In the mid-1920s, the Bolshevik Party and the Young Communist League were increasingly concerned about expressions of depression and pessimism among Soviet youth. Young people fretted about the perils of the “humdrum life” as they sought to find place and solace in the post-revolutionary order. Many critics then and historians since have pointed to this wave of depression as indicative of youth’s dissatisfaction with the New Economic Policy and a yearning for revolution renewed.

In this talk, Sean Guillory considers a different interpretation: youth’s expressions of aimlessness and doubt were rooted in the traumatic legacies of Russia’s “time of troubles” from 1914 to 1921. The talk demonstrates that growing up in this period left indelible, traumatic scars on Russia’s youth rendering them, like their European counterparts, a lost generation.