The Party was never a body that one could join at a whim; members had to be nominated, their backgrounds checked and, once they had been admitted, serve a candidate stage before being accepted into full membership. In the early years, class background was crucial for entry, but from 1939 the formal preference given to members of the working class was dropped and people were admitted regardless of the class to which they belonged; from 1961, the Party was officially a Party of “all the people.” Members were always a minority within Soviet society. In 1986, before membership began to plummet in the late 1980s, there were 18,309,693 full and 728,253 candidate members, constituting 9.7 percent of the adult population. The Party remained heavily male; in 1986 only 28.8 percent of members were women. Members were subject to Party discipline, had to attend regular Party meetings, obey all Party instructions, pay membership dues, and continually conduct themselves according to the rules of the Party and the principles of what it meant to be a good communist. While the tasks were not onerous for non-office bearers, at various times they did impinge on individuals’ lives. This was especially the case if someone became subject to Party discipline, when such an entry on someone’s personnel file could have significant future consequences for career advancement; being expelled from the Party was worse than never having been a member.
Party members generally gained few advantages over non-Party citizens. Officeholders were more fortunate in this regard. Just as there was a graduated scale of the power to fill office, there was a similar scale regarding access to privileges and to goods that were not widely available. In a deficit economy like that of the Soviet Union, access to scarce goods was a real bonus, and those who held official positions gained such access. The level and range of availability differed according to the level of position one occupied, but because all of the leading positions were determined by the Party, it was the Party that determined who got access to such goods. The Party was thus the key to access to privilege in the Soviet Union.
PARTY FUNDING
Officially, the Party was funded through the membership dues that all members paid and the revenues generated by sale of the Party’s publications. However it is clear that, from the time of the Party’s ascension to power, such dues were substantially supplemented by funds from the state. The amount of money that was transferred across in this way in unclear, but it was substantial. The Party owned property in all cities and towns in the Soviet Union, paid salaries to its employees, funded a range of publications, made provision for its own daily functioning, and funded sister parties and movements abroad. The annual budget far exceeded the amount of money brought in through fees and publications. The difference was covered by money obtained from the state. As the Soviet Union fell during the late 1980s to the early 1990s, much of this money was secreted abroad, its whereabouts as uncertain as the dimensions of the Party’s real annual budget.
The Party’s financial dependence on the state and the way in which it was intertwined with the state at all levels led many to argue that it was not really a political party but more a state organ. There is much to this argument, but it was neither coterminous with the state nor reducible to it. It was the first of the sort of organization that became common during the twentieth century, the ruling single party. As such, the CPSU was the prototype for which many would emulate.
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See also: CENTRAL COMMITTEE; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; KAMENEV, LEV BORISOVICH; LEFT OPPOSITION; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; MARXISM; MOLO-TOV, VYACHESLAV MIKHAILOVICH; NOMENKLATURA; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; POLITBURO; RIGHT OPPOSITION; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; STATE DEFENSE COMMITTEE; TROTSKY, LEON DAVIDOVICH; UNITED OPPOSITION; WAR COMMUNISM
Gill, Graeme. (1988). The Rules of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Gill, Graeme. (1994). The Collapse of a Single-Party System. The Disintegration of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Millar, James R., ed. (1992). Cracks in the Monolith: Party Power in the Brezhnev Era. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Schapiro, Leonard. (1970). The Communist Party of the Soviet Union. London, Methuen. Wesson, Robert G. (1978). Lenin’s Legacy. The Story of the CPSU. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. White, Stephen. (1989). Soviet Communism. Programme and Rules. London: Routledge.
GRAEME GILL
The Communist Youth Organization (Komsomol) was the major vehicle of political education and mobilization for Soviet youth. Founded in November 1918, and disbanded in 1991, the All-Union Leninist Communist League of Youth was one of a series of Soviet institutions dedicated to educating and regulating Soviet citizens at every life stage- the Little Octobrists, the Young Pioneers (ten to fourteen), the Komsomol (fourteen to mid-twenties), and the Communist Party.
The Komsomol was founded as an elite and “self-standing” organization of communist youth. Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s the Komsomol was gradually transformed from a select organization of activist proletarian youth into a mass organization subservient to Party policy. By March 1926, there were approximately 1.75 million young people in the Komsomol; more than half of the working-class youth in Leningrad and Moscow were members. A few years later, the Komsomol was almost twice the size of the Party. Nonetheless, as of 1936, still only about 10 percent of eligible youth belonged to the Communist Youth League. In response, and at Josef Stalin’s direction, the Komsomol was formally relegated this same year to the role of a propaganda and education organization open to almost all youth regardless of class background. By 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev acceded to general secretary, the Komsomol reported that it had 42 million members between the ages of fourteen and twenty-seven.
Young people joined the Komsomol for many different reasons. In the first decades of Soviet power, the Komsomol provided a community of peers for urban youth, especially as all other youth groups-the Boy Scouts, religious youth organizations-were suppressed. Komsomol clubs in factories, schools, and institutes of higher education organized sports activities, drama groups, and concerts, as well as literacy and antidrinking campaigns. The Komsomol offered a new identity as well as new opportunities; some young people experienced the exhilaration of the Revolution, the struggle of Civil War, and the rapid industrialization of the Stalin era, with a sense of great personal involvement. Like joining the Party, becoming a member of the Komsomol could also confer economic and political benefits. It helped pave the way to eventual Party membership, and Komsomol members were often awarded important political and agitational positions. The Komsomol was not equally relevant or available to everybody, however. Proletariat males were at the top of the ladder of Bolshevik virtue, while peasants, students, and women of all classes were on lower rungs. Women of all classes made up just 20 percent of the Komsomol in 1926. Although their numbers increased throughout the Soviet period, they remained underrepresented in leadership positions.
The energetic participation of some Komsomol members in the dramatic industrialization and collectivization campaigns of the early 1930s did not protect either the rank-and-file or the Komsomol elite from the purges. In 1937 and 1938, the entire Komsomol bureau was purged and the first secretary, Alexander Kosarev, was executed along with several others. During World War II, the Komsomol was deeply involved in patriotic campaigns and was effective in this period of national defense at attracting members and encouraging enthusiastic response to patriotic propaganda. The war was the final high point of the Komsomol, however. After the war, the Komsomol was increasingly trapped between the Party’s demands for political con-formism and young people’s increasingly diverse
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Young Pioneers march on Red Square. © AFP/CORBIS and internationally informed desires for relevance and for entertainment. The conservatism of the Komsomol was reflected in the aging of its leadership. In 1920, the median age of a delegate to a Komsomol Congress was twenty. In 1954, it was twenty-seven. By the years of stagnation (the period of Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership) the Communist Youth League was mired in bureaucracy and corruption, and unable to remake itself; it had become a mass membership organization to which few truly wanted
