Ten years ago the words “Putin generation” evoked images of Kremlin-backed youth supporters, teenage shock troops hounding Estonian diplomats in Moscow and holding summer camps immersed in ideology at the picturesque Lake Seliger.

Fast-forward a decade and it’s more likely to look like Marina Konovalova, a smiling, 19-year-old fine arts student from Tver, a city of 400,000 north-west of Moscow, who can’t remember any other leader than Vladimir Putin. She plans to vote for him in Sunday’stoday’s presidential elections.

That will put Putin in power at least through Konovalova’s mid-20s, a time when she expects that she’ll be starting a family and opening her own visual design studio in Moscow, if she can cobble together the money.

Konovalova is not a dyed-in-the-wool supporter of the president. But she is emblematic of a generation that sees him as an immovable part of the political landscape. And until someone much better comes along, she said, she does not see a reason to rebel.

“Why replace him? I see loads of progress,” said Konovalova, sitting in a Starbucks on Moscow’s White Square. Across Tverskaya Street, a statue to Maxim Gorky, the writer and revolutionary, has been restored after a 30-year absence. “I think people focus too much on Putin. What does Putin mean for me in my everyday life? He’s not setting the prices or telling me who to see or what to wear. And I just try to think every day: if I want to be happy, I have to make myself happy.”

Once or twice a month, Konovalova takes a shabby commuter train to Tver, where her mother works at a medical clinic. She’ll listen to music on the way on her iPhone, mostly foreign pop. She likes Lorde, and will sometimes opt for 1980s dance hits. Then with a flash of faux-guilt, she added: “OK, I’ll put some Russian pop on sometimes, too. It reminds me of being a kid.”

“Change takes time and I know everything’s not perfect,” she said. “But I just get so mad when people say they want to move away and leave Russia. It kills me. It’s such a lazy response. OK, something’s awful. Let’s fix it.”

The Putin generation does not have a single political position. Membership is not optional. All young Russians, those who support Putin or oppose Putin, have been influenced by his long-term merger with the state.

“Putin is the only myth that they have and they have no idea what Russia would be without him,” said Konstantin Gaaze, a reporter and political commentator at the Carnegie Moscow Centre.

We expect youth to bring rebellion, as it did in the 1960s, and that young people will reject the values of their parents. A popular international relations theory says that as a country becomes more wealthy, and in their lifetimes the children of the Putin generation have done, they shed authoritarianism and seek freedom.

But the statistics say otherwise. Russians aged 18-24 are more likely to support Putin than their parents or any other previous generation, more likely to think the country is going in the right direction, and more likely to think the current Russian system of government is superior to western alternatives (or the Soviet Union).

“They are more supportive of the system, although just by a bit,” said Denis Volkov, a sociologist and expert at the Levada Centre, which collected the data. Like young people elsewhere, they are also less likely to vote.

But unlike during the Soviet Union, young Russians don’t take the current political system to also mean isolation. Brought up with the internet, they are steeped from a young age in foreign popular films and music, while maintaining strong cultural ties to traditional Russian media. To a certain degree, young Russians can leave Russia without travelling abroad.

“Children of the millennial generation, in Russia and in other countries, have seen economic improvement in their life, and that’s really the key,” said Evgeniya Shamis, the founder and coordinator of the RuGenerations project.

To Shamis, millennials from Russia and abroad are the “most pro-government generation” because of their high expectations for the state to address their needs. In Putin, she said, young people looking for purpose could find a baby-boomer extolling big ideas.

The Kremlin is concerned about tying young people to the state before the next round of elections in 2024. “We need young people to buy into the system before Putin goes,” a person close to the Kremlin said in December. He asked not to be identified in order to speak candidly.

A report with polling data quietly commissioned by the government and obtained by the Observer concluded, after dozens of focus groups, that Russians were optimistic but “can’t imagine practically how to advance from their current situation to the ‘abstract’ future”.

Alexander Shepelev, a 22-year-old supporter of Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner, recently joined hundreds of other young students to prepare to travel as an elections observer to the North Caucasus for Sunday’s vote.

Young people have emerged as a driving force in Russia’s opposition movement. Just six years ago, observers were stunned by middle-class office workers joining the protest scene. Last year it was high-school and college students who shut down a central Moscow thoroughfare. Many are boycotting the vote and signing up as election observers instead.

“I remember when I was 12,” Shepelev said, “and I saw how [Dmitry] Medvedev came to power, but I knew that Vladimir Putin was still running the country.”

Was he already against Putin at that moment? “I didn’t really support anyone,” he said. “But I understood that nobody knew who Medvedev was. Even a 12-year-old like me understood what was happening.”