The Komsomol: Questions and Answers

A catechism, and openly so: something over a hundred questions in six chapters, each followed by an answer running from a paragraph to several pages.

There is no single author. Five writers are credited - Andrei Andreyev, Vladimir Krivoruchenko, Victor Moshnyaga, Dolores Polyakova and Stanislav Chibiryayev - with Polyakova as compiler. The credit that tells you most is the style editor, Angus Roxburgh: a native English speaker was put over the prose because the book was not written for Russians.

Its imagined reader is reconstructible from the questions themselves, several of which are transparently other people's accusations turned into interrogative form. The introductory essay addresses the progressive and democratically minded young people of the world, describes the campaigns of young people in the capitalist countries, and worries that their protest often becomes spontaneous and politically immature. This is a book for a young Western or third-world leftist, sympathetic in principle, who has met hostile accounts of the Komsomol and would like them answered.

What it therefore documents is the whole apparatus of Soviet youth organisation as the organisation itself wished it understood: membership and admission, the relation to the Party and the Pioneers, the labour projects and the student building brigades, military-patriotic education, culture and sport, and the international work.

Written in 1978 or 1979 and published in English in 1980 - so before the army entered Afghanistan, though on the shelves throughout that war.

Translated by Alex Timofeyev. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.