This is a catechism. Progress Publishers issued it in English in 1980 under the title The Komsomol: Questions and Answers, and it is exactly what the title says: something over a hundred questions, grouped into six chapters, each followed by an answer of a paragraph to several pages. There is no single author. The title page credits five writers — Andrei Andreyev, Vladimir Krivoruchenko, Victor Moshnyaga, Dolores Polyakova and Stanislav Chibiryayev — with Polyakova as compiler, Alex Timofeyev as translator and Angus Roxburgh as style editor. That last credit matters more than it looks. Progress put a native English speaker over the prose because the book was not written for Russians. It was an export product, and knowing who it was exported to explains nearly everything else about it.
Start with the date, because the spine misleads. The English edition is 1980 and the Russian imprint carries the same year, but the book's evidence stops earlier. The current party congress throughout is the Twenty-Fifth, of 1976, cited four times; the Twenty-Sixth, of February 1981, is naturally absent, but so is any event of 1979 beyond a passing reference to that year's Supreme Soviet elections. The latest Komsomol congress discussed is the Eighteenth, of 1978, and the most recent anniversary celebrated is the League's sixtieth, of October 1978. The Tenth Five-Year Plan, 1976–1980, is described as in progress and its targets as still to be met; 1980 itself appears only as a date in the future, the year of Lenin's 110th anniversary and of school-building quotas yet to be filled. This is a manuscript written in 1978 or 1979 and published in English in 1980. The distinction is not pedantry. It means the book almost certainly went to press before Soviet troops entered Afghanistan in December 1979, and the authors cannot fairly be accused of concealing a war that had not begun. It also means the book was on the shelves throughout that war. The copy from which this text was digitised carries a Los Angeles Public Library date stamp of 13 May 1983.
Who is asking the questions? Not a Soviet teenager. 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 "quite often" becomes "spontaneous and assumes politically immature forms." The imagined reader is a young Western or third-world leftist, sympathetic in principle, who has encountered hostile accounts and would like them answered. You can reconstruct that reader from the questions themselves, because several are transparently other people's accusations put into interrogative form. One chapter asks whether the All-Union March through the sites of military glory gives grounds "to claim that this is a form of 'para-military training' of young people," and answers that "there is absolutely no reason to allege" it, "as some bourgeois Sovietologists claim." Another concedes that critics "claim, in particular, that the mass participation of young people in shock-work construction projects is not based on enthusiasm but is a direct result of the 'pressure' applied by the Party and Komsomol organs," and replies: "But this is very far from the truth." The book is a briefing document for friendly foreigners on how to answer the other side.
That format produces one exchange which is worth the price of the volume:
Is it obligatory for young people to join the Komsomol? No, certainly not. The Komsomol is a voluntary organisation.
Hold that answer against the book's own arithmetic. Membership stands at "almost 38 million." "Some 60 per cent of the Soviet Union's younger generation are Komsomol members." "Over 140 million have passed" through it since 1918. A voluntary organisation containing three-fifths of everyone in its age band is a curious kind of voluntary. And the book states, without embarrassment, what the League was for at the top end: "The second Komsomol function is to be a reserve pool for the CPSU," and "of all public organisations operating in the Soviet Union, only the Komsomol has the right to recommend its members for CPSU membership." Over thirteen million people, it records, joined the Party on a Komsomol recommendation. This is the career ladder, described accurately, in the vocabulary of vanguard training rather than of advancement.
The honest thing to say about the Komsomol is that both halves were true at once, and that the book gives you one half plainly and refuses to set it beside the other. It was a genuine mass organisation which did real things, and it was the ante-room to a career, and for most of the 38 million the two were not experienced as separate. The book cannot admit the second because it has assigned that motive to a different category altogether. The word "careerism" occurs four times, always as a vice: the moral code demands "intolerance of injustice, idleness, untruthfulness, careerism and money-grubbing," and Komsomol organisations combat "individualism and egocentrism, untruthfulness and careerism, tale-bearing and boot-licking." Careerism is a personal failing of narrow-minded individuals. That membership might be the rational precondition of a place at university or a promotion is never raised, and cannot be, because the question does not exist in the book's moral universe. The corresponding silence is total: the words "expel" and "expulsion" do not appear anywhere in the text. A book of a hundred questions about an organisation of 38 million never asks what happened to a member who was thrown out — which was, for anyone with ambitions, the end of them.
The deeper falsification is historical, and it takes two forms: an organisation that disappears, and a generation that is never named.
The Young Communist International is founded in this book with some ceremony. The Komsomol Central Committee, six weeks after the Comintern's establishment, "issued an appeal to convene the founding congress of the Young Communist International"; the YCI "was set up on 20 November 1919, with active organisational and political support from the Komsomol." It reappears in the 1930s, when winning young people from fascism "became one of the major tasks of the Young Communist International and the Leninist Young Communist League." Then it stops. There is no third mention. The narrative moves through 1942 and 1943 to the founding of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, and the organisation whose birth was described twice simply ceases to be referred to. The two occurrences of "disband" in the whole book both concern the Anti-Fascist Committee of Soviet Youth, wound up in 1956.
What is missing is that the YCI was dissolved in 1943 alongside the Comintern, a gesture to Moscow's wartime allies. It is instructive to check this against the companion volume in this same series, Victor Privalov's volume on the Young Communist International (Progress, 1971) — a book of sixty thousand words whose entire subject is the YCI. Its proportions are themselves an answer: some fifty thousand words carry the story from the nineteenth-century socialist youth movement as far as 1921, and seven thousand cover everything from 1922 to 1970 — so barely two of the detailed years are years in which the YCI actually existed. Privalov does mention the dissolution, once, in a sentence built to carry as little weight as possible:
Judging it inexpedient to maintain a single centre for the international working-class movement because this partly gave rise to bourgeois slander about "Moscow's interference" in other countries' internal affairs, the Executive Committee of the Communist International adopted a resolution on May 15, 1943, to disband the Third Communist International. This decision, approved by the Communist parties of the world and the Young Communist International, meant that the international communist youth organisation would also cease to exist as a section of the Communist International.
Even here the YCI does not act; it approves, and then ceases to exist as a subordinate clause of somebody else's decision. And the reason given is the offence taken by bourgeois slanderers. In the 1980 volume, aimed at a younger and less specialist reader, even that sentence has gone.
The second silence is heavier. The Komsomol of the 1920s was a real site of political argument, and this book knows it. It devotes a full question to the subject — "What opponents did the Communist Party have to fight while spreading its influence on the youth?" — and the answer catalogues the positions with some accuracy: the theory of "equal footing" between Party and League, the theory of Komsomol "neutrality," the "contracting parties" principle, and the "youth syndicalists" who wanted councils of young workers outside the League. These were genuine debates about whether a communist youth organisation was an instrument of the party or a political body in its own right, and they were argued out by people who believed the answer mattered.
The book resolves them by attribution. "It is a known fact that in his fight against the Communist Party and Leninism, Trotsky set the youth against the Party apparatus and the veteran Party cadre, hardened in the revolutionary struggle, calling the youth 'the Party's most sensitive instrument' and referring to the students as 'the barometer of the revolution.'" Note the quotation marks, and note that they are unsupported. This is a heavily annotated book — 130 footnotes, 23 of them citing Lenin's Collected Works to volume and page. The two phrases attributed to Trotsky carry no reference at all. The reader is given words inside quotation marks and no way to find them, in a volume that documents Lenin scrupulously.
Then the opposition is filed: at the outset the Komsomol had to fight "the Trotskyites and other Right-wing opposition groups." The Left Opposition has been reclassified as right-wing, in a sentence that also disposes of the actual Right Opposition by never mentioning it. Bukharin's name does not occur in this book. Neither does Zinoviev's, nor Kamenev's, nor Stalin's except once in the name of a tractor works at Stalingrad.
Most striking of all: not one leader of the Komsomol before the living incumbent is named. Not Lazar Shatskin, who chaired the founding congress and helped build the YCI. Not Nikolai Chaplin, general secretary through the middle 1920s. Not Alexander Kosarev, who ran the organisation from 1929 to 1938 and whose name was attached to everything the book celebrates about the first five-year plans. Shatskin, Chaplin and Kosarev were all arrested and shot in the Terror. The book covers sixty years of an organisation and can name two of its officials: Boris Pastukhov, the First Secretary in post when it was written, and Leonid Brezhnev, who was not one. The generation that built the thing has been removed from the account of it, and the removal is seamless — a reader would not know there was anything to look for.
The reply was written at the time, and it is specific. Trotsky devoted a section of The Revolution Betrayed (1936) to exactly this subject: chapter 7, "Family, Youth and Culture," part 2, "The Struggle Against the Youth." He is describing the Komsomol congress of April 1936:
Moreover, it soon became clear that this carefully sifted and selected congress was called at this time exclusively for the purpose of a political expropriation of the youth. According to the new constitution the Communist Youth League is now even juridically deprived of the right to participate in the social life of the country.
And on the reasoning offered:
"We have no need of any second party." This argument reveals the fact that in the opinion of the ruling circles the Communist Youth League, if it is not decisively strangled, threatens to become a second party.
His account of the result is the direct answer to this book's silence about its own leaders: "All who are outstanding and unsubmissive in the ranks of the young are systematically destroyed, suppressed or physically exterminated. This explains the fact that out of the millions upon millions of Communist youth there has not emerged a single big figure." Written in 1936, before Kosarev was taken.
Trotsky also set out the three courses available to a young person in that situation — "participate in the bureaucracy and make a career; submit silently to oppression, retire into economic work, science or their own petty personal affairs; or, finally, go underground." That first road is the one the 1980 volume denounces as "careerism" while describing its institutional machinery in detail. Writing on 16 April 1936 in the Bulletin of the Opposition, in the same weeks as that Komsomol congress, he put the political conclusion in a sentence: "Bonapartism is afraid of the youth; we must rally it to the banner of Marx and Lenin." The Fourth International's press continued the analysis into the war years; writing in Fourth International in August 1941, John G. Wright observed that "the Komsomols — the Russian YCL — were erased as a political organization in 1936," and in July 1941 that the League "has been purged more frequently and savagely than any other branch of the apparatus." By October 1943 Wright was reporting in the same journal that the village Komsomol, "reorganized so many times in the past, must be rebuilt from scratch" — and quoting Pravda's own account of a district in Tadjikistan where, of 52 primary Komsomol organisations, "more than half of them exist only on paper."
None of which means the book is worthless, and a reader told that everything here is a lie will be badly served. A great deal of what it describes was real, and some of it was admirable.
The material provision was not invented. Higher education was free and financed from the state budget; most students received state grants scaled to academic progress and material circumstances; accommodation in student hostels was, as the book says, "practically free" and canteen meals were subsidised. Workers taking evening or correspondence courses had their hours reduced by law, and were entitled to paid leave for examinations and four months' paid leave to write a diploma dissertation — provisions that would have sounded, to the Western apprentice this book was aimed at, close to fantasy. The sports grounds, the tourist camps in the Crimea and the Caucasus, the sanatoria, the subsidised holidays: these existed, and they were available to ordinary young people on terms unavailable to their contemporaries in Manchester or Detroit.
So did the work. The student construction brigades began, as the book records, with physics students from Moscow University who went to northern Kazakhstan in May 1959; by 1976 some 533,000 students were spending their "labour semester" building things. The Baikal–Amur Railway was built, largely by young people, in conditions of real hardship. The literacy campaigns of 1929–32, in which Komsomol members were given a short training course and sent out as group leaders, reached tens of millions of people and are among the genuine achievements of the Soviet 1930s, whatever else was happening in those years. The publishing operation was substantial: Molodaya Gvardiya, whose objectives the Fifth Komsomol Congress set out in 1922, had by the 1970s issued over 14,000 titles and more than 700 million copies.
And the internationalism was not fraudulent in the young people who felt it. Komsomol members did volunteer for the International Brigades in Spain. Soviet students did work for solidarity with Vietnam, with Chile, with the liberation movements of southern Africa, and the book's account of the World Youth Festivals describes something that really did move hundreds of thousands of young people across the world. That a bureaucracy used these sentiments, and that it used them to legitimise a state which had shot the founders of the organisation professing them, does not make the sentiments false. It makes them a resource that was stolen. An introduction which sneered at the young reader who was moved by this book would be missing what the book is evidence of.
Which brings us back to the one word the volume uses four times and never applies to its own moment. "Internationalist duty" appears here in four settings: defending the revolution during the Civil War, aid to the young communist movement in the West, support for national liberation, and solidarity with the developing countries. By the time this English edition reached its readers, "internationalist duty" was the official formula under which Komsomol members were conscripted and sent to Afghanistan, where a great many of them were killed. The book contains no mention of Afghanistan, and, given its date, probably could not have. But it closes on a long passage about the international situation in which "detente was progressing" — published in the year détente ended, the year of the Moscow Olympics and the Western boycott, into a world its authors had finished describing just before it changed.
It is worth adding that the revolutionary left did not read that boycott as the West's friends of Soviet youth would have wished either. Writing in Intercontinental Press of 2 June 1980, David Frankel counted the score with some relish: "President Carter calls a boycott of the Moscow Olympics—and two-thirds of Washington's NATO allies send their teams." A book like this one and a boycott like that one were arguing past each other, and both were about something other than the young people in whose name they spoke.
Read it, then, for what it is: the most complete statement available in English of how the Soviet state wished its youth organisation to be understood abroad, at the last moment when that state still expected to be believed. It is accurate about buildings, budgets and benefits, and it is silent in exactly the places where the history hurts. Read it beside chapter 7 of The Revolution Betrayed, and beside Privalov's volume in this same series, and the shape of the omissions becomes as informative as anything the authors chose to include.