Putin’s Children
By BILL KELLER
NYT
IN the waning days of the Soviet Union, I spent a lot of time in a cluster of apartment towers along the Moscow River, contemplating what seemed to me an essential question about the future of our cold-war adversary: Could Russia grow an authentic middle class? Not a privileged class, favored wards of the state, but independent achievers who would be the engine and the evidence of upward mobility.
The place on the river was called a youth living complex, the product of a classically harebrained Young Communist League scheme to ease a housing shortage. Young professionals at important state enterprises — in this case mainly scientists from a nuclear research institute and engineers from the plant that manufactured the Russian version of the space shuttle — were given months away from their jobs to labor as an overeducated communal construction crew. Each family put in hundreds of hours pouring concrete and installing drywall, and then moved into a precious new apartment. The theory was that, liberated from sharing their parents’ overcrowded flats, forged into a contented new community, they would devote themselves even more loyally to their high-priority jobs.
But this was 1991, a time of possibilities. Many of the families in my little microcosm moved into their new homes in the youth living complex “Atom” and promptly quit their state jobs to join the new private sector. I followed a sample of Atom families as they tried to figure out the novelty of a self-reliant life.
(Meanwhile one of their contemporaries, Vladimir Putin, was winding up his own formative experience in the ultimate bastion of the state, the K.G.B. Colonel Putin’s last assignment for the spy agency was conducting surveillance on students at Leningrad State University.)
(More here.)
NYT
IN the waning days of the Soviet Union, I spent a lot of time in a cluster of apartment towers along the Moscow River, contemplating what seemed to me an essential question about the future of our cold-war adversary: Could Russia grow an authentic middle class? Not a privileged class, favored wards of the state, but independent achievers who would be the engine and the evidence of upward mobility.
The place on the river was called a youth living complex, the product of a classically harebrained Young Communist League scheme to ease a housing shortage. Young professionals at important state enterprises — in this case mainly scientists from a nuclear research institute and engineers from the plant that manufactured the Russian version of the space shuttle — were given months away from their jobs to labor as an overeducated communal construction crew. Each family put in hundreds of hours pouring concrete and installing drywall, and then moved into a precious new apartment. The theory was that, liberated from sharing their parents’ overcrowded flats, forged into a contented new community, they would devote themselves even more loyally to their high-priority jobs.
But this was 1991, a time of possibilities. Many of the families in my little microcosm moved into their new homes in the youth living complex “Atom” and promptly quit their state jobs to join the new private sector. I followed a sample of Atom families as they tried to figure out the novelty of a self-reliant life.
(Meanwhile one of their contemporaries, Vladimir Putin, was winding up his own formative experience in the ultimate bastion of the state, the K.G.B. Colonel Putin’s last assignment for the spy agency was conducting surveillance on students at Leningrad State University.)
(More here.)
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