Teenage Gangs, ‘Afgantsy’ and Neofascists

Abstract

In recent years the Soviet media have turned increasing attention to the theme of teenage violence: ‘All the papers write regularly about the senseless cruelty of today’s teenagers. ’² The problem is by no means new; but the reporting of it is, as is the screening: a number of feature and semi-documentary films, most notably the Latvian, 1986 film It Isn’t Easy to be Young, have shown Soviet youth ‘warts and all’. As one of the young actors in this film pointed out, ‘Youth problems have certainly been around for ages, but they were played down, stifled … We were protected from knowing too much about ourselves.’³ Today, glasnost is helping to reveal a whole range of phenomena that just a few years ago were repressed: hippies and punks, night bikers and drug addicts, soccer hooligans and muggers, glue sniffers and prostitutes, vigilante gangs and skinheads, Zen Bhuddists and Hari Krishna followers, even Swastika-sporting young neofascists. They may be abhorrent to ‘polite society’, and have been condemned by leaders from Gorbachov to Archbishop Mikhail of Vologda and Velikoustyug. Gorbachov has spoken of ‘a certain section of young people enclosed in its own narrow little world, out of step, or trying to get out of step, with the swift onrush of life’,⁴ while the Archbishop has written in Pravda of the ‘moral decay’ among teenagers.⁵

We’re going to cleanse society of the hippies, punks and heavy metal fans who disgrace Soviet life.¹