Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context

Matthias Schwartz, Heike Winkel, Matthias Schwartz, Heike Winkel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137385130
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The demise of state Socialisms caused radical social, cultural and economic changes in Eastern Europe. Since then, young people have been confronted with fundamental disruptions and transformations to their daily environment, while an unsettling, globalized world substantially reshapes local belongings and conventional values. In times of multiple instabilities and uncertainties, this volume argues, young people prefer to try to adjust to given circumstances than to adopt the behaviour of potential rebellious, adolescent role models, dissident counter-cultures or artistic breakings of taboo.

Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context takes this situation as a starting point for an examination of generational change, cultural belongings, political activism and everyday practices of young people in different Eastern European countries from an interdisciplinary perspective. It argues that the conditions of global change not only call for a differentiated evaluation ofyouth cultures, but also for a revision of our understanding of 'youth' itself – in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Part I

Reconsidering Generational Change

1

The End of Childhood and/or the Discovery of the Tineidzher? Adolescence in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture

Catriona Kelly

This chapter examines the cultural and social force of the adolescent in Russian culture, focusing on the Soviet and post-Soviet period.¹ My purpose is to assess Soviet understanding of the pre-adult years, and the gaps and contradictions in this perception. I also look at how representations of the shift from childhood to youth have changed since the demise of the Soviet Union and the arrival – under direct influence from the West – of a much greater preoccupation with the transitional phase and with the figure now often referred to using a word transliterated from English, the tineidzher (teenager). Following the famous yet often misunderstood strictures of Michel Foucault in L’Histoire de la sexualité, I do not, however, see this process of ‘westernising’ perceptions of the transition between childhood and youth as necessarily contributing to the ‘liberation’ of the human subjects involved (Foucault, 1976). Rather, I shall be concerned to emphasise that the silences imposed by the canons of official (and unofficial) Soviet culture on certain corporeal topics could be in some respects more ‘liberating’ than the stress on the importance of frank sexual discussion that followed. In any case, the post-Soviet period (as in contemporary western countries) also saw the emergence of another kind of anxiety focusing on adolescence, where the established cliché of the ‘end of childhood’ as the loss of innocence started to be intermingled with the idea of ‘vanishing childhood’ as a symptom of social malaise, producing widespread concern about supposedly premature puberty and its consequences.

In tracing ‘the invention of the teenager’ in Russian culture, I am primarily concerned with what one might term ‘public’ representations of the boundaries between childhood and youth, of the kind to be found in the creative arts, popular medical literature and advice literature for parents.² However, I also include some discussion of the extent to which these have resonated in lived experience, as those undergoing what is sometimes named in Russian as ‘the transitional age’ (perekhodnoi vozrast) seek to grasp what is happening to them according to the norms and standards of the society they live in.

‘Childhood’ versus ‘youth’: The anatomy of a polarity

‘Childhood’ and ‘youth’ were, in terms of Soviet ‘agitation and propaganda’, easily recognisable phases of life, with their own age-specific organisations (Octobrists and Pioneers for ‘children’ up to the age of 14 or 15, the Komsomol for ‘young people’ from 14 or 15 to their mid-20s). Schoolchildren were categorised into those from the ‘younger classes’ (mladshie klassy) and those from the ‘older classes’ (starshie klassy). Both ‘children’ and ‘youth’ featured in Soviet slogans – ‘Thank You, Comrade Stalin, for a Happy Childhood’, ‘Children Are Our All’, ‘Soviet Youth Votes for a Happy Life’ – but the term podrostok, or a ‘half-grown person’, the nearest equivalent to ‘adolescent’ in common parlance, was not marked or honoured in this way.

The vagueness of the ‘transitional’ phase was expressed also in the flexibility of age boundaries. The age of criminal responsibility was, from 1918, fixed at 16; however, from 1935 it was lowered for certain crimes, particularly theft, to the age of 12. Labour legislation also fixed 16 as the age when a person might begin adult work, in the sense of the length of the day and the tasks assigned. However, work according to a limited tariff could begin at 14; and ‘socially useful work’, that is, participation in collective activities, such as collecting scrap metal, child-minding during elections, organising games and so on could start at a significantly younger age. There was also a good deal of fluidity over the age of admission to ‘children’s’ and ‘youth’ organisations. From 1922 to 1936, the Young Pioneers accepted children from 10 to 14; from 1936 it accepted those from 11 to 16; in 1939, the age boundaries were changed again, to include those between 10 to 15; and, in 1954, the age span was changed to 9–14, before settling in 1957 at 10–14.

Perhaps the most striking case of uncertainty is the age at which marriage was allowed. In 1918, this was set at 16 (for women) and 18 (for men). However, there was soon a good deal of public pressure both for the lowering of the age (from the rural population) and the raising of it (from the educated urban public). In 1926, the age at which marriage was allowed for women was raised to 18, but a year earlier it had been decreed that in the case of appropriate certification from a doctor (that sexual maturity had been reached) the registration of a marriage would be allowed at 17. Jurists of the day also pointed to a notable inconsistency, in that there was nothing prohibiting the contraction of a de facto marriage earlier. Article 151 of the 1926 Criminal Code (which remained in force throughout the Stalin years) forbade ‘sexual relations with persons who have not reached sexual maturity’. But ‘sexual maturity’ was not directly associated with age (in contrary to the ‘age of consent’ specified in English law, prohibiting sexual relations under the age of 16). On the contrary, an individual approach was taken. As a commentator on the Codex of Marriage, the Family, and Care for Children (1926) put it, this age was to be understood as:

a degree of sexual development according to which there is the possibility of fertilising someone else or being fertilised [oplodotvorennym – [sic], in the masculine form] by someone else. The question of whether a person with whom sexual relations have taken place is not resolved on formal grounds – whether they have reached a particular age, but in each individual case, according to the specificities of the sexual life of the given person [italics original], and in cases of doubt, with the participation of a medical expert.³

The formulation ignored the issue of sexual relations that did not involve the possibility of ‘fertilisation’ (consigning to limbo both homosexual relations and intimacy among people at a late stage of life). More significantly for the present discussion, though, it associated sexual activity with a phase of life at which development had been completed – an understanding that also underlay the customary term for ‘puberty’: ‘the moment of the onset of sexual maturity’ (moment nastupleniya polovoi zrelosti, a phrase that suggests the completion of growth, rather than the actual course of development).

In turn, this polarisation between different phases of life, ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’, with little sense of any intermediate phase between the two, has affected the historiography of pre-adult experience, with separate discussions focusing on ‘childhood’, or alternatively ‘youth’, at different historical periods.⁴ If the focus in work on youth has been on issues of political control and social participation, often rotating round the question of the extent to which young people conformed – or did not – to Soviet reality, then work on children has tended to be preoccupied with the victimisation of children under Soviet power.⁵ In other words, the question of agency has been crucial to the study of youth, but has been answered in advance with reference to the study of children – the latter have invariably been assumed to be what a historian of the Holocaust has termed ‘always and everywhere the most innocent victims’ (Novick, 2000, p. 255). The compartmentalisation of the discussion has by extension ignored awkward questions about age thresholds and about the manner in which they might be crossed.⁶

This conceptual problem for retrospective academic work on childhood and youth in the Soviet Union is thus derived not just from stereotypes (based on likely behaviour) that are widespread outside the culture, but also from certain features of Soviet culture itself. Celebration of youth (as the future of society and the guarantee of enduring communist tradition) was ubiquitous:

Our youth [nasha molodezh’] is a phenomenon without parallel the world over; its magnificence and significance may even be beyond our own grasp. Who gave it life, taught it, raised it, assigned it the business of revolution? Whence came forth those tens of millions of skilled workers, engineers, pilots, combine harvester drivers, scientists, and scholars? Can it really be us, the oldsters, who have created this youth? But when? And why did we not notice? […] But look: in these radically new, fairytale spaces of the factory shops of Kramatorsk, in the endless expanses of the Stalingrad tractor plant, in the mines of Stalinsk, Makeevka, and Gorlovka, and on the first, and on the second, and on the third day of creation, on planes, and tanks, and in submarines, in laboratories, over their microscopes, over the wastes of the Arctic, next to every possible kind of capstan wheel and crane, by all the entrances and exits – everywhere are tens of millions of new, young, and terribly interesting people.

(Makarenko, 1937, vol. 1, pp. 3–4)

But the trumpeting of youth’s importance went alongside an enveloping silence with regard to adolescence – above all, though not exclusively, the symptoms of puberty in a biological sense.

‘The secret of producing children’: Puberty and silence in the early Soviet period

The invisibility of adolescence in the Stalin era was not an entirely new phenomenon. Even in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the period when sexuality generally became more visible in Russia (Engelstein, 1992), juvenile sexuality had represented a problematic case. A thinker such as Rozanov, for example, had advocated early marriage as a way of ensuring that children did not turn to masturbation – that is, as an instrument of sexual control.⁷ In this, 1917 did not mark a significant rupture, contrary to the widespread myth of the immediate post-revolutionary years as the time when the ‘glass of water’ model of sexual relations held sway unchallenged.⁸ In fact, a much more prominent element in the culture was anxiety about the emergence of a mechanistic attitude towards relationships between the sexes. Panteleimon Romanov’s 1927 story ‘The Trial of a Pioneer’, for example, portrayed the persecution of two 15-year-olds, Andrei Chugunov and Mariya Golubeva, by their peers in a Young Pioneer troop because their gently romantic relationship had been discovered. The other Pioneers snooped on them and hounded them, culminating in a trial at which Andrei was upbraided for his sentimentality:

‘If she was necessary to you for physical intercourse, then you could have honestly, in a comradely style announced this to her, and not corrupted her by picking up handkerchiefs and carrying bags instead of her. We need women who march in step with all of us. And if she needs a chaperone to get her across a stream, then, brother, we don’t need someone like her.’

‘She wasn’t necessary to me for physical intercourse at all,’ said Chugunov, blushing deeply, ‘and I won’t allow insulting …’

‘So what did you need her for?’ asked the chairman of the court’s right-hand neighbour […] ‘What on earth for in that case?’

‘What for? … How should I know what for? … All in all … I talked to her.’

‘And you had to go and hide away from everyone for that?’

‘I wasn’t hiding, I wanted to be alone with her.’

‘You could have been alone with her for intercourse. That’s your personal business, because you wouldn’t have been removing her from the collective, but acting like that, you were setting up a whole ideological direction.’

(Romanov, 1927)

In fact, Panteleimon Romanov’s story did not so much demonstrate the triumph of mechanistic physicality among adolescents as indicate how alien such a phenomenon was, in the eyes of an older generation (Romanov was born in 1884). The story was, indeed, criticised at the time for being out of touch. It appeared with an editorial note stating that the author’s knowledge of actual Pioneer life was insufficient and inviting (by implication critical) responses (‘Ot redaktsii’, 1927). A discussion duly ensued, and Romanov’s story was described by one Pioneer collective as having a ‘harmful orientation’. However, the alternatives suggested had nothing to do with sexual licence: rather, another Pioneer group requested more ideological input from the Party network: ‘Instead of frivolous illumination of the sex problems among pioneers, Pioneer workers request that Party circles should come to our aid in a Marxist manner, and that they should work through and illuminate the issues of sexual education for Pioneers in a scientific way’ (Gusev, 1927, pp. 144–145).

The British educationalist Beatrice King, a fervent supporter of ‘progressive education’, who paid several visits to Soviet Russia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, noted that ‘Communists of long standing’ espoused views on sex education that were, as she put it, ‘no more advanced than those of the suburban parents living in other countries’. King was particularly struck by the contradictory attitudes of a friend who had not told his son anything at all about reproduction and was then bewildered about how to talk to the boy, who had been ‘put in the picture’ by the children his own age with whom he associated in the courtyard (King, 1936, p. 102).

If reticence with regard to sexual behaviour by adolescents was the rule at a period when ‘sex in public’ was treated with relative indulgence,⁹ inevitably, the prohibition on the direct representation of ‘physiology’ that was asserted at, for example, the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 could only further mute discussion. In 1937, Anton Makarenko, who had become the canonical provider of advice on Soviet family life, as well as children’s institutions, wrote dismissively, in his A Book for Parents, about the whole idea of sex education:

To begin, a sharp contradiction between parents’ liberalism and parents’ idealism set in. It suddenly – who knows why – with unmistakable obviousness began to become clear that the problem of sex, notwithstanding any explanations that might be given, notwithstanding their heroic truth to life, still remains the problem of sex, and not the problem of cranberry kissel or apricot jam. As a result of this, the problem demanded a level of detail that was unbearable even in terms of the most liberal yardstick, and had to be kept secret. Truth, in its striving for the light, clambered out in a form that made even the blindest of parents feel a sensation as though they were fainting […]

And second, it turned out that, despite all their most conscientious efforts, despite their scientific camouflage, parents were still telling their children exactly what all those ‘dreadful boys and girls’ would have told them – although the whole point of parents’ explaining was to pre-empt this. It turned out that the secret of producing children does not exist in two forms.

And then in the end people started remembering that since the very beginning of the world there has never been a case where young people entering into the state of marriage did not have sufficient information about the secret of producing children, and as is well known … always in only one form, without appreciable deviations of any kind. The secret of producing children is, so it would seem, the only area where arguments, heresies, and dark spots have never been observed.

(Makarenko, 1937, vol. 1, p. 210)

Makarenko’s view of truth – something best kept hidden lest it emerge shockingly on the surface, and something that would emerge anyway in pure and uncorrupted form, if only left to itself – was contradictory. Yet the message was clear: silence with regard to reproduction was definitely the best policy.

It was not just the ‘physiology’ of adolescent experience – and the long history of disquiet which this aroused – that made adolescence hard to address in terms of the official Soviet canons. Crucial, too, was the proscriptive character of Socialist Realism with reference to the aesthetic of the body. The ideal was a well-proportioned, well-muscled and conventionally handsome physique that was directly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Reconsidering Generational Change
• Part II: Popular Belongings: Subcultural Places and Globalised Spaces
• Part III: Reshaping Political Activism: Between Rebellion and Adjustment
• Part IV: Contested Agency: Civic Engagement and Everyday Practices
• Index