the times | Tuesday March 15 2022 31
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Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826This generational struggle for Russia’s soul
Young people with iPhones, Instagram and dreams of a future are standing up to old men dragging them back to the past
this, I suppose you’d find it in those
haunting black and white images of
young Afghan women in miniskirts,
or of hippy Iranians in flares before- The more obvious parallel, of
blue jeans and rock’n’roll ripping
holes into the Iron Curtain, doesn’t
quite work. Even when young East
Berliners watched, say, Bruce
Springsteen in 1988, they were seeing
what they wanted, not what they’d
already known but abruptly lost.
What you do have though, clearly, is a
familiar dynamic of young people who
can see a future, and old men hellbent
on dragging them back to the past.
We’ve grown accustomed, in the
past decade, to projecting softness
and fecklessness onto millennials, as
if their very futurism — their social
performances and their blithe
connectivity; their internationalism
and easy travel — comes, inevitably,
with a lack of conviction, backbone
and mettle. I’m not sure how many
more young, Instagram-ready
Ukrainian MPs we have to see,
chopping off their nailjobs to better
hold an AK-47, before we realise that
this has always been nonsense.
Either way, there’s a new curtain
coming down, whatever it is made of,
and I don’t see much chance of
Vladimir Putin convincing even the
most politically apathetic of young
Russians that they’re on anything
other than the wrong side of it. Shirt
off or shirt on.
cultural space as their western peers.
Or rather, they did. Yes, many will
still wrangle access via tech tricks,
but as spectators in somebody else’s
world. True, a Russian Instagrammer
can always shift to Telegram, but
that’s like telling somebody who
dreams of a Mercedes-Benz to make
do with a Lada.
I’m not suggesting that Putin will
fall because young Russians find it
harder to post bathroom selfies. Not
quite. Extrapolate it out, though, to aRussian future without iPhones,
without Coke, without fashion labels,
without western music, without
Hollywood films, without
international travel, and without the
freedom to even complain about it,
and you do wonder. Indeed, you also
wonder if this isn’t, in a sense,
precisely what Ukrainians are
fighting for, and why they are
fighting so hard. For 32 years, they
have tasted the world. Now comes
the old oppressor from the East,
determined to wrest them out of it.
Just like young Russians, but unlike
many older ones, they know precisely
what it is that they have to lose.
If there’s a historical parallel forChelmsford or Santa Monica, and
sometimes in Izmir or Bialystok. Not
Yekaterinburg or Vladivostok,
though. Not any more.
Many, many big brands have
pulled out of Russia in the past
fortnight. With social media brands,
interestingly enough, the pressures
work in the opposite direction: they
have a moral imperative to stay, but
the Kremlin wants them out.
Facebook and Twitter were both
blocked a couple of weeks ago.
Instagram was severed on Sunday,
leaving 60 million Russian users with
nowhere to post their pouts.
“The tears were flowing Sunday
among Russia’s airbrushed Instagram
influencers,” was how The Washington
Post put it, while Mail Online went
for: “War is hell: Russian influencer
whines about her lost income.” I’m
not sure it is actually all that funny. I
also think the Kremlin, once again,
might not quite understand how
badly it has messed up.
Russia is not China. In Beijing, the
authorities have dealt with the
liberalising threat of the internet by
largely blocking it out and building
their own. As a result, online Chinese
life centres around websites — Baidu,
Weibo, Douyin — of which most in
the West have barely heard. Russia
hasn’t done this. There they have
hacked and spied, but also dived right
in. As a result, young Russians now
dwell enthusiastically in the sameI
appreciate this may sound
absurd, but I do find it useful to
remember that Vladimir Putin
was born in the same year as
Patrick Swayze and David
Hasselhoff. At 69, he’s a solid baby-
boomer, and sometimes it shows.
Yes, those famous half-naked
photographs have always been
ludicrous — his combat trousers are
far too high, it’s all a bit Simon
Cowell, and who goes fishing like
that, and where on Earth does he
keep his worms? But the sentiment is
unsubtle and entirely generational.
Masculinity means muscle and meat.
At a mere 44, meanwhile,
Volodymyr Zelensky is a late
Generation X, right on the cusp of
Millennialism. That tells you
something, too. It’s not that he is
without artifice — he’ll have thought
about that wartime stubble — but
the direction of it is just so very
different. If there is a photo of
Zelensky to match the iconography
of Putin looking like Spam poking
out of a sock, it is probably that one
of him with his wife and kids.
They’re all giggling, and he’s wearing
superhero facepaint. A veteran men’s
magazine editor once told me of the
abrupt generational shift between
older men who never mentioned
their kids and younger ones who,
from the moment they first put on a
BabyBjörn, found such reticence
baffling. It makes me think of that.
Among the many prisms through
which one can see the war in
Ukraine is as a generational struggle.
And it crosses borders. Within Russia
itself, we know, younger people
support the war far less than their
elders. Simplistically, this seems to be
because they have different
information; the old rely on state-run
TV broadcasts, the younger gather
their news online. The differencebetween life online and off, though,
is not purely informational.
Forget news, for a moment. You do
not need to delve deeply into, say,
Instagram or TikTok to come across
a world seemingly populated by a
trillion identical men lifting weights,
or gazillion women all with the same
hair and clothes, all walking slowly
towards their own bathroom mirrors.
Sometimes they will be inYoung Russians dwell
in the cultural space
of their western peers
There’s a new curtain
now coming down,
whatever it is made of
Hugo
Rifkind@hugorifkind