Post-Soviet youth: similarities and differences with elders

The future of any country depends to a large extent on what values and philosophy the younger generation cherishes and what kind of vital energy fuels its minds. This is perhaps why sociologists prefer surveying 16-to-34-year-olds than any other group of the population. No exception is the attempt to analyze the present and forecast the future of three post-Soviet countries — Azerbaijan, Russia and Ukraine — through the prism of young people’s attitudes.

The polls conducted show that the young citizens of Ukraine and Russia place the right to work, education, and housing above all else, while those of Azerbaijan put emphasis on the right to work, freedom of expression, and the right to housing. By all accounts, the young expect the state to furnish them all these goodies because, despite the profound transformations that have occurred since the USSR collapsed, the level of paternalism in what seems to be a generation free of the all-embracing excessive government care still remains very high. The overwhelming majority of poll respondents said it is the state that is obliged to care about its own citizens and provide them with decent living standards, which proves convincingly that all of them or, to be more exact, of us, originate from the same place. Hence grow the roots of another common feature: the low civic activity among youth in all the three countries surveyed. 90% of young Ukrainians, Russians, and Azeris belong to no public organizations and take extremely little interest in politics. Yet, they are very well aware of what one must do to step into the political arena. More than a half of those polled readily answered that, to do so, one should work in a certain political party, non-governmental organization, or be on the staff of regional or national bodies of public administration or law enforcement. But, in all probability, a political career is not high on the list of young people’s priorities.

What seems interesting in light of the approaching presidential elections in the three countries surveyed is the analysis of young people’s electoral preferences. In their opinion (75% of the Azeris, 48% of the Russians and 40% of Ukrainians), the next president should be a politician. Moreover, a larger percentage of the Russians than of the rest would like him to come from the army, security service, or law enforcement. Most respondents prefer to see a man, rather than a woman, as their head of state. Ukrainians are the least conservative as to the gender of the next president: 17% of our compatriots think that a representative of the fairer sex would be a more effective ruler. While the Russians and Ukrainians would like their future leader to be a politician aged about forty, the Azeris prefer a more mature person. By contrast with the Ukrainians polled, the overwhelming majority of the Russian and Azeri respondents expressed confidence in their current presidents. But, while there is no reason why we should doubt the sincerity of our northern neighbor’s youthful preferences, the young Azeris might have answered this question with tongue in cheek. It is the Azeris themselves — an opposition party member and an embassy official — who raised this doubt at the press conference which announced the poll results. The former hazarded a guess that young people, unsure that the poll was anonymous, could have been paltering, and the latter... publicly expressed his dissatisfaction over the presence of an opposition member and over the fact that the press conference’s organizers had not announced the full list of participants and guests, which allowed a wrong person to show up.

As to young people’s living standards in Ukraine, Russia, and Azerbaijan, the situation looks most attractive, judging by the results, in Russia, where the unemployment rate is the lowest and where more than half of the young people surveyed said they earned enough money to buy food and clothes, while most Azeris and Ukrainians responded that their wages only allow them to buy food.

It will be noted in conclusion that the poll was conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in Ukraine, the Georgian firm GORBI (Georgian Research Business International) in Azerbaijan, and the All-Russian Public Opinion Survey Center in Russia. The organizers polled 519 Ukrainians, 500 Azeris, and 1264 Russians aged 16 to 34.