The Generational Divide in Eastern Europe: the Stability Generation (The Youth)

I readily admit that “Stability Generation” isn’t a moniker that will ever stick in the public consciousness. But, I chose the term to highlight the stark difference in society that the younger generations grew up in. Those who spent their conscious, formative years in the Putin period of relative stability are quite different from the generations that preceded them. Basically, people who were children in the 90s or 00s and who have entered young adulthood now, grew up in a Russia that was on the upswing. Once the Chechen problem was solved, stability returned to the country and the real economy began to recover in ways that improved the quality of life for the average Russian.

In Ukraine, in contrast, the stability period never really materialized. Yes, the economy generally recovered some from the shocks of the 90s, but the organized looting never ended and political turmoil only intensified as time went on. This had notable ripple effects on average Ukrainians, who became far more demoralized as the years went by and fled the country in droves. It is hard to imagine it, but Ukraine used to have a population of 50+ million souls. Some analysts put the number at 27 million now, but estimates vary. This is a shocking statistic to even consider.

What happened to all those people? Well, they either emigrated or died, I suppose. Not many new Ukrainians were born in the post-USSR period, either.

In Belarus, in contrast, the period of instability was less intense and stabilized quicker because of Lukashenko, who, for all his flaws and habit of playing footsie with the West from time to time, refused to let national assets and industries be dismembered and sold to foreigners for pennies. Having a strong leader during a time of crisis pays dividends, does it not?

Generally speaking, the youth who grew up in the stability period in Russia and Belarus are more or less normal people. They don’t have ideological “cockroaches in their head” as the expression goes i.e., they don’t have a set of bizarre political complexes at war with reality running around their heads. That means that they’re not really participants in the never-ending pro-USSR vs anti-USSR ideological debate that dominates Russian political discourse and for the most part largely eschew regular politics. Putin isn’t going anywhere and besides, the only serious opposition party in Russia has always been the Communists, and the youth weren’t going to go out into the streets waving red flags. They got enough of that at home from their grandparents. That being said, many of them are possessed with an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West like the generation that preceded them. But if the Bariga generation is militant in its aggressive pro-Western posturing, the younger people have less of a knee-jerk anti everything related to the USSR and Russia mentality.

Yes, things were going well for awhile with the youth, and I had high hopes for the future of Russia based on my interactions with this generation. They had few of the bad characteristics of either the Sovoks or Barigas and were generally optimistic about the world and their place in it.

But then it all began to change.

Eastern Europe has benefitted, unbeknownst to itself, from a “cultural lag” and from the unintended positive effects of the Iron Curtain, which cut off ties between East and West. Trends started in the West by Hollywood or the CIA or MI6 used to take decades to make their way over to the USSR. My parents only saw Star Wars in 1991, for example. But that cultural lag has started to wear off and what may have taken decades to permeate Slav society is now flooding in at an alarming, transformative rate.

Eastern Europe was blissfully insulated from the SJW craze for a time — they were still watching the old Terminator films and talking about cowboys and gangsters when I made my way over in 2014. America was seen as a cool and macho place overflowing with fun and guns and easy sex and not much else. When I started sounding the alarm about SJWism to my friends all the way back in 2015, I received only scoffs of unbelief that such a thing could even exist.

“No-no-no, you don’t understand. It’s like Marxism, really. Instead of Proles and Bougies though, it’s Blacks and Whites, Gays and Normals, and so on.”

Nowadays, SJWism has already made its inroads into youth culture. You see rainbow flags and pins on the backpacks of young girls sitting at trendy cafes. Metrosexuality is quite popular as a fashion trend among big-city young men and there has been a veritable explosion of interest in elective sexual identities among both boys and girls. Being pro-Ukraine has become trendy as well, with the Ukrainian flag coming to symbolize Human Rights Freedom Democracy™ and opposition to Russia’s oppressive and backwards conservative culture. Coffee shops routinely play Ukrainian rock music like Okean Elzy (not bad, actually) to signal their support for Kiev and their hatred for their own country.

These trends used to be confined to places like Kiev and Minsk and Moscow and St. Petersburg. However, because of smartphones and apps like Tinder and Instagram, this culture has become accessible in even far-flung places like Barnaul (Siberia), which I visited half-expecting to find Hyperboreans walking around in furs and animal pelts, but instead ended up spending my time talking about K-Pop stars with trendy Vans-wearing local students at the anti-cafe (a coffee-shop where you pay for time instead of drinks). University towns are where these alarming trends are most visible. There is an almost one-to-one correlation between English-language penetration and progressive views. Young Russians who know English well almost all display the warning signs of latent SJWism, which they no doubt acquired through their Netflix subscription or reading the various fashion/trend magazines in English.

This is made worse by English-language cultural content being translated into Russia by media outfits geared to the youth like Medusa and The Village. Both have been shut down, thankfully, within Russia since the special operation began.

Of course, the situation is nowhere near as bad as it is in America, for example, but the general trend isn’t good. Central Moscow and St. Petersburg are hotspots of rabid anti-Russian hatred and opposition politics. As soon as the special operation was announced, throngs of students went out to protest and get man-handled by the police. Because of the swift, illiberal response from the OMON, these protests were quickly quashed. But these are very bad optics on the part of the Russian government — young people getting beaten up by riot cops isn’t exactly a PR victory.

Naturally, instead of investing in a patriotic youth movement, the Kremlins in their infinite wisdom, decided to do literally nothing over the years to work with the youth and so ceded the future of the country to the malign influence of Western media. This means that spending an afternoon wandering around Moscow’s trendy youth hotspots is akin to spending time in Brooklyn, albeit with far less diversity, thankfully. Luckily for the Russian government, the youth doesn’t really vote with any consistency and hasn’t rallied behind an opposition candidate to date, although Alexey Navalny came close to capturing that youth energy with his antics.

Why was Navalny successful with the youth? Well, unlike the standard run-of-the-mill Russian politicians, he had Western-educated advisors with deep pockets and experience running color revolution ops advising him to utilize the internet and to tailor his message to appeal to the youth. In other words, unlike other political figures, he actually tried. The youth, eternally gullible and naive, rallied behind an actual bariga from the older Bariga generation who had gotten caught embezzling money on two separate occasions (the perfume and the forest scandals) and then had the gall to run on an anti-corruption platform. Ah, to be young…

But what problems do the youth face? What issues do they want addressed?

Well, the problems that the youth face in Eastern Europe are pretty much identical to the problems that the youth in the West face, even if we factor in the grotesque ethnic grievance agenda aimed at Western Whites by Jews and brown people. Anti-Russianness, however, is largely confined to the universities and isn’t actively promoted by the major media like in the West. On the economic front, the Russian youth can’t afford housing and unlike in America, credit is quite tight. A loan for a starter apartment usually comes with 12–16% interest. There are few jobs and even fewer jobs that pay well. Gone are the days of Soviet macroeconomic stability and gone are the days when one could steal enough for a personal nest egg. Programming is the only real field for a smart Russian without connections to make some money and set himself up for middle-class stability later on in his life. The youth go to universities where they get useless degrees and a good dose of Liberal propaganda much like their Western counterparts (albeit without the crushing debt) and then realize that a lifetime of service economy drudgery awaits them. Some of them decide to take to the streets, I suppose.

Also, many young people come from broken homes and are the product of single-mommery and divorce drama. Relationships between the sexes are strained, but not quite as bad as in the West. Toxic feminism has been growing at an exponential rate in Russia with negative effects for both women and men. It has become fashionable to go to a psychologist and start taking anti-depressants SSRIs — an alarming trend, and one that the parents remain largely ignorant of. Designer drugs are readily available and cheap and popular (“metadron,” in particular). Tattoo culture is also widespread and ubiquitous, especially among the women, as is Western gangster rap, although there’s plenty of “Russian” degenerate music from rappers like Oxxxymiron (Jewish) to choose from as well.

Again, if we were to compare this with the West, it’s simply a difference of cultural lag and scale.

If you want to know what trendy big-city Russians will look and act like in 5 years time, simply look at how they act in the West now and wait. There is no meaningful local counter-culture pushing back against these trends as of yet. Political pundits on TV will occasionally whine about the youth, but seem genuinely baffled that WWIIism and old Soviet movies are not enough to reverse the trend. Parents don’t know what to do or generally don’t care enough to intervene.

The trend is bleak, but that doesn’t mean that the youth is lost entirely — far from it. In the West, there are many young men who have begun rebelling against the culture of hedonism and self-destruction promulgated by the Jewish culture-creators. So too, in Russia, there are many young men who are disgusted by what they see occurring in their country. Only, we have yet to see an analogous youth cultural movement like the meme-right appearing anywhere in Eastern Europe.

However, I believe that the war will have a positive effect on youth culture in Russia.

Not only are many Liberal media projects being shut down, but many Russians are waking up to the fact that the people running the West hate them and want them dead. Young veterans from the war will start trickling back into civil society and will contribute to the overall level of “basedness” as well. Because this war is popular, unlike the war in Afghanistan, for example, the prestige of the military in society will only grow as a result. Hopefully this translates into increased political power as well. I’d like to see popular military figures running for office and demanding to be put in charge of key industries and civil institutions once the conflict dies down. Russia used to be run by military men, not by the merchant class and its time to RVTVRN to tradition as far as I’m concerned.

Other than that, what else can I say?

Things could be better, I suppose. But they could be worse, to be fair, as well. There aren’t really that many young people to make much of a dent in the cultural landscape of Russia, really. Also, current reproductive rates indicate that there will be even fewer young people in a generation’s time and I see little to indicate that this generation will start having large families any time soon. In 2021, there was were either 1.5 or 1.82 births per woman, depending on what statistics are to be believed.

Luckily, neither Russia or Ukraine or Belarus have begun a society-wide program of population replacement like the governments of the West have. In fact, the number of non-White migrants seems to have precipitously fallen in all these countries as a result of recent events, but the official statistics (for what they’re worth) have been delayed this year and we don’t know for sure yet.

In other words, the situation is grim, but it’s far from hopeless.

I want to conclude this series by pointing out that both Western and Eastern Whites are in a civilizational death spiral. There is, however, the faintest glimmer of hope for Eastern Europe because there are still organized forces in society that are capable of standing up to the power of the Global Oligarchy. Both Putin and Lukashenko seem hell-bent on surviving and not meeting the same fate as Hussein and Ghadaffi. The military by and large remains a bastion of Spartan conservatism and martial stoicism. A vast hinterland of rednecks and hicks still retains the capacity to turn up their noses in disgust at the behavior of the big-city people.

If Russia can prevent the youth from falling for the cultural brainwashing coming from the West, and if the country survives the NATO onslaught, the situation may very well still be salvaged.