The "Children of Perestroika" Come of Age: Young People of Moscow Talk About Life in the New Russia

ADELMAN, Deborah, THE "CHILDREN OF PERESTROIKA" COME OF AGE: Young People of Moscow Talk About Life in the New Russia. New York: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1994, 216 pp., $16.95 softcover / $30.00

Reviewed by: JULIE V. BROWN*

This book is a follow-up to an earlier volume, The Children of Perestroika (M.E. Sharpe, 1991), in which Adelman presented a set of interviews which she had conducted in 1989 with eleven Moscow teenagers about their lives and their plans for the future. These young people were experiencing all the usual problems of adolescence. In addition they were struggling to find their way into adulthood during the Gorbachev era of perestroika, a time of very rapid social, economic, and political change in the Soviet Union.

Adelman decided to write a second book after she revisited Moscow in the summer of 1992 and spent time catching up on events in the lives of her young respondents. According to...