By Boris Kagarlitsky
MOSCOW — The left in Russia is not extremely popular among young people, but this does not mean that neo-liberalism is.
During the '90s, young people, students in particular, earned the reputation of being very apolitical. It is true that they suffered less during economic "reform", were able to adjust faster to the changing social and economic conditions, and were more capable of finding occasional opportunities to earn money.
During the Chechen War, the students tried to avoid military service, but there was no strong anti-war movement. When the war was over, the ruling elite thought the "student problem" was also over.
The regime and its neo-liberal ideologues saw the new generation (especially its educated members) as their passive supporters and a reserve of the "loyal middle class". They were therefore shocked when student protests erupted in Ekaterinburg last month and spread all over the country.
In Ekaterinburg, student protests started on April 14 and continued for about a week. Young people vehemently opposed the government's view that education should be paid for and privatised. They wanted it to stay free and public. In reality, the quality of private education in Russia is so low that even people who can afford it prefer traditional state-run institutions.
The students were also sure that education is a right, not a privilege. Finally, they were unhappy that, instead of paying them subsidies, the government wants students to pay their own way by taking waged working while studying. Such policy would mean social apartheid: working-class young people could not enrol in those faculties where full-time study is essential.
The students were united. Even the privileged students from better-off families joined the protests, a new phenomenon which shocked the pro-establishment commentators and was characterised in the media as a type of betrayal.
What shocked them even more, however, was the use of force in Ekaterinburg.
Russian troops bombing Grozny or police dispersing hungry workers and beating "communist radicals" — that is OK. But when the same brutal methods were used to disperse students, including the children of "good families", the establishment media did not hesitate to condemn police violence. Police officers were forced to repent in public and the authorities were forced to negotiate.
Right-wing journalist Andrey Cherkizov, who tried to assert the right of the police force "to protect itself against student violence", received no support from his colleagues or audience. When Cherkizov asked his (usually politically loyal) audience to call the studio to support his thesis that young people must work hard (rather than demand educational subsidies) and that the police did the right thing "kicking their stupid heads", the great majority of those who called disagreed.
Even Cherkizov's (accurate) description of students carrying a red flag and the slogan "Today we come with slogans, tomorrow we'll come with guns" didn't change the mood of the audience, which sympathised with the students.
On April 18, the National Student Forum was opened in Moscow. Students from different parts of the country came together to express their support for the principles of free and public education.
The forum received a lot of positive press coverage, even though its left-wing orientation was clear from the beginning: the organising committee was dominated by members of the Komsomol [formerly the Communist Party youth organisation]. Daria Mitina, a Komsomol member of the Duma, plus many other leftists were elected to the leadership of the Russian Student Movement, launched by the forum. The only member of the leadership who is not a leftist is a social democrat.
The student radicalisation is an important symptom of the change that is occurring in Russian left politics. Since 1990, the left in general lacked new activists. Now, for the first time in years, more young people are getting involved in socialist politics.
The Leftist University in Moscow, a system of free political education classes for young people, has been very successful, and over the last year the membership of the Komsomol increased from 15,000 to 20,000.
These developments indicate that more people are realising that the neo-liberal theory of the new generation reaping the rewards of capitalism is simply not true. As young people get older they find they confront the same problems as earlier generations.
At the same time, young people are becoming fed up with the corruption and injustice of Boris Yeltsin's regime. While the Communist Party is clearly not interested in the students, more students are becoming interested in communism and will find their own methods of struggle.