Young People In Post Soviet Russia

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Russia, grade: 7, Uppsala University, course: M.A. "Euroculture: Europe in the Wider World", language: English, abstract: During the course of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union rose and fell, and Russia re-emerged. The Russians were left "feeling robbed of a sense of place, of purpose and of identity" . By the mid-1990's, Russia, while contending with the ups and downs of economic crisis and the health of its leaders, was trying to find its own course, attempting to resurrect past glories, learn from recent mistakes, and forge a place in a community of nations. Together with society, youth was going through a period of change in its ideological, economic and moral values. According to Martha Olcott, "it was Russian youth, who seemed to suffer disproportionately from the numerous social disorders in the USSR at the end of the decade". Ilynsky talks about the widespread moral decay in Russia in the 1990's and the lack of direction among many young people - "their poor understanding of freedom, lack of faith in politicians, growing sense of injustice and general concerns about what the future might bring". Russian identity is and has been a topic of continual argument, of conflicting claims, competing images, contradictory criteria. According to S. Franklin, "Russia is continually represented as a question, a field of possibilities, a set of contradictions". After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 even more intensified self-questioning in the "new" Russia started. Usually, such questions have been posed by the young population of Russia who happened to live in the period of global economic and ideological transitions. What kind of country is Russia to be? What has happened to young people in the post-Communist phase? The focus of this paper is how the changing economic, political and social geography of Russia affected the youth since the fall of communism in 1991

Anthropologist Fran Markowitz interviewed more than one hundred Russian teenagers to discover how adolescents have been coping with their country's seismic transitions. Her findings present a substantive challenge to near-axiomatic theories of human development that regard cultural stability as indispensable to the successful navigation of adolescence.Markowitz's fieldwork leads to the surprising conclusion that the disruptions brought by glasnost, perestroika, and the fragmentation of the USSR exerted a greater impact on Western political hopes and on many of Russia's adults than on young people's perceptions of their lives. In their remarks on topics ranging from being Russian to religion, sex, music, and military service, the teenagers convey a flexible and optimistic approach to the future and a sense of security deriving from strong family, school, and neighborhood ties. Their perspectives suggest that culture change and social instability may be seen as positive forces, allowing for expressive opportunities, the establishment of individualized identities, and creative, pragmatic planning.

Demonstrates the relevance, rigor, and creativity of interpretive research methodologies for political science and its various sub-fields. Designed for use in a course on interpretive research methods, this book situates methods questions within the context of methodological questions - the character of social realities and their "know-ability."

The primary goal of this study is to analyze the position of youth in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This covers their health, intellectual development, socio-economic status, crime patterns, attitudes towards politics, present preoccupations and thoughts about the future.

This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of youth, in all its diversity, in Muslim Central Asia and the Caucasus. It brings together a range of academic perspectives, including media studies, Islamic studies, the sociology of youth, and social anthropology. While most discussions of youth in the former Soviet South frame the younger generation as victims of crisis, as targets of state policy, or as holy warriors, this book maps out the complexity and variance of everyday lives under post-Soviet conditions. Youth is not a clear-cut, predictable life stage. Yet, across the region, young people’s lives show forms of experimentation and regulation. Male and female youth explore new opportunities not only in the buzzing space of the city, but also in the more closely monitored neighbourhood of their family homes. At the same time, they are constrained by communal expectations, ethnic affiliation, urban or rural background and by gender and sexuality. While young people are more dependent and monitored than many others, they are also more eager to explore and challenge. In many ways, they stand at the cutting edge of globalization and post-Soviet change, and thus they offer innovative perspectives on these processes. This book was published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey.

This book provides new and empirically grounded research-based knowledge and insights into the current transformation of the Russian child welfare system. It focuses on the major shift in Russia’s child welfare policy: deinstitutionalisation of the system of children’s homes inherited from the Soviet era and an increase in fostering and adoption. Divided into four sections, this book details both the changing role and function of residential institutions within the Russian child welfare system and the rapidly developing form of alternative care in foster families, as well as work undertaken with birth families. By analysing the consequences of deinstitutionalisation and its effects on children and young people as well as their foster and birth parents, it provides a model for understanding this process across the whole of the post-Soviet space. It will be of interest to academics and students of social work, sociology, child welfare, social policy, political science, and Russian and East European politics more generally.

Two decades have now passed since the revolutions of 1989 swept through Eastern Europe and precipitated the collapse of state socialism across the region, engendering a period of massive social, economic and political transformation. This book explores the ways in which young people growing up in post-socialist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union negotiate a range of identities and transitions in their personal lives against a backdrop of thoroughgoing transformation in their societies. Drawing upon original empirical research in a range of countries, the book's contributors explore the various freedoms and insecurities that have accompanied neo-liberal transformation in post-socialist countries - in spheres as diverse as consumption, migration, political participation, volunteering, employment and family formation - and examine the ways in which they have begun to re-shape different aspects of young people's lives. In addition, while 'social change' is a central theme of the issue, all of the chapters in the collection indicate that the new opportunities and risks faced by young people continue both to underpin and to be shaped by familiar social and spatial divisions, not only within and between the countries addressed, but also between 'East' and 'West'. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Youth Studies.