RUSSIAN YOUTH: THE REVOLUTION IS OVER

...Ideological matters are now under the jurisdiction of a special commission of the central committee headed by Piotr N. Demichev, who is relatively liberal...

...For what do we use modern technical things...

...For instance, when I entered a newspaper office in Volgograd, one of the young editors said immediately, with an eager smile, "Tell us what you don't like about us...

...To some this is a development "like the Renaissance, when man was at the center of everything...

...It existed in the cave baby crawling out and the father saying, 'Don't crawl out.' In my age, we stayed in the cave...

...On the other hand, ideological subversion has increased...

...Now people read papers by themselves and go to the theaters alone and discuss things later...

...In our country, those of more than forty years of age are scared of everything," Pavel Litvinov, the grandson of longtime early Bolshevik foreign minister Maxim Litvinov, said recently as he protested against the Soviet state's imprisonment of writers and their defenders...

...The question can be put only by the people who live in the system...

...The old idea that dominated Bolshevik passions—that the whole world must become Communist and that every true Communist must spread the faith, even to those who resisted—finds little response in this sophisticated generation of Soviets...

...Then suddenly she removed it from the wall, uncovering another poster which read Free Greek Political Prisoners...

...The most important conflicts arise from another characteristic of this generation—the drive toward greater personal and intellectual freedom...

...What should not be missed is the fact that there is a revolution in this generation...

...We have a generation that has not experienced war and has not suffered the hardships of revolution," he began...

...Gone is the fervid belief that if a man is not a Communist today, he must become one tomorrow...

...They care about their fellow man...

...It has its revolution, but it is an internal one—a revolution turned inward to the veins of the soul and the arteries of the mind...

...It is the timeless revolution of people who leave the tribe, or the mass, or the collective, and, when the fear of change dies away, begin to feel themselves...

...It is not looking out at the world with any pre-formed and rigid viewpoint...

...Even if you know how to do things, the problems of 'what for?' still remain," a psychology student commented...

...They begin to sense their own individuality, and that of others...

...Appropriately prepared for a Soviet-American confrontation, the little room was hung with posters of Patrice Lumumba, Lenin, and others emitting strident anti-American cries...

...But it must not be forgotten that the hard-liners, fed by Vietnam and the old, obsessive fear of the West, are still waiting in the wings and in some cases striding onto the stage...

...It was actually easier in Stalin's time," one young man in Leningrad said...

...Rozov acknowledged that he himself was writing a kind of modern Fathers and Sons drama that would be the equivalent of Ivan Turgenev's celebrated Nineteenth Century story of the conflicts between the generations...

...But what it can do against an entire generation in the long run is open to question...

...Going is the early rigidity that said the only moral man was the Marxist man (the young have a new Russian word, sozialnost, which means responsibility not to the Party but to the broader community...

...It comes from Cuba...

...This is what is typical today—the assertion over and over again of the individual's right to make his own judgments...

...They want to show his inner life...

...My art students are all trying to depict man in a different way," an art teacher in Volgograd said, "not just to show what he looks like...

...Tatyana Malnikova, a petite, blond editor of the youth newspaper, Young Leninist, in Volgograd, put it with unusual sensitivity...

...It is far better educated and more refined than its elders...

...If there are two groups of people and they are both happy, they can co-exist...

...To woo the children back to orthodoxy, a new form of patriotic education is present everywhere, particularly in the "Red Pathfinder Program," which takes young people out hiking literally to track down the revolutionary past...

...This new development should surprise no one except the most rigid of Marxist theoreticians, whom it stuns...

...No, not that...

...What it can do in the short run is considerable...

...The hard-liners in the Soviet state, frightened of the remarkable generation they have raised, admit in front of foreigners who happen into their offices for an hour or two that they are concerned the young Soviets "would not defend their country in time of war...

...it does not harbor the Byzantine fear of the outside world that has run like a purple thread through Russian history even up to the present time...

...One time, the young Russians say, they get away with things...

...I recommend to those of my generation to say frankly what they think...

...The problem now is that nobody knows how far he can push...

...In the Caucasus I met one group that had just returned from a hike of three days over the mountains to find some graves and place a wreath...

...In ninety-five per cent of my conversations—with students of all sorts, writers, artists, and Komsomol workers —there was one predominant strain that never ceased: a concern for the "spiritual life" of man...

...There is also the theory that capitalism and socialism are coming closer...

...A highly popular movie of several years ago, / Am Twenty, showed a son of twenty-four going for advice to his father, a man whose growth and life had stopped in the compromises of the Stalin years...

...If you do not have this conflict, society would perish," he went on...

...Both now are headed by Brezhnev appointees...

...The conversation was good-natured enough until the end of the evening, when the students began urging me to be "objective...

...it is the process of growth, and it is explained neatly by one of the Soviet Union's finer playwrights, Victor Rozov...

...All three parts will be played by one actor...

...it is out to serve it and to * •» Mi en|oy it...

...And that is just what the younger generation thinks of its elders today— that they cowered "in the cave...

...These are all reasons why this generation—individualistic, searching, looking inward—has no stomach for exporting revolution abroad...

...I do what my conscience tells me to do...

...It is not that they are unconcerned about the collective (which Melko says is changing instead to "solidarity" between men, an important difference), but it is that they are passionately interested, almost in a religious sense, in man's soul...

...And what kind of ideological subversion...

...For none of the students defended the offending poster...

...Cuba...

...Were all other systems considered, per se, antithetical to Communism...

...They remind one of nothing so much as our own pictures of George Washington and red, white, and blue ornaments...

...Then you have the man of the present, with big gray thoughtful eyes, working on a cybernetic machine...

...Rather, it is looking inward—upon itself, to man himself...

...Everywhere you find them, with sore feet, tramping through the mountains to find the graves of the heroes, corresponding with old revolutionaries, and studying historic documents...

...it did not go through revolution and war...

...We knew how far we could go...

...For the process is quite natural...

...Her findings make up this article.-—The Editors...

...I had asked Valerie, whom I had found, incidentally, through other than official sources, "What are your generation's ideas about other systems...

...It is up to my generation to bring about a change...

...This generation of Soviets is so interesting precisely because it is so varied...

...Nowhere did I encounter the slightest interest in the underdeveloped world...

...As one Western diplomat in Moscow put it, "Somebody down there is always pushing for more, and they keep pushing and pushing until somebody on the top is forced to react...

...And another thing is typical and accounts for the cooling of revolutionary passion: the transformation of ideology from a struggling, assertive force, trying to impose its own order from without, to the central, inte"This Russian generation is not out to change the world...

...And I am only twenty," the father says to him...

...In religious propaganda, for instance, it now has substituted state "folk holidays" for the old religious holidays...

...the next time they don't...

...Then he said something deeply significant: "I am not a member of an organization or a revolutionary...

...But recently the state security administration, the successor of the dreaded secret police of Stalin's day, has shown an interest in ideology, as has the new Ministry for the Protection of Public Order...

...A more sophisticated but equally typical response came from a brilliant twenty-eight-year-old physicist-psychologist at Kiev State University, Valerie Melko...

...The first will be a boy of the Civil War, dirty and unkempt...

...Georgie Anne Geyer, award-winning, roving foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, recently returned from a three-months journey through the Soviet Union where she interviewed many young Russians...

...To more orthodox Marxists, it is the natural evolution of the system, which now has time and room for man...

...That is why we are trying to educate our young people in the spirit of proletarian internationalism...

...The young Soviets of the 1960s seem to want to identify themselves as individual beings—not to forget their fellow man but to differentiate themselves from the old, amoeba-like, sloganized "masses...

...To others, it is the birth of a Marxist humanism...

...They still spend their vacations going to the virgin lands and the collectives to work on the land...

...Hard-liner Leonid Brezhnev, whose predominance came clearly to the fore during the fiftieth anniversary celebrations last November when his face appeared first in all the poster parades, is now politically ahead of Premier Alexei Kosygin, a personal favorite among the young people because of his moderation, good manners, and dignity of person...

...the young people themselves as to how far it is smart to push, the momentum continues...

...The present younger generation does not have the severe schooling of revolutionary struggle and is not hardened as the older generation had been...

...They see people as all very much alike...

...Now that ideology is accepted as an integral and natural part of things instead of something mammoth and glorious and all-powerful, young people feel the room to move around as individuals, to act out of conscience instead of mass fealty, and to stand alone...

...It was ridiculous...

...The differences between the two previous generations are not difficult to assess...

...I am not interested in politics as such, but Soviet law should be respected...

...The grain of truth for me in this encounter was that the signs of revolutionary fervor among Soviet youth today are just that—signs, tokens—and nothing more...

...The question of ideology—and thus revolutionary passion—is so dramatic with this generation that the offensive against loss of Marxist faith is going on on two levels: persuasion and force...

...It is like trying to hold back the sea, as every wave breaks one of the old shibboleths on the beach...

...One is that while there are still plenty of tight-lipped young Marxists about, most seem to be eager to open themselves to the world...

...But despite the prison sentences, despite the incarcerations in insane asylums, and despite the doubts of ". . . young people feel the room to move around as individuals, to act out of conscience instead of mass fealty, and to stand alone...

...grated, invisible force in society...

...Different sociologists and politicians of the West speak about the no-class society, of societies divided only into good and bad...

...it is out to serve it and to enjoy it...

...What do they give to man...

...It isn't ours, you know," she said finally...

...It depends upon what you mean by different systems," he answered, in his pleasant, unassuming way...

...it is so much itself...

...Russian Youth: The Revolution Is Over by GEORGIE ANNE GEYER The winds of change blowing through the Communist satellite nations of Eastern Europe, especially Poland and Czechoslovakia, have their parallel in the mother country...

...We used to read the newspapers aloud in different groups or gather together to go to the theaters," she said...

...It is the revolution of young people buying up books on philosophy and sociology and burying themselves in scientific manuals...

...Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, 1967 Communist Party Congress One night in Irkutsk, a rather pleasant city of multi-colored Siberian commercial palaces of the last century, I was sitting in the Komsomol (Communist Union for Youth) office of the university with several officers talking about everything from freedom to revolution...

...They are idealistic...

...The man on the eve of the Second World War is already one fourth a gentleman, with a part in his hair...

...This Russian generation is not out to change the world...

...Rather, subversion aimed at convincing them that men are men, and that human decency is where you find it, regardless of ideology...

...The question is whether the system meets the needs of its people...

...I am writing about three young people in three generations," he said...

...We want the worker to feel he is a person among people, not only among machines," one young editor said...

...While the Komsomol still has some thugs running around "keeping things in order," its methods have switched much more to persuasion...

...Some showed some interest, but their interest in the United States was far more intense...

...I met Rozov in the Writer's Union, that nest of literary lions and snakes whose huge hall was once a Masonic hall and one of whose buildings was once the town house of the aristocratic War and Peace Rostov family...

...Without pity, the young criticize their elders for "selling out under Stalin...

...This was expressed to me by Ivan Tikhonovich Komov, one of the members of the central committee of the Komsomol, as we confronted each other across a long table in his office...

...But if there are two systems and one group considers the other system better, it is another thing...

...I have nothing to tell you...

...As Valerie Melko put it, "If there is one thing typical of this generation of Russians, it is its tendency to analyze everything and understand everything independently...

...Galina Mamayeva, a twenty-three-year-old teacher in Khabarovsk and an enthusiastic Marxist, put it this way: "Now the main problem of young people is not to think about Communism or capitalism but peace...

...What do they give on a spiritual level...

...But now they are paid, and studies of their motivations reveal that they go for adventure, for pay, and for experience—not to change the world...

...Then the young woman official walked over to the poster and looked at it with a puzzled air...

...We sat in a corner of the snack room, where authors had scrawled irreverent bits on the walls, and talked about the generational conflict, something that the Party says does not exist and most of the writers say does...

...The girls were far too young for this, they couldn't take it," snapped one of the boys, who was in every way a loyal member of the state...

...Something that hits the visitor, if he is honest, is the way in which the omnipresent pictures of Lenin, the tools of ideology, and the accoutrements of revolution have become simply part of "the scene...

...Hardly the Byzantine mood of the past...

...The state wavers back and forth, between the carrot and the stick...

...First there was a long silence...

...With a sigh of relief, she placed the Greek sign on top, and we all went ahead with our conversation in an atmosphere of solidarity...

...Gone are the Comintern passions of the early years when the Russians used to say, as the Cubans now say, "The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution...

...I am against all violence, whether from below or from above...

...It existed always, as long as the world existed...

...Could there really be co-existence...

...The present generation of youth, coming into adulthood half a generation after the de-deification of Stalin, knows neither fear nor submissive gratitude for little favors...

...The early Bolshevik revolutionaries, molded in the storm of revolution and by years of depredations, were men holding on tight to life for fear of being swept away by the tide...

...What came next was, to me, a fascinating post-mortem on the death of Russian revolutionary spirit...

...A pleasant enough man of about forty, he nevertheless had that certain stiffness that devout Marxists unfortunately so often have...

...Not, tellingly, subversion aimed at converting them to another faith...

...I'll be objective," I said, pointing to a poster that read Resist the Struggles of the Gorillas and Yankees in Latin America, "but I don't think that sign is very objective...

...DeGaulle is one, but he is not the only one...

...It is very far away," they said over and over...

...Their children—raised in the 1930s and 1940s, with purges and disappearances in the night and the horrors of losing twenty million Russians in World War II—were grateful for some economic betterment and for the relative comforts of "the thaw...

...In three months of traveling and talking to young people in almost every part of the Soviet Union, several things stood out...

...Many were actually hostile: "Khrushchev brought us to the brink of war because of that place," one journalist said...