CHAPTER 10
PAST AND PRESENT:
THE INTERNATIONAL
MEMORIAL SOCIETY
What have we learnt from the last two chapters?
First, that Grigory Shvedov is right – achieving legislative reform is a Sisyphean task and beyond the means of the human rights community. Its increasing professionalization, level of expertise, and use of new technologies gives it no political weight. To persuade political authorities to pursue policies that, for them, are of secondary importance or simply of little interest, you need weapons, among which the support of powerful interests or of a broad social constituency, depending upon the circumstances, are the most useful. But the activists lacked any substantial popular support, still less that of the powerful, while international approval became of less and less interest to the Russian government, and Western financial assistance a target for attack. However, without their efforts legislative change would have been even more modest. They succeeded in providing assistance (often life-saving) to the vulnerable, in introducing or keeping issues on the public agenda, and in professionalizing many of their activities. Some became known internationally. I come back to these issues in the Conclusion.
Second, we have observed the surely not surprising influence wielded by the army leadership, the MVD, and the prosecutor's office, all of which after a shaky few years in the nineties, reasserted their status while maintaining their accustomed patterns of behaviour. The culture of established institutions such as these, in any society, is very strong; only radical reform from on top will bring changes lower down.
Igor Kalyapin, our activist from Nizhny Novgorod, sees it in these terms:
But, in the main the huge mechanism, controlled by a primitive hand-held system, which we call the Russian state machine, is going down a slippery slope, and no one is seriously concerned with society's interests, or freedoms, nor is anyone seriously concerned with the elementary functioning of the state machine. Sadly things are moving backwards fast. And our political leadership constantly produces and plays on a variety of patriotic slogans, while saying, Russia, move ahead!
Pavel Levashin, the young ex-prison officer, sees it from the point of view of young recruits:
Until the generation which, in Soviet times was accustomed to using force to decide any issue has completely disappeared, nothing will change. What can you ask of a young trainee who has only just joined? He simply can't oppose the system on his own. People such as that, whether in the MVD, in the internal troops, or in the prison service, simply aren't kept on […] Staff only start defending their rights – labour rights, pensions – once they have left or retired […] an individual simply can't take on a system that has solidified over years and years.
In February 2012 Artemy Troitsky, a well-known cultural critic, activist, and Moscow University lecturer, suggested to a London audience that, with the exception of the few years of perestroika, nothing had changed in the relationship of state and society since Ivan the Terrible. Such an assertion tells us more about perceptions than realities but, if we are to understand the behaviour of institutions, both old and new – government offices, law and order institutions, enterprises, the media – or of the activists themselves, and citizens' attitudes towards them, we must try to untangle the way the past influences the present. Can we, as Beissinger and Kotkin have recently asked, determine why? Two decades after the ending of Soviet rule, ‘certain institutional forms, ways of thinking, and modes of behaviour appear to have persisted’ and others, disappeared? Rigorous arguments, they suggest, demonstrating how and why particular institutional forms or cultural carry over despite ‘significant ruptures’ or regime change are few.1
In the conclusion to this chapter, and to the volume as a whole, I come back to the influence of the past (and which parts of the past?) but, as regards the institutions which featured in the two preceding chapters, the answer is relatively simple. The ending of Communist party rule brought a few years of uncertainty over the future but no significant changes to the internal hierarchical running of the institutions. Much carried on as before, while the move to the market, with its scope for bribery and corruption, had an impact on codes of behaviour, both for the impoverished lower ranks, and for the generals, ministry officials, for anyone at the top of a hierarchy, who could now live in a style undreamt of previously.
There were improvements to the prison system, but its key features – high rates of detention, long sentences and harsh conditions – were still there. Yes, these were a bequest from the Stalinist Gulag. But why did they persist? It was not just institutional self-interest and a lack of interest on the part of the political leadership or judges. It was also that the long period of Soviet rule produced a public used to its exclusion from participation in decision making (‘I never thought’, said one the respondents to a survey, ‘that anyone would be interested in my views on how to respond to juvenile crime’) and that acquiesces in the continuation of harsh policies. The absence of a tradition of political and social activism allowed the conservatism of the government and judicial apparatus, which became ingrained in the Brezhnev period, to go unchallenged. The new political elite (which included democrats and liberal entrepreneurs) did little to change this.
Government officials find it very difficult to conceive of a role for NGOs and, in their turn, many of the organizations value a partnership with government above that of acting as critics. This allowed a creative authoritarian leadership to emasculate parliamentary politics or control, and to promote ‘dialogue’, on its terms, with NGOS through the Civic Chamber or with the Presidential Council for the Advancement of Civil Society and Human Rights. Some of the most respected human rights activists in Moscow accepted places and remained on the Council until 2012. After all, this enabled them, sometimes, to achieve a positive result, and to keep issues on the public agenda. ‘Speaking to the president’ carries not only a symbolic weight, but a real weight with officials, while at the same time it reaffirms a traditional relationship between the ruler and his subjects.
However, at the same time, there were those who did not shrink from criticizing president, ministers, or government officials, and there were independent local initiatives that brought results, including from within the court system. Both were new elements in what we can call a traditional Soviet landscape. In Chapters 11 and 12 we shall see many more. But, first, let's return to the International Memorial Society, whose trajectory over the period illustrates many of the issues we have been discussing.
The International Memorial Society
Accounts of the Society's early years exist, and others will surely write in detail of its activities in later years. My intention is more modest – to show how both inherited and new ways of doing things, and different factors, played a part in its evolution during our period. In the perestroika and post-perestroika years the Society's members across the country were primarily concerned with justice for the victims of Stalinist persecution, but by 1993 its Human Rights Centre, dealing with present injustices, was active. By the late nineties, the Society was known in human rights circles, in Germany, and in some regions, but its work on memory had dropped off the public radar, and its reports on Chechnya appealed to only a small audience. Its public impact was negligible. In Alexander Daniel's words, writing in 1999, a common response would be ‘Memorial? Really? Does it still exist?’2 Yet in 2001 its participation in the Civic Forum was recognized by the Kremlin as critical for the event to take place; it continued to receive international awards from the Polish government and elsewhere in Europe. In 2010, as we saw in the Introduction, the Society's leading members, both from Moscow and the regions, were engaged at its four-yearly conference in discussing and disagreeing over a wide range of activities. They took an active part in the Constitutional Forum of the same year, yet, as the other leading NGOs, they were caught by surprise by the protests against the election-rigging in 2011. In 2013, despite its Human Rights Centre receiving an instruction from the prosecutor to register as a foreign agent, the Society was awarded a presidential grant. On 1 March 2014 its board, without hesitation, issued a statement that the sending of Russian troops on to Ukrainian territory was a crime. What then was the International Memorial Society, and what role had it come to play in the human rights community and wider society?
As the nineties progressed, the Society's active organizations across the country worked on historical memory – books of memory, memorials – and in a few places on contemporary human rights issues. There was, however, little cooperation between organizations, or between the local organizations and the Moscow centres, let alone with those outside Russia. But, given its status as an international organization, should it not then act as one, link up its organizations, and thus be able to gain a louder voice? Could not the Society's organizations elect members of a board, which would meet regularly, discuss strategy, and launch collective projects? To its Western funders this seemed an obvious strategy (as with the crisis centres) and, by 1998, discussions over a new Ford Foundation grant to the International Society included the idea of ‘strengthening the organization as a whole’.
In 1998 the Society elected a board that included representatives of active local organizations, and from Ukraine and Latvia, and thereafter the board has met regularly, and held the occasional meeting in one of the regions. Joint work on rehabilitation and compensation for victims of repression, and more frequent board meetings, gave its regional members more of a sense of belonging to a national, if not an international organization. Yet attempts to encourage its board to develop and implement a shared strategy, which would unite its organizations, and widen its appeal to a broader public, have brought meagre results. Why?
The fate of an attempt to unite its membership through a newspaper provides a clue. In 1998, the Society advertised for an editor of its periodical. Grigory Shvedov, a young graduate, an historian-philologist with an editorial qualification, applied for the job. He was someone who had thought Memorial no longer existed. The outcome of his interview (at which he was shown something consisting of ‘a few pages, stapled together, printed on a large and very fine printer’), was, at Roginsky's suggestion, that they began to publish a newspaper aimed at a wider readership. The new monthly publication, 30 October, initially included both materials on historical repression, and on Chechnya, and on organizational matters, but it became clear that there was one readership for historical repression (the newspaper has a circulation of 5–7,000), another for a human rights journal, and that purely organizational matters, including the protocols of the board meetings ‘which was a unique feature of Memorial's openness’ should be circulated as a bulletin within the Society. The human rights journal subsequently failed to find funding, and the bulletin died for want of a staff member to compile it. In Shvedov's view, the majority of the Memorial organizations are not capable of working together to create a regular electronic news that would strengthen relationships within the Society.
But what after all is the Society? In Roginsky's words, it is a confederation of autonomous organizations, a horizontal organization.3 The board cannot make decisions that bind a local organization. (Participation in the Civic Forum, we remember, was a matter for each local organization to decide.) In other words, the Society is much more similar to an Association of independent organizations than it is to anything else. While it may get funding for a project in which some of the organizations will participate, they live their lives independent of the Moscow Centres or the board. As Roginsky saw it in 2011:
The Memorial organizations will carry on doing their thing, as they understand it, quite independently of what is happening in Moscow […] our real help for them, the help of the centre, has consisted of lobbying in different places, at national level, those demands which they put forward. We have often failed, but we have also achieved a great deal […] Memorial exists not thanks to the fact that it has a good board, a good strategy or a good centre […] the Memorial network holds together thanks to an idea, the very simple idea of historical memory, an idea that is not easy to realize in practice.
This is partly true, but only partly. Without doubt, the commitment to historical memory gives the Society its basis, its roots, but even by the late nineties its members were engaged in many other issues too. By the turn of the century local organizations had developed very different profiles. Ryazan worked on historical memory, but also produced the website hro.org; by the end of the decade its young members had taken up orphans' rights. The Perm Memorial Society, unusual in that it has a large membership, understandably declining but still around 4,000, has a line in the regional budget for its office and the publishing of books of memory. (Another indication of the unusual situation in Perm.) No salaries are paid. Active since perestroika, its elderly leader, Alexander Kalikh, set up a youth organization as a legal identity in the late nineties, an NGO that could apply for grants, pay its staff, and finance projects. It has its youthful volunteers, who help the aged, but it also organizes educational and human rights projects, and supports alternative service. A separate organization runs the Perm-36 Gulag prison camp restoration project. By the early 2000s, St Petersburg had three Memorial organizations, the newest of which worked on racial discrimination. Vyacheslav Bituitsky of the Voronezh organization participates in the Migration Rights network. Igor Sazhin, in Syktyvkar, heads a new kind of human rights centre. Organizations in Ingushetia or Dagestan are engaged in dangerous work, monitoring kidnappings or murder. By the end of the decade a few organizations were linking up with one another. The St Petersburg Research Centre was working with the Memorial organizations in Ryazan and Krasnoyarsk on a digital Gulag museum. But we saw how, at the Society's conference in 2010, its members found it difficult to decide which of the issues, if any, should have priority.
The Society's Moscow centres have very considerable achievements to their credit. The Human Rights Centre, working with EHRAC in London, has won more than 100 cases before the European Court of Human Rights,4 Migration Rights is internationally known, as are the Centre's reports on Chechnya. An everyday history competition for school children,5 scholarly publications on the Gulag based on meticulous work in the archives, compensation for those who suffered under the Gulag, the building of the Society's own archive, publicity for the Katyn massacre in Poland, all are part of the Society's activities. But these reflect the very different interests and concerns of strong-minded individuals who came together, almost accidentally, many years ago, and remain in a sometimes uneasy but respectful alliance with each other. They are held together by a shared past, a shared building, and shared views that one has a right of access to information, both about past and present, that facts are important, as is a law-based state accountable to society. The struggle for historical truth and for rights today are, in Alexander Daniel's words, indivisible. The collection, verification, and analysis of facts underlie both. Writing in 1999, he suggested that the failure of attempts to agree on a ‘political position’ (remember the disagreement over Yeltsin's actions) had convinced all that, except for a belief in the importance of democratic institutions, these were the only values shared by all. A decade later, he emphasized the conviction that the authorities must come to realize that independence and criticism is not the same as political opposition, ‘and political opposition is not a state crime’. Both Daniel and Roginsky make a strong and attractive case for the necessity of linkage between past and present rights, with Roginsky adding the argument that knowledge of history is required for us not to repeat past mistakes. However, it remains the case that the members of the Human Rights Centre, engaged in monitoring human rights abuses, have tenuous ties with those working on past repression, while the elderly children of those repressed under Stalin who make up the Society's Moscow branch have little time for the Human Rights Centre. Not surprisingly, some liken Roginsky, the chair of the Society, to a tightrope walker, skipping lightly and dangerously along a wire that holds two poles together.
There are other factors that work for or against the Society's members acting as a united body. The search for funding has led its organizations and centres in different directions, while its international and national reputation has encouraged foreign organizations or individuals to seek it as a partner in human rights projects for which they can access funding. This has led to members becoming involved in new and very different activities. Sergei Krivenko, a member of the Memorial board, headed the large Coalition project on alternative service. Grigory Shvedov, quietly spoken, able, while continuing to run 30 October and remaining a member of the board, prefers working on his own to navigating the cross-currents that, from time to time, cause turbulence within Memorial. Working from a café, with wifi, comfortable chairs and good tea, his laptop permanently open, a great deal of his time is occupied by Caucasian Knot, a professional news and information internet publication serving a Russian and international readership, for which he has created a network of contributors. In 2004, with Memorial as the lead Russian organization, he took on a project on social marketing led by two American academics, Theodore Gerber and Sarah Mendelson, and funded by USAID. The project had as its aim one of introducing activists in three cities – Ryazan, Perm and Rostov on Don – to social marketing techniques, techniques that would enable them better to identify issues that engaged the local population, and then to devise a campaign that would resonate.6 The project, which included several NGOs in the different cities, including the Memorial organizations in Ryazan and Perm, received a mixed reception, with some local activists either objecting to an approach that sees the identifying of popular interest as the critical starting point (for example, the losses among Russian soldiers fighting in Chechnya rather than the human rights excesses) or their simply being unable to identify and agree on a clear target, and design a campaign to focus on it. The Perm activists succeeded in identifying children's rights as a popular issue (hardly difficult), and ran a campaign that raised its profile; in Ryazan the younger activists, after a split within the group, raised public awareness of the losses in Chechnya by a poster campaign; the southern participants never got their act together. In this we see Memorial acting as a lead organization in a very different type of project from its traditional ones, and one that had its critics within the Society.
Perhaps a good sign? The appearance of a younger generation? Whereas an interest in his family history had brought Igor Sazhin in Syktyvkar to Memorial, Grigory Shvedov was simply looking for an interesting job, not thinking of joining a cause and, in this respect, the Society reflected the changes that were taking place in society and would influence the human rights community. The post-Soviet world was already a fixture for a younger generation. Their parents' world of a certain future – education, profession (often that of one's parents), career path, pension – was no more. Parental influence was still important but it was up to you, perhaps as you watched your parents grow poorer and poorer, to make out in an environment of opportunities, uncertainties, and risks. It was often a combination of chance and circumstances, and the desire to make use of skills, that took young people into human rights where their skills, usually from a training in the humanities, were needed. With the odd exception, they grew up, thinking about other things, and would have been most surprised had anyone suggested they should get involved in human rights. Katya Sokiryanskaya, from St Petersburg, who by chance met activists from Chechnya in Warsaw, is a case in point. Robert Latypov who recently replaced Alexander Kalikh, now over 70, as chair of the Perm Memorial Society is another.
Latypov, quite tough, straightforward, was born in 1973 into a working class family in a chemical town, Berezniki, in the Perm region, a town built by prisoners and deportees. To his and his parents' surprise he made it to university. ‘Many of my contemporaries either ended up in prison, or became drug addicts, or alcoholics.’ It was tough going but he graduated in 1995, specializing in medieval history, and was called up for military service.
It was absolute serfdom. I did not want to be there […] and I also had to talk to the conscripts about their duty to serve the Motherland, to observe their military vows conscientiously, when I myself did not want to. And that double-standard, those awful feelings when I had to do it, it made me sick at heart.
Once demobilized, he vowed that whatever he did with his life, ‘I must be free and the work must be interesting’. That took him first to work as an excursion guide at the open-air local history museum but on a visit to the Kalikhs, parents of a friend from university, he was asked whether he might like to help with a volunteer camp at the Perm-36 Gulag prison that was being restored. He agreed, for two weeks, but was so appalled at the low standards of the excursion guides that he joined the museum staff to work as a guide and on related projects. He stayed for two years and, in 1999, moved back to Perm city to work in Memorial's youth organization.
Had he not known of Memorial before? Yes, his friend Kalikh had told him about it but he was not particularly interested, and his diploma work had been on the ethics of the aristocracy.
When we were studying [at the beginning of the nineties], history went through a crisis. The year before us had a course on Marxism-Leninism, we did not. But we still had political economy, in which the dominant place was held by a Marxist view of economics. We had barely picked up our textbooks when the lecturers said we did not need them, and they did not know what to teach us […] we found ourselves in a ‘time out’ because we did not know whether the Soviet system would come back or not, and how were we to study history? Nothing was clear.
This meant that the theme of political repression was also not a straightforward one […] We wanted to understand and decide for ourselves what our values were, what we held dear. Was a great empire and the memory of it, or were the fates of those who were of that empire, who suffered, and who lived far from easy lives, dearer to us? I still had to go through the army before I could sort this out for myself.
Latypov thinks of himself as a member of a second generation of Memorial or civic activists. Their values have been influenced by those dissidents who joined Memorial, and the perestroika activists, but ‘the world has changed, and therefore views of human rights also change […] to be a hostage to a traditional, classical, conservative view on such matters means that you can simply lose out, cease to be of interest to anyone’. The main characteristic of his generation, he suggests, is the ability to raise uncomfortable questions, remove the taboos from certain subjects. A new generation will, he hopes, do more than this, ‘will start, not simply living, but transforming the environment’, in particular by working directly with business and the local community, without having to refer everything to the still over-active state. And, as previously mentioned, he advocates teaching human rights in new ways. In the following chapter, I pursue the question of generational change, but note how different were the concerns and interests of Memorial's younger members – Grigory Shvedov, Igor Sazhin, Katya Sokiryanskaya, Robert Latypov. In this, they reflected the Society's complex personality, there since the early nineties, and still very evident today. How they might lead this most unusual Society forward is far from clear.
With many competing interests present, it is not surprising that board meetings can be home to sharp disagreements and, as in 1993, the issue of cooperation with the president – today as regards membership of his Council – produces dissenting voices. However, just as Chechnya brought its members together, so too, presidential actions in the new century, directed against civil and political rights, have had the effect of holding the Society together and, ironically, of giving it a louder public voice. Despite internal disagreements, its board can be depended upon to issue a statement on a key domestic or international incident, to speak in support of a well-known or little-known political prisoner, and to take a public stand on, for example, Ukraine. From this perspective, the Putin leadership has done it a service. Roginsky's words, as Memorial celebrated its quarter century, were not celebratory:
We have existed for 25 years and we cannot yet say that the country shares our view of the past. We cannot yet say that human rights violations do not take place in our country, to say nothing of the infringements of freedom and democracy. Part of the responsibility lies with us, and it is obvious that we have made mistakes, or not been sufficiently active or focused enough [….] we have nowhere won victories, but, without us things would be worse.7
And, he adds, by ‘us’ he means all those ‘islands of independence, engaged in responsible civic activities’. The Society has not only held together, retained its international reputation, in particular in Germany and Poland, but it can and does speak out to and for a much larger number of its own citizens.
Cultural constraints
Does it seem to the reader, thinking back over the activists in action, that they behaved in a particular Russian or Soviet way? Can we see legacies of the past at play? I come back to this in the Conclusion, but this is the place to introduce the explanation offered by Mendelson and Gerber for the limited success of the social marketing project. They suggest that an important factor was: ‘a predominant activist culture that discourages and inhibits activists from looking beyond their own circle to the public, relying on empirical data, or planning goal-oriented action’ and they attributed ‘the resistance we encountered among some activists, particularly older ones, to the lingering hold of intelligentsia culture in Russian civil society’. The activists' weakness as campaign strategists, their concern with ‘purity and principle over strategy and action’, had its roots, they argue, in a traditional Russian intelligentsia culture. In the repressive Soviet period, which made goal-oriented politics ‘futile’, critical intellectuals, drawing upon Tsarist intelligentsia traditions, focused on ‘providing living examples of principles that contradicted those of the regime’; they formed tightly knit groups where ‘authenticity’ and commitment to principles took the place of action-oriented politics. And this Soviet-era ‘intelligentsia culture’, has, they argue, had an enormous influence upon the human rights community because of the leading positions held by former dissidents.
Yes, at times and in places the activists spent a great deal of time talking among themselves (the 2004 conference could be an example) and many of them were not good at organizing campaigns, nor in thinking how to evaluate the results of their activities. An evaluation of a programme by an outside independent consultant was often viewed with suspicion or simply ignored; the views of those they knew and respected were what mattered. The notion of a conflict of interests was alien. But such attitudes and practices were not a peculiar attribute of the human rights activists. They were widely shared. A small group culture and distrust of outsiders was the norm for citizens of all persuasions, not only the intelligentsia. An inability or unwillingness to engage in action-strategy in the post-Soviet environment was as marked, if not more so, among young students, rank and file trade unionists, journalists, or conformist teachers as among critical intellectuals or ex-dissidents. Of course there were the exceptions – those members of the Soviet intelligentsia who applied brilliant action-strategies to building business and financial empires – but the traits identified were very common. And they can all be traced to aspects of life in the late Soviet environment.
To suggest a key factor in determining the actions of the human rights activists was Russian intelligentsia culture, absorbed and crystallized by the dissidents, who ‘led’ the community, both oversimplifies the Russian intelligentsia, and the dissident community, and exaggerates the influence even of those dissidents who were active in the post-Soviet years, and who themselves had very different attitudes towards action in the new environment. Kovalev, who Gerber and Mendelson cite as exemplifying the priority awarded to principles over action-strategy, was an activist who entered the political arena, and worked (successfully) on getting legislation adopted. Abramkin is another example. The most traditional dissident, in their terms, was perhaps Alexander Podrabinek, who carried on Express Khronika, and would have nothing to do with the new regime but he, effectively, took himself out of the growing human rights community.8 There were those who talked, and achieved very little, but such individuals were as common among the politicians, academics, artists and others, as among the ex-dissidents. Kovalev, in contrast, remained in politics, as a deputy until 2003, and is still a member of the Yabloko party. He continually argued that human rights activists should engage in politics, if possible as elected deputies.
It is true that this divided and diverse community chose for some of its leaders those with an aureole of past suffering for their convictions, had public reputations, and were prepared to engage with the present. Alekseeva was such a one, and we saw how local activists revered her. Kovalev was another. But it was not that by their actions (or beliefs) they fashioned the community or the way activists behaved. It was far too diverse a community for that. And even within Memorial, Kovalev, upon being nominated for re-election as president in 2010, pointed out that he almost always found himself in a minority when it came to board decisions. In contrast Alekseeva's views take precedence in deciding between projects or stating MHG's position but the way MHG works – autonomy for the local organizations who participate in the projects – means that they go their separate ways. What we can say is that one of the prevailing attitudes in post-Soviet Russia was respect for leaders. Kovalev's re-election was never in doubt, and it is difficult to conceive of MHG without Alekseeva. Many of those who set up organizations in the early nineties, regardless of their age or background, still head them today. If we are talking of culture, then here is an example of a widely-accepted practice under Soviet rule: leaders rarely resign from or are voted out of office.9
In 2010, Kalikh and Latypov persuaded the 450 delegates at the Perm Society's annual conference on Political Prisoners' Day to elect Latypov as chair of the Society itself
I thought there would be problems with that – after all Aleksander Mikhailovich [Kalikh] has led the organization for 22 years, and he is very well known and authoritative – but it was all right, I had been in Memorial for ten years and many know me. But what was most important – I proposed that Aleksander Mikhailovich should be awarded the title ‘Honorary Chair’, and then everyone agreed and voted unanimously for me.
I was reminded of a comment by Tanya Lokshina: ‘The culture of the human rights movement in Russia is a culture of authority. Not only in Moscow but in the regions too. In Perm Averkiev is tsar and God.’ But in almost any profession, people in a position of authority tend to remain in post. An English observer is struck by this. In the academic world, in the world of culture or art, the directors and heads of departments stay in place long after they would have been replaced (often to their own relief) in similar institutions in the UK or USA.10 There are rarely rules, or conventions, on limited terms of office. Whether such cultural habits were perhaps reinforced for an older generation by the threatening new market economy, and whether they will survive generational change in a new economic environment is an interesting question. The Memorial board, dominated by its Muscovite core, has seen little change since 2002. The heads of the most active organizations, all excellent people, stay in place. Meanwhile young members (and some of them may be nearly 30) may decide to move on to other pursuits. And that brings us to the youngest generation.