COMMENTATOR (COMM.): Previously on Life . . .
EVELINE HERFKENS: In a decent world where you want justice you need more international rules, not less.
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: We have to have rule to show that, you know, that, that, when a government takes action, it actually reflects the will of the people.
ROBERT REICH: The dangers of the new global economy are to, to split societies.
COMM: Under Soviet rule, young people in Central and Eastern Europe were drilled into the ideology of communism - indoctrinated with its sense of purpose, of structure, of belonging. The collapse of communist authoritarian rule has brought greater freedom of choice and opportunity. But it's also created a climate of growing uncertainty, especially for the sixty five million young people in the region.
As the gulf between the "have's" and the "have not's" has widened, the former safe and well-trodden road from childhood to adulthood has increasingly been swept away. Stripped of their sense of "belonging", many young people in Eastern Europe have become "outsiders".
COMM: Korsun Shevchnkovsky - three hours drive into rural Ukraine. This peaceful setting is about to be invaded. The volunteer movement is the biggest youth organisation in Ukraine. Every year they gather for their annual summer camp.
Maryna Suponina is twenty-one. A magazine journalist, she's visiting the camp to research a story about the youth movement today, and how it compares with those of the past.
MARYNA SUPONINA: I've never been to one of those only my friends went to pioneer camps during the Soviet Union times so I don't know what to expect.
COMM: Under Soviet rule pioneer camps were a place where young communists came together to celebrate and sustain the clear political ideals of a one party state. Young people knew what was expected of them and where they were going.
MARYNA SUPONINA A couple of weeks ago I managed to look old Soviet Union archive footage about pioneer camps and the things I saw made me feel like I am a child again. Though I've never been in those camps I always wanted to be part of it - these were propaganda films so they showed the very best of those camps and I always wanted to be part of that game.
COMM: Maryna arrives at the camp to talk with the volunteers about the philosophy that underpins their work.
TATIYANA KONDRASHEVSKAYA, Dept. Social Services for Youth, Kiev (TRANSLATION): We try to create a team spirit here. It's difficult to overcome some problems on your own and you can do it with your friends. Here, you have a chance for both personal and team development
COMM: Today, volunteer youth camps bring together people from across Ukraine to promote a healthy lifestyle and learn about social work. There's no political agenda to the camps as there was in the past. But here people find a sense of belonging that's perhaps missing elsewhere. Maryna's father was one of the key youth leaders in Soviet times - she's consulting him as part of her research.
MARYNA: This is my Dad; this is my Mum and here - Grandma! Hello! Well, come in! In fact my dad when he was young - he was head of the youth club in Makyrka - which he was very proud of and he showed me this album since when I was like five years old.
SERGEI SUPONIN (TRANSLATION): I was head of youth club and also a member of a regional party organization. We had big aims and believed in everything that was told us by the party. Peace and friendship between nations - future great happiness for mankind and we believed that Lenin's ideals were indestructible! Now it's more difficult, perhaps, because you have to be independent and choose your own path in life. You need to have a good knowledge and be more grounded in the world. Now it's more difficult and back then the Party led everyone from cradle to grave: this is where we are going and you must do this and that! It's not the same anymore: I think that now youth is a bit more disorientated - because of lack of clear aims and goals. It's more difficult for them but on the other hand more interesting.
COMM: Maryna's home town, Mariupol, is an industrial city on the coast of the Azov Sea.
MARYNA SUPONINA: I like coming home very much because I think that family is one of the essential things that a person can have. There is a big question between who is raising the person: society or family? And I think family plays a very important role in it. I think that family values is something a child takes and then lives with it for all his or her life. So I think that having a strong family and having the feeling of a family behind my back is something and essential and very important - it keeps me running.
COMM: Mariupol - like many industrial Soviet cities - has been hit hard by the collapse of heavy industry. Up until 1989 there was virtually no unemployment in the region - most people were employed by large-scale industry in huge factories . State assisted education and health care were all part of the package. Today unemployment is a major problem. One in three young people in 1999 had no work. According to a new Monee report from UNICEF, more children are being forced to leave school early because of financial difficulties. And the breakdown of a structured society - employment and education - is often mirrored by the collapse of family life. Children and teenagers are increasingly smoking and drinking as much as their older peers. Drug abuse and HIV infection are reaching epidemic levels. Over the last eleven years half a million children aged between five and fourteen have died from illness or suicide.
ROSEMARY MCCREERY, Unicef Representative - Russia, Ukraine & Belarus: I think one of the biggest challenges is the change in expectations. A decade ago young people coming out of school knew what to expect - people invested in education because there was a clear outcome - now there is no clear outcome. The educational system itself is under challenge because of under-funding and various other things, and even if you do succeed in getting through the whole school system it's not at all sure what will happen to you - and will you get a job, won't you get a job?
COMM: Maryna is visiting her old colleagues at the youth newspaper in Mariupol where she started her career in journalism.
LYUDMILA KASATKINA Editor in Chief - Priviet Rebyata (TRANSLATION): Our newspaper was created to help the new generation of children to think more freely to learn a skill and to develop their minds. It's a clear cut division now: those who push for the ways out, those who already have everything - although there's not that many of those - and those that I would call the "outsiders".
COMM: Yulia's keen to follow in Maryna's footsteps and become a journalist. She's been exploring what's happening to young people who have no support or family - who are, in effect, social outcasts. She and her friends are working on a story about street children.
YULIA VALLER, Trainee Journalist - Priviet Rebyata (TRANSLATION): I don't come from a particularly good background myself - but at least I have a house and a family. But that's not the most important thing, what's important is that we are really all the same. These children are no different from us, they are just less fortunate - their parents are alcoholics or drug addicts - but it makes them no different from us.
COMM: Yulia herself is no stranger to hardship - her mother is dead. She lives with her grandmother, surviving on very little money.
YULIA (TRANSLATION): Are these your friends? Are you hanging around that shop Tyschyk? Oh are you Mickey Mouse? Oh Great! Do you remember me? This is Dima, this is Elena. I wasn't particularly concerned or bothered about street children before I started getting involved with them and started talking to them and found out how they live. And now and I am very worried about them.
1ST STREET KID (TRANSLATION): Denis you're in my place - get out of the way!
INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): What would you buy if you had lots of money?
1ST STREET KID (TRANSLATION): If I had money I'd buy a house.
2ND STREET KID (TRANSLATION): I would buy a kingdom!
3RD STREET KID (TRANSLATION): I would buy trousers and then some bread and sausage.
1ST STREET KID (TRANSLATION): If I had lots of money I would go and buy a home.
STREET KID (TRANSLATION): He would buy glue to sniff!
COMM: Back at her home, Yulia and her friend Elena are getting ready to go out to a disco. Tonight, it's a disco which is spreading information about the problem of AIDS.
YULIA (TRANSLATION): AIDS is a big problem in Ukraine and we need to deal with it and try to solve it by any means possible, which is why events like the one tonight are so important
COMM: Since 1987 a quarter of a million people in Ukraine are estimated to have become HIV-positive. One of the major reasons for the spread of HIV is the enormous intravenous drug problem. Increasingly, the infection is spreading through the sexually active population - often accelerated by girls who are forced into prostitution to feed their drug habit.
PART TWO
COMM: In Odessa, five hundred kilometres south west from Mariupol, Elena is going back to the music institute where she used to practice the piano. Once a promising musician - part of the cultural élite - she fell into drugs and prostitution and now finds herself alone struggling to survive.
ELENA (TRANSLATION): When I play I feel myself like a fish back in water. Because it's where I belong. I miss the piano very much - I used to play it a lot but now I have different problems
COMM: Prostitution is a growing trade in Odessa and Elena lives close to the main area where the women vie for work. She rents her flat out to prostitutes who entertain their clients there. She also pimps for many of the girls who work on the streets.
ELENA (TRANSLATION): What am I trying to do? I'm just trying to find ways out. If I were to get work as a music teacher or work in the kindergarten I don't think I could live on the pay they offer its just so low. I have another business - we have a street here where the girls are working, and I have an apartment that they use for their clients . I close my eyes to it: I have to live on something.
INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): And what about you - are you on drugs now?
ELENA (TRANSLATION): Sometimes. You have these urges - and you try to stop yourself but its very difficult and sometimes you cant say no. If I could I would cross out the last four - yes, approximately four. Is it four years? Maybe more. I'd cross those years out of my life - but I can't because that's when my daughter was born and I love her very much.
COMM: Elena has become an outsider - her only daughter has been taken away from her and she has lost the support of the family that she was once close to. It was when his family broke down that Sergey fell into drugs.
SERGEY (TRANSLATION): My father was murdered on 18th January 1992, and on the first of February I injected for the first time. With the death of my father I lost something and replaced it with drugs.
COMM: Sergey was a drug addict for eight years - he has been clean for only the past nine months. He was diagnosed with HIV eleven months ago. Because of shortage of funds and medical technology in Ukraine, Sergey is unlikely to live for more than another twelve months. He is trying to make the best of the short life he has left.
SERGEY (TRANSLATION): Living with HIV is very difficult and it's difficult not to be scared of the future. But fear is an obstacle and I never say I will never take drugs again - I never say "never" at all - I say "today".
COMM: Unofficial figures indicate that a third of all young people in Odessa are taking drugs. Sergey works for an organisation of ex drug-addicts which tries to get other users to kick the habit by handing out information and clean syringes. They work in the destitute area of Palermo in Odessa - ironically named after its narcotics infected counterpart in Italy.
SERGEY (TRANSLATION): I don't have any plans to go to Palermo to make half of the addicts quit in one day because no matter what happens I do this primarily for myself. If I help someone to quit whether they stay clean or not I will stay on the right track.
JUNKY (TRANSLATION): I'm alone in this world - all my friends of my age are dead.
SERGEY (TRANSLATION): You are alive by accident.
JUNKY (TRANSLATION): I'm alive whilst they're not - I am so alone.
SERGEY (TRANSLATION): They used to say we can't have AIDS here - that this disease can only take place in the West. They used to say that we didn't have drugs or prostitution here but now in Odessa we have an epidemic and it happened very fast because no one wanted to talk about it. They closed their eyes to it.
COMM: As the youngest-ever Press Secretary to the Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament, Victor Ukolov belongs to a new generation of politicians.
VICTOR UKOLOV, Press Secretary to Speaker of Verkhovna Rada (TRANSLATION): We need the transition of the generations in power and we want what we call a youth politics to take over so that the entire country will have new fresh politics - not the old-style communist politics. We can then agree on both our interests and the interests of children's future
ROSEMARY MCCREERY, Unicef Representative - Russia, Ukraine & Belarus: People who are now in, let's say, their late teens and early twenties, really don't have a great deal of experience of political participation except through the youth movements that we've already talked about. For years and years young people in many of these countries were involved in what you might call, obligatory volunteer service - in various youth movements and so on. And the challenge now is to take the skills and capacity which were accumulated in those youth movements - the Pioneers, the Komsomol and so on - and to channel all that energy and all that organizational skill into doing other things. I think it's very encouraging that young people are still coming forward to volunteer - but I think that we have to recognize the limits of that participation.
MARYNA SUPONINA: I think that a lot of the people who join the volunteer movement miss the sense of belonging that they used to have in Soviet times. But most of the politicians that we have at the moment are all old-school politicians who used to be communist, who used to be Komsomol members - they still have this mentality of society life.
She [her grandmother] thinks it's getting worse and worse every day! She doesn't believe in the future. My dad doesn't agree. He thinks that I am the future, and the sooner we get to power it will be better. My dad says that those people who are in power now they need to go home on pension because they are still old minded and the youth can build a newer world.
YULIA (TRANSLATION): Young people face many problems now: drugs, alcohol, HIV - and they need to start fighting them before it's too late. When I become a journalist I will definitely be working with social problems because every person needs to know about them. It's very important for young people to get involved - to build a better future for themselves and their children.
END
EVELINE HERFKENS: In a decent world where you want justice you need more international rules, not less.
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: We have to have rule to show that, you know, that, that, when a government takes action, it actually reflects the will of the people.
ROBERT REICH: The dangers of the new global economy are to, to split societies.
COMM: Under Soviet rule, young people in Central and Eastern Europe were drilled into the ideology of communism - indoctrinated with its sense of purpose, of structure, of belonging. The collapse of communist authoritarian rule has brought greater freedom of choice and opportunity. But it's also created a climate of growing uncertainty, especially for the sixty five million young people in the region.
As the gulf between the "have's" and the "have not's" has widened, the former safe and well-trodden road from childhood to adulthood has increasingly been swept away. Stripped of their sense of "belonging", many young people in Eastern Europe have become "outsiders".
COMM: Korsun Shevchnkovsky - three hours drive into rural Ukraine. This peaceful setting is about to be invaded. The volunteer movement is the biggest youth organisation in Ukraine. Every year they gather for their annual summer camp.
Maryna Suponina is twenty-one. A magazine journalist, she's visiting the camp to research a story about the youth movement today, and how it compares with those of the past.
MARYNA SUPONINA: I've never been to one of those only my friends went to pioneer camps during the Soviet Union times so I don't know what to expect.
COMM: Under Soviet rule pioneer camps were a place where young communists came together to celebrate and sustain the clear political ideals of a one party state. Young people knew what was expected of them and where they were going.
MARYNA SUPONINA A couple of weeks ago I managed to look old Soviet Union archive footage about pioneer camps and the things I saw made me feel like I am a child again. Though I've never been in those camps I always wanted to be part of it - these were propaganda films so they showed the very best of those camps and I always wanted to be part of that game.
COMM: Maryna arrives at the camp to talk with the volunteers about the philosophy that underpins their work.
TATIYANA KONDRASHEVSKAYA, Dept. Social Services for Youth, Kiev (TRANSLATION): We try to create a team spirit here. It's difficult to overcome some problems on your own and you can do it with your friends. Here, you have a chance for both personal and team development
COMM: Today, volunteer youth camps bring together people from across Ukraine to promote a healthy lifestyle and learn about social work. There's no political agenda to the camps as there was in the past. But here people find a sense of belonging that's perhaps missing elsewhere. Maryna's father was one of the key youth leaders in Soviet times - she's consulting him as part of her research.
MARYNA: This is my Dad; this is my Mum and here - Grandma! Hello! Well, come in! In fact my dad when he was young - he was head of the youth club in Makyrka - which he was very proud of and he showed me this album since when I was like five years old.
SERGEI SUPONIN (TRANSLATION): I was head of youth club and also a member of a regional party organization. We had big aims and believed in everything that was told us by the party. Peace and friendship between nations - future great happiness for mankind and we believed that Lenin's ideals were indestructible! Now it's more difficult, perhaps, because you have to be independent and choose your own path in life. You need to have a good knowledge and be more grounded in the world. Now it's more difficult and back then the Party led everyone from cradle to grave: this is where we are going and you must do this and that! It's not the same anymore: I think that now youth is a bit more disorientated - because of lack of clear aims and goals. It's more difficult for them but on the other hand more interesting.
COMM: Maryna's home town, Mariupol, is an industrial city on the coast of the Azov Sea.
MARYNA SUPONINA: I like coming home very much because I think that family is one of the essential things that a person can have. There is a big question between who is raising the person: society or family? And I think family plays a very important role in it. I think that family values is something a child takes and then lives with it for all his or her life. So I think that having a strong family and having the feeling of a family behind my back is something and essential and very important - it keeps me running.
COMM: Mariupol - like many industrial Soviet cities - has been hit hard by the collapse of heavy industry. Up until 1989 there was virtually no unemployment in the region - most people were employed by large-scale industry in huge factories . State assisted education and health care were all part of the package. Today unemployment is a major problem. One in three young people in 1999 had no work. According to a new Monee report from UNICEF, more children are being forced to leave school early because of financial difficulties. And the breakdown of a structured society - employment and education - is often mirrored by the collapse of family life. Children and teenagers are increasingly smoking and drinking as much as their older peers. Drug abuse and HIV infection are reaching epidemic levels. Over the last eleven years half a million children aged between five and fourteen have died from illness or suicide.
ROSEMARY MCCREERY, Unicef Representative - Russia, Ukraine & Belarus: I think one of the biggest challenges is the change in expectations. A decade ago young people coming out of school knew what to expect - people invested in education because there was a clear outcome - now there is no clear outcome. The educational system itself is under challenge because of under-funding and various other things, and even if you do succeed in getting through the whole school system it's not at all sure what will happen to you - and will you get a job, won't you get a job?
COMM: Maryna is visiting her old colleagues at the youth newspaper in Mariupol where she started her career in journalism.
LYUDMILA KASATKINA Editor in Chief - Priviet Rebyata (TRANSLATION): Our newspaper was created to help the new generation of children to think more freely to learn a skill and to develop their minds. It's a clear cut division now: those who push for the ways out, those who already have everything - although there's not that many of those - and those that I would call the "outsiders".
COMM: Yulia's keen to follow in Maryna's footsteps and become a journalist. She's been exploring what's happening to young people who have no support or family - who are, in effect, social outcasts. She and her friends are working on a story about street children.
YULIA VALLER, Trainee Journalist - Priviet Rebyata (TRANSLATION): I don't come from a particularly good background myself - but at least I have a house and a family. But that's not the most important thing, what's important is that we are really all the same. These children are no different from us, they are just less fortunate - their parents are alcoholics or drug addicts - but it makes them no different from us.
COMM: Yulia herself is no stranger to hardship - her mother is dead. She lives with her grandmother, surviving on very little money.
YULIA (TRANSLATION): Are these your friends? Are you hanging around that shop Tyschyk? Oh are you Mickey Mouse? Oh Great! Do you remember me? This is Dima, this is Elena. I wasn't particularly concerned or bothered about street children before I started getting involved with them and started talking to them and found out how they live. And now and I am very worried about them.
1ST STREET KID (TRANSLATION): Denis you're in my place - get out of the way!
INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): What would you buy if you had lots of money?
1ST STREET KID (TRANSLATION): If I had money I'd buy a house.
2ND STREET KID (TRANSLATION): I would buy a kingdom!
3RD STREET KID (TRANSLATION): I would buy trousers and then some bread and sausage.
1ST STREET KID (TRANSLATION): If I had lots of money I would go and buy a home.
STREET KID (TRANSLATION): He would buy glue to sniff!
COMM: Back at her home, Yulia and her friend Elena are getting ready to go out to a disco. Tonight, it's a disco which is spreading information about the problem of AIDS.
YULIA (TRANSLATION): AIDS is a big problem in Ukraine and we need to deal with it and try to solve it by any means possible, which is why events like the one tonight are so important
COMM: Since 1987 a quarter of a million people in Ukraine are estimated to have become HIV-positive. One of the major reasons for the spread of HIV is the enormous intravenous drug problem. Increasingly, the infection is spreading through the sexually active population - often accelerated by girls who are forced into prostitution to feed their drug habit.
PART TWO
COMM: In Odessa, five hundred kilometres south west from Mariupol, Elena is going back to the music institute where she used to practice the piano. Once a promising musician - part of the cultural élite - she fell into drugs and prostitution and now finds herself alone struggling to survive.
ELENA (TRANSLATION): When I play I feel myself like a fish back in water. Because it's where I belong. I miss the piano very much - I used to play it a lot but now I have different problems
COMM: Prostitution is a growing trade in Odessa and Elena lives close to the main area where the women vie for work. She rents her flat out to prostitutes who entertain their clients there. She also pimps for many of the girls who work on the streets.
ELENA (TRANSLATION): What am I trying to do? I'm just trying to find ways out. If I were to get work as a music teacher or work in the kindergarten I don't think I could live on the pay they offer its just so low. I have another business - we have a street here where the girls are working, and I have an apartment that they use for their clients . I close my eyes to it: I have to live on something.
INTERVIEWER (TRANSLATION): And what about you - are you on drugs now?
ELENA (TRANSLATION): Sometimes. You have these urges - and you try to stop yourself but its very difficult and sometimes you cant say no. If I could I would cross out the last four - yes, approximately four. Is it four years? Maybe more. I'd cross those years out of my life - but I can't because that's when my daughter was born and I love her very much.
COMM: Elena has become an outsider - her only daughter has been taken away from her and she has lost the support of the family that she was once close to. It was when his family broke down that Sergey fell into drugs.
SERGEY (TRANSLATION): My father was murdered on 18th January 1992, and on the first of February I injected for the first time. With the death of my father I lost something and replaced it with drugs.
COMM: Sergey was a drug addict for eight years - he has been clean for only the past nine months. He was diagnosed with HIV eleven months ago. Because of shortage of funds and medical technology in Ukraine, Sergey is unlikely to live for more than another twelve months. He is trying to make the best of the short life he has left.
SERGEY (TRANSLATION): Living with HIV is very difficult and it's difficult not to be scared of the future. But fear is an obstacle and I never say I will never take drugs again - I never say "never" at all - I say "today".
COMM: Unofficial figures indicate that a third of all young people in Odessa are taking drugs. Sergey works for an organisation of ex drug-addicts which tries to get other users to kick the habit by handing out information and clean syringes. They work in the destitute area of Palermo in Odessa - ironically named after its narcotics infected counterpart in Italy.
SERGEY (TRANSLATION): I don't have any plans to go to Palermo to make half of the addicts quit in one day because no matter what happens I do this primarily for myself. If I help someone to quit whether they stay clean or not I will stay on the right track.
JUNKY (TRANSLATION): I'm alone in this world - all my friends of my age are dead.
SERGEY (TRANSLATION): You are alive by accident.
JUNKY (TRANSLATION): I'm alive whilst they're not - I am so alone.
SERGEY (TRANSLATION): They used to say we can't have AIDS here - that this disease can only take place in the West. They used to say that we didn't have drugs or prostitution here but now in Odessa we have an epidemic and it happened very fast because no one wanted to talk about it. They closed their eyes to it.
COMM: As the youngest-ever Press Secretary to the Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament, Victor Ukolov belongs to a new generation of politicians.
VICTOR UKOLOV, Press Secretary to Speaker of Verkhovna Rada (TRANSLATION): We need the transition of the generations in power and we want what we call a youth politics to take over so that the entire country will have new fresh politics - not the old-style communist politics. We can then agree on both our interests and the interests of children's future
ROSEMARY MCCREERY, Unicef Representative - Russia, Ukraine & Belarus: People who are now in, let's say, their late teens and early twenties, really don't have a great deal of experience of political participation except through the youth movements that we've already talked about. For years and years young people in many of these countries were involved in what you might call, obligatory volunteer service - in various youth movements and so on. And the challenge now is to take the skills and capacity which were accumulated in those youth movements - the Pioneers, the Komsomol and so on - and to channel all that energy and all that organizational skill into doing other things. I think it's very encouraging that young people are still coming forward to volunteer - but I think that we have to recognize the limits of that participation.
MARYNA SUPONINA: I think that a lot of the people who join the volunteer movement miss the sense of belonging that they used to have in Soviet times. But most of the politicians that we have at the moment are all old-school politicians who used to be communist, who used to be Komsomol members - they still have this mentality of society life.
She [her grandmother] thinks it's getting worse and worse every day! She doesn't believe in the future. My dad doesn't agree. He thinks that I am the future, and the sooner we get to power it will be better. My dad says that those people who are in power now they need to go home on pension because they are still old minded and the youth can build a newer world.
YULIA (TRANSLATION): Young people face many problems now: drugs, alcohol, HIV - and they need to start fighting them before it's too late. When I become a journalist I will definitely be working with social problems because every person needs to know about them. It's very important for young people to get involved - to build a better future for themselves and their children.
END