The authors of the Millennial Club project, economist Yevgeny Gontmakher and sociologist Alexander Sogomonov, within the framework of the European Dialogue expert group, presented a collective portrait of the worldview of the generation of people born from 1981 to 1996. This portrait is in many ways contrary to the popular notion of them as cynics and radical individualists who care only about personal well-being. Why are the values of community, humanism and justice important for today's thirty-five-year-old Russians? And what can other generations learn from millennials?
— How was the idea of the report born? Why did you both, busy people, well-known experts, lead this project for a whole year?
Eugene Gontmakher: I have always been interested in the behavior of large communities of people. Now in the world there is a natural change of elites, those people who determine the policy in their countries. Until recently, Europe was ruled by people who were born during the Second World War or immediately after it. This is a well-defined generation, with its own habits, views on the world. In their place come those who have recently turned 30-40 years old. For example, Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Zelensky, Sanna Marin and others. In the literature, they are called millennials. We, in the European Dialogue expert group, were not interested in a specific classification, but in what kind of people they are, what they have in their heads, what their social philosophy is.
For Russia, where people of about 60-70 years of age are still in power, this is extremely important — after all, a change of generations will inevitably occur in our country.
Alexander Sogomonov:< /strong>For many years, since the beginning of the 2000s, we have been told that the world is going one way, and we are developing somehow differently. And it became interesting — are our people really different too? The whole world is changing, but we reproduce the same socio-cultural code? They wanted to understand: are Russian and European millennials the same thing or not? The word «research» is not quite correct here, we used the narrative-reflexive method of cognition. We tried to talk to them, involved them in a conversation on various topics and began to understand what mental practices distinguish this generation from both the older one and the “kids” who step on their heels.
Photo: Alexey Dushutin/Novaya Gazeta
Every generation that we invent as sociologists is a kind of convention. In the 20th century, the idea was established that a generation is a kind of community of people united by the unity of an eventful history. Generation of war, generation of «thaw». Everything is immediately clear. We are the perestroika generation. We act within the framework of intersubjective meanings, they do not need to be spoken, they are obvious. I don't need to explain to you that democracy is good. And now it is sometimes necessary to prove it to older or younger people. And so in everything. Touched on the shoulder — is it decent or not? For people of our generation, a touch on the shoulder or a friendly hug is nothing special. But today a community is being formed for which this is ambiguous.
We thought about the fact that young growth is growing, which does not have any common event, a monolithic background. They socialized under Putin, they live only under him.
Children who were born around the 1990s did not survive perestroika and the collapse of the USSR, and then there was no event that could unite them. And the question arose: is this a generation, or some kind of conditional cohort from such and such to such and such an age, as in a standard questionnaire? This was the starting point that we were interested in.