Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood

by Cathy Young, Ekaterina Jung

The author, who emigrated to the United States with her family in 1980, describes her impressions and memories of the Soviet Union

Genres: Biography, History, Russia, Memoir, Nonfiction, Russian Literature

334 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1989

About the author

Cathy Young is a columnist for The Boston Globe and Reason, an author and a public speaker.

Born in Moscow, Russia in 1963, Young came to the United States with her family in 1980. She received her B.A. degree in English from Rutgers University in 1988, where she was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa.

Young is the author of two books: Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality (The Free Press, February 1999), and Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (Ticknor & Fields, 1989). She also contributed the essay, "Keeping Women Weak," to Next: Young American Writers on the New Generation (Eric Liu, ed.). W. W. Norton & Co., 1994. As a research associate at the Cato Institute, she co-authored, with Michael Weiss, Esq., the 1996 policy analysis, "Feminist Jurisprudence: Equal Rights or Neo-Paternalism?"

Since September 2000, Young has been a regular op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe. She also writes a monthly column for Reason magazine. From 1993 to 1999, she was a weekly columnist for the Detroit News. Her columns, book reviews, and feature articles have appeared in many publications including New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, The American Spectator, Salon.Com, National Review, and The New Republic.

Young's television appearances have included The Today Show (NBC); Crier & Company, Inside Business (CNN); This is America!, To the Contrary, and Uncommon Knowledge (PBS); Washington Journal (C-Span); Judith Regan Tonight and The O'Reilly Factor (Fox News Channel). Radio appearances have included Talk of the Nation and Radio Times (National Public Radio) and numerous shows on stations across the United States.

Young has spoken before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco; at the Sex Wars Conference (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London); the Freedom School (Freedom Communications Media Conference); the Children's Rights Council; the New School for Social Research; The Pacific Research Institute; and the Cato Institute. She has also appeared at colleges and universities including Boston College Law School, Georgetown University Law School, Stanford Law School; Boalt Hall Law School (University of California-Berkeley); University of North Carolina Law School; Northwestern University Law School; and University of Michigan Law School.

Reviews

[Olga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love it! As if I had written this book. So many coincidences with my life: I was born in 1959, in Moscow, to Jewish professional parents, who while not exactly dissidents, were opposed to the regime, and raised me to question it. I also attended a privieged magnet Englsih language school. I also learned about politics and about se from "anecdotes" (jokes).
I have 2 copies of this book since I used to lend one to Amerian friends who asked what it was like...

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cathy Young and I are quite different. She is some years older than me. She is Jewish, American and was born and grew up in Moscow. She describes herself as libertarian and conservative, and has built a career in the US as a conservative columnist and writer. And yet, reading her memoir, Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood, I constantly nodded in agreement and found many similarities between us. Most obviously, we both grew up in a Communist country, and emigrated to the West. We both have a passion for and write in our second language -English. I might be more of a centrist, and, thanks to the experience of living in Denmark, more in favour of Nordic style welfare state, but we are both pretty clear-eyed about the failed Communist experiment. But there are no dry passages about politics in this frequently funny book, although, of course, politics is omnipresent. Young paints a very vivid picture of everyday life: the empty shops, the queues, the school life, the fascination with all things Western, the classless society’s new inequalities that had replaced the old class divides. She is very astute on women’s lives - although in some ways, women in Soviet Bloc’s countries were freer and more emancipated, than women in the West, because Marxist class analysis benefited women, the patriarchy still held strong. All of it, even the darkest aspects of life in Moscow in the 70s, is described with tremendous perspicacity and sense of humour. Young is never funnier than in the chapter on love and sex, and I recognised so much in her and her friends’ experience. I bought this 1985 edition second-hand and what a great find it’s turned out to be. I am always looking for books about that time and region, and I have not found any other memoirs, which document growing up behind the Iron Curtain, certainly none from a female emigré’s perspective, so I am very glad it exists.

[Daria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Growing up in Moscow right after finishing A Mountain of Crumbs, another memoir written by a Soviet émigré. Both memoirists left their country for the United States around the same time, both around the beginning of their adult age, one was from Leningrad and the other, as the title reveals, from Moscow. So it was inevitable for me to make a comparison between these two books in my head, and to decide that while A Mountain of Crumbs is more beautiful and lyrical, Growing up in Moscow is more analytical and down to earth, to the point that at first I even found the narration a bit dry.

Both young women had to face the same difficulties growing up, practical (such as shortages in the shops), but most importantly of the moral kind: the duplicity, the corruption of power, the feeling of living in a lie. From this point of view it was very striking for me to realize how important literature was in the life of both girls. However, I found that Cathy Young/Ekaterina Jung goes more in depth in explaining the reasons that brought her to reject her home country (although the decision to leave was taken by her parents, and they emigrated as a family when she was just a teenager). Ultimately I think it’s this depth that made me appreciate this memoir more, together with her free thinking and the habit of questioning everything, although in the end her political views might differ from mine.

The most interesting chapter for me was the one about the narrator’s rebellion against the established role of women, in which the ambiguity of women’s conditions in the Soviet Union is very well explained:

On the one hand, our textbooks were constantly hammering into us the idea that the revolutionary Soviet state had been the first and perhaps really the only society to lift women up to full equality with men. This assertion was backed by statistics on how many of the deputies in the Supreme Soviet were female and, invariably, on the numbers of women doctors in the Soviet Union - 70 Percent of all doctors […]. On the other hand, an article in the Literaturnaya Gazeta on the importance of teaching the right values to teenagers said that although the October Revolution had liberated women and opened all avenues of life to them, we mustn't forget that this blessing of equality should by no means overshadow the primacy of woman's role as Wife and Mother […].

If you want to know how was life in Moscow in the Seventies for a family of closeted dissidents (this is how the author defines her parents in one of her interviews) I think this book offers a very good overview through the prism of skepticism, wit and humor, and also some striking and thoroughly enjoyable anecdotes.

PS. The main shortcoming of this book is the fact that it somehow aged too quickly (it was published around 1989 when the Soviet Union was shaken but still standing) and many lines that were supposed to be “shocking revelations” to the West about the hardships of life in a regime don’t have the same effect now. It did stir my curiosity though about what the author’s views on contemporary Russia might be, thankfully there is YouTube to supply this sort of information:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_5oM...

[Charlie Luthi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I decided to read this book to do research for a story I’m writing set in Soviet Union. Though, I quickly discovered that the author was somewhat politically biased in her account. I will admit that I myself read the book with my own opposing biases, and also that I never got the chance to live in the Soviet Union, yet I also know of the negative aspects in Soviet life (trust me I have to write all about them). However, with comparison to my other research, this book doesn’t provide an objective and therefore entirely accurate account of what it was like to live there, which to be fair she herself admits at the end of the book.
Nonetheless, overall the book is very well written and descriptive, and details the events of her childhood in a very entertaining and engaging way, but I believe it should not be seen as a source of completely reliable information.
Perhaps most importantly this book reminded me that reading and analyzing the opposition’s position (with the truth in mind) is very important especially today.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

An easily read memoir. The author paints a picture of life under an authoritarian regime. Amid the scenes of her life in school, on vacation, etc. are interspersed jokes then current in the Soviet Union and with a few changes of words be appropriate for any country. The author's descriptions of life on vacation at their 'dacha' and in Latvia show the difference between city and rural life. It is also interesting to note her comments on the changes in text books as she was growing up. In the seventies there was a 'convergence' theory in political science. Essentially it was the Soviet Union becoming more democratic as the US became more authoritarian. Currently (2020) the US seems headed toward the authoritarian end of the spectrum whether Russia has become more liberal is in question. I recommend it to all who are deeply imbued with adulation for any political figure.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A charming account of growing up n Moscow before emigrating to the USA at age 17 with her parents. Reading this indicated how even under a totalitarian regime life goes on and lives are lived and boundaries are tested. Fascinating and absorbing

[Jasanna Czellar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a super intriguing autobiography about life as a kid (and family) in communist Russia! I'm a sucker for biographies or autobiographies...and this lived up to my hopes. Although Russia is not the same place nowadays, I'm sure, it likely still has vestiges of this era. A very interesting picture into communist life, indoctrination, and 'priviledge' in the capital city. One chapter on sexuality was something I wasn't a fan of, and although the author writes from a liberal feminist standpoint, I still agreed with her on many things. Definitely recommended!

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is an interesting memoir about Cathy Young's youth in Moscow. A lot has changed since 1989 when the book was written, but the book was interesting nonetheless.
Cathy describes her childhood experiences, from schooling and her family's summer dacha to the Pioneers and the nearby summer camp. This is a story that describes the daily problems and situations that an upper-middle class family would face in Moscow of the 1970s.
It's hard to pick out one particular thing to mention about the book, but one of my favorite parts were Cathy's retelling of jokes that she heard passed along from her buddies and the thoughts and perceptions that she and her family had toward Soviet ideals and figureheads, including Lenin and Brezhnev. The stories that they were told about Lenin were particularly interesting, as they almost portrayed a sort of religion.
Overall, this was really easy to read, and I thought the book was cleverly written, embedding enough funny comments throughout to seem witty but not overdone. I noticed this at the library a couple of months ago as I passed through the Biography section, and it caught my eye, and I'm glad it did, because it was a good read.

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This s a memoir about a woman, born in Russia, who grew up during the last days of old Communist regime before emigrating with her parents to the US. I suppose it presents a realistic portrayal of a place and time, but it is hard to put into the current day context.