Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (review)

With this very good book, Juliane Fürst confirms her reputation as a preeminent historian of the final years of Stalin’s regime from 1945 to his death in 1953. This book advances, expands, and deepens arguments initiated in articles and in an earlier edited volume, namely that it was in the rigid postwar period, not the more volatile years of Khrushchev’s “Thaw,” that the challenges, and failures, of mature socialism were forged. The book also contributes to our understanding of Soviet youth, describing both Soviet-specific choices and cultures, and youths’ relationship to youth cultures and forces of modernity in western Europe and the United States. Postwar youth are described in all of their diversity: as believers in the Soviet project, as doubters, as hooligans and criminals, as followers of fashion, as comrades, friends, and lovers. They also appear as stand-ins for the Soviet people as a whole, a people who during the four decades following World War Two would rarely openly oppose the Soviet state, but increasingly undermine it by disengaging, withdrawing, and “opting out.” “Soviet people did not confront the system,” Fürst concludes, “they bypassed it.” Young people, she argues, were at the “forefront” of this evasion, beginning in late Stalinism (345).

Fürst argues that people’s relationships to the Soviet state were forged in the “banal and ordinary aspects of life” (5). Her first chapter on the experience and consequences of war describes something far from the ordinary, but her point is well taken in her attention to the traumas of the daily life on the home front, including great poverty and hunger, and to the inability of the state and its institutions to address the desperate situation of so many young people. The trauma of war is shown to have challenged fundamental, prewar understandings of the Soviet project leading some sufferers to question the supposed invincibility of the system. In this chapter, as in the book as a whole, Fürst’s expert use of a wide range of sources—archival, published, literary, and interview—bolsters her claim to understand young people’s experience and opinion.

The second chapter provides the most top-down approach, but understandably so as Fürst unravels the details of Stalinist Cold War, anti-western, and anti-Semitic ideological campaigns. She returns to the day-to-day in her analysis in Chapter Three of “mechanisms of integration,” including the everyday rituals of the Young Communist League (Komsomol) such as assemblies, badges, and elections. Fürst concurs with Alexei Yurchak, who in Everything was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation argues that Soviet language and ritual became increasingly standardized in late socialism. It was no longer the specific content, but the “process of participation that mattered and bestowed a sense of identity and belonging” (135) to the Soviet project. For some young people, this sufficed. But for others, the increasingly rigid postwar Soviet system drove them to more entertaining activities. Chapter Four provides a case study of the ups and downs of Soviet propaganda in late Stalinism through a close look at Alexandr Fadeev’s novel (and the subsequent movie), The Young Guard. Like other rituals, postwar heroes, and even the Stalin cult itself, the history of The Young Guard is evidence of the complexity of postwar Soviet socialism when, on the one hand, the state appeared most in control, and on the other, even a powerful and popular novel about wartime heroes contributed (among some) to disappointment, skepticism, and apathy.

The remaining chapters explore the non-conformist world of Soviet youth. Fürst examines problems of juvenile criminality and violence, acknowledging continuities with the 1920s and 1930s, but arguing that the war disrupted in new and profound ways earlier boundaries between legal and criminal behaviors. After the war, some forms of illegality and norm-breaking moved from being a necessity to a habit...