Youth Nihilism of the 1950s – 1960s and the conflict of generations: the origins of the ideological split in Russia

Petrenko Maksim Stepanovich PhD in History Associate Professor; Department of World Economy, International Relations and Law; Novosibirsk State University of Economics and Management Associate Professor; Novosibirsk Law Institute (branch) Tomsk State University; National Research Tomsk State University 56 Kamenskaya str., Novosibirsk, 630099, Russia petmaxim@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction.

The ideological split, which largely caused the collapse of the USSR, still remains an urgent problem. Before the start of the special military operation, the majority of the Russian population was convinced that there was no national unity in the country ^[1]. Now the situation has temporarily changed, people have rallied in the face of an external threat, but the causes of the social split have not been overcome.

The social division is most pronounced in the various value orientations of young people and the older generation. A significant part of young people are more focused on Western values (individual freedom, private property, material success, the market, money), most representatives of the middle and older generations who survived the collapse of the state and the "dashing 90s", as V. I. Pantin writes, adhere to traditional or semi-traditional Russian and Soviet values to one degree or another and orientations: the state and state paternalism, family, social justice, order, development based on their own traditions and national culture ^{[2, p. 12]}.

Generational conflict, from the point of view of historians and sociologists, is a normal phenomenon in itself, but in some cases it can become a social problem that disrupts the natural functioning of society. In Russia, the generational conflict was associated not so much with age-related psychological differences between individual demographic groups, but with fundamental ideological differences, which predetermined the revolutionary outcome at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s.

The degree of scientific development of the research topic and objectives.

The problem of the generational crisis and assigning the main share of responsibility for it to young people is not new for sociologists. Conditionally, two directions in modern sociology can be distinguished that address this topic: the sociology of youth and the sociology of generations. Scientists studying young people face significant difficulties when referring to the theory of generations. The reasons for this, according to the sociologists of youth themselves, are related to the erosion of the conceptual meaning of this concept, as well as to the dominant tendency in science to look for intergenerational connections and elements of inheritance by youth of the social and cultural experience of fathers and grandfathers ^{[3, pp. 379-381]}. This makes it difficult to study the conflict of generations within the framework of youth sociology and poses new challenges for researchers.

As for the second direction, researchers feel relatively confident here, discover fundamental differences between generations, come up with different names for new age groups (X, Y, Z). However, the main focus in the study of generational conflict is not on a society experiencing a state of division, but on the generations themselves. Traditionally, various socio-economic interests, psychophysiological differences, and the opposite of ideological and political views of different age groups are cited as the reason ^{[4, p. 46]}.

The thesis that the older generation tends to traditional values, while the youth rejects them, is also unoriginal. Moreover, this is typical not only for the present time. Young people seem to reproduce a generational conflict, which causes justified irony among a number of modern researchers who disagree with this statement ^{[5, p. 61]}.

Obviously, the problem is not with the youth. Focusing on this group in the study of generational conflict really often gives rise to a false idea of it, its values and natural skepticism that young people are mainly to blame for the split in society. When considering the generational crisis, it is necessary to move away from youth as an object of research. Young people only express this conflict, not create it. It represents only a field in which the ideological crisis and the clash of values receives a favorable living environment and therefore is revealed more clearly. It is also impossible to talk about the homogeneity of the youth or the older generation. To understand the existing conflict, one should turn not to the study of generations, but to the causes of the ideological and psychological crisis of mass consciousness, which turned young people into a carrier of nihilism and made them extremely sensitive to uncritical perception of alien cultures.

It may seem that this has always been the case. But in the first decades of Soviet power, during the Great Patriotic War, this did not happen. Consequently, the sources of conflict between different age groups lie not so much in different needs, interests and orientations, as in the state of society and the socio-cultural processes that characterize it.

The need to study the transitional states of society in order to understand the conflict of generations was clearly traced in the research of V. T. Lisovsky, one of the leading Russian developers of youth sociology. However, for him, the beginning of the modern crisis was in the transition from Soviet to post-Soviet times. It was then, the scientist believed, that the nature of the succession of generations changed ^{[6, p. 112]}. Without questioning this fact, I would like to note at the same time that the ideological crisis at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s matured gradually, and its origins should be sought in a more distant historical period.

The theme of the twentieth Congress of the CPSU, youth subcultures of the 1950s – 1960s is popular among historians. However, research on the "Khrushchev thaw" and the youth rebellion of that time, as a rule, tend to be empiricist and avoid more general sociological issues, limiting themselves to a narrow chronological framework.

Thus, it can be stated that there is an insufficient degree of knowledge of the origins of the modern ideological split in Russia in the context of the generational conflict. The reference to the 1950s – 1960s, as the time of the conflict, is poorly represented in both sociological and historical literature, which poses the task of researchers to study more closely the origins of the ideological split that predetermined the conflict of generations.

Methodological basis of the research and methods.

The methodological basis of the research was the theoretical principles of sociological constructivism, associated with the identification of public consciousness as a decisive factor of social interaction, when the subjective perception of reality sets the semantic framework and meanings of social practices. Comparative and systematic methods were used in the work, which made it possible to combine narrative analysis with historical and sociological research data.

The twentieth Congress of the CPSU and the beginning of the ideological and psychological crisis of mass consciousness.

Generational conflict, which has developed on the basis of ideological differences, is always based on a split that is observed at the level of an individual human soul. The crisis of identity, the breaking of habitual worldview orientations leads to the denial of the former way of life and conflict with the more conservative part of society. Youth, as a more sensitive group, turns out to be the most susceptible to radical rejection of the old foundations of life and imitation of other people's outwardly attractive cultural forms.

Karl Mannheim also formulated the idea that the consciousness of generations is formed on the basis of the common experience of a traumatic historical event ^[7]. In Russia, such events occurred in the 1950s, when widespread criticism of the past began. The XX Congress of the CPSU and the debunking of the cult of Stalin's personality played a key role in this. In a new way, meaningful historical facts and the realities of the present have pushed young people to criticize the existing order. Young people were particularly sensitive to the changes taking place in society. More than anyone, she felt deceived in her bright romantic thoughts. The emancipation of consciousness that took place after the XX Party Congress became a powerful incentive for the development of nihilism among young people and the spread of critical attitudes towards the past.

The discovery of the falsity of life, the loss of faith while maintaining the old moral guidelines of consciousness, set up a new generation sharply negatively towards those who did not want to think independently, who clung to old authorities, who were afraid to take the wrong step. The decisive role here was played not so much by the emergence of an alternative positive program, as by an emotional desire to distance themselves from those in whom young people were disappointed. And it was mostly the "adult world". As recalled by Ch. Symonovich: "The "children" condemned the "fathers" for allowing the cult with its atrocities, and the "fathers" complained about the strangeness and excessive freedom of reasoning of the "children"" ^{[8, p. 43]}. The older generation for many young people lost their unquestionable authority, since the loud words about honesty, courage, and heroism uttered by their fathers, as it turned out, were only a simple repetition of phrases coming down from above, and the people themselves were in a state of permanent fear.

The main accusation against the older generation was related to attributing to it a social choice made: "Keep your head down!". The desire of some young people to oppose themselves to their fathers gave rise to nihilism and nonconformism, which manifested itself both in the political and in the general cultural spheres. The critical ("demagogic", as they were called by the party organs) performances of students in 1956-1957, "stylishness", fascination with Western philosophy, awakened interest in abstractionism, the fashion for jazz, boogie-woogie and rock and roll - all these were symptoms of the social conflict that had begun. As A. I. Lebed, one of the employees of the emigrant Munich Institute for the Study of the USSR, wrote in his assessment in the 1960s: "She [the youth] was bored with calls for the romance of the revolutionary years, for the pathos of the construction of the post-revolutionary period and a reminder of the sacrifice of the period of the Second World War. The struggle for universal human truth, the search for new ideological directions now permeates the creative activity of young Soviet people" ^{[9, p. 4]}. It is noteworthy that until the mid-1950s, emigrants were practically not interested in Soviet youth and only in the late 1950s began to talk about the conflict of generations ^{[10, pp. 59, 65]}.

The critical speeches of students in the second half of the 1950s were not directed against the existing system. However, the fashion for "frontage" has become an important incentive for further contrasting oneself with the rejected past. In the speeches of the youth, the main emphasis was placed on the requirements of providing students with greater independence, the opportunity to express independent judgments and opinions ^[11]. Even semi-oppositional political organizations appeared, such as the L. N. Krasnopevtsev group ^[12].

The youth's search for new forms of self-expression and the beginning of a split.

The desire for independence and the desire to oppose official structures led to the creation of new Komsomol organizations and other amateur student groups in a number of universities in the country. Disillusionment with the old forms of social organization, which were represented primarily by the party and the old Komsomol structures, led to a shift in value orientations away from traditional norms. The old living bond between the generations began to weaken. The skepticism that appeared, the undermining of faith that occurred after the XX Congress of the CPSU, deprived the old organization of meaning and ceased to provide satisfaction of social needs. The lack of adequate reflection of social needs, a sense of novelty, a decline in prestige, and formalism in the work of official public organizations brought to life other types of activities that were supposed to make up for the violated compliance. With a decrease in the importance of formal norms, the role of informal communication has significantly increased. At the same time, elements of individualism and pragmatism have intensified, which have led to other psychological attitudes and models of social behavior.

The collective has ceased to act in the meaning of society or the people. Group self-awareness and social localization began to strengthen on the basis of contrasting one's group with others, when informal communication and the practice of joint leisure activities are key factors in group formation. "There were us and them, there were our own people, and there were plebeians who did not understand that the Soviet government was bad, and that made them worse..." recalled one contemporary ^{[13, p. 187]}. Hilary Pilkinton called this youth phenomenon "embodied communication", one of the forms of which was the game ^{[14, p. 172]}. Hence the growth of student solidarity, the protection of guilty comrades, unity in opposing themselves to those who found themselves in an "alien" group. These could be students who were considered sycophants or careerists, the Komsomol committee, the dean's office, the rector's office.

Party organs were often criticized. There were statements that the leaders of the city and the region think only about their careers and personal well-being. The rejection of such qualities indicated that the basis of the separation was not so much political factors as value differences. The idealism of young people raised on the communist ideals of selflessness and dedication, romantic enthusiasm for the belief in a bright future gave rise to acute rejection of leaders who personified the "adult world", who put prudence and pragmatism in life first. If more recently the elders were imitated, now, as a contemporary of those years recalled: "The example of adults living boring is not inspiring, I want to create, create something unique, become famous, reason and touch humanity" ^{[15, p. 30]}.

At a time when formal structures had lost credibility and respect, it was much more important to maintain personal status in the primary informal environment. People were ready to go into conflict with official bodies in order to preserve the "face", the trust of those whose opinion and support were the most significant. The desire for independence and individual freedom was central among the demands voiced among the youth.

Often the protest was elevated to a principle. Nihilism shielded young people from unwanted outside influences in their minds. Hence the ridicule, mockery, and banter of those who tried to shape their lives. That was also part of the game. Dmitry Prikhodko, a well-known "stylist" at Tomsk University in the late 1950s, after being summoned to the Komsomol committee and reprimanded for his "non-Soviet" appearance, appeared at the university the next day in a sweatshirt and canvas boots. The students recorded the speech of the secretary of the Komsomol committee on a tape recorder and put the famous thug song "Murka" to music. Pilkinton calls this phenomenon "being sussed" ^{[14, p. 196]}. She conducted her research in Moscow in 1988 – 1991. In a period that goes beyond the chronological framework of this work. However, the individual youth features of the period of the late USSR that she noticed for the first time became noticeable during the years of the "Khrushchev thaw". It was an attempt to assert themselves in their own eyes and convince themselves that their behavior was built only by themselves without outside interference. Therefore, even in the most harmless cases, young people could go to conflict.

The emergence of subcultures and imitation of the West.

Resistance to the prevailing and externally imposed values and tastes is always carried out on a symbolic level, through ritual, through the creation of subcultures that run counter to the prevailing ideology ^[16]. Youth subcultures in the USSR were aimed at symbolic criticism of the Soviet system and the Soviet style. Hence their demonstrativeness and the deliberately "wrong", defiant behavior of its bearers. Subcultures in the USSR were more expressive than meaningful phenomena. To flaunt oneself, to seem different from others, meant much more than to be different. Representatives of subcultures, first of all, wanted to separate themselves from the "gray mass", from the environment that they openly despised. But their nonconformity was often another inverted image of the value system they denied, which made them dependent on rejected external forms. Instead of wide trousers – narrow, instead of a short haircut – long hair. Rebelling against the officially imposed culture of outdated forms, young people have become a negative mirror image of their fathers. Fathers did not attach importance to clothes, sons focused on this; fathers had a negative attitude towards the West, sons were delighted with it; fathers sacrificed the present for the sake of the future, sons lived only for today ^{[17, p. 239]}.

The hypocrisy of adults, the collapse of previous political meanings, the inconsistency of ideological education, and the erosion of old ideological orientations favored the emergence of a special sensitivity to those cultural forms and values that were considered hostile in the eyes of official ideology. They were primarily Western fashion, music, and behavioral patterns. Later, the fascination with thugs and tavern songs, as well as the White Guard theme, will be added to this.

The fascination with Western fashion and music, trophy films appeared in the late 1940s. However, it was only by the end of the 1950s - early 1960s that we can talk about a change in the cultural paradigm of the Soviet Union, when they gradually began to move from a harsh confrontation with the West "to an interested dialogue and direct convergence," as L. B. Brusilovskaya ^{[18, p. 135]}.

The orientation towards the West was most noticeable among the children of high-ranking parents, who had the opportunity to get imported items that cost a lot of money. And the very request for elitism, which presupposed opposition to the "scoop", could rather arise among representatives of the privileged class. Back in the early 1960s, the United States noticed that representatives of the Soviet elite themselves undermined the socialist system and the unity of society. Western researchers assigned a significant share of responsibility for the destruction of the party's ideological guidelines for the communist education of youth to high-ranking leaders who deliberately pampered their children, protected them from physical work, and provided them with money for entertainment. Uttering loud phrases from high tribunes about selfless service to the ideals of communism, they dissuaded, or even directly forbade their children to go to the virgin lands, to Siberia, even in cases when young people themselves sought to go on Komsomol vouchers to the construction sites of socialism ^{[19, p. 144-153]}.

Of particular importance for the generation of the "sixties" was the so-called private–public sphere, which on the one hand separated a person from the world of officialdom criticized by him, on the other - acted as a "different" publicity. An example of this kind is the so-called "intellectual cuisine" ^{[20, p. 194]}. It was in this area that stable protest sentiments were formed, and with the transfer of the rules of the private-public sphere to the sphere of official publicity, dissidence arose.

The discrepancy between word and deed, which intensified after the twentieth Congress of the CPSU, and the inconsistency in criticizing Stalin and the negative aspects of life undermined the basic ideological and moral principles of Soviet education. Hence the radicalism of the youth in the rejection of the old dogma. The new value system was based not so much on the development of new ideological positions and practical attitudes of positive action, as on the denial of the world, which began to seem deceitful, stupid and dishonest. Bitterness and resentment became decisive in the set of feelings that guided the young man, making his political and ideological choice in favor of Western culture and foreign radio stations "BBC", "Voices of America", etc.

At first, the imitation of Western fashion and bourgeois aesthetics touched the consciousness of a few young people. But by the mid-1980s, their number had increased by a multiple. The split of society that occurred on this basis turned out to be the epicenter of the social conflict that resulted in a generational conflict. Its content has changed significantly over the following decades. Today's youth is not like the youth of the 1950s and 1960s. In those years, most still believed in bright ideals. Sociological studies conducted in Russia have shown that 75% of modern youth have no ideals ^{[21, p. 178]}. In the 1990s, answering a correspondent's question: "What is the difference between your generation and the current one?" - the then rector of Novosibirsk State University, V. N. Enemies, a former student of NSU, replied: "We did not have such Western practicality, pragmatism as current students, and had more confidence in the future. We had more openness in communication, we could come to each other at any time of the day or night, everyone could share the last piece of bread and bacon that they could find... Now, as far as I know, there is no such thing, we have lost the freedom of human communication. Now it is closer to the Western type of behavior, where everyone is self-contained" ^{[22, p. 34]}.

The older generation remained in the traditional world of personal connections and relationships, not clouded by cold prudence, the search for personal gain and pragmatism. At first, many young people joined them, focused on the cult of fathers, the heroic past, aspiring with these ideas to the future, which seemed bright and beautiful to them. "Children" increasingly began to live with a pronounced critical attitude towards the past and without dreams of the future, but with great realism and tenacious practical grasp.

The generational conflict is not only connected with the youth protest. In the Stalinist years, young people did not oppose themselves to their elders. She tried to grow up faster and get involved in the common cause of fathers. Youth was a demographic rather than a sociocultural phenomenon. The very isolation of youth as an independent social group and its self-reflection, the isolation of oneself from the adult world and opposition to it is largely the result of a change in attitude towards youth on the part of adults themselves. In the 1950s, young people were not only the builders of communism, but increasingly began to demonstrate deviant tendencies in the eyes of the older generation. It was this idea of youth that began to be given the main attention. The youth began to be understood as a victim of the corrupting influence of Western society ^{[23, p. 83]}.

Reproduction of generational conflict in modern society.

The value divisions between the youth and the older generation, which first emerged during the years of the Khrushchev thaw, remain defining generational conflict in modern Russia. The content of modern youth rebellion echoes some of the social attitudes of a significant part of the youth of the 1950s and 1960s. This allows us to talk not only about the conflict of values, but also the conflict of generations. Despite the change in the current agenda and the emergence of new slogans, since the 1950s, young people throughout the subsequent time gravitated towards freedom, independence, new forms of self-expression and sought to distance themselves from other social groups and cultures, perceiving the adult world as alien.

At first glance, it is paradoxical that the bearers of traditional paternalistic values in our time and in the recent past are the very people who in their youth fiercely defended the principles of individualism and personal freedom. For example, the above-mentioned "dude" Dmitry Prikhodko in 1978 became the head of the Department of Scientific Communism and became a respected professor. However, the imitation of the imaginary West has not gone away. Only over time, the passion for this became inherent in the new grown-up generation. And yesterday's "dudes" and rebels looked at their reflection in the "children" with bewilderment and did not recognize themselves in them. The reasons for this kind of discrepancy should be sought in the general destructiveness of the protesting youth. The lack of a positive program of action, the focus on the denial of the rejected aspects of life deprived youth nihilism of creative power, which made it unlikely that the ideological attitudes of youth rebellion would remain in adulthood. So far, despite the long drift towards Western values, young people have not become the bearer of the Western worldview. The different attitude towards the Soviet past, the state, and national tasks compared to the older generation does not mean a complete break between young people and traditional values. Sociological surveys show that young people still maintain a benevolent attitude towards their parents and cherish their family ^{[24, p. 11]}. The young people have not formed the existing Western attitude towards active social and public participation. Approximation to the standards of Western countries is observed only in cultural, sports and entertainment terms ^{[21, p. 268]}.

The values of consumerism and material prosperity that were established in the late USSR were not directly related to orientation towards the West and denial of the old norms of communist morality. Philistinism, greed for profit, a well-fed carefree life, conformism and careerism were deeply antipathic to the critical youth of the Khrushchev thaw period ^[25]. The widespread dissemination of these values in modern Russian society, including among the older generation, was the result of other social and cultural processes. Utilitarianism was not introduced into our time by the generation of the "sixties".

At the same time, the origins of the current ideological conflict of generations should be sought in the 1950s and 1960s. It was not generated by the critical-minded part of the youth who challenged their fathers for the first time. It was based on an ideological and psychological crisis of consciousness generated by the collapse of faith, when former values, habits, traditions ceased to serve as prompts in the development of standards of behavior. A kind of existential vacuum was formed, which gradually grew over the next 30-40 years. According to V. Frankl, in order to get out of this state, it was necessary to devote oneself to the service of an important cause ^[26]. As he grew up, the accumulated life experience allowed a person to overcome the crisis state of nihilism. However, its causes have not been eradicated. The level of trust in society was falling. The attitude towards active public participation has not developed. Overcoming the difficulties that arose was still carried out within the framework of individual survival strategies. Therefore, with each new generation of youth, the ideological conflict of generations was only reproduced.

Conclusion.

The analysis of youth nihilism of the 1950s and 1960s suggests a connection between the ideological split of the Khrushchev thaw period and the modern generational conflict in Russia. Its origins should be sought in the ideological and psychological crisis of mass consciousness caused by the decisions of the twentieth Congress of the CPSU and the debunking of the cult of Stalin's personality. Due to age-related psychological characteristics, young people most painfully perceived the lies, hypocrisy and double morality of adults, which stimulated the search for new forms of self-expression, based on a sharp rejection of the legacy of their fathers. Lacking positive targets and their own program of action, the youth, who were critical of the older generation, embarked on the path of nihilism, which favored fascination with Western cultural trends and style. The negativism of youth was unable to transform consciousness based on Western principles of life organization. He only plunged people into an existential vacuum, created social tension, stimulated the crisis of Soviet identity, which split society and deprived it of the ability to develop a new creative idea.