Talking About My Generation
Russians reminisce about their Soviet childhoods on a new web site dedicated to those born between 1976 and 1982.
By Anna Malpas Published: November 11, 2005
In some ways, being a Soviet kid in the 1980s wasn't that different from growing up in the West at the same time. You could find the same stonewashed jeans, ill-advised leggings and passion for "Dirty Dancing" on either side of the Iron Curtain. But in the Soviet Union, children had to use a lot more than pester power to get what they wanted. They boiled Indian-made jeans in bleach to give them street cred, cut up tights to make the crucial hairbands and even colored their chewing gum with felt-tip pens to make it look like imported bubblegum.
These and other tips on how to be the envy of Class 7B circa 1988 are shared in a new web site called "76-82: Encyclopedia of Our Childhood." Developed from a popular LiveJournal.com forum, the site lists the iconic toys, games and clothes from the childhood of people born roughly between 1976 and 1982. They were the last to enter the Young Pioneers and the first to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger films in backstreet video salons.
A is for avoska, the string bag carried for impromptu purchases on those rare occasions when shops had something to sell. It's also for alyaska, the orange-lined, fur-trimmed hooded jackets that were popular at the time, and for anketa, the girly Cosmo-style questionnaires that best friends prepared for each other at school, running through likes and dislikes to the all-important "who do you like?" question.
The site, located at www.76-82.ru, opened in late October and immediately attracted huge numbers of hits -- as many as 15,000 per day. It was designed as a not-for-profit project by Notamedia, a web site development company that also created a popular site of old photographs of Moscow called Moskva Kotoroi Nyet, or Moscow That No Longer Exists. In addition to the alphabetical listings, "76-82" has forums where visitors can offer suggestions, reminisce and search for old school friends.
The director of Notamedia, Adrian Krupchansky, fits into the more mature end of the age range at 27. Dressed in a pinstriped suit, he sat at a paper-strewn desk in his office for a recent interview, fiddling with a plastic zmeika as he discussed plans for the site. A few minutes of deft twisting, and Krupchansky had given the Rubik's Cube-style puzzle toy a perfectly symmetrical shape.
The zmeika was sent in by a visitor to the site, Krupchansky said, and that gives him hope that the site will eventually become self-sustaining, filled with essays and pictures sent in by readers. Although the idea came from a LiveJournal community called 76_82, he said that his company had to work hard to turn personal ramblings into more focused and impersonal listings.
"The standard thing to write on such a site is a personal response," he said. "For example, 'I remember I had a spaceship like that. I loved playing with it.' But if we are making a site that has to be interesting for everyone, then naturally we don't need things like 'I had a space ship and loved playing with it,' but rather, 'In such-and-such a year a model spaceship was manufactured that many Soviet children liked playing with.' Obviously, there wasn't a single article like that in the [LiveJournal] community."
While the listings on "76-82" are factual, they slip in some insights about a time when children were entrusted with many adult tasks -- buying bread and standing in lines, for example -- and often had to make their own fun. Some of their activities could get a stamp of approval from Western hippies, such as dressing paper dolls in hand-drawn clothes or learning poems by heart to recite at birthday parties.
Naturally, that made them suckers for anything mass-produced, from fluorescent Chinese hairbands, which were so hard to obtain that some kids chopped up tights or socks to make imitations, to chewing gum, another rarity that was sometimes placed in the freezer for reanimation after each use.
The 1976-1982 generation caught a bit of socialism, but it also came fresh to such Western entertainment as Disney cartoons, Krupchansky said. He put the site's appeal down to a cozy feeling of nostalgia for a society with definite rules. "It seems to me that this kind of nostalgia for a bright past is a general characteristic of socialist people. ... Since there were certain ideals, there were certain heroes. What heroes are there now? Batman?"
While the site has no ideological agenda, it reflects the huge social changes that took place during a 1980s childhood. Its film listings run from innocent favorites such as "White Bim, Black Ear," a tragic 1977 film about a dog, to the racy Hollywood drama "9 1/2 Weeks" -- the kind of film that teenagers were clearly avid to watch, once given the chance. "In order to watch an erotic film now, all a child has to do is turn on the television at home after about 7 p.m.," Krupchansky said. "Back then it was very difficult to watch one. You had to see it in a kind of video salon where they had it on cassette."
One section of the site is a forum called "Find Me" that has a similar aim to the highly successful British site FriendsReunited.co.uk or its U.S. equivalent at Classmates.com, both of which charge a fee to help graduates from the same class locate each other. But Krupchansky doesn't see the Russian equivalent becoming commercial -- if only because his users are unfamiliar with paying for things online. Nevertheless, the forum shows the site's power to connect people. One woman writes that she went to school in a village in Turkmenistan and would like to contact her classmates. A message sent three days later comes from a man who went to the same school and is friends with the brother of a girl in her year.
The site has a somewhat different flavor from that of the LiveJournal community that inspired it, located at livejournal.com/community/76_82. The co-founder of the community, Yekaterina Utkina, put it succinctly in a recent interview: "The site is beautiful, it's kind, it has a lot of information, but it's a bit dry when it comes to emotions." The community's pages on LiveJournal -- a blogging and discussion site so popular in Russia that many offices ban it -- have the feel of a drunken school reunion, with laughter and tears in equal proportions.
Contributors wax lyrical on the joys and horrors of the food at kindergarten and Pioneer camp; others discuss exactly what they did to chewing gum. "Coloring it in? That's beginners' stuff," one user writes scathingly. "We went so far as breaking up pencils and chewing gum mixed with the lead." Then there are the more familiar childish pursuits such as prank phone calls -- although Soviet children tended to represent themselves as Cheburashka or someone from ZhEK turning off the hot water.
Just as children in the West lost little sleep over Reaganomics or the space race, the forum makes it clear that Soviet children weren't interested in politics, seeing such ideologically charged activities as street demonstrations simply as occasions to have fun. "I always went to demonstrations with my dad, while my mom stayed at home," one contributor remembers. "When we went home, we smelled the lovely smell of pancakes (always with jam), and we ran straight to mom and asked, did you see us on TV?" Another forum topic speaks for itself: "Pioneer Camp and Swear Words."
The LiveJournal forum was started in January by Utkina, a 25-year-old advertising account executive, and Vasily Bykov, a 27-year-old journalist. They met through LiveJournal, Utkina said, and started talking about their childhoods. The forum seemed like a good way to fill in the gaps in their memories, but they didn't expect its immediate success. In the first week, people posted up to 400 messages per day, Utkina recalled. "It was madness."
The proposal to develop a site came from Notamedia, Utkina said. Her hectic work schedule doesn't allow her to check the LiveJournal forum often now, and she admitted that she hadn't told her coworkers about the project because she's doesn't want them to find her personal blog.
Members of the 76_82 community range from journalists and advertising professionals to housewives and programmers, Utkina said. The age range is broader than the formal boundaries, running from 20 to 35. Some users have arranged to meet up, and Krupchansky is currently trying to organize a party through the site. Utkina doubted, however, that members of the 1976-1982 generation had anything in common except for their ages. "They are trying to find something that unites them, apart from this childhood, their memories," she said. "In principle, there isn't anything."
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/157499/
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