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  • Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism by Juliane Fürst
  • Helene Carlbäck
Juliane Fürst , Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. xiv + 391 pp. $99.00.

This study of Soviet society in the middle of the twentieth century discusses how young people in the USSR wanted to spend their lives and how the authorities wished to control them. In Juliane Fürst’s monograph we meet youth groups who shared love for the same fashion, films, and dances, forming their identity as they engaged in their own particular brand of oppositional behavior, apart from the rest of their surroundings. The book has a universal touch, describing youth culture similar to that elsewhere in the world. However, the setting here is the late Stalinist Soviet Union, with its harsh oppression and far-reaching state control of private sentiments and endeavors. The full-blown Cold War was expressed through a propaganda battle fought between the East and the West on a cultural front. Both sides sought to prove the superiority of their own lifestyle while scorning the values of their opponent. Soviet authorities launched shrill public campaigns against “decadence” and “cosmopolitanism.”

The book is a rich analysis of a generation that has undergone little previous study. In a well-argued introductory chapter Fürst introduces the key concepts of age and generation. She acknowledges that these Soviet young people did not identify themselves as a generation and therefore lacked a generational consciousness, but she still insists that the young cohort of late Stalinism is a generation. The key argument lies in the values they all shared in their common experience of growing up during the war and the bleak society of the postwar period.

A central theme of the book is the relation between the state and youth. The most frequent representative of the state presented here is the Communist Party’s youth organization, the Komsomol, which was responsible for socializing and educating young people, a task that was extremely difficult amid the poverty of the postwar years. Komsomol organizations suffered from a vast turnover of cadres and a low level of education among local activists. Most young people preferred to be with their own social groups to dress up, drink, and dance rather than to sit through dreary lectures on politics. Still, this was not the whole truth, Fürst emphasizes, because the collective, state-controlled activities did give a sense of empowerment and socialized people to “feel Soviet” (p. 135). What scholars conventionally have regarded as empty rituals, such as elections of Komsomol representatives, practices of criticism and self-criticism, and people’s letter-writing to authorities and organizations, in fact had integrative power and offered frameworks for individuals to find identity and meaning. As a way [End Page 216] of controlling the morality of youth, some Komsomol districts formed vigilante patrols that sometimes acted like youth gangs, becoming involved in violent street brawls and attracting attention from local police forces. This example superbly illustrates how the spheres of the state and youth would sometimes overlap.

Another important theme of the book is how the various ideological campaigns of the postwar era were incomprehensible to most people, a dilemma for the authorities that the author brilliantly captures in the title of her second chapter: “Explaining the Inexplicable.” In the long run the effect was to disillusion and confuse a young generation faced with the glaring contrasts between the promises of a better life after the victory over fascism and the bleak reality of the postwar years. Young people chose to devote their efforts to consumption and sought to avoid taking part in official activities. A third theme of the book is the argument that late Stalinism was a much more dynamic period than previously believed. Recent studies (including some in which Fürst herself played an important role) have demonstrated that the late Stalin years foreshadowed many later developments.

The final part of the book deals with fashion, style, friendship, and love, offering extremely interesting insight into the private spheres of youth subcultures and how...

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