Pizza and Punk on Gorky Street

By Patricia Blake

Western ways increase their hold on Soviet youth

The band of teen-agers ambled down the avenue toward the pizza parlor in Wrangler jeans, T shirts inscribed with U.S. ARMY and Adidas sneakers. Some exhibited the glazed stare and the jerky arm-and-leg movements that are the telltale signs of a Walkman wearer. Inevitably, a few hard-eyed, Camel-smoking punk rockers slipped into the crowd, their side-cropped hair adorned with spikes on top, their black leather pants punctured by safety pins.

Rome? San Francisco? Liverpool?

Surprisingly, the city was Moscow, the avenue was Gorky Street, and the pizza parlor was a pitseriya, the first in a chain of 22 that an Italian firm plans to open up around the U.S.S.R.

Only the mozzarella substitute in the pizza had a distinctively Soviet flavor; it was suluguni, a cheese from Soviet Georgia that used to be one of Joseph Stalin's favorite snacks.

To the dismay of the authorities, many Soviet young people have turned away from the stuffy ideal of the committed Young Communist Leaguer that was fostered by their elders. Now two generations beyond the terror-filled Stalin era and the suffering of World War II, the young are bent on having fun in all the ways taught by Western movies, visitors and foreign radio broadcasts. In and around Moscow last week, youngsters were boardsailing, skateboarding and hang gliding; practicing yoga, karate, kung fu and fad diets; exchanging Bruce Lee posters; disco dancing; listening to tapes of Diana Ross and ABBA; and going to see Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer and Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome, two of several U.S. movies playing in Moscow.

Wearing jeans and insignia T shirts is not always a sign of disaffection. On the contrary, many of the young people who mimic Western ways are the children of Soviet officials who buy Western clothes abroad or at state stores reserved for the elite. The less privileged must buy or cadge their status gear from Western tourists. The most prized items in any Soviet youngster's wardrobe, Adidas sneakers, are manufactured in Moscow under license from the West German footwear firm. The Voskhod factory has been turning out a million pairs of green, yellow and purple sneakers a year, scarcely meeting the demand even at about $40 a pair.

Pursuing some Western fads requires considerable ingenuity, as well as cash. The craze for boardsailing, for example, has obliged Soviet citizens to build their own, a process that requires the painstaking application of layers of fiber glass over a homemade frame. The materials cost about $140, and some budding capitalists sell their boards for as much as $420. At the Klyazma Reservoir, twelve miles north of Moscow, a 26-year-old graduate student in mathematics showed off his handiwork. "My first board took a month to build," he says, "but once I got the hang of it, I could do it in a week."

Boardsailers receive some official encouragement, but rock groups and their fans have come under increasing attack in the Soviet press. One group called Mashina Vremeni (Time Machine) was denounced in the Communist youth daily Komsomolskaya Pravda for "giving thousands of spectators dangerous injections of dubious ideas." As expressed in Time Machine lyrics, the ideas (for example: "There's no point in believing promises any more") hardly seem likely to set off alarm bells in the Kremlin. Still, Time Machine has made no albums and has been banned from playing in Moscow. New regulations have forced discos to cut back on Western rock, and bootleg tapes of Western and local groups sell for $60 and up, even in remote parts of the U.S.S.R.

Equally disturbing as rock to the Soviet authorities has been the growth of unauthorized clubs of teen-age soccer followers, known as fanaty, or fans. According to a censorious article in Komsomolskaya Pravda, fanaty members are senior technical-and vocational-school students from Moscow's working-class quarter. Characterizing them as a "dubious tribe of sports-minded hooligans," the paper criticized them for picking fights in the subway, waking up neighborhoods with their all-night singing, and defacing walls and bridges with graffiti boosting their teams.

Clearly, the decisive influence on Soviet young people yearning for Western pop culture has been foreign broadcasting. When Willis Conover, who since 1954 has conducted the Voice of America's jazz program, went to Moscow last month with Musicians Chick Corea and Gary Burton, some 500 people jammed into an auditorium with 400 seats. Conover took the microphone and said, "Hello, I'm Willis . . ." He got no further. The young people erupted in cheers. They had grown up listening to that voice on the short wave. --By Patricia Blake. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof and Jane Tempest/Moscow

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof, Jane Tempest

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