Ungrateful young people have long irritated Russia’s elites. Mikhail Leontiev, a TV propagandist and vice president of Rosneft, even suggested a couple of years ago that young people should lose the right to vote, because “otherwise we will lose the country.” “These people are completely ignorant, almost like in Ukraine. It’s awful,” he claimed.

The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia has gone all-in on a special operation to “demilitarize” the imaginary “Ukraine in people’s minds” ever since its party leader, notorious nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, recovered from COVID. On March 16, the LDPR faction in the State Duma proposed a referendum on reinstating the death penalty. Zhirinovsky’s followers declared, “Russia is leaving the Council of Europe, which means throwing off the chains of foreign values and rules. One of those values is abolishing the death penalty.” The LDPR suggests using the death penalty to combat terrorism.

We view this initiative as an attack on young people. The blatantly fabricated “anti-terrorism” cases of The Network (Set’) and New Greatness (Novoe velichie) have ruined the lives of many young men and women whose only fault was “preparing to train” for… something.

Are the LDPR’s initiatives their own, or were they dictated from above? Whatever the case, it is obvious that Russian elites are panicking, seeing signs of a revolutionary situation in Russian society. It begs the question: does a government that is so afraid of its youth have a future?

Russian Socialist Movement

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