Free Republic

A Russian television serial exploring the tragedy wrought by brutal teenage street gangs fighting for survival, money and love in the last years of the crumbling Soviet Union has become a sensation in Russia. The series – “A hoodlum’s promise – blood on the asphalt” – shows the savagery of the gangs which carved up the Russian city of Kazan in 1989 as the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev gyrated the Soviet Union towards its 1991 demise. In the Kazan badlands, many of the teenagers tried to make sense of their Soviet world turned upside down by flocking to the gangs...

PRAGUE, December 8, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- On December 8, 1991, the leaders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine gathered at a site in the Belarusian forest of Belavezhskaya Pushcha to declare that the Soviet Union was dead. In its place, they announced the formation of a new alliance, the Commonwealth of Independent States. For those who lived through it, it was a heady but uncertain time. Hopes of social change and political freedom mixed with fears of economic freefall and the disintegration of state institutions. But what about those with no memory of that time? RFE/RL spoke to young people born...