cry. I shouted: ‘I won’t give you the scarf! I won’t give you the scarf!’ I fell down on my knees and begged them not to take the scarf from me. But they took it all the same. From that day on, I was no longer a Pioneer.40
The purpose of the Pioneer organization was to indoctrinate Soviet children in Communist values and discipline. The were subject to the same regime of ‘work plans’ and ‘reviews’ used in the Komsomol and the Party. According to the psychologist and educational theorist A. B. Zalkind, the Party’s leading spokesman on the social conditioning of the personality, the aim of the Pioneer movement was to train ‘revolutionary-Communist fighters fully freed from the class poisons of bourgeois ideology’. Krupskaia believed that the Pioneers would replace the family as the main influence on Soviet children. Pioneers were taught to be hard-working and obedient, pure in thought and deed. ‘Through the Pioneers I learned to be smart and tidy, to finish all my tasks on time, and to be disciplined in everything I did,’ reflects Minusova. ‘These became my principles for life.’41
Pioneers were activists. There was a wide range of club activities – organizing demonstrations, editing wall-newspapers, voluntary work (
What did being a ‘Soviet person’ mean? It meant loving the Soviet motherland, working hard and setting an example, as we were taught at school and in the Pioneers. I took these words to heart. In my third school year [in 1924] I was already the chairman of the school committee. Later I became the chairman of the school court, a prosecutor in school trials, and deputy chairman of the school’s trade union. I was an active Pioneer. Through the Pioneers I learned to love my school and country more than my own family. I loved the head-teacher of our village school as if she were my own mother.42
Not all Pioneers were as active as Romashkin. For many children, the activities of the Pioneers were really just a form of play. Ida Slavina, the daughter of a prominent Soviet jurist, recalls forming her own club in the apartment block where she grew up in Leningrad:
I liked to read the children’s journal
Other Pioneers were more serious about their political activities. Encouraged by their seniors, they would imitate the practices of adult Communists and perform the roles of bureaucrats and policemen. These precocious enthusiasts would bring briefcases to ‘executive meetings’, where they would speak in Party slogans, recording formal minutes, and denounce those teachers they suspected of holding counter-revolutionary views. There were even Pioneers who helped the police hunt out ‘spies’ and ‘enemies’ by acting as informers on the street.44
At the age of fifteen, Soviet children progressed from the Pioneers to the Komsomol. Not all children made the transition. In 1925, the Komsomol had a million members – about 4 per cent of the Komsomolage young (from the age of fifteen to twenty-three) – a fraction five times smaller than the percentage of children in the Pioneers.45 To join the Komsomol was to enter on a career path towards Party membership. There were many jobs and college courses that were open only to members of the Komsomol, or which selected such members over candidates who were better qualified. Nina Vishniakova recalls joining the Komsomol as a ‘huge event’:
To this day [she wrote in 1990] I can remember every word of the rule book – it stirred so many feelings in me: I recall thinking that I was now suddenly a responsible adult… It seemed to me that I could do far more than I had been able to do before I joined. It had always been my dream to belong to the Soviet elite, to achieve something important, and now that dream was coming true.46
The poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky, who was born in 1915 to a family of Moscow lawyers, recalls his graduation from the Pioneers to the Komsomol in 1930. Arriving late at the admission meeting, Dolmatovsky was reprimanded by the secretary of the Komsomol, who said that he was ‘evidently not mature enough to join the Komsomol’ and was ‘only joining as a careerist’. When Dolmatovsky told his father about the incident, he was criticized for making light of it. ‘They are watching you,’ his father warned, ‘and you must prove that you are ready to give yourself to them.’ At the next meeting Dolmatovsky was questioned by a girl, who asked him if he was ‘ready to sacrifice his life for Soviet power’.47
Belonging to the Komsomol entailed accepting the orders, rules and ethics of the Communist Party. Members of the Komsomol were supposed to put their loyalty to the Revolution above their loyalty to the family. They were no longer children, but young Communists, expected, like Party members, to live their lives in the public sphere. The Komsomol functioned as a reserve army of youthful activists and enthusiasts for the Party, providing volunteers for Party work as well as spies and informers ready to denounce corruption and abuse. Such tasks held a broad appeal for Soviet youth in the 1920s and 1930s, shaped as they were by the ideals of the Revolution and the Civil War, when action and energy had carried the day. Many young people joined the Komsomol not because they were Communists, but because they were activists: they wanted to do something, and there was no other channel for their social energy.48 Members were charged with exposing ‘class enemies’ among parents and teachers and, as if in training for the job, took part in mock trials of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ in schools and colleges.
Born too late (between 1905 and 1915) to be raised in the values of the old society, and too young to have taken part in the bloody fighting of the Civil War, these young activists had a highly romantic view of the Revolution’s ‘heroic period’. ‘We yearned to be associated with the revolutionaries, our older brothers and fathers,’ recalls Romashkin. ‘We identified ourselves with their struggle. We dressed like them, in a military style, and spoke a type of army jargon, which we copied from the older village boys who had brought this language home from the Red Army.’ The activists embraced the Spartan culture of the Bolsheviks with a vengeance. Having grown up in the barren economic landscape of the First World War, the Revolution and the Civil War, they were no strangers to austerity. Even so, they were especially militant in their ascetic rejection of all personal (‘bourgeois’) wealth and pleasure that detracted from the revolutionary struggle. Some formed communes and pooled all their money and possessions to ‘abolish individualism’. In moral terms, too, they were absolutists, struggling to break free of the old conventions.49
The Komsomol idealists of the 1920s were a special group – one that would play a major role in the Stalinist regime. Their guiding ethos was described by Mikhail Baitalsky, a Komsomol activist in the Odessa region, who formed a club together with his friends. ‘Everyone was pure, ready to give his life if need be to defend Communism,’ Baitalsky writes in his memoirs. ‘Those who showed off or complained were called rotten intellectuals. “Rotten intellectual” was one of the most insulting labels. Only “self-seeker” was worse.’ In these circles there was total commitment to the Party’s cause. Nobody was shocked, for example, when it was reported that an agent of the Cheka (the political police) had confiscated his own father’s hardware shop for the Revolution’s needs. Thoughts of personal happiness were considered shameful, and should be banished. The Revolution demanded the sacrifice of today’s pleasures for a better life in the future. As Baitalsky put it:
With hopes fixed on the future, a feeling of personal participation in the world revolution, which was imminent, and a readiness to share full responsibility for it, we felt uplifted and fortified in all matters, even in very ordinary ones. It was like waiting for a train that was to take us somewhere to accomplish something wonderful and happily straining to hear its whistle in the distance…50
Intimate relations between young men and women were seen as a distraction from the collective passion
