The ice is melting

The new face of protest! The first free generation! Children's Crusade! No matter how you feel about the protests on March 26, you probably already know that a young and more or less unfamiliar tribe took to the streets: the expert consensus that the driving force behind the action were people of high school age formed instantly.

Various conclusions have already been drawn from this knowledge: what the new generation, devoid of fear, will now show everyone; that it will gradually merge from the stage, just as the previous ones merged; that it was brought about by the collective Mizulina with traditional values; that he was not given enough warmth by his AP curators, who cut the budget for pro-Kremlin youth movements; yes, surely the opportunity to see Medvedev once a year on Seliger would have solved all the questions for teenagers. One way or another, everyone agrees that the key to these protests - their understanding, development or overcoming - lies in the backpack of a Tomsk or Bryansk fifth-grader.

This position is convenient for everyone: from the point of view of the authorities, this is not a mass movement, but nonsense, movement for the sake of movement; there is no need to take it seriously - it is enough to isolate the instigators, lower the age of criminal responsibility and transfer the matter to the RONO and children's rooms of the police. You can also ban something on the Internet, they say, the blue whale has gotten loose. For government personnel, this is a convenient opportunity to get a budget for the patriotic Katya Klap or a comic book about the “man-Volodin.” For the liberal establishment, this is the hope of harnessing new energy, leading it and directing it: look, the movement has no program and plan of action - and then again, the PARNAS party. In general, if a new generation has appeared that listens to video bloggers and is not afraid of riot police, we need to work with them; the tasks are clear, the methods are clear, let's go.

It is clear that the action on March 26 will go down in history as the “Shkolota uprising”; this cannot be corrected, although it seems that there is more propaganda in this thesis than understanding. In photographs and videos from rallies, especially in Russian cities, teenagers are not exactly the overwhelming majority - but the image of a Tomsk fifth-grader reading out the Russian development program to the protesters interrupts the objective data. Then, for the authorities there is nothing better than to tie the protest movement to a certain narrow segment; in the same way, near-state media once created the myth of Bolotnaya as a whim of the capital’s creative class, which is terribly far from the people. And the generational conflict is an even more understandable and even friendly matrix: did the children go out into the street? It’s okay, they’ll get over it, the stupidity will pass.

And all this does not bring us any closer to answering the question of what it was.

What is most striking about this action is its style, the small differences that become noticeable in comparison with the same Bolotnaya. No pathos - “The best people have gathered here, who overcame fear and retained their conscience”; no, no, they're just people. No self-winding - “Putin on the bunk”, “The Kremlin is afraid of us”; This is all the rhetoric of last season. There is no fear - they enter the paddy wagon as if they were entering a subway, the riot police are perceived as part of the landscape. Even in relation to the formal occasion of the action, there is no hysteria - not “Corrupt officials to the wall!”, but “Corruption is stealing our future.” Feeling of calm strength.

Another traditional rhetorical device that comes up in discussions of rallies is why did you protest against this and not that? Now, if people took to the streets for the freedom of political prisoners (Putin’s resignation, reform of the FSB, return of Crimea, a speedy solution to housing and communal services problems) - then yes, it would be worth listening to them, but this is all frivolous. But let’s proceed from what we have: Navalny brought people out onto the street, and the reason was a video about Dimon. No matter how you look at it, this is a tremendous media success - a little less views than the last video of the group “Mushrooms”, a little more than the last “Leningrad”, somewhere on the level of programs about Shurygina; plus viral spread in Odnoklassniki, where it’s definitely not a student. The video about Medvedev touched layers that even the name “Navalny” had never reached before; judging by my personal conversations with relatives and friends from different cities, it does not turn people into supporters of Navalny (or even opponents of the current regime), but it causes annoyance and bewilderment. You can search for a long time for the reasons why, of all the investigations, it was the video about Medvedev that worked so well, but the answer is most likely simple: Medvedev is the most famous, he is responsible for the economy, he calculates pensions. In the end, he did not respond to this video. And in the media environment where all his viewers have existed for a long time, this is a sign of weakness. The drain is counted.

It is also important to understand why this video causes annoyance and bewilderment. The already traditional propaganda line of defense against Navalny’s investigations, which turns on almost automatically, is to report that the object of the investigation does not violate the requirements of the current legislation, and only Sharikov’s heirs, who want to take away and divide everything, can be indignant about palaces and private planes. But it seems that this rhetoric is also from a different era - it seems to imply that people envy palaces and yachts and want the same ones for themselves. This is wrong. Palaces don't annoy people because they're illegal, and if the Deputy Prime Minister flies corgis around on a private jet, the problem isn't that he doesn't have the right to do so. It's just not pretty. Indecent. Unworthy. It's the 21st century, they don't wear that anymore.

As Konstantin Gaaze correctly notes , the term “corruption” in this protest campaign should be understood in a broad sense: it is not just illegal enrichment - it is damage, corruption; the claims against the ruling class here are not in the legal plane, this is a problem of ethics, style, way of life. The fact that the painful point was not Crimea, not political prisoners, not the power of the security forces, not even the figure of the president, once again proves that this is not a conflict between the opposition and the authorities, and certainly not a confrontation between fathers and sons. This is a conflict at the value level, two worlds are moving in different directions - the urban middle class of the 2010s and the elites stuck in the 90s.

From the point of view of the former, all these palaces and yachts are simply not cool. It's cool to get a good education. It's cool to be able to run a marathon. It's cool to wear clothes that just look like clothes. It’s cool to work as a volunteer and generally do some good deed not for profit. It's cool to work with kids. Cool - this is Zuckerberg, Justin Trudeau, Durov, after all. Navalny is close to his audience rather stylistically - he reads books, walks in the park with children, goes to the cinema on weekends; rhetoric like “If he gets to power, he will also steal” does not work against him, despite all the vagueness of his political program, he is one of his own (and his vagueness in the political sense is the same as everyone else’s). And all these private jets with decorative dogs and yachts with silicone blondes are kindergarten, the Stone Age. Indecent.

If young people have any priority positions in the current conflict, it is only that they feel these stylistic differences better, at the level of instinct. And they make her angrier.

It’s not very clear what the authorities can say to these people today - well, minus the traditional rhetoric of Bryansk teachers: you were paid, you are not patriots. It's not that propaganda doesn't work anymore—it probably already did; the next generation is not very concerned about the issue of Crimea’s ownership, expresses every respect for the May 9 holiday and other traditions, but then what? What can you say to a person who has some doubts that in the foreseeable future he will be able to earn money for housing, educate and treat his children, and generally ensure a decent standard of living at which he can respect himself? That NATO is squeezing its fingers around its throat, gays are undermining the foundations, they want to return us to the 90s, so go to a concert in honor of the anniversary of Crimea, where singer Trofim will sing to you about how our ancestors fought off the Western evil spirits? Thanks, but this is a cheap trick; NATO does not interfere with your duck house.

Writer Alexey Tsvetkov Jr. recently offered a biting formulation explaining the current processes: “People who control financial flows manage people in search of identity.” Judging by what the new middle class is watching, listening to, and discussing on the Internet, even this formulation is a little outdated. Everyone has more or less figured out identity - music videos, fashion shoots, popular TV series, the film “Bitter” and the film “Attraction” paint a similar picture: yes, we live in a rather tough country, it is strong in some ways and unsettled in many ways, it has gopniks and panel high-rise buildings, it is impossible to make a heavenly Stockholm or even a metaphysical Canada out of it, but we can live in it.

All the high-profile discussions of recent years on social networks are precisely about defining, so to speak, the norms of cohabitation: these are disputes about what cannot be said and how one cannot act in relation to women, students, people with disabilities, people of other social status and property level, etc. who came for a walk in the center from a residential area. People who have decided on their identity are trying to find the rules for living together - and gradually, as best they can, they begin to send signals to the people who control financial flows: we will live in our country, according to such and such rules and on such and such grounds. Just let us and you will live in it.