Word: young
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cyclone fence and metal bars encircle the stage. Like a caged animal, a slender young woman in black paces back and forth. Suddenly, she rattles the prison door, her pale features exposed by the spotlight. "Three hundred forty-nine days! Three hundred forty-nine days!" she screams. "Bite on your hat, anything to keep from sobbing!" Few in the audience at Moscow's Sovremennik Theater stifle the emotion inspired by such searing scenes from Eugenia Ginzburg's memoirs of the Gulag, Journey into the Whirlwind. An innocent victim of the Stalinist purges, the heroine endures humiliating interrogations, strip searches...
...lights come up at the House of Composers after a screening of The Puppy, director Alexander Grishin's new film about a young defender of perestroika who loses his battle to expose corruption. At least one viewer is disturbed by a final scene showing the body of the youth floating in factory waste water. "Why can't the film have a positive ending?" asks the decorated war veteran. "Everything is so negative today." He is interrupted by hoots of protest from the audience...
...Saturday night some 6,000 Moscow teenagers pack into the Luzhniki sports amphitheater, a warehouse-like hall that is usually the venue for hockey matches and basketball games. Off-duty soldiers, their pink faces fuzzy with adolescent stubble, scuffle to get closer to the stage, while packs of young girls giggle at their antics. It might be a concert anywhere in America -- except that no T shirts are for sale, no hot dog vendors trawl the aisles, and, most of all, no one smokes anything stronger than cigarettes...
Through 2 1/2 hours and ten opening bands, the kids have stood shoulder to shoulder waiting for their favorite group. Finally, a short, well-built young man, his hair shaved severely around the sides, appears onstage. He grins demonically and defiantly surveys the crowd. Behind him a swarm of guitarists, horn players, a keyboardist and a drummer troop onto the stage. A drumbeat clears the air, and suddenly the band is cruising through the infectious opening rhythm of The Man in the Hat. The lead singer grabs the microphone and shrieks, "Heading for a meeting/ Across the frozen intersection...
...Tashkent-based Muslim board for Central Asia, the most important of the four government-imposed bureaucracies for Soviet Islam, Deputy Chairman Abdulgani Abdulla recalls that "almost nobody was interested in religion" in the 1960s. Now, he reports, large numbers are becoming active believers, many of them young people. "None of the philosophies except the religious ones are able to satisfy men's needs," he maintains. The leader of the Muslim board for Transcaucasia, Allahshukur Pasha-zada, declares that until recently "freedom of conscience was on paper only." The pre-Gorbachev regimes, he says, "destroyed all the values of the people...