Age effects

Philip Bump from the Washington Post passed along this interesting visualizaton of differential interest/concern with Russia's invasion of Ukraine invasion, by age.

He thinks he knows why old folks are so much more supportive of Ukraine than younger people. We live with memories.

I can't prove that empirically here, but the dates line up. If you are 29 or younger, you were born in 1993 or later, meaning after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. If you are aged 30 to 44, you were probably born sometime between 1978 and 1992, meaning that you probably no more than a preteen when that collapse occurred. Perhaps you similarly grew up with Russians as America's default enemy, but not in the same way.

This pattern of relative — relative! — antipathy carries over into other questions as well. For example, the vast majority of those aged 65 and up care who wins the war in Ukraine. Barely half of younger people do. If you're at least 65, you were born in 1957, a few years after the end of the Korean War.

We old people were raised immersed in terror that the evil Soviet Union/Russia would incinerate us all. We ducked and covered. Suspicion of anything that emerges from the Kremlin is deep in our psyches, even for those of us who have worked to know a little more about the world and our own country's imperial designs.

• • •

Once Bump had clued me in to these disparities, I began to see the influence of age on perceptions of the Ukraine war all around.

Joshua Yaffa reported from a Ukrainian village from which Russians had withdrawn, taking some residents with them. He tells the story of a man who was trying to explain what had happened to an elder:

He hasn’t found the words to tell his mother, who is eighty-one and suffering from dementia, about her granddaughter’s disappearance. In fact, he has avoided the details of Russia’s invasion altogether. Instead, he has explained the situation using an analogue from her childhood: “I told her, ‘Mom, the Germans are back.’ ”

He knew what catastrophe would be meaningful to her.

• • •

This one comes from an article about visible Russian opponents of Putin's war. Marat Grachev displayed an anti-war message at his Moscow computer repair shop. He was detained and fined. He described what had happened to him in terms of a generational conflict:

Mr. Grachev, the computer repair store owner, said he found it remarkable that not one of his hundreds of customers threatened to turn him in for the “no to war” text that he prominently displayed on a screen behind the counter for several weeks after the invasion. After all, he noted, he was forced to double the price of some services because of Western sanctions, surely angering some of his customers. Instead, many thanked him.

The man who apparently turned in Mr. Grachev was a passer-by he refers to as a “grandpa” who, he said, twice warned his employees in late March that they were violating the law. Mr. Grachev, 35, said he believed the man was convinced he was doing his civic duty by reporting the store to the police, and most likely did not have access to information beyond state propaganda.

Grachev's customers collected cash for his fine.

Mr. Grachev is now pondering how to replace his “no to war” sign. He is considering: “There was a sign here for which a 100,000 ruble fine was imposed.”

A brave man who knows his customers.

• • •

Because Erudite Partner meets and teaches college students in San Francisco in her job, I wondered whether she had encountered the relative disinterest in the Ukraine war among the young that polling reports. She says "no way." Perhaps they might find President Volodymyr Zelenskyy an attractive leader. The guy is making friends among people who had never given Ukraine a thought.