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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.