Putin will be removed by 30-year-olds

On the day before Christmas, I had the opportunity to take a walk around the suburbs of St. Petersburg. I was in Petrodvorets, watching families walking in Peterhof Park. I saw them in the pompous restaurant "Vienna" and the noisy "Wasabi". I looked at them and listened. And I finally felt that I could responsibly say that Putin will be removed by thirty-year-olds.

Now, in these years, the first generation is approaching its thirties, with little memory of the Soviet Union. The first generation to grow up hearing stories about democracy, human rights and a decent future. The first generation that knew freedom and did not know communal slavery. It is also excellent in that it received its education at a time when private universities and various institute charades were flourishing. At a time when paid educational places poured into the market, thousands of murky universities. We are the first generation for whom higher education has become almost universally accessible. And even though they received diplomas at these universities somehow and on their knees, they still taught something there. Probably the same freedom, liberalism. A university, even the most provincial and corrupt, is still a hotbed of freethinking.

And now those who passed this hotbed first are approaching their 30th anniversary. They are approaching the age of maturity with its mature problems and concerns. To the age when it’s time to put the first crown on a tooth, when the first serious diseases appear. When children go to school, and parents grow old and require treatment. About thirty is the age when people have already lived with a mortgage for a couple of years and even took out a car loan. When they were already abroad, they saw strikes in Spain, demonstrations in Greece or pogroms in Egypt.

These people are under thirty, and through their new problems and realities they are just beginning to understand that they have absolutely no social protection. Teeth are expensive, serious illnesses cannot be cured for free, you can’t go on sick leave for long, because the Labor Code is violated and you can be thrown out into the street at any moment. For the same reason you won't give birth to a second child. They live with their loans in fear, because they understand that they are not protected by anyone or anything. Their parents are getting sick more and more often, and now 30-year-olds find out how expensive medicine is, how long the queues at the clinic are, and how mercilessly they rip off people in hospitals.

The children went to school - parents are faced with new expenses: textbooks, uniforms, fees for extracurricular activities and gymnastics lessons. If there is a second child, then it is difficult to survive: kindergarten is expensive, there are still the same fees for educational games, dancing, theater clubs. And from this year, fees in kindergartens will jump significantly.

In general, we have a generation that, having reached adulthood, will fully feel the entire dissonance between the values ​​that were instilled in them in childhood in the ruins of perestroika, and the values, or rather, the devaluation of human life in modern Russia. Until they got sick, until their children grew up and their parents grew old, they did not see this monstrous injustice, powerlessness, and social impasse. Now they have their noses in it.

And they, I am sure, will be the first to join the political protest. Or they will take to the streets themselves, and the political opposition will run after them. And I am sure that these people, people of my generation, will demand not a reshuffle in power, but systemic changes. And it will be impossible not to listen to them, because the children of the baby boom era will take to the streets. There are many of them, because in the early 80s they gave birth without foreseeing the stagnation of the end.

I just hope that by the time they finally boil, when something like Krymsk, the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station or a plane crash happens in Russia, and the thirty-year-olds come out, society will be ready. Coming out and demanding is not a big trick. Will Russia have the strength to control the new government? If civil society does not emerge by then, a new oligocracy awaits us, at best, with the same figures in prominent places. At worst, we get civil terror and dictatorship. This is how all democratic transformations end. There are no mass examples where a dark society, as a result of an explosive democratic revolution, would bring the worthy into power and retain democracy. Unfortunately, it’s the other way around: all the worst dictators came to power through legal means, elected in fair elections after severe socio-economic upheavals. If we don’t have time to grow up before the regime disappears, the same rake awaits us. No illusions.

Merry Christmas to you all. I will repeat my New Year's wish. I have no doubt that the 30-year-olds will soon leave and Putin will leave. He will run away, hang himself... I wish you not to get confused by that time and be vigilant, because nothing will end with Putin’s departure. Rather, everything is just beginning.