This study is the third and culminating work by Kitty Weaver on Soviet youth. The first, "Lenin's Grandchildren," studied the Soviet child from birth to age seven. The second, "Russia's Future," studied Soviet children from ages seven to fourteen, the years of the Young Pioneers. This study examines the Soviet system and its education of young communists in the Komsomol (the Young Communist League) and at Moscow State University. Given the events of recent times, Weaver also shifts from examining how Soviet young people learned communism to considering how they unlearn communism.

Her first-hand account is based on her travels and her study in the Soviet Union and in Russia and the other fourteen republics. The question Weaver most frequently asked, and the question implied by many of her other questions of her Soviet friends and informants was, Who are you? Their illuminating answers and her pithy comments and observations sprinkle her narrative with a sense of the everyday, providing the reader with a three-dimensional portrait of Soviet life, of the hopes and the fears of Soviet youth.