Fourteen years into the transition from socialism to capitalism, there’s a growing social chasm in Central and Eastern Europe. The brave new world that opened up in 1989 brought many lucrative careers, travel and the chance to shape their lives. But for those without connections, languages or savvy about how to work the new system, freedom has brought fresh insecurities and inequalities. As the state has shrunk in favor of the private sector, so, too, have guaranteed jobs, apartments and support networks.
Youth have been both the major winners and among the major losers in all the changes. For the children of the revolution–young people now in their late teens and 20s, whose own transitions from childhood to adulthood coincided with economic transition–the division between haves and have-nots is often stark. Nimbler than their elders, easier to train in the ways of a tech-driven international marketplace, many young Central and Eastern Europeans forged high-flying careers during the 1990s. But many rural, poor or minority youth couldn’t compete–in part because the notion of competition was itself new. Those left behind frequently turn to drink and drugs, say youth workers, to curb their despair.
A 1999 poll tested 14-year-olds in 28 countries on world knowledge and social skills. Poles scored the highest of any nation. They also had the biggest gap between the highest and lowest scores. “I treat the whole world as my country,” says Wojtek Rabiej, chief financial officer of Link4 Insurance in Warsaw. “But there is a divide within my generation–those who feel that they can achieve something, and others who have given up very early.” Today, in the transition countries, the average rate of youth unemployment is 30 percent–roughly twice that of the rest of the population. In the short term, freedom has brought uncertainty, unemployment and rising drug usage as well as Gap jeans and international jobs.
For those able to navigate the choppy waters of a post-Soviet economy, the world is rich in opportunity. The first step to making it: moving to a city, for it is there, rather than in the provinces, that good schools, jobs and futures lie. Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, rural households are half again as likely to be poor as the rest of the population. In Romania, youth-unemployment rates in rural areas are two and a half times those in urban areas, which already run at more than 10 percent. The cities, on the other hand, are producing a new breed of career-minded citizens. Anita Pocsik, editor of the Hungarian edition of Cosmopolitan, has built a readership of independent twentysomething women–a breed largely unheard of a decade ago, when women tended to marry earlier and earn less.
With their disposable incomes, gym memberships and much-stamped passports, these women enjoy “being singly” as part of the spoils of freedom, says Pocsik. They also suffer the trials of capitalism. “Stop Mommy Teresa,” Hungary’s No. 1 best seller since its publication last June, chronicles a young woman’s search for both love and a job. Fans write in to say how much they identify with the heroine, says the author, Zsuzsa Racz, who sees “uncertainty” as her generation’s reigning state of mind. “It’s so easy to lose a job,” she says, “and so hard to find a new one.”
Often parents and professors can’t counsel kids on how to work the new system, since they’re struggling with it themselves. Polish studies show that what divides the country’s youth is not rural-urban or rich-poor splits, but how savvy parents are at picking good schools and teaching kids foreign languages. Across the region new private schools are springing up, widening the gap between kids whose parents can afford to pay and those who can’t. And though the number of people in school has risen, so have dropout rates, particularly among minorities like the Roma.
Sadly, the one thing that may unify both wings of Eastern European youth is the vice encouraged by openness. The northern city of Most, tarnished with the Czech Republic’s highest unemployment rate–22 percent–also has a serious drug problem. K-Centrum, the local advice center for drug addicts, records almost 1,500 registered drug users in a city of just 70,000; the actual number is probably much higher. Public-health officials across the region are alarmed at the incidence of substance abuse. Smoking is on the rise, as are injectible drugs: a survey of Hungarian teenagers found that drug use trebled between 1995 and 1999. Theories for the rise vary. Open borders brought drugs, while open markets created more disposable income for some, bleak prospects for others. “If you have 24 hours to yourself, what can you do apart from take drugs?” Lubomir Slapka, who runs K-Centrum, says of the town’s many unemployed. For too many transition kids, a free market too often doesn’t seem like any kind of freedom at all.
