SUMMARY:

In this essay, Donald Raleigh suggests what oral history can contribute to discussions of the closed nature of Soviet society by comparing the memories of a privileged cohort of baby boomers from Moscow and Saratov regarding how foreign travel shaped their worldviews and heightened their awareness of the fault lines in the Soviet system, made clear through the kind of invidious comparison that firsthand encounters with the outside world invite. The essay is focused on how baby boomers remembered and understood such experiences. It is based on interviews of sixty individuals who graduated in 1967 from Moscow’s School No. 20 or from Saratov’s School No. 42, then recently opened “specialized” schools that offered intensive instruction in English. More specifically, this is a group of individuals conceived in 1948−1949, when Soviet propaganda declared that efforts to “reconstruct” the war-ravaged country had been completed. In that regard, the 1967 graduates’ collective story tells the larger story of the upper strata of the Cold War generation that lived through the USSR’s twilight years.