TEEN SPIRIT.(teenagers in Russia)

In the late nineteen-eighties, I was sent to Stuyvesant High School, in Manhattan, a magnet school specializing in math and the sciences that was also a kind of holding pen for multinational nerds. The majority of us were immigrants or the children of immigrants, although a good number of sweet native-born kids from the Upper West Side were on hand to teach us about the right music and the proper drugs. Despite their best efforts, our outsiders' angst often found its expression in the Eurotrash New Wave tunes of a Long Island radio station called WLIR (later renamed WDRE), broadcasting from deep in the suburban interior of Garden City. We--and by "we"I mean pimply young Russians, Koreans, Chinese, Indians--were lost between two worlds. We went to school in Manhattan, but we lived in Flushing, Jackson Heights, Midwood, and Bayside, and couldn't resist WLIR, that clarion call of squeaky synthesizer music, and the narcoleptic Goth outfits and the spiky hair that went with it. The usual British suspects ruled the airwaves: Depeche Mode, Erasure (their bittersweet hit "Oh l'Amour"was an inspiration to the loveless), and, of course, the Smiths, the princes of the gelled-hair set, best known for their moody anthem "How Soon Is Now?”

Recently I heard a remake of this New Wave classic, sung not by a quartet of disenchanted Mancunian lads but by two Russian girls with high-pitched voices that screeched from my stereo speakers:

You shaht your maus,, The sentiment is still there--banal, adolescent, and irresistible. (Who among us isn't hyooman and doesn't want to be lavd?) The girls behind the accents are Julia Volkova, a short, dark-haired eighteen-year-old with enormous eyes and a brash manner, and Lena Katina, a redhead, who is also eighteen. Their band is called Tatu (styled t.a.t.u. for the Western market). The girls sing of teen-age lesbian love, and when they encounter cameras and reporters they kiss each other with abandon. Tatu's "200 km/h in the Wrong Lane"has recently been released in the United States, on the Interscope label (the home of artists such as Eminem), making the band one of the first Russian pop acts to be exported to the West. Their single "All the Things She Said"is climbing the American charts, having already hit the No. 1 spot in Britain, where the Tatu girls' antics have caused a public outcry. It is a remarkable turn of events for Russia's fledgling music industry: Russian teen-agers sent to conquer America and the West, instead of the other way around. I could have used Tatu back in my adolescence.

I was born in Leningrad, in 1972. My brief tenure as a Soviet pre-adolescent was memorable. Whatever daily evils befell adults in the Brezhnev era, the regime was good for a child's imagination. Bereft of anything resembling Western popular culture (the jokes that there were nightly farm reports on television were accurate), I turned inward and experienced what I believe was my most fertile creative period. I fell in love with the Red Army and all things Socialist. I dreamed of Lenin and the little hut he supposedly built single-handedly while hiding from the Tsar's police, and I wrote my first novel, a fairy tale about the great bald leader, which was set on the planet Andromeda. I quizzed my father, an engineer, about the relative merits of Soviet-made Tupolev planes versus the hated American Boeings, and then raced a pair of clothespins--a red Tupolev and a blue Boeing--always letting the Tupolev win.

We moved to Rome when I was six, having joined the exodus of Soviet Jews seeking a less gray, more remunerative life in the West (not to mention a respite from Russia's anti-Semitism). It was there, while awaiting our papers for resettlement in the United States, that my father told me it was all a lie--Lenin, his handmade hut, the nightly farm reports, the Soviet Union itself. I was six years old, and he broke my heart. And yet, at that tender age, I already had one of the immigrant's most valuable skills: the ability to adjust my values and shed unnecessary beliefs at will. In my daily clothespin race, I let the Boeing win.

I returned to St. Petersburg twenty years later, in 1999. I was expecting a somewhat shabbier version of Prague, where I had studied while in college. Instead, I learned that the Cold War, like any war, must have a loser. From my window, as the plane approached the Petersburg airport, I saw defeat on the ground: deserted suburban fields, the shell of a derelict factory, a clutch of decaying apartment houses that even from three hundred yards in the air looked as if they should be condemned. There was defeat on the faces of the adolescent-looking men toting machine guns who guarded the dilapidated international terminal. Defeat at passport control. Defeat at customs. At the curbside, defeat in the line of sad men with battered Ladas begging to ferry us into town for hard currency.

It was the end of the Yeltsin era, when the President's drinking bouts vied for the front page with accounts of spectacular acts of urban violence. Oligarchs such as Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky had the backroom power, and the economy was still reeling after the near-collapse of the banking sector the previous year.