Lecture: Being young in the Soviet Union from Stalin to Brezhnev

Abstract
The concept of youth and the reality of young lives was central to Soviet identity and visions of the future. Lenin had famously declared that the Bolscheviks were the party of youth, setting the parameters of a cult of childhood and youth that was to last the entire Soviet period. With communism projected as a future utopia in Soviet ideology youth continued to harbour the promise and hopes of the Soviet project, while at the same time also embodying the fears and anxieties of the Soviet regime. Youth was considered both the guarantor of socialism but also its potential enemy and undoing. It was between these two poles of projection that several generations of Soviet youth grew up in the post-war years, navigating between careful and thorough Soviet socialisation and curtailment of their youthful spontaneity and preferences.

This lecture will charter the experiences of three Soviet generations of youth – the immediate post-war generation, which grew up in the aftermath of the unprecedented patriotic rallying of the Great Fatherland War, the so-called Thaw generation, coming of age in the Khrushchev reform period, and what Alexei Yurchak has termed the ‘last Soviet generation’, whose members carved out a niche in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. It will highlight how the double discourse of Soviet ideology on the promises and dangers of youth shaped their experience and formed pockets of non-conformism and disobedience, while at the same time shaping stable hallmarks of being Soviet. It will look at continued socialist commitment as well as at oppositional subcultures, demonstrating the rather than opposites these poles worked together to shape Soviet youth and hence late socialist reality.

CV
Juliane Fürst is a Soviet historian, specializing in the post-war period and is particularly interested in questions of youth, subculture, dissent, and protest. She is the author of Stalin’s Last Generation: Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (2010) and Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland (2021) and the editor of Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (2006) and Dropping out of Socialism: The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc (2016). She is co-head of the department ‘Communism and Society’ at the ZZF Potsdam.