Strikes across France and on the London Underground marks a rude reminder that the holidays are over, and grim reality returns. But the transport chaos in London failed to disrupt a special occasion at the headquarters of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development this week.
Instead of its normal dry statistics on the economic performance of post-Soviet and post-Communist countries in central and eastern Europe, the EBRD has published a collection of essays from a bunch of 20-year-olds who were born in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down.
It was not exactly a reassuring exercise. Some 80 per cent of the 600-odd essays submitted for “Born in ‘89″ are angry about the life of post-Communist children forced to experience the chaos of transition from the old order, with no rules for the new one. But they are also inspiring, because the writing is articulate, self-critical, and challenging.
“Some people call us the lost generation,” writes Daria Orlova from Izhevsk, the Russian city where Kalashnikov guns come from. “But I think I was born at the very right time. We are not lost, we are united, possibly by Facebook and MTV, but it is much better than being separated by any kind of wall.”
Ekaterina Kolpinets, from Togliatti, the tough Russian town where the Lada car is made, is more pessimistic. “We are just a generation of enfants terribles,” she says. “Our parents gave us everything. But we have nothing…We have no boldness, no passion…At one time we aspired to ‘do something in the world’, now all we want is a new pair of trainers.’”
They are sceptical about democracy, and cynical about capitalism. They spend much of their lives glued to the internet. Their essays show a lot of common experience.
Nikita Bolkov, from Rostov, calls himself “one of those born in the last millennium, in a country that no longer exists.”
“With the collapse of ideology our souls emptied, for a while, like an apartment abandoned after a radiation accident: the objects are there, but the owners are not.”
Ana Dabrundashvili, from Tbilisi, lived through the economic collapse of independent Georgia in the 1990s. Her mother keeps telling her it will all be OK when she’s older. “I’m getting older and older and it’s never OK enough,” she retorts.
She remembers seeing a documentary about crowds cheering the declaration of Georgian independence (in 1991). “Who could ever have imagined that Georgia would get stuck forever between a Soviet past and a European future, taking steps back and forth, over and over again?” she asks.
What answers can we give them? No easy ones, I fear. They are going to have to work life out for themselves in a world where the rule-book has been largely torn up. But they have “learned not to whisper, but to speak out loud,” says Daria. That is surely a good place to start.
Across the globe: Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs on