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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.