Grandchildren off the Revolution

By James Kelly.

A big Chernenko challenge: westward-looking, apolitical youth

At a festival in Soviet Armenia, 5,000 rock-besotted fans sway and twitch in the stands of a bicycle stadium.

Onstage, half a dozen Soviet groups belt out numbers in a Berlitz of languages, including English, Italian and French. As midnight slips by, the gray-uniformed police stationed by the amplifiers glower, but the beat goes on. Suddenly a combo swings into an Elvis Presley classic, and the fans roar along, "Mah bluh svade shoos."

Not long ago, Oleg Radzinsky, 25, stood before a Moscow judge. The charge: spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. In 1982, Radzinsky had joined with a dozen other young Soviet intellectuals and founded the country's only independent peace organization. Besides seeking to exchange ideas with like-minded Americans, the defendant reportedly had been teaching the works of banned authors like Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The sentence: one year in prison and five of internal exile. The trial went virtually unnoticed by Soviet youth.

Those are two glimpses of the world of young people in the Soviet Union, one as telling as the other. They can rock 'n' roll with happy abandon, but they do not demand the climate of freedom that spawned the Western youth culture in the first place. Their lack of interest in politics was evident last week in the absence of young faces in the procession to bid farewell to Yuri Andropov. "What goes on in the leadership is remote from our lives," said Volodya, 26, an engineer. "Besides, nobody asks our opinion."

Today more than half of the Soviet Union's 274 million citizens are under 30. Had the Politburo selected one of its younger members to lead the country, young Soviets might have seen a sign that someone was trying to bridge the generation gap. Konstantin Chernenko, however, strikes the young not only as a typically uninspiring ideologue of the old school, but also as uncharacteristically voluble in decrying the youth culture brought in from the West. Only last June, Chernenko delivered a jeremiad to the Central Committee contending that "our enemy is trying to exploit for its ends the specific features of youth psychology."

More fundamental, Chernenko and his contemporaries are sensitive to the fact that today's youth belong to the first generation that has not been directly touched by the fervor of the Bolshevik Revolution or tempered by the monumental sacrifices of World War II. In his speech last year, Chernenko complained that "our young people have not seen firsthand the grim trials of class struggle and war, when the true face of imperialism with its hatred for the peoples of our country and for the socialist system was laid absolutely bare." Such finger wagging does not find a receptive audience among the grandchildren of the Revolution. "That he says these things is understandable," acknowledges a student in Moscow. "The trouble is, he believes them."

Young people in the Soviet Union today are, by and large, more materialistic, more outspoken and much more curious than ever before about the outside world, especially the U.S. But if today's youths are less passionate about Communist ideology than their forebears were, they are no less patriotic. "We have grown up without the privations of war, so this has allowed us to think more about ourselves and give our personal desires more importance," says Yuri, 28, a gas-drilling technician from the Caucasus. "But we are just as ready to defend our motherland."

The craving for Western goods, and its implied materialism, is evident everywhere. Jeans and rock music are even more popular than they were a decade ago, and now those fads have filtered from the city to the countryside. A pair of brand-name denims fetches $400 on the black market in Siberia; tapes of Michael Jackson and the Police go for $54 in Moscow. Teen-agers are so fond of Adidas sneakers that a new Russian adjective has been coined: adidasovsky, meaning "terrific." A trendy girl is described as firmennaya, from firma, meaning an item with a Western brand name.

Western pursuits are copied just as eagerly. Soviet youths who have come to love pizza and disco music are now smitten with skateboarding and jogging. Among the well educated in Moscow and Leningrad, Jane Fonda is a cult figure, but not for her politics. Her popularity stems from movies and, even more surprising, from bootlegged tapes of her exercise routines.

Donning Levi's and a college T shirt emblazoned STANFORD is not an act of political rebellion but of status seeking. For Soviet youngsters, Western products proclaim to their friends, "I can get what I want." A scarf with a designer signature adds a dash of color to what can be a gray existence. Nor are Soviet officials immune to the temptations; it is often their children who are first to sport the latest Western clothes, courtesy of a trip abroad or a state store reserved for the elite. "What cannot help alarming us," Chernenko said last year, "is the desire on the part of our youth to make themselves noticeable not by their knowledge or industry but by expensive things bought with their parents' money."

Such clucking is in character with the scrupulous attention the Soviet government pays to the young. Soviet parents are fond of saying, "Our children are our future." From age seven, when first grade begins, the children are enrolled in Leninist youth groups, which can lead eventually to party membership. After showing the proper spirit as "Little Octobrists" (named for the month in which the Russian Revolution took place), boys and girls graduate to the "Young Pioneers" at the age of nine. Their training in athletics, fitness and handicrafts can soon turn political. At the Black Sea camp of Artek last summer, Pioneers wrote postcards to President Reagan urging him to accept Soviet peace proposals; during a broadcast of the TV show I Serve the Soviet Union, Pioneers ran obstacle courses and assembled machine guns, all under the watchful eyes of KGB border guards.

By age 15 most Pioneers join Komsomol, the League of Communist Youth. Forty-two million Soviets, 60% of those between the ages of 15 and 29, participate in its lectures, sporting events and work projects. Joining Komsomol does not ensure a better education or job, but failure to belong can hinder one's career.

School, in effect, sorts out the young. All students attend classes through the eighth grade, when they take a battery of tests that determine the next step. For many families, this is a time of great anxiety, replete with tutors hired at $13.50 an hour. Low scorers usually switch into a vocational school, lasting one to two years, that prepares them for factory and service jobs. Those who fare better on the exams gain admission to a more advanced training school that usually lasts four years and turns out electricians, factory foremen and the like. Good students finish high school. After that the winnowing begins anew. Only 20% will go on to one of the country's 66 universities (among the most desirable: Moscow University and the Foreign Relations Institute, also in the capital), while others will enter one of the more than 800 prestigious technical institutes for degrees in areas such as engineering and computer programming.

As Soviets grow up and see the gulf between the Communist dream and reality, some fall back on job and family. Rifi, a red-haired Tatar who services diesel locomotives in Samarkand, declares ebulliently, "Best of all in my life I like my work." Others, however, are inclined to become cynical and apathetic. Tanya, 21, is an attractive Muscovite who works as a waitress. Married and divorced in her teens, she is content to drift through a day-to-day existence.

In the evenings she sometimes catches a movie with a girlfriend, but mostly she watches TV in her cramped apartment. Often she calls in sick. Observes a neighbor: "I have met many like her. They live in a political no man's land between loyalty and dissidence."

Better educated than their parents, the young outspokenly criticize the system, not for its ideology but for its inefficiencies. Vladimir, 27, a worker in Siberia, wonders why the Soviet Union is rich in resources but "our products are shoddy and poor." Government and party also inspire less admiration when youths realize how much business is done through bribery and favoritism. The young are, above all, losing touch with the forces that drove their ancestors to embrace Communism. "Ours is a lost generation," says Larisa, 25, an artist in Leningrad. "For us there are no dreams, no illusions, only a hard existence from day to day."

As ideology loses its hold over the young, the regime must strengthen the grip of nationalism. In school, children are drilled constantly on the heroic deeds of earlier Communists, especially during World War II. Teen-agers regale visitors with exploits of this or that World War II unit, complete with names, numbers and battles. The history lessons are selective: no mention is made of Soviet unreadiness for the German attack, for example. The U.S. role in the victory is underplayed.

But despite the traditional xenophobia of the Soviets, many of today's young say that their dearest wish is to travel to other countries, especially the U.S.; the most popular foreign language taught in schools is English. Passion for American music is so strong that it sometimes revives detente: last June a rock extravaganza in Moscow was linked by satellite with a jazz concert in California. Natasha and some of her friends met seven U.S. college students en route from Kiev to Moscow last summer. Suspicion dissolved into excited questions on topics ranging from rock music to nuclear war. But the answers are not always trusted. Told that Americans do not have to serve in the Army any more, Leonid was skeptical.

"Obviously, they have been told to lie about it," he said afterward. "Everyone knows America is a militaristic society."

That attitude should reassure the Kremlin, for it illustrates that a Soviet youngster can be enthralled with the trappings of Western culture but still retain his deeply nurtured distrust of the U.S. Indeed, the blue jeans and the disco thump probably serve as useful vents for youthful frustrations. The greater threat facing Chernenko is not that the Soviet Union's young people are attracted to other cultures, but that the system does not provide for their multiplying needs and locks them into slots at an early age, breeding apathy and boredom. --By James Kelly.

Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow