The Shadow of the Past: Distinguishing Soviet Legacy from Global Trends in Post-Soviet Youth Nihilism

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was expected to result in a psychological break from communist values. Thirty years later, especially within youth in Central Asia, that anticipated psychological break is nowhere in sight. This paper argues that post-Soviet youth nihilism is a distinct phenomenon from that of the Western part of the region, as it is passive and a repudiation of political participation instead of an active renegotiation of meaning. Combining Nietzsche's division between active and passive nihilism, this paper argues that the passive nature of post-Soviet youth nihilism is due to three Soviet mechanisms : The Pavlovian de-humanization of psychology to a reaction; the outlawing of dissent by making criticism an illness via Snezhnevsky's notion of Sluggish Schizophrenia; and the transgenerational transfer of the socialization by regime exposure, as posited by Pop-Eleches and Tucker (2017). Using conceptual analysis and data from the World Values Survey Wave 7, this paper uses the case of Uzbekistan, though Central Asian data are referenced and compared, in order to assert that passive nihilism in post-Soviet Central Asia is not a choice of worldview but an acquired defense.