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."