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16 Fathers and Sons
- Penn State University Press
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16 FATHERS AND SONS The rise to maturity of an educated postwar, post-Stalinist generation is the fundamental socio-political change that Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and all other political figures of the older, sixty-plus generation have had to deal with. — . , Russia Transformed Conflict between fathers and sons is a well-known theme in the literature of many nations. Russians know it from Ivan Turgenev’s masterful novel, Fathers and Sons (titled in Russian as the more politically correct Fathers and Children). Stalin himself would have experienced such a conflict had he been alive when his daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the West in and became a U.S. citizen. Nikita Khrushchev also would have known it when his son Sergei became a U.S. citizen in . Earlier, in the s, the father-son conflict took another form in the stilyagi (style-hunters), the Soviet “zoot suiters.” As described by S. Frederick Starr: “The early stiliagi were the inverse image of the Stalinist society of their fathers’ generation . The fathers wore baggy trousers, so the sons cut theirs narrow; the fathers were careless in dress, so the sons waged a clean-cut protest; the fathers denounced the wicked West, so the sons embraced it; the fathers sacrificed for the future, so the sons indulged in the present. The stiliagi, in short, rebelled against the officially sponsored mass culture of the Soviet Union.”1 The stilyagi also had a female counterpart. As described by Sovetskaya kultura, the newspaper of the Soviet Ministry of Culture,“This species wears dresses which cling to the point of indecency. Her skirts are slit. Her lips are brightly painted. She wears ‘Roman’ sandals during the summer.”2 “The media ridiculed these “disgusting girls,” writes Rodger Potocki, “with their ‘a la garçon’ haircuts—pitiful bristles of cropped hair—and their shoes that remind one of caterpillar tractors. These Soviet youth not only dressed in what they thought to be the latest in American fashion, but adopted English names, drank kokteili, dropped American slang, smoked Lucky Strikes, and danced to hot dzhaz.”3 . S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . .“Stilyagi,” Sovetskaya kultura, January , , (translated by Rodger Potocki Jr.). . Rodger Potocki Jr., “The Stilyagi: A Love Affair with the American Dream” (manuscript, Georgetown University, ). Our pages here, however, are about the children of high-ranking Soviet officials and members of the intelligentsia a generation later whose parents sent them to the prestigious English-language spetsshkoly (special schools) where English was taught intensively. In such schools, students began their study of English at an early age and graduated with near fluency. The intention was to prepare them for good jobs with the Foreign Ministry, Intourist, Soviet banks, or the KGB, but the parents did not realize that, in the process of learning a Western language, their children would also be westernized, and many would support changes and reform. Foreign language study not only introduced them to new words but also to new cultures, values, and ways of thinking. The spetsshkoly began as an effort to provide intensive schooling in foreign languages , mathematics, science, and the arts. Intended originally for the gifted and talented, such schools in the late Soviet period were filled with the children and grandchildren of high officials and members of the nomenklatura and intelligentsia , the“golden youth,”as they were called. The schools, as a sign of their prestige , were assigned low numbers, from to , whereas ordinary schools were given four-digit numbers. That changed when Yeltsin, in his populist mode, attacked the special schools as havens for the privileged, some of whom were grandchildren of his opponents in the Politburo, although Yeltsin’s own grandson attended a Moscow English-language spetsshkola before he was sent to school in England.4 School No. , an English-language spetsshkola, was located on Moscow’s Kutuzovsky Prospekt, a broad avenue where many prominent Russians resided. Among the students there in the s were girls with such names as Viktoria Brezhneva, Tatyana Suslova, and Irina Aristova, granddaughters of high-ranking communist party officials. They married well but, like most Soviet women, did not become active politically, unlike many of their male classmates.5 Among the male spetsshkoly students in the s was Vyacheslav A. Nikonov, who, as noted earlier, went on to study American history at Moscow State University . Named after his grandfather, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Old Bolshevik and Stalin confidant, Nikonov became a prominent democrat in the...