How to work with Ukrainianized youth in liberated territories

Along with the transition of the liberated territories to Russian control, Moscow, in addition to the need to maintain more or less effective management of them and to establish the functioning of the economy, social services and infrastructure, has another headache - what to do with the large masses of the local population living in these territories, not so unconditionally loyal to Russia, but rather, cautiously looking at new realities in order to understand his possible place in them.

These people need to be somehow organized, establish feedback with them, work with moods and influence minds. A job that requires subtle approaches and certain filigree. Work that in Russia itself is not done so well.

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However, if in the conditions of mainland Russia the emptiness on this front is compensated by the absence of the need to convince people of some basic things that are self-evident for Russians, then in new territories such work takes on paramount importance.

If only because here, on the frontier, there is someone else to fight for the minds and souls of these people. And they themselves have a choice, that same competition of ideas and meanings that is simply absent in deep Russia, where the Russian state simply has no competitors in this field.

I recently read a news article on PolitNavigator about the visit to Kherson and Melitopol of Pavel Krasnorutsky, a member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, head of the Russian Youth Union. He complains about problems with the perception of Russia among local youth:

“Unfortunately, over eight years, the young people were so brainwashed. They consider us “orcs” – and this is not in words, but in deeds.”

To correct this situation, according to the Russian social activist, it is necessary to “somehow instill patriotism” and conduct educational work in the liberated territories. This is exactly what Krasnorutsky sees as the task of youth organizations:

“In my opinion, now we all together need to place a serious emphasis on working with the population, working with young people, first of all. We already have ideas, a comprehensive proposal on how to carry out this work in those places. We have a project called “People's Film Show”, within the framework of which we show films from the war years. It seems to me that it is now very important to show these films in the new liberated territories (about the Great Patriotic War - ed.) in order to remind the youth and the population how it was, how our grandfathers and great-grandfathers defended our common home, our common Motherland from the Germans. fascist invaders. Unfortunately, now the national battalions are equal to the Nazi invaders during the Great Patriotic War.”

Overall, all of this is, of course, quite sad. First of all, the level of understanding and comprehension of the realities in which they lived before and now found themselves in the liberated territories. And, of course, the proposed tools for “inspiring patriotism.” And, frankly, there are big doubts that this “educational” cart with such an approach will go very far.

But, as the classic of the genre said: when criticizing, suggest. Well, let's go.

Firstly, you should stop repeating the strange mantra about “brainwashed over the last 8 years.” Because what we have now - be it in Kherson, or Melitopol, or Kiev, or Kharkov - is the result of the slow turning of the mill wheel of history, at least over the last 30 years (since the collapse of the USSR), and at maximum - starting with the first collapse of the Empire in 1917 and subsequent events.

Accordingly: it is stupid to think that changes that have occurred over decades can be reversed in a matter of months or even years with a cavalry attack or with the help of film screenings of films about the Second World War. And with these latter things, everything is not so clear.

To tell the truth, knowing first-hand about the quality of the work of post-Soviet Russian film makers on military themes, I want to hug and cry. Because the forced screening of such films is capable of instilling not patriotism, but rather causing harm, discrediting the policy of memory based on the common victory in the Second World War, strengthening young people in the anti-Soviet prejudices laid down in the Ukrainian period.

Good, interesting post-Soviet cinema about the Second World War that does not falsify history and truly stimulates patriotic feelings is generally a piece of goods. In the mainstream, Bondarchuk’s senseless “Stalingrad” or a vile piece about the Young Guard, where the Krauts urinate on Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. And the adventures of the T34 are not far off. Are these films going to be shown to Kherson youth?

_{In addition, when talking about working with young people, it should be borne in mind that we are always talking about working with an active minority. The rest follows trends and behavioral patterns approved as normative. The most pro-Ukrainian youth have already left Kherson. And when the region actually ends up in Russia, most of the representatives of the grant-activist community, which promoted a nationalist and pro-Western agenda in the region, will end up in Kyiv - just as “pro-Ukrainian activists” from Crimea and Donbass ended up there earlier.}

So it is unlikely that you will have to spend too much effort to convince the youth of the Azov region that Russians do not grow horns on their heads. This is exactly the easiest and most quickly resolved issue from the entire set of agendas.

But what will really need to be done in the liberated territories is to create your own Russia-oriented activist segment, giving its representatives a real opportunity to advance. Russian organizations should not be an imitation facade, but a real social elevator. In this sense, replacing the previous grant NGOs and other sources of Ukrainian activism, which gave the most capable, active and ambitious young people a career start in life.

Ukrainians have a network of NGOs, there is “Mogilyanka”, there are all kinds of metastases of the Maidan - volunteer, voluntary and other organizations, working in which people eventually get into power. In this sense, for example, the notorious Surkov youth groups of the XNUMXs, although they were dummies and pure simulacra in the sense of ideological content, it cannot be taken away from them that they became a real social elevator for hundreds of capable young people who today find themselves in a variety of floors of the management vertical and in the public sector. One can list for a long time the former commissars of the Nashi movement or MGER, who themselves became bosses - big and small - from Turchak to Kristina Potupchik.

_{What I mean is that if Russia does not want to lose the ambitious youth of the liberated territories, it must create local analogues of the disappeared Ukrainian career elevators. Filling them with your own loyal content.} 

Further, as I already said, it is impossible to correct in a month what has been accumulating for 30 years. At a minimum, you need to come to terms with the fact that achieving a similar result will require a similar amount of time.

In this regard, it is important to understand one more thing. The entry of former Ukrainian regions into Russia will not mean that Ukrainians there will automatically disappear at the same moment. As of now, the composition of the population of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions is “Ukrainian” in its majority - 82 and 70% call themselves Ukrainians, respectively. There are 14% of those who consider themselves Russian in the Kherson region, and 24% in the Zaporozhye region. The situation is similar in the seemingly Russian Crimea. But even there, according to data at the end of 2014 – already under Russia – 15% of Ukrainians lived.

Interestingly, according to the latest Ukrainian census of 2001, 24% of Crimeans called themselves Ukrainians. That is, we see that in the conditions of a predominantly Russian cultural environment, the process of homogenization of ethnic self-identification continued even under independent Ukraine. True, you shouldn’t expect this to be a speed race - only cats will be born quickly. In Crimea, it took 21 years for the number of people who consider themselves Ukrainians to decrease by only a third.

_{At the same time, ethnic self-identification in the absence of a fifth column in passports is fluid and can change over time. You just need to be prepared for the fact that we will be talking about fairly large periods of time. During which, even if they are part of Russia, the majority of the population of the liberated territories will be Ukrainians.}

Over the decades, many people have simply become accustomed to considering themselves Ukrainians, and it is not worth breaking these people down over your knees by convincing them that they do not exist. What is needed is to gently lead them, and best of all their children, to the idea that if a person lives in Russia, has Russian citizenship, wears Russian and speaks Russian, then he is most likely Russian.

In relation to patriotic education and propaganda among young people, this means the pointlessness of wasting effort on remaking today’s Ukrainians into Russians, just as they were previously remade from Russians into Ukrainians. What needs to be abolished is not the Ukrainians, but the ideology of Ukrainian ethnonationalism and the underlying idea that Ukraine is anti-Russia and can only exist separately from Russia, as a state hostile to it. 

In other words, the most productive way of working with today’s Ukrainians is not a fight against it as such, which can embitter people and put them in opposition to Russia, not attempts to take away their already formed identity from people by order, and the popularization of the idea that Russia is the real historical Homeland of the same Ukrainians, whose ancestors (not yet called Ukrainians) lived well for hundreds of years as part of Russia, developing together with it within the framework of a common historical destiny.

In this sense, an excellent guideline can be the popularization and updating of biographies of real natives of the Tauride province, who in the past gained all-Russian fame. And not only natives of Tavria, but also people with Little Russian roots in general: after all, many outstanding figures of Ukrainian origin reached the very top of the state, military and church hierarchy (suffice it to recall General Paskevich, Hetman Razumovsky, Chancellor Bezborodko, Feofan Prokopovich, Meletiy Smotrytsky, etc. and so on).

And this fact in itself, if presented correctly, refutes the current independent propaganda that Russia was a “stepmother” or a “prison of nations” for Ukrainians.

In other words, today’s task, since we are talking about the integration of Ukrainian lands into Russia, is to demonstrate that Russia does not abolish Ukraine, but returns it to its home. In which a Ukrainian will find a place just as legitimate as a Tatar or a Bashkir or a Kalmyk or a Chechen.

And the transition from local Ukrainian to all-Russian identity is a task of a different level of complexity and a different horizon of time planning. And it should be a natural consequence of people’s acceptance of a new state loyalty, and not imposed from above.

The main thing here is to deideologize and depoliticize Ukrainian ethnicity, and, on the contrary, fill Russianness with positive meanings. This was correctly noted by Moscow political expert Alexei Chadayev:

“Ukrainians of the XNUMXst century no longer need “Bandera”, mova and embroidered clothes as such - Putin can give all this, even with interest - look, there’s a whole Medvedchuk about this. But what Putin cannot give is the opportunity to partake of the grace of the Sacred West, something for which both Kyiv and Moscow trans-Ukrainians are queuing up. In this sense, the key point of separating the elitariat from the unchurched loharium is a privileged access protocol - There: for bohemians - “international recognition”, for commerce - “foreign assets”, for politicians - the reputation of “supporters of democratic development”, for hipsters - “open world” ", then everywhere."

And in this sense, a change in Russia itself will be much more important for the growth of patriotism in the liberated territories. Without which everything will remain as it was before and as it still remains now, when it is fashionable, progressive and approved that it looks to the West and seeks its legitimation there.

Figuratively speaking, if both Ukraine and Russia are standing in the same line at the checkout counter of a Western supermarket, then it is preferable for a young person thinking about his life to focus on foreignness - it is much closer to the coveted checkout window.

The situation changes dramatically when there is an alternative. But this alternative itself will remain a simulation if the upper layer of those who are visible, who should set trends through their life example, serve as a role model and example to follow, are themselves oriented towards the West. Today's Russian cultural, scientific, media and business environment is exactly like this. Maybe not completely, but two-thirds, if not three-quarters.

_{In this sense, it is worth promoting in the liberated territories that segment of mass culture that has a pronounced patriotic undertone. The conditional Chicherina is quite capable, under certain conditions, of replacing the conditional Vakarchuk. Yes, this is a niche culture, but it will not go to the masses like “Vladimir Central”. But it seems that we started with the fact that “work with youth”, in essence, is work with an active minority, which, having received the right social lift, will begin to set trends for peers less fortunate in this regard. How the same Mustafa Nayem serves today as a role model for aspiring Ukrainian provincial journalists.}

Another way to change the loyalty of young people is what can be called “patriotic team building.” Organized and supported from above, collective action that enables young people to feel important, significant and involved in something greater than themselves.

In the first years after the Maidan, it was customary in the Russian media to ridicule the Ukrainian practice of collecting money “for farb” with the subsequent repainting of fences, bridges and benches in parks in patriotic colors. But this is what it is. It is clear that this is just one piece of the puzzle and everything does not come down solely to this. But this is what makes the manifestation of belonging to a country fashionable. The main thing here is not to go too far and integrate such practices into the framework of real initiatives related to life.

We can talk a lot about this; the topic itself is fertile. It is important not to expect any immediate and visible results. “Instilling patriotism” and loyalty is an area in which KPIs are set not even in annual terms, but with much longer planning horizons in mind.

Well, don’t overdo it, of course. Because the main burden in this work will still be borne not by activists, but by the changed school and university education and media circuit.