| During critical moments of political uncertainty, university students are traditionally a dynamic force in society. Why, then, have university students been politically inactive during the period of sweeping political and economic transformation across the former Soviet republics? Two factors account for student passivity: the behavior of the state and the political attitudes of students. In Russia, the state acted first with extreme coercion and then with extreme permissiveness and did not provoke students by alternately liberalizing and cracking down. The students, for their part, generally supported the leadership-initiated transition to a democratic political system and market economy. Most large-scale student protests of the magnitude of the Tiananmen Square, Czechoslovak, or other protests were preempted by swift and extensive reform that corresponded with student preferences. In Central Asia, states balanced liberalism and repression more precariously, but like in Russia, their reform policies generally corresponded with student preferences. Student protests were uncommon because both the students and governments of Central Asia shared a reluctance to reform.;These findings do not support theories of protest which focus on psychological motivations, resources, and economic opportunities. Instead, the findings suggest that attitudes play a critical role in determining political behavior, specifically, in their link with the macro-political situation. Pro-reform attitudes in Russia nurture political apathy. Pro-reform attitudes in Central Asia nurture quite the opposite. I provide evidence from an original survey of over 2,000 students chosen at random from the physics, economics, history, and philology departments of state universities in Russia (Novosibirsk, Kazan, Moscow), Ukraine (Kiev, Kharkiv, Lviv), and Central Asia (Bishkek, Almaty, Dushanbe). |
