Russian.teens.3.glasnost.teens

No adults. Just sweat, electric guitars, and a crowd of teens slamming into each other. The band, Glasnost Kids (formed that morning), plays a cover of "Should I Stay or Should I Go" – lyrics translated badly, passionately wrong.

This is Glasnost.Teens .

– "openness" – had been Gorbachev’s promise two years ago. Now, in the spring of '88, the air smells of thawing permafrost and printer ink from underground samizdat magazines. The teens in this film don't want to storm the Winter Palace. They want jeans. They want rock music. They want to know why their history textbooks have chapters being rewritten as they study them . Scene 3: The School Auditorium Russian.Teens.3.Glasnost.Teens

Silence. The camera holds on the teacher’s face – not anger, but confusion. He doesn’t have a party directive for this.

The crowd roars back: "SO WE’LL MAKE IT UP!" No adults

"Leave?" Dmitri scoffs. "And go where? Everything we know is broken. But it's our broken."

From the back row, a boy named Dmitri raises his hand. Not to answer. To question. This is Glasnost

Viktor, now in a cowboy shirt from the black market, screams into the mic: "We don’t know what comes next!"

Viktor laughs, dry and bitter. "Next year, they say we can vote for real. Maybe even leave the country."

For the first time, they aren't whispering.

But the film? The film survived. Because teens, Russian or otherwise, always remember the year the lies stopped and the questions began.