– Zëri i Rinisë, Organ of the CC of the Labour Youth Union of Albania –
The western journalists who go to Moscow, Budapest, Warsaw or Prague, point out that now there is no difference in the fashion, or habits of the youth in these cities from those in the western countries. Long hair, hippies, the return to primitivism, to the time of the primitive community, hooliganism, prostitution, drugs — all these are being steadily introduced into life and culture in revisionist countries. In particular these evils have infected the youth of these countries.
In the hotels of Warsaw, such as the “Europeiski,” prostitutes are always present to amuse foreigners. Indeed, they are protected by law. Prostitution, the AFP agency writes, has become a business in itself, and the centre of a flourishing black market.
In the “Europeiski” hotel, or the “Maxim” or “Adria” clubs in Warsaw, rock music resounds and dissolute dancing takes place to such an extent, the tourists are surprised that the Polish Capital continues to bear the name of “socialist”…
Contact with western tourists, the showing of degenerate films, radio and television programmes have made the youth of these countries still more dissolute, and have pushed it further toward corrupt western culture and the imitation of the American way of life. The many tourists who come to the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, bring with them not only the latest degenerate fashions in clothes, but also plenty of records of deafening music.
In Hungary things have gone so far that the composers have begun to write pieces which are executed before the public with plates, kitchen utensils and various objects which fall on the stage. The “melody” of this constitutes the “originality” of this music. There are other composers who instead of proper notes use for “originality” an astronomy map projected on a paper with lines. The height of the notes, one of these modern Hungarian composers says, is set by the position of the stars and their nuances must come out in proportion with the intensity of the light of each star shown on the astronomy map…
There are many such absurdities which are becoming quite fashionable in the revisionist countries.
All this environment yields its bitter fruits, particularly among the youth. It has been officially admitted that in Poland there are 30,000 drug users. The figures are still higher in Czechoslovakia, the same thing occurs in the other revisionist countries. Drug-taking is associated with hooliganism and crime. In Czechoslovakia, for example, criminal gangs and groups of hooligans, called “jit,” spring up like mushrooms. To be able to enter these groups one must spit at a teacher.
The gangsters of Moscow, Warsaw or the other capitals of Eastern Europe are now worthily competing with their Chicago or New York partners. The same forms of gangsterism, the same forms of robbery, the same terrorisation of the population exists as in the large cities of “western culture.”
The difference between the East and West perhaps exists only in the published figures. The FBI publishes, several times a year in the United States, increasingly more alarming figures about the growth of criminality and gangsterism among the young, in the Soviet Union, Poland or Hungary these figures are kept closely guarded in the safes of the Home Ministry; and the press carries only expurgated data. But what the press publishes is of little importance. It is a fact, and it cannot be concealed, that the revisionist cliques which have usurped power in the Soviet Union and in the countries of Eastern Europe have, parallel with the restoration of capitalism, infected the youth of these countries, pushing them increasingly toward the dissolute American way of life, toward degenerate western culture.
(Originally published in “Albania Today,” 4 (17), 1974, pp. 60-61)