Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia

Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia PDF Author: Fran Markowitz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Anthropologist Fran Markowitz interviewed more than one hundred Russian teenagers to discover how adolescents have been coping with their country's seismic transitions. Her findings present a substantive challenge to near-axiomatic theories of human development that regard cultural stability as indispensable to the successful navigation of adolescence.Markowitz's fieldwork leads to the surprising conclusion that the disruptions brought by glasnost, perestroika, and the fragmentation of the USSR exerted a greater impact on Western political hopes and on many of Russia's adults than on young people's perceptions of their lives. In their remarks on topics ranging from being Russian to religion, sex, music, and military service, the teenagers convey a flexible and optimistic approach to the future and a sense of security deriving from strong family, school, and neighborhood ties. Their perspectives suggest that culture change and social instability may be seen as positive forces, allowing for expressive opportunities, the establishment of individualized identities, and creative, pragmatic planning.

Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia

Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia PDF Author: Fran Markowitz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
Anthropologist Fran Markowitz interviewed more than one hundred Russian teenagers to discover how adolescents have been coping with their country's seismic transitions. Her findings present a substantive challenge to near-axiomatic theories of human development that regard cultural stability as indispensable to the successful navigation of adolescence.Markowitz's fieldwork leads to the surprising conclusion that the disruptions brought by glasnost, perestroika, and the fragmentation of the USSR exerted a greater impact on Western political hopes and on many of Russia's adults than on young people's perceptions of their lives. In their remarks on topics ranging from being Russian to religion, sex, music, and military service, the teenagers convey a flexible and optimistic approach to the future and a sense of security deriving from strong family, school, and neighborhood ties. Their perspectives suggest that culture change and social instability may be seen as positive forces, allowing for expressive opportunities, the establishment of individualized identities, and creative, pragmatic planning.

Young People in Post-Soviet Russia

Young People in Post-Soviet Russia PDF Author: Nadia Ptashchenko
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640398750
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 37

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Russia, grade: 7, Uppsala University, course: M.A. "Euroculture: Europe in the Wider World", language: English, abstract: During the course of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union rose and fell, and Russia re-emerged. The Russians were left "feeling robbed of a sense of place, of purpose and of identity" . By the mid-1990's, Russia, while contending with the ups and downs of economic crisis and the health of its leaders, was trying to find its own course, attempting to resurrect past glories, learn from recent mistakes, and forge a place in a community of nations. Together with society, youth was going through a period of change in its ideological, economic and moral values. According to Martha Olcott, "it was Russian youth, who seemed to suffer disproportionately from the numerous social disorders in the USSR at the end of the decade". Ilynsky talks about the widespread moral decay in Russia in the 1990's and the lack of direction among many young people - "their poor understanding of freedom, lack of faith in politicians, growing sense of injustice and general concerns about what the future might bring". Russian identity is and has been a topic of continual argument, of conflicting claims, competing images, contradictory criteria. According to S. Franklin, "Russia is continually represented as a question, a field of possibilities, a set of contradictions". After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 even more intensified self-questioning in the "new" Russia started. Usually, such questions have been posed by the young population of Russia who happened to live in the period of global economic and ideological transitions. What kind of country is Russia to be? What has happened to young people in the post-Communist phase? The focus of this paper is how the changing economic, political and social geography of Russia affected the youth since the fall of communism in 1991

The "children of Perestroika" Come of Age

The Author: Deborah Adelman
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 9781563242878
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In 1992 Deborah Adelman returned to Moscow to meet once again with the young people who told their stories in The "Children of Perestroika". During the intervening three years, the teens had experienced not only major social and political upheavals, but also important changes in their personal lives: the death of a parent; love, marriage, and the prospect of children; for some, the beginning of a higher education; for others, military service and entry into a rapidly changing world of work. In this new book of interviews, the teens describe the trials and tribulations of their first years of adult life - the decisions they have made, and the hand that fate has dealt them and their families, in the chaotic and uncertain world of post-Soviet Russia.

Reforming Child Welfare in the Post-Soviet Space

Reforming Child Welfare in the Post-Soviet Space PDF Author: Meri Kulmala
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000193667
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This book provides new and empirically grounded research-based knowledge and insights into the current transformation of the Russian child welfare system. It focuses on the major shift in Russia’s child welfare policy: deinstitutionalisation of the system of children’s homes inherited from the Soviet era and an increase in fostering and adoption. Divided into four sections, this book details both the changing role and function of residential institutions within the Russian child welfare system and the rapidly developing form of alternative care in foster families, as well as work undertaken with birth families. By analysing the consequences of deinstitutionalisation and its effects on children and young people as well as their foster and birth parents, it provides a model for understanding this process across the whole of the post-Soviet space. It will be of interest to academics and students of social work, sociology, child welfare, social policy, political science, and Russian and East European politics more generally.

Learning to Labour in Post-Soviet Russia

Learning to Labour in Post-Soviet Russia PDF Author: Charles Walker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136873600
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This book explores the changing nature of growing-up working-class in post-Soviet Russia, a country dislocated by the experience of neo-liberal economic reform. Based on extensive ethnographic research in a provincial Russian region, it follows the experiences of vocational education graduates whose colleges continue to channel them into the ailing industrial and agricultural sectors. Rather than settling for transitions into ‘poor work’, the book shows how these young men and women develop a range of strategies aimed at overcoming the poverty of opportunity available to them in traditional enterprises, pursuing instead emerging opportunities in higher education, jobs in the new service sector and the prospect of migration. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, Charles Walker analyses these strategies and their significance for wider processes of social change and social stratification in post-Soviet Russia.

Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc

Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc PDF Author: William Jay Risch
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739178237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc explores the rise of youth as consumers of popular culture and the globalization of popular music in Russia and Eastern Europe. This collection of essays challenges assumptions that Communist leaders and Western-influenced youth cultures were inimically hostile to one another. While initially banning Western cultural trends like jazz and rock-and-roll, Communist leaders accommodated elements of rock and pop music to develop their own socialist popular music. They promoted organized forms of leisure to turn young people away from excesses of style perceived to be Western. Popular song and officially sponsored rock and pop bands formed a socialist beat that young people listened and danced to. Young people attracted to the music and subcultures of the capitalist West still shared the values and behaviors of their peers in Communist youth organizations. Despite problems providing youth with consumer goods, leaders of Soviet bloc states fostered a socialist alternative to the modernity the capitalist West promised. Underground rock musicians thus shared assumptions about culture that Communist leaders had instilled. Still, competing with influences from the capitalist West had its limits. State-sponsored rock festivals and rock bands encouraged a spirit of rebellion among young people. Official perceptions of what constituted culture limited options for accommodating rock and pop music and Western youth cultures. Youth countercultures that originated in the capitalist West, like hippies and punks, challenged the legitimacy of Communist youth organizations and their sponsors. Government media and police organs wound up creating oppositional identities among youth gangs. Failing to provide enough Western cultural goods to provincial cities helped fuel resentment over the Soviet Union’s capital, Moscow, and encourage support for breakaway nationalist movements that led to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Despite the Cold War, in both the Soviet bloc and in the capitalist West, political elites responded to perceived threats posed by youth cultures and music in similar manners. Young people participated in a global youth culture while expressing their own local views of the world.

Young People in Post-communist Russia and Eastern Europe

Young People in Post-communist Russia and Eastern Europe PDF Author: James Riordan
Publisher: Dartmouth Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The primary goal of this study is to analyze the position of youth in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This covers their health, intellectual development, socio-economic status, crime patterns, attitudes towards politics, present preoccupations and thoughts about the future.

Citizens in the Making in Post-Soviet States

Citizens in the Making in Post-Soviet States PDF Author: Olena Nikolayenko
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136824537
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
The political outlook of young people in the countries of the former Soviet Union is crucial to their countries’ future political development. This is particularly relevant now as the first generation without firsthand experience of communism at first hand is approaching adulthood. Based on extensive original research and including new survey research amongst young people, this book examines young people’s political outlook in countries of the former Soviet Union; it compares and contrasts Russia, where authoritarianism has begun to reassert itself, and Ukraine, which experienced a democratic breakthrough in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution. The book examines questions such as: How supportive is this new generation of the new political order? What images of the Soviet Union prevail in the minds of young people? How much trust does youth place in current political and public institutions? Addressing these questions is crucial to understanding the extent to which the current regimes can survive on the wave of public support. The book argues that Russian adolescents tend to place more trust in the incumbent president and harbour more regrets about the disintegration of the Soviet Union than their peers in Ukraine; it demonstrates that young people distrust political parties and politicians, and that patriotic education shapes social and political values.

Youth and Social Change in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union

Youth and Social Change in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union PDF Author: Charles Walker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135701245
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
Two decades have now passed since the revolutions of 1989 swept through Eastern Europe and precipitated the collapse of state socialism across the region, engendering a period of massive social, economic and political transformation. This book explores the ways in which young people growing up in post-socialist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union negotiate a range of identities and transitions in their personal lives against a backdrop of thoroughgoing transformation in their societies. Drawing upon original empirical research in a range of countries, the book's contributors explore the various freedoms and insecurities that have accompanied neo-liberal transformation in post-socialist countries - in spheres as diverse as consumption, migration, political participation, volunteering, employment and family formation - and examine the ways in which they have begun to re-shape different aspects of young people's lives. In addition, while 'social change' is a central theme of the issue, all of the chapters in the collection indicate that the new opportunities and risks faced by young people continue both to underpin and to be shaped by familiar social and spatial divisions, not only within and between the countries addressed, but also between 'East' and 'West'. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Youth Studies.

Surviving Post-communism

Surviving Post-communism PDF Author: Kenneth Roberts
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
How do young people survive in the era of high unemployment, persistent economic crises and poor living standards that characterize post-communist society in the former Soviet Union? This work demonstrates how young people have managed to maintain optimism despite the very severe economic and social problems that beset the countries of the former Soviet Union. It reveals that in spite of all the hardship, the majority prefer the new uncertainties, and the merest prospect of the Western way of life, to the old guarantees.