Category Archives: Komsomol

Today, I began research on Komsomol participation in collectivization and found this little tidbit in the archive.  This is from Komsomol Central Committee member Gerasimov’s report, October 1929:

In Penzen region, there were rumors that a [grain requisitioning] commission arrived to close the church.  Or in a similar rumor, the commission arrived to arrest the priest and take him away.  A crowd gathered.  Or another case, to catch a swindler.  A crowd of up to 800 people surrounded the commission and began shouting.  They wanted to arrange a samosud.  There were shouts of “They attack the peasantry from all sides, let’s beat them all.”  True, more than half of [the crowd] was drunk.

RGASPI f. 1M, op.5, d. 24a, l. 22

The Russian media is abuzz with reports on the 90th Anniversary of the Komsomol.  Local celebrations, museum exhibits, and conferences are planned all over the country to commemorate the youth organization. In Pskov, the local office of the Committee for Youth Policy and Sport has organized festival called “My Komsomol Youth.”  Arkhangelsk has a series of events planned through November 4 “to give an objective judgment of the activities of the League, remember old friends, and impart our experience to young people,” says Arkhangelsk governor Ilya Mikhalchuk. “On these days we will celebrate the organization, which without exaggeration, gave us admission into life.”  The Volgograd provincial museum will host an exhibit titled “Milestones Glorious Path of the Komsomol.” Other cities holding events include Nizhni Novgorod, Cheliabinsk, Amur, Novosibirsk, Kursk, and Irkutsk, to name a few.  The biggest event was held on Sunday in the State Kremlin Palace in ..read more

Ninety years ago this week, 194 delegates from youth groups from all over revolutionary Russia met to consolidate themselves into an all-Russian youth organization.  Of the 194 delegates, 176 had voting rights, (the rest had the right to speak but not vote).  The voting delegates claimed to represent 120 different youth groups with a total membership of 21,000.  The core groups were two pro-Bolshevik groups, the Socialist League of Worker youth based in Petrograd and the Third International from Moscow.  Of the delegates, half (88) were Bolshevik Party members, 38 were communist sympathizers, and 45 were non-party youth.  Also present were three Social Democratic Internationalists, one Left Socialists Revolutionary, and one Anarchist.  The week long conference, which ran from 29 October to 4 November finalized the creation of the Russian Communist Youth League, or Komsomol.

To commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Komsomol, SRB will follow the history, reminiscence, and celebrations ..read more

Robert Amsterdam’s blog has a translation of a fascinating Kommersant Vlast’ article (the Russian version is here along with some great photos.) on one of the more peculiar forms of early Soviet propaganda: the agitation trial. The article argues that agitsudy were one of the ways “the Bolsheviks managed to change the attitude of tens of millions of people towards the repressions being conducted by them.” I’m quite familiar with agitsudy and their role in fostering a Soviet-style morality among the illiterate masses. I have a few copies of these court room dramas. They come in such stiff names as Trial of Sexual Promiscuity and Trial of Hooligans. I use one titled Trial of a Komsomol or Komsomolka for Breaking League Discipline in my discussion of Komsomol expulsion.

Here is a description of what a typical agitsud looked like:

The most serious attention was devoted ..read more

So everyone is declaring Nashi’s death. According to Kommersant and other Russian media, Nashi plans on shutting down 45 of its 50 branches. All that will remain are chapters in Tula, Ivanovo, Vladimir, Voronezh, and Yaroslavl. The consensus reasoning is that Nashi has outlived its purpose. Russia is no longer threatened by “colored revolution,” which Nashi was created to battle, and some feel the pro-Kremlin group has gotten of control. Perhaps even downright embarrassing to its Kremlin sponsors. Nashi’s persistent protests against Estonia over the Bronze Soldier have gone beyond containment. The last straw appears to have been when the EU began denying Schengen visas to Nashisty. In an act of defiance, organization protests in front of the European Commission in Moscow and some of its member decided to illegally enter the EU anyway. Both acts resulted in arrests.

Moreover, present political conditions ..read more

Third Congresses seem to have great significance in the history of Russia’s pro-state youth organizations. The 3rd Komsomol Congress held in 1920 steered the organization away from Civil War to socialist construction. It was there that Lenin gave his famous “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues” speech that urged that young communists must “learn communism.” Lenin said,

“I must say that the tasks of the youth in general, and of the Young Communist Leagues and all other organisations in particular, might be summed up in a single word: learn. . . The teaching, training and education of the youth must proceed from the material that has been left to us by the old society. We can build communism only on the basis of the totality of knowledge, organisations and institutions, only by using the stock of human forces and means that have been left to us by ..read more