Russia's 21st-century teens: they may act, think, and look like American teenagers, but they're also deeply patriotic and see the world in a very Russian way.

• Author: Wines, Michael
• Position: International

Seventeen-year old Dmitry Tagin lives in a Moscow neighborhood of low-to middlein come concrete apartments. His mother is a housewife; his father an auto mechanic. He likes Russian hard rock and he opposes his government's military policies.

The tall, blond Dmitry "Dima" for short--may be a typical Russian teenager, but he could easily pass for an American teen. In fact, young people in Russia's capital city of 10 million have embraced many American habits, from rock music to hanging out at shopping malls.

But jeans and CDs do not an instant Westerner make. A closer look at Dima makes that clear: American in many of his tastes, he says he nevertheless dislikes the U.S. He's sorry that Russia is no longer a superpower, which is one reason he belongs to a patriotic youth group.

Dima's generation is the first in a thousand years to come of age in Russia with real choices to make about its future-instead of lives planned by czars or Communist dictators. But it is also a generation profoundly uncertain whether it wants to steer a westward course or stay more Russian.

WARY OF DEMOCRACY

That uncertainty is not surprising considering all that has happened in Dima's short lifetime. The process of Russian reform had begun before Dima was born, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. When Dima was 3 years old, Berliners demolished the wall that divided the Communist controlled east and the free western sides of that German city in 1989. Dima was 5 when the Soviet Union and its Communist system came crashing down. When he was 12, Russia's economy collapsed, wiping out the savings of millions who had staked their futures on capitalism. At 13, Islamic led separatists in the province of Chechnya reopened a war against the Russian government.

Older Russians, who grew up in the Communist Soviet Union, knew nothing but state control of the economy (which performed miserably), the educational system, where they could live and work, and what they could say and think (see "Life in Communist Russia," pg. 16). They risked their livelihoods, and in many cases their lives, by even questioning the totalitarian system and the people who ran it.

Today's Russian teens appreciate the freedom they have, but don't seem that knowledgeable about, or interested in, how difficult life was in the Soviet Union. They are, however, aware of the Soviet Union's superpower status and the much larger role it played on the world stage than Russia is able to play now.

The result, sociologists say, is a schizoid generation: mad about Schwarzenegger movies and Russian-language rap, but also resentful of American influence around the world; believers in democracy, yet skeptical that ordinary people can or even should influence their leaders; deeply patriotic, but often failing to question the uglier parts of Soviet history.

"A generation of people who are not afraid and who are free has grown up," says Irina Anatolyevna Bukrinskaya, a Moscow high school teacher. The flip side, she says, is a determined ignorance about the depths of Soviet oppression and cruelty. When teens are told, for example, how the Soviet Union's secret police limited typewriters to a handful of loyal Communist party members, "They say, 'What? Would they take away my computer?'" according to Bukrinskaya. "They just don't know about these things."

THINGS ARE BETTER NOW

Indeed, Dima's friend, Dmitry Danichkin, 16, sums up Soviet history this way: "It was more difficult for our parents. There was less of everything; they had to save money. But there wasn't that much crime in the city, as there is...