The Thinking Reed

In themselves, the interviews with young people are rather monotonous, and there is no attempt at analysis. Twelfth Floor offers a much fuller presentation of the views of the new generation. But it is the beautiful, professional images of the Latvian film that stay in one’s memory. Its picture of the youth culture comes over in an indistinct way that fails to excite the spectator. The interview with Afghanistan veterans is used to show that war in general, regardless of its purpose, is a dirty business — but one in which somebody has to engage all the same. Somebody has to do ‘the dirty work’ — cut up corpses, shoot Afghan rebels. (It is interesting that people who fought against the Germans for the liberation of our country during the Second World War reasoned quite differently.) The film’s objectivity is based on cynical indifference. With such an approach one inevitably ends by putting on the same level truth and lies, criminals and their victims. And yet the culture of youthful radicalism is a protest against just such a view of the world. There are, of course, cynical and indifferent people in every generation, but they are not the ones who create cultures.

In the opinion of youth movement activists, rock groups are persecuted first and foremost not for their music but for their ‘striving to get away from ordinary forms of life, their fear of sinking into philistinism’, their ‘rebellious tendency’, their protest against social injustice.4 A movement of ‘metallists’ has been formed around the ‘heavy metal’ rock groups, with its own symbols, structure and leaders. At first the official organizations reacted with bans, and a list was compiled of 73 Western and 37 Soviet groups whose records were not to be played at discotheques or any other institutions for young people under Komsomol control. But after Gorbachev came in, this list, whilst not cancelled, simply ceased to be operative. It was just ignored. The ‘banned’ groups ‘Mosaic’ and ‘Aquarium’ were allowed to appear on television, and songs of the ‘Kino’ group began to be quoted in newspapers. It had been admitted by official personages that the movement of the ‘metallists’ and other informal youth groups constitutes ‘a challenge to the Komsomol’.5 To suppress them or drive them underground is simply not considered possible in the new conditions, even though many Komsomol officials would prefer just such a course. The changed relation of forces at the top and the new social situation have forced the legalization of informal youth groups. In 1987 in the Sevastopol district of Moscow a club of ‘metallists’ was registered for the first time. The rebels were permitted to speak openly about their feelings and their views.

What do the new radicals want? Up to now they have not formulated their ideas quite clearly. What is predominant is just moods, and they obviously lack a clear-cut platform. However, their moods are eloquent enough in themselves. For example, many people criticize Grebenshchikov because his lyrics are too abstract and his work too replete with mythological and even heraldic imagery. All the same, the singer’s main idea reaches his audience all right: it is a call to emancipate human feelings, to unite with nature, to protest against alienation and cynicism. The name of the ‘Aquarium’ group harks back to the Beatles’ famous song about people looking out from inside a glass onion, and Grebenshchikov is constantly stressing the link between his group and the traditions of the Liverpool quartet.6 The lyrics, the music and the style of performance of ‘Aquarium’ remind many of Latin-American song culture, and even more of the best examples of Western youth counter-culture in the sixties, with its close connections to the ‘New Left’. Paradoxically, despite the similarities in fashion and their interest in American music and the latest Western films, young Soviet people today are more reminiscent of the Western generation of the sixties than of their contemporaries in Italy or the United States.