A few hours before the millennium celebrations on December 31, 1999, President Boris Yeltsin resigned and appointed Vladimir Putin as interim president. In his first New Year’s address, the new head of state assured the Russian people: “The state will reliably protect freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press and property rights, all the basic elements of a civilized society.” Twenty years on, little remains of these promises. More and more citizens, especially young people, are demonstrating against state power and Putin’s authoritarian system.

The children who were born on that day and around the turn of the millennium only know the ex-KGB man Vladimir Putin in the heaven of power. But like their peers in the West, they belong to the Internet generation and have access to information that has no place in Russia’s state-controlled media. How does the Putin generation think and feel? How do they want to live in a country that appears to be stronger but is still unstable?
From St. Petersburg to Eastern Siberia, the film follows various representatives of this generation: from ardent admirers of Putin, who believe it is right that state-controlled propaganda has created a myth around the eternal ruler, to a passionate opposition activist who considers Putin and his supporters to be a ‘criminal gang’ that has amassed wealth through criminal methods and impoverished the people.
The film delves into the lives of young people, showing impressions from a closed city in Siberia surrounded by barbed wire, from impulsive Moscow and a Muslim village in Tatarstan. The Russian education system becomes visible in a police high school or during training as a cook, the methods of propaganda become apparent in a seminar for journalism students.
And the tsars come into play again and again: be it in a teenager’s rap, or at a graduation ball in St Petersburg, which is opened by a tsar couple in costume, or in the preparation of suckling pig, which used to be considered a tsar’s dish. Until the rally on July 27, 2019, when the millennials who have grown up protest on the streets of Moscow against the exclusion of the opposition in the local elections, show no fear of police batons and chant “Down with the tsar!” into the air. This refers to President Vladimir Putin.

A densely differentiated portrait of the ‘Putin generation’ has emerged from the perspective of millennial children, in the field of tension between the private and the political.