The PBS documentary show POV ran a great film last night on the last Soviet generation that grew up in the 80's and 90's. They interviewed five class classmates from School No. 57 in Moscow and compared their lives now with extensive home movie footage taken by their parents. The interviewees are a HS History prof and his wife, an elementary schoolteacher, a man who sells fancy shirts and ties in his own chain of stores, a woman who services a supplier of billiard tables, and a rock musician. Each has a different story, but they all discuss life from the Brezhnev days, through Perestroika and Yeltsin to the present.
I found it very interesting and enlightening.
I recall reading article after article in things like the Readers Digest about how life was an eternal gloomy winter in Moscow, where no one ever smiled or had any fun at all. By and large, each of these people describe their childhood nostalgically as happy and wonderful. Life today seems ambiguous and somewhat confusing, but of course, with free speech.
http://video.pbs.org/video/1999551405
