COLUMN ONE : Freedom Before Ideology : The gap between generations widens as young Russians work toward building their own lives, unlike their parents, who looked to the state for guidance.

MYTISHCHI, Russia — Thirty years ago, Yuri Belousov reported to work at the Chemical Fibers Plant in this Moscow suburb, eager to give himself to the kollective to help build the bright future promised by the Communist regime.

Now his 25-year-old son, Alexei, who believes that he alone is the master of his future, is trying to buy part of the same factory.

“I don’t want to earn an hourly wage; I want to get a percentage of the profits. I want something of my own. It’s very important for me to know the exact results of my work,” the younger Belousov said. “When my father started working here, it was another time. No one even had the idea of doing something on his own.”

The striking differences between the Belousovs provide a view of the huge gap separating a new generation of Russians from their elders. Unlike their parents and grandparents, who strove to build communism at home and abroad, the young are interested primarily in their own lives. Their elders looked to the state for everything; the young understand that their future lies in their own hands.

“We believed in a happy tomorrow that never came,” said the elder Belousov, who was a Communist Party member until after the unsuccessful military coup in Moscow in August, 1991. “They want to be happy today.

“We were more idealistic than they are, had fewer material demands and were ready to go through any hardships necessary for our state,” he added. “Our children are more tied to the ground. They are pragmatic. They don’t want to be part of a big collective. They don’t want moral rewards, like the medals we always received; they want material rewards.”

Alexei Belousov quit a dead-end job earlier this year and, together with three associates, talked management at the Chemical Fibers Plant into letting them use part of the factory to produce badly needed surgical thread. Then they persuaded the government to give them a loan.

They are starting small, but they plan to buy part of the factory and expand their production capabilities as soon as they turn a profit.

“I think the majority of my generation has the same values that I have,” said Alexei Belousov, who has sharp amber eyes, an athletic build and wavy brown hair. “I want to be rich. But I haven’t even started to dream about what I would do with the money. Any amount of money that I get now, I’m going to put it into the development of my company.”

Sociologists, psychiatrists and older Russians who work closely with young people are amazed that the new generation is so motivated, optimistic and free-thinking--considering that it was raised on stories about the goodness of Uncle Lenin, father of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

“They are completely free people. They don’t feel negative about anything. They think this is a very good time to be young and in Russia,” said Anatoly Rubinov, a commentator for the prestigious Literaturnaya Gazeta who helped interview students for a new university.

Conversations with scores of young people in Moscow, St. Petersburg, the provincial city of Voronezh and the Moscow suburb of Mytishchi confirmed that the new Russians are independent and free-thinking. Their plans, hopes and fears offer a glimpse of what their vast country may one day become.

Oleg Zhdanov, a 19-year-old Muscovite who runs his own tourist agency, wants to improve his country’s image by helping Russians and foreign tourists rediscover its proud past.

A slight man with wire-rimmed glasses, Zhdanov has read countless guidebooks published before the Bolshevik Revolution, talked to historians and implored babushkas, Russia’s famous all-knowing grandmothers, to tell him stories about their neighborhoods.

For years he took friends to see the architectural wonders hidden in the tiny streets of old Moscow, but over the last year and a half he has started taking foreigners on these tours and realized there was real money to be made while pursuing his passion.

“I’m an individualist,” he said. “I know my goals; I’m moving toward them, and I will achieve them.”

Zhdanov’s goal is no less than to take the tourism market out of the hands of Intourist, the giant state agency that held a monopoly on tourism in the Soviet era and whose guides described the past through the prism of ideology.

With their initiative, self-confidence and vibrant individualism, young Russians look nothing like the stereotypical lazy, bored Russian workers whiling away the hours between punching in and punching out.

“I think that if a man wants something enough, and if he is not a certifiable fool, he will find a way,” Zhdanov said. “I do not regard myself as a fool. I think I more or less know my business, and I have found people who think the way I do, so why should I fail? Together we will achieve what we have set out to achieve.

“We are part of the society, and if every single member of society gets what he wants, no matter whether he is a theater critic, a chairman of a stock exchange, a tourism tycoon or a musician, we are going to be a jolly good society.”

Yelena Vrono, a psychiatrist who works with teen-agers and young adults, believes members of the new generation are more emotionally stable because society now--unlike the restrictive Soviet system--allows them to do their own thing.

“Any student (in a Soviet school) who showed personal initiative or was different from the others was considered bad,” Vrono said. “They tried to kick him out or tried to break him and make him like the others.”

Now, she noted, teen-agers and young adults are remarkably accepting of each other’s differences, and students can go to alternative state schools, or even private ones, if they have problems.

Zhdanov’s mother, Natalya, 48, whose father and husband both suffered in the gulag of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, delights in the apparent changes to the Russian character.

“Our whole lives were about fear,” she said. “My generation was a generation of fear. I cowered before my boss, and I cowered before my doorman. I was afraid of everything. I was 40 before I realized that I was worth something and that I did not have to be afraid of anyone.”

Recently laid off from her engineering job and now teaching drawing classes and supervising after-school activities at a local school, Natalya Zhdanova says she sees the change in her pupils and in the dozens of young people her son brings to their apartment, located in one of the countless prefabricated high rises on Moscow’s outskirts.

“These kids are different,” she said. “They are not afraid to go into any room and give their opinion.”

She fears, however, that older Russians will smother the younger generation’s enthusiasm and ambitions. Even in the new Russia, political control is exerted by mostly middle-aged former Communists who--despite their public embrace of democracy and free-market economics--still are influenced greatly by the old values. Many older people resent the new values of the young and their ability to adjust to the new capitalism.

“I’m afraid that people in our generation will refuse to give the young people the freedom they need to build the lives they want,” Natalya Zhdanova said.

Most Russians between the ages of 15 and 30 ignore the stormy politics that have rocked the country over the last several years.

“We have a lot of interesting things to do other than be interested in politics,” Oleg Zhdanov said. “Each of us wants to make a career and get rich. You can’t make a lot of money in politics.”

The pro-democracy rallies of the late 1980s and 1990 that helped bring an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power were attended primarily by the middle-aged and elderly. Only when hard-line forces tried to take power in the August, 1991, coup did the young come out in force. Zhdanov was one of the tens of thousands of teen-agers and young adults who rushed to the Russian Parliament, known as the White House, to defend President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government against the rebellious generals.

“We have been overfed on politics, and besides, all of us have our own views and principles which we do not want to bandy about in the streets,” he said. “But the White House was a special case. Standing there, I knew I was defending the society in which I live. In other words, I was defending not democracy, but myself, my beliefs and my freedom of thought.”

Sergei Skatershikov, 20, who studies at Moscow State University and has three different jobs and his own consulting firm, also boycotted the anti-Communist rallies but came out to defend the White House during the attempted putsch.

“I never took an active part in the demonstrations, mostly because I saw no reason to side with either side,” he said. “But on the day of the coup, when I went out to express my protest against the tanks, I felt compelled to stand with the mob in order to protect my independence.”

Young people are so apathetic about politics these days that even Roman Barsukov, 19, who is studying to be a diplomat, does not care what kind of government sits in the Kremlin.

“It’s not important to me what government is in power--a Brezhnev-type regime or a democratic one,” said Barsukov, a dark-haired young man with rosy cheeks. “As long as the state wants to stay in the international community, the internal system is not important.”

Barsukov’s father, who was sitting in the family’s cozy kitchen as his son talked, remarked on how different Russian young people were 25 years ago, when thousands enthusiastically answered the government’s call to staff the industrial revolution in far-flung sites in Siberia.

“We had no doubts,” said Col. Anatoly Barsukov, 45, a military historian and career officer in the Soviet army. “We firmly believed in the Soviet system and were very idealistic.”

While talking wistfully about his youth, the elder Barsukov conceded that there were negative aspects to this idealism.

“When I was a young man, everyone looked in exactly the same direction; modern youth looks around in a full circle,” he said. “I think this is healthy. Maybe we were too romantic.”

As in immigrant families in America, where children act as interpreters of language and culture for their parents, Russian parents now look to their children for practical and moral advice on how to deal with the new challenges of daily life. With prices 100 times higher than a year ago, the crime rate soaring and no sign of an end to the deep economic crisis, many older people feel disoriented and betrayed.

Marina Kovaleva, 19, an economics student at Moscow State University, feels the responsibility for shielding her parents from the day-to-day shocks.

“My parents are older, 55 years old, and it’s very difficult for (them) to understand what is going on,” she said. “They look to me for explanations of why prices, which stayed the same for 30 years, keep going up, and why we’re poor although they worked hard all their lives.”

During the Soviet period, many parents supported their grown children financially. Now many young people are beginning to realize that they need to support their parents. High school and college students regularly take part-time and even full-time jobs to help support themselves and their families, a rarity during the last several decades.

“Our generation knew that our parents would support us for a long time,” said Maria Volkenstein, 40, a Moscow-based pollster. “This made us dependent on them. Now the situation is reversed.”

While some parents preach the values of the Soviet era, many others feel so off-balance and incapable of giving advice suitable for today’s world that they do not play the traditional roles of adviser or disciplinarian to their children.

“Their generation feels, and they’re right, that they are more stable than their parents,” said Volkenstein, who has conducted focus groups with young people in Moscow and Voronezh. “This is why they don’t feel conflict with their parents.”

And young people, who are rebelling against the strict social standards and rules of Soviet society, do not try to control each other’s behavior with peer pressure.

“In our generation, no one says you should or should not,” said Alexander Bakhaldan, 22, another fledgling capitalist. “Everyone does what he thinks is necessary.”

Taken to the extreme, this anything-goes attitude gives many young people the feeling that they are above basic laws and morals. Many young women, lured by the easy money and the material goods it can provide, turn to full- and part-time prostitution; many young men turn to crime.

In an ice-cream parlor-vodka bar in downtown Voronezh, a Russian city of 1 million, Kirill Dolgikh and five other tough-looking young men sat smoking and drinking pint after pint of straight vodka from plastic cups on a recent Sunday afternoon.

“My monthly pay at the factory is not enough to take a girl out to dinner,” complained Dolgikh, 20, a welder at the Vornozh Aviation Plant and admitted part-time extortionist. “I’d like to go into business and make real money, but I don’t have the chance. So, instead we rough up the non-Russians who sell fruit at the bazaar. . . . Because they’re afraid of us, they give us money.”

Dolgikh, an effusive, skinny young man wearing an expensive leather jacket and plaid cap, said he and his cronies prey especially on the dark-skinned peoples from the Caucasus republics of the former Soviet Union.

“We let them know they are living off the Russians and for that they have to pay,” he said. “We’re very nationalistic by nature. We hate non-Russians.”

Dolgikh isn’t alone in his sentiments. Support among the young for ultra-nationalist and pro-monarchy fringe groups is the exception both to their generation’s tolerance and to its political apathy.

In St. Petersburg, the old czarist capital and Russia’s second-largest city, 23-year-old Milana Kovalkova is the ideological leader of one of the numerous Russian-supremacist groups that have sprung up over the last few years and are particularly popular with young people.

“I am a young person, but I’ve long been interested in current events,” Kovalkova said. “I searched and searched for an ideology that would lead Russia forward. I soon saw that democracy was failing, and I became interested in nationalism. We need to solve huge economic problems, and nationalism is capable of solving it.”

Sergei Negrobov, 18, a biology student in Voronezh, is an ardent monarchist who believes that in the new Russia, he will have the same privileged life as his ancestors. They were part of the pre-revolutionary nobility, with one mansion in the city, another in the countryside and a third on the Black Sea.

“Western democracy is not for Russia,” Negrobov said. “We’re completely different people. We need a pure monarchy, without a constitution, and a leader with an iron hand.”

Monarchists, nationalists and the average, nonpolitical young all have one thing in common: They feel a deep love for their country.

“I don’t know how to feel about the (Bolshevik) Revolution; was it good or was it bad? I don’t know what to think about the Soviet regime. But I feel I’m a patriot,” said Kovaleva, the economics student at Moscow State. “I’m proud that I am a Russian.”

And many, like Zhdanov, the young tourism entrepreneur, are as confident in their country’s success as they are in their own.

“I believe there will be a New Russia,” Zhdanov said. “It will be a highly cultural and noble country. It will be a superpower, but not like before. Nothing will remain in our souls of the people of my generation from the Soviet period.”