Young people and their leisure in former communist countries: four ...

Young people and their leisure in former communist countries: four theses examined K. ROBERTS and COLETTE FAGAN Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work Studies, Eleanor Rathbone Building, University of Liverpool, Bedford Street South, Liverpool L69 7ZA, UK

This paper interrogates four theses against data from 1997 surveys among a total of 900 young people in Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine. Three of the theses – that postcommunist youth at leisure are divided primarily by their various (postmodern) youth cultures, immiseration, and that money has become the main stratifying factor – are rejected. The fourth, that traditional gender and social class divisions are surviving, is endorsed. It is argued that, up to the time of the surveys in 1997, the main gender differences were persisting, and the main social strata formed under communism were enduring as status groups. In the longer-term it is argued that the latter groups may either be eroded gradually by continuing economic crises, or, if the reforms succeed, reconstituted as new socioeconomic classes.

Introduction Leisure is extremely context-dependent. It is highly sensitive to broader socioeconomic conditions and divisions. Trends such as the spread of unemployment and economic polarization invariably have leisure effects. Any widening or narrowing of gender divisions in the labour market and domestic life, or a sharpening or blurring of age divisions, will normally be signalled in the leisure of the groups concerned. This makes leisure an excellent arena for testing claims about more general structural and cultural trends. For example, leisure is likely to supply the best of all possible evidence for testing whether social class really is dead, meaning that producer roles have ceased to be bases for broader sociocultural formations. Another claim that can hardly be interrogated properly without recourse to leisure evidence is that a postmodern condition is leading to consumer roles and the related lifestyles, which do not necessarily map neatly onto any other divisions, becoming the bases for the groups with which individuals identify themselves and one another. Aims and methods The following passages use leisure evidence to explore emergent structures and divisions in former communist countries. These countries are generally described as in transition, but in most cases their destinations remain unclear. The dismantling of the planned economies and one-party rule have placed all Leisure Studies 18 (1999) 1–17 0261–4367

© 1999 E & FN Spon

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K. Roberts and C. Fagan

former social structures and divisions at risk. Have these really been subject to melt-down and, if so, what is taking their place? Young people are the age group within which one would expect to nd the clearest signs of new social formations. In ex-communist countries this age group has been exceptionally exposed to wider trends such as the run down of the old economic orders which closed many of the old career routes before today’s young people could enter. Moreover, today’s young people have no post-childhood experience of their countries’ old social orders. They are the rst generation in their countries to have no stakes or statuses in the old systems. Unlike their parents, they are growing into adulthood during their countries’ transitions. One would expect all aspects of these young people’s lives to be shaped powerfully by their countries’ emergent socioeconomic orders, whatever these might be. And one would expect the social divisions created by these new orders to be writ large in young people’s leisure. The following passages search for signs of any such new divisions in evidence from interview surveys that were conducted during 1997 among a total of 900 20–26-year-olds in three former Soviet countries – Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine. In Ukraine the young people were from Donetsk and Lviv, cities in the east and west of the country respectively. In Georgia all the young people were from Tbilisi, the capital. In Armenia a third of the sample was from the capital, Yerevan, another third was from provincial cities, and the remainder were from rural villages. The samples were selected from the elementary and secondary school registers of several years previously (1988–91). Inevitably there had been considerable attrition: many young people had moved away. When the movements had been local the young people were usually traced and interviewed, but during the 1990s Georgia and Armenia had both lost around a fth of their populations, mainly young people, through out-migration. So the evidence is from and about young people who had been reared in and who were still living in the research areas in 1997 rather than all who were ‘from’ these backgrounds. The samples were not meant to be simple microcosms of the national or local populations. Rather, they were selected so as to ensure that males and females, from all the main types of secondary schools and home backgrounds, would be adequately represented. The overall purpose of the research was to examine how all aspects of young people’s lives were being affected by the macrochanges that were in process in their countries, but here the focus is on their uses of leisure, and the commonalities and differences between various subgroups of respondents within each of the countries and research regions. The eldwork was conducted by research teams based in universities or research institutes in each of the research areas. Each team was led by a partner in the research project. Identical interview schedules were used in each country, translated into the local language, and the interviews were conducted by local university students and recent graduates. The production of the SPSS data set from the interviews in all the countries was centralized at the University of Donetsk to where all the completed questionnaires were despatched. The Donetsk team then produced the data set, and basic tables, which were sent conventionally to Armenia, and electronically to all the other

Young people and their leisure

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research partners who were able to undertake their own independent analyses. This particular paper is the work of the UK partners, and the views expressed do not necessarily represent those of other contributors to the research. The evidence is used to interrogate four claims about how young people’s (and sometimes other age groups’) lifestyles are being reshaped under postcommunism. Thesis may be too strong a term for some of the claims: discourse might be more appropriate. The rst type of discourse claims that young people have been divided primarily by their youth cultural afliations. The argument here is that amid the collapse of the older social structures, and with the former inward trickle of Western youth cultures becoming a ood, young people have become divided primarily by the consumer styles that they have adopted. This claim is associated with the work of Western investigators, such as Hilary Pilkington (1994), who have relied on cultural analysis to ‘read’ the practices of selected groups of young people. The second type of discourse claims that the populations have suffered allround immiseration due to the collapse of the old economies, the failure of the market to revive economic life, and, therefore, the sharp and huge reductions in living standards. This type of discourse was rst heard in the 1980s when the communist economies entered what proved to be their terminal decline, and has continued unabated. It has been the favoured discourse by writers on leisure, or the people’s ways of life, based in the countries concerned (for example see Gvozdeva, 1994; Jung, 1994; Poretzkina and Jyrkinen-Pakkasvirta, 1995). The third thesis alleges that not everyone has endured immiseration, or, at any rate, not to an equal extent, and that a new socioeconomic hierarchy, entirely different from the old occupational strata, based primarily on the amounts of money that people earn and are able to spend, is being created. This claim is made by writers, mostly based within former communist countries, who have conducted large-scale surveys among young people, and who have highlighted the strengthening of post-communist youth’s pecuniary motivations (for example Magun, 1996; Zuev, 1997). All the above theses prove inconsistent with the authors’ evidence. The fourth thesis is the authors’ own, except that it is consistent with claims arising from research among the political and business elites, and social mobility studies, which have drawn attention to the success of many members of the old communist elites in preserving their privileges. The evidence on young people’s leisure is consistent with this type of discourse. It shows that older divisions in the populations’ ways of life are surviving and in some cases are being reinforced, but the evidence also invites suspicions that, in the longer-term, some of these divisions may be subject to gradual erosion. The evidence on the samples’ leisure is primarily from questions about their possessions (of leisure-related equipment) and activities. Some of these questions were also included in earlier or parallel surveys among young people in other Eastern and Western countries – in surveys of the young

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unemployed and the young self-employed in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia in 1997, in surveys of more representative samples of young people in three regions of Poland in 1993, and among 16–19-year-olds in Britain in 1987–89. These various surveys were not all conducted at the same point in time, the ages of the samples do not match neatly, and the samples were selected in rather different ways, so the ndings do not compare like with like. Nevertheless, in some cases the evidence from elsewhere can be used as convenient benchmarks in assessing, for example, exactly how impoverished the lifestyles of young people in Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine had become during the 1990s. In many ways the countries from which our evidence is drawn are very different from one another. Armenia and Georgia are small, middle-east states, with populations of 3 million plus and 5 million plus respectively. Armenia’s post-communist transition has been complicated by a militarized dispute with Azerbaijan over the status of Nagorno Karabakh (a part of Azerbaijan with a mainly Armenian population), and an economic blockade imposed by all the country’s muslim neighbours – Turkey and Iran in addition to Azerbaijan, leaving Georgia as land-locked Armenia’s sole surface route to the wider world. Georgia’s transition has been complicated by a series of civil wars. Ukraine is a much larger (population 50 million plus) European country whose transition has been relatively peaceful, though this country contains one of the former Soviet Union’s most volatile examples of the ‘nationalities question’: there are Russian majorities in the industralized East and in Crimea. These are important differences, but there are also huge similarities among these and other former Soviet countries. They were all modernized by Soviet communism and remained communist for 70 years. They all became independent in the same way, through the decision of Yeltsin’s Russia to quit the USSR. And all the countries’ economies declined steeply with the disappearance of COMECON and the collapse of the trading relationships that had linked plants throughout the Soviet bloc. Youth cultures This discourse has supercial plausibility. Western-type youth cultures spread under communism, initially in deance of the authorities, and in the 1990s have lled much of the cultural space vacated by the old system. Western tastes, music and (apparently) the associated attitudes and ways of life have not simply moved in following communism. They played a part in undermining the old system by enabling young people to aunt their disaffection. In the 1990s the invaders have manifestly triumphed. Once the authorities ceased to resist, participation in these youth cultures ceased to be deant. No music or clothing are inherently rebellious. They become so only when authorities – parents, teachers or governments – make their disapproval evident. So it is now many decades since the mere act of listening to rock turned a Western teenager into a rebel. In the West nowadays the types of music that young people listen to have more to do with dening


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their particular membership groups and differentiating themselves from other age peers than intergenerational relationships. Likewise in the East, when the governments became pro-market and pro-West, young people could no longer use Western music to protest and resist, and began to use Western and local cultural products to express their similarities and differences from one another. However, some of the styles that young people in the East have adopted in the 1980s and subsequently have had some political signicance. For example, in the 1980s ‘patriotic’ Russian skinheads who had fought in Afghanistan expressed contempt for decadent peers (see Riordan, 1988). This type of cultural confrontation has been rarer in the 1990s. Young (and older) people who have wanted to make political statements have been able to join political parties. Others have become openly involved in churches or sects. Youth cultures have thereby been stripped down to their normal (in the West) leisure functions. In Moscow distinctive styles have sometimes been adopted by young people from specic regions of Russia, and sometimes by residents in particular Moscow suburbs. In other cases the styles have simply reected preferred types of music and a (symbolically) related set of attitudes. On the streets of Moscow in the early 1990s Hilary Pilkington (1994) was able to distinguish stiliagi (mods), rokeries (motor bikers), punks and rockabilies. This has been one picture of post-communist youth at leisure: partying at the barricades as communism fell and subsequently revelling in their new freedom to express themselves through their choices of places to meet, music and dress. It is plausible to suggest that these have become the main divisions among young people, generated through their lifestyle choices, with the old social formations having crumbled. Post-communist youth can thereby be presented as pioneers of postmodern lifestyles. What were once advantaged origins may now have become a handicap. Whether higher education is still a career asset has become uncertain as unschooled businessmen have been able to prosper. In these circumstances it is plausible to argue that young people ‘place’ themselves and each other by virtue of their chosen uses of leisure and the related subcultural afliations. Elements of this picture could certainly be recognized in the lives of the young people who were investigated in Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine. The music and clothing were very evident. In this sense Western youth cultures had clearly taken over in the 1990s. However, as later passages show, their family and educational backgrounds, and long-standing gender divisions, were continuing to govern the young people’s leisure opportunities. Moscow may well be different. It will contain more rich parents who are able to indulge their children’s tastes in music, clothing and motor transport than any of the research locations used here. However, there are always dangers in drawing general inferences from young people who can be clearly located within, because they are contacted via their participation in specic youth cultures. Western countries have spawned numerous youth styles and identities but most young people have always distanced themselves from the lot and insisted that they are just ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ (see Brown, 1987; Willis, 1990). Even ‘on scene’ young people often explain, when given the opportunity, that their involvement in youth cultures is just Friday and

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Saturday night fun rather than their real selves engaging in the serious business of life (see Roberts, 1997). Young people in Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine were simply unable to disengage from more pressing concerns given, in many cases, their dire nancial circumstances. Immiseration This is another thesis with rst glance plausibility. Here the evidence is not from what has been happening on the streets but from ofcial statistics and house-to-house surveys. These have shown that people’s real incomes have fallen in most ex-communist countries, certainly those in the Commonwealth and Independent States (CIS), and the declines have sometimes been drastic. Higher proportions of people’s incomes have been absorbed by food and other basics (see Gvozdeva, 1994; Poretzkina and Jyrkinen-Pakkasvirtna, 1995). There have been declines, often steep declines, in state spending on culture and sport (see Jung, 1994; Council of Europe, 1996). Young people’s leisure opportunities have been affected adversely by the disappearance of the Komsomol (the Communist Party youth organization). Neither the market nor new nongovernmental organizations have lled more than a small part of the gap. There was plenty of evidence of immiseration in the authors’ research. In all the countries less than a half of the young people who had left full-time education had been able to obtain regular full-time jobs. Monthly pay in such jobs was rarely in excess of US $100. Most of the young people in the surveys would have endorsed the immiseration thesis. They complained that their leisure had been impoverished. There were fewer newspapers, books and magazines being published. The lms at the cinemas were mostly ‘yellow’ (old) and admission charges were said to be too high. The young people complained that holidays had become a luxury. Some complained that they were deprived of regular television entertainment by the unreliability of electricity supplies. However, the objective evidence does not endorse the immiseration thesis. Table 1 gives the percentages of respondents who had the use of several items of leisure equipment – cars, video-players, and satellite or cable connections – and contains some comparable statistics from studies of young people in other countries. In Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine, these items of equipment were more likely to be household than personal possessions. The question Table 1 Leisure equipment Percentages with the use of: Lviv Car Video Satellite/cable

14 47 9

Donetsk Tbilisi

Poland Armenia 1993

E-C EUROPE SE Unempl Britain 1997 1997 1988

13 23 6

33 40 6

87 NA 72

20 55 38

52 61 35

52 NA 53

26 82 NA

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Young people and their leisure Table 2 Leisure activities (percentages taking part at least once a week) Lviv Playing sport 44 Watching sport 3 Cinema, concerts etc 5 Pubs, restaurants etc 22 Drinking alcohol 17 Smoking 36 Church 9 Holiday previous year 1 54 2 or more 25 Belong to recreationbased club 18

Donetsk Tbilisi

Armenia Poland

E-C Europe Britain SE Unempl

27 3 1 14 16 34 7

22 5 6 18 25 50 9

27 1 5 32 18 29 13

38 2 3 20 10 34 30

45 24 4 56 55 28 14

NA NA NA NA NA NA NA

NA NA NA NA NA NA NA

40 14

40 22

26 18

32 34

NA NA

46 17

5 34

5

11

6

NA

NA

10

9

asked was whether the respondents ‘had the use of’ rather than ‘owned’. Most of the respondents were still living with their parents and, as explained below, intrahousehold processes were often blurring the impact on the young people of the economic and other changes that were occurring in their countries. Table 2 gives participation rates for a set of leisure activities including holidays, while Table 3 contains some information on the young people’s experiences of foreign travel from Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine. Generally, the young people’s homes were not as well-equipped for leisure as Western households. For example, video-recorders/players were rarer. However, just under a quarter in Donetsk, but between 40% and 55% in the other CIS locations had the use of this item of equipment. Under 10% of the samples in Armenia, Lviv and Donetsk had satellite or cable connections, but nearly two-fths in Tbilisi had this source of information and entertainment. Attendances at cinemas and other places of out-of-home entertainment were at roughly the same (low) level as among young people in Britain. Sport participation was generally lower in the CIS countries, though not in Lviv, Table 3 International travel Lviv

Donetsk

Tbilisi

Armenia

Poland

Percentages who had been to another country to: Visit relatives, friends Earn money Holiday

35 25 29

29 10 28

14 19 70

19 8 23

31 30 69

Percentages who had visited: W Europe USSR E Europe N America

33 38 34 8

5 53 8 1

31 72 20 3

8 54 5 2

60 (Germany only) 39 25 3

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while watching live sport was far less common in the ex-Soviet countries, and likewise visits to bars and restaurants, and alcohol consumption. These ndings are as expected, given the greater poverty in the East. However, the statistics do not portray all-round immiseration. Between 44% and 79% in the different CIS locations had been on at least one holiday away from home during the previous year. It is true that many of these holidays had been low cost visits to family dachas or to stay with relatives. However, approximately a quarter of the young people in Armenia and Ukraine, and 70% in Tbilisi, had been to another country for a holiday at some time or another. There are several explanations for the young people’s leisure being less deprived than the crude economic conditions in their countries might have appeared to dictate. First, some of the leisure equipment, especially the motor cars, had been acquired in the 1980s, before the countries’ economies collapsed. Other items had been bought with savings accumulated in better times. When hyperination became a serious risk, then a reality in the early 1990s, it had seemed only sensible to exchange cash for goods. Second, goods and services have to be priced within the means of consumers otherwise the manufacturers and service providers cannot achieve sales. In the countries in this study Western goods could be bought readily, but only by the (few) people who were able to afford Western prices. Western motor cars, Japanese televisions and genuine Bennetton were priced at much the same levels as in other parts of the world. However, goods produced in CIS countries were generally much cheaper, and local produce was extremely cheap (very, very cheap to Westerners). Local food, wines and clothing had to be priced within the means of the people who worked in these industries. Low pay meant low production costs and low prices. In all the countries there was a polarization between shops selling expensive Western goods and others selling local produce, and between hotels and restaurants catering for foreigners and the local rich and those catering for ordinary locals. Third, throughout the former communist world there has been extensive pirating of video and audio tapes, branded footwear and clothing. The multinationals have made few efforts to eliminate this prior to establishing their own production and distribution sites in the countries concerned, which, up to 1997, had not happened on a signicant scale in any of the countries in this study. In such countries the multinationals would gain little if they succeeded in eliminating pirating. The people in countries such as Armenia would be unable to pay world market prices. Allowing consumers to obtain pirate products in the short-term could prove a sound long-term strategy for developing new consumer markets. The same has applied with satellite channels and computer software. What do the source companies lose if people who could not afford to pay world prices are drawn into ofcial or unofcial lower tiers of the markets? The chances are that pirating will be squeezed if and when (as in Central European countries by the mid-1990s) the local populations become able to pay world prices. An upshot of all this is that young people in countries such as Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia have been able to watch Western lms (mainstream and pornography) on video, to follow the latest sounds and fashions, and have


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usually succeeded in appearing much the same as young people the world over but at a fraction of the costs in London and Paris. Fourth, leisure can be cost free. The West has become accustomed to paying more and more for types of entertainment that can be self-generated. Listening to music, and watching and playing sport, are examples of this. Under communism people never lost the art of passing time without spending money. Daily life was never as monetarized as in the West (see Ashwin, 1996). Even if people had money the shops did not necessarily have the goods that they wanted to buy. Young teenagers never felt unable to go out without sufcient cash to purchase bars and cans, or, when a few years older, without a new item of clothing. So in the 1990s households in all the CIS countries have been able to fall back on their ability to make and mend their cars, furniture and clothing. When people have lost their jobs and the greater parts of their incomes they have still had one another. So in 1997 young people were continuing to form the social relationships characteristic of youth. They were becoming involved in circles or networks of friends, then, as they grew older, in couple relationships which, they usually hoped, would lead to marriage and parenthood. Money The authors’ third thesis, that money has become the principal stratier under post-communism, also has a body of evidence in its favour. Indeed, some of the ndings are supportive. Real incomes and living standards had generally fallen during the 1990s in Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia (as in the rest of the CIS) but alongside the spread of much wider inequalities than in the past. The old common ways of life, based on the collective consumption of publicly provided goods and services, had gone. The populations were no longer united by common experiences of the ups and downs of national economic fortunes. The earnings of the respondents in our surveys who had jobs ranged from under US $30 to over US $200 a month. The top earners were either successfully self-employed or had jobs in Western-based organizations. All the countries had ‘new rich’. They were highly visible with their Western cars, smart clothes, and visits to up-market restaurants and night spots. Money had become much more important in the 1990s. Anything could be bought, by those who could pay the price. So understandably money had become a prime value. Other researchers have stressed how, under post-communism, young people’s pecuniary orientations have strengthened (see Magun, 1996; Zuev, 1997). In surveys in Russia most young people have expressed interest in taking jobs in which they are likely to be offered bribes, and roughly a quarter have expressed willingness to have sex for money (Meek, 1998). Maybe they did say these things but there is often a difference between what people say and what they actually do. In any case, it is not known how many young people in Western countries would like to be bribed, or how many would consent to paid sex under certain circumstances. Attitudes measured by structured questions always need to be interpreted cautiously.

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Whatever people say will always depend, so some extent, on exactly what they are asked. In the surveys respondents were questioned about their life goals. There is no doubt that nearly everyone would have liked more money but ‘material security’ was ranked much higher than ‘becoming rich’. And the young people’s labour market behaviour did not suggest that immediate earnings had been the over-riding inuence on their choice of jobs, when there had been some scope for choice. Working according to one’s speciality appeared to have been at least equally important. However, the main ground for rejecting the money thesis is that there was not a very strong relationship between the young people’s levels of earned income and their uses of leisure. Needless to say, there was a quite strong relationship between the young people’s leisure possessions and activities on the one hand, and, on the other, the amounts of money that they were spending on themselves. Things could hardly have been otherwise, though it is signicant that some uses of leisure did not vary according to levels of spending. These were smoking, church-going, sports participation and spectating, and visiting cinemas and other places of out-of-home entertainment (see Table 4). The best way of grouping our samples according to their labour market experiences and normal earnings proved to be the typology in Table 5. Some of the young people had spent most of their working lives developing successful businesses. Some had spent most of their time unemployed. Then, among those who had spent most of their working lives as employees, there was a division according to whether their jobs had been in the public or the private sector, and a cross-cutting division according to whether their jobs had been ‘regular’ or ‘marginal’, this latter division being drawn operationally according to whether they were working for at least 20 hours per week and earning at least US $30 a month. Of these career groups only the successfully self-employed could be said to possess a distinctive lifestyle – distinctive in the frequency with which they were visiting bars, restaurants, cinemas, theatres and other places of entertainment, and consuming alcohol. There was no equally clear distinction between the leisure of those with regular and marginal jobs, or between those in jobs and the unemployed. Other studies of post-communist youth (see for example, Roberts and Jung, 1995) have found that, in the countries concerned, the young unemployed’s leisure is not clearly disadvantaged which, needless to say, is quite contrary to what should have become the case had levels of earning and spending become the main stratifying process among young people. The main reason why high earnings were not always being translated into advantaged lifestyles in Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine is that these links were being blurred by intrafamily cash transactions (see Table 6). The higher earners in the samples were receiving less money from their families than any other group, and were spending more on virtually everything else, including household expenses. Families were obviously compensating, when they were able to do so, for young people’s relatively low earned incomes. This happens in Britain, usually in covert ways since parents do not wish their children to

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Young people and their leisure Table 4 Spending and leisure (personal spending per month) , US $30 Has use of Car Video Satellite/Cable Own room Participate at least weekly Sport Bars, restaurants Alcohol Smoking Watch sport Cinema Church Member of recreation club Holidays last year 0 1 More Been abroad Visit relatives Work Leisure Visited West Europe USSR (former) East Europe North America n

US $30–US $50 US $50–US $100

. US $100

15 37 14 49

25 48 20 68

34 59 25 82

44 59 36 86

25 15 15 33 4 4 9 8

33 28 21 50 3 6 12 9

29 30 38 49 2 7 13 9

22 51 27 37 4 5 8 15

63 39 19

44 35 21

40 39 22

31 39 30

21 13 34

16 18 48

26 19 50

27 18 63

13 48 13 2

26 68 16 2

28 71 16 5

32 76 17 4

340

166

126

78

feel that they are not reaping the full benets when they move from unemployment into jobs, or from low paid to better paid employment (see Hutson and Cheung, 1991). Traditional divisions This is the thesis that the evidence conrms. The main leisure differences within the samples were traditional, meaning that they had existed under communism. Gender One such division was by gender. This was not a money effect. The men were earning more and spending more on themselves, but, in the latter case, only slightly more. The females were the more likely to be living with opposite sexed partners and to have children, but family circumstances were making a clear (negative) difference to the amounts of money available for personal spending only among the lone parents. The main gender differences in uses of leisure appeared to have cultural rather than economic roots. The females

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Table 5 Leisure and labour market experience

Has use of: Car Video Satellite/Cable Participate at least weekly Play sport Bars etc Cinema etc Watch sport Smoke Alcohol Church Member of recreation club Holidays last year 0 1 More Holiday abroad (ever) Visited West Europe USSR East Europe North America Spending on self per month , US $30 US $30–US $50 . US $50

Regular Self-empl State Private

Marginal State Private

Unemployed

27 61 21

8 37 22

19 58 24

18 41 20

23 39 14

24 38 24

30 33 9 9 45 39 6 12

22 16 2 3 39 17 6 13

34 24 4 8 48 26 5 11

24 10 4 4 35 15 8 14

31 17 4 4 45 24 10 11

20 22 5 3 40 20 12 3

53 44 13 52

40 43 17 45

37 47 16 55

36 45 19 42

39 38 23 43

48 28 24 40

33 61 24 6

25 54 19 6

36 67 30 4

16 51 12 4

28 51 22 3

13 59 9 2

48 22 31

44 29 26

37 39 24

69 16 16

66 21 13

42 20 37

were as likely as the males to be going regularly to cinemas, theatres and other places of out-of-home entertainment, the sexes were equally likely to be church-goers, and neither was clearly advantaged in terms of holidays. However, the males were by far the more likely to play and to watch sport, to smoke, to visit bars and restaurants, to consume alcohol, and to belong to recreation-based clubs. Also, the males were more likely to have the use of all the items of leisure equipment about which the samples were questioned – cars, videos, and satellite or cable connections (see Table 7). There had been little, if any, of the blurring that has been noted in Western countries in the young men’s and the young women’s uses of free time as a result of more unaccompanied (by men) females asserting their presence and claiming public space in bars, sports facilities and on the streets. Nowadays in the West it is often young males who lead the narrower leisure lives doing little except drink, play, watch and talk about sport (and women), while young females have escaped from the ‘bedroom culture’ to develop broader leisure interests, relationships and skills (see Roberts et al., 1990; Roberts, 1996). The gender divisions revealed in the research had arisen under or

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Young people and their leisure Table 6 Earning and spending (income from main job) 2 US $30 Income from other job 2 Nil 2 US $30 . US $30 Income from parents 2 Nil 2 US $30 . US $30 Board and lodgings payments Nil 2 US $30 . US $30 Living expenses Nil 2 US $30 . US $30 Spending on self 2 US $30 2 US $50 . US $50 n

2 US $50

2 US $100

. US $100

74 17 9

81 11 8

83 9 8

76 6 18

34 32 34

69 17 14

71 12 17

77 7 16

71 24 5

53 25 22

51 24 25

40 11 49

74 19 7

74 19 7

70 13 17

64 15 21

61 22 17

66 26 8

41 30 29

26 21 53

127

150

138

95

preceded communism and they were continuing (probably widening, see below) rather than being overturned in the 1990s. Education The young people’s experiences in education were very closely related to their family backgrounds. The educational elite who had progressed through academic secondary schools, then into higher education with free places and (modest) living allowances were overwhelmingly from elite families. The young people who had attended nonacademic secondary schools and then progressed no further in full-time education were overwhelmingly from working class homes. For practical purposes, family origins and educational backgrounds divided the young people into the same elite and nonelite groups, and this division was related to numerous, very clear differences in their uses of leisure. Table 8 compares the leisure of these two groups. There are differences on nearly all the leisure indicators and some of these differences are extremely wide. The educational elite were the more likely to have the use of videos and satellite or cable connections (but not motor cars). It appears from this evidence that the private motor car was signalling a different kind of status – based on money – rather than a generally cultured background and way of life. Members of the elite group had taken more holidays in the last 12 months, were the more likely to have been on holidays abroad at some time or another, and to have visited all the groups of countries about which the

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K. Roberts and C. Fagan Table 7 Gender and leisure Spending on self per month (US) , 30 30–50 50–100 . 100 Use of Car Video Satellite/Cable Participation (at least weekly) Play sport Pubs, restaurants, cafes Cinema, etc Watch sport Smoke Alcohol Church Member of recreational club Holidays last year 0 1 More Holiday abroad (ever)

Males

Females

43 27 19 11

52 21 17 11

30 46 19

16 41 15

38 27 5 5 57 32 10 12

19 19 4 1 21 10 10 7

46 34 20 43

39 41 19 38

samples were questioned. They were also the more likely to belong to leisurebased clubs, to play (but not to watch) sport, to consume alcohol, and to visit bars, restaurants, cinemas and other places of entertainment regularly. The other exceptions to the elite group doing more and having more, apart from the use of cars and watching sport, were smoking and church-going. This evidence is not exactly what one would have expected given all the talk about the disappearance or impoverishment of the old intelligentsia strata under post-communism. The division between elite and nonelite leisure had been a feature of the old system and it was ourishing in the 1990s. Exactly the same contrast was recorded among young people in Poland in 1993 (see Roberts and Jung, 1995). The persistence of this division is obviously not peculiar to any one post-communist country. And the 1997 evidence from Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine does not suggest that the division is gradually being obliterated. The reasons why elite young people were leisure advantaged were not that they had the best jobs and were earning the most but that they were being treated the most generously by families that could afford to be generous, and because they had inherited the leisure tastes and skills of the old elites. Discussion It is not an original observation that political constitutions can be changed in a matter of months, that transforming centrally planned economies into

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Young people and their leisure Table 8 Education and leisure Have use of Car Video Satellite/cable Participate at least weekly Play sport Pubs, bars etc Cinema etc Watch sport Smoke Alcohol Church Recreational club Holidays (last year) 0 1 More Holiday abroad (ever) Earned money abroad Visited West Europe USSR (country of) East Europe North America Spending on self per month , US $30 US $30–$50 . US $50

Academic

Vocational

20 51 24

23 30 4

34 28 6 3 36 21 9 16

19 13 2 3 41 16 8 9

34 41 25 54 17

54 34 12 20 7

32 65 23 4

6 36 10 1

46 24 29

60 23 17

private enterprise market systems takes years, while changing social relationships and the associated cultures is most likely to take generations. So it is perhaps not surprising that the main leisure differences among the young people in this study were carry-overs from the old system. The main differences were between the elite and the rest, each group divided by gender. The progress of the reforms is unlikely to challenge gender divisions in so far as the reforms include the loss of the free or heavily subsidized child care that communism provided, along with the indulgent employment regimes which enabled mothers to combine paid jobs, home and child care. The future of the division between the elite and the rest is less certain. The generally well-educated young people from elite families in the study mostly had not been able to obtain good jobs. In fact the majority were either unemployed or in marginal jobs. Meanwhile, some young people from nonprivileged backgrounds, and who were not particularly well-educated, were succeeding in business, while others had established themselves in decent jobs. Elite families had not always, or even usually, been able to transmit their occupational and economic privileges to their children. The elites have stood

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better chances of doing this in the Central European countries where the economies have recovered more quickly and where, therefore, there have been more good jobs for educationally successful young people to claim. In time, such jobs could be created in former Soviet countries such as Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine. If so, the generally well-educated young people from elite backgrounds are likely to claim them. In the meantime, up to 1997 at any rate, they were surviving as a distinct status group with a characteristic lifestyle even though the material foundations of this lifestyle had not, in most cases, been transmitted to the new generation. If this situation continues indenitely, and if the career groups into which the sample was divided endure throughout the young people’s lifetimes, by then it is likely that these groups will have developed characteristic ways of life and that new socioeconomic strata will have been created. It is quite likely that by then money will have become the principal stratier whereas, among the young people in this study, it was a subsidiary and largely mediating (family backgrounds) factor. However, for one generation it is most likely that leisure will be a site where the old elites are able to maintain their positions as status groups, set apart by their lifestyle. In the longer-term, if they succeed in becoming an advantaged socioeconomic group under post-communism, this will be partly through their uses of leisure having preserved their distinctiveness during their countries’ difcult and protracted transitional years. Acknowledgements The research on which this paper is based was supported by INTAS (93–2693). References Ashwin, S. (1996) Forms of collectivity in a non-monetary society. Sociology 30(1), 21–39. Brown, P. (1987) Schooling Ordinary Kids, Tavistock, London. Council of Europe (1996) Cultural Policy in the Russian Federation, Culture Committee, Strasbourg. Gvozdeva, G.P. (1994) Changes in free time utilisation by rural residents in West Siberia under the ongoing economic reform, paper presented to International Sociological Association conference, July 1994, Bielefeld. Hutson, S. and Cheung, W. (1991) Saturday jobs: sixth formers in the labour market and the family, in Family and Household: Division and Change (edited by C. Marsh and S. Arber), Macmillan, London, pp. 45–62. Jung, B. (1994) For what leisure? The role of culture and recreation in post-communist Poland. Leisure Studies 13(1), 1–15. Magun, V.S. (1996) From 1985 to 1995: revolution of youth aspirations and life strategies (in Russian). Sotsioloicheskyi Zhurnal 3/4, 29–48. Meek, J. (1998) Brown envelopes for young Russians. Guardian 17 March, 11. Pilkington, H. (1994) Russia’s Youth and its Culture, Routledge, London. Poretzkina, E. and Jyrkinen-Pakkasvirta, T. (1995) Reconstruction of consumption patterns of St Petersburg families’, paper presented to Second Conference of the European Sociological Association, August 1995, Budapest. Riordan, J. (1988) Problems of leisure and glasnost. Leisure Studies 7(2), 173–85.


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Roberts, K. (1996) Young people, schools, sport and government policies. Sport, Education and Society 1(1), 47–57. Roberts, K. (1997) Same activities, different meanings: British youth cultures in the 1990s. Leisure Studies 16(1), 1–15. Roberts, K. and Jung, B. (1995) Poland’s First Post-Communist Generation, Avebury, Aldershot. Roberts, K., Campbell, C. and Furlong, A. (1990) Class and gender divisions among young adults at leisure, in Youth in Transition (edited by C. Wallace and M. Cross) Falmer Press, London, pp. 129–145. Willis, P. (1990) Common Culture, Open University Press, Milton Keynes. Zuev, A.E. (1997) Socio-economic situation of the youth in a labour sphere in the modern Russia, paper presented to conference on Youth Unemployment in East-Central Europe, Smolenice, October 1997, Slovakia.