What does it mean to be cool in Russia?

In 2015, when I was living in Moscow, I wrote a text called “Poor but Cool” for Wonderzine, the Russian feminist website. The text was about young people and designers from post-soviet countries like Ukraine, Russia, the Czech Republic, that got used to compensating for their poverty by the feeling of being cool. That is the way I was also raised.
That includes an inner feeling of coolness you own. As well as outside markers such as fashion originality, liberal political views, provocative and even anarchic way of living. In short, everything that is the complete opposite of the mainstream.
The heroes of this text were against the rich establishment in Paris and the world of fashion. But the idea of the calm esthetic rebel was taken from their life in Eastern Europe — the ability to oppose the values of their Soviet parents and grandparents through new aesthetics.
You probably will ask — what? Opposing the crowd? Being and feeling cool? Yes. I know, it sounds childish, but it is true. Eastern Europe culture is fresh and brand-new and is still looking for the right identity. Who should we follow? The West? The Far East? Or do we have to find a unique way of living? All these questions are still relevant even so many years after the Dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

As a Russian, born at the end of the 80-s in Leningrad (now — Saint-Petersburg), I spent half of my life trying to live in a new way: to follow Western values to oppose myself to soviet adults around me with the help of taste: western fashion, music and film, journalist new media education, a profession in the creative industry. My granny hasn’t even heard of any of these new words in her life.
Generally speaking, cool is everything associated with the West’s way of living. Add to these ambitions the absence of money after bloody 90s and of healthy political institutions. That is how the concept of being “poor but cool” was created.
The prerequisites of social separation are simple. They lay down the roots for the way the young generation was raised by the parents and social institutions like kindergarten, school or the workplace. It is the authoritarian way, when everyone is being compelled to do things against their will. Which stands for not expecting someone different from you. Instead of coming to grips with other ideas of unknow groups, people choose the easy way out and distance themselves from everything new and different.
The educational authoritarianism is also one of the reasons why Russians behave so unfriendly and prickly, stinging each other with words of animosity and judging criticism.
In order to run away from all these, I also chose to surround myself with the same “cool Russians”: smart, educated, liberal and cool-looking. This process of decoding yourself to a new cool young Russian was a huge trend in my generation and is still a thing.
The coolness I am talking about you can’t buy with money. Rich Russians felt it critically a few years ago when the best new media ignored them as heroes. They were not accepted as cool and progressive and were impossible to be seen as modern heroes. So they stayed in the shade or in the light of glossy cheesy magazines.
They even radically changed the way they look and represent themselves in social media from that time on. They pretend to like strange new fashion and to be all liberal, and think about the environment. But still, people laught at them when everyone noticed that they were faking the “coolness “— one body-shaming or racist wrong comment ruined the whole facade. The context is still very current in modern Russian society.
You can see it every time when a liberal Russian media writes a story and looks for ”cool” heroes. Regular simple or rich, cheesy people are not interesting because they do not represent the progressive picture. But they forget that they all represent Russia of nowadays and vote for Putin. Everyone who is called “uncool” is the majority of the country. So the real picture is impossible without them. In short, by ignoring and cutting off the reality the progressive media also becomes a fake-news academy.

Even still, and especially in Moscow, you can see this separation. In Moscow, people are divided mostly into two groups — “cool” and “uncool” Russians.
You will say, so Moscow, probably in that sense, is no different from NYC or London. Each of them has a thing with dividing people into social boxes according to their political views, level of wealth, level of education, etc. But what I find interesting and important is that this list of features helps people to lock themselves in a like-minded environment — in the echo chamber. What eventually divide everyone. Add into that the social media bubble which makes the gap between them even bigger.
Why does it matter? Urbanism, mindfulness, therapy, feminism, garbage recycling — all these concepts give you a feeling of being progressive and different from all these “uncool” Russians. But they have no sense when the police crackdown on protesters during the latest peaceful demonstrations. What we call “visceral immigration” or “inner Europe”, when you immigrate only inside your mind, as a part of “coolness” doesn’t work anymore. I wonder where the Russian government is running? Is it towards their “inner Tajikistan”? A joke.
I think this narrative helps no one. And one of the problems is a fear of stepping out of one’s comfort zone because you will have to deal with different opinions. Blocking is easier than listening to or changing the behavior — and this policy does more harm than good. Feeling stuck up and being snobbish doesn’t help you get closer.

What is a modern coolness? To be democratic, accept different opinions and groups of people, accept diversity, be tolerant, right? These are things we are missing. Because being tolerant means to accept and understand other opinions and not to make jokes or be snobbish towards “uncool” Russians who are afraid of feminism and LGBTQ and uphold other traditional values.
And I know what I am talking about because I struggled through life, directing my behavior of putting distance from something different. I also know the feeling when you feel that the other side is putting pressure on you, behaving irrational and rejecting you. So you do the same towards the other side.
But I do believe that it is a very human feeling to suffer from a lack of curiosity and ability to listen. It is a problem around the world. The United States or Europe, in this sense, shows no difference.
