ABSTRACT
The deconstruction of the glasnost media undertaken in Part II facilitated the location of the discourses, and their institutional bases, which structured the youth culture debate in Russia during the perestroika years. This says much about the ways in which youth cultural activity is perceived by the adult world, but little about the youth cultural world itself. In the last part of this book, attention must be turned to the ‘ways of life’ of those young people who appear in the pages of the glasnost press and the restructured academic texts. However, just as glasnost could not confront the lies of the past through ‘revealing’ Soviet society in its true colours, but only create a new agenda of its own, neither can any claims be made here to present the real story. The ways of life described are not discrete cultural phenomena awaiting their discovery by the intrepid sociologist delving beneath the respectable face of society. They are cultural formations which are created by young people and which act to make sense of the meanings encountered in their daily lives (of school, work, home) and to generate new meanings which sometimes resist, sometimes confirm and sometimes simply sideline these.
