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Salient: An Organ of Student Opinion At Victoria University College, Wellington, N. Z. Vol. 24, No. 4. 1961

Soviet Scale of Values Questioned by Youth

page 14

Soviet Scale of Values Questioned by Youth

Summer Madness in the form of disillusionment symptoms and longings for a purpose in life seems to have descended upon Soviet youth, judging from a casual glance through the current crop of U.S.S.R. periodicals. The various kinds of whinings range all the way from lady schoolteachers in a Murmansk village who say that they know neither the purpose nor meaning of life and doubt that enthusiasm "can exist these days" (from a letter in Komsomolskaya Pravda, official Soviet youth organ); and an 18-year-old ditch digger beyond the Arctic Circle who asks, "Does building Communism mean digging ditches?" (from Yunost); to open questioning of Soviet policy. An instance of the last is again a letter in Komsomolskaya Pravda (June 11, 1960), which questions the high placement of rocketry in the Soviet scale of values: "What have these sputniks and rockets brought the ordinary mortal, including myself? . . . Tell any worker, 'Ivan, if we didn't shoot off this rocket, your little boy would be going to kindergarten, . . . cloth would cost . . . only half as much, and you would be able to buy an electric iron'—and I am sure he would say, 'For heaven's sake (sic), don't shoot off any more rockets!' One rocket after another, and who needs them now?"

An interesting note is that this time the complaints come not from the "idle parasites" or "stilyagi" as in the recent past, but from respectable young workers and from recent graduates assigned jobs in the more remote parts of the Soviet Union—in other words, from the younger generation, the generation which "people have become accustomed to call the builders of Communism."

—East European Student and Youth Service Inc.