Patriotism and war enthusiasm sweeps through the totalitarian countries in the run-up to WW2. Children are supposed to become the prime soldiers of the future.
The
All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (Russian: Всесоюзный ленинский коммунистический союз молодёжи (ВЛКСМ),
listen, usually known as
Komsomol (Russian: Комсомол), a
syllabic abbreviation of the Russian Коммунистический Союз Молодёжи (Kommunisticheskiy Soyuz Molodyozhi), was a political
youth organization in the
Soviet Union. It is sometimes described as the youth division of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), although it was officially independent and referred to as "the helper and the reserve of the CPSU".
The Komsomol in its earliest form was established in urban areas in 1918. During the early years, it was a Russian organization, known as the Russian Young Communist League, or RKSM. During 1922, with the
unification of the USSR, it was reformed into an all-union agency, the youth division of the All-Union Communist Party.
It was the final stage of three youth organizations with members up to age 28, graduated at 14 from the
Young Pioneers, and at nine from the
Little Octobrists.
After the
1917 February Revolution of the
Bolsheviks and the
Russian Civil War of
1917–1922, the Soviet government under Lenin introduced a
semi-capitalist economic policy to stabilize Russia’s floundering economy. This reform, the
New Economic Policy (NEP), introduced a
new social policy of moderation and discipline, especially regarding
Soviet youth. Lenin himself stressed the importance of
political education of
young Soviet citizens in
building a new society.
The
first Komsomol Congress met in
1918 under the patronage of the Bolshevik Party, despite the two organizations' not entirely coincident membership or beliefs. Party intervention in
1922–1923 proved marginally successful in recruiting members by presenting the ideal
Komsomolets (Komsomol youth) as a foil to the "bourgeois
NEPman". By the time of the second Congress, a year later, however, the Bolsheviks had, in effect, acquired control of the organization, and it was soon formally established as the
youth division of the Communist party. However, the party was
not very successful overall in recruiting Russian youth during the NEP period (
1921–1928).
This came about because of
conflict and disillusionment among Soviet youth who
romanticised the spontaneity and destruction characteristic of War Communism (1918–1921) and the
Civil War period. They saw it as their duty, and the duty of the Communist Party itself, to
eliminate all elements of Western culture from society. However, the
NEP had the opposite effect: after it started,
many aspects of Western social behavior began to reemerge. The contrast between the "Good Communist" extolled by the Party and the capitalism fostered by NEP confused many young people. They
rebelled against the Party's ideals in two opposite ways:
radicals gave up everything that had any Western or capitalist connotations, while the
majority of Russian youths felt drawn to the Western-style popular culture of entertainment and fashion. As a result, there was a
major slump in interest and membership in the Party-oriented Komsomol.
By
1925 Komsomol had 1 million members, and many others were in theater groups for younger children. In
March 1926, Komsomol membership reached a NEP-period peak of 1,750,000 members:
only 6 percent of the eligible youth population. Only when
Stalin came to power and
abandoned the NEP in the first Five Year Plan (1928–1933) did
membership increase drastically. The youngest youth eligible for Komsomol membership were
fourteen-years-old. The
upper age-limit for ordinary personnel was
twenty-eight, but
Komsomol functionaries could be older. Younger children joined the
allied Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization. While membership was nominally voluntary, those who
failed to join had
no access to officially sponsored holidays and found it very difficult (if not impossible) to pursue higher education.
The
Komsomol had little direct influence on the Communist Party or on the government of the Soviet Union, but it played an
important role as a mechanism for teaching the values of the CPSU to the younger generation. The Komsomol also served as a
mobile pool of labor and political activism, with the ability to
relocate to areas of high-priority at short notice. In the
1920s the Kremlin assigned Komsomol major responsibilities for
promoting industrialization at the factory level. In
1929 7000 Komsomol cadets were building the
tractor factory in
Stalingrad, 56,000 others built factories in the
Urals, and 36,000 were assigned work underground in the
coal mines. The goal was to provide an
energetic hard-core of Bolshevik activists to influence their coworkers the factories and mines that were at the center of
communist ideology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komsomol .
