ABSTRACT
The rise of the social control discourse was associated not, as might be expected, with the strengthening but with the weakening of the state. The centrifugal forces pulling the Soviet Union apart, together with deepening economic and social crisis increased the state’s concern with securing its national future. This meant it paid additional attention to the material position of young people as well as solving those ‘youth problems’ (drug addiction, alcoholism, juvenile crime) which threatened the health and strength of the future nation. Such a dramatic change could not be contained within the old paradigms of the youth debate and the first part of this chapter will chart the collapse of the Komsomol and with it the paradigm of youth as the vanguard of the construction of communism. The second part will go on to detail the elaboration of a new but equally paternalistic approach to youth, which saw it first and foremost as an object of social policy. By the end of 1991, it will be argued, youth had become not the symbol of the bright future in a new society but ‘the lost generation’ and as such a social metaphor for a collapsing society.
