Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation by Donald Raleigh (review)

This book is about a generation of Soviets once thought to be nondescript. Unlike their revolutionary predecessors, their grandparents who survived the Stalinist purges, or their parents who fought in WWII, Soviet citizens who came of age during the Cold War were born after history had already happened—or so the story goes.

Donald Raleigh joins a growing cohort of scholars who argue otherwise. Drawing from original interviews, Raleigh shows how members of this generation shared a bond of pragmatism and self-protection. They grew up with excellent educational opportunities, increased living standards, greater access to Western information, and a mounting sense of cynicism—but not necessarily antagonism—toward the Soviet dream. These slowly built, nonrevolutionary mores are what enabled this generation to support and survive the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Raleigh’s argument grows out of sixty oral histories that he conducted with 1967 graduates of two elite Soviet high schools, one in the provincial Russian city of Saratov and one in Moscow. Conducting interviews between 2001 and 2008, Raleigh traveled between various cities in the Russian Federation, North America, Israel, and Cyprus in order to pull the voices of these dispersed classmates into a “choral arrangement,” a collective biography (13). Raleigh’s earlier work, Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk About Their Lives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), offered lengthy translations of select interviews from this cluster, whereas Soviet Baby Boomers integrates their voices into a thematically driven social history, exploring memories of family life, education, careers, and the disintegration of state and subsequent economic depression.

There is a fruitful dialogue between Raleigh’s work and that of anthropologist Alexei Yurchak on the same cluster of late Soviets, Everything Was Forever Until it Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). On the whole, Raleigh’s work complements rather than contradicts Yurchak’s thesis that Soviet citizens experienced the collapse of socialism as somehow both surprising and inevitable all at once. As a social historian, however, Raleigh reveals more subtle changes over time and a greater diversity of perspectives than does Yurchak.

Raleigh also uses the concept of generationality to make a comparison across space as well as time. In addition to pointing out what made these groups of high school classmates different from their predecessors, he compares them to their American contemporaries—as the title phrase, Baby Boomer, provocatively suggests. Raleigh asserts that “the positive developments that shaped the Russian Baby Boomers have remarkable similarities to those that molded their Western counterparts, including me” (11). This claim is most convincing when it arises from the narrators themselves. In an especially interesting segment, interviewees recalled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, actively pointing out “that it was all too similar to the Americans in Vietnam” (263). Regarding popular Western culture, “baby boomers” from both Moscow and Saratov bought illegal copies of Beatles albums in high school and they sought to “get hold of jeans” through similarly unsanctioned means (136). What Raleigh seems to display with these segments on music and clothing is not so much a crosscultural similarity as an attempt by one culture to imitate another, as a comment on their own local options. Raleigh allows the complexity and asymmetry of this cultural appropriation to emerge more from his subjects’ voices than from his own analysis.

Indeed, outside of his larger arguments about late Soviet socialism, Raleigh offers a rich and varied portrait of his interviewees, revealing aspects of their memories that do not appear in official histories. Regarding religion, for instance, he shows how some of these “baby boomers” were exposed to traditional Russian Orthodox practices early in life via grandmothers and elderly caretakers. Equally valuable are the many sections in which Raleigh treats the topic of Jewish identity. The disproportionately high number of Jewish students from these two high school classes claimed not to have...