03.02 Moscow School Shootings Hint at Pain of Forgotten Generation
MOSCOW, February 3 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) – The school shooting, a nightmare scenario most commonly associated with the United States, was visited upon Russia on Monday in an attack that left two people dead.
There was little about the suspected perpetrator – a retiring, 15-year-old straight-A pupil – that aroused suspicion.
Some education experts fear, however, that the boy may be just one of a swell of forgotten youths in Russia whose solitude has driven them to an ultimate act of despair.
“Our children are insanely lonely,” said Irina Abankina, director of the Institute for Educational Studies at the respected Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
The boy detained Monday is said by police to have made his way into his school in the northeastern Moscow district of Otradnoye carrying a Saiga hunting rifle apparently belonging to his father.
Upon reaching his classroom, he shot dead a geography teacher, who media reports suggested may have incurred the boy’s ire by denying him the top mark he would have needed to receive the gold medal awarded to pupils for top academic performance. Police officers arriving at the scene were also shot at, one of them fatally.
The standoff, during which around 20 students were taken hostage, was brought to an end after the boy’s father persuaded his son to surrender to police.
Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said he believed the teen had suffered a nervous breakdown.
Education specialists are voicing concern the shootout was not an isolated incident, but an indicator of the isolation endured by modern Russian youths deprived of the fragile socialization mechanisms that existed in Soviet times.
Children’s rights activist Boris Altshuler points out that many young people in modern Russia do their socializing online, which makes a poor replacement for real human interaction.
“They’ve got nowhere to go once the classes are over,” Altshuler said.
Altshuler suggested the causes for this particular tragedy could be rooted in personal history, but that there are larger issues at play.
The Soviet school system came complete with a wide range of semi-mandatory extracurricular activities, including sports teams, study groups and various clubs, where children received adult guidance and psychological support from coaches and supervisors. That system became largely defunct after the Soviet Union’s demise, with clubs and groups either disbanded or starting to charge money for admission.
