Statistical studies of protests voiced by a political scientist and economist Alexei Zakharov in a speech on the Rain television channel and published on Facebook showed a very interesting picture. The core of protests this time was a generation of age 25–35 years. I have been following this age group for a long time, since it belongs to my eldest daughter, as well as many of my former students. About 8-10 years ago, communicating with my daughter’s peers, I noted their extreme apoliticality. They were interested in a lot - business, culture, travel, music, but not politics. And now, unexpectedly, it was this generation that has sharply entered politics. But is this turn so unexpected?

Ten years ago, it seemed to young people who entered an adult life that everything around them was going up. New technologies were rapidly appeared. Russia seemed to regain the lost world positions. Moscow is good, and with it many large cities of the country. There was an Olympics ahead, money poured into the defense industry, the business developed. Students vying up their business ideas shared with me. Many of them wanted to start their job. In these conditions, interest in politics was perceived in the youth environment as the lot of freaks, incapable of a real interesting matter. Ahead of many other social elevators - science, sport, art, business, civil service, finally.

But 10 years passed, and it turned out that much of what the young generation hoped for was left on paper. The Olympiad was “soaked”, the business “nibbled”, science “emasculated”, and art was tied hand and foot. World technologies have become less accessible. Somewhere there, in the distant lands, the handsome Musk launches rockets into space, and Russian youth at that time reads about corruption scandals in Roscosmos, holes in the ISS and the beggarly salaries of engineers.

All social elevators, without exception, turned out to be bluff. The sports career rested on doping and corruption money, art and music - in the absence of a normal market with clear rules of the game, the state was needed only as a free milking cow, science was left without money and states. The only possible way of career is now a civil service. But this is the role of boys on the errand, the highest corruption and the inability to break up, because the upper echelons are occupied by children, and already the grandchildren of the elite sitting upstairs.

And if you do not take into account the penny positions of postmen or librarians, then the most real work in the regions is the Russian Guard, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the contract service in the army. The girls are a difficult profession of sellers. The lot of the rest is an informal sector.

The saddest thing is that, according to most forecasts, many years of stagnation, a further lag from developed countries and the complete absence of any prospects ahead. And most young people in our country are more and more aware of this. The strongest film of Navalny and his detention served as a powerful trigger for all the negative that has accumulated in the young generation.

Unfortunately, this is very poorly aware of this. Otherwise, on the eve of people to enter the streets of cities, a proposal of Vladimir Putin would not be published to cancel the limit for the age for him. But the top of the country lives on its own calendars, as political scientist Ekaterina Shulman likes to say, and this decision was not connected for them either with protests, or Alexei Navalny, or the future of our youth. Only now youth sees all this - the lack of social elevators, and monstrous corruption, and future gerontocracy.

And it goes to the streets not only for Alexei Navalny, but also for his future, which they were deprived of.

A decade of disappointments for young people