On Yezhov’s recommendation, I’m watching the documentary film series “Born in the USSR.” The idea behind the project is that the children, starting in 1990—that is, during perestroika—at the age of seven, answer questions and tell the presenter about the world. The next film is made seven years later, when the children are already 14, in the midst of the “wild nineties.” Another follows when they are 21, in 2004, when the future can already be viewed with some optimism, and the last one at 28—that is, quite recently, in 2011.
All the films are on YouTube and RuTracker. Despite the dreary music traditional in Russian documentaries, the films are quite enjoyable.
The children are quite diverse: a priest’s daughter and the grandson of a renowned journalist, ordinary boys from villages and privileged children of the Soviet elite, an orphan adopted in the United States, and newly minted immigrants serving in the Israel Defense Forces. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that the director selected particularly interesting and representative subjects for his purposes, and all credit to him. They are also from different countries and regions: Lithuania, Georgia, St. Petersburg, Moscow, the Volga region, Kyrgyzstan, and so on.
My personal impressions of the film: it turns out that even at 7, and especially at 14, you can have a pretty good practical understanding of what is happening around you and where everything is headed. The children do not harbor many illusions, and sometimes their observations are astonishingly spot-on.
