Although historians have long been interested in the subject of Soviet youth, relatively few academic studies have ever focused squarely on the communist youth league—the Komsomol—in their investigations of state and society in the USSR.Footnote 1 This is surprising, insofar as the experience of the Komsomol dovetailed with that of the party in many ways, especially during the interwar years. Loosely-structured in its early days, the Komsomol gradually swelled into a massive monolithic institution. Originally a radical group intent on overthrowing the status quo, the youth league later became a central part of the USSR's increasingly conservative cultural establishment. And if the Komsomol began as an organization intent on freeing Soviet youth from the constraints of the past, it eventually assumed a key role in shaping and disciplining those it claimed to be liberating.
In his monograph Raised under Stalin: Young Communists and the Defense of Socialism, Seth Bernstein provides a needed analysis of the history of the Komsomol between the late 1920s and 1941. Writing largely within the genre of institutional history, Bernstein traces the evolution of the Komsomol from its founding in 1918 as a revolutionary organization to its maturation as an instrument of rulership, administration, and control.Footnote 2
As is well known, the early youth league was a party organization designed to mobilize young radicals into the service of the revolution. Once enrolled in the Komsomol, these activists became associated with some of the revolution's most radical, anti-establishment actions, whether in the workplace (the baiting of bourgeois specialists), the home (the denunciation of traditional family hierarchies and superstition) or society at large (the disruption of organized religious practice and incitement of generational conflict). Komsomol members also served as the shock troops of the revolution during the so-called Great Break (1928–1929) and the period of collectivization and dekulakization (1929–1933).
Bernstein argues that over time, however, the Komsomol came to be more than just a vehicle for the party's mobilization of popular radicalism. The youth league served as a context for social experimentation as Bolshevism was transformed from an oppositionist political movement into a model of social and cultural practices on a massive, society-wide scale. It offered an opportunity to fashion and shape the radicalism of its membership through propaganda activities that were both agitational and indoctrinational. It attempted to train its recruits through educational and cultural programing. And it did much of this in a surprisingly bureaucratic way, tracking its membership through personnel reports, statistics, and the surveillance of opinions, habits, and practices expressed within the ranks.
Aside from being a recruiting tool for the party, the Komsomol fulfilled a variety of functions designed to ensure that its upwardly mobile membership possessed the necessary professional, cultural, and ideological qualifications. Early priorities like education and indoctrination were thus complemented by physical fitness and paramilitary exercises during the later 1930s as national defense became a high priority. These forms of physical, educational, and political training for the rank and file were, in turn, matched by efforts to identify and purge unworthy elements from the ranks, either through self-criticism, document verification, or investigations into social origin and past political affiliations.
Above and beyond its role in preparing Soviet citizens for party membership, the Komsomol fulfilled other important administrative functions as well. Early on, youth league members frequently served as party auxiliaries when card-carrying Bolsheviks proved to be in short supply. This was particularly visible during the cultural and political agitation drives of the late 1920s and the collectivization and dekulakization campaigns of the early 1930s, as well as in the aftermath of the 1937–38 Great Terror, when Komsomol activists were promoted en masse into the party. The same would later be true during the Second World War. During the mid-1930s, the Komsomol's mobilizational service to the party and state was augmented by a new mandate, according to which the league was now to offer Soviet youth training in culture, personal conduct, and good manners. Becoming cultured was now an intrinsic part of becoming an upstanding citizen of the proletarian dictatorship.
Bernstein complements Raised Under Stalin’s institutional point of view with regular attention to the Komsomols themselves.Footnote 3 There, he notes that Soviet youth were simultaneously an asset and a liability for the party during the interwar years. After all, if many of these recruits proved to be easily rallied to the revolutionary cause, they also required a huge amount of discipline and direction. Such issues became more pronounced over time, aggravated by a growing generation gap that has been most thoroughly discussed by Anna Krylova. According to Krylova, Soviet youth in the mid-1930s were forced to confront a crisis of authenticity, insofar as they were expected to make their way in a revolutionary society despite having been too young in 1917 to have actually participated in the USSR's foundational events. As a result, Soviet youth sought out revolutionary credentials wherever they could find them—in the village, on the shop floor, in higher education, or in their Komsomol organizations. This crisis of legitimacy and authenticity was in many cases only fully resolved at the front during 1941–45.Footnote 4
As Bernstein sheds light on the experiences of individuals in the Komsomol, he repeatedly returns to a handful of central youth league leaders. In some senses, this history of the Komsomol could have been written through the biography of A. V. Kosarev, who served as the seventh general secretary of the organization from 1929 to 1938. A radical with three grades of formal education, Kosarev worked on the shop floor in Moscow factories during the First World War before joining the pro-Bolshevik Union of Worker Youth in the fall of 1917. An early member of the Komsomol in 1918, he came to personify the youth league, rising from a rabble-rousing local activist through the Red Army ranks into a series of leadership posts during the mid-1920s, pausing only twice for remedial schooling in political and administrative work.
The quintessential Komsomol “promotee” (vydvizhenets), Kosarev demonstrated considerable political savvy during the second half of the 1920s and was appointed to head the entire organization in 1929. From then on, Kosarev would guide the league as it followed the party's increasingly Stalinist line. Kosarev himself transformed during these years from a militant revolutionary to an increasingly conservative representative of the party establishment. Along the way, he exchanged his interest in militancy, class consciousness, and internationalism for discipline, party mindedness, and Soviet patriotism.Footnote 5 Bernstein provides photos of the activist that capture this transition perfectly: if Kosarev, around 1925 assumed a cocky Napoleon-like pose in his worker's cap and commissar's leather jacket (44), by 1936, he had swapped his revolutionary machismo for the gravitas of a bureaucrat's double-breasted Boston suit, dress shirt, and polka dotted tie (136).Footnote 6
Bernstein argues that Kosarev's eventual fall from grace was linked to his overall career trajectory. A member of the Stalinist elite in the 1930s, he built a patron-client network within the Komsomol that strengthened his hold over the organization, but which also linked his fate to those both above and below him. According to Bernstein, Kosarev's authority was called into question between 1937–38 by his ties to politically-compromised officials and his reluctance to engage in an indiscriminate purge of his organization. His fall in November 1938 was precipitated by a denunciation by O. P. Mishakova, a fanatical underling who questioned his vigilance as Komsomol boss. Bernstein also reveals that Kosarev was closely aligned with N. I. Ezhov—a fact that may have ensured him the latter's protection until late 1938, but thereafter left him painfully exposed. Ultimately, if Kosarev was the quintessential Stalinist Komsomol, he also epitomized the perils of this calling.Footnote 7
Bernstein completes his story of the communist youth league by examining the degree to which the organization had become an instrument of party and state rule by 1941. What had once been an autonomous organization with a militant following was now a bureaucratic apparatus tasked with supplying its membership with proper ideological, cultural, and paramilitary training. This ossification of the Komsomol's revolutionary élan is reflective of similar processes visible throughout the late interwar Soviet experiment.
