Teddy Goes To Siberia
My friend Kate Coe's 21-year-old son Ted is in Russia and is blogging about it here. Here's one of his posts I found interesting:

Russians perceived outside of Russia always conjurs up images of frozen people, huddled together for warmth with icicles hanging from their nostrils all listening to some public speaker haraunging on about the evils of one thing or another. When he is done they go back to their little homes, whether or not its a big apartment building or not is irrelevant because the apartments are still tiny, once there they eat some bland soup drink plenty of vodka, and then settle down for a long nights rest.

I was too young to ever visit the Soviet Union before it collapsed so I cannot say wether this interpretation of Russia is correct. But what I can say is what Russia is like today, and modern Russians would have shocked their grandfathers right out of their felt boots.
Young Russians today have wisened up to the games of their adults, they all have the trait of someone who has been misled for so long, even the ones born after 1990 because they still feel the after effects of the parent's ridiculous desicions to build ugly as sin buildings and drive cars with the same amount of styling as a trash compacter. And they're bitter and confused because of it. They seem upset that they're forced to live around such hideous buildings and confusing engineerings desicions but at the same time they're relieved that they're now earning enough money to put giant tiger decals on their Lada's or wear shirts with Americanesque logos printed on them.

Like the kid who gets to watch the adult TV show for the first time, young Russians are feeling the power of having money in their pocket, and for those who can spend it, they buy the most outlandish and over stylized things they can find. Needless to say, pointy shoes and mind numbing electronic music are in vogue, but thats the norm in Europe so no biggy. Imagine that model of a Russian I mentioned earlier, a frozen solid fuzzy man; kids today are the opposite, flexible, pink t-shirts and rat tail hairdo's. In a sense, young Russians are going through a sort of cultural revolution of style. Trying to show the rest of the world what Russia has become, how its changed. Proving to themselves and their peers that what happened in Russia before can't happen again because of the cool clothes they wear, how much of individuals they are, but they're trying to combat a dead enemy, while another creeps in, nationalism.