelling the logic of existing discourse, which is not to be confounded with studying mentality or consciousness, intentions, or the interests of actors, thereby becomes the main task (2014 [1966]). Though it stems from a different intellectual tradition, Wittgenstein’s language philosophy is in many respects complementary to the French poststructuralist approach. Wittgenstein suggests that the use of a word, that is to say its performative dimension, is ‘extended in time’ (2009 [1953]: §138). If we are to investigate discursive rules, we must therefore try to understand the diachronic meaning of the terms we are analysing. Moreover, to recognize how discursive rules create meaning we have to consider the individual rule in relation to the wider community of speakers. If meaning depends on rules and if we accept that rules cannot be followed by an isolated individual, changing meanings can be understood through combining linguistic and non-linguistic contexts (McGinn 2013: 78–170). This level of interpretive depth is often hard to realize in purely quantitative approaches to text analysis, which all ultimately require a considerable degree of qualitative decision-making (Grimmer and Stewart 2013).

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Discourse analysis is subject to several valid criticisms. Parker and Burman perceive no less than thirty-two problems with discourse analysis, including opaque transitions from particular utterances to the general discourse, the early closing of alternative interpretations, and the lack of a clearly spelt-out methodology (1993). Social movement researchers have furthermore criticized the often nebulous sampling, which can invalidate interpretations (Snow et al. 2013: 366). Taking these criticisms on board, this book seeks to develop and strengthen the methodology of discourse analysis. I develop an approach that relies on systematic sampling and transparent shifts between the particular utterance and the respective language games. This approach permits the interpretation of textual material without any a priori fixing of the number or kind of discursive formations. Approaches that combine qualitative and quantitative methods can potentially make discourse analysis more compelling to a wider social science audience, being integral to the current scholarly interest in studying text as data (Lowe and Benoit 2013; Roberts et al. 2014; Slapin and Proksch 2008).

2 . 2 AN A L Y T I C PR OC E D U RE With the theoretical framework sketched out, the question arises of how, precisely, language games and discursive rules are to be analysed. Here, I develop a research procedure that follows the steps illustrated in Figure 2.1. The case selection and formulated research hypotheses, discussed in Chapter 1, inform the creation of the relevant corpus. Given the research interests, the corpus includes all articles in major domestic newspapers that refer to youth as a social group during the periods under consideration.

Research Hypotheses & Case Selection

Establishing the Corpus

Determining sample size (approx. 20%) Random sampling

Developing a Coding System

Theory-driven (deductive) formulation of codes Data-driven (inductive) refinement of codes with 10% of the material Reliability check (fit with H)

Figure 2.1. Discourse analysis research procedure.

Coding Process

Interpretation

Macro Meso Micro

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Table 2.2. Typology for newspaper selection Genre Quality

Mass Media

Conservative Attitude Progressive

The case selection therefore needs to delimit the length of each crisis in order to determine what is part of the corpus. The newspapers vary along two dimensions to capture discursive diversity, distinguishing between their political attitude and the genre to which they belong (Table 2.2). As ideal-types, these categories conceal a high degree of ambiguity and difference and can only be compared across cases with great care—but they are nonetheless helpful for guiding the selection. These categories contain variation and in aggregate account for much of the diversity of voices in public discourse. Newspapers are a particularly insightful source because they are widely available and play a large role in influencing public perception of political events (Johnson-Cartee 2005).2 Newspapers also absorb adjacent, more specialized discourses, for instance from the artistic, academic, or cultural realms. In this study, I split the newspaper genre into mass circulation and quality papers as I assume that the way in which youth is spoken about will differ amongst them. Mass media, for example, can be expected to simplify complex issues and privilege entertainment at the expense of in-depth analyses and might therefore tend to homogenize the contradictory reality of youth. On the other hand, we would expect quality newspapers to convey the complexity of social issues to their readership and to shed a more differentiated and analytic light on youth mobilization. In addition to variation in genre, I sought for variation in newspapers’ political attitudes, the second most important factor determining the coverage of youth and its political mobilization. In moments of regime crisis with various factions of youth opposing or supporting the regime, media coverage should vary according to political attitude.3

Newspapers have been used to study ‘European Memory’ (Trimçev et al. forthcoming), the meaning of ‘refugees’ (Gabrielatos and Baker 2008), or body metaphors in speaking about Europe (Musolff 2004). 3 I decided not to include variation according to geographical scope and sampled exclusively on newspapers that address a supra-regional population, though not always strictly national. 2

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For each case, the sampled newspapers are the most widely read national papers. Admittedly, this is not always an easy choice since circulation only roughly indicates readership. In certain cases, estimates of the numbers that are printed may be wrong or unavailable and it is difficult to establish the number of readers per copy. In the Weimar Republic as well as in Soviet Russia, for example, people commonly passed newspapers on to friends and family members. The simple number of printed copies is thus only one indication of a newspaper’s readership. To assemble the corpus I identify articles about youth either via an electronic database or by going through hardcopies and microfilm. This first selection process enables me to exclude ‘accidental hits’, such as articles that mention youth simply as part of advertisements for theatre, films, or TV programmes; as part of tables listing the results of youth sport competitions; in reference to Jugendstil (Art Nouveau), or when ‘youth’ simply figured in the name of a ministry. This leads to a corpus tailored to the research questions, composed of just over 5,500 articles from sixteen newspapers (Table 2.3). Given the large size of this corpus, it is necessary to reduce the number of articles for the interpretive analysis. Such a reduction is also methodologically compelling. If we assume that the rules of the various language games are in principle manifest in every utterance, there is no added value in examining every article individually, as no more variation can be captured. I therefore

Table 2.3. Newspaper corpus Germany interwar Germania Vossische Zeitung

347 321

Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung Vorwärts Total

315 416 1,399

France around 1968 La Croix Le Monde

617 445

Le Figaro L’Humanité Total

345 456 1,863

Russia perestroika Izvestiya Literaturnaya Gazeta

321 271

Pravda Argumenty i Fakty Total

304 427 1,323

Russia 2004–2011 Izvestiya Kommersant’

318 456

Komsomol’skaya Pravda Novaya Gazeta Total

429 357 1,560

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code a representative random sample stratified at the level of the newspapers per country. A sample size of 20 per cent serves as a first indication of how many articles are required in order to achieve ‘saturation’.4 Ritchie et al. emphasize seven factors affecting sample size (2003: 84): the heterogeneity of the population; the number of selection criteria; the extent to which ‘nesting’ of criteria is needed; groups of special interest that require intensive study; multiple samples within one study; types of data collection methods used; and the budget and resources available.

In the case of persistent variation, I increase the number of articles. Having identified the empirical material manually by going through printed or digitized newspaper editions, I am also able to include articles that appeared to be of undeniable significance, either because of the speaker, because it was referred to by other articles, or because of its analytic depth.

2.2.1 Developing a Qualitative Coding Scheme I develop a multi-stage approach to coding the articles. First, I define an initial coding structure that reflects my research interests. This structure reflects the theoretically determined core for interpreting the material. Second, I refine this coding structure based on a close analysis of 10 per cent of the sampled articles in each case to define the precise codes. This in-depth reading captures the variation of content across the articles and leads to a very fine-grained coding scheme, which corresponds with the theoretical and empirical focuses. The codes need to be exhaustive to capture the variation in the content of the sources. The developed coding scheme also aims at parsimony, since an excessively complex scheme would make a coherent application of codes across the cases less likely. Here, the coding is at the level of utterances—the entities of meaning—which are not always sentences or single paragraphs, but can be shorter or longer (Saldaña 2013). The codes are rarely explicitly in the text but are inferred by the interpretation. The same standardized heuristic guided the interpretation of each case. The final coding scheme (see Appendix) is as follows: Structure captures the overall characteristics of the corpus. The individual codes of the following four sections were mutually exclusive and each one had

4

This is in line with previous QDA research (Mayring 2000: §11; Schreier 2012: 151–2).

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to be attributed to allow for a mapping of the corpus: (1) What topics are discussed in relation to youth? Here, topics might range from political, social, and economic issues, to cultural and other non-political themes. (2) Who are the authors of these texts, if they can be identified at all? Do citizens, for example, engage in the public sphere through letters? Do politicians address the public through the media? Or, do journalists prevail? (3) What discursive positions do these speakers occupy? In addition to the aforementioned socialinstitutional labels that can be attached to each speaker, those same authors also speak from (and for) a particular discursive position. This implies, for instance, that authors’ self-understandings reveal generational or national discursive positions. (4) In which genre is the article written? Do the authors express value judgements, and report or express demands? Definitions comprise two main categories that capture the manifold meanings attributed to youth. (1) Social Attributes [SA]: Is youth portrayed as being dependent upon the older generation or as having an independent and autonomous status? Youth needs a constitutive ‘other’ to be intelligible; in statements about youth, it is usually at least implicitly clear how authors see the relation of youth to this other. This code category thus asks how youth in general and its political mobilization in particular is categorized: Is youth understood as being involved or disinterested, enthusiastic or apathetic, wellinformed or naïve, precious or a threat? Do contemporaries express great excitement when speaking about youth or do they express fear and anxiety? The attributes are very detailed and comprise more than forty codes. (2) Factions [F]: Is youth described as a homogeneous group or are differences and contradictions amongst it underlined? Is the collective youth described as being composed of, for instance, different genders, socio-economic groups, or political currents? Contrary to the first set of ‘structural’ codes, the definitional concepts here are not mutually exclusive as the co-occurrence of different codes helps us to understand the meaning of youth. Evaluations [E] capture how youth and its behaviour is valued. Here I distinguish between (1) positive, (2) neutral, and (3) negative evaluations. In the interest of clarity, evaluations are attributed in a mutually exclusive way. Evaluations and definitions are the central codes for extricating the different meanings of youth and also unite the largest number of codes in all cases. Tempi [T] aim at investigating the temporal dimension of the meaning of youth. The semantics of political and social language contain in themselves experiences and expectations, and this temporal anchorage makes language intelligible (Koselleck 2003), which is of particular relevance for youth, as argued earlier. I investigate two temporal dimensions: (1) Temporal layers: What times are evoked when speaking about youth (past, present, future)? (2) Temporal rhythms: How is the relationship between different temporal

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layers characterized (repetition, rupture, continuity, acceleration)? The temporal codes were not mutually exclusive, since one of the interesting aspects in the sources is the combination of different tempi. Before turning to discuss the method of discourse network analysis, I wish to pre-empt concerns about inter-coder reliability tests for the specific type of interpretive work undertaken here, which seeks neither to obscure the process of interpretation nor to defend arbitrary explanations. However, it is important to note that the idea that one can entirely eradicate the subjectivity of interpretation through training another coder, who then codes the same material or part of it, is based on the misguided assumption that intersubjective knowledge is independently or autonomously contained in texts. Such an idea may speak to purely quantitative approaches to text analysis, for which replicability is the bedrock of validity.5 However, the primary measure of quality for these kind of approaches—consistency across different coders in document categorization—should not simply be transposed to interpretive approaches and turned into the primary measurement for evaluating the quality of this kind of textual analysis. Meaning, as it is understood throughout this book, is not a property inherent in texts but can be established only by the researcher.6 Manual coding of text thus remains a subjective act and is not restricted to measuring objective variables. Different researchers frame the material that they code with their own conceptual and cultural baggage. Personal conceptions, values, and capacities all have an impact upon how we interpret sources (Auerbach and Silverstein 2003: 22–8). From an interpretive perspective, this is not a drawback. To the contrary, it is researchers’ subjectivity that makes their interpretational work valuable; such work does not necessarily benefit from being evaluated by criteria imported from different research traditions, which do not share the methodological foundations of interpretive scholarship. Moreover, even quantitative text analysis must eventually engage in a hermeneutic endeavour when it comes to interpreting results (Roberts et al. 2014). In the analysis for the present study, the qualitative coding transforms the textual material into a text indexed with the frequency of attributed interpretive codes, which forms the basis for the multi-level discourse analysis (Table 2.1). On the macro level, I observe the basic order of the discourse by historical 5

Within such research it is indeed essential to train coders (Benoit et al. 2009) and make use of the various measures of inter-coder reliability (Byrt et al. 1993; Cronbach 1951; Hayes and Krippendorff 2007). 6 For a discussion on the epistemological distinction between content and discourse analysis, see Herrera and Braumoeller (2004).

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contextualization and scrutinizing frequency distributions of codes and binary code-correlations. This permits insights into the structuration of the corpus and the patterns of the discourse. Attention to the meso level—the discourse networks as captured by the relationship between different codes in the network—refines this perspective, and permits a reconstruction of clusters of meaning across articles. Exploring the discursive formations in the networks guides the interpretational work and points to those nodal points that are revelatory for a detailed investigation on the micro level. It is on this latter level of utterances embedded in their respective language game that the discursive formations and potentially abstract associations of codes link back to the empirical material. The macro and micro levels of analysis do not require much further elaboration. However, the discourse network analysis constitutes a new way of apprehending discourse, so it must here be introduced in some detail.

2. 3 D I S CO UR SE S AS NE TWO R KS : ‘ M O RE T H A N W O R DS ’ At its core, social network analysis is based on the idea that the interdependencies of a network’s individual components, nodes, and edges, characterize social life (Prell 2012: 1). When combining qualitative content analysis with network analysis, two additional assumptions are important. First, for understanding the patterns of behaviour between individual entities (usually people or institutions), their individual attributes must be understood alongside the structural relations that exist between them. Second, these structural relations must be understood as dynamic, due to constant interactions taking place (Knoke and Yang 2008: 4–6). The approach that I propose here distinguishes itself from other quantitative approaches to text analysis, insofar as it does not analyse relations on the level of words but on the level of concepts. Discourse network analysis is thereby a significant interpretive improvement to older attempts at visualizing text through semantic word networks (Sowa 1992). Such networks, as used for instance to analyse science communication (Leydesdorff and Hellsten 2005), rely on co-word analyses and the evaluation of word co-occurrences. These co-occurrences are identified in different ways, ranging from their simultaneous presence in a sliding window of a text of a given width, within a given sentence or paragraph, or within a whole text. Carley underlines that such word-centred analysis frequently relies on an ‘overestimation of the similarity of texts because meaning is neglected’ (1993: 77). Indeed, interpretations which exclusively use co-occurrence or

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word networks might fail to grasp how a term is used in a particular context. I therefore undertake network analysis based on the different latent concepts that authors use in the sampled articles. The specific combinations of concepts and articles permit the identification of clusters in the network, understood here as discursive formations. A promising range of quantitative approaches to text analysis are currently being developed at great speed. Predominantly using methods of scaling and clustering, such approaches treat text as unstructured data, in order to infer otherwise hard-to-measure concepts. However, progress in quantitative text analysis is no substitute for the benefit to be gained from the application of qualitative methods. Grimmer and Stewart state: ‘Automated content analysis methods are insightful, but wrong, models of political text to help researchers make inferences from their data’ (2013: 270). Scaling methods such as wordscores (Laver et al. 2003) or wordfish (Slapin and Proksch 2008), and clustering methods such as topic modelling (Mohr and Bogdanov 2013) or correspondence factor analysis (Mayaffre and Poudat 2013) face the challenge of integrating textual ambiguity and linguistic context. Ideally, these approaches need to engage in extensive pre-processing, a serious qualitative endeavour of interpretation (Young and Soroka 2012). The methodological combination of discourse and network analysis applied here also draws on some earlier work. Leifeld and Haunss, for example, estimate policy networks and coalitions through text. Both develop a different approach to coding aimed at detecting an actor’s positions in specific policy areas without extracting the discursive meaning of the texts analysed (2012). Verd and Lozares meanwhile develop a sociological approach for identifying the network of actors based on narrative analysis (2014). Their conceptualization draws on in-depth reading and coding of autobiographical accounts to establish a general structure for the narrative and relationships between actors (ego-networks). The research described in this book builds upon both the policy position and biographical approaches described above. By using qualitative coding to structure the meaning of the different articles, I deal with implicit meaning, metaphors, and irony in a way that a purely quantitative approach could not. Above all, through qualitative interpretation, I am able to appreciate the text as a practice of meaning. This approach does not merely draw upon words to extract ‘topics’ or ‘positions’, but instead extricates the meaning that each text conveys about the latent topics. This book is the first to apply such a method in a comparative research design to uncover the struggles behind the discursive construction of social reality. This method increases confidence in the study’s findings, whilst elucidating the method’s strengths and limitations.

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2.3.1 Linking Discourse and Network Analysis Social network analysis has conventionally concentrated on relations between entities of the same type, including things as diverse as the transfer of goods between people (Galaskiewicz 1979), interpersonal relations in getting a job and making a career (Granovetter 1974), and the impact of elite networks on the birth of the Renaissance state in Florence (Padgett and Ansell 1993). Such ‘one-mode networks’, expressed as adjacency matrices, have been studied in detail and most of the formal treatment in network analysis has been developed with reference to them (Wasserman and Faust 1994). Increasingly, however, scholars have recognized that relations exist not only between nodes of the same type, but also between nodes of different types, such as actors and their joint attendance of events (Latapy et al. 2008). Like most real-world networks, discourse networks are bipartite: the nodes are of two disjoint sets and the nodes within one set are never adjacent. More formally, let a graph G = {T, C, E} be composed of a set of utterances such as newspaper texts (T), and a set of concepts drawn from the coding scheme (C). Edges (E) exist only between T and C, hence there are no edges between the same kinds of nodes. The number of articles is given by m so that T = {t1, t2 …tm} and the number of concepts by n so that C = {c1, c2 … cn}, A ¼ ½tm  cn 

ð1Þ

Such bipartite data has been generated for a long time (Davis et al. 1941) but it has usually been analysed only in its adjacency, i.e. one-mode form, by multiplying it with the transpose At of the matrix (Everett and Borgatti 2013). However, the mere analysis of the transpose of weighted bipartite networks distorts central network algorithms, as the two-mode structure is discarded. In one-mode networks, it is assumed that ties are formed independently of one another, which is not the case in projected two-mode networks, where a large number of ties between different nodes of set c can be created by a single node on t. Moreover, projected two-mode networks tend to be more clustered (Opsahl 2013: 159–60), which is a serious concern for an interpretive analysis focusing on groups in the network. Debates concerning optimal modularity division of networks have illustrated that operating merely with the one-mode projection indeed distorts results (Barber 2007). Here, I build on this development in network analysis, and treat discourse networks as bipartite networks, with their specific properties. In this research, the presence of an edge (Figure 2.2) means that an author uses a given concept (a dark grey node) to make sense of youth in a particular

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Concept 3 Concept 5

Text A

Concept 2

Concept 8

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Figure 2.2. Bipartite network.

text (a light grey node). The thickness of the edge indicates the density of this link, referring to the number of times that a specific idea about youth was used. Naturally, meaning is contradictory and manifold and rarely maps neatly to one single concept, even within a single utterance. This echoes the previously developed theoretical assumptions about the rule-based nature of discourse, which is manifold and in perpetual mutation.

2.3.2 Measuring Significance in Discourse Networks In a discourse network, centrality measures establish the significance of concepts and articles. Centralities help us to gain a better understanding of the structure of a network, in particular of those texts and concepts that stand out. Degree and betweenness centrality are here the most relevant centrality measures (Wasserman and Faust 1994: 167–219). Degree centrality is the measure of the number of ties a node forms with other nodes in the network. Applied to a discourse network, degree centrality refers to the number of concepts an article evokes, or inversely, the number of articles that draw on a specific concept. It is a simple measure, intuitively indicating which nodes are somewhat more ‘important’. It is formally expressed as follows (Freeman 1978): k i ¼ CD ðiÞ ¼

PN j

xij

ð2Þ

where i refers to the node under consideration, j refers to all other nodes, N is the sum of nodes, and x is the adjacency matrix defining the particular

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node xij (2). Extended to weighted networks, degree centrality has been labelled node strength (3) where the weighted adjacency matrix is w. si ¼ CwD ðiÞ ¼

PN j

wij

ð3Þ

Discourse analysis, as conceptualized in this book, works with a weighted network to account for both the number of connections and the weight of these connections. To this end Opsahl et al. extend degree centrality by the parameter α (2010: 247), which the researcher has to set according to whether multiple connections are a sign of strength or of weakness. Cwα D ðiÞ

 α si ð1αÞ ¼ ki  ¼ ki  sαi ki

ð4Þ

Degree centrality provides an indication of node significance in a given network. It is a descriptive measure which in its extended form takes edgeweight into account, that is to say, the number of times a concept is evoked in a specific article or vice versa. In a bipartite network, it is possible to operate with different assumptions about the impact of edge-weights as opposed to having multiple edges. In terms of discourse analysis, it is important to identify which utterances are characterized by a low number of different concepts that those utterances evoke but which might thereby solidify a specific discursive strand. On the other hand, other utterances bridge discursive strands and evoke numerous concepts, sometimes from competing discursive formations. Degree centrality does not take into account the global structure of the network. Betweenness centrality therefore provides complementary information, as it refers to the sum of the shortest (geodesic) paths between two other nodes that go through a particular node. It is formally expressed as (Freeman 1978): CB ðiÞ ¼

gjk ðiÞ gjk

ð5Þ

where gjk refers to the number of geodesic paths and gjk ðiÞ to those geodesic paths going through node i. Further refinement is needed for weighted bipartite networks (Opsahl et al. 2010: 248): Cwα B ðiÞ ¼

gwα jk ðiÞ gwα jk

ð6Þ

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The scores for betweenness centrality provide insights into the structure of the network and indicate discursive subgroups centred on specific nodes. A high betweenness centrality for an article-node underlines that the specific combination of concepts increases the discursive connectivity within the network and brings many nodes together, while a high score for a concept-node points to a concept which numerous articles share and therefore links them. However, betweenness centrality on its own is not without limitations. Many individual nodes are not on a geodesic path between any two nodes and thus have a score of zero, though this would not imply that the concepts or articles represented by these nodes are necessarily without meaning. For the present analysis, degree and betweenness centrality are considered jointly. They are important for understanding the structural components of the discourse network as constructed from the codes that were manually attributed to the articles. Given the high number of codes, it would in this particular case have been impossible to analyse so many data points to a satisfying degree without the application of quantitative methods.7

2.3.3 Formations in Discourse Networks Subgroups in discourse networks, i.e. discursive formations, are amongst the most revealing aspects for discourse network analysis as they help to disentangle the complex network structure. The earlier quote by Foucault (p. 35) emphasizes that the specific relationships between concepts and related utterances characterize a discursive formation. In terms of a network, edges are more likely to form amongst the nodes of one specific discursive formation rather than with nodes of other discursive formations. Repeated reference to shared concepts characterizes discursive formations, which helps to contextualize and interpret utterances. The division of the network illustrates which nodes share structural similarities, not on the level of words, but on the level of the concepts used by authors. Modularity, as a measure of fit for a particular division of a network,8 has been defined for unipartite networks (Newman and Girvan 2004). More recently Guimerà et al. (2007) and Barber (2007) refined the measure for bipartite networks. Both make important contributions, though debate continues

7 All network algorithms are calculated in R using the tnet package; visualizations are made with the packages ggplot and ggraph. 8 Murata defines modularity as ‘a scalar value that measures the density of edges inside communities as compared to edges between communities’ (2010: 110).

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over the ideal divisions of bipartite networks (Murata 2010). Guimerà et al.’s algorithm, for example, only takes into account the connectivity of one node type. This would be a fatal restriction for this project, as for a discourse analysis, we want to discover communities across the two node types and not only within each node type individually. Barber’s BRIM (bipartite, recursively induced modules) algorithm meanwhile suggests promising divisions of the network, by respecting its particular bipartite structure (2007).9 But the modularity score need not trump substantive interpretation. In other words, model fit should not be maximized at the expense of interpretation (Chang et al. 2009). In the present study, criteria for discursive formations relate to Gerring’s ‘consistency’ and ‘differentiation’ (2001), i.e. discursive formations ought to be both internally consistent and exclusive in order to facilitate interpretation. Already, the small hypothetical network highlights that modularity divisions are always contested (Figure 2.3). In the process of interpretation, individual utterances have to be taken into consideration along with the macro-historical context. Even if the community membership of some concepts and articles remains controversial and is subject to revision in the process of interpretation, this approach, applied here, provides us with a unique indicator of the groups sustaining the network. Concept 7

Text D

Concept 9

Concept 6 Concept 4

Text C Concept1 Concept 10 Text B Concept 8

Text A Concept 2 Concept 3 Concept 5

Figure 2.3. BRIM modularity division of a bipartite network. 9 Thanks to Michael Barber who has been kind enough to provide the matlab script of this function.

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The graphic representation of such division into modules is helpful. Taking the earlier bipartite network (Figure 2.2), its BRIM modularity division suggests a division into four communities, leading to a modularity score Qmax of 0.4936 (Figure 2.3). Obviously, this particular division is somewhat trivial and Qmax is much higher than what can be expected in actual discourse networks. However, it illustrates the processes to be used in the empirical investigations. The later applications of this method also underline the constitutive opacity of discourse which makes clear-cut distinctions between these formations unrealistic. Not only are there links within each such modularity class, but there are also many links between classes.

2 . 4 RE M A R K S O N T R A NS L A T IO N S A study of discourse across different linguistic and socio-historical contexts requires great care when comparing seemingly similar terms. The language used by contemporaries of each period is, of course, informed by a long history and in each case communicates different past experiences and future anticipations. It is thus important not to simply set equal terms referring to very different socio-linguistic backgrounds, which would be potentially tantamount to teleological unequivocality, blind to difference and the heterogeneous nature of discourse. Instead, in this comparative scenario, various historical contexts must be considered in order to carefully interpret those experiences that are carried within language across time. The subsequent challenge is to transpose those experiences into another language, without distorting and simplistically equalizing.10 Thus, the process of translation is twofold, from past into present (Weimar era German into modern German, Soviet Russian into modern Russian), and from the foreign into the current analytic language (German, French, and Russian into English). Achieving this goal requires a clear distinction between the analytic conceptual language and the language as embedded in the historic practices. It is an advantage that the language of the sources is not the language of the present book; English here serves as the analytic language. However, the idea that there can be some kind of meta-language into which we can neutrally translate every experience is an illusion, as English also carries its own historical semantics. 10

Already Bloch identified the elaboration of a common language as a challenge to comparative work (1928: 39), and Sartori similarly emphasized the necessity to develop conceptual tools that travel (1970: 1034).

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There is no way around this basic fact of language. As a result, the demand on readers here is high as they will have to overcome preconceptions stemming from their own linguistic expectations, and must accept being taken on a journey through different language cultures. To make this alienation easier, I use key terms in the original language to emphasize the level of ‘language in use’ and to create what is hopefully a constructive degree of confusion. Translations are always provided when the term is mentioned for the first time and are, unless otherwise stated, my own. For translations, I concur with Goldhammer, who argues: ‘It is usually a mistake to fetishize the lexical dimension of a text. Translation […] is, like any art, subordinate to a larger order, to a principle of the whole’ (2006: 151).

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Youth as a Political Force in Twentieth-Century Europe An Overview

The idea of youth and of the way in which young people have mobilized politically has a deep history which this chapter will briefly sketch out. The discussion stretches back in time and illustrates the historical development underlying the current perspective which regards mobilization of young people specifically as youth mobilization. I suggest that a combination of socioeconomic change—in particular nineteenth-century industrialization—and violent political upheaval spurred the emergence of the concept of youth which gained decisively in visibility after the First World War. In pre-industrial European societies, youth had little relevance as a socio-political category beyond guilds of young craftsmen and the various student associations (Speitkamp 1998: 25). Paying attention to this historical development highlights the importance of adopting a discursive perspective if we wish to critically attend to the idea of youth. Over time, the very concept of youth gained in social prominence and gradually, the political significance of youth increased and became a key matter of public controversy with the rupture left by the First World War.

3 . 1 YO U N G P E OP L E B U T N O Y O UT H ‘ AVANT L A LETTRE ’? Throughout history, people have always fallen into the ever-shifting age categories that we consider as typically corresponding to ‘youth’. Although comments about generational conflict can be found in Plato and Aristotle (Kleijwegt 1991), it is important to underline that the status of youth in Graeco-Roman society differed fundamentally from that found in modern and

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contemporary societies. Even by the end of the Middle Ages, the idea of youth barely qualified as ‘moral personae’, since the term predominantly referred to biological characteristics or to integration into the labour force (Gauvard 1981: 244). Although early modern societies were also organized according to age categories, relations between youth and non-youth were less polarized (Griffiths 1996). Indeed, Ariès pointedly claims that the ‘sentiment de l’enfance’ (‘feeling of childhood’) was inexistent until late into the eighteenth century (1960)—there was no consciousness of being a child or youth. Demographic changes which increased the share of young people in society were at the root of large historical changes such as the English or French Revolutions (Goldstone 2016: 31). However, the visibility of young people in the ‘Age of Revolution’ does not imply that the symbol of youth gained in political visibility or autonomy for contemporaries. Tellingly, though Maximilien Robespierre was about 30 years old at the time of the French Revolution, canonical treatments of the period do not treat him as the leader of a youth movement (Furet 1981; Hobsbawm 1996 [1962]; Hunt 2004). The view that generational splits drove the French Revolution became relevant for understanding 1789 primarily in the context of the global youth mobilization that took place almost two centuries later, around 1968 (Egret 1968: 47; Sutherland 1986: 41). During the nineteenth century, youth surfaced as a key actor during revolutionary moments such as the 1848 revolutions (Agulhon 1970). At such moments, gaining the support of young people proved decisive for governments. Traugott illustrates the key role of recruiting ‘potentially turbulent’ young men into the National Guard and thereby rendering them regime loyal (2010: 129)—an early demonstration of my second hypothesis, i.e. that regimes mobilize young people in moments of regime crisis to display popular support. Gradually, the idea of youth, and young people themselves, was mobilized in nationalist movements across Europe (Hobsbawm 1996 [1962]: 132). Nationalist movements often drew inspiration from one another such as the Young Ireland Movement led by William Smith O’Brien which felt encouraged by the 1848 February Revolution (Traugott 2010: 137). Similar movements included Giuseppe Mazzini’s La giovine Italia (Young Italy), the young patriots in Poland, and Junges Deutschland (Young Germany), and later, but structurally analogous movements, like the Young Czech Party Mladočeši in 1874 (Winters 1969), youth movements in Tsarist Russia around the 1890s (Kassow 1989; Morrissey 1998), and self-appropriations of the term in the 1908 rebellion against the Ottoman monarchy, led by the Young Turks (Turfan 1999).

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Also in late Tsarist Russia politically relevant generational consciousness manifested itself forcefully.1 By 1860, Russian intellectuals increasingly understood their society in generational terms (Lovell 2008), and a motif of sons destroying their fathers emerged—captured for instance in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1994 [1862]). This generational thinking, when engaged with by the young, became a way to affirm one’s own cultural significance (Raeff 1994). The youth-based union of socialist intellectuals Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) anchored conceptions of generational conflict in public consciousness, which also furthered gender divisions, as the movement’s participants were primarily male (Offord 1986). In 1881, Ignacy Hryniewiecki and Nikolai Rysakov assassinated Tsar Alexander II, affirming the willingness of these students to defend their rights in Tsarist Russia, thus also helping the studenchestvo (student) identity to spread. Students perceived themselves as a collective, which became alive during skhodka (congregation), assemblies of the student body to discuss issues of common concern. Ultimately, the importance of such student movements was augmented when they successfully expanded to other social groups. Between 1899 and 1911, students went repeatedly on strike and by 1905 they were in tune with broader popular mass movements in which young people were not, however, the main participants (Kassow 1989: 54–7). After the 1905 Revolution, student movements no longer mobilized as a distinct collective and the mythology of the studenchestvo grew dissonant with the reality of actual student involvement (Morrissey 1998). By the time of the 1917 Russian Revolution, student movements had become an integral part of worker movements (Markov 1996). Population growth, changing labour relations, and urbanization all contributed to a more distinct youth culture that began to clearly affirm and to assert itself, aided by an increase in the disposable income of middle-class youth (Gillis 1974: 41). At the same time, education spread in the nineteenth century throughout Europe (Gellner 1983; Meyer et al. 1992; Soysal and Strang 1989), fostering an age-based identity that blended with class, gender, and regional identities. In addition, universal military conscription bolstered the creation of a ‘youth world’ as has been highlighted with regard to the French Third Republic (Cohen 1989). Nevertheless, internal and outgoing migration of young people frequently disrupted emerging youth-bonds (Heywood 1988: 82) and differences across regions and economic strata characterized the lived realities of young people. By the end of the nineteenth century the position of youth had changed dramatically as it had become ‘the focal point for a series of strong images, 1

For an overview, see Feuer (1969: 88–172).

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ways of imagining and representing both the self and society in its entirety’ (Levi and Schmitt 1997: 6). Against a backdrop of industrialization and revolution, and the interwoven emergence of class and national identities, the category of youth became endowed with political relevance. The augmented symbolic value of youth is manifest in how the discourse around youth became a central strategic element in regime consolidation. Indeed, youth had turned into a constitutive part of political discussions about the broader socio-political dynamics of the era (Hobsbawm 1996 [1962]: 118; Plamenatz 1979). Ultimately, by the beginning of the twentieth century, many countries had adopted specific policies for managing and thereby controlling youth (Dyhouse 1981; Hendrick 1990). Simultaneously, with the rise of a unifying and integrative notion of youth, the actual political and social heterogeneity of young people also became evident. The lived diversity of young people along regional, economic, political, and other divides thus sat in constant tension with attempts to unify ideas about youth as a homogeneous group.

3 .2 T H E INTE RW A R P E RIOD: WEIMAR IN CONTEX T During the First World War governments mobilized youth through ‘war pedagogy’, hoping to gain support by young people during those years of fundamental crisis. However, with wartime shortages and suffering, the new approach to education that was being developed for instance in Germany also inspired some youth to critically question the authority of their teachers (Donson 2010). Similarly, the French government targeted the younger generations with its wartime propaganda (Audoin-Rouzeau 2004). However, with a worsening military situation, the state lost the capacity to control its youth, and critical voices, such as politicians and observers lamented the decline of patriotism amongst youth (Agathon 1919 [1913]). On the continent’s Eastern half, by the time that war began, a similarly politically heterogeneous youth had developed. Various factions of youth supported or opposed the Bolsheviks during the 1917 Revolution (Woytinsky 1961), and in early Soviet Russia youth was far from being unanimously communist (Neumann 2011: 57).

3.2.1 A Devastating War and Its Impact on Youth The experience of the First World War and the revolutions of that time created a fundamental generational rupture across Europe, which was decisive for a new, heightened level of youth political self-consciousness (Nipperdey

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1974: 87). Youth affirmed itself as an increasingly independent and multifaceted actor (Wohl 1980). Once the war had brought into question the legitimacy of the old generation, a focus on youth as the bearer of potential promise for the future only accelerated. This pivotal role for youth is evident through the flourishing of generational concepts after 1918 (Burnett 2010: 27–39) and numerous publications of that time testify to the importance of youth in making sense of the contemporary period in Great Britain (Johnson 1927), France (Truc 1919), or the Soviet Union (Lenin 1967 [1903]).2 Youth had become almost indispensable for thinking about politics. Near the end of the interwar period, Léon Blum even affirmed: ‘We live at a time when everyone assumes the right to speak in the name of youth, when everyone, at the same time, wants to grab hold of youth, when everyone is fighting over youth’ (1934). Irrespective of whether or not the war had ended in victory or defeat in 1918, its significant losses heightened the sense of societal fragmentation, dividing societies between those who had participated in the fighting, and those who were too young for it, and also splitting them along gender lines. Moreover, groups of ex-soldiers attempted to transmit their ‘authentic’ interpretation of the war to those who were too young for direct experiences of the battlefields. This cultivation of the war, and in some countries of revolution, further sustained a sense of generational separation. Meanwhile, contrary to their intended aim, the flourishing initiatives to institutionalize generational continuity via youth wings of political parties or civic associations added to an antagonistic intergenerational discourse that grew across Europe. The unbalanced demographics of European societies in the interwar period placed a further burden upon intergenerational relations. As a consequence of military casualties and declining fertility rates across Europe during the war (Vandenbroucke 2014: 111), by the 1930s Europe lacked, in relative terms, children and adults. However, there were relatively more young people, namely those too young to have participated in the war, as contemporary commentators for instance in the Soviet Union noted with astonishment (Mehnert 1933: 12–13). This demographic imbalance drove politicians to compete over which party could genuinely represent the young generation. Thereby, youth as a discursive signifier absorbed ever more competing political expectations. Political actors’ success in appropriating the symbol of youth differed between countries and political orientations. Scholars have highlighted in particular the success of fascist (Kalman 2008; Payne 2001) and communist

2

K voprosu o dvukh pokoleniyakh, in Pravda, 1 January 1924.

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movements (Whitney 2009) in appropriating the idea of youth and bringing young people out onto the streets. But mainstream political parties across Western Europe also turned towards youth, in an attempt to bridge the gulf that had emerged between politics and the people. However, youth frequently felt only rhetorically listened to, and politicians rarely managed to truly overcome the generational conflict that haunted European societies. Throughout this interwar period, the lives of young people remained fractured by class, as social historians have observed (Prost 1987; Todd 2006: 720; White 1986). The awareness of being young initially applied mainly to the middle classes, who were able to enjoy the privileges of an expanding educational system, whilst other young people continued to enter the workforce at a young age. The expansion of commercialized leisure venues, and the increasing financial autonomy of these middle-class youth, enabled the emergence of a distinct but confined youth lifestyle (McKibbin 1998). Membership in youth movements peaked during the interwar years. Young people had become increasingly emancipated actors, possessing their own interests. Some were adult-led, such as the Scout Movement, and largely aimed at controlling youth. But at the same time, they also provided the space for young people to unite and express their views, independent of the political system and society in general. Many such movements had their roots in the pre-1914 period, though they truly flourished during the interwar period. Whilst politics may have preoccupied only a minority of young people on a daily basis, the turbulence of these years attracted youth to political involvement. A greater consciousness of generational differences thus became firmly enshrined in social thought and political practice during those years of crisis, across Europe and further afield.

3.2.2 New Beginnings: Youth in the Soviet Union The Bolshevik leadership did not come to power with a ready-made set of ideas about youth (Kuhr-Korolev 2005: 323), but in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution the leadership attempted to represent itself as the voice of youth and thereby the country’s future. It emphasized the important role played by youth in the unfolding of the revolution itself. Youth swiftly became one of the core social categories (Gorsuch 2000: 12–15). By the 1920s, youth had become a central symbol and a way of legitimizing the political and social order in Soviet ideology (Bukharin 1984; Landa 1966); it had indeed become ‘one of the most vital areas […] for social transformation’ (Gorsuch 1992: 189) and appropriating the discourses surrounding youth was a central part of the transformative project of the Soviet leadership.

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In this emerging discursive order, the working class constituted the paramount source of economic innovation and social progress, embodying the novyi sovetskii chelovek (New Soviet Person), despite there being a weakly developed class identity (Fitzpatrick 1993: 745). This working class was to display youthful (male and female) vigour (Lebina and Shishkin 1982). The famous statue ‘Rabochii i kolkhoznitsa’ (‘Worker and Communal Farm Woman’) summed up the Soviet Union’s self-image at this time for display abroad and at home. Finished in 1936 by Vera Mukhina, the statue depicts a male worker and a female collective farmer, each over 25 metres tall, jointly holding a hammer and a sickle above their heads. Both are young, committed to their cause, and appear determined to achieve their aims. The statue is emblematic of works designed for public reception during this period, and reiterates the outstanding importance of youth in carrying the October Revolution forward, whether working on collective farms, fighting in the war, or advancing the socialist cause in other ways. But despite the public hymns of praise, the USSR suffered from generational tensions not unlike those that Western societies experienced (Lovell 2007). The Komsomol, the official youth organization, was split over multiple tensions: between the party and its youth auxiliary; between the peasant rankand-file and the urban leadership; and also between different regions (Tirado 1993: 461). Inequalities caused by economic scarcity and competition affected women and young people in particular (Koenker 2001: 807), contributing to the emergence of distinct political interests among youth. The discrepancies between political rhetoric and the lived experience of youth became clear (Neumann 2012: 283). From around 1928 onwards, once Stalin had abandoned the New Economic Policy, the party took a clearer lead in disciplining young people, spurred by the idea that a generational conflict needed to be overcome and replaced by the overarching and transcendental unity of class (Koenker 2001). The Communist Party framed youth as having a mission to construct socialism, and reiterated through public visuals and speeches the importance of youth in the political process. Youth became the frontrunner in the creation of the novyi sovetskii chelovek, whilst the Komsomol was to guarantee simultaneously symbolic and performative generational continuity.

3.2.3 Gaining Distance from the First World War with Youth After the First World War ideas about youth across Europe also incorporated ideas from this new Soviet discourse—youth as embodying new beginnings, heroism, and self-sacrifice for the greater good. The Bolshevik leadership

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established heroic associations with youth, which also inspired Western actors (Gorsuch 2000). French intellectuals, the New Humanists for instance, posited that young people embodied the country’s future. This progressive intellectual movement of the 1920s, ‘perceived youth as having the potential to improve upon their elders, and this potential, especially in the aftermath of the Great War, accorded the younger generation a special heroic status’ (Fox 2002: 49). With their various political implications, these notions contributed to a mythical space surrounding youth in the political struggles across Europe. At the same time, the competing political currents corresponded to and confirmed the numerous political ambitions voiced by young people, for instance in the Weimar Republic (Stambolis 2003: 33). During the interwar period, civic associations spread across most of Europe’s new and fragile democracies. Young people were frequently the core members of these organizations, but it was the combination of young people’s participation and support from adults which made for a particularly powerful combination. Although the important role of strong radical youth movements has been highlighted in the case of the breakdown of Weimar Germany (Berman 1997), fascist movements attracted youth in every European country (Morgan 2003). Comparing Spain and Italy, for example, Riley argues that in the latter the strength of civic movements backed the rise of a fascist hegemonic authoritarian regime, whereas in Spain the associations’ weakness precluded the emergence of a radical fascist party (2005). In France, the right-wing Faisceau (Fasces) mobilized sections of the young generation. But one of the largest and most enduring movements existed in Romania. Known as the Garda de Fier (the Iron Guard), it was founded in 1927 and recruited a large number of students, drawing inspiration from nineteenth-century Romanian and European-wide nationalism, in particular its anti-Semitic elements (Clark 2015). Personal interactions across countries frequently provided the basis for initiatives to institutionalize youth movements. W. D. Boyce, for instance, founded the Boy Scouts of America in 1909, after travelling to Britain (Rowan 2007), and in the 1920s and 1930s, young British activists such as Rolf Gardiner aimed at spreading cultural youth movements from England across Europe (Fowler 2008: 31). In a similar vein, Whitney shows how it would be mistaken to perceive the communist and Catholic youth mobilizations in France as isolated within national boundaries; Soviet communists in particular travelled widely to exercise influence across the continent (2009). Moreover, Western European youth travelled to the Soviet Union and tried to emulate things that were being put in practice there. By definition, communist but also Catholic movements had an international outlook, and during the interwar period extensive exchange amongst young people contributed to bringing about shared organizational forms (Tiemann 1989). The religious revival during and after the First

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World War also aided Catholic movements across Western Europe (Becker 1994), which made for the largest section of youth movements in France at the time (Michel 1988: 13). Socialist youth meanwhile tried to reinvigorate its international umbrella organization, the International Union of Socialist Youth. Created in 1907, representing around 60,000 young people from thirteen countries, the organization was reconstituted in 1923, despite considerable financial difficulties (Bouneau 2008: 42). In the Weimar Republic, socialist working-class youth, under the leadership of Carlo Mierendorff or Theodor Haubach, stressed the need to make socialism an emotional experience to instil in the young generation at large a sense of a new beginning (Stambolis 2003: 55–6). Research tends to suggest that in moments of political crisis, youth mobilized on the streets and in discourse is associated with political extremes. However, during the interwar period, the diversity of aims for which political youth mobilized outside of the Soviet Union is significant. What had fundamentally changed by the 1920s was that youth movements had started to assume a self-understanding as the vanguard of historical change and saw themselves specifically as youth movements. In the Weimar Republic, this selfunderstanding was particularly developed (Wohl 1980). It was there that youth became the subject of a particularly vivid political debate, which the case study will discuss in detail. However, as this contextualization illustrates, it is crucial to go beyond ideas of a Weimar anomaly when comparable elements can be encountered elsewhere.

3. 3 APPROACHING THE S ECOND WORLD WAR: POLITICA L ESCALATION AND YOUTH

3.3.1 Radical Youth in the Late Weimar Republic Since 1922, non-democratic movements had been spreading across European countries, and with the rise of fascism in Italy and the Weimar Republic, the symbolic fight for youth had intensified. In fascist ideology, the mythical idea of youth as bringing renewal and embodying strength was in heavy use, and encouraged political leaders from across the political spectrum to compete for the support of the young. The cultivation of patriotism across the political spectrum, however, created an important sense of unity amongst youth. Political youth mobilization took place in two forms: first, within the youth wings of political parties or tightly state-controlled movements, and second, as part of independent, usually smaller, political groups. Within the former, adults

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were key initiators, although this did not mean that these party-controlled movements were mere products of adult manipulation, illustrating the difficulty in controlling mobilized youth. Numerous young people engaged with genuine motivation in those movements, finding fulfilment and the chance to participate in public life. In a context of frequently disrupted family relations—one consequence of the war—youth movements provided much-needed alternative spaces of socialization. The European fascist movements recruited those who came of age just after the First World War and had usually not directly participated in the conflict. ‘Their youth and idealism meant that fascist values were proclaimed as being distinctively “modern” and “moral”’ (Mann 2004: 26). Certainly, the bestknown attempts to control youth and place it in the service of the state took place in Weimar Germany. Following the NSDAP’s seizure of power in 1933, the Hitler Youth became the country’s only official youth organization. It was founded in 1922 and until 1933 it had been one of many youth organizations of the Weimar Republic. Its membership increased rapidly after that year, due to significant pressure placed upon young people to join, and the ban on other youth movements. By the outbreak of the Second World War, 98 per cent of German young people were members (Klönne 2008: 33). During the 1930s, radical movements offered young people a chance to prove their national commitment, particularly for those who had not fought in the previous war. This youth support for fascism leads Linz to define fascism as a ‘generational revolt’ (1979: 52–4). However, youth and adult worlds have never been hermetically sealed; even in the Weimar Republic the two spheres were densely intertwined (Brown 2009: 31).

3.3.2 Youth Movements beyond Weimar Developments in the Weimar Republic are best considered alongside those from other European countries. Taking such a perspective is not to deny that Weimar itself was in some respect an idiosyncratic case; instead, it works from the assumption that certain elements of the Weimar Republic’s story can be better understood if placed in their international context. Italian youth movements, for instance, similarly questioned democracy and sought alternative ways to link the masses and the political class (De Grand 2000: 9). Italian fascists applauded violence as an expression of their movement’s youthfulness, and praised the cult of youth, seeing it as capable of generating new revolutionary movements: ‘The myth of youth borrowed from futurism became for the fascists almost the premise, the necessary and unavoidable condition of their being fascists, the militants of a movement that did not

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intend to last forever’ (Gentile 2005: 110). The appeal of fascism to youth concerned only an articulate minority, but the silent majority within broader society failed to voice clear and coherent alternatives. Therefore, just months after the creation of the fascist movement, Mussolini was able to claim that a majority of young people supported him (Wanrooij 1987: 404–6). By 1939, the umbrella organization of the National Fascist Party, Gioventù Italiana del Littorio (Italian Youth of the Lictors), had almost eight million members within a complex institutional infrastructure incorporating theatres, sporting groups, and orchestras (De Grand 2000: 89). During the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), youth movements grew increasingly militant and radicalized; the socialist youth joined the communists, and extreme-right activism grew rapidly (Linz 1978). The Spanish case is a strong illustration of the effects of the international youth networks that had developed during the interwar period. Volunteers from across the world arrived in Spain to fight for but also against Franco. Primarily these were the International Brigades, with around 40,000 soldiers fighting for the Republic, more than 100,000 German or Italian soldiers—not necessarily involved voluntarily— and around 1,200 genuine volunteers, a mixed bag of ‘pious Catholics, cryptoNazis, aspiring fascists, old-style conservatives and anti-Semites of every stripe’ (Keene 2007: 2). They came from around thirty countries, including England, France, Russia, and Romania. In the aftermath of the Civil War, leading up to the Franco dictatorship, the indoctrination of youth became a central occupation for the new regime. An analysis of textbooks given to school students reveals the degree to which the Spanish fascists were inspired by Germany (Pinto 2004: 650), which resonates with the general approval of Hitler’s actions by Franco (Preston 1995: 73). In Tito’s Yugoslavia, youth movements also played a key role. Each year, on Tito’s birthday, young people across the country engaged in a nationwide relay. Where Communist Party Pioneer organizations existed, state officials presented the young members of such movements as being builders of the future. The inspiration for the form and focus of Pioneer organizations in Yugoslavia, which mushroomed during the Second World War, came from the USSR, and young Pioneers were involved in a vast number of activities, such as fighting in partisan units, executing civil tasks, or conducting military duties such as courier missions (Erdei 2004: 163). In some countries, however, the nationalist movements failed to gain a greater degree of influence. In Denmark, for instance, signs of extremism were contained at an early stage, and Social Democratic Prime Minister Stauning maintained a successful bulwark against anti-democratic radicalism. Throughout the interwar years, radical movements were constrained in terms of how they could operate across the country; uniforms in political organizations were

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forbidden, anti-Semitic statements were criminalized, and there was tight regulation regarding the carrying of weapons (Lidegaard et al. 2003: 279–81). For Vichy France meanwhile, youth became a critical component of its ideology. Maréchal Pétain aimed at substituting the pale youth of the interwar period with a strong and vigorous new youth for which a number of specific institutions (e.g. Chantiers de la Jeunesse [Compulsory youth work camps] or Compagnons de France [Companions of France]) were set up, leading to the first all-encompassing youth policy in France (Giolitto 1991: 438–46). Pétain’s discourse insisted on the idea of youth, whom he addressed to cultivate their patriotism and integrate them into his hierarchical understanding of society (Miller 2004). To his advantage, Pétain was able to draw on the failure of the French youth movements of the 1930s to capture the mass of young people, and the corresponding feeling that something needed to be done about youth (Halls 1981: 132). In that context, the Compagnons de France came to symbolize the renewal of French youth as eager to work, respectful of their family heritage and their country, and physically strong. Supportive of maréchal Pétain and led by the 29-year-old Henry Dhavernas, the Compagnons were a direct response to soaring unemployment or deviant youth as le Galde Kerangel argues: ‘The problem of moral and intellectual education is inherent in the project of Révolution nationale. The youth turns thereby into the favourite soil of exercise for the new regime’ (2001: 24). In France, unlike in fascist Germany, Italy (Morgan 2004: 113), and communist Europe, a unified rather than a unique youth was what the leadership aimed for. Considering this historical context I argue that democracies across Europe were fragile during the interwar period, and a discursive perspective on youth and its political mobilization emphasizes the unconsolidated nature of European democracies. It is therefore misleading to perceive of Weimar as making for a ‘Sonderweg’. If that were the case, every European country had its ‘Sonderweg’ in those years. The case study of the Weimar Republic (Chapter 6) will further elaborate on the political place of youth, to contribute to our understanding of one of the most momentous democratic breakdowns of the twentieth century.

3 . 4 RI S I N G F R O M TH E A S H E S O F WA R : A F T E R THE S ECOND WORLD WAR Where the Second World War left devastation, disillusionment towards youth replaced the heroic narratives that had been characteristic of the interwar

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years. The hopes for decisive political renewal through youth thus largely disappeared after 1945. As youthful enthusiasm had been instrumentalized for the purpose of enacting fascist atrocities (Donson 2006; Koon 1985: 233; Whitney 2009), after 1945 it became implausible to frame youth as the saviour of a nation. The situation was very different in communist Europe. In the regimes’ official discourse, youth had heroically contributed to the victory of the Red Army and helped to liberate Europe from fascism. For post-war youth in this context, this situation signified an emerging gap between the frontovik— the mythical youth that had actively participated in the war—and the younger generation.

3.4.1 A Symbol of Cultural Renewal: Youth in Non-Communist Europe In France, after the liberation in the summer of 1944, youth came to symbolize the country’s cultural reconstruction. Through youth, French society could potentially end a war that had created shameful memories of collaboration as well as heroic stories of resistance (Dank 1974). Young people themselves were exposed to both, the enthusiasm of the liberation, and the perpetual political turmoil of the French Fourth Republic. But beyond the cultural sphere, the symbol of youth was of limited currency. Despite complaints about the ‘old society’ and the need for ‘fresh blood’, French politicians from Michel Debré to François Mitterrand distanced themselves from youth (Bantigny 2009). Unlike the First World War, the Second World War did not lend itself to clear generational narratives given the vastly different experiences that individuals had of this war, depending on religion, region, gender, or socio-economic status (Lagrou 2003: 290). It was in the late 1950s that talking about societal renewal by drawing on ideas of youth gained greater prominence in Europe (Jobs 2007: 30). The changing place of youth in post-war France gained momentum in 1954. When the war in Algeria started, 80 per cent of 20-year-old French men had to leave for Algeria and by 1962 when the war had ended, youth had again turned into a political subject, which itself laid the foundations for the eruptions of ‘1968’ (Bantigny 2007). During the war in Algeria, the French nation needed to relegate memories of the occupation, and alongside the global process of decolonization, the Holocaust memory as a global imperative began to emerge (Rothberg 2006). Hopes for cultural renewal in this context rose, captured for instance by Giroud’s ‘La nouvelle vague’ (‘The New Wave’) (1958). But despite this new symbolic importance in France and elsewhere, youth remained politically silent across Europe in the early post-war years (Gillis 1974:

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185–91). In Britain, for instance, youth cultural movements shunned politics until the 1960s (Fowler 2008: 114–26). In West Germany, youth lost the positive mythical ascriptions that had characterized the interwar period. After the war, young people themselves faced a world in ruins (Kersting 1998). According to Schelsky, those born in the 1920s and 1930s were the ‘sceptical generation’, sceptical about ideas that the rise of Hitler had discredited, such as democracy and peace (1958). Meanwhile, with young people being disengaged from official politics, the public complained about the disruptions that Halbstarke (beatnik, lit. Halfstrongs) created during the 1950s; people were concerned about the wild young generation causing trouble with rock ’n’ roll and disrespect for authority. The Halbstarke was primarily a male subculture, rooted in the working class and larger cities, aiming at provocation rather than political change (Breyvogel 2002; Schissler 2001: 435). Although they remained a minority, they were a troublesome phenomenon for the young Republic; once again, Germany seemed to be losing its grip on young people (Stremmel 2007). The way in which the symbol of youth in West Germany became relatively emptied of political connotation can also be interpreted as a response to over-politicized youth in East Germany (Moeller 1997: 408). However, if we want to truly understand the meaning and political place of youth in the aftermath of the Second World War we must look at the intersections between countries. There were certainly distinct traits in the way young people gathered in each country: when West Germany experienced the Halbstarken, the French had their blousons noirs (rocker, lit. black leather jackets) (Robert 2006), the Brits the Teddy Boys, or the Italians their teppisti (vandals) (Stella 1994: 157). Local youth groups were generally aware of developments in neighbouring countries, and tried to mark their distance from institutional or parental authority in similar ways, notably through rock concerts or watching films featuring transnational stars such as James Dean and Marlon Brando. A comparison of US and German youth after 1945, for instance, suggests similarities and mutual inspiration, and points to the importance of transnational frames of reference for youth (Kurme 2006).

3.4.2 A Political Driving Force and Contestation through Culture: Communist Europe Being young in post-1945 USSR offered freedoms that the previous generation, which lived through the Great Purges and the Great Patriotic War, could not have even dreamed of. Post-war youth had no direct experience of the Great Purges and the potential brutality of the state (Zubkova 2000).

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Undeniably, youth remained a continuous subject of propaganda and was expected to display its loyalty. But even under Stalin’s repression, youth was never as obedient to the Komsomol as political leaders claimed. Without defining themselves as opponents of the regime, young people ‘integrated their new practices into their Soviet identity’ (Fürst 2010: 3). Further changes occurred after Stalin’s death in 1953. During Khrushchev’s Thaw with the relaxation of censorship and repression, more critical voices appeared in the Komsomol. Young people, moreover, expressed themselves through wearing new fashionable outfits and listening to jazz, behaviour which officials often dismissed as oppositional. The young post-war generation comprised those who had come back from war, born in the 1920s, and those who did not fight in the war, born in the 1930s: overall a generation of reform-minded youth who pragmatically echoed ideas of socialism and the revolution that they were to carry forward (Zubok 2009). However, the young heroic defenders of the fatherland, the frontoviki, embodied communist masculinity whereas those male students who were too young to have participated in the war were not able to attain the ideal of masculinity that the frontoviki embodied. Meanwhile, those who had performed their duty in and survived the war did not find new freedoms at home but instead found themselves living in a state that demanded unconditional support for the Cold War. The contribution to the war effort made by women, moreover, was generally ignored (Engel 1999). In this climate, some Soviet youth started to seek alternative models of belonging, and turned to Western youth for inspiration, adopting and often exaggerating their styles. The appearance of stilyagi3 was the most visible of these deviations. The excessive media campaign waged against them made these young people in their stylish outfits famous across the country. In 1949, the satirical paper Krokodil described the stilyagi style, language, and way of dancing, ridiculing it as ‘Parisian’.4 However, due to the cost of obtaining the necessary goods for this lifestyle in a context of low living standards, the stilyagi remained a minority phenomenon (Filtzer 1999: 1099). Moreover, to get hold of English, French, or Italian clothes, which were only available through hard currency, required personal connections. Thus, primarily the children of the nomenklatura were able to behave as stilyagi; they enjoyed a more loosely controlled social world in which they were allowed, for instance,

3 Sometimes translated as hipsters or style hunters, groups of young people that emerged during late Stalinism, united around an unusual Western style of clothing and popular culture; for an introduction, see Edele (2002) and Litvinov (2009). 4 Beliaev: Stilyaga, in Krokodil, 10 March 1949, p. 10.

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to dance in semi-private clubs.5 Over time, however, young people across the country copied the stilyagi phenomenon, whose style became ever more detached from how Western youth dressed and behaved. Similar practices of youth emerged in other communist countries, such as the Polish bikiniarze (beatniks) (Crowley and Reid 2010) or the Hungarian jampec (dude). In Soviet Russia, the Komsomol took drastic action to disrupt the ‘extravagant’ gatherings of stilyagi (Kassof 1965: 118–19). The Communist Party also tried to contain the phenomenon, and gave further support to the Komsomol, fearing that the vanguard role of the official youth institution was being brought into question.6 During this period, stilyagi thus came to be seen as opposite to the frontoviki and the image of strong workers. The wider population came increasingly to monitor them, demonstrating what can be described as ‘mutual horizontal surveillance amongst peers’ (Kharkhordin 1999: 219, 355). Nevertheless, the student population did not generally question Soviet authority, and trying to absorb Western cultural influences was not automatically linked to oppositional political activism. Even some of the most politically active student leaders at the time of Stalin and Khrushchev affirmed the state goal of constructing socialism (Tromly 2014). Students aimed at maintaining a social status, being part of the intelligentsia, and trying to develop and preserve kul’turnost’ (culturedness). When Khrushchev led the Soviet Union between 1953 and 1964, major economic projects and the introduction of decentralizing sovnarkhoz (Regional Economic Councils) were important aspects of young people’s lives (Kibita 2013). During the 1950s and 1960s state publicity aimed at involving youth in these vast economic transformations. The supposed success of these campaigns left heroic memories that were reiterated in later years, when the Soviet economic reality had become bleak. Young people also served an important role for cultural diplomacy in those years: carefully selected and prepared youth travelled to the West in official organizations (Kozovoi 2011: 222). In other places in Europe, developments stood somewhere in between the suspicion directed towards youth in Germany and France, and the persistent general enthusiasm directed towards youth in the USSR. Post-war Yugoslavia, however, was generally an example of the latter. There, communists dominated the newly elected Constituent Assembly. Following the Tito–Stalin split of 1948, the Yugoslav Politburo developed a more decentralized theory of socialism. Party propaganda aimed at rallying popular support for ‘Yugoslavism’, Timofeef, Garri, in Krokodil, 20 December 1953, p. 5. Komsomol i shkola, in Pravda, 29 November 1955, describing stilyagi as the trace of bourgeois morality. 5 6

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rather than socialism. The 1946 constitution had already enshrined ideas of ‘brotherhood and unity’, and granted largely equal rights to the country’s different ethnic groups. The new regime was particularly popular amongst rural youth, which made up around three-quarters of all party members (Lampe 2000: 236), and the communist-organized youth brigades became crucial for the country’s economic recovery. In sports-like competitions, young people worked without much adult supervision and did not shy away from forcing their peers to assist them (Lampe 2000: 239). The labour brigades rebuilt the destroyed infrastructure and the Communist Party placed great hopes upon the young generation, trying to nurture a generation with new ‘values, beliefs and standards of behavior’ (Lilly 1994: 395). Until 1948, debates persisted over the extent to which youth should be obliged to participate in these brigades. After 1949, these debates gradually shifted, as fulfilling brigade quotas again became a priority (Banac 1988).

3.5 A GENERATION AL WAKE-UP C ALL A ROUND 1968

3.5.1 A Global Turn towards Resistance When Daniel Cohn-Bendit stood trial in Paris after the first wave of unrest of May 1968, the judge repeatedly asked the defendant for his name to which he replied: ‘Kurón-Modzelewski’. With this, Cohn-Bendit referred to two well-known Polish opposition figures, Jacek Kurón and Karol Modzelewski, who in 1964 criticized Polish post-war communism in an open letter to the Communist Party.7 The letter circulated widely amongst students in the West who, despite typically having no direct experience of East European communism, felt a sense of solidarity, believing themselves part of a shared antiauthoritarian struggle. The targets of criticism for youth mobilization across the globe varied according to each country’s situation, including capitalist exploitation, communist repression, colonial rule, and imperialist domination. Ideas of international solidarity and struggles elsewhere became part of the national context and were reinterpreted to make sense in these new environments. Hobsbawm describes this transnational dimension of the 1960s as the ‘astonishing internationalism’ of the student movements era (1994: 326). In this process of transfer, ideas of solidarity became a source of inspiration and 7

In the letter they advocated for a programme of self-managed socialism in which workers and peasants, rather than the Party, would be the key decision-makers in political and economic matters (Bernhard 1993: 313).

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knowledge about revolutionary practice elsewhere, and provided a template through which domestic political faults could be understood and contested. Solidarity with the ‘Third World’ challenged communist parties in Eastern and Western Europe, whom young radicals saw as obstructing revolution. The generational awakening transformed the previous cultural contestation in Western Europe and the United States into a political one in the years leading to the mobilization around 1968. The simultaneity of demonstrations increased this feeling of sharing a mission, which extended eventually beyond advanced capitalist societies alone. Within the existing scholarship on this subject, the focus on Western students has gradually widened to include uprisings in other parts of the world and to emphasize how globally interlinked protests were. In the Middle East, for example, young people took to the streets and raised questions about sexuality and paternal authority which had decreased markedly in the Palestinian Territories. Similarly in Africa and Asia, protests were held against authoritarianism and outdated societal structures (Gassert and Klimke 2009). In Poland, the Party brutally repressed student protests which initially drew inspiration from Adam Mickiewicz’s play Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve) that criticizes the tyranny of the Russian tsar and was being staged at the time. To dismiss the demonstrations, the communist leadership circulated ideas of a Nazi–Zionist conspiracy, claiming in a strange merger of ideologies that Zionist conspirators incited the demonstrations (Shore 2009: 313–14). Young people across Eastern Europe took to the streets, often responding to specific national problems, but equally drawing inspiration from mobilizations seen further afield (Apor and Mark 2011; Ebbinghaus 2008). Political leaders also showed awareness of the global dimension of the unrest that they faced. West German chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, for example, labelled student unrest as an ‘American revolutionary export’ and the executive secretary of the US State Department’s Inter-Agency Youth Committee, Robert Cross, spoke of the ‘first truly international generation’. The Vietnam War as well as American counterculture were indeed crucial inspirations for national movements worldwide (Frei 2008; Kraushaar 2000). Such cross-references expressed a shared political and philosophical outlook amongst students, rather than any kind of organizational infrastructure; to solve local problems, young people were now looking to peers in other countries.

3.5.2 Expanding the Borders of 1968 In recent scholarship, the geographical space associated with 1968 has been further broadened. One such expansion concerns the case of Yugoslavia, where

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demonstrations also took place on a large scale; inspired by contestation elsewhere, flaws in the country’s political system spurred local mobilizations in cities such as Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo. Demands formulated by Yugoslav youth navigated between local realities and global aspirations. Living in a socialist country, it was not so much the system’s overthrow that drove the youth, but rather the correction of existing socialism (Fichter 2016: 121). It was therefore possible for the regime to claim that the protests took place in support of it and to argue that youth mobilization was a sign of regime support. Such broadening of the geographical scope within scholarship has also led to a questioning of the social borders, i.e. the range of actors involved in the events surrounding 1968. For the French case, Ross (2002) provides a forceful critique of the youth-centred narrative of the mobilization, arguing that this was in fact a cultural and political construction in the aftermath of 1968. In a similar vein, researchers have looked beyond youth, notably at workers (Vigna 2007) and peasants (Bruneau 2008). If we wish to overcome the narrow focus of early scholarship upon liberal students, one must also acknowledge the enabling effect of 1968 on fascist movements in France and Italy (Mammone 2008). Work on Eastern Europe has added to this widened understanding of the actors involved. Romania, for instance, experienced large-scale mobilization, which integrated elements of global youth culture, whilst also using the language of isolationist nationalism and being anti-socialist (Fichter 2011). In addition to questions surrounding its geographical and social scope, the issue of 1968’s temporal borders remains important. Placing the uprising in a long-term national history of progressive change after the Second World War, Capdevielle and Mouriaux (1988), for example, regard 1968 as a juncture between les trente glorieuses (The Glorious Thirty) and the economic crisis of the 1970s. Such an emphasis on the longer-term changes underlying the emancipation of youth in the aftermath of the war also applies to Germany (Schildt and Siegfried 2006) or Poland (Junes 2015: 103). One can indeed observe a shared ‘culture revolution’ that occurred across the West between around 1958 and 1974; this included the end of censorship, the collapse of the traditional family, the emergence of second-wave feminism, and gay liberation (Marwick 1998). The value change Marwick discerns is interwoven with Inglehart’s concept of intergenerational value change, leading from materialist to post-materialist values (1977). Events around 1968 also encouraged scholars at the time to reconsider earlier political youth activism across Europe (Feuer 1969). Coutrot, for instance, emphasizes ‘the attitudes of dissent and hope shared by a young generation’ during the interwar years in France (1970: 23). Such definitions of youth clearly carry the marks of their respective present times. Indeed,

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Eisenstadt’s (1956) earlier explanations of societal evolution as occurring through tensions between clearly distinct age groups underpinned many such unifying perceptions of youth in the 1970s. Erikson’s psychoanalytic studies, which equated ‘youth’ with a crisis of identity, rendered this conflict-prone perception of youth even more prominent during this highly charged time (1968: 21). During the 1970s, researchers in the Soviet Union itself also granted more attention to the category of youth; in particular the pioneering sociologists Ikonnikova and Kon. They argued that one could not talk about youth as a social group (molodezh’) given that lived youth (molodost’) was specific to social class (1970: 10). Meanwhile, Western scholars suggested that communist youth purposely mirrored its peers in the West, in order to stand in fundamental opposition ‘to the demands of the system and [being] of continuing and grave concern to the Communist Parties’ (Cornell 1968: 177). Overall, the lens of youth points to the necessity of thinking beyond an East–West dichotomy for fully understanding the dynamics of political mobilization commonly captured by ‘1968’. Although the divisions created by the Cold War were a historical reality of their time, the confrontational rhetoric of the era does not map onto any kind of political reality on the ground as experienced by youth. The case study of France, which this book discusses in greater detail (Chapter 7), further substantiates the importance of transnational diffusion.

3.6 Y OUTH IN OUR T IME: POLITICS THROUGH O T H E R ME A NS ?

3.6.1 Youth Movements and the Regime Changes of 1989/1991 With the mobilizations of 1968, young people on both sides of the Iron Curtain became aware of their shared horizons of expectation. Throughout the 1980s, these shared expectations also translated into similar political practices. Across the Iron Curtain, movements increasingly developed a common understanding of what Europe meant for them, at a time when the political integration of Western Europe was gaining speed. The nonconventional practices of young people should therefore not simply be dismissed as mere riots or destructive squatting, but instead appreciated as political expressions (Andresen and van der Steen 2016). During the last years of communist rule in Europe, young people again took centre stage. In Central and Eastern Europe, dissent had been developing even

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before Gorbachev came to power, but after March 1985, the style and the goals of those opposition movements evolved. A new generation of political opposition centred less on an intellectual critique of the communist system and more on concrete concerns; this was the ‘konkretny generation’ (Kenney 2002: 121–56). Dissidents’ reactions to Gorbachev in communist countries were mixed. Whereas Václav Havel, for example, expressed concerns about the enthusiasm Gorbachev generated when visiting Prague in 1987 (1991: 352), others such as Adam Michnik were excited about the changes taking place in Moscow (2009 [1987]: 143). For young people in Soviet Ukraine, the scope for youth mobilization changed fundamentally after 1985. Being part of the Soviet Union meant that constraints on their mobilization had been significantly tighter than in other communist countries in Central Europe. However, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in particular had a profound impact on the politicization of students and those about to enter the workforce. In the aftermath of the nuclear explosion, young people set up discussion circles and the tradition of underground publishing, samizdat, flourished again. Viacheslav Chomovil relaunched the journal Ukrainian Herald in 1987, which had been forcibly shut down fifteen years earlier. In this more relaxed atmosphere, movements in opposition to communism formed (Kuzio 2000: 68–9). Young people were at the forefront of these initiatives which also filled the vacuum created by the retreat of the official youth organization. The emergence of youth counterculture in the 1980s across communist Europe frequently took place at music festivals. Subcultures around music also spread across communist Poland. Jarocin, for instance, became one of the largest rock music festivals across Europe, with around 120,000 participants by 1987. During the festival, its young participants discussed theories of anarchism, socialism, and pacifism, plus broader criticism of the communist states (Piotrowski 2011: 299). For the Polish case, recent historiography highlights that generational dynamics proved particularly important, seemingly more so than in the case of East Germany. Supported by the Catholic Church, Polish youth movements actively tried to oppose the ‘foreign’ communist domination of the country, and emphasized that they felt as if they were members of a ‘community of destination’ (Gerland 2016: 112). Students got together to resist higher education reform (a 1985 law had undone liberal provisions), and organized the revival of the independent student association NZS, which took to the streets and reconquered the public sphere from the regime. This leads Junes to argue that the young generation ‘played a significant role in reviving the opposition to the regime’ (2015: 249). Amongst the most prominent political activists in Yugoslavia was Igor Vidmar, a radical new leftist who studied social sciences whilst playing in

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various rock bands. Politically well connected, the subculture that developed around people such as Vidmar also conveyed the internationalization that took place in the 1980s. As a result of increasing communication with peers in Western Europe, young people began to think differently about socialist ideology. They increasingly perceived socialism as a restricting, foreign-imposed Soviet feature of their country, and began opposing the country’s political regime also through their music (Tomc 2010: 194). Youth was evidently part of the political changes that led to the end of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Most importantly, its protests, diverse publications, music festivals, and discussion circles in universities and firms, created the conditions for social change amongst the wider population. The media reacted to these developments, and those in power became increasingly aware of the societal changes that were occurring by looking at their youth. For the reforms undertaken by Gorbachev, youth became a critical mirror in a context of rapid political, economic, and social change. In Chapter 5, the case of the Soviet Union is studied in greater depth and in light of the changes that occurred across the communist space. In the newly independent post-communist countries, the emphasis on implementing the economic and political transition also meant that young people were no longer a key concern for the wider public (Slavnić 2010). Despite a general rise in the level of welfare spending (Lipsmeyer 2002), inflation meant that child benefits across the region were eroded; meanwhile, the education sector was privatized, primarily at the university level, under conditions of low minimum standards and young people became the victims of rapidly deteriorating school facilities (Cook 2007: 121). Secondary education also became increasingly monetized; for instance, free meal provision in schools declined (Deacon 2000: 155). In the 1990s, young people in post-communist countries were thus thrown headlong into market societies replete with uncertainties and opportunities; they also lacked a generational role model. During this transition period, new risks—such as unemployment—emerged, as spending on welfare and education crumbled (Roberts 2000: 28). This neglect accompanied a decade of low electoral participation and few youth-led demonstrations, and thus contributed to youth being politically sidelined (Colton 2000: 118). Such observations prompted Blum to characterize the younger generation during the 1990s as ‘asocial, apolitical, unhealthy, often delinquent, and generally disaffected’ (2007: 97). Skyrocketing imprisonment rates in post-Soviet Russia also particularly affected young people, many of whom suffered in the country’s overcrowded incarceration system (Senter et al. 2007: 324). As society struggled to adapt to the new political and economic realities in a

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context of hyper-transition, post-communist youth largely withdrew from being involved in politics.

3.6.2 Lethargic or Rebellious? Youth between Resistance and Conformity Comments in the media and by academics confirm the profound gap that now separates young people from formal politics, seen as being conducted by older people (Pilkington and Pollock 2015: 2). Young people are in general less likely to participate in elections (Henn and Weinstein 2006; Kimberlee 2002; Wattenberg 2012), or to become members of a political party or a union (Dalton 2002: 31). Though the decline in party membership partially reflects a general decline in levels of party membership across democracies (Mair and Van Biezen 2001; Sloam 2014a: 669; Van Biezen et al. 2012), it has been more pronounced amongst young people. Moreover, on average young people are particularly prone to vote for populist parties (Bakić 2009; Fourquet 2017; Mayer 2016), primarily due to ethnic nationalism, financial problems, and economic insecurity (Mieriņa and Koroļeva 2015: 184) given that they allegedly ‘compete with immigrants for scarce resources’ (Arzheimer 2009: 263). If one analyses young people’s political worlds by looking beyond voting behaviour, it becomes clear that participation has shifted towards nonconventional forms (Stolle et al. 2005). Indeed, compared to the 1970s, nonelectoral forms of political participation have even increased (Sloam 2014a: 679). Young people are more likely than adults to participate in protests or to sign a petition and express political discontent online (Dalton 2009; Inglehart and Welzel 2005). Some of these new forms of political involvement demand a level of personal commitment that goes significantly beyond that required for voting. Moreover, in moments of crisis, non-electoral forms of political participation can place crucial pressure on an unpopular regime, which may lead to change or even regime collapse. Technological developments, including blogging and the growth of interactive platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, have enabled broader participation and eased communication amongst young people. But the use and presence of technology cannot simply replace face-to-face interaction (Cammaerts et al. 2015). Moreover, technological progress is no guarantee for equal, inclusive, or open participation. To the contrary, as the case of contemporary Russia highlights, the political implications of technological change also depend on the practices in which they are embedded; digital technologies can encourage more liberal politics, but also more restrictive politics.

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In the most recent history of political youth mobilizations, the ‘Colour Revolutions’, the Arab Spring, and the anti-austerity movements stand out.

3.6.2.1 The ‘Colour Revolutions’ The politically neglected and largely lethargic post-communist youth (Markowitz 2000: 58) changed its tune in the 2000s, once the ‘Colour Revolutions’ swept across some Balkan states, and a number of post-Soviet countries. Youth was visibly important in these revolutions. In fact, emphasizing the importance of youth in those events, Kuzio argued that young people ‘dominated the civil societies [of] all democratic revolutions going back to the Philippines people’s power protests in the mid-1980s’ (2006: 366). At the time of their unfolding, these mobilizations generated great enthusiasm (Åslund and McFaul 2006; Karumidze and Wertsch 2005; Wilson 2005). Indeed, McFaul concludes that ‘these electoral revolutions triggered a significant jump in the degree of democracy’ (2007: 50) and led to effective regime change. As a symbol for mobilizing citizens, ‘Colour Revolutions’ enjoyed a remarkable success, as mobilizations across the globe were understood through reference to each other, for instance in Georgia’s Rose Revolution of 2003, Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution of 2005, and Kuwait’s Blue Revolution that same year. The perceived link between these movements also stretches back in time, to earlier revolutionary moments, such as the 1989 Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution, the 1986 Yellow Revolution in the Philippines, the mobilization around 1968 (Krawatzek 2017a), and even the ‘red’ October Revolution of 1917.8 The end of President Slobodan Milošević’s rule in Serbia in October 2000 was closely linked with the start of the ‘Colour Revolutions’. The mass demonstrations, a violent takeover of Parliament, and the eventual imprisonment of the president led to hopes for a free, democratic, and European Serbia. In particular, it was the younger generation, which had lived through a decade of armed conflict in the region, that carried the uprising. However, ethnographic research has highlighted the rapidity with which the ‘short romance with democracy’ came to an end, symbolized in particular by the assassination of the pro-European Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić in 2003 (Greenberg 2014: 3). In the aftermath of his death, youth was not able once again to mobilize the

8

Commentators link Putin’s Leninphobia to his fear of a revolutionary uprising in Russia, referring to the wide public support that the first head of government of the Soviet Union enjoyed. See, for instance, Brian Whitmore, The Ghosts of Kremlins Past—Lenin, 10 October 2016, RFERL, (accessed 6 December 2016).

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masses as it had done in the winter of 1996/7 and October 2000, when there had been hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of Belgrade, speaking to the importance of youth mobilization to expand to other social groups. In retrospect, the fate of later ‘Colour Revolutions’ has been disappointing. Whilst some—such as Georgia’s Rose Revolution of 2003, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004, and Kyrgyzstan’s yellow Tulip Revolution of 2005—did bring reform-minded leaders to power, these leaders failed to transform their countries into consolidated democratic states. Ultimately, these revolutions thus meant continuity, rather than change (Mitchell 2012: 187). The leaders who came to power in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan each ruined their country’s economic record and failed to build accountable political institutions. The political enthusiasm of those moments was thus quickly deflated. As Linz remarks: ‘Presidents, especially those who come to power after a plebiscitarian or populist campaign, often find that the power they possess is hopelessly insufficient to meet the expectations they have generated’ (1990: 86). In the post-communist space, fraudulent elections typically served as a trigger for the ‘Colour Revolutions’ mentioned above, catalysing mobilizations led by youth (Bunce and Wolchik 2006; Khamidov 2006; Kuzio 2006). In such cases, anger about electoral fraud helped to overcome the collective action problem that had hitherto made protest in these non-democratic states unlikely (Tucker 2007). Writing some twenty years after the breakdown of communist regimes, Diuk emphasizes that the new young generation living now is also the first globally connected ‘free generation’; it carries the hope for pro-democratic change and a more inclusive and participatory political system (2012: 144). A brief analysis of the ‘Colour Revolutions’ highlights the importance of politics being conducted beyond formal institutions. After all, the political involvement of youth in each of these historical moments proved crucial in changing political agendas, even in those cases where effective institutional change did not occur. If one was to focus exclusively on voting behaviour, the reality of young people’s diverse political convictions and political participation risks being ignored, since protests across the post-communist space also included for example those who were too young to vote. Other young people who took to the streets during the ‘Colour Revolutions’ also chose not to vote in a political system that failed to offer genuine political representation. Indeed, voting patterns only changed once the opposition had developed and mobilized the electorate in countries such as Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine (Bunce and Wolchik 2010: 69). Whilst many scholars have granted ample attention to those cases where ‘Colour Revolutions’ led to regime change, limited research exists on those

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countries in which such a revolution could have occurred but failed, or did not happen. Youth movements emerged in almost all post-communist countries, notably in Russia (2005 Birch Revolution), Azerbaijan, Belarus (2006 Light Blue Jeans Revolution), Moldova (2009 Grape Revolution), Armenia (2015 Electric Yerevan), or Macedonia (2016 Colourful Revolution). These all tried to reproduce the success seen in neighbouring countries, but eventually failed to have any tangible success beyond publicly questioning the status quo and appealing to Western media. In this group of failed ‘Colour Revolutions’, each anticipated or actual mobilization created a high degree of enthusiasm amongst activists, and fears amongst those in power that had political implications. Just as with the interwar period, one should therefore be cautious when dismissing these protests as insignificant; a mistake which is typically derived from considering only the long-term disappointment that these moments generated (Greenberg 2014). Indeed, around 2005, competitive authoritarian regimes in the postcommunist space feared that they might fall, and therefore invested great resources in order to counteract the threats created by those upheavals. In Azerbaijan, for instance, President Aliyev saw splits amongst the leadership as one key driver in bringing young people out on the streets. By 2005 he therefore began to arrest a number of potentially disloyal ministers in the hope of pre-empting protests (Valiyev 2006). Structural conditions in each country affected the potential for mobilization and change through these revolutionary moments. Lucan Way, for example, argues that the strength of the old state, not the power of the opposition, is the key factor in determining the likelihood of a ‘Colour Revolution’ (2008: 62). However, domestic conditions alone are not enough to account for the fate of ‘Colour Revolutions’. Indeed, Whitehead has argued for a long time that democratization is also the result of strategic actions from abroad: ‘the policy of a third power […] explains the spread of democracy from one country to the next’ (2001: 9). These protests must thus be understood by considering diffusion and viewing them in their wider transnational context. Accordingly, some accounts have emphasized the role of American democracy promotion in the region. Herd, for instance writes that in the post-communist region, ‘Colour Revolutions’ were widely regarded as a ‘Western attempt to “manufacture democracy” in the former Soviet region’ (2005: 4). As is shown in this book, scrutiny of the Russian case suggests that it is ultimately the particular interplay between transnational and domestic dynamics that helps us to understand the outcomes of regime crises; the effects of regime diffusion are always bound to a particular local context with its own contradictions and tensions. Regime blueprints from abroad are only very rarely simply downloaded from the transnational to the national level.

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Diffusion is also not only to be seen in terms of Western influence spreading outwards. Importantly, it also took place within the region itself, as the ‘electoral revolution’ model for democratic breakthrough spread throughout the postcommunist world (Bunce and Wolchik 2006). Beissinger systematizes the diffusion process by distinguishing between the different elements of this ‘modular political phenomenon’, noting that emulative activity was based upon local initiatives and sources of dissatisfaction (2007: 262). Thus, the destiny of post-communist countries could not simply be changed through American or European financial transactions (Ó Beacháin and Polese 2010: 8). The way in which the ‘Colour Revolutions’ made an impact upon Russia and Belarus has received some attention from scholars. Marples, for example, discusses the obstacles that lay in the way of a successful Belarusian ‘Colour Revolution’, noting how in that country the national past is interpreted alongside the popularity of the president, achieved through firm control of the media (2006). Moreover, not only did the diffusion of mobilization take place; so too did the diffusion of mobilization-prevention techniques. Indeed, authoritarian leaders actively emulated techniques from the ‘Colour Revolutions’ to consolidate their regimes. In Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, and beyond, the threat of an allegedly Western-led overthrow of the government was used to justify the adoption of democracy prevention strategies and to place restrictions on civic freedom (Finkel and Brudny 2012a; Horvath 2013). In summary, despite the great interest in the ‘Colour Revolutions’, the way in which these helped to change domestic politics in countries where the government was not overthrown has not been sufficiently studied. Indeed, scholarship exhibits a certain selection bias by primarily including ‘successful’ cases.9 My case study of the failed Russian attempt at a ‘Colour Revolution’ contributes to addressing this imbalance, and adds to our understanding of the role of youth in authoritarian regime consolidation more broadly. Occupying the symbol of youth and mobilizing young people on the street was decisive for the consolidation of authoritarian power in Russia.

3.6.2.2 The Arab Spring The Arab Spring took place as post-communist authoritarian regimes consolidated their power. Sparked by the death of 26-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in a Tunisian town who set fire to himself in December 2010, demonstrations against incumbent leaders spread across the Middle East, from Tunisia to Jordan, Oman, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Libya (Honwana 2013;

9

Amongst the exceptions are Ambrosio (2009), Horvath (2013), and Wilson (2009).

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Osman 2011; Tejerina et al. 2013; Vandewalle 2012). Led by young people, like many of the ‘Colour Revolutions’, a ‘frustrated youth population’ was seen as fuelling dissatisfaction with regimes (Lynch 2013: 85). Across most of the Arab region, young people faced the world’s highest youth unemployment rate alongside serious housing problems which were not a key issue in the post-communist revolutions. At the same time, the spread of social media (Dalacoura 2012) and the growth of civil society (Filiu 2011) facilitated protests. Goldstone argues that cross-class alliances were a particularly important factor in achieving the successful overthrow of incumbents in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya (2011)—a factor which relates to my hypothesis about successful protests being able to expand to other social groups. Recent survey data has carved out the importance of economic motivations for mobilization in Tunisia and Egypt rather than political demands (Beissinger et al. 2015). The extent to which these revolutions were carried out by young people also differed between countries; for example, young people aged 18–24 were over-represented in the mobilization in Tunisia, but not in Egypt (Beissinger et al. 2015). One explanation for this is that economic liberalization in Tunisia had severe consequences for the young, particularly in peripheral regions, creating grievances that had a distinct generational character. In contrast, the urban middle classes, who also became over-represented during the revolutionary moments, experienced the greatest changes in the years prior to the revolution in Egypt. Observers were quick to speak of ‘democratic revolutions’, and in some countries free and fair elections did indeed follow the protests. Overall, however, as with the outcome of the ‘Colour Revolutions’, the results of the ‘Arab Spring’ have been disappointing compared to the democratic breakthroughs that they intended to achieve (Roberts 2016: 270). In Bahrain, Jordan, Oman, and Morocco, protests quickly came to an end, at times through the support of foreign militaries as in Bahrain in March 2011. Changes of government in Egypt, Yemen, or Libya did not bring the desired reforms. Whilst Egypt returned to military rule in 2013, it is only in Tunisia where one can see modest achievements, notably the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another in 2014. However, commentators have urged caution about the lack of reform in a number of political and judicial areas (Marzouki 2015). Even worse, the violent repressions of peaceful demonstrations in Syria have led to an ongoing and devastating civil war since 2011. Nevertheless, the Arab Spring has shown the power of civil resistance and contributed, at least for a short while, to a shift away from the ‘fatalism and depressing cynicism’ amongst young people (Roberts 2016: 325). Young people have also played a critical role in providing the manpower needed for radical Islamic movements. Indeed, Roy describes Al Qaeda in

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Europe, somewhat provocatively, as a ‘youth movement’ (2008: 5), positing that it shares important similarities with other forms of political or behavioural dissent. He argues that most participants in Al Qaeda and other radicalized movements have broken with their own families; they are not integrated into traditional hierarchies but instead assembled around age. Other scholars meanwhile highlight the recruitment of Western youth into the Islamic State. The organization appeals to youth through its online presence, featuring videos and music and a radical ideology that contrasts the wrongdoings of an enemy with the moral importance of one’s own good deeds (Gates and Podder 2015). The socialization process into the Islamic State itself is sophisticated and the organization exploits young people and children notably for martyrdom which is celebrated in its propaganda material (Horgan et al. 2016).

3.6.2.3 ‘Outraged’ and ‘Desperate’: Youth in the Economic Crisis The current global economic crisis, characterized by rising unemployment and unpopular austerity measures, has severely affected the extent to which people trust that representative democracy can steer societies through difficult times. The consequences of this crisis have affected young people especially, whether via youth unemployment, cuts to youth services and education, or rising levels of child poverty. This has furthered young people’s lack of confidence in mainstream politicians and politics in general. As a reaction to the perceived limits of liberal market democracies, young people’s political mobilization thus increasingly challenges established political patterns, accusing the national and European political classes of failing to take determined action during the economic crisis (Anduiza et al. 2014; Hooghe 2012). However, the political mobilization of youth is increasingly dispersed and it seems that none of the movements initiated by young people has succeeded in persistently involving other social groups. The riots that unfolded in Greece in late 2008, following the shooting of a 15-year-old schoolboy in Athens, are sometimes seen as the moment when European politics came out onto the streets (Economides and Monastiriotis 2009). The protests in Greece included violent riots (Andronikidou and Kovras 2012). Primarily through Greek students studying abroad, the protests of December 2008 also spread to other EU countries. Three years later, in 2011, Spain became the second EU member state to see its youth unemployment surpass 50 per cent. Its youth began to distinctively mobilize as youth by starting the Indignados (aka M15M) demonstrations (Hughes 2011), which were closely linked with the Portuguese Geração à Rasca (Desperate Generation, aka M12M) (Baumgarten 2013). In both,

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protesters demanded a form of ‘real’ democracy that could find solutions to the financial and debt crises that had so badly affected them, and which had increased their frustration with the political classes that had brought the countries close to collapse (Taibo 2013). Although data from Salamanca emphasizes the over-representation of students in M15M—but a roughly equal split according to gender—demands made by protesters largely reflected the opinions of the broader population (Calvo 2013: 237). The grievances generated by the economic crisis were able to have a significant mobilizing impact in this context because the pace of change that unfolded was so tangible for young people. Whilst the rates of youth unemployment were especially high, it was the rise of unemployment which was unprecedented. It is conceivable that a similarly high rate might not have led to the same degree of intense mobilization had society been confronted with those levels at an altogether gentler pace (Kern et al. 2015: 483). Overall, the mobilization of youth in this period crosses the political spectrum. On the one hand, in favour of liberal and internationalist aims, young people participated in the Spanish Indignados’ demonstrations, the global Occupy Movement’s protests against the excesses of capitalism, and they voted primarily against the UK leaving the EU (Goodwin and Heath 2016). On the other hand, young people also played a decisive role in the populist rejection of established political parties and mainstream politics; they strongly supported democratic candidate Bernie Sanders10 but are also involved in Germany’s AfD, the Italian Five-Star Movement, and the Lega Nord or the Belgian Vlaams Belang Party (Heinisch and Mazzoleni 2017). During the protests discussed above, the use of interactive websites served as a catalyst for political participation, helping to facilitate the mass meetings that characterize this new wave of transnational resistance (Bennett and Segerberg 2013). Indeed, the Spanish, Portuguese, and other transnational youth movements all relied heavily on space offered by the World Wide Web. At the same time, however, it was the actual physical occupation of space that formed the key focus of mobilization; the internet helped activists to quickly achieve a level of initial coordination, to which they then added physical mobilization, in public space. These contemporary youth-led movements have deliberately decided to not team up with established institutions (such as parties and unions). Online connectivity has therefore been a substitute for initial institutional coordination (Sloam 2014b: 221–4).

10 ‘More young people voted for Bernie Sanders than Trump and Clinton combined—by a lot’, in Washington Post, 20 June 2016.

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The international dimension is critical to the success but also to understanding the nature of current youth movements. Some Portuguese protesters referred to themselves as Lisbon Indignados, emphasizing this interwoven nature. Moreover, the Arab Spring, which unfolded at the same time as the Indignados and Geração à Rasca were becoming more active, left its imprint on mobilization in Madrid, Lisbon, and Athens with Egyptian flags visible during gatherings (Baumgarten 2013). Just as with the ‘Colour Revolutions’, the events surrounding 1968, and even the European revolutions of 1848, a transnational dimension has characterized these mobilizations, which have at the same time taken regionally specific forms. One should therefore fetishize neither the global nor the national scale (Tejerina et al. 2013: 4). Instead, with these contemporary mobilizations across Europe, it was the interplay between global structures and national conditions that contributed to political mobilization. Indeed, another movement in Europe, Nuit Debout (Night on Our Feet), surfaced in Paris in March 2016, quickly spreading across France and beyond. Testifying to the international receptivity of youth movements, Nuit Debout has reinvigorated mobilization in Spain, Belgium, and elsewhere. Driven by disappointment with the French left-wing government, perceived as incapable of responding to the economic, social, and security problems facing the country, its activists have attempted to formulate alternative visions of the political, social, and economic order. Their criticism is targeted at the government’s responses to unemployment, immigration, and home-grown terrorism, all of which are regarded as following a liberal-conservative logic that pre-empts political debate through a framing which suggests that there are no alternatives (Brustier 2016). The movement achieved global visibility within weeks, with similar events in Brussels, Berlin, Madrid, Lisbon, and Montreal. One striking feature of such current mobilizations, most clearly Nuit Debout, is the aim to function with horizontal deliberation. No longer confined to rather specific spheres, such as anarchist or squatter circles, basic democracy has infused various kinds of youth-led social movements. Occupy and Nuit Debout have functioned through working groups, with important decisions being made during general assemblies employing a consensus model of direct democracy, rather than by working through representatives. Using discussion facilitators and hand-signals is expected to diversify participation. In current times, the symbol of youth has beyond doubt proven its political relevance. The political and economic crisis stemming from the financial crash of 2008 has reinforced the conditions that have enabled the emergence of highly connective mobilizations amongst young, well educated, and technologically savvy citizens (Sloam 2014b: 218). The different moments of political

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upheaval discussed in this chapter are striking illustrations of the potential of youth to ignite larger protests, which in many cases have led to political change. Although this change may not always come in the form of new and overthrown political regimes, one should not ignore the extent to which youth movements have nonetheless contributed to shifting the political agendas in different countries.

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.................... PART II .................... YOUTH DURING REGIME CRISES

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4

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The Russian Federation after the ‘Colour Revolutions’ Consolidating an Authoritarian Regime

Strengthened by Russia’s improved economic performance prior to the global economic crisis of 2008, the country’s president, Vladimir Putin, has enjoyed widespread approval amongst the electorate during his second term (2004–8) (Treisman 2011). However, despite this boost to his reputation, the political elite around the president has been consistently tightening its mode of coercive authoritarian rule. Though the country was formally a democracy in the period studied (2005–11), media manipulation, electoral fraud, and the obstruction of oppositional political activity have characterized politics in Russia. Important elements of this authoritarian ascent took place between 2005 and 2011. One after the other, competing centres of political power disappeared; regional leaders, media critical of the regime, and potential political opponents from amongst the elites were all silenced. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, for example, head of the oil group Yukos and a critic of Putin, ended up in jail in late 2004, while other elites were domesticated and avoided actively engaging in politics, in order to accumulate wealth in peace (Shevtsova 2007). Elections increasingly became mere rituals, and oppositional civil society was gradually marginalized. The regime also became increasingly proactive in mobilizing citizens—in particular, pro-Kremlin molodezhnye dvizheniya (youth movements) were key to its strategy as these loudly expressed their support for the existing political order after 2005. In terms of political mobilization, the years after 2005 were a major turning point. At the beginning of this period, political change in Russia seemed likely, including the possibility of democratic modernization encouraged by the fact that Putin could not run for a third consecutive presidential term after 2008 (Krawatzek and Kefferpütz 2010). During those years, analysts described Russia’s political system in a way that still acknowledged democratic elements, calling it for instance a ‘democracy with adjectives’ (Bogaards 2009; Collier

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and Levitsky 1997) and a ‘hybrid regime’ (Levitsky and Way 2010). Reflecting on this development, Sakwa sees Russian politics during this period as resulting from institutional competition at different levels, and develops the idea of the ‘dual state’. Ultimately, however, Russia has moved towards ‘the authoritarian end of the spectrum’ (2011: 38).1 At the time of writing, the political ambiguity of the years 2005–11 has vanished. It is striking, for example, that the 2015 demonstrations in Armenia against rising electricity prices hardly worried the Kremlin at all. In contrast, earlier such demonstrations in Russia’s geopolitical neighbourhood caused the leadership much concern.2 I therefore argue that the years 2005–11 are crucial for understanding the standing of the Russian regime today. A degree of political openness characterized the first half of that period; political youth opposition voiced democratic aspirations, and appeared powerful to political observers. However, this came to an end by 2011, clearly visible with the crushing of the Russian Winter demonstrations, which began as a response to flawed elections for the legislature in December 2011. In the aftermath, nationalistic policies, the elimination of opposition (both non-parliamentary and institutional), and the extension of political control over the media became conventional (Gel’man 2015; Tsygankov 2014). This is not to say that youth mobilization has entirely disappeared, but the perceived threat emanating from it is less important (Krawatzek 2017c). Through an analysis of youth alone, it is not possible to explain the authoritarian ascent during the period in question. However, by looking at the relationship between the young generation and the regime, I can address three critical aspects of the regime’s stabilization: first, the way in which the Kremlin created a regime-loyal political youth movement and embedded it in its wider authoritarian consolidation; second, the way in which the country’s media framed the meaning of youth throughout this time period; third, looking at the diversity of political opinions that youth expressed conveys the magnitude of the crisis that the Russian regime confronted. After 2005, to break with the transition years which had left shameful memories, pro-Kremlin youth enthusiastically conveyed the broader popular backing for the leadership, and sought to strengthen a culture of natsional’naya gordost’ (national pride).

1 Sakwa borrows a legal-theoretical concept from Ernst Fraenkel, who conceptualized the independence of the prerogative state from the formal constitutional state in the Weimar Republic (1969 [1941]). 2 The press was quick to speculate about another ‘Colour Revolution’ in Erevan (see Sargasin poobeshchal natsionalizirovat’ energokompaniyu razdora v Armenii, in Moskovskii Komsomolets, 29 June 2015; Armeniya naelektrizovana?, in Argumenty i Fakty, 1 July 2015), but such speculations triggered hardly any mobilization in Russia.

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Others, however, from across the political spectrum, took great risks in opposing this political line. The Russian government intervened on a large scale to mobilize youth in its favour. This effectively prevented anti-Kremlin movements from developing. At the beginning of this period, the political elite also attributed great importance to the potential impact of oppositional youth movements; their elimination was critical to the consolidation of the authoritarian system. Mobilization remained restricted to the realm of youth, and did not succeed in including other sections of the population. The analysis undertaken of the Russian Federation allows me to carve out three hypotheses about the role of youth in a moment of regime crisis.3 These are investigated further in the book’s other case studies. H1: Under conditions of crisis, a political regime consolidates its power by dominating the discourses that surround and support the concept of ‘youth’. H2: Under conditions of crisis, a political regime consolidates its power by mobilizing youth to display popular support for the regime. H3: Under conditions of crisis, young people fail to challenge the existing regime if their mobilization does not expand to other social groups.

4. 1 A STABLE BUT I NSECURE POLITICAL R E G I ME: R US S I A BY 2 0 05 Explanations of Russia’s political trajectory often refer to the country’s institutional design: Stepan, for example, concentrates on the flawed structure of the country’s institutions (2005), whilst Fish critiques the presidential system (2005). Meanwhile, Colton and Skach point to semi-presidentialism as the cause of democratic failure (2005), but Levitsky and Way warn that constitutions are imperfect constraints on politicians’ behaviour (2010: 183). Taking a different approach, some scholars turn to political mobilization to explain regime trajectories (McFaul 2005; Robertson 2011). Movements’ tactics and transnational dynamics were indeed central for the ‘Colour Revolutions’ (Beissinger 2007; Bunce and Wolchik 2006). However, the diffusion of these revolutions had an ambiguous impact on political systems, as they also contributed to the use of democracy suppression techniques in Russia (Finkel and Brudny 2012b) and beyond (Korosteleva 2012). 3

See Chapter 1, pp. 27–9 for a more detailed discussion of the hypotheses.

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Greene recently argued that Russia does in fact have a vibrant civil society.4 He emphasizes the role of quick online communication for issues ranging from the interests of car drivers to the abuse of bureaucratic authority (2014). Moreover, movements in Russia that may appear ‘uncivil’ from a Western normative perspective are nonetheless characterized by features typical of civil society, such as voluntary involvement in the pursuit of an agreed common good. The country’s youth, I argue in this chapter, is politically active, even if that involvement defies normative conceptualizations of civil society. A deeper appreciation of Russia’s political youth sphere thus enables a widening of our understanding of civil society. As Yeltsin’s chosen successor, Putin benefited from the bureaucracy’s support, and his image as a strong leader contrasted with the weakness of that of his predecessor (Desai 2005). ‘Everyone knew that no one but Putin had a chance, because the entire might of the state was working on his behalf ’ (Shevtsova 2003: 70). After the turbulence of the transition period of the 1990s, Russians, from the bureaucratic elite to ordinary people, had come to prefer consolidation (Carnaghan 2007) and wanted to get rid of Yeltsin. His rule evoked memories of low state cohesion, the national humiliation of the IMF bail-out in 1998 (Gould-Davies and Woods 1999), and a chaotic and corrupt bureaucracy (Baturin et al. 2001; Kahn 2002) in which elements of the state ‘acted each according to their own plan’ (Kryshtanovskaya 2005: 230). In short, the political chaos of the 1990s discredited Russia’s political class and its institutions (Chebankova 2013: 30–2). A weakly organized party sphere, even the absence of party discipline, incited politicians to enhance personal authority at the expense of institution building (Hale 2006). During Putin’s first two terms as president (2000–8), Russia stabilized as a competitive authoritarian regime (Way 2005). His reforms improved the coherence of the bureaucracy in both the centre and the regions (StonerWeiss 2006: 62). The organizational power of the state increased, and control over key sectors of the economy, such as transportation, energy, and communication, expanded (Goldman 2008). As a result, trust in the president and in other state and social institutions rose (Sakwa 2011: 15). The ruling party Edinaya Rossiya (United Russia) consolidated, which increased the political elites’ unification around a shared political project (Reuter and Remington 2009: 513–22) and eliminated parliamentary competition

4

This goes counter to earlier research by Howard who describes that Russians in the 1990s felt ‘utter and complete disgust with contemporary politics’ and thus withdrew from the public sphere (2003: 139).

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(Ivanov 2008: 183–4).5 Indeed, Gel’man states that Putin’s consolidation implied the ‘destruction without exception of all opposition parties’, eradicating ‘meaningful alternatives to incumbent power’ (2007: 69). This coincided with increasing support for Putin. Rose et al., analysing the 2010 New Russia Barometer Survey, point to a staggering 75 per cent of respondents holding a favourable view of the political system (2011: 77).6 In early 2005, however, this support was unstable. Horvath argues that the outbreak of protests in Kiev in 2004 ‘transformed “velvet revolution” from a diplomatic irritation into a catalyst for fundamental change within Russia’ (2013: 31). The authoritarian backlash that had become evident by 2015 reaches back to this year, which is the start of the period analysed here. The Russian public perceived the toppling of the Ukrainian regime as a possible blueprint for change in their own country, since the two seemed so similar. Beichelt highlights the structural similarities between the countries: the electoral regime, the nature of the public arena, the lack of civic freedoms, and the vertical power structure (2004: 125). The Russian media showed awareness of such connectedness and Izvestiya, loyal to the regime, even provided room for Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko to express her desire to export an ‘Orange Revolution’.7 By 2005 Putin’s consolidation felt fragile, with memories looming of the instability of the early post-communist period. This anxiety was compounded by pensioners’ demonstrations against the monetization of their benefits at the time.8 The seniors associated both the government and the president with this threat to their living standards, as shown by Levada Center polls.9 The situation was particularly tense outside the big cities, where demonstrations bridged ideological divides10 and grew daily.11 By early 2005, the sheer scale of public unrest prompted the regime to act as it sought to get the streets under control.12

5

The 2016 Duma elections further strengthen this point. With an extremely low turnout of 48% (60% in 2011, 63% in 2007) United Russia got a constitutional majority. There is no serious opposition party. 6 Since then support has increased further and is at a current approval rate of 85% according to Levada Center Polls: (accessed 6 December 2016). 7 Revolyutsiya v Kieve prokhodit po vsem zakonam ulichnogo shou, in Izvestiya, 4 December 2004. 8 A real cause for concern, since polls at the time stressed the importance of older people for supporting Putin, ‘Silovoi’ Putin prevrashchaetsya v ‘pensionnogo’, in Izvestiya, 17 October 2005. 9 Vlast’ spotknulas’ na starikakh, in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 31 January 2005. 10 Yaitsom po monetizatsii, in Sovetskaya Rossiya, 15 February 2005. 11 Regiony protiv monetizatsii, in Kommersant, 18 January 2005. 12 The historian Roy Medvedev emphasizes the passivity of young people during the Yeltsin era, which he contrasts with the activism of pensioners (2000: 268–9).

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4.1.1 Youth in Putin’s Russia: From Disregard to Resurgence In the years 2005–11, the activists who mobilized specifically ‘as youth’ were for the most part those born in the post-Soviet era, described by Mickiewicz as Russia’s ‘future leaders’ (2014). For them, memories of Soviet repression and shortages became frequently relegated, replaced by nostalgia which had spread across the post-Soviet space (Oushakine 2007). Arguably, young Russian men were particularly affected by the consequences of transition, both economically and ideationally. Throughout the 1990s, they quickly lost their status as heroic workers and the skills that they exercised in large industrial plants were rapidly devalued (Kay 2006). This nostalgia contrasts a stable Soviet era with the tumults of the transition period of the 1990s. Viktor Pelevin’s popular novel Generation P conveys the economic and political chaos of the transition, during which a commodification of culture amalgamated with advertising and shaped disaffected and sarcastic individuals (1999). Whether P stands for pizdet’ (bullshit/‘fucked up’) or for Pepsi is irrelevant;13 it expresses the idleness of a generation that chooses Pepsi just as stupidly as its parents voted for Brezhnev. Forced to believe that they were now in a free society, claims Pelevin, Russians ignored their new form of imprisonment, in which advertising took the place of propaganda; the freedom to make individual choices was thus as much of a farce as it had been under Soviet rule. Early in 2005, in reaction to the ‘Colour Revolutions’, the public silence of Russian youth ended. The diffusion of these revolutions had been enabled by actual and perceived connections between countries, including dense communication channels, shared historical trajectories, and similar institutional designs (Beissinger 2007: 259). The effect of diffusion may take different forms, ranging from the ‘demonstration effect’ to actual planning and collaboration (Bunce and Wolchik 2006: 287). However, its ultimate effect can only be accounted for once the broader domestic political context is considered. Since 2005, Russia has undergone considerable democratic regression, due to the leadership’s ‘preventive counter-revolution’ (Horvath 2013). Molodezhnie organizatsii (youth organizations) have been central to this authoritarian consolidation. Pro-Kremlin movements have loudly shown their enthusiasm for the political leadership, seeking to affirm Russia’s place as a world-leading nation and to break with the embarrassing post-Soviet transition.

13 Interview with Pelevin: I never was a hero, in The Guardian, 30 April 2000: (accessed 6 December 2016).

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4.1.2 Three Components of Russia’s Regime Consolidation Looking at youth, I argue that the consolidation of the authoritarian regime after 2005 concerns the redefinition of the regime’s ideology, an increase in repression of the opposition, and active mobilization in favour of the regime. First, youth is a key component of the unified official ideology that has emerged since 2005. Ever since then, discourses on Russia’s national identity and its place in the world have recurred, entwined with the idea of ‘sovereign democracy’, which unites different political streams in the country (Casula 2012: 200). The state elite—the president, the dominant party, pro-government consultants, and think tanks—gradually monopolized the interpretation of this ideology, which emphasized their opposition to the West and constructed an image of enemies encircling Russia. Second, even authoritarian regimes that appear unchallenged by domestic opposition remain nervous about its impact. If opposition triggers doubt about a regime’s legitimacy, it might damage their international reputation. Since early 2005, during Putin’s second term, ‘the use of preventive detention and harassment to pre-empt protest actions has become extremely widespread’ (Robertson 2009: 531). This limited room for manoeuvre is a reflection of Putin’s belief that independent non-governmental organizations (NGOs), particularly foreign-funded ones (insultingly referred to as inostrannye agenty [foreign agents]14), are a threat to Russia. The obshchestvennaya palata (public chamber) is the official institution for civil society (A. Evans 2008), but its generous funds are typically designated for loyal NGOs only (McFaul and Stoner-Weiss 2008). Third, after 2005, the regime showed an awareness that simply manipulating the media in order to win elections was insufficient for regime stability. It realized that the active support of the population was necessary. This was most visible in the case of youth, but the change can be seen in the realm of NGOs as well, notably the ‘socially-oriented NGOs’ which President Medvedev suggested legalizing in 2009 and supported financially.15

Introduced in July 2012 by Edinaya Rossiya: O vnesenii izmennenii v otdel’nye zakonodatel’nye akty Rossiiskoi Federatsii v chasti regulirovaniya deyatel’nosti nekommercheskikh organisatsii, vypolnyayushchikh funktsii inostrannogo agenta: (accessed 6 December 2016). 15 Poslanie prezidenta Dmitriya Medvedeva federal’nomy sobraniyu RF, in Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 13 November 2009. For the evolving legal landscape, see Horvath (2013: 127–35). 14

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4 . 2 A C O MPA RT M E N TA L I Z E D B U T DI V E RS E M E D IA LANDSCAPE A ND THE D ISCURSIVE C ONTEXTS O F Y O U T H M O BI L I Z A T I O N With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s media changed fundamentally. The end of centralization and the arrival of free market capitalism challenged many outlets in the absence of the old economic infrastructures (Arutunyan 2009: 32). After 2005, media control increased, but shared little in common with the direct interventions of the Soviet era. Influence was indirect, facilitated by a weak private media tradition, insufficient journalistic training, and continuing self-censorship (Koltsova 2006: 60–6; Oates 2007: 1288).16 Nevertheless, print media remained diverse,17 ranging from investigative papers to tabloids and government-controlled outlets (Table 4.1). This diversity, however, has not translated into independent centres of political power (Oates 2007: 1285). To capture the different publics addressed, I analyse the following papers: • Izvestiya: Gazprom bought the paper in 2006 and by 2007 it had a circulation of 370,000.18 It straddles the divide between quality and mass media (Voltmer 2000). • Kommersant: Russia’s leading business paper, targeting the small, liberalminded economic elite. By 2008, it had a circulation of 87,000. • Komsomol’skaya Pravda: amongst the papers with the highest circulation (around 660,000 by 2008), this paper addresses a mass readership (Beumers et al. 2009: 22). • Novaya Gazeta: famous beyond Russia for its investigative journalism, in particular concerning the North Caucasus. Published twice a week, it Table 4.1. Russian Federation: newspapers Genre Quality

Mass Media

Conservative

Izvestiya

Komsomol’skaya Pravda

Progressive

Kommersant

Novaya Gazeta

Attitude

16 Self-censorship is deeply internalized, unaffected by generational change amongst journalists (Pasti 2005). 17 This is unmatched by TV, probably because newspapers are now less important for manipulating the masses. 18 Following data from (accessed 31 October 2016).

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devotes major attention to political opposition in Russia, and by 2007 had a circulation of 171,000. In total I identified more than 1,500 articles featuring statements about youth for the period under scrutiny, out of which I coded a random sample of 312, attributing nearly 6,300 codes. The selection provides variation, and the newspapers are represented roughly equally in the sample.

4.2.1 Corpus Structure: Topic, Genre, Author and Discursive Position 4.2.1.1 Topics It is common for youth to be spoken about in relation to socio-educational topics, as well as domestic political and economic issues (Figure 4.1). Most articles coded as ‘socio-educational’ relate also to the political mobilization in which young Russians were engaged. Here it was often not possible to distinguish between articles about domestic and foreign issues, as both were usually discussed together,19 conveying, for instance, concerns about the large number Main Topic

Genre

Social & Education

Evaluation

Domestic Politics & Economics

Account

Non-Political

Interview

External Politics & Economics

Demand 0 25 50 75 in %

0

Author Journalist

25

50 in %

75

Discourse Position Observer

Unsigned Intellectuals & Civil Society

Nation

Politician Generation

Citizen 0

25 50 75 in %

0

25

50 in %

75

Figure 4.1. Russian Federation: corpus structure. See for example: ‘Likuyushchaya gopota’ v gostyakh u ‘Kommersanta’, in Kommersant, 5 March 2008. 19

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of young people leaving Russia to find their fortune abroad.20 Also the generational divide was explicitly discussed as ‘Generation Y’ was felt to be apart from its parents.21 Considering youth, some journalists emphasized the societal importance of the older generation within the socio-educational realm.22 Those articles coded as political and economic often reflect the views of politicians who were involved in youth affairs or who spoke explicitly about youth issues in the political arena.23 This coding also captures political comments on the capacity of young people to destabilize the regime. As will be analysed in due course, politicians clearly interpreted the ‘Colour Revolutions’ as a precedent and a trigger for Russian youth activism.24 Non-political topics are also prominent in the discourse on youth and are focused primarily on young people’s engagement in sports such as ice hockey, ice skating, and football. Beyond the realm of sports, the cultural involvement of youth in forums such as youth theatre25 and youth art festivals26 was a topic of discussion. Distinct youth styles were also a matter of controversy,27 and youth were accused of simply imitating Western styles.28

4.2.1.2 Genres and Authors In terms of genre, most authors made value judgements, as reflected by the popularity of the ‘evaluations’ code, which was particularly characteristic of articles written by journalists. Indeed, hardly any journalistic contribution qualifies as being a mere account. The significant majority of authors were of this profession though journalists were not impartial observers, but political and social actors themselves. Interventions by intellectuals and civil society actors meanwhile could usually be coded as demands or evaluations, in terms of their genre. Ilya Yashin, leader of the Yabloko youth movement, a socialliberal party, was the most prominent contributor here.

Novaya volna emigratsii, in Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 14 October 2011. Kommandos molodosti nashei, in Novaya Gazeta, 19 November 2010. 22 Eto mif, budto molodye kormyat pensionerov, in Novaya Gazeta, 17 August 2011. 23 Economic topics rarely relate to youth, except for where we find an emphasis on youth’s importance for combating regional labour shortages, e.g. Brosit’ vso i uekhat’ v saldu, in Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 10 May 2006. 24 Grazhdanin nachal’nik kursa, in Kommersant, 7 March 2005. 25 Molodezh’ daet vsem prikurit’ ot ‘Shvedskoi spichki’, in Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 4 February 2009; Bog saditsya na svobodnoe mesto, in Novaya Gazeta, 16 June 2010. 26 Den’ goroda na stolichnykh bul’varakh, in Novaya Gazeta, 2 September 2011. 27 Novoe molodezhnoe uvlechenie, in Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 1 September 2007. 28 iPod stanet mashinoi, in Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 4 September 2007. 20 21

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4.2.1.3 Discursive Positions The codes ‘generation’ and ‘nation’ are almost equally distributed between topics identified as political/economic and social. The language which ‘generation’ captures indicates the degree to which a rift between generations was a central concern in Russian society. The prominence of the ‘nation’ code also emphasizes the extent to which authors identified with and believed in being able to assume a position of authority, in the name of a national collective. Tolz highlights that there were indeed long-standing difficulties in agreeing upon a Russian national project (2004). However, for the period analysed, there was in fact an increasing identification with ‘Russia’, simultaneous to the rise of nationalist policies under Putin, which reached their peak during the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

4.2.2 Eliminating the Diversity of Youth: Three Discursive Formations The network of articles and concept-codes can be divided into four main formations that characterize the overall discourse about youth (Figure 4.2).29 Differing in size, each draws upon concepts that are central to the others, thereby giving meaning and stability to otherwise seemingly disconnected parts in the discourse. The three largest of these formations were critical to the ways in which different parts of the public made sense of youth mobilization. Whilst the largest discursive formation, related to movements loyal to the regime, represents the PRO-KREMLIN image of youth, the second-largest DISCORDANT formation is the subject of oppositional youth-activism and the influence of the ‘Colour Revolutions’ upon Russian youth.30 Meanwhile, a third formation centres on VIOLENT youth behaviour as a risk to society. Compared with the other formations, VIOLENT includes a higher proportion of concept and article nodes in residual categories. Some of these residual nodes effectively span different discursive formations, which implies the existence of a diffuse discourse beyond the relatively distinct PRO-KREMLIN core. The DISCORDANT and VIOLENT discursive formations share in a comparatively higher number of conceptual codes. This proximity points to an intriguing feature of the Russian discourse about youth which tends to blur the boundaries between every form of activity that does not support the leadership. In other words, very similar discursive rules underpin talk about very different ‘oppositional’ activities in the country. 29

The modularity score is 0.2183. To express the analytic language I use small capitals for terms when they refer to CONCEPTS which were used for coding and use large capitals to refer to DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS. 30

[SA]-Arrogant

[F]-Religious

32%

Discordant

25%

Violent

15%

Indifferent

14%

Residual

[SA]-Violent

13%

[SA]-Difficult [SA]-Materialist [SA]-Optimism [SA]-Economic aspects

[SA]-Fun

[SA]-Indifferent

[E]-Negative [SA]-Apathic

[SA]-Open-minded

[SA]-Crisis [SA]-Capable

[T]-Present

[F]-Political [SA]-Trouble-maker [SA]-Discipl [SA]-Oppositional

[SA]-Disoriented

[SA]-Nationalist

[SA]-Messianistic

[SA]-Victimized

[T]-Future

[SA]-Involved Imagination

[F]-Other

[SA]-Heroic

[SA]-Decisive

[SA]-In-need [SA]-Vanguard

[SA]-Sensational

[SA]-Different [SA]-Jugendwahn

[T]-Rupture

[SA]-Precious

[SA]-Dynamic

[E]-Neutral

[SA]-Romantic

[T]-Continuity

[SA]-Pacifist [SA]-Enthusiastic

[E]-Positive [SA]-Innocent

[SA]-Consciousness

[F]-United [SA]-Autonomous

[SA]-Opportunism

[T]-Repetition

[SA]-Idealistic

[SA]-Boring

[SA]-Desired [SA]-Naive

[T]-Past

[SA]-Irresponsible

[SA]-Biological [SA]-Courageous [SA]-Incapable [F]-Socio-economic

[SA]-Miserable

[SA]-Moralistic

Figure 4.2. Russian Federation: discourse network.

Proportion

pro-Kremlin

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[F]-Gender

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A number of concepts underpin the overall discourse about youth. The first set of these concepts includes the temporal codes of PRESENT, PAST, and FUTURE. The importance of PRESENT is noteworthy, suggesting that the discourse in this case was primarily geared towards discussion of current events. References to PAST and FUTURE, typically so central to Soviet discourse, were less relevant. One explanation for this is that after the transition period it became implausible to project the nation into its future and to rework its past using the discursive signifier of youth. Strikingly, however, within the PRO-KREMLIN discursive formation, actors revalued youth and placed the youth of the time in a clear position of rupture in relation to the youth of the 1990s. An enduring legacy of Soviet times was the predominantly POSITIVE tone used in references to youth, often describing it as UNITED. The temporal structure of the corpus illustrates the constant presence of the topic of youth in public discourse. The frequency of articles about youth remained relatively stable, with a peak occurring around 2005–6. After the ‘Orange Revolution’, youth became a topic of intense debate in Russian public discourse. In early 2005, the discursive rules of the PRO-KREMLIN and DISCORDANT formations both dominated the meaning of youth (Figure 4.3). However, over time, the PRO-KREMLIN formation gained in importance, 20

Frequency

15

10

5

20

04 20 Q4 05 20 Q1 05 20 Q2 05 20 Q3 05 20 Q4 06 20 Q1 06 20 Q2 06 20 Q3 06 20 Q4 07 20 Q1 07 20 Q2 07 20 Q3 07 20 Q4 08 20 Q1 08 20 Q2 08 20 Q3 08 20 Q4 09 20 Q1 09 20 Q2 09 20 Q3 09 20 Q4 10 20 Q1 10 20 Q2 10 20 Q3 10 20 Q4 11 20 Q1 11 20 Q2 11 20 Q3 11 Q 4

0

Frequency per Quarter Discursive Formation pro-Kremlin

Discordant

Violent

Figure 4.3. Russian Federation: frequency per discursive formation.

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and effectively marginalized the DISCORDANT formation. Towards the end of the period analysed here, discursive rules increasingly moved away from framing youth as a political threat, and were instead concerned with VIOLENT youth, which had been ignored during the more intense moments of political youth mobilization. The next sections analyse in depth the three main discursive formations and look at the political mobilization associated with them by identifying the different language games which constitute the respective discursive formations.

4.3 THE PRO-KREMLIN YOUTH: A NE W PERSPECTIVE No ne menee vazhnym yavlyaetsya i nastroi v obshchestve—sila deistviya dolzhna byt’ ravna sile protivodeistviya. Esli vy vidite, chto ekstremisty vybirayut kakie-to novye formy, nuzhno protivopostavit’ im takuyu zhe aktivnost’. But society’s attitude is equally important—the force of action must match the force of counteraction. If you see that extremists choose some new forms, it is necessary to oppose them with the same actions.31

The largest discursive formation identified in this analysis is the PROKREMLIN one which framed youth movements supportive of the regime and which had come to dominate the discourse by 2008. Within this formation, Russia’s youth is unanimously engaged to protect the country. I argue that the success of pro-Kremlin youth movements like Nashi (Ours) is better understood if placed in the context of an evolving discourse about Russian youth around that time. Decisive elements of the discourse were reminiscent of patterns in the earlier SOVIET-LENINIST discourse, which is identified and analysed in Chapter 5. Indeed, Nashi was successful after the late 2004 Ukrainian ‘Orange Revolution’ because the Russian political leadership provided new meaning and a sense of belonging to a generation that had first been socialized during the tumultuous transition period of the 1990s. Nashi succeeded in uniting the dispersed discursive field surrounding the idea of youth, and its position had become hegemonic by 2008. The Ukrainian ‘Orange Revolution’ is at the start of this discursive formation. The Russian leadership and media framed youth as central for the downfall of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovich; youth thereby appeared decisive for political change. International media coverage amplified this interpretation and echoed older Soviet ideas about youth. Events in Ukraine, along with emerging Putin cited in: Putin poobeshchal studentam pribavku, no ne otsrochki, in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 26 January 2005. 31

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signs of increasing mobilization by young opposition activists in Russia, put an end to the political irrelevance of youth characteristic of the 1990s. Moreover, pro-Kremlin movements such as Nashi or Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard) showed that Russia’s leadership had learned lessons from the recent Soviet past; losing control over youth had gone hand in hand with the Soviet Union’s disintegration (Krawatzek 2016). Contrary to media reports in 2005, the new pro-Kremlin movements that emerged were therefore no mere reincarnations of the Komsomol.32 Instead, participants’ commitment and enthusiasm, and genuine support for the leadership characterized the new movements (Hemment 2012). Even as their freedom increased, in particular at the regional level, the movements increasingly converged ideologically with the country’s political leadership, unlike in the USSR. Ignoring oppositional youth movements, an unquestionably POSITIVE image of youth dominates this PRO-KREMLIN discursive formation, which also holds the idea that youth is PRECIOUS and must be protected and guided; only then can it develop its full potential for the benefit of society. The temporal distribution of the articles in the formation highlights that, once established, this formation persistently dominated the discourse (Figure 4.3). The two conservative newspapers, Izvestiya and Komsomol’skaya Pravda, plus Kommersant, shape this discursive formation. The seemingly contradictory presence of the oppositional paper Kommersant in the PRO-KREMLIN formation is due to its fascination with developments amongst youth generally and Nashi’s success in particular. When speaking about youth, the paper’s journalists often relied on statements by politicians or representatives of that movement and thereby gave space to the respective discourse. Kommersant also reiterated the rules of this discursive formation in relation to frequently debated nonpolitical topics, ranging from hockey to theatre. In their coverage, its authors could hardly break free from discursive constraints of the dominant formation. The graphical representation of the discursive formation (Figure 4.5) emphasizes the significance of concepts such as POSITIVE, PRECIOUS, and CONTINUITY. All articles evoked at least one of these concepts, and many evoked more. The betweenness centrality directs further attention to the significance of the concept IN-NEED (Figure 4.4) which is crucial for structuring the

Budet li v Rossii oranzhevaya revolyutsiya?, in Argumenty i Fakty, 16 March 2005; Vasilii Yakemenko: Ya pokhozh na Khodorkovskogo, in Kommersant, 11 July 2005; Sovetskii renessans?, in Ogonek, 1 January 2007, ‘Nasha’ armiya, in Ogonek, 19 March 2007. An analogy also prominent in Western press coverage: Preempting Politics in Russia, in The Washington Post, 25 July 2005; Die Schreihälse des Präsidenten, in Financial Times Deutschland, 14 June 2007; Putin’s Children Russian Protests II, in International Herald Tribune, 6 July 2007; Youth Groups Created by Kremlin Serve Putin’s Cause in the Streets, in The New York Times, 8 July 2007; Cadre’s Campfire Song to Russia, in Financial Times, 18 July 2007. 32

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Degree Centrality

Betweenness Centrality

Positive

Positive

Precious

United

United

In-need

Continuity

Precious

In-need Decisive

Continuity

Future

Decisive

Vanguard

Future

Heroic

Other Factions

Other Factions

Heroic

Capable Idealistic

Vanguard

Desired

Desired 0

25

50

75

0

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Figure 4.4. Pro-Kremlin: centralities.

Figure 4.5. Pro-Kremlin: discourse network.

network.33 The concept UNITED is also fundamental to these discursive rules; no utterance in this formation would challenge the assumption that youth was a homogeneous social actor. All those positive attributes about youth associate youth with being dependent on the older generation to thrive. If left on its own, so the logic of this discursive formation goes, youth would be lost and get involved in destructive behaviour. 33

See Chapter 2, pp. 45–7, for information about this measure.

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4.3.1 Nashi: The Discursive Resurgence of Youth A first language game revolves around the shifts in the way media presented youth. Prior to the ‘Colour Revolutions’, Russian molodezhnie organizatsii lacked political relevance. In 2001, just after Putin came to power, Vladimir Yakemenko, who had worked in the presidential administration previously, started to lead the hierarchical pro-Kremlin group Idushchie vmeste (Walking Together), which had little credibility and limited influence. The public considered many of its actions to be distasteful.34 Moreover, the group’s ideological basis—‘Putin is our president and he is always right’—was deemed narrow and weak.35 However, Idushchie vmeste was the first post-Soviet youth organization that tried to offer moral guidance to the young generation inspired by Soviet ideas. The ideas expressed in its main text, ‘The Moral Codex’, follow in the vein of those found in the 1961 ‘The Moral Code of the Builder of Communism’ (Lassila 2012: 44).36 On 1 March 2005, Nashi was founded and replaced Idushchie vmeste. It hit the ground running37 and Yakemenko remained the uncontested leader, backed by influential people in the Kremlin, notably Vladislav Surkov, who was then the chief consultant to Putin. Surkov monitored the movement, which reiterated his official description of Russia’s political system as a ‘sovereign democracy’.38 Unlike Idushchie vmeste, however, Nashi did not support Putin unconditionally, but chose a more programmatic approach, in ‘support of his policy aimed at preserving the sovereignty of the country, the implementation of its economic and political modernization, ensuring its sustainable development’.39 Most public personalities emphasized their support

Sorokov expressed disgust about the campaign against Vladimir Sorokin’s ‘pornographic’ novels and the destruction of his books. The diffusion of pornographic material by one of the members added to problems (Schmid 2006: 71); Idushchie vmeste stood for a public relation disaster: Obyknovennyi ‘Nashizm’, in Kommersant, 21 February 2005. 35 Quote by National Strategy Institute Vice President Viktor Militarev cited in: Russia: ‘A Youth Movement Needs a Leader’, Radio Free Europe, 21 April 2005: (accessed 6 December 2016). 36 The document formalized the appropriate behaviour for members of the USSR’s Communist Party and the Komsomol. 37 Idushchie vmeste was soon history: Idushchie vmeste poidut za Tarakanovym, in Kommersant, 11 May 2005. 38 E.g. Vladislav Surkov razvel demokratiyu, in Kommersant, 29 June 2006, echoed in Nashi’s manifesto published in: Rossiya—megaproekt nazhego pokoleniya. Manifest, in Izvestiya, 15 April 2005. 39 Ibid. 34

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for the movement, its ideals, and the necessity of placing youth ‘under the patronage of large organizations’.40 Nashi’s 2005 manifesto formalized the movement’s mission. In the present discursive formation, this utterance stood out as having a high betweenness centrality. In other words, the manifesto held much of this stream together, as it introduced the concepts that shaped the newly emerging way of speaking about youth. The manifesto effectively limited debates and framed how Nashi would be understood.41 Many of its ideas reappeared in due course, often as literal repetitions throughout different media outlets. The movement’s manifesto stated two missions: first, preventing Western powers from exercising any political influence in Russia; second, bringing about a generational renewal to change Russia and overcome the shameful 1990s. The text began: ‘You have to either accept the challenge of the global world or escape from it. We are the ones who accept the challenge and believe in our own capabilities.’ Andrei Fursenko, minister of education and science,42 attended Nashi’s inaugural meeting and emphasized his view that: ‘You have to be competitive, to be victorious, successful people, in a successful country.’ Just as Darwinist principles were applied to the realm of international relations, ideas of risk and encirclement dominated the text: ‘The weak should adopt the rules of the game from the strong, follow their path in world politics and culturally assimilate. You are leader, follower, or victim.’ This conception of the world revolved around external and internal threats to Russia, with Nashi framed as a legitimate response to this. According to its own selfconception, the movement was naturally capable of fighting the ‘unnatural alliance’ of internal enemies (including Westernizers, ultranationalists, fascists, and liberals) who along with the ‘external enemy’ were destabilizing Russia. The idea of a generational renewal structured the document’s second axis, ‘Our Revolution’. By emphasizing the need to replace the generation of ‘bureaucratic-defeatists’ from the 1980s, who had ‘lost faith in Russia’, the authors here combined Erfahrungsraum and Erwartungshorizont when speaking about generation.43 They rejected the late Soviet past and urged for a departure towards a different future, through a ‘revolution in content but not in form’. Generational rhetoric was central to this rejection. Bureaucrats older than 35 years of age were called ‘porazhentsyi [defeatists], who failed to

41 ‘Nashi’—eto vashi?, in Kommersant, 11 July 2005. See note 38. Fursenko’s presence firmly illustrates the official backing of Nashi. Fursenko also had a personal reason to be concerned about politicized youth, having been egged by members of AKM, see: Novoe politicheskoe pokolenie, in Vedemosti, 5 April 2005. 43 See Chapter 1, pp. 14–21, for a conceptual discussion on generation. 40 42

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guarantee Russia’s leadership in the world’.44 This rhetoric combined the need for political stability as underlined by Putin, with Nashi’s own calls for ‘the energy of youth’ to modernize the country and protect it from internal and external enemies. The manifesto illustrates my theoretical arguments on generation as a concept anchored in PAST and FUTURE. In the summer of 2005 Putin invited Nashi representatives to the presidential residence in Zavidovo and told them that their organization was ‘a shining example of civil society’.45 Other political leaders also joined the Seliger youth camps46 to emphasize that ‘Colour Revolutions’ were genuinely threatening Russia and to incite action against them.47 Gleb Pavlovsky, political adviser to Putin, most bluntly illustrated this hostility: ‘If the “orange revolutionaries” stick their wet noses out of the underground in Moscow, the presidential administration will volley on these noses from all its gun barrels. A bullet will be driven into the foreheads of these rotten liberal vermin.’48 By 2005, the social and discursive organization of youth no longer resembled the marginality that it had experienced in the 1990s. Youth came to be of paramount importance for the stability of the political system, as the discursive reorganization illustrates. But despite enthusiastic support for the leadership, worries about the potential threat that Nashi might constitute persisted between 2005 and 2011. Sergey Mironov, chairman of the Federation Council, for instance, raised the question of what would happen to the power of the movement if the country’s political situation changed: ‘Now it seems beyond doubt that the motives are sincere. But what if something changes? Where will this force be directed to? Against whom and for what? This is a big question.’49 Mironov also emphasized that the political elite ‘inflates the threat of the Orange Revolution in Russia and is simply eager to move youth on its side and to use it as cannon fodder for street fights’. He perceived Nashi as potentially splitting youth into ‘ “nashikh” i “ne nashikh”’ (‘ours’ and ‘not-ours’).50 Chinovnikam-porazhentsam gotovyat smenu, in Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 27 May 2005. Audientsiya: Vladimir Putin pozazhigal so svoimi, in Kommersant, 27 July 2005. 46 In 2005 the first Lake Seliger camp attracted 3,000 participants from 45 Russian regions who got training in survival under extreme conditions and political theory. The prominent speakers at the camp included Gleb Pavlosky, Sergei Markov, and Vladislav Surkov. Pavlosky underlined his vision for Nashi: ‘You do not have enough stiffness. You should be able to disperse the fascist demonstrations and physically resist attempts of an anti-constitutional coup’, see Gosti. ‘Nashi’ dlya putina svoi, in Gazeta, 27 July 2005. 47 Komissary seligera, in Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 15 July 2005. 48 U poslednei cherty, in Sovetskaya Rossiya, 12 April 2005. 49 Mironov nashel rabotu Putinu, in Nezavisimaja Gazeta, 17 March 2005. 50 Sergei Mironov pereshel v oppositsiyu ‘Nashim’, in Kommersant, 27 August 2005. 44 45

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Other pro-Kremlin movements also arose at this time, indicating the broader attention being granted to youth and its political influence. In 2005, students created Grazhdanskaya smena (Civic Change) as a ‘commitment to the preservation of political stability in the country’.51 Along similar lines, graduates of Bauman Moscow State Technical University founded Rossiya molodaya (Young Russia) in May 2006, aimed at ‘preventing revolutions and coups that lead to the colonization of Russia’. These movements and the related discursive patterns were firmly rooted in the PRO-KREMLIN formation and represented youth as DECISIVE. Their convictions were reinforced by commentators’ observations of events abroad: ‘a lack of attention from the authorities towards youth and students can be used by destructive forces in violation of public peace and order’.52 This specific framing of the importance of youth recalled discursive patterns from Soviet times, in particular the notion of youth as being PRECIOUS and DECISIVE.53 By 2008, the discourse of youth had evolved further. Previously, it had revolved around preventing foreign influence and hindering domestic opposition, framing youth as a bulwark against these. But new protest movements abroad, particularly in Serbia in 2008 against the Kosovo declaration of independence, once again illustrated the political might of youth, and Russia’s leadership showed awareness of the need to redesign spaces for youth’s controlled political involvement. It therefore declared 2009 the ‘Year of Youth’, to demonstrate its symbolic importance. That year, Komsomol’skaya Pravda argued that investments in youth augmented the human capital of the entire nation, best achieved through dobrovol’cheskikh organizatsii (voluntary organizations) to assure the physical education of youth and promote a healthy lifestyle. Youth was important for the FUTURE and thus had to be taken care of.54

4.3.2 Mobilizing to Appropriate the Past According to the PRO-KREMLIN formation, youth that took to the streets established CONTINUITY with the country’s PAST. This perceived temporal relation emphasized the obligation and desire of living youth to remember the young heroes who had died for the nation; commemorations had youth as Studentam propisali patriotizm, in Kommersant, 12 September 2005. Teleupravlenie. Smotryashchie vmeste, in Kommersant, 15 August 2005. 53 ‘Molodaya gvardiya’ poidet turisticheskim putem, in Kommersant, 28 June 2008. 54 ‘Nasha molodezh’ vpolne sposobna pobedit’ len’, grust’, bezynitsiativnost’’, in Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 2 December 2009. 51 52

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central actors and gave meaning to the lives of the dead. The association with the past thus de-temporalized youth: Putin himself developed upon this very idea when he understood Nashi as a permanent societal VANGUARD for the present but also the future, presenting youth as ‘the people who are moving ahead’.55 Marching Nashi members legitimized Putin’s political project with reference to the main historic signifier in contemporary Russia, the Velikaya Otechestvennaya voina (Great Patriotic War). As in Soviet times, commemorations took place through parades, though by 2005 these had become multimedia occasions. On 15 May 2005, between 50,000 and 60,000 young people, in addition to around 1,000 veterans, marched on Moscow’s streets to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the victory. Wartime songs and video installations set the pace for Nashi’s first significant public action. The Russian tricolour and Nashi flags (red with the white St Andrew’s cross) added colour to the march, flying above the marchers’ uniforms of white shirts decorated with a red star and the dates of the Velikaya Otechestvennaya voina (1941–5). The shirts had the inscription Nasha pobeda (Our Victory) printed on the front and Russia’s national anthem on the back.56 Veterans handed youth medals in the shape of shell casings, inscribed with the words ‘Remember the war, protect the motherland!’57 to highlight historic continuity.58 This event emphasized the importance of the struggle against fascism sixty years before, and linked it with the fight against the spread of ‘Colour Revolutions’ which Nashi understood as ‘contemporary fascism’. The commemoration also equated living youth with those who defended the Soviet Union in the war; ‘Today we are all 18 years old!’, shouted the 34-year-old Yakemenko.59 As a symbol of continuity and the passing on of responsibility, he stated: ‘You defended our country on the battlefield—we will save it in the classroom, workshops, and offices!’60 This effort to preserve the ‘truthful’ past drove masses of young people out onto the streets. Equating their fight against contemporary ‘fascism’ with 56 See note 45. ‘Nashim’ razdali gil’zy, in Vremya Novostei, 16 May 2005. ‘Antifashistkoe’ nashestvie, in Novye Izvestiya, 16 May 2005. 58 Whether veterans knew what they participated in is doubtful as the Moscow Region Veterans Council advertised the event as a simple meeting with the youth; see Triumf voli, in Kommersant, 16 May 2005. 59 See note 57. 60 Many rank-and-file members internalized this discourse: ‘I am a free citizen of Russia, today we (nashi) accept taking our home out of the hands of the older generation. I swear that Russia will never accept new colonists and invaders, there is simply no space for neo-fascists and their allies.’ Cited in: Triumf voli, in Kommersant, 16 May 2005. For more details on the instrumentalization of history within Nashi, see Mijnsen (2012). 55 57

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the successful resistance against the fascism of sixty years before, they pulled history into the present, making it of direct relevance to 2005. This embrace of ‘truthful’ memory suggested support for Russia’s leadership; even the progressive Novaya Gazeta admitted ‘it is impressive when a crowd of sixty-thousand fills a square’.61 Attempts to oppose this dominance received little public attention.62 Indeed, due to Nashi’s display of loyalty and strength, Komsomol’skaya Pravda was able to stress in 2005: ‘Supporters and managers of “orange revolutions” should think before becoming active in Russia. It seems that the revolution will not be according to the colours conceived by the distant script-writers. It will be red and white’ (Nashi’s colours).63 The CONTINUITY between past, present, and future expressed by young people at this time can be encountered in the discourse of the period. One example was the reprinting of Brezhnev’s memoirs, centred on the war and the reconstruction effort, which linked the present Russian society with that of the Soviet Russian past. According to one review in Kommersant: They [the memoirs] teach us how to work better, conclude what we begin, correct mistakes, seek new opportunities, and critically assess what we achieved. Brezhnev shares with youth his huge life experience which teaches us to be Leninist, intolerant of shortcomings, and constantly working on ourselves.64

This discourse about youth and generational renewal reappraised the entire Soviet period and reactivated elements of the SOVIET-LENINIST youth discourse. In doing so, it constructed a link between (and at times equated) Soviet and Russian youth, projecting this new post-Soviet Russian generation of 2005 into the country’s future. The social meaning of generation thus depended on the fusion of PAST and FUTURE as illustrated by an interview with President Medvedev in 2010.65 Discussing the current implications of the Great Patriotic War, he stressed that youth had a ‘moral responsibility to future generations’. Youth could persuasively bring ‘the truth’ to the people as it embodied the truth simply by virtue of being young. His utterances de-temporalized youth: heroic actions of the past were framed as legitimizing actions of current youth, giving coherence to a discourse that projected onto

Denezhnaya massa, in Novaya Gazeta, 19 May 2005. The leader of Idushchie bez Putina, Mikhail Obozov, threw one of Nashi’s T-shirts into St Petersburg’s eternal flame, shouting ‘Nashism is not going to pass!’ Mironov nashel rabotu Putinu, in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 17 March 2005. 63 Krasno-belaya revolyutsiya, in Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 20 May 2005. 64 Pamyatnye poslaniya, in Kommersant, 31 March 2008. 65 Nam ne nado stesnyat’sya rasskazyvat’ pravdu o voine, in Izvestiya, 7 May 2010. 61 62

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current youth a moral mission to protect Russia from fascism: ‘If we now close our eyes to these crimes, in the future such crimes can happen again.’66 Through this period, Nashi continuously exploited the societal importance attached to Nasha pobeda, inscribing it with the singular importance of youth. By 2010, however, the emphasis of its mass rallies shifted to the intimidation of ‘counterfeiters of Russian history’.67 Nashi forcefully conquered a central position in shaping the discursive organization of memory and its success marginalized alternative interpretations.

4.3.3 Youthful Courage and Creativity: Sports and the Arts The last language game in the PRO-KREMLIN discursive formation relates to the realm of sports and arts. The rules that underpinned this language game significantly complement the dominant discursive formation, creating a holistic view on youth and connecting different themes. Such an all-encompassing understanding of youth was critical for the dominance of this formation, as it was able to bridge the ideological divides of the country. The diverse newspapers that make this formation also highlight this inclusiveness. In newspaper reports on sport, Russian youth was presented as HEROIC and DESIRED, with these characteristics framed as leading unquestionably to successes in swimming, hockey, and football. It is reasonable to assume that sports coverage attracted a wide readership; the image of youth that developed in relation to sports should therefore not be underestimated. The humiliating 1:8 defeat of Russia’s youth hockey team against Canada in 2007, for example, turned into a ‘crisis in Russian hockey’, framed ultimately as indicating a fundamental societal crisis. Commenting on this match, Kommersant ironically stated that one thought that ‘at least at the level of youth Canada could be beaten’. But when Canada smashed the young Russians who were going to represent Russia at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, doubts arose as to whether Russia was still playing at a world level. By 2007 the country’s youth lacked ‘tactic, passions, and dedication’. This was in clear contrast to Soviet-era youth hockey, and the constructed link with the past made the present seem even more deplorable. In accordance with the rules of this discursive formation, however, youth was not held responsible for its weakness. Instead, Kommersant emphasized that youth was IN-NEED, and that its failure was a sign of neglect by politicians.68 67 Ibid. Nashi otprazdnovali Pobedu, in Izvestiya, 17 May 2010. ‘Dal’she—tupik’, in Kommersant, 6 September 2007; similar utterances concern amongst many others football: Gol futbolista ‘Alanii’ voshel v desyatku luchshikh v Evrope, in Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 13 April 2011. 66 68

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4.3.4 Youth Acting beyond Control Nevertheless, this positive and all-encompassing youth discourse needed to find a way of dealing with those activities that obliged the Kremlin to distance itself from Nashi. Amongst them was the excessive patriotism displayed during the 2010 Seliger Camp, which the forum’s business partners received with irritation.69 As part of ‘Zdes’ vam ne rady’ (You are not welcome here), Nashi’s radical wing Stal’ (Steel) defaced effigies of prominent opposition activists and human rights defenders with Nazi insignia.70 These ‘ocherniteli rodiny’ (‘traitors of the motherland’) included Eduard Limonov, Lyudmila Alekseeva, Boris Nemtsov, and Mikhail Saakashvili, and Nashi youth awarded them the ‘falsification’ prize, for their ‘betrayal’ of Russian interests. The Kremlin ultimately had to condemn this act, illustrating that its control over youth was not complete71 and that some activities were against the interests of at least some in the political establishment.72 The movement’s situation changed rapidly in 2011. Vyacheslav Volodin replaced Surkov, and the former took issue with the divide amongst youth that Nashi had created as increasing numbers of young people turned their backs on the organization. Volodin’s reforms put an end to Nashi as Yakemenko and Surkov had conceived it, and transformed the organization into a web of activities seemingly loyal to Volodin. Aiming at less controversial and more inclusive actions, Volodin split Nashi into different projects; Khryushi protiv (Piglets Against),73 Stop kham (Stop Boor),74 and the fitness movement Begi za mnoi (Follow me) were all explicitly concerned with different social evils, and ostensibly avoided potentially divisive political topics. Whilst Putin’s ‘hooray’ nationalism and social doctrines continued to characterize these initiatives, the organizations also offered youth various skills and sought to

‘Seliger’ ishchet sponsorov, in Izvestiya, 10 April 2012. Zdes’ mogli by byt’ vashi golovy!, in Novaya Gazeta, 13 September 2010. 71 Ekaterina Pol’gueva: Inkubator nenavisti, in Sovetskaya Rossiya, 31 July 2010. 72 Also the brutal beating up of the oppositional journalist Oleg Kashin in 2010, who almost died, stretched what the Kremlin would want the movement to do; see Yakemenko vs Kashin, Interfax, 25 March 2011: (accessed 6 December 2016). 73 Its members dress up as pigs and report about food with expired shelf life in supermarkets. 74 The movement says it fights traffic code violations and uncivilized behaviour on the roads. 69 70

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improve their self-esteem, rather than being purely and predominantly antiWestern. The Kremlin’s reach amongst Russian youth is thus now far more subtle; reportedly employing a highly captivating mix of entertainment and education,75 the camps have become an annual forum for assembling youth from Russia and beyond, teaching lessons on topics such as history, leadership, and economics. The December 2011 counter-demonstrations defending the falsified elections underlined that Nashi as known between 2005 and 2008 was exhausted. Yakemenko expressed great nostalgia for the movement’s heights in 2005, when Nashi had brought 50,000 people onto the streets of Moscow76—a deplorable contrast, given the small group defending the election results in 2011. Youth is now far less expected to loudly express its political adoration of Putin. Moreover, the Kremlin has drawn lessons from the problems that come with centralized movements, and from the criticism that was made of Nashi. In summary, the PRO-KREMLIN discursive formation underpinned the resurgence of youth in Russia between 2005 and 2011. I argue that this profound discursive change in speaking about youth in Russia contributed to Nashi’s success. Part of this discursive formation recalled rules that can be encountered in the SOVIET-LENINIST youth discourse discussed in Chapter 5. However, these were adapted to the changed context and linked to contemporary challenges and threats. Wider discursive rules meanwhile combined the multifaceted character of youth, and travelled between very different thematic realms. Consdering these discursive shifts is therefore vital for understanding the effects of the Putin-initiated preventive counter-revolution during the period analysed here. Constant reiteration solidified these rules, which became part of the publicly accepted truth, including the consensus on the threat of a revolutionary government overthrow. The success of Nashi, and other proKremlin movements in dominating public discourse and the public sphere, testifies to the importance attributed to youth as a political actor during this episode.

75 See Silvan’s report: (accessed 6 December 2016). 76 Kreml’ otkazhetsya ot ‘Nashikh’, in Vedomosti, 5 March 2013. Yakemenko stressed in 2012 that Nashi was going to be ‘disbanded’: ‘Nashikh’ zakryvayut, Gazeta.ru, 6 April 2012: (accessed 6 December 2016).

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4.4 Y OU TH IN D ISC ORDANCE WITH T HE REG IME Smotryu na flag—on oranzhevyi. Ponyatno, chto tak spetsial’no—deistvuet kak stop-signal, potomu chto kak-to ukorenilos’: dazhe esli ty molcha stoish’ pod takim flagom, yasno—kto ty i chego khochesh’. I look at the flag, it is orange. It is obvious that it is on purpose—it acts like a stop-light, because it is deeply seated in it: even if you stand silently under this flag, things are clear—who you are and what you want.77

The second-largest formation in the discourse revolves around the idea of youth being DISCORDANT with the regime. This discursive formation captures the progressive counter-voice in the struggle over the meaning of youth, which the two progressive newspapers, Kommersant and Novaya Gazeta, dominate. Given the restricted readership of these newspapers, only a small Russian audience would engage in this discourse. Within this formation, a positive image is attributed to political youth opposition, alongside an often sarcastic critique of pro-Kremlin groups. The democratic political spectrum consisted of several small movements, most of which relied on financial support from their members. As we shall see, many of their activities were innovative, and their online presence (on Livejournal, VKontakte, and Twitter, for example) made them accessible to a wider audience, ensuring some visibility in the public sphere. The DISCORDANT discursive rules were particularly prominent during the early years of the period analysed here. The importance of this way of speaking about youth diminished over time, however, and primarily resurfaced around specific events (Figure 4.3). In particular, the ‘Orange Revolution’ contributed to a short-term shift in the understanding of Russian youth, which correlated with a period of intense political mobilization of oppositional youth groups. The graphical representation of the DISCORDANT discursive formation (Figure 4.7) points to the importance within this discursive formation of concepts such as AUTONOMOUS and ENGAGED, which stand out as having the highest degree-centrality in the network (Figure 4.6). Authors of newspaper articles within this formation also emphasized the plurality of youth by referring to POLITICAL FACTIONS. This acknowledged the coexistence of numerous small molodezhnye dvizheniya, unlike the PRO-KREMLIN discourse, which presented an image of youth as UNITED. Such heterogeneous factions, however, also contributed to the fragmentation of youth, the mobilization of which potentially appeared contradictory. The code IMAGINATION captures the importance of events abroad for this way of understanding and talking about youth. During the period 2005–11, 77

Prilichnoe mestoimenie, in Novaya Gazeta, 15 September 2005.

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Figure 4.6. Discordant: centralities.

Figure 4.7. Discordant: discourse network.

discursive rules related foreign youth to Russian youth, and saw the former as inspiring the latter, who are represented in this formation as being ENTHUSIASTIC and DYNAMIC. The perceived importance of youth over these years signified a clear break with the past behaviour of youth, which explains the frequent references to RUPTURE found in this formation. Whilst this temporal concept is technically part of the third formation—VIOLENT, discussed below—the plot of the overall discourse network (Figure 4.2) shows that RUPTURE in fact connects the DISCORDANT and VIOLENT formations.

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4.4.1 Rediscovering the Political Dimension of Youth In 2004, as tensions grew in Ukraine, culminating in the overthrow of Yanukovich’s government by the end of that year, the question arose of what this might mean for Russia.78 Communication between Ukrainian and Russian youth fortified ideas about a transnational network of oppositional youth activists bringing ideas and techniques to Russia.79 Indeed, by the end of 2004, the ruling Edinaya Rossiya party expressed concerns about a potential Russian ‘Birch Revolution’ taking place. Members stressed the need to pay close attention to developments amongst youth, and to respond with a loyal massovoe dvizhenyie (mass movement).80 The political power of youth thus became a topic of political concern. Idushchie bez Putina (Walking without Putin), an ironic allusion to the pro-Kremlin Idushchie vmeste detailed above, imported the ‘orange atmosphere’ into Russia in December 2004. The St Petersburg-based blogger Mikhail Obozov created the movement along with a friend, though journalists quickly claimed that ‘several hundred people’ joined them. Quickly growing, the movement was perceived as ‘the Russian version of the “Orange Revolution” ’.81 Irrespective of its actual size, the Russian regime felt threatened by this; given the international context at that time, a youthled government overthrow appeared plausible. In February 2005, Obozov was arrested, after unfolding a ‘Walking without Putin’ poster in front of an Edinaya Rossiya rally.82 Prompted by developments in Ukraine and by this subsequent Russian youth activity, the discourse about youth thus gained a new momentum. Once Ukraine reached the climax of its ‘Orange Revolution’, parts of Russia’s media changed the way it referred to youth. It emphasized Ukraine’s and Russia’s interconnectedness and reformulated past references to youthempowered change. Now, the concept of youth began to symbolize an ENGAGED actor, representing a clear break with the early post-Soviet period.

78 79

Sodruzhestvo. Ded moroz oranzhevoi revolyutsii, in Novye Izvestiya, 15 December 2004. Nashi idei nashli podderzhku v sosednei strane, in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 28 December

2004. Edinorossy boyatsya ‘oranzhevoi revolyutsii’ i sozdadut dlya ee predotvrashcheniya ‘massovoe dvizhenie’, in Kommersant, 24 December 2004. 81 Politicheskaya sreda. ‘Idushchie’ bez Putina, in Rossiskie Vesti, 19 January 2005. 82 V Sankt-Peterburge zaderzhali ‘Idushchego bez Putina’, in Izvestiya, 14 February 2005. 80

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4.4.2 An Increasing Fear about Oppositional Youth Novye Izvestiya summarized: ‘A main lesson drawn by Russian politicians from the “Orange Revolution” was that the street, and not political technologists, plays a decisive role when it comes to real confrontation.’83 Similarly, SOVA reports at the time underlined: ‘Fighting for “young people” became a priority for virtually all stakeholders after the “Orange Revolution”, ranging from the President’s Administration that established the Nashi youth movement, to liberal political parties. Right-wing radicals did not lag behind in this activity’ (Kozhevnikova 2006).84 Such utterances illustrate the role of IMAGINATION—the shock created by events abroad such as the ‘Orange Revolution’—in shaping this discursive formation. The unfolding events in Ukraine mobilized Russian youth, and the media encouraged such comparisons. In the context of this constructed similarity, hopes for political change diffused and empowered non-violent resistance by molodezhnie dvizheniya. The discursive attribution of power to youth predisposed the public to be highly attentive towards virtually everything concerning youth; by 2005 media across the ideological spectrum was devoting significant attention to Russia’s oppositional youth. In April that year, activist Roman Dobrokhotov, along with some friends from the Moscow Institute of International Relations, transformed Idushchie bez Putina into My! (We!). The movement gained prominence when it tried to occupy Moscow’s Red Square with orange balloons, leading a journalist in Ogonek to describe Dobrokhotov later as the ‘official distributor of the “Orange Revolution” in Russia’.85 In the expectant atmosphere, media and politics waited for the arrival of a Russian equivalent to Ukraine’s Pora! (It is time!) by 2005. The media thus granted excessive attention to My!’s efforts to alert Russians to the importance of democratic values,86 despite the fact that in 2005, My! had barely thirty members. A similar movement, Oborona (Defence), meanwhile attempted to unify the emerging liberal movements. Described as trying ‘to move “orange” technology onto Russian soil’,87 liberal journalists believed that Oborona could mobilize around 5,000 young people in less than six months.88 In retrospect Svezhaya krov’, in Novye Izvestiya, 28 February 2005. The Sova informatsionno-analiticheskii tsentr conducts research on nationalism and racism in Russia and is regarded as highly reliable by commentators and researchers. 85 Tema nomera. Partii zelenykh, in Ogonek, 10 October 2005. 86 This was available via the now suspended website of the organization: . 87 Aktivnaya ‘Oborona’, in Novye Izvestiya, 4 April 2005. 88 Conservative membership estimates varied between several hundreds and 2,500; Tema nomera. Partii zelenykh, in Ogonek, 10 October 2005. 83 84

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this was a blatant exaggeration, but it is indicative of the expectations that such movements created. This perceived potential led to increased state coercion and control, and progressive newspapers increasingly emphasized the risks, such as imprisonment, taken by political activists. In progressive media, the ‘orange noises’ helped to shape an image of youth as ENGAGED, AUTONOMOUS, and ENTHUSIASTIC. Novaya Gazeta described the courage of anti-Kremlin youth movements,89 which changed the discursive rules about youth. By now, the public actions performed by youth no longer conformed to the image of apathetic youth that the Russian public had come to know in the 1990s. The activist Ilya Yashin reiterated this idea by elaborating on the dynamism of youth and its genuine political interest.90 At the same time, the discursive formation pointed towards the limits of what Russian opposition youth movements could achieve, and the many bureaucratic constraints that they faced. Because of being considered fascist or extremist within the dominant PRO-KREMLIN discursive formation, such movements failed to expand their activities beyond a certain level.91 It is therefore not the case that Russian movements simply ‘lack many of the features that made youth movements in other postcommunist countries successful’ (Schwirtz 2007: 77). In fact, the Russian discursive-political context constituted a major political obstacle which created specific constraints and opportunities.

4.4.3 A Carnival of Mobilization In the period analysed here,92 Russia’s youth opposition positioned itself as being in continuity with wider European traditions of youth resistance, notably the ‘1968’ student riots in France. This connection helped to amplify the image of youth as a democratizing and revolutionary force.93 Such historic references resonated strongly within the post-Soviet context, reminiscent of patterns within the SOVIET-LENINIST youth discourse. Moreover, political youth opposition, although it was not numerous, realized that its voice was best heard when mocking the authorities, particularly in staged, theatrical happenings—a practice which also echoed action seen in the 1970s.

89 90 91 92 93

Prilichnoe mestoimenie, in Novaya Gazeta, 15 September 2005. V vuzakh vosrodilsya institut stukachestva, in Novaya Gazeta, 27 October 2005. Prichislyayushchaya sebya k gruppirovke ‘Yabloko’, in Novaya Gazeta, 4 March 2011. This section’s heading is an allusion to Kenney’s A Carnival of Revolution (2002). Oprichniki protiv dzhedaev, in Moskovskii Komsomolets, 1 March 2005.

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Such carnivalesque mobilization ensured media attention but came at a significant cost, as this form of political opposition rarely expressed a message beyond the rejection of the status quo. This kind of oppositional activity failed to develop a political agenda, and implicitly underlined the limits on what could be said and done politically in Russia. Numerous articles referred to such carnivalesque practices, which the discourse network reflects with the code FUN. This term conveys that, particularly after 2006, the media considered these ironic theatrical happenings to be innovative and amusing but not necessarily politically credible. A case in point was My! with its theatrical mobilization that reinterpreted popular references to Russia’s past. For instance, in one action, members stood near Moscow’s White House holding empty white posters, a reference to a Soviet anekdot about a ‘protester’ who distributed white leaflets, devoid of any statements. Just as the Soviet citizen in that story had trouble with the forces of order, so did Dobrokhotov as a representative of My! 94 He was arrested and had to spend five days in prison for little more than stating that he was ‘against’ something undefined, an act of opposition void of content, as Kommersant pointed out.95 In 2010, My! reacted to Nashi’s glorification of the Soviet past in a similarly ironic tone, by staging a ‘Back to the USSR’ protest. Equipped with Soviet flags (and orange scarves), members marched the conventional route used for commemorating victory in Moscow, but went in the opposite direction, shouting ‘Give us Censorship’ and ‘Putin is our Leader’. Under a veil of irony, the movement underlined that Nashi’s interpretation of the past was ridiculous. Moreover, the humour expressed the young activists’ frustration and anxiety about Russia’s sliding into Soviet-style leadership. Beyond the liberal-democratic spectrum, pro-Kremlin groups also tried to attract media attention through carnivalesque happenings in the period analysed here. During the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, for example, activists from Nashi and Rossiya Molodaya protested in front of the Georgian embassy, placing pig heads near the building. Afterwards, activists drew the map of South Ossetia on the pavement, driving several toy tanks, representing Georgian troops, across the border. These tanks were loaded with fake dollars with fake blood on the paper. In front of the embassy the tanks were smashed with activists’ hammers.96

94 The video is available at Sobytiya: Aktsiya dvizheniya ‘My’ u belogo doma: (accessed 6 December 2016). 95 Aktivistov dvizheniya ‘My’ prigovorili za chistye listy, in Kommersant, 26 July 2006. 96 Flagovaya ataka, in Kommersant, 13 August 2008.

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The occupation of buildings and key sites—one of the hallmarks of the Velvet Revolution during the fall of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe—is also an activity with an important performative dimension, and used in Russia during the period analysed here. The demonstration against a senior police officer who refused to investigate an alleged attack by a member of the National Bolshevik Party on Nashi’s regional office is one such example.97 In this case, the officer was dismissed and a public apology issued after Nashi mobilized its members and warned that they would live alongside the police building for months, if necessary, to achieve their aim.98

4.4.4 Mockery of Official Youth Movements Attempts by progressive media to distort and disrupt pro-Kremlin movements were another aspect of the DISCORDANT discursive formation. Given the impossibility of even opposition newspapers simply ignoring the existence of pro-Kremlin youth, ridicule became a way of acknowledging these movements without approving of them; progressive media thus presented Nashi in a way that differed from the HEROIC picture that characterized the PRO-KREMLIN discursive formation. One source of mockery for Novaya Gazeta was, for instance, the songs that emerged during Putin’s first presidential term and which became ever more prominent by 2005, in particular the popular ‘Takogo kak Putin’ (‘One like Putin’) by Poyushchikh vmeste (Singing Together), which celebrated the president’s virtues of strength, moral integrity, and sobriety.99 The Seliger training camp for ‘nationally minded managers’ was also a subject of mockery. In 2011, Soviet-style planning and discipline were undermined when storms and heavy rain caused chaos amongst the participants, leaving six injured and anxious parents trying to get hold of the camp’s leaders.100 With an ironic tone, this pattern illustrates attempts to respond to the omnipresence of Nashi.

4.4.5 Youth Opposition Abroad Liberal-democratic movements located abroad but related to events in Russia, such as the opposition action in Belarus 2006, are referred to by the last 97

In 2010 the NBP (National Bolshevik Party) was forbidden. Its leader, Eduard Limonov, maintains an unclear relationship with the Putin regime. 98 Nashi snyali podpolkovnika militsii, in Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 24 March 2005. 99 Kul’turnyi sloi, in Novaya Gazeta, 23 May 2005. 100 Na ‘Seliger-2011’ obrushilsya uragan, in Izvestiya, 4 July 2011.

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language game in this formation. Writing on events in that neighbouring country, Novaya Gazeta emphasized the courage of those young people who spent the night in the centre of Minsk ‘at 10 to 12 degrees below Celsius, facing wet snow and wind’. The youth accepted the continual risk of a police crackdown and some citizens expressed cross-generational solidarity by secretly bringing food to the tent village. Led by young people, the journalist underlined with surprise: ‘No aggression, rudeness or even ordinary irritability [razdrazhitel’nosti]’, was present, even though young people led the event. Such coverage complemented a discursive pattern that framed youth as 101 COURAGEOUS as well as responsible. For Russia this view of events abroad, captured by the code IMAGINATION, was significant: the discursive rules about youth here crossed national boundaries. In 2011, Kommersant portrayed Egyptian youth demonstrations in a similar way. As a victim of the state apparatus’ excessive violence in response to initial demonstrations, youth was seen as being in a prime position to organize ‘the largest anti-government protests over the past decade’ demanding the resignation of Hosni Mubarak.102 As part of this discursive pattern, youth in the Arab world became a shorthand for referring to the contestation of the existing political order. This notion was then integrated into the Russian context, where a tiny fraction of the country’s youth made for a colourful but eventually toothless opposition formed from a diverse group of people and ideologies, labelled as ‘unnatural alliances’ by Nashi. Beyond movements in support of democracy, however, a range of marginalized and violent left-wing and nationalist oppositional youth activism existed.

4. 5 VIOLENT YOUTH: THREATENING T H E ES T A B L I S H MEN T Roma priznaetsya, chto ‘sperva strashno, a potom privykaesh’, dazhe ugryzenii net. Takaya nenavist’ poyavlyaetsya, chto uzhe vso po figu’. Roma recognizes that ‘it is scary to begin with, but then you get used to it, you do not even have remorse any longer. Such hatred shows that nothing fucking matters.’103

101 102 103

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Shumel surovo, in Novaya Gazeta, 13 April 2006. Egipetskaya molodezh’ vyshla na peremenu, in Kommersant, 27 January 2011. Young skinhead quoted in: Skinam pozhelali dolgikh let, in Novaya Gazeta, 17 February

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This third discursive formation, labelled as VIOLENT, revolves around a NEGATIVE perception of youth, particularly nationalist and left-wing groups, and portrays political youth activity as a dangerous threat to the established order. The rules of this discursive formation dismiss any broader political value of youth mobilization. The structure of this formation therefore brings to mind Pearson’s work on English hooliganism, which highlights how interpretations of this violent youth establish an alarming picture of departure from an earlier ‘golden age’. In this work on the construction of ‘youth as risk’, he argues that youth crime has always been represented as a radical rupture from the stable state of past affairs (1983). In contemporary Russia, Novaya Gazeta in particular reacted to this idea of youth as a threat to the present order and many of its discussions drew on these discursive rules in framing the notion of youth. This may be explained by the paper’s desire to warn readers of antidemocratic tendencies in Russia, which it saw as driven also by violent molodezhnye dvizheniya. According to SOVA reports, two organizations were central to the extraparliamentary nationalist-patriotic camp: Dvizhenie protiv nelegalnoi immigratsii (DPNI) (Movement against Illegal Immigration) and Evraziiskii soyuz molodezhi (ESM) (Eurasian Youth Union). They acted relatively independently of the Kremlin, seemingly more so after 2009, when alternative sources of funding became available (Kozhevnikova and Verkhovskii 2009: 9). Regime officials emphasized their distance from these organizations, criticizing the fact that there was no ‘proper political judgement’ of ‘criminal acts performed on xenophobic grounds, which only serves to further encourage extremist activity’ (Obshchestvennaya palata 2008: 52). Established in 2002, DPNI served as the main right-wing non-party organization with offices in more than thirty Russian regions.104 The brothers Aleksandr Belov (also known as ‘Potkin’) and Vladimir Basmanov, who both began their political careers during perestroika as young members of Pamyat’ (Remembrance), led the organization. The movement used the internet to communicate with its ‘flexible membership’ and worked with a ‘loose (leaderless) structure, and network of regional representatives’ (Zuev 2010: 269). The lack of a well-elaborated ideology reduced internal tensions and contributed to its success (Laruelle 2009: 74).105 Thanks to its decentralized structure, DPNI remained able to react promptly to political developments (Kozhevnikova 2007). Anti-Western references were almost absent; its

Sego dnya. Chya Moskva?, in Moskovskii Komsomolets, 7 November 2005. There are no reliable membership estimates but ‘several thousands in total’ seems reasonable (Obshchestvennaya palata 2008: 53). 104 105

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ideological focus was instead on the ‘Islamist threat’ or the ‘Yellow peril’. Thus, DPNI geared its language to appeal to widespread anti-immigrant views, hesitant to use the language of xenophobia and anti-Semitism (Kozhevnikova 2006). It enjoyed great success amongst youth, and although it was not a youth movement its self-presentation nonetheless appealed to young people. The movement was banned in 2011. The second right-wing movement, ESM, was established in February 2005, and aimed at containing the spread of the ‘orange mood’. Led by Pavel Zarifullin and Valeriy Korovin, the movement claims that it ‘stands as a human shield in the face of the orange bulldozers’.106 ESM had links with Alexander Dugin’s Mezhdunarodnoe evraziiskoe dvizhenie (International Eurasian Movement), which in 2005 was active beyond Russia (notably Moldova, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan), but adjusted Dugin’s older conspiratorial visions to the evolving context.107 An ‘anti-orange’ worldview attributed a missionary dimension to the fight against the United States; in the manifesto, Western encroachment seemed to threaten national survival, accusing the United States of having already ‘smashed to pieces our fatherland once’.108 Meanwhile, the left-wing movements captured in this discursive formation had a longer pedigree, and most were established during the 1990s. Their manifestos reiterated communist rhetoric and emphasized the injustices and inequalities that had emerged during Russia’s transition years. Avangard Krasnoi Molodezhi (AKM) (Vanguard of Red Youth) was the most radical amongst them.109 It was also the one that decisively shaped the discursive formation, as the press repeatedly featured its provocative actions and therefore shaped the construction of youth as a threat. The movement’s leader, Sergei Udaltsov, frequently underlined his desire to overthrow the government through a violent revolution.110 Its members were proactive and the communist ideology motivated and unified them to the point that AKM did not

106

Katekhizic chlena: (accessed 6 December 2016). Dugin was also part of Pamyat’ during perestroika but was expelled in 1989. 108 V Rossii poyavilis’ neoprichniki, in Russkii Kur‘er, 28 February 2005. 109 Programmnoe zayavlenie AKM: (accessed 10 December 2016) along with the charter: Ustav AKM: (accessed 6 December 2016). 110 Ironically, Udaltsov had come to symbolize Russia’s democratic opposition in Western media by 2012: Russia Accused of Kidnapping, in The Washington Post, 26 October 2012; Socialism may be Waning, but not for Young Russians, in The Washington Times, 23 November 2012; and even appeared in one sentence with Gary Kasparov: Merkel kritisiert Pussy-Riot Urteil: (accessed 6 December 2016). 107

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require many resources to quickly mobilize adherents. In 2008 AKM realized long-standing ambitions of a revival of Russia’s Left by creating Levyi Front (Left Front).111 Revolyutsionnyi kommunisticheskii soyuz molodezhi (bol’sheviki) (RKSM(b)) (Revolutionary Communist Youth League (Bolshevik)), founded in 1996, operated independently of Levyi Front, believing that the latter had no ‘common ideology or common action’, and represented merely ‘decorative unity’.112 RKSM(b) claimed to have the potential to mobilize several hundred members, and experienced a period of growth around 2005, having been marginal and close to disappearance at the turn of the millennium. Its revival followed the organization’s involvement in protests against the ‘anti-social politics of the government’, and it also joined popular demonstrations against the 2006 G8 summit in St Petersburg. RKSM(b) also occasionally cooperated with other small Trotskyist groups, such as the communist youth SKM RF as well as the Russian Communist Workers’ Party (EIF-PKK). The boundaries between all these movements were porous, and joint actions of this ‘unnatural alliance’ not rare (Kozhevnikova 2006, 2007).113 The VIOLENT discourse network is sparser than the preceding ones and revolves around a small number of conceptual nodes (Figure 4.9). The most prominent codes are NEGATIVE evaluations of youth, and the emphasis on this being a problem of the PRESENT, in addition to references to the kind of RUPTURE that Pearson emphasizes, with respect to British hooliganism. This phenomenon of violent youth itself expressed the crisis young people went through, but it also evoked clearly negative attributes such as VIOLENT or 114 IRRESPONSIBLE behaviour of youth. Furthermore, the legacy of the Sovietera discourse, which sought to avoid allocating blame to youth, shone through this formation when the idea that youth was NAÏVE was used to excuse its behaviour. The betweenness centrality (Figure 4.8) here indicates that NEGATIVE and TROUBLE-MAKER are the codes that crucially structure this discursive network.

111 Debates about uniting the extra-parliamentary movements are much older. Sleva ot KPRF zamechno dvizhenie, in Kommersant: (accessed 6 December 2016); Radikaly otkryli ‘Levyi Front’, in Kommersant: (accessed 6 December 2016). 112 Na levom fronte bez peremen: (accessed 6 December 2016). 113 ‘Derzhite lysogo!’, in Novaya Gazeta, 2 June 2005; Igrali v dymovye shashki, in Novaya Gazeta, 19 September 2005. 114 In that respect Judah stresses the brutalization of Russia’s society following the Soviet Union’s breakdown expressed by high numbers of young people in prison (2014).

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Figure 4.8. Violent: centralities.

Figure 4.9. Violent: discourse network.

4.5.1 Skinheads and Fascists In this discursive formation, the most important language game refers to the violence of right-wing movements. Narrow discursive rules that structure reports about such activities were building a NEGATIVE view of youth whose activities were depicted as causing TROUBLE, being VIOLENT, and having

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motivations. However, beyond outright blame there was greater complexity when those young people were in fact presented as VICTIMIZED or simply NAÏVE. A young skinhead presence was often visible where nationalist music (such as Britogolovye idut [Skinheads go] or Vait pauer rok [White power rock]) was easily available; indeed, it was prominently displayed in some shops. For such young people, the svyatoe (sacred) homeland was the most important thing, though according to Novaya Gazeta, most had no idea what that actually meant.115 Free of paperwork and bureaucracy, these movements successfully attracted young people who were often fascinated by the possibility of realizing their desire to fight (Pilkington 2010). Beyond sensational actions, this discursive formation, in part, revolved around the everyday fascism that affected, for instance, foreign students. After the killing of a student from Guinea-Bissau in Voronezh, officials quickly underlined that this was merely the act of ‘marginalized youth’, and some young people stated that life was ‘becoming more and more dangerous and depressing’.116 This discourse also emphasized that racism was a structural problem. However, comments about fascist youth often went along with hopes that youth might be able to deal with the problem themselves. The discursive formation therefore also included youth-based initiatives such as the Mezhdunarodnoe molodezhnoe pravozashchitnoe dvizhenie (International Youth Human Rights Movement) or the Molodezhnaya set’ protiv rasizma i neterpimosti (Youth Network against Racism and Intolerance), which organized solidarity marches to give voice to broader Russian youth. However, these specific acts of solidarity also caused frustration, as one kindergarten teacher explained: ‘One of my boys was killed, a fifth-grader, and there were no protests, nothing was organized. And a neighbour was killed who was still a student. And again, no one protested. And for a foreigner, there is so much noise!’117 Such disruptive youth activities shaped the image of entire cities. One case in point is the transformation of St Petersburg, which went from being the former ‘capital of culture’ to being the ‘capital of fascism’, due to the spread of right-wing extremism.118 The rules of the VIOLENT formation, however, demand that the actions be put in perspective, excused by perpetrators’ living conditions, their lack of ‘normal education’, and an insufficient level of NATIONALIST

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Skinam pozhelali dolgikh let, in Novaya Gazeta, 17 February 2005. ‘Edinaya Rossiya’ sozdaet ‘Moloduyu gvardiyu’, in Novaya Gazeta, 17 October 2005. Ibid. Kto sdelal ‘stolitsu fashizma’ iz goroda-geroya na neve?, in Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 4 July

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provision for leisure activities—for Izvestiya, these deficiencies explained why Russian youth sometimes got out of control.119 At the same time, the dominant PRO-KREMLIN discursive formation constrained the extent to which youth could be criticized since it asserted that youth was inherently POSITIVE. Finally, the Russian discourse did not consider the activism of skinheads to be the only fascist threat. At times, Kommersant accused Nashi’s mobilization of being ‘fascist’. One such instance was the selling of Kommersant toilet rolls, printed with fake Kommersant articles beneath the chief editor’s name, in 2008. Further protests against the paper spread across Moscow, starting at the newspaper’s own headquarters, and were justified as ‘revenge’ for negative press coverage of Nashi.120

4.5.2 Left-Wing Radicals The violence of the non-democratic youth opposition received some attention after the publication of Petr Silaev’s autobiographic account Iskhod (Exodus) under the pseudonym ‘DJ Stalingrad’ in 2010. Silaev was active in the left-wing anarchical scene until 2010, when he had to leave the country, following sometimes violent demonstrations against the destruction of parts of the Khimki forest, to make way for a new stretch of highway around Moscow. Police captured him in Spain in 2012. His highly literary writing retraced his experience and elaborated his political opinions. Although his literary account does not aim at being a sociological analysis, it is striking in its glorification of violence, the nostalgia for the Soviet period, and the consciousness of a generation lost in transition: We are all part of the rotten post-Soviet generation. […] As time passed by all that is left is an abyss of contempt, cynicism, pragmatic nihilism, and tired greed. But the longing for heroism is left somewhere deep inside of us, in myself, in all those other people who still have not renovated their apartment. We had to suffer and die for some cause, but since all that is stupid and does not count any longer, we are just attracted by suffering and death. […] Melancholy is in our blood, we chew pain, and it pulls us into the grave. (D. J. Stalingrad 2011: 68–70)

This excerpt from Silaev’s autobiographic text illustrates a number of important aspects that characterized left-wing activism. He emphasized the existence of a generational consciousness and stressed the importance of the Soviet reference point for the self-conception of many radical left-wing activists. 119 120

‘Rossiya i fashizm—sochetanie chudobishchnoe’, in Izvestiya, 4 May 2006. ‘Likuyushchaya ropota’ v gostyakh u ‘Kommersanta’, in Kommersant, 3 May 2008.

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In this view, the iconic post-Soviet citizen was a victim of the past, of the society in which he was raised and socialized. The Soviet person is my friend […] He does not lie, only plays helplessly with the muscles on his cheek-bones. He silently ages in his cramped apartment and grows a beard. On working days he drinks strong tea, on the weekend, vodka. […] Welcome to the world of the lost, the ugly, the unsociable, the short-sighted ones. This is my home, I do not need another one. (D. J. Stalingrad 2011: 85)

Here, the generational blame is deeply rooted, and directed against all those young people who benefited from the system change and turned their backs on the Soviet ideals: I hate all these people, the entirety of this fucking generation. Everyone who grew up in the 90s, stinking assholes […] I was interrogated by people born in 1988. Dressed in these nastily trendy clothes, stupid coats with gay hairstyles, they were indistinguishable from those blokes that we used to beat up all those years. […] Fuck, all these pillocks should go straight in the oven, the one from Auschwitz, no one is sorry for the entire generation, all those aged between 20 and 25, and I can join them, that is ok. (D. J. Stalingrad 2011: 96–7)

Although Silaev was not a member of AKM and his radical voice is a marginalized one, his attitudes nonetheless seemed to overlap with other left-wing movements. The acceptance of physical risks, which Silaev showed in his activism, could also be frequently encountered in AKM, for instance, when activists could have lost their lives climbing on the Ivan the Great Bell Tower in Moscow, unfolding a banner stating Putin, pora ukhodit! (Putin, it’s time to leave!).121 The boundaries between right-wing and left-wing were ultimately porous in this discursive formation that revolved around the idea of troublesome youth;122 sometimes, the rules of the discourse made it possible to lump all of the ‘opposition’ together, in order to neatly discredit them as done by the oppositional press.123

4.5.3 Youth Out of Control The rules of the VIOLENT discursive formation were also employed beyond the political realm. A 2005 defeat of Russian youth in football against Denmark triggered discussions about the current crisis of youth. Komsomol’skaya Pravda, for example, suggested that the behaviour of youth in this case had 121 122

V Kremle potrebovali otstavki Putina, in Izvestiya, 1 June 2005. 123 See note 113. ‘Ulichnyi protest’, in Novaya Gazeta, 12 January 2006.

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caused trouble, since this loss, accompanied by rowdy behaviour on the pitch, was in fact a disgrace for the entire nation.124 Moreover, as Novaya Gazeta presented it, youth appeared unpredictable when it came to sports, and despite their capability, young people lacked commitment and rigour, so few good trainers wanted to work with them.125 This contradicted the youth picture shaped in the PRO-KREMLIN formation, and served as a warning of what could happen if the state failed in guiding youth. In a milder form, this notion of youth as being irresponsible concerned Russia’s ‘golden youth’, living abroad and supported financially by the money their parents had extracted from Russia’s economic and natural resources in the transition period. One such young person caused a fatal ‘scandalous accident’ in a hit-and-run in Geneva. His irresponsible driving without a licence stirred debate within Russia about the morality of its ‘golden youth’ and the image of Russia that they presented.126 Such discussions also evoked concepts that emphasized the risks inherent in youth and the possibility that its behaviour might be out of control. This section has illustrated the diversity of the discourse around youth, alongside the two highly politicized main formations. To account for the contradictory sense of youth in contemporary Russia, it is important to acknowledge this counter-voice that frames youth as VIOLENT. It anchors a negative vision about youth, which could also be reiterated by the regimeloyal press to discredit the democratic opposition, or to affirm the need to take care of youth to avoid it from turning against society. Such demands were particularly forceful where such rules might link to democratic discordant youth discussed earlier—movements such as My! were then blamed for causing trouble to Russia and undertaking joint actions with other ‘fascists’ in an ‘unnatural alliance’.

4 . 6 Y OUT H IN A C ON S O LIDAT I N G AUTHORITARIA N S YSTEM By 2005, in the increasingly authoritarian setting of Russia’s ‘sovereign democracy’, political youth had become radicalized and a vocal opposition rejected the status quo. In the aftermath of the Ukrainian ‘Orange Revolution’, some 124 125 126

Nasha sbornaya poslala vsyu evropu, in Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 18 November 2005. V sbornoi dolzhny igrat’ svoi, in Novaya Gazeta, 6 September 2010. Delo rossiiskikh likhachei v Shveitsarii, in Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 28 November 2009.

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youth took up the revolutionary call and tried to spread ideas about liberal democracy in Russia. They adopted new techniques of mobilization, and initially were successful in capturing the attention of the broader public. The international dimension was therefore critical for the initial opening up of the discourse at the beginning of the period analysed here. Change abroad had strong repercussions in Russia, since Putin’s regime also felt pressured by the simultaneous home-grown protests of pensioners over the monetization of benefits. Given the perceived proximity between the two countries in terms of history, culture, and the political order, and the close contacts between Russian and Ukrainian activists, the Russian media and politicians saw Ukraine as a potential precedent for what might happen in Russia. Seeing what members of their cohort achieved abroad changed Erwartungshorizonte. Young people felt empowered to overthrow the political leadership. The belief in a Russian ‘Colour Revolution’ pushed some youth to become politically active. However, youth was not only mobilized in support of the ideas of the ‘Orange Revolution’: pro-Kremlin initiatives and other ‘anti-orange’ movements attracted an important segment. The case of Russia thereby illustrates how domestic constraints that hamper political mobilization can be overcome through the power of a foreign example. Although the political conditions hardly changed, constraints that existed before and continued beyond the ‘Orange Revolution’ lost part of their significance for activists, who mobilized regardless of what might have been rationally possible (Weyland 2009: 1152). However, the ultimate impact of the power of example is, importantly, determined by the domestic political context. The first public appearance of Nashi in 2005 demonstrated its patriotic fervour to protect the official national history and to impose a specific interpretation of that history upon Russian memory. The movement’s activists constructed historical continuity by drawing upon well-chosen aspects of Russia’s past. This specific upholding of memory provided the Russian leadership with moral authority, since the success in the Great Patriot War justified the need for a hierarchical authoritarian structuring of society. For youth, the cultivation and reinterpretation of memory helped them to make sense of their existence by finding new meaning in a past that elided the shameful period of transition. Youth kept alive patterns of interpretation that enabled the construction of an image of the historic continuity of youthful heroism. That image also emphasized the historic mission that youth was endowed with during the most important moments of Russia’s history. The visibility of political youth gave rise to a highly politicized discourse on youth, with little discussion about those young Russians who expressed a silent approval of the current political system through non-action. However, as time

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passed and with little visible success, mobilization as youth across the political spectrum, along with the interest of the wider public, shrank. Returning to the hypotheses, I want to underline three points.

4.6.1 Establishing a New Discursive Regime to Reshape the Meaning of Youth The consolidation of political power of the Russian leadership must be placed in the context of a new and well-defined set of youth-related discursive rules. During the period 2005–11, repetition in the media and actual responses in the political behaviour of youth consolidated these rules. From 2005, the receptiveness of youth and its willingness to engage in pro-Kremlin movements provided the new discursive setting with legitimacy and coherence. This contrasts with Russian youth in the transition period of the 1990s, which was simply portrayed as victim of the economic and political changes (Dafflon 2009: 35–8). The PRO-KREMLIN discourse formation identified here presents a clear rupture with that past. Updating certain aspects of the Soviet discourse of a glorified youth, it links youth’s present importance to past achievements, and makes youth responsible for the country’s future. The discourse made it possible to reassess the national past and to draw up a project for the future. I therefore hypothesize that under conditions of crisis, a political regime consolidates its power by dominating discourses about youth (H1).

4.6.2 Co-optation of Youth to Display Popular Support for the Political Regime On the level of the political leadership, a twofold learning process, on the synchronic and the diachronic level, can be observed. Synchronically, Putin and Medvedev realized during the ‘Colour Revolution’ that falsified elections, media manipulation, and phony political parties are insufficient for maintaining political power. The Russian duumvirate understood that the support of the citizens would need to come in a more outspoken, different form than simply through the ballot box, if a ‘Colour Revolution’ was to be avoided. The presence of youth in the public sphere served as an ideal mechanism to silence critiques of the regime’s legitimacy. Looking back, the Russian leadership was able to draw lessons from the contribution of the Komsomol’s disintegration to the downfall of the Soviet Union. It is therefore not the case that Nashi was a

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simple reincarnation of the Komsomol, as suggested in Western and Russian media.127 Rather, the case of the Komsomol served as a warning against losing youth politically, as shall be argued in Chapter 5. Drawing on these two learning processes, Nashi was therefore geared to express the leadership’s power and capacity to deal with destabilizing political factors. Furthermore, this involvement expressed genuine support for the political system (Hemment 2012: 255) and not a mere continuation of an alleged dvusmyslennost’ (double think). Considering the efforts that went into the controlled mobilization of young people during the Russian crisis, I hypothesize that a political regime consolidates its power by mobilizing youth to display popular support for the regime (H2).

4.6.3 The Limited Impact of Mobilization Restricted to Youth The diminishing visibility of youth movements towards the end of the period studied here points to a disillusion with the ‘youth-driven’ change of the ‘Colour Revolutions’. In Ukraine as well as in Georgia, evaluations of these revolutions became more nuanced, which adjusted expectations of how profound political change initiated by youth could be. The contestation which youth carried out in Russia between 2005 and 2008 failed to bring the wider population onto the streets and instead remained confined to youth itself. I hypothesize that young people fail to challenge the existing regime if their mobilization does not expand to other social groups (H3). Over time, two of the most prominent youth leaders of 2005, Dobrokhotov and Yashin, outgrew the status of youth and, although they remain opposition politicians,128 neither of them continues to speak for youth. Given the limited success of youth-based movements, young people who have become involved politically after 2008, instead, have done so alongside the older generation. The discourse of generational conflict has lost its currency. Young people were important during the ‘Russian Winter’ of 2011, but they protested alongside adults who opposed Putin’s system. Similarly, during the few demonstrations against Russia’s 2014 interference in Ukraine, youth did not speak up distinctively as youth. Youth participated in demonstrations after the falsified legislative and presidential elections of 2011–12, but movements that spoke up specifically in the name of youth were absent. My! or Oborona also vanished as the movements’ protagonists outgrew the status of ‘youth’. 127 128

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