By Irina Glushchenko
MOSCOW — Some day an accounting will be made of the economic damage which Yeltsin's reforms have dealt our country. Even now, people have begun to speak about the moral losses. The group that has suffered most is youth.
In March alone the liberal Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta published three articles devoted to the way young people are reacting to the market. The saddest related the findings of a study conducted by the Moscow City Soviet's Permanent Commission on Youth Affairs. The researchers drew a distinction between "market" and "non-market" youth — those who are trying to adapt to the new conditions and those who still live according to former habits.
The new ideology, which derides the concept of labour, is enticing above all for its stress on easy money. For the smartest and most ruthless operators, profits in Russia's new market sector can be fantastic: fortunes of 500 million roubles (about US$600,000) are by no means rare.
"Here, it is true, the number of young people is no more than a handful", write the authors of the Nezavisimaya Gazeta article. The broadest category of "market youth" consists of people aged from 18 to 33 years working as stall-holders. At the lowest level of the market structure — street pedlars — the proportion of young people, including teenagers, is growing.
"Non-market" working youth generally live around the level of the subsistence minimum income, on incomes between 10,000 and 15,000 roubles per month. In Moscow, however, there are now around 20,000 young people who are neither employed nor studying. "The preconditions for the formation of broad marginal layers are thus present", note the authors of the study.
Students, whether in high schools, trade schools or tertiary institutions, are showing less and less
interest in their classes. "Only 10% of young people link their chances of a professional career with their educational level", Nezavisimaya Gazeta reports.
At every step, students are presented with examples of how one can prosper without any education at all. "The only students who take their studies seriously are those who are not of this world, and those who plan to earn dollars. Most students are lumpen intellectuals, potential unemployed."
In some cases, students with a flair for market dealing are making better money than their teachers. However, three out of four students are barely able to survive, and 80% receive help from their parents. "If the trend to further impoverishment continues, a significant proportion of students will simply not survive to the end of this academic year, at least as students", writes Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
The spread of paid tuition means that particular categories of education will increasingly be available only to children of well-off families. The quality of free education will inevitably decline.
What do young people of 10 to 14 talk about these days?, Andrei Baiduzhy asks in one of the articles. "About the prices for vodka, vouchers, chewing gum and cigarettes", he relates, adding, "They also swap experiences of how much it costs if you have a run-in with racketeers or the militia."
Soviet newspapers used to complain that children were growing up unprepared for life. But with the beginning of "market relations" there was a sudden rupture. "We have become thoroughly accustomed to children engaging in business", Baiduzhy observes. "The kids washing windscreens on Tverskaya Street, selling newspapers in underpasses or simply wheedling souvenirs out of foreigners have become part of the urban scene, and no-one is surprised any more.
"It seems everyone has simultaneously forgotten that the main task of children is, after all, to learn. Otherwise we'll find ourselves surrounded in a few years' time by a great mass of young people who only know how to count money, and who need a calculator to do that."
"The adjective 'savage' has become firmly fixed to the market that rules on our streets", Baiduzhy complains, "and adolescents imbibe all its traits: aggressiveness, moral nihilism, disrespect for the law and contempt for creative labour."
But why is this supposed to apply only to adolescents? "Creative labour" now has an almost indecent ring to it; it smacks of communist ideology. Although everyone insists on the need to work, the word "work" is more and more often understood as "hustling".
In the course of 1992 crime among young people increased by 16.5%. The offenders in most cases were young people not engaged either in study or employment. This category is growing every day. Under the recently adopted Law on Education, unsuccessful pupils can be expelled from school from the age of 14 years. "There is no doubt that schools will soon begin actively to rid themselves of troublemakers within their walls", writes Baiduzhy in an article entitled "Children behind bars".
"It is not hard to predict the subsequent fate of adolescents expelled from school: in most cases they will be drawn into criminal activity and will be lost to society for good."
The breaking down of the structures of society has taken its toll. Commissions on Youth Affairs that were responsible for around half a million adolescents have been disbanded. Special schools and special trade colleges are being closed, with the result that there is simply nowhere to keep juvenile offenders.
In Moscow not a single one of the Pioneer Palaces has survived. This means that there are no longer any children's activity clubs, choral and dance circles, sporting clubs, and a great deal else that was considered natural during the "era of stagnation". The children are losing the pioneer camps one by one to commercial structures. "Without a struggle, society has handed over its children to the street ... the boomerang of indifference to the fate of youth that is set loose today will return later to deal us a tremendous blow."