Abstract
This article deals with the problem of political participation and public sphere learning by adolescents during the mass protests in contemporary Russia and Ukraine. Referring to theories of contentious politics and the public sphere in the post-communist world, the author highlights the debate around the relations between private and public in this context: is the value of public participation formed in the private sphere and then translated into a public one? Or rather, is the public realm something opposite to the private? Using in-depth biographical interviews with the adolescents participating in the Bolotnaya and Maidan movements, the author considers this dilemma through the lens of activists’ socialization. The analysis discovers that there is no direct connection between the values of private independence and public freedom during the growing-up process of adolescent activists. The values of private independence appropriated by Russian adolescents do not automatically translate into practices in the public sphere, and, conversely, Ukrainian activists strongly adhere to an ethic of political freedom, but to do it they prefer to break with the values of the private sphere rather than transfer them into politics. To conclude, the author discusses some implications of the analysis of political participation of adolescents on how notions of private and public are composed in Russia and Ukraine.
Yes, I’m for fair elections. I even have a white ribbon. But I think that underage people are not welcome at rallies. Especially at ‘contemporary’ ones. Parents are in charge of underage people. They have no opinion by law. Did you see what kind of people participated in Maidan? There were not just minors, but even 10-year old kids. Ten-year-old kids scurried, trundled tyres, made Molotov cocktails! This is their future, you see?
Introduction
For the past several years two huge mobilizations have emerged in the post-Soviet region. In 2011–2012 in Russia, thousands of people came onto the streets demanding the annulment of the parliamentary election results and later, for Putin’s resignation; in Maidan Square in Kyiv, Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered in 2013–2014 to protest against the corrupt Yanukovych government. For Russia, it was the first nationwide anti-governmental mobilization for 20 years, while Ukrainian citizens had already experienced the ‘Orange Revolution’ 10 years previously. Thus, the mobilizations took place in different political climates: protest politics in Russia was not only marginalized, but also actively stigmatized by the population (Gudkov and Dubin, 2007; Prozorov, 2008; Zhuravlev, 2015); on the contrary, in Ukraine it was more common for rank-and-file citizens, though not being a part of everyday political culture (Centre for Society Research, 2012, 2014; Ishenko, 2013; Kuzio, 2015). Nevertheless, both mobilizations were radical in terms of participants’ claims in wanting to destroy previous political regimes (Ukraine) and their distrust of the state and ruling power as such (Russia). Both consisted of, for the most part, newcomers with no previous political experience. How did such a huge number of people, especially those who were younger and socialized in societies where protest was a rather marginal phenomenon, suddenly become members of radical movements?
In his book Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences, Ulrich Beck writes about a new modernity after the collapse of communism and the emergence of a new ‘apolitical’ generation (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). He insists that the individualized values of the West have infiltrated the former communist world and a new type of self-consciousness has formed among post-communist youth, with values of self-realization crucial for the new generation – explaining why there is an increase in the value of personal freedom in post-socialist societies. Young people dislike formalized politics (e.g. trade unions and parties), but the values of personal private freedom (internalized democracy, as Beck calls them) still foster their commitment to public space, where ‘an inner kinship exists between the values of self-development and the ideal of democracy’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 162). Other researchers are, however, much more sceptical about the expansion of private values of self-realization and personal freedom in post-communist societies. Sergey Prozorov (2008) describes the connection between the ‘exodus’ of people to the private sphere during late socialism and their passivity, disorientation and alienation from public politics in the beginning of the new post-communist era. Marc Howard (2003) also opposes the idea of individualized private values preventing people from public participation and civil society formation. Howard (2003) argues that civil society is so weak in post-communist countries because of the expansion of the private sphere and its associated values. Therefore, how do young people learn to be politically active? Do they transfer values of self-realization, self-reliance and participation from the private sphere into a public one, as Beck argues? Or do they rather break with their private experience to attain public freedom, as Prozorov or Howard suggest? No one really knows how the private values of personal freedom ‘might be combined into a political statement and action pointing beyond the present day’, as Beck puts it (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 252). This article deals with this dilemma by analysing an empirical study of the political socialization of adolescents during the emergence of mass movements in Russia and Ukraine.
Theories of the public sphere link notions of freedom and dependency, the notion of place and – implicitly – the growing-up process. Hannah Arendt (1998) defines the private realm as the sphere of dependency inside the household, a space traditionally reserved for women and children. At the same time, public space is, like the Agora in Ancient Greece, the place where free adult men gather and act together to govern their community’s life. Nina Eliasoph (1998), criticizing the sexist implications of Arendt’s theory, argues that ‘Arendt’s division of the world into “instrumental” and “housekeeping” efforts vs. lofty, non-instrumental public life would collapse if she thought about how children and children’s education fitted into her division’. I would go even further and say that the person who can undermine this division is not necessarily a child, but an adolescent. According to the critical sociology of childhood, children are consistently excluded from public (‘adult’) space and embedded in the private realm of households (Alanen, 1992; Christensen and James, 2008; Ennew, 1994). The transition from being part of the private realm into public life occurs during the growing-up process when a child becomes an adult, and the question of how this transition can be possible is absent in Arendt’s approach as well as in the majority of theories of the public sphere. 1 Adolescents are those for whom values of independence and freedom are both problematic and important: society expects them to be grown-up and as independent as adults, while often simultaneously treating them like children. This is why a study of adolescents’ political socialization can, from the point of view of how values of public freedom and participation are acquired, contribute significantly to the understanding of how the transition from private to public and the political learning process as such happen.
Literature review
Political socialization and participation in the public sphere of adolescents and children are widely studied in political and social science. Studies of political socialization most often focus on how different institutions influence the political attitudes of young people (Jennings and Niemi, 1974; Niemi and Sobieszek, 1977; Pacheco, 2008; Torney-Purta, 2004; Westholm and Niemi, 1992). Jennings and Niemi (1974) show that the family influences party preferences more than peer groups, insofar as parents usually do not consciously think about the political education of their children and do not provide them with alternative political points of view. Niemi and Sobieszek (1977) argue against this, claiming that it is rather political discussions at university that influence political attitudes, even more so than special classes in secondary school devoted to political participation and democracy. Scholars insist that it is not only specific political attitudes (say, more right-wing or more left-wing values) that are acquired during the growing-up process, but also a more general orientation towards participation (Sherkat and Blocker, 1994); in this article I develop this idea in detail.
Other researchers are interested in adult–child relations as determining children’s participation in the public sphere. Daiva Stasiulis (2002) claims that the conception of ‘innocence’ of childhood in Western societies means that the child is perceived as deprived of agency. Adults try to exclude children and adolescents from public spaces or to control their public activity (Christensen and James, 1999; Ennew, 1994; Valentine, 1996). This process is called ‘protective exclusion’ by Jens Qvortrup (1990): children and adolescents cannot protect themselves from a number of ‘danger strangers’ and, thus, they cannot act as independent human beings and need adult care (Qvortrup, 1990; Stasiulis, 2002; Valentine, 1996). Using the statistics of actual crimes against children in public spaces, Gill Valentine (1996) shows that public danger is more a result of adults’ beliefs than actual threat. ‘Despite the fact that children are statistically more likely to be abused in “private space” by a person known to them and that many children experience the home as a place of domestic conflict, strife, and parental pressure, the crude dichotomy of public danger versus the safety of the home is fed to many young people through the combined agencies of parents, schools, the police, media, and private educational programs’ (Valentine, 1996: 210). At the same time, adults can perceive adolescents as a source of danger in the public sphere because they behave in an ‘amoral way’; thus, adults produce ‘public space as adult space’ (Valentine, 1996). As a result, ‘the public participation’ for adolescents usually means to act according to the rules established by adult society, that is, to obey adult authority and to participate in activities approved by adults (de Castro, 2011). All these scholars show that contemporary Western society restricts public participation of adolescents, representing them as dangerous for ‘adult public space’ or as not mature enough and still dependent on adults as ‘human becomings’ (Qvortrup, 1994). However, paying enormous attention to the constraints imposed on adolescents in the public sphere, they typically do not conceptualize the transition of private experience into public participation; that is, the ways adolescents’ public participation may be possible.
Meanwhile, researchers in the field of developmental psychology carefully explore attitudes towards independence from parental care formed during adolescence in private life, but they too rarely relate adolescents’ development to the possibility of public participation (Flanagan and Gallay, 1995). Even when they do, they usually equate private competences adopted within the family with public ones. As Constance Flanagan and Gallay Leslie (1995: 38) argue, ‘the gradual transformations that adolescents go through – from being told what to do by powerful others, to contesting that power, to sharing in the power of decision-making – is what psychologists consider as normative transition in development’. Thus, just like Ulrich Beck, they take for granted that the values and skills of self-reliance and participation in the private sphere are inevitably connected with civic competences.
In their classic research on civic culture, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1989) question the self-evidence of such a connection. One of the main issues they pose is: ‘if a sense of ability [is] in some way transferred from the more limited sphere of participation in non-political decisions to the larger one of participation in politics’ (Almond and Verba, 1989: 284). Using data gathered from empirical research on political attitudes in five nations with different levels of democratic development, they determine that there is a connection between perceived ability to participate within the family or at school and a perceived ability to participate in politics. This article challenges this perception through an analysis of the very process of private–public transition during adolescence in post-Soviet societies where ‘not only children but every citizen has to learn to do democracy’ (Petrovic et al., 2014).
Data and method
The findings in this article are based on the analysis of 20 in-depth biographical interviews with adolescent activists from the Bolotnaya movement (Moscow and St Petersburg, Russia) and Maidan (Kiev, Ukraine). To conduct the interviews, I used the life-story method developed by Daniel Bertaux. Bertaux’s life-story method entails the collection of in-depth biographical interviews with flexible, at most semi-structured, guidelines. The information from such interviews is both factual and interpretative; in other words, it can be used ‘both as evidence of fact along with perceptions and evaluations’ (Bertaux and Thompson, 1997).
Eleven Russian interviews were conducted during the autumn of 2012, half a year after the movement emerged. Nine Ukrainian interviews were collected during the summer and autumn of 2014 in Ukraine, also half a year since the main Maidan events unfolded. The selection criteria for interviewees were age (under 18 at the time the protests emerged 2 ) and their support of protest movements (strong support and/or participation). Interviewees were found through public pages devoted to the Maidan/Bolotnaya movements on ‘VKontakte’ (‘In Touch’, http://vk.com/), the most popular social network among adolescents in the post-Soviet region. A message inviting participants for interview was sent to every member of the public page who qualified by being within the age parameters and lived in a particular city (Kiev, Moscow, St Petersburg). 3
The majority did not reply to the message; of those who responded there was a mixture of acceptances and refusals. Most of the members of the Bolotnaya public pages refused to be interviewed, referring to the fact they did not participate in any rally (in such cases I explained that it was their support rather than participation that was important; most still refused, but some did accept the invitation after this explanation), and also to the fact that they are underage, so cannot talk about politics in an interview. Most members of the Maidan public pages refused to take part in an interview referring to everyday obstacles such as lack of time or being out of the city at the time. With only one exception, all the Ukrainian interviews were conducted in Russian because the interviewees explained that they know and speak both languages, and, thus, have no problem with Russian. One of the interviewees had moved to Kiev from Western Ukraine and so had difficulty speaking Russian, so the interview was carried out in Ukrainian, then translated into Russian by a native speaker. The meetings with the interviewees were arranged in cafes or public parks.
Interviews were conducted with two females and nine males from Bolotnaya, and with five males and four females from Maidan. These numbers reflect the proportion of males and females in Bolotnaya/Maidan groups in social networks more or less: there are more females among Ukrainian adolescent activists than among Russian adolescent activists. The interviewees came from families with varied socio-economic status. In the group of Russian adolescents, five people had parents who were public servants (budzhetniki), four had parents who were white-collar workers in private companies, one grew up in a self-employed family, and one was brought up by a single, unemployed mother. Six families earned an above average income, and five were relatively poor. 4 Four of the Ukrainian interviewees came from families of public servants, three had parents in white-collar positions working for private companies, one came from a working-class family, and one was brought up by an unemployed mother and grandmother, then had moved to live with his aunt’s family, who were self-employed. Two of the Ukrainian families were poor, four had average incomes for the country, and three earned above average incomes. 5 Connections between the socio-economic status, gender and the specific features of public sphere learning were not investigated, in that they deserve a different approach and analysis. These connections are one of the main goals of my further research.
As the data on which this article is based are interviews rather than participant observation, it is difficult to analyse the practices of young activists. Following Almond and Verba, I am here more interested in the relations between their perceived ability to be self-reliant and to participate in the private sphere, and their perceived ability to be independent and participate in the public realm. Data analysis was conducted in several steps. First, I worked on each interview separately: how does a single adolescent perceive his or her ability to be free and participate in the private/public sphere? In order to address this question, I analysed narratives where adolescents describe their everyday experience along with their protest participation and reflect on independence from or dependency on authoritative adults. Second, I compared the individual patterns that were revealed and defined common tendencies (separately for Russia and Ukraine). Third, I compared Russian and Ukrainian cases and drew conclusions.
Results
The Bolotnaya movement in Russia: The domestication of the public
Politically active Russian adolescents manifested themselves in interviews as adherents of personal independence and freedom in the private sphere. Speaking about their daily decision-making, they emphasized that it was always they who are responsible for the decisions influencing their lives. Most interviewees said they would decide which college to attend by themselves, and some of them remember that they chose to change secondary school independently even at the age of 14–15. The adolescents also insisted that only they and not their parents could decide how they should perform in school or whether to take university preparation courses or not. Recalling all of these experiences in the interviews, they argued that independence from their parents or other significant adults 6 and the ability to decide by themselves are crucial for them. For example, when Luba recounted her decision to join a particular department of Moscow State University, she said: ‘This decision was mine only. Totally mine. My family was even against it’ (Luba, 17, female). Describing his decision to change secondary school, Roman emphasizes: ‘It was purely my wish’ (Roman, 16, male).
The ability to be independent also appeared in the interviews when the adolescents spoke about people they usually do or do not take advice from. Most interviewees insisted that they have no need for their parents’ advice. For example, when asked whether he needs advice to choose a movie to watch, a book to read, or music to listen to, Roman answered:
I choose purely on my own. Purely on my own. Say, if I’ve heard something or somewhere, I will analyse if it is worth [anything] to me or not. I don’t like interference in my life in that sense. (Roman, 16, male)
Approaches to life that do not coincide with their parents’ could lead to conflict, as the adolescents explained in their interviews. In this regard, Vladimir mentioned how he hates how his parents forced him to behave in accordance with their religious faith, which led him to run away from home. This also emerged quite significantly in another excerpt from his interview:
There was one more thing in the university, me and my mom came together to the university to pay for the education, and my mom met the president of the Student Council, it was a guy about 30. And mom was telling him about me, it was annoying me, and finally I started a row right in his office: stop, stop deciding for me and telling me what to do, I can speak about myself, by myself, and all the stuff. (Vladimir, 17, male)
Recalling this situation in the interview, Vladimir emphasized the phrase ‘by myself’. Similarly, Nikolay stated: ‘I just can’t tolerate it when somebody gives me orders. If somebody tells me “do it like this”, I will never do it’ (Nikolay, 17, male).
To conclude, when speaking about their private lives, most of the Russian interviewees highlighted that they are adults, and a sense of independence, self-reliance, freedom and participation are of great significance to them. However, as we can see below, they also felt themselves to be children, i.e. as those who are not grown-up enough to think and act independently within the sphere of politics and protest.
This was especially evident when the interviewees described their decision whether to get involved in the protest movement they all supported. Their parents or other significant adults tried to control (and sometimes prevent) their participation in politics, and the adolescents needed to react to that somehow. Three different strategies of communication with significant adults concerning movement participation became apparent in the analysis (although some adolescents may combine different strategies).
The first strategy (only two interviewees mentioned it) was to attend the rallies in spite of being forbidden to do so by their significant adults. For example, in her interview, Luba said that her parents and grandfather (the most influential person within the family) disapproved of her participation in the Bolotnaya protest, but she nevertheless made the decision to be involved in it.
The second strategy (more interviewees used it) was participation in the movement initiated by significant adults, which usually meant attending the rallies together. Thus, recalling the reason why he joined the movement, Nikita said that it was his aunt and uncle who brought him into the world of protest, and that they always attended the rallies together. What is particularly important here is that the interviewees relate their decision to participate in protest accompanied by adults with their ‘youth’ (maloletstvo). In this regard, Olga’s words are especially meaningful:
And later, when the Bolotnaya movement emerged, I always attended the rallies together with my parents – first of all, because of my youth, and secondly, because they also were interested in them. (Olga, 17, female)
The last strategy (the most interviewees mentioned it) was to not participate in the movement (while still strongly supporting it) in accordance with the desires of their significant adults. The following passage from Vlad’s interview highlights this issue:
I kept watch on all of demonstrations, but I didn’t participate because … My parents, they’re in charge of me now, they’re my guardians. So, that’s why they’re against my participation, because many things can happen. So, that’s why I didn’t participate. But I kept watch on them, watched them … Well, I told [my parents] that I’d like to attend the rallies, but they usually replied like this, ‘when you are grown-up, you will decide, and now we are in charge of you. If something happens, you’re underage. You don’t need it yet.’ (Vlad, 16, male)
The Russian interviewees did not only obey adults’ rules, but also took such taboos for granted and did not problematize them. A good example of how adults’ views were internalized can be seen in how Nikolay describes why he did not take part in the demonstrations:
I kept all the rallies under observation, but I didn’t attend them because my parents are in charge of me. I didn’t want to sell my parents short, and in any case there was nothing to do there. (Nikolay, 17, male)
Only the first strategy among interviewees (mentioned by only two) confirms the idea that the Russian interviewees value personal independence and participation concerning their public experience. The second and particularly the third strategies reflect the fact that they perceive themselves rather as dependent upon adults as political beings, and are not mature enough to be fully-fledged political actors themselves.
We can observe the same situation in the adolescents’ self-conceptualization of their public experience. In his interview, Nikolay separated adolescents’ rights in the private and public sphere:
I think it’s possible to lower the legal age a bit. In the US, for example, people can get a driver’s licence and drive when they are 16. But I’m not sure about the right to take part in rallies for them. Maybe it’s better to give them some isolated space within demonstrations, in other words, not to mix them with adults. But if they participate as a part of family, it’s ok, I think. (Nikolay, 17, male)
Participation in radical demonstrations is legitimated here not as revolutionary, but only as a patriarchal practice (where someone who is younger has the right to participate in politics as part of an ‘older’ and more influential body). A similar attitude appears in the interview with Nikita:
Do you think that adolescents can participate in protest actions in the same manner as adults do?
In my view, they couldn’t. An underage person doesn’t have any particular point of view, and they just follows a mob … If you participate with family – it’s ok, you approve your parents’ views. But if you just participate with some nationalists, just to cause an outcry, make noise, burn fires – it isn’t ok. (Nikita, 17, male)
Here an adolescent who takes part in a demonstration with nationalists is perceived not as nationalist but as someone who has been manipulated, who attends a rally ‘just to cause an outcry, make noise’. Again, it is the family who legitimate young people’s political participation and thus transform it into a patriarchal and conservative practice. Usually the interviewees felt that being underage they could not always fully understand the goals of political events. As Martin put it, they are ‘more silly’ (bolee glupye) than adults.
As we can see from the analysis conducted above, Russian adolescents used two types of arguments justifying their refusal to participate in the public sphere. On the one hand, they claimed that Russian law prevents them from being a part of the rally: breaking this law, they would make their parents accountable for the legal violation. In reality, there is no law restricting participation in legal rallies on the grounds of age: according to Russian law No. 54, 7 people of any age have a right to take part in a rally. On the other hand, the interviewees considered that people of their age are not mature enough to understand the political process fully and, thus, to have a ‘real’ and independent political position.
To sum up, young Russian sympathizers of the Bolotnaya protest had a strong sense of their ability to participate, to be self-reliant, and to be free in their private lives. They were even ready to challenge their parents’ prohibitions and defend their private independence. At the same time, they perceived their dependency upon adults in the public (political) sphere as something obvious and normal. To put it in another way, they grow up quickly as private individuals while remaining children in the public sphere for a longer period of time.
The Maidan movement in Ukraine: A break with the private
The sense of independence the Ukrainian interviewees felt in their private lives is not as prominent as in the Russian case. When describing their private practices Ukrainian adolescents spoke just as much about self-reliance and participation as their Russian counterparts. Recalling events when they needed to make decisions their parents disagreed with, the Ukrainian interviewees highlighted the fact that they usually get their own way. For example, Dmitry spoke of his decision to leave military school and enter a special secondary school (Gymnasium) in spite of his grandmother’s wishes (his main guardian). Valery highlighted the fact that she stopped her parents paying for college for her, and Pavlo said that he usually informs his mother about his decisions after he has made them.
At the same time, many of the Ukrainian interviewees mentioned their parents and other significant adults as those whom they consult for personal advice. Anna said she usually relies on her mother’s opinion in her daily life; Pavlo argued that he does not take advice from his mother, but as a divinity school student, he does take into consideration the opinions of the school priest. Dmitry, who left military school in spite of his grandmother’s disapproval, said that he usually takes advice from his aunt:
[I can take advice] from different persons, but more often it’s my aunt. She has something to say in all cases, and she helps me … she advises me how to behave in some situation … just how to do the right thing. (Dmitry, 16, male)
Only two of the Ukrainian interviewees unequivocally described having freedom/dependence in the private sphere, that is why the explicit conceptualizations of private freedom are excluded from the analysis.
Therefore, when speaking about their private lives, the youngest sympathizers of the Maidan protests demonstrated different attitudes towards freedom and participation. Depending on the circumstances, on the one hand they described themselves as independent people, able to participate in decision-making processes, but on the other hand they also take for granted their dependence on significant adults. In this regard, Ukrainian adolescents’ conceptualization of their public experience is much more forthright: unlike supporters of the Bolotnaya movement, most of them are guided by the sense of an ability to be independent and participate in the political sphere.
The Ukrainian interviewees’ sense of independence can be explicated through their communication strategies with significant adults about protest participation. The first strategy was similar to the Russian adolescents’ (but many more interviewees mentioned it): to attend rallies in spite of rules set by adults. Some of the interviewees said that they sneaked out from home to visit rallies; one young girl was even confined to the apartment by her mother to prevent her from participation in the dangerous events of Maidan, but she found the key, unlocked the door, and went to the protest anyway. We can observe values of self-reliance embodied in passages from the interviews where the adolescents describe such experiences:
My parents told me that I can’t participate because I haven’t turned 18 yet. …
And how did you reply to them?
If not me, then who?
And they agreed with you?
Finally, yes, they did. In the end they came with me. (Denis, 18, male)
The second strategy which most of the Ukrainian interviewees used to overcome their parents’ rules and regulations and participate in dangerous demonstrations was to keep adults partially informed about their participation, or to make a deal with them. Anna told her mother that she did visit Maidan Square, but not that she had become a member of a radical group and participated in clashes with the police. Similarly, Dmitry informed his aunt and uncle about his general involvement in Maidan rallies, but did not mention that he was a part of clashes at the barricades. Valery spoke of how although her father forbade her to go to Maidan on 19–21 February, at the height of the protests, she did not just stay at home. Instead, she spent those days helping at the hospitals, receiving wounded protesters from Maidan in the urban area she lives in. Speaking about making deals with or lying to their significant adults, the interviewees highlighted the fact that this was just a strategy to get their own way, as is well described by Daniil:
Even if my parents were totally against it, I would come to Maidan anyway. They just know this. That’s why they decided that it’s better to make an agreement with me. (Daniil, 15, male)
Finally, in some cases Ukrainian adolescents were mobilized after being influenced by significant adults. For example, Denis said it was his father who persuaded him to help a local self-defence group (Samooborona);
8
and when Maria recalled the beginning of her militancy, she stated:
When the rallies just emerged, I didn’t participate. My parents usually attended them, they tried to involve me too. But I’ve just … I have my friends, why do I need it? But when the students were attacked, I came with them. (Maria, 17, female)
Unlike Russian adolescents, young Ukrainian activists did not associate their younger age (‘maloletstvo’) with the fact that they sometimes came to Maidan with their parents or other significant adults. Moreover, none of them attended the rallies with adults all the time. Conversely, being influenced by them initially, they became more and more involved in protest, finally becoming much more active then their parents.
Thus, the sense of ability to be independent and to participate in protest politics is rather prominent among Ukrainian interviewees. In spite of any kind of adult rules or prohibitions, they still take part in radical demonstrations no matter how intensely they participate. They still feel that it is they who should make the final decision whether or not to participate. The most important thing here is that if the significant adults forbade it, it did not stop any of the Ukrainian interviewees from participating in the demonstrations, although it did for a lot of the Russian interviewees.
Explicitly conceptualizing their ‘adolescent’ position in the public sphere, most of the Ukrainian interviewees argue that they have exactly the same right as adults to participate in protests. From the youngest Maidan activists’ points of view, the adolescents can, and even should be, involved in mobilization, largely because it is they who hold the future of the country in their hands, as well as being totally able to understand politics at the age of 16–17. Some interviewees even insist that adolescents have a better understanding of good and bad than adults:
What do you think, could underage people fully participate in protests?
Sure. Underage people also have some feelings about what is good and what is bad. I even think that such feelings are more advanced in their case. Because they are not so influenced by all these news media. They have the possibility to view [things] from different perspectives. Like, the adults, when they just use big words, it usually means that they are right. But this is alien to a child. It’s easy for him to understand what is really good, and what is really bad, you see? (Dmitry, 16, male)
Only two of the interviewees were not so positive about adolescents’ self-reliance in the political sphere. They were doubtful as to whether the youngest participants at the protests could fully understand the complexity of everything that was happening. Nevertheless, they eventually concluded that at least 16–17 year olds should be active in politics and protests. Anna discussed this:
Just imagine that your 16-year-old child strongly supports the Maidan revolution, and she’d like to participate, what would you do?
I think, I would participate with her. And I would also see what exactly it is she supports. … if she is 16, I would say – go to a hospital. The wounded protesters were brought to hospitals, and sometimes police came here to arrest them. And there were also the activists who visited hospitals, defended them to prevent the arrests. I would say – just go to the hospital, they need you there also! I don’t know. Or just share out sandwiches among protesters. Or buy something and then share it. (Anna, 18, female)
There were several arguments the Ukrainian young activists used to justify their public participation: even 10-year-olds can understand why Maidan emerged, that is why children and adolescents can participate in it; the adolescents are those who will build the future and their participation is especially important; and, finally, it is personally important to do what one thinks is right, that is, to participate in Maidan.
To sum up, when describing their public experiences, the Ukrainian adolescents appealed to values of independence and freedom. Even if they sometimes allowed their parents to influence their decisions in the public sphere, this influence finally lead to more intensive participation (and, consequently, to more freedom) and not to a refusal to participate, as happened in the Russian case. Young protesters from Maidan perceived themselves as fully-fledged participants of protest politics, who are, paradoxically, sometimes even more ‘mature’ than adults.
Comparison and discussion
Bolotnaya and Maidan emerge as different phenomena in terms of public sphere learning by their youngest participants. Adolescent supporters of Bolotnaya perceive themselves as independent people who participate actively in their private lives: they say they usually make decisions by themselves and prefer not to take advice from significant adults. Moreover, they often do not let their parents govern their private lives. For the youngest participants of Maidan, the value of independence in the private sphere is not so crucial: they do sometimes choose to be rather self-reliant, but at times ask significant adults for advice. The most important thing here, however, is the difference in how they learn about and perceive the public sphere and their place within it.
The Russian interviewees, although at the same time appreciating personal freedom, mostly describe themselves as dependent upon adults in the political sphere. They do not think of themselves as mature or grown-up enough to be independent and fully-fledged political actors. Young Ukrainian protesters, unlike Russian ones, have a strong sense of their ability to be independent and participate in the public sphere. They can attend rallies together with significant adults, as did Russian adolescents too, but, contrary to their Russian counterparts, they feel no less competent in politics than their parents. If adolescents are those who are somewhere between childhood and adulthood, then in the case of Maidan they are certainly a kind of young adult, while in the case of Bolotnaya they could still be considered to be children.
Growing up in the private sphere, Russian adolescents continue to be ‘children’ in politics. They lack the values and skills of public independence, and so are not able to suddenly transform themselves into mature political actors when they become adults. Politics is perceived by most Russian adults as something dangerous, where someone more knowledgeable and more mature can take advantage of them. Russian authorities as well often describe protesters as those who are manipulated by more competent politicians and who are dissatisfied just because they do not have enough knowledge to understand the politics of the state. 9 They even use a law officially called ‘hooliganism’ to accuse people of ‘illegal’ participation in demonstrations and rallies as an irresponsible or uneducated act. In such a way, this ‘childish’ position of adolescents in the political sphere is not only due to their age, but reflects specific features of Russian protest politics as such. Protest politics is usually perceived as something dangerous; being involved in it means you will probably be manipulated, and this perception is reproduced in the socialization of young activists.
Similarly, the sense of an ability to be independent and participate in public life adopted during their socialization by Ukrainian adolescents reflects a more general phenomenon: the strong adherence to public freedom as such among activists. As one of my Ukrainian interviewees put it when speaking about the anti-protest laws passed by the parliament on 16 January 2014: ‘We’ve taken very rebelliously the fact that somebody is trying to curb our freedom’ (Pavlo, 18, male). Public independence and self-reliance are also connected with the value of being active instead of passive and dependent on somebody’s will – that is exactly what the reflexive pronoun ‘self’ means in the word ‘self-organization’. It is no surprise that the level of self-organization during the Maidan revolution was extremely high: a small new community was created by the activists right on Maidan Square with its own economy, police, medicine and education, and without top-down authoritative power. A lot of voluntary service organizations emerged after the protest through the efforts of Maidan activists. As another Ukrainian interviewee said: ‘Maidan cultivates the feeling that if you’d like to change something, you should change it by yourself. For example, you can sit in your kitchen and say “our country provides our soldiers with nothing”. But you can just buy several cans of sardines and feed them yourself’ (Anna, 18, female).
The very notion of freedom, then, differs for Russian and Ukrainian adolescents. For the young participants of the Bolotnaya movement it is personal, private freedom, the freedom from interference of others in their lives which they consider to be the quintessence of freedom itself. This notion of freedom sets the binary logic: they can only violate or comply with their parents’ bans, but not exceed the boundaries of a compliance/violation logic. For Ukrainian adolescents, who experienced unity and solidarity with the whole of society during Maidan, 10 the sense of freedom is now not about someone’s personal restrictions and their violation, but rather about self-organization and acting together for the sake of freedom. Being free in this sense means not being free from others interfering in your life, but acting collectively with others in order to change, control and design the social and political environment they live in. The youngest participants of Maidan have a strong sense of their own ability to be independent in the public sphere, and this is not because they somehow transfer a private, personal self-reliance into politics, but because they participate (sometimes together with their parents) in the creation of a totally new ideal of public freedom and responsibility.
Conclusion
From the interviews conducted with adolescents in Russia and Ukraine on their participation in public protest, the analysis shows that contrary to Beck’s argument there is no direct transfer of the values of private independence and self-reliance to the public sphere during the growing-up and politicization process in the post-Soviet world. The perceived ability to be independent and to participate in the private sphere appropriated by Russian adolescents does not automatically translate into a perceived ability of being fully-fledged public actors. Conversely, even being sympathizers of the protest, young participants of the Bolotnaya movement described themselves as incompetent and dependent upon their significant adults as political actors. One can argue that this kind of perception is common for adolescents as such – because of their age and of the specificity of the sphere of politics, which is, by definition, a ‘place for adults’. But the analysis of the Ukrainian case breaks out of this logic. Young protesters from Maidan have a strong sense of their ability to be independent and free in the public sphere. Thus, they become fully involved in protest politics and civil society, but to do it they have to break with the values of the private sphere, rather than transfer them into politics.
Arendt’s theory of public space, notwithstanding that it is a ‘classic’ approach, seems very appropriate for describing Russian society. Arendt (1998) writes about the blurring of boundaries between public and private in the modern world, about the mixing of these two spheres due to the appearance of the new one – the social sphere. She observes this process at the macro level of state and economic markets. This research shows a similar phenomenon at the individual level in the lives of Russian young people: they see the public sphere as a threat and remain dependent on adults in that space, while in the private sphere they strive for independence and freedom. Paradoxically, leaving the boundary of their homes and participating in a rally or a demonstration, Russian adolescents do not become public actors. To some extent, they do not establish the nascent public space, but ‘domesticate’ the space of the rally. Public space in the case of contemporary Russia remains rather undeveloped even in a time of huge mass mobilization and political protest.
The Ukrainian revolution reveals a ‘purer’ case of composition of public and private within society. Young participants of Maidan often allow their parents and other significant adults to govern their private lives, but in the sphere of politics they insist on independence and freedom. The public space here is really the space of freedom: even those who were limited by private child–parent ties become free individuals interacting with other free individuals in Maidan Square. It is possible that the Orange Revolution and other protests which have taken place in Ukraine over the last 10 years have influenced and developed the public sphere, which in the case of Russia has remained rather immature. This research shows how these different public/private compositions in Russian and Ukrainian societies are reproduced through the course of people’s political socialization.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am thankful to Oleg Zhuravlev, who provided comments that greatly assisted the research, and to Maxim Alyukov, who helped with the rewriting of the article’s draft.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.