At Alexey Navalny’s bright, modern campaign headquarters in Moscow, Ruslan Ivanov took a seat by the wall, beneath white boards and campaign posters. A shy eighteen-year-old economics student from Novosibirsk, Ivanov had come to the Russian capital for a just few days, to see the city. He’d followed Navalny’s career from afar (most recently, the thirty-seven-year-old opposition leader was sentenced to five years in prison, then freed, pending appeal, the next day, and is now running to be Moscow’s next mayor) and decided to go down to the campaign’s headquarters and volunteer. “I suppose I just must help Navalny and his team to win,” said Ivanov, who spent his first day carrying boxes. “I think he’s the most interesting candidate and the most appropriate for our country, because of the corrupt system. I think if a person really works, there is no way they cannot overcome obstacles.”
With his message of change, Navalny has caught the imagination of young, educated Russians like Ivanov. That’s clear as soon as you walk into the campaign’s headquarters, where, a few hours before the first debate of the race (which the incumbent mayor had declined to join), some fifty volunteers sat elbow to elbow, typing on rows of laptops, stacking leaflets, registering walk-in volunteers, and eating apple cake. If they were nervous about the upcoming debate, worried by new charges that the campaign is being illegally financed from abroad, or concerned about the potential for voter fraud, it didn’t show. Instead, they looked energized, focussed, fashionable and, like Ivanov, very, very young. “It’s a common truth that young people are pretty hardworking,” said Ivanov, when I mentioned this. “They do things ideally—better, and with more hope. We have more stamina.”
In the past month and a half, according to Navalny’s campaign organizers, fifteen thousand people have signed on as volunteers via social networks. The largest age group is twenty-four to twenty-seven; the second largest is twenty-one to twenty-four. No one knows exactly how old the two hundred full-time volunteers working at the headquarters are, but it looks like that group skews even younger, particularly during the day, because university students are using their summer holiday to create viral political videos, distribute giant Navalny banners, and hand out homemade newspapers.
While many, like Ivanov, say that their youth enables them to imagine alternatives to the current system in a way their Soviet-born parents or grandparents can not, Elena Slesakareva, the twenty-year-old assistant to the press secretary, assured me that Navalny volunteers come in all ages. “It is not only young people,” said Slesakareva, running her blue fingernails through her hair. “I think some of the people downstairs, the I.T. people, are old,” agreed another volunteer. “Like, thirty-plus.”
Vladimir Ashurkov, the forty-one-year-old banker responsible for the Navalny campaign’s ideology and core message, said that it was only natural that so many young people are active in the campaign. “They’re well versed in campaign tools—social media, online organizing,” he said. “And young people have more time on their hands. They’re not tied down with kids and a mortgage.”
Volunteers see it somewhat differently. “I’m here because I want to help my city and my country change,” said the seventeen-year-old Danil Minaev, who will study political science when he starts his university courses, in September. “Right now, we have this weird mix of West, East, and our own special kind of crazy. People just don’t care. If there’s trash on the street or the jailing of dissidents, people just don’t care. But we have hope and a vision of the future.”
Yaroslav Koryakin, eighteen, quit his summer internship with a British finance firm to join Navalny’s team. Now, instead of analyzing portfolios, Koryakin spends his days gluing campaign leaflets to post offices and Sberbanks around the city. He also does outreach for Navalny’s town-hall-style neighborhood meetings, which are arranged semi-secretly, to avoid hecklers. “The old people, they sit on these benches, and we say, ‘Hey, he’s coming to talk, there will be chairs.’ They all go, ‘Wow,’ and they do come,” he said. “When there are six hundred people at a meeting, and they’re interested and engaged and asking questions, you have the feeling you’re making a difference.”
Like many of the volunteers, Koryakin—whose friends had bones broken by police at an anti-Putin protest—has travelled extensively in the West, something that would have been unusual for a student even ten years ago. “It’s not like it’s the Soviet Union anymore,” he said. “I’ve been everywhere in Europe. You see that in Europe, cities work better, have better infrastructures, better life levels, the business environment is better.”
While some liberals are concerned by Navalny’s more populist stances, the opposition candidate’s anti-corruption message is what resonates with his young volunteers, who would like to see their city provide better health care, better education, and a law-abiding police force, among other things. (One volunteer dismissed Navalny’s 2006 appearance at a nationalist rally as a youthful folly. “I think he’s pretty moderate,” he said.)
“This is definitely a generation that wants to live in a different country,” said Masha Baronova, a twenty-nine-year-old columnist who has been spending several days a week in court fighting trumped-up charges of having incited a riot at one of the anti-Putin demonstrations. “They learned from CNN about the Obama campaign. Also from movies that show lots of junk food, you eat only pizza and cheeseburgers and Coca-Cola, you can’t leave the office for five days, you can’t sleep because you’re doing everything for your candidate. They’re playing like they live in some kind of American film.”
Alexander Chepurenko, dean of the sociology department at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, sees more similarities than differences between this generation and previous ones. He argued that “ ‘Westernized’ young middle-class boys and girls [living] in two capitals” are nothing new for Russia: in the sixties and seventies, the Navalny volunteers would have met in flats at night to listen to western music, or they would have hung out on Arbat Street, hippie-style, agitating for peace. “Now, it becomes ‘cool,’ again, to be more inclined for public life,” he wrote in an email.
At an afternoon press briefing, held in the office’s rundown back courtyard, the nineteen-year-old Gleb Sinev stepped up to the camera. Wearing Ray-Bans and an “Enjoy Slurm” T-shirt (Slurm is a fictional soda, the “No. 1 soft drink of the future” on the TV show “Futurama”), he answered questions from the press about the campaign’s methods for reaching voters, like its “cubes”—volunteer-manned information centers, twenty-five to fifty of which are scattered through Moscow‘s streets each day—and the ways that the establishment has responded. (On several occasions, the city has sent men to rappel down from the roof of a high-rise apartment building to take down Navalny banners.)
Meanwhile, inside the office, Alexandra Vasileva, who is studying to be a translator, had just signed up to volunteer. “We can do a lot to change things,” said the earnest twenty-one-year-old in bright-magenta lipstick. “And we must. For example, our elderly people are very poor. An old person might be paid five thousand rubles. A flat costs three thousand rubles. They can’t eat something, can’t live like a normal human being.” She paused, leaning in close. “We are the new generation. It is our time.”
Above: Alexei Navalny on July 20th. Photograph by Vasily Maximov/AFP/Getty.