We contacted a Russian teenager in Moscow during the month of April '99. Below are his opinions and beliefs.

About NATO's Involvement with Kosovo

Nowadays everybody in Russia are discussing Yugoslavia and Kosovo. As you know Serbian and Russian nations are Slavs and we have the same religion. So the discussion point is should we send troops and weapons there or should we not. The opposition (Communists, liberal democrats) say we should send both troops and weapons. Conservatice and liberal organizations and others say we should find a political way to solve this problem. My opinion is that sending weapons is essential, but no troops.

My granddad took part in World War II and he says that the man that has been at war will never want to fight again. I'm not for Milosevic (of course), but I'm not for what NATO is doing.

You see - United States mass media and Russian press and television have radically different points of view. In your country [the USA] CNN name it a "strike" to Yugoslavia. Russian politics and journalists name it aggression. Aggression term suits the situation much better now.

You see - sending troops is very dangerous. You've seen three Americans caught by Serbian troops. German, French, Italian, American soldiers will die not for protecting their homes but for something very unclear. Serbians are very good gorillas. They fighted with Germans in WWII and they won.

NATO is doing quite barbarian things - like destroying memorial place for people died.

On Russia

The situation in economics is very, very bad and it's Russia, not Yugoslavia.Tthe situation is more stable than in August, but still there are a lot of problems. The cause of the modern problems is a problem of non-professionals in government. They thought not about their country but about their wages. One book of character says that "no great capitals were earned in a legal way" - that's true for Russia of course, a lot of politics are still communist-minded but the "young reformators" are worst than communistic-minded democrats. We should choose between people who ruled our country for seventy years and ruled it to a crash in 1985-91 and young ambitious democrats that ruled our country to three greatest economic crisis. A great choice, really.

If the elections were tomorrow, I'd vote for our present Moscow senator Yuri Luzhkov. He is in the middle between communistic part and "truly" democratic part. Another good choice is our present Prime Minister - Evgeny Primokav. He is the only clear (non-corrupted) person in all our government; he tries to do all his best to make Russia and Russians happier, to get Russia out of this economic gap.but he's alone. We should wait half a year or so - then there will be results of his economic politics.

Nowadays young people in Russia aren't interested in politics - only drugs, smoking, alcohol.Where there is no drugs (like in big cities) - there's vodka and when you speak to people on the Internet your understanding of the situation isn't representative - only the big cities are connected to the Internet and only those who can pay for it (or their institution does). The most part of people don't even know what Internet is. They have much more problems to solve than the problems of new technologies. When you aren't paid your monthly wage that equals $15 - would you care about the Internet?

During our interviews, we developed a set of questions to ask. This Russian teenager gave us some answers, and the whole interview can be viewed by clicking the link below.