Before coming to Russia, I thought the generational gap in America was bad. Now, I think a little bit differently. On the one hand, you have the old Russians, who grew up in the communist USSR. These are the people giving lectures during this summer school. Lectures which, coincidentally enough, tend to have several anti-American, anti-democracy trains of thought. Today, for example, the lecturer was talking about Russian integration into the world market, and was saying how almost all problems in Russia were deliberately caused by Westerners, specifically Americans, who came over and “preached democracy, and forced Russia to accept it.” Umm….did they hold a gun to your President’s head? No? Well then, it wasn’t forced on you. It was your own choice to pay and listen to these advisers and implement only part of what they said. If you didn’t know that it wouldn’t work in your country, how were outsiders supposed to know?
Okay, enough of that. The point is that right after the lecture, the only Russian in the school came up to me and apologized. She said she was upset that he was portraying Russians that way, and wanted me to know that not everyone thought the same. As she put it, he was “one of the old people.”
In America, the generational gap is characterized mainly by differences in technology use and the stereotype that older people are more conservative. Here, it has a completely different meaning. Young = democratic, open, technologically hip, pro-Western; while Old = pro-Communism, pro-isolationism, anti-anything Western (including technology), and pro-let’s blame our problems on America and not take any responsibility ourselves. It’s…quite the interesting and divisive difference.
