Authors

Armen Aramian¹; Beregovsky Dan²;  ¹ SSEES UCL, UK;  ² UCL, UK

Discussion

Why don’t Russians simply protest Putin? This was the question that initially motivated our research project in March 2021. Initial idea was to study how young people in Russia are shaping their political opinions through their practices of media consumption. We have conducted 15 in-depth interviews with young Russians with different political attitudes and social backgrounds, digital ethnography of social media (chats and groups with political discussion; personal social media accounts of our respondents). One of our findings is that for young Russian people (before the full-scale invasion) political didn’t take shape of specific class interests, ideological positions, or symbols. To explain this mode of involvement with politics we developed the concept of ‘vibe’. it describes how one perceives specific political values, and cannot put these values into a specific discursive argument, but can use this mode of perception to assess the political positions of other people (in relation to the position of the observer). Due to the lack of coherent political discourses/ideologies, young Russian ended up using vibes as devices for navigating politics.