Kristina Silvan – PhD Candidate in Political History, University of Helsinki, Finland. Address: Snellmaninkatu 14 A, 00014, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. E-mail: kristiina.silvan@helsinki.fi Citation: Silvan K. (2019) Youth Policy Practice in Post-Soviet Russia and Belarus: Past and Present. Mir Rossii, vol. 28, no 1, pp. 161–171. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2019-28-1-161-171 This article examines the changes and continuities in youth policy practice in the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus from the mid-1980s until the present day. The article finds that while there were notable similarities between Belarus and Russia in the early 1990s, the practice of youth policy has since developed distinctively in the two countries, with Belarus currently demonstrating a mass organization model and Russia a complex model of youth policy practice. The focus on a patriotic upbringing and an approach that tends to ignore young people’s agency are recognized as features that stem from the two countries’ shared Soviet past and their present authoritarian tendencies and thus distinguish the Belarusian and Russian approaches to youth policy practice in comparison with other countries, although the aim of youth policy, to bring up “ideal citizens”, remains universal.

Based on extensive and diverse primary material, this article provides a detailed analysis of the development of Belarusian government-affiliated youth organisations from the late 1980s until 2002. Using a historical institutionalist approach, it examines the transformation of the Belarusian Komsomol into an independent association and the emergence of new, proactive pro-government youth organisations. The article demonstrates that, contrary to common assumptions, building a mass membership pro-presidential youth organisation in Belarus was a complex project that took years to complete. When the Belarusian Republican Youth Union finally emerged in 2002, it was a result of an interplay of many structural and agency-related factors.THE EXISTENCE OF GOVERNMENT-ORGANISED MASS MEMBERSHIP YOUTH organisations as showy mainstays of youth support for a non-democratic regime has been noted in existing literature on Belarus in particular

In the 2010s Russia, government-organized local, regional and national youth forums have become major sites for state-youth interaction. These typically weeklong summer camps are organized across Russia, attracting up to one million participants annually. Although the forums have diverse foci, they are all formal platforms of youth participation, aimed at young people engaging in ‘compliant’ forms of activism. Drawing from qualitative content analysis of official reports and media accounts combined with participant observation and interview data, this article analyses the forums as a case of youth policy in an authoritarian political setting. It finds that the government treats youth as a ‘problematic resource’. Moreover, while the forums’ agenda is defined by the policymakers, young people acquire and apply agency to navigate and negotiate the official agenda and re-signify it to respond to their interests. This process, it is argued, has an empowering effect regardless of the constraining authoritarian setting.

Goverment-organized youth mobilization in an authoritarian political setting is subject to active debate in academia and the policy-making community, but knowledge of the mechanisms of "compliant" activism remains limited.The dissertation addresses this empirical and theoretical gap by examining changes and continuities in the sphere of state-affiliated youth activism in post-Soviet Belarus and Russia. It explores the little-known afterlife of the republic-level organizations of the Leninist Communist Youth League of the Soviet Union, the Komsomol, and studies contemporary government-affiliated youth activism.The dissertation is based on a diverse collection of qualitative source material ranging from archival material to interviews and ethnographic analysis. The data is utilized to develop novel analytical concepts pertaining to the complex dynamics of statesanctioned youth mobilization both from the perspective of the decision makers and the young people engaged in "compliant" modes of activism.The dissertation further demonstrates that while legacies of the Komsomol remain operative in some spaces, the Soviet "stamp" on state-youth relations in both Belarus and Russia is becoming increasingly translucent.Kristiina Silvan is a graduate of the Doctoral Program in Political, Societal and Regional Change at the University of Helsinki. This doctoral study was completed in 2022 in the discipline of political history at the Faculty of Social Sciences.

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