Russians reminisce about their Soviet childhoods on a new web site dedicated to those born between 1976 and 1982. In some ways, being a Soviet kid in the 1980s wasn`t that different from growing up in the West at the same time. You could find the same stonewashed jeans, ill-advised leggings and passion for "Dirty Dancing" on either side of the Iron Curtain. But in the Soviet Union, children had to use a lot more than pester power to get what they wanted. They boiled Indian-made jeans in bleach to give them street cred, cut up tights to make the crucial hairbands and even colored their chewing gum with felt-tip pens to make it look like imported bubblegum. These and other tips on how to be the envy of Class 7B circa 1988 are shared in a new web site called "76-82: Encyclopedia of Our Childhood." While the listings on "76-82" are factual, they slip in some insights about a time when children were entrusted with many adult tasks -- buying bread and standing in lines, for example -- and often had to make their own fun. Some of their activities could get a stamp of approval from Western hippies, such as dressing paper dolls in hand-drawn clothes or learning poems by heart to recite at birthday parties. Naturally, that made them suckers for anything mass-produced, from fluorescent Chinese hairbands, which were so hard to obtain that some kids chopped up tights or socks to make imitations, to chewing gum, another rarity that was sometimes placed in the freezer for reanimation after each use. The 1976-1982 generation caught a bit of socialism, but it also came fresh to such Western entertainment as Disney cartoons, Krupchansky said. He put the site`s appeal down to a cozy feeling of nostalgia for a society with definite rules. "It seems to me that this kind of nostalgia for a bright past is a general characteristic of socialist people. ... Since there were certain ideals, there were certain heroes. What heroes are there now? Batman?" TheMoscowTimes