The End of Childhood and/or the Discovery of the Tineidzher? Adolescence in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture

Abstract

This chapter examines the cultural and social force of the adolescent in Russian culture, focusing on the Soviet and post-Soviet period.1 My purpose is to assess Soviet understanding of the pre-adult years, and the gaps and contradictions in this perception. I also look at how representations of the shift from childhood to youth have changed since the demise of the Soviet Union and the arrival — under direct influence from the West —of a much greater preoccupation with the transitional phase and with the figure now often referred to using a word transliterated from English, the tineidzher (teenager). Following the famous yet often misunderstood strictures of Michel Foucault in L’Histoire de la sexualite, I do not, however, see this process of ‘westernising’ perceptions of the transition between childhood and youth as necessarily contributing to the ‘liberation’ of the human subjects involved (Foucault, 1976). Rather, I shall be concerned to emphasise that the silences imposed by the canons of official (and unofficial) Soviet culture on certain corporeal topics could be in some respects more ‘liberating’ than the stress on the importance of frank sexual discussion that followed. In any case, the post-Soviet period (as in contemporary western countries) also saw the emergence of another kind of anxiety focusing on adolescence, where the established cliche of the ‘end of childhood’ as the loss of innocence started to be intermingled with the idea of ‘vanishing childhood’ as a symptom of social malaise, producing widespread concern about supposedly premature puberty and its consequences.