BTW, he has a Lenin Award from when he was a Komsomol group leader: "No! The Komsomol is not about reading about Lenin! It is about going to dances, drinking vodka, meeting girls and listening to Uriah Heep!" That's '70s Soviet youth culture in a nutshell for you. (He also writes a weekly column for the Russia Journal and is, incidentally, a really great guy, kind of an archetypal middle-aged Soviet man: heavy drinker and smoker, romantic to the point of being maudlin, loves Putin, hates Yeltsin's fucking guts.)
Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------ Joanna wrote:
At 06:24 AM 04/15/2002 -0400, Chris Doss wrote:
>I would not say there was less social mobility under Brezhnev compared to
>today. Farmer's son could go to study in the Moscow State University or any
>other prestigious educational institution. Moreover, children of workers
and
>peasants enjoyed privileges. For example, they could enroll on teh
so-called
>"preparation courses" called "rabfak" - worker's faculty - and in a year
>they got automatically enrolled in the MSU without exams. These days it's
>much harder for a child from a depressed family to rise to the middle class
>level. For example, if I could not afford to pay $1,200 a year for my
>daughter she would not have been able to get a higher education because in
>order to enroll in a free higher educational institution one needs either
to
>pay huge bribes or have connections. Children of the riff-ruff become
>riff-ruff automatically these days. In Soviet era the state cared about
such
>kids much more. Another matter is that during Brezhnev one, regardless of
>his skills and talens, could not go beyond the so-called "potolok" (salary
>ceiling)
My experience backs up what you're saying. When I was in Romania in the sixties, my parents told me that I had to get straight A's (10s) if I wanted to go to the university. In other words, my performance would need to be nearly perfect in order to overcome the negative marks against me: 1) I was privileged by being the daughter of intellectuals who 2) did not belong to the party. Had I had "healthy social origins," like being the daughter of peasants, the bar would have been lower.
The situation was then reversed when we emigrated to France and then to the U.S....where I had to get straight A's because I was the daughter of immigrants.
Joanna