ABSTRACT
In April 1985 a major attack was launched on ‘old ways of thinking’ in the Soviet Union. The rallying call for the ‘acceleration’ of socio-economic progress was accompanied by a new attitude to the individual; socialism was to be constructed not at the cost of the people but for the people. This new ‘socialism with a human face’ involved a redefinition of relations between state and individual. Institutions of the state, and their representatives, were to become genuinely accountable to the people whilst individual citizens were asked to recognize their obligation to the state. Consequently, over the six years that can now be characterized as those of perestroika, the institutions which had framed the debate on youth and its culture—the party, the Komsomol, parliamentary and government committees, academia and the various organs of social control—changed significantly, both internally and in their relative centrality to the youth debate. The aim of this second part of the book is to explore these changes in order to assess: to what degree the youth paradigms were reconstructed or restructured in the period 1985–91; what the key moments in this restructuring were; and whether it is now possible to talk of a post-perestroika youth paradigm in Russia.
