Prefiguration,Resilience and Transitions to Adulthood: Russian Youth in Times of Uncertainty

Abstract

The article discusses how Russian youth search for resilience strategies, opportunities for decision-making and meaningful participation in times of uncertainty. Being in a high-risk political climate, young Russians turn to prefiguration: they embody the alternatives to the existing regime of neoliberal governmentality via organizing or engaging in grassroots activist initiatives. Based on the analysis of in-depth interviews with young St. Petersburg residents in 2022 and 2023, we show how they define their civil positions in the presence and how they mark their (non)adulthood. We demonstrate that involvement in prefiguration via informal grassroots youth organizations is an important condition for the formation of the youth’s civic consciousness.

Transition to Adulthood in the ‘Age of Uncertainty’

It is a generally accepted statement that the contemporary youth is undergoing a transition into adulthood—a stage of the life course at which there occurs ‘the highest concentration of significant events that change the social status of a person and the structure of their life’ (Billari & Liefbroer, 2007)—in conditions of widespread uncertainty (‘risk society’, ‘second modernity’, ‘liquid modernity’). In the 21st century, the transition to adulthood occurs in the context of dismantling the welfare state, the high degree of precarization and the rise of social inequality. Under these conditions, the cultural model of adulthood based on stability and a set of clearly defined transitions becomes structurally unattainable for young people (Woodman & Bennett, 2015). Traditionally, adulthood has been viewed as a set of completed transitions: for Europe, a relevant set consists of completing primary education, entering the labour market, leaving the parental home, forming the first union and entering parenthood (Buchmann & Kriesi, 2011); in non-Western countries, alternative markers may be important (Juárez & Gayet, 2014; Park 2013). Despite the differences in the sets of transitions, one trend can be seen everywhere: traditional markers of adulthood, such as marriage, house purchase and career building are becoming difficult to achieve.

In the era that Silva (2012) calls the ‘age of uncertainty’, the model of adulthood based on a completed set of transitions loses its relevance and is replaced by a model based on subjective markers. These include taking responsibility for oneself, emotional separation from parents and independent decision-making (Arnett, 2004). Arnett’s concept of emerging adulthood has been criticized for promoting a neoliberal ideal of individualism (Côté, 2014; Sukarieh & Tannock, 2011); in this instance, we side with Settersten et al. (2015). According to them, the state of not independence but interdependence is an adequate marker of transition into adulthood. The reason is that adults are acting not autonomously but in conditions formed by their connections with other people. This position highlights the importance of community rootedness for a successful transition to adulthood, which we will return to in the section on resilience.

There are gender-specific patterns in youth’s transitions to adulthood in times of uncertainty. The approach to adulthood may be different for young men, who traditionally have been valued for economic independence (Spéder et al., 2014), while women have been seen as responsible for parenthood (Benson & Furstenberg, 2006). Since 2020, Russian youth have faced multiple crises and conflicts: first the pandemic and then the so-called special military operation (SMO) in Ukraine, which entailed several radical social transformations, the sanctions crisis, the rupture of many international relations; and changes in the internal politics of the Russian Federation generational conflicts (Nartova, 2023, p. 94). In such conditions, the search for resilience strategies, opportunities for decision-making and meaningful participation becomes even more relevant.

Resilience and Community

Affective connections, becoming a trigger for activism (Krivonos, 2016), underlie the formation of activist communities through feelings of solidarity and mutual support (Pilkington et al., 2018). Many conceptualize rootedness in the community as a key feature of the younger generation: Helne and Hirvilammi (2021) state a conceptual transition from homo economicus to homo iunctus (the interconnected person); Honkatukia and Rättilä (2023) equate being young with ‘developing a sense of oneself as a part of communities’; Oinonen (2018) emphasizes the importance of a sense of belonging to place and community for an individual’s well-being during times of uncertainty. Researchers claim that the ability of people to come together in a community to maintain and promote their well-being in the face of challenges determines their resilience (Suarez et al., 2021).

Rooted in ecology, the concept of resilience is used extensively in the social sciences, particularly in discussions about youth, who are often identified as a group in a structurally vulnerable position (Coe, 2022). At the same time, the concept of resilience is criticized as a deeply conservative neoliberal technique. At the existential level, the concept of resilience suggests that the hostility of the world toward the individual is so fundamental that it must be accepted as a fact of nature (Webster & Rivers, 2019). At the political level, the concept of resilience is associated with the Foucauldian concept of governmentality and involves governance ‘through greater awareness of our own behaviour’ (Joseph, 2013, p. 40). At the socio-economic level, the concept of resilience involves the abdication of social and political responsibilities (Bourbeau, 2015). In addition, the lack of a unified methodology for calculating resilience leads to polar conclusions that can be used for speculative purposes. Thus, in a study that used entrepreneurship, leadership and feeling powerful as dimensions of resilience, male students showed significantly higher levels of resilience than female students (Erdogan et al., 2015). On the contrary, when using the parameters of communication, empathy and seeking help, girls showed higher levels of resilience than boys (Sun & Stewart, 2007).

Taking into account all the criticisms, we nevertheless consider the concept of resilience to be a useful analytical tool, as it allows us to highlight the importance of rootedness in the community for the meaningful participation of youth. For the definition of resilience, we include not only the efforts of youth to pave their way to resources but also the ability of the social environment to provide these resources (Southwick et al., 2014; Ungar et al., 2008). For us, the key parameters for defining youth resilience are decision-making, including meaning, control and connectedness (Oliver et al., 2006) and the ability to organize in groups to strengthen their well-being (Suarez et al., 2021). In this study, we aim to demonstrate how the youth in the political climate of everyday violence (Coe, 2022) build resilience based not on individualistic aspirations and an abdication of social and political responsibilities (Bourbeau, 2015) but rather on creating horizontal communities that provide opportunities for decision-making and embody the alternative to the existing regime of neoliberal governmentality.

Activist Practices in High-Risk Political Climate: Conceptual Framing

Independent decision-making and a high degree of autonomy, arguably two of the most essential features of adulthood and resilience, are hard for young people to achieve in a high-risk political climate, as is the case with Russia. In Russia’s cleared political field, young people find it impossible to participate in public politics, so they are often branded as ‘apolitical’, ‘passive’ and ‘immature’. Despite the fact that ‘youth are apathetic’ is an unpopular position in the global academic community, it finds support in Russian discourse. There is a strong tradition of depicting Russians and Russian youth in particular as predominantly apolitical, compliant and conformist: ‘mythical Russian quiescence’ (Clément & Zhelnina, 2020a) is cited as the supposed root of Russian apathy; Russian youth is labelled as a ‘non-civilian’ generation focused on hedonistic individualistic values (Babintsev & Reutov, 2010; Dlugosh, 2012); and young volunteers and activists are infantilized for taking on only small (non-political) problems and refraining from critiquing the structural problems of society (Oberemko & Istomina, 2015).

Not only in the Russian academic community but in the global one as well, most often, the focus of research is on loud protest movements or, conversely, participation in state-led projects. Thus, grassroots youth-led initiatives that do not immediately read as ‘political’ or ‘resistant’ fall outside the scope of attention. Meanwhile, in our opinion, it is precisely such initiatives that deserve close attention in the political climate of everyday violence (Coe, 2022). In contrast to the dominant narrative, according to which unsafety is associated only with ‘discrete acts of violent crime’ (hence, an exception to the norm and not a systemic problem), Coe (2022) claims that unsafety takes root in everyday violence experienced by young people. Drawing on the work of feminist scholars (Hlavka, 2014; Kelly, 1987; Stanko, 1990), Coe formulates the concept of youth as a class that experiences violence ‘that occurs on a routine basis, accumulates overtime and becomes normalized, and that takes subtle forms less visible or recognized by society’ (Coe, 2022, p. 458).

In order to study the activist practices of young people who do not belong to either mass protest movements or state-led projects, and to avoid accusing them of being ‘disinterested’, ‘apathetic’ or ‘apolitical’, a broader definition of what is political is necessary. Such a definition was proposed by Scott (1990) in his influential work on ‘infrapolitics’—a sphere of disguised resistance that remains unnoticed by the powerful stakeholders akin to ‘infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum’. With their emphasis on the diversity of practices that fall on the spectrum between ‘politically engaged’ and ‘apolitical’, Scott’s ideas were further developed in the contextual frame of ‘everyday politics’ (Boudreau et al., 2009; Fernández et al., 2016; Kerkvliet, 2009) and ‘pragmatic politics’ (Clément & Zhelnina, 2020b).

For us, the most important idea in the scope of a broad interpretation of politics is that of creating being the key content of activist practices; it receives conceptual development in the works of Hughes (2016) and Monticelli (2021). Hughes (2016) draws on Foucault’s (1977) argument that to resist something is to create something, and thus it challenges the dominant view of resistance as characterized primarily by intent. In turn, Monticelli (2021) formulates the concept of ‘prefigurative politics’ as practices ‘focused on the embodiment of alternatives’ and claims that the prefigurative approach is the key to transcending late-stage capitalism, as it offers a fundamentally new ontological and epistemological approach to the creation of social change compared to political parties and protest movements.

Studying youth activism through the lens of a broad interpretation of politics works well in societies with a sterilized public policy field such as Tibet (Yangzom, 2016), Uzbekistan (Urinboyev & Eraliev, 2022), Kuwait (Buscemi, 2020), China (Yang et al., 2015) and Cambodia (Lee, 2018). Research by Russian sociologists has also shown the successful application of this theoretical framework. A transition occurred from large-scale projects to local ones (Kravtsova & Omelchenko, 2023); Russian youth prefer to solve problems within the framework of everyday life (Nartova, 2019). Petukhov (2020) believes that through systematic, albeit subtle changes in social practices, youth can draw public attention to new topics, new areas of social conflicts that key policymakers care little about, and set ‘moral guidelines, returning them to public use amid total ‘hybridity’ and relativism of the concept of the norm’.

Based on the existing discussion around youth activist practices, the research question is formulated as follows: How do Russian youth look for resilience strategies, opportunities for decision-making and meaningful participation in times of uncertainty? We chose the concept of prefiguration (Monticelli, 2021) as a theoretical framework to analyse how young St. Petersburg residents implement their vision of a better future in a high-risk political climate. Following Monticelli (2021), we understand prefiguration as practices focused on the embodiment of alternatives to the dominant regime of enforced resilience via neoliberal governmentality. We believe this concept is a perfect analytical tool to examine grassroots youth initiatives that tend to be overlooked due to typically small-scale and ambiguous (neither obviously pro-governmental nor protest-oriented) nature that nevertheless have a powerful ability to make a change.

Methods and Methodology

The empirical material of the article is derived from two projects implemented by the Centre for Youth Studies team. The first project (2022) was carried out in the format of an exploratory study ¹ and was dedicated to the analysis of key choices and paths to adulthood among today’s youth. The second project (2023) addressed informal youth leadership and the inclusion of urban youth in grassroots initiatives. ² In interviews conducted in 2022, informants mentioned that engaging in volunteer activities and building a community around caring for others is what allowed them to gain resilience in times of uncertainty. Considering, on the one hand, the growing trend of the need for meaningful participation and, on the other hand, the shrinking windows for said participation through 2022 and 2023, we considered it suitable to conduct a study of young people actively involved in grassroots initiatives in 2023. St. Petersburg is a suitable location for such a study: it is a youthful city, a centre of educational and labour migration that attracts young people of diverse backgrounds from all over Russia; a large city that offers more opportunities for grassroots initiatives than most Russian cities, yet its public space is less institutionalized and state-run than Moscow’s. The participants of the research were urban, educated youth, mostly from middle-class backgrounds and living in St. Petersburg.

We collected 16 interviews in 2022 (age 18–25 years) and 30 interviews in 2023 (age 18–35 years); the sample was maximally balanced on gender. Among the informants interviewed in 2022, nine people have experience in participating in activist or volunteer initiatives (2, student activism; 2, event volunteering; 4, volunteering in cultural institutions; and 1, supporting an animal shelter). For informants interviewed in 2023, participation in grassroots initiatives was a selection criterion; among 30 people, 5 people were organizers or active participants in initiatives in the fields of science and innovation, sports and healthy lifestyle, ecology and animal protection, the urban environment, culture and the social sphere. Recruitment of participants took place in several stages and through different entry points into the field: through the researchers’ social networks and via the snowball method. Interviews were conducted both offline and online, and they lasted from 50 minutes to three hours. Conversations were recorded on a voice recorder and were then transcribed and anonymized. We chose narrative thematic analysis as a method of interview analysis to identify common elements among narratives: to reconstruct common themes, events and the dominant types of their interpretation (Riessman, 2005). The article uses the narratives of only part of the informants, which is explained by the chosen focus of analysis and the limited possibilities for publishing such material.

Activism as a Resilience Strategy in Times of Uncertainty

Contemporary Russian youth are transitioning to adulthood in conditions of permanent crisis when the only constant is uncertainty. In such circumstances, finding optimal resilience strategies becomes of paramount importance. Two closely related strategies are coming to the fore: community building and involvement in prefigurative practices.

In a crisis, more and more informants realize themselves as being interconnected persons, and the formation of support networks is recognized by many as the only opportunity to survive in an era of total uncertainty. As one of our informants stated; ‘Now if we don’t help each other, we’ll all go fucking extinct’ (Daria, 22, logistics manager, 2022 ³ ). Youth communities, in turn, are seen as springboards for promoting their values, even in a relatively narrow circle. Thus, the project of forming a community united by common values and the project of implementing one’s vision of a better future become one.

This was especially evident in the 2023 interviews, when, speaking about the goals of creating a grassroots initiative, the meanings of activism and/or volunteering, and the difficulties and joys of their activities, informants would always return to the shared meanings of inclusion in the community. The community and its greatest gift—the opportunity to be heard, understood and accepted—is what makes the initiative worth organizing. Even if it is not obvious from the outside, the idea of community formation is embedded in our informants’ initiatives:

For example, we did a volunteer movement…we also went to such events as, as I said, a roller race in [a park in St. Petersburg] or distributed leaflets against drugs or something else. And, from the outside, it would seem that this is just an event. But what is important is the content we put in, what information we convey, what meanings, how we don’t just get people to do something once, but we purposefully build a community, help them come regularly to communicate, build connections, connections within the school and so on. (Olga, 33, psychologist, 2023)

It should be noted that when speaking about activism, interviewees almost always mean non-political activism: in their opinion, political activism is a thing of the past that is difficult to imagine in contemporary Russia. Other studies confirm that most Russian activists consider their activism as non-political (Morris et al., 2023). According to several researchers and stakeholders, this automatically makes youth infantile and their activism invalid, but our informants think differently. From their point of view, the creation of a community united by common values leads to civil society; whether they united around a political or non-political project does not matter:

I see some more global goals in this, that it’s not just that we at the exhibition helped visitors understand why this painting hangs here. So, in general, this is a community that can be developed, that grows, in which people also somehow find themselves; and volunteering is, in general, an important thing from the point of view of, well, the organization of society or something, that people choose to spend their leisure time helping others. (Svetlana, 22, volunteer at the exhibition centre, 2022)

While grassroots activism has previously been a daily backdrop in the lives of many young St. Petersburg residents, the importance of activist and/or volunteer work has grown significantly since the pandemic. In the face of growing political and economic pressure, grassroots activism with its ‘systematic change in key social practices’ (Petukhov, 2020) becomes an inoculation against learned helplessness for youth who feel powerless. Several informants (especially women) explicitly highlight widespread involvement in activist and/or volunteer practices as a characteristic feature of the generation. Thus, transforming powerless guilt into active responsibility and embodying an alternative to the harsh regime of neoliberal governance becomes the key value of the generation:

It was this reservoir of people that the whole situation hit the hardest, because these were the people who fought the hardest, advocated the hardest, and so, well, the hardest, I mean, again, to the extent of personal capabilities… Those who are younger, they don’t give a fuck yet, those who are older, they most likely no longer give a fuck. That’s it. And we remain, it turns out, the only ones who give a damn. (Daria, 22, logistics manager, 2022)

Embodying a Better Future via Grassroots Youth Initiatives

Given the consolidated nature of Russia’s field of public politics, it is no wonder that our informants feel like their values are alien to a society where the decision-making power is assigned to the older generation and the risks associated with direct political participation are too high to resist openly. Therefore, interviewees turn to prefiguration: they unite around ideas that are alternative to the state that has filled the entire public sphere and establish spaces for non-hierarchical and ecological communication. Embodying these visions of a better future, they build resilience in an era of post-democratic neoliberal transformations.

Our informants create grassroots initiatives to build a community of like-minded people based on the principle of equality. Such initiatives are born as alternatives to the existing hierarchical, bureaucratic institutions in their fields. In the case of Alexander (26, manager at an NGO, 2023), this is an informal additional education instead of a strictly formalized one, where a diploma is valued above real skills; in the case of Ksenia (32, founder of a fund for people with mental illnesses, 2023)—a community of peer consultants instead of stigmatizing, punitive institutionalized psychiatry; in the case of Sophia (20, organizer of a K-Pop inspired event, 2023)—a community of young people consolidated by a common interest and choosing to develop it according to their own rules, away from the canons imposed from above. Informal or semi-formalized associations are chosen as more consistent with the values of mutual assistance and altruism; a focus on strengthening the community and a lack of ambition for personal power explain the preference for collective leadership that is most suitable for fluid modernity with its complex multi-component society, according to Mikhail (28, urban environment activist, 2023).

Active participation of contemporary Russian youth is formed by the context of everyday violence and permanent unsafety (expanded securitization and the government’s crime prevention programmes that criminalize the youth’s political action before it occurs; media spreading moral panics that stigmatize youth activism, in particular, new subcultural manifestations; hate speech and threats against activists with opposing views on social media, etc.). Characterizing large-scale activism as something accessible ‘only to heroes of novels, and not to real people’ (Vadim, 23, student, 2022), our informants are looking for opportunities to express their active position. Interviewees emphasize the importance of being involved in the information field, discussing recent news (updates to the so-called SMO, mass emigration, price spikes, etc.), even if in a narrow-trusted circle, often precisely in those youth communities united around non-political ideas, and taking emotional responsibility for what is happening. Such everyday practices as taking sides in a debate on questions of values can build connections and develop into more visible or public actions (Bakardjieva, 2009):

I need to know. And it seems to me that it is unfair to those who are now worse off not to know, that is, what I experience is a smaller share of what many are dealing with now. Well, it’s my responsibility to at least stay involved in all of this, accept it, be aware of it and maybe spread it. (Veronica, 25, event manager at the library, 2022)

Pronouncing one’s thoughts on political events—alone, in the community or publicly—has become a significant stage of transition to adulthood for young people in present Russia. The situation of moral crisis and social schism (as evidenced by repeated narratives of discord up to the break in relations with significant others due to political issues) forces one to more clearly formulate one’s values, articulate one’s position, and become a more conscious and authentic version of oneself. In this crucible, the identity of youth is forged. This is how rethinking one’s views is presented in the narrative of Karina, who faced the collapse of her educational and career plans, emigrated and then returned because she could not imagine her life outside of Russia, and in the process of this experience realized herself as part of a generation and as an adult woman:

The picture of my entire world, which was familiar to me, was broken, many of my life plans were broken there…. At the same time, something new was definitely born from this…. It seems to me that perhaps we will leave our mark as a generation that thinks more about peaceful values and well-being, at least for Russia, I think this is relevant. (Karina, 24, English tutor, 2022)

On the other hand, Oleg, who had previously argued with his parents over politics, reassessed his values and concluded that the elders were right, the youngsters were wrong and so was he. Trying to rise above his generation, Oleg discursively joins the camp of the older generation and accepts their position: young people do not know their roots, are impressionable and do not see the essence behind the wrapper. The informant considers this position to be proof of his mental and moral maturity:

They just don’t understand, they’re not, they’re not progressive-smart. But you understand that the elders are right, the elders are right somehow for some reason, that’s because I didn’t notice this before, but at some point, I just saw that there was a lot, a huge amount of use of inappropriate Anglicisms. That is, some of my, my generation, they look at some old things, but you serve them in some new sauce, so to speak, Western, well, I’m talking about Western sauce, and well, the identity is lost. (Oleg, 23, master’s student, 2022)

Based on these interviews, we can claim that Clément and Zhelnina’s (2020b) statement about the relative stability of the current political and economic situation in Russia and, consequently, the increased ability of people to make sense of the world around them and their experience in it has lost its relevance. Being in danger of being lost in the incomprehensible world, our informants face the need to define their values, a vision of a better future, and the actions needed to embody it in the present day.

Adulthood and/or Activism

The earlier quotes are symptomatic: male and female interviewees conceptualize the prospects for meaningful participation during the transition to adulthood differently. In our informants’ narratives, the constant refrain is that being an adult means having one’s views and the opportunity to defend them. The former is accelerated by the current crisis, and the latter is impossible in the conditions of present Russia if said views do not correspond to the official position. Thus, interviewees—especially those who are active, initiative and aimed at social transformation—seem to get stuck in the process of growing up. Men and women see a way out of this situation differently.

For female informants, adulthood is increasingly synonymous with resilience that is achieved through the creation of support networks within which they can freely articulate their thoughts, knowing that they are surrounded by people with similar values. The main thing is ‘not to fall into inaction from shock’, as 21-year-old Vera put it, and the best way to do that is collective action within the community:

Now you need, it seems, it’s better for me personally, you need to cling to each other a little more…. And you just need to cling more to those who are close to you, because, I don’t know, I cling to my brother, yes, my brother clings to his mother and his best friend, the friend in turn clings to her family, the mother clings to their family – and that’s how it is, here it is, a clear chain of people rallying…. That is, we can now survive like this, but without it, it’s almost impossible to do this alone right now. (Daria, 22, logistics manager, 2022)

As a rule, female informants believe that change is necessary and possible, at least in narrow circles limited to personal contacts where they can realize themselves as adults through care and mentoring. By engaging in prefigurative practice, female informants embody the image of a better future—a community with non-hierarchical and ecological communication. Care is a central aspect of their motivation for creating or joining a grassroots initiative:

For me, a leader is one who will maintain normal relations in the team, who will care about how a person feels in this team, that is, whether they are comfortable, uncomfortable, is it pleasant to work [here], unpleasant, whether they are satisfied with the salary there, for example, or not, whether they like or don’t like the project, [a leader] won’t force them to do something they don’t want to do. (Katya, 25, dance and movement therapist, 2023)

Male informants’ judgments about the relationship between activism and adulthood are informed by their experience of engaging in prefigurative practices. One can observe a great contrast between the narratives of men who are involved in activism/volunteerism superficially or have no such experience at all and men who are organizers of or active participants in grassroots initiatives.

Male informants with experience in engaging in prefigurative practices (that is, either organizing or actively participating in grassroots initiatives) do not problematize the relationship between adulthood and activism. For them, the project of transition to adulthood and the project of meaningful participation are combined in the pursuit of ‘self-mastery’—the conscious attempt by the individual to define and control their behaviour and identity (Hodgkinson, 2013). Organizing a grassroots initiative, in particular, serves as a means of embodying a better future and gaining control over one’s life, as befits an adult:

And they reconstructed it [the city skatepark] absolutely awfully…. Nothing really came of it, we realized that you couldn’t cook porridge with them, the result wouldn’t be the kind we would like. And that we need, in fact, to do something on our own, because if we don’t try to do something on our own, then it’s kind of unclear where to go. At that time in St. Petersburg, it seemed, there were no other indoor skate parks, this was the only one…. Well, as a result, that year we opened the first, it turns out, skate park. (Igor, 33, skate school organizer, 2023)

In contrast, for male informants with limited or non-existent activist experience, activism often seems incompatible with adulthood. In their narratives, adulthood is often contrasted with ‘youthful maximalism’ (this is the exact wording used by interviewees), the world of which includes activism and expressing an active social position in general. In this paradigm, being an adult means being like adults, while the manifestation of emotions caused by social injustice, the desire to defend one’s rightness, and to convince others are signs of immaturity. Activism remains the matter of the young, not adults, and therefore can never be taken seriously—this is what young men say regardless of their perception of their adulthood. This position is to some extent consonant with the rhetoric promoted by youth volunteer organizations backed by the government: volunteering makes sense to engage only in youth, after that one needs to devote oneself to realizing ‘adult’ goals, like starting a family, raising children, working, and so on (Lukyanova & Elkina, 2020).

Adulthood is ‘being in a system in which everyone lives’, says Ilya, who does not consider himself an adult because of ‘youthful maximalism’ and does not want to grow up since he has a ‘conflict’ with this way of life. Using condemning words (‘infantile’), he nevertheless prolongs youth and its inherent right to be unsystematic:

For me, new youthful maximalism started…. Not with a desire like to grow up, in the understanding that you need to take on new responsibilities and work hard, have no free time and no time to think about the events that surround me, naturally, just being in some kind of system, in which everyone lives, and I have a small conflict with this as if I don’t want to get into [it]. (Ilya, 23, student, 2022)

Adulthood is marked by the onset of imperturbable loyalty, says Oleg. By classifying himself as part of the adult camp (‘I’ve outgrown’) and criticizing his previous position as childish, he symbolically gains power and rises above his peers. In his narrative, it is especially obvious that ‘youthful maximalism’ is a linguistic construct designed to delegitimize the feelings, thoughts and actions of young people:

Because of my, how to say, youthful, youthful maximalism, because of me being a puppet, I quarreled a lot with my parents about politics without understanding some aspects… But, so to speak, current events have shown who is who in reality, and it’s a shame, of course, that…. I’m glad that I’ve outgrown this moment, but it’s a shame that many of my friends don’t share [my opinion], so to speak. (Oleg, 23., master’s student, 2022)

It is no coincidence that the word ‘puppet’ appears in Oleg’s narrative: the project of proving one’s adulthood is also a project of proving one’s masculinity. Here again, we find a stark difference between the narratives of men with and without experience of engaging in prefigurative practices. Male informants who do not problematize the relationship between adulthood and activism do not problematize their relationship with masculinity either. On the contrary, for those who view adulthood and activism as incompatible, being a man is often antonymous to being outspoken, resisting the status quo and striving to create meaningful change:

Someone is just blind there, I don’t know, a doll, really like a whipping girl, that is, well, an example, I’ll just give [an example]: those who [note: emigrated from Russia after the start of the so-called SMO], they are like ‘Here, we support you, blah blah blah’, and the answer to them is ‘A good Russian is a dead Russian’, and they are like “Oh well, how can that be, we are helping you, we donate to you, to your forces’, and at the same time they continue to humiliate themselves in front of them, you look and think ‘Well, you people are truly lost’. These are some kind of puppets, I won’t gloat, but it’s just unpleasant, unpleasant that sooner or later they will return, and nothing will happen to them. (Oleg, 23, master’s student, 2022)

In Oleg’s narrative, ‘maximalist boys’ who have not ‘outgrown’ their ‘childish’ beliefs are described as ‘dolls’, ‘whipping girls’ and ‘humiliating themselves’—feminized and infantilized Others. The one who gives them such a definition declares himself as a masculine subject, a master, one having authority. This figure, on the contrary, is built on the concepts of ‘prudence’ and ‘common sense’—all of these constructs are used to describe the masculine ideal of the imperturbable citizen.

We find a completely different image of masculinity in the narratives of male informants with experience in organizing or actively participating in grassroots initiatives. Feeling secure in their masculinity, these men do not feel the need to get their status of masculine subjects affirmed by the top link of the hierarchy—senior men, holders of decision-making power. Instead, they are carving a place for themselves to be the holders of decision-making power by creating a community embodying the principles of a better future, including gender equality that men like Oleg strive to prevent:

I looked at the statistics of different cycling communities, and, of course, they are sad…. There is also a thing with toxic masculinity, that there are certain communities where men display toxic masculinity. And, accordingly, the selection there is very tough. Those men who stay possess this property and exhibit toxic masculinity. Those who do not possess, they relearn and start to possess. And most women are very uncomfortable there. And there remain those who are comfortable with this, who are accustomed to it from their family, from society, from our culture. And it turns out that this toxic masculinity flourishes in such communities. As for us, I can say that this is not the case. (Mikhail, 28 years old, 2023)

Both men and women who took part in the 2022 and 2023 studies note enthusiasm and willingness to act as key characteristics of their generation. At the same time, female informants more often consider the desire for change and the willingness to act for it as a positive generational trait; among male informants, two main vectors of reasoning stand out. Among informants with superficial or no experience of volunteering/activism, a common position is that the desire for change is something that young, immature, driven people must ‘outgrow’ to become full-fledged members of society. On the contrary, for informants with experience of engaging in prefigurative practices, creating a change by building a community embodying an alternative to the state-promoted regime of formalized hierarchical communication is an integral part of pursuing self-mastery, being an adult, and being a man.

Moreover, there is another gender emphasis distinguishing ideas about the results of prefigurative practices. Male informants see opportunities for transformation in a specific area, usually related to their career trajectory, for example, science, sports or medicine. The female position shows the manifestation of the role of caregivers prescribed for women: female informants do not hope that their generation will change anything; rather, they place their hopes on the younger generation and leave themselves the role of torch-bearers who shape the values of the future:

I just think that maybe we are forming some values for the younger generation and maybe these values, well, will bring me a brighter future, I don’t know. (Veronica, 25, event manager at a library, 2022)

Conclusion

In this study, we demonstrated how Russian youth look for resilience strategies, opportunities for decision-making and meaningful participation in times of uncertainty. Based on 46 interviews with young St. Petersburg residents with various degrees of engaging with prefigurative practices, we showed that grassroots youth-led initiatives that oftentimes fall outside the scope of attention due to being neither loud protest movements nor massive state-led projects are the key to securing gendered adulthood and resilience in the political climate of everyday violence.

For our informants, the turn to prefigurative practices to create opportunities for decision-making and meaningful participation emerges as a response to the challenges of the time such as ever-present political and economic pressure. By creating alternatives to the state-promoted regime of formalized hierarchical organization of public life in various forms (a community of peer consultants, a culture festival, an all-female gym, etc.), interviewees embody their vision of a better future—a community that helps its members, brings joy to their lives and becomes a space of ecological communication. The findings of this research confirm earlier studies of Russian youth: they consider the optimal area for applying their efforts to be not large-scale but local projects aimed at eradicating social injustice at the grassroots level. At the same time, the focus of grassroots activists is on areas of social conflict that escape the attention of key policymakers (such as creating a comfortable environment for people with mental illnesses), and ethical values become a key guideline for youth in the era of massive top-down promotion of neoliberal technologies of self-help and self-reliance.

Engaging in prefiguration in the form of grassroots initiatives ensures community rootedness, which is a requirement for resilience on par with active participation and bringing meaningful change to society. The emergence of an interpretation of adulthood based on resilience (and, as a consequence, rootedness in community and collective action), an interpretation of adulthood as self-mastery, within which masculinity and activist identity are unproblematically combined, and postponing transition to adulthood to continue emotional involvement in prefigurative practices show a high priority for meaningful participation among young people. The spread of volunteerism and activism amid the crisis indicates that young Russians are ready to act to bring closer a better future based on the values of altruism and mutual assistance. Therefore, prefiguration emerges as a new resilience strategy in the era of post-democratic transformations.

Informants with superficial or no experience of involvement in prefigurative practices struggle to form an understanding of society’s power dynamics and their place in it, while those with such experience have a better grasp on the complex social realities of modern Russia. Thus, involvement in prefiguration via informal grassroots youth organizations is an important condition for the formation of youth’s civic consciousness. The formation of solidarity, the creation of a community united by common values, leads to civil society, regardless of what kind of project the participants united around—political or not. Given that St. Petersburg is a centre of attraction for young people from all over Russia, we believe that the results of our research are relevant for urban youth across Russia. At the same time, taking into account the diverse nature of Russian youth and the complex web of inequalities they are subjected to, we would advise caution in extrapolating the results of this study on young people with backgrounds that are alternative to the middle-class, educated, based in a big city one.

Given the globally increasing political and economic pressure on young people, and the growing inaccessibility of both objective (homeownership, a stable career, etc.) and subjective (such as financial and emotional independence) markers of adulthood, we believe that our research can demonstrate that in the modern unstable world, the paths to building resilience and becoming an adult, a political and a gendered subject, are interconnected; the local grassroots youth communities emerge as a prime site for shaping one’s identity at an intersection of all of the aforementioned in a high-risk political climate.