Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, March 31, 2017

It's analysis, not news

It gets more difficult to sort out what is news, what is "alt-news," and what is analysis. Can you explain why this is not news?

In Protests, Kremlin Fears a Young Generation Stirring

The weekend anticorruption protests that roiled Moscow and nearly 100 Russian towns clearly rattled the Kremlin, unprepared for their size and seeming spontaneity. But perhaps the biggest surprise, even to protest leaders themselves, was the youthfulness of the crowds.

A previously apathetic generation of people in their teens and 20s, most of them knowing nothing but 17 years of rule by Vladimir V. Putin, was the most striking face of the demonstrations…

[T]he harshness of the response to the protests on Sunday — hundreds of people were arrested, in many cases simply for showing up — suggested that Mr. Putin’s hierarchy was taking no chances.

Artyom Troitsky, a Russian journalist and concert promoter who for years has tracked Russian youth culture, said the fact that so many young people took part in the protests in Moscow and elsewhere “is exceptionally important.”

The reason, he said, is that “young people have always been a catalyst for change,” and their presence suggests a break from the lack of political interest they had exhibited in recent years…

Aleksei A. Navalny, the anticorruption campaigner and opposition leader who orchestrated the nationwide protests — and who received a 15-day prison sentence on Monday for resisting arrest — said in court that he was surprised at the turnout on Sunday and that he was determined to keep up the pressure by running in next year’s presidential election…

That the Kremlin has been vexed by Mr. Navalny is clear from the authorities’ response to what, in most countries, would be inconsequential protests that merely disrupted traffic. The police arrested protesters in some cases for nothing more than carrying a rubber duck, a symbol of extravagant money reportedly spent on a duck pond at a government residence…

“Russia is really stuck in the past,” said Ilya Amutov, a 25-year-old technology worker who marched in Moscow on Sunday. Young people, he said, “just want to live like normal, modern people in the rest of Europe.”…

In the past, the Kremlin has been highly skillful at channeling the energy of young Russians away from opposition political activism into a pro-Putin youth movement called Nashi…

But Aleksei A. Chesnakov, the director of the Center for Current Policy… said that in recent years the government had largely withdrawn support for pro-Putin youth movements, leaving the authorities without the ability to stage counterprotests and keep young people occupied.

The limits of this approach were on stark display Sunday when the protesters were not retirees or gritty industrial workers of Russian protests past, but iPhone-wielding, takeaway-coffee-carrying urban youths, representing Mr. Putin’s long-term challenge…

Despite the dynamic in the capital, the vast majority of Russians still cling to the leader they know in Mr. Putin. His popularity ratings have slipped, but only marginally…