The League of Communist Youth: Enthusiasm as a Driving Force

The League of Communist Youth: Enthusiasm as a Driving ForceAuthor(s): Katherine KuskovaSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 10, No. 29 (Dec., 1931), pp. 301-316Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4202668 .

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I'HE LEAGUE OF COMMUNIST YOUTH: ENTHUSIASM AS A DRIVING FORCE

I. ONE may take up a most favourable attitude to the Soviet Govern- ment, one may own oneself convinced that the Russian people have such a government as its qualities deserve, but it cannot possibly be denied that in ruling the people this Government resorts, or has been compelled to resort, to despotic measures for consolidating its power and in particular for carrying out its political and economic plans. There are persons ready to find justification for these despotic methods of the Government; they point to the vastness of the country, the anarchical disposition of the people-a people which has never become used to self-government and is at a low level of culture, and they ask how else could such a people be compelled to do work that was useful to the State ? Why, surely, they say, even in the past, to enhance the greatness of Russia despotic measures were demanded of the autocracy. To such persons it should be pointed out that by a whole series of revolutions of ever-increasing strength, the people tried to destroy precisely this despotic system of the autocracy; that by the 2oth century it had reached maturity and did not want any longer to accept its deprivation of rights. This was just the idea expressed by Leo Tolstoy in his famous letter to Nicholas II written on 25 January, I902, on the eve of the first Revolution. " Autocracy," wrote Tolstoy, " is an obsolete form of government, which may be suitable to the demands of some people somewhere in Central Africa remote from the rest of the world, but not to the demands of the Russian people, which is obtaining always greater and greater enlightenment in the common enlightenment of the world; and therefore to support this form of government, and Orthodoxy as connected with it, cannot now be done, as it is done at present, by means of every kind of violence, exceptional repression (martial law), administrative exiles, executions, religious persecu- tions, prohibitions of books and newspapers, perversion of education, in general every kind of evil and cruel thing. By means of violence one can persecute the people, but one cannot govern them."

In this perfectly right judgment of Leo Tolstoy there is one capital mistake; even on the eve of the 2oth century not all strata of the people consciously rejected autocracy as a system. The boot pressed the foot, and all felt the pain and discomfort, and all were ready to dash into revolution. But not all discerned the cause of the pain, and far less could it be said that all were ready to replace it with a more civilised form of government; such willingness is only

30I



302 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.

to be obtained by practical experience. Such experience the Russian people did not possess; it had to come only in the future with the establishment of constitutional government in one form or another. That is why it was comparatively easy for the Bolsheviks to remove the thin layer of the educated intelligentsia and the still thinner layer of the conscious elements of the people and to establish the autocracy of the Communist Party, an autocracy infinitely more despotic than its predecessor.

However, there is not a single despotic government that can maintain itself by measures of violence alone. It is all the same necessary that someone should sympathise with it, that someone should willingly support it and defend it. Indeed, if it is only in order to carry out measures of violence, men are needed, hands are needed, executants are required. The Soviet Government requires a very great number of these executants. In the first place it has to suppress the active and passive resistance of its enemies, of whom there are a great multitude; secondly, it must destroy the old way of life, the old customs, the old beliefs; lastly, it must carry out such -plans as destroy all personal initiative and establish an order of life which is unintelligible to the widest masses of the people. Under the old autocracy anyone who did not interest himself in politics had after all a great deal of freedom in other spheres of his life. He could sow and reap his crop, he could trade, he could engage in a handicraft or build up a big business, he could choose a learned career or become a poet, a writer or an artist. Even if there were obstacles on these paths, they could be removed or got round in

-ways that were customary, and anyhow there was an extremely -wide sector of human life defended, if not by law, yet by custom, -from the interference of the Government. Under the Soviet system, personal freedom is limited to a minimum. Long before the collective movement, the peasant had prescribed to him the times when he was bound to sow; he was not allowed to make use of the product of his labour; he was not allowed to keep the amount of cattle that his farm might require, and so on. Similar regulation, carried into -the utmost details, spread over every side of the life of the townsfolk. If the citizens of Russia had willingly submitted to this system of planning, the question how and by whom the Government was supported would be clear; but, in fact, almost all the measures of the Soviet Government met with open or secret opposition. Who helped to carry them through by force?

All who have followed Soviet life with close attention for these fourteen years will necessarily give a quite definite answer to this



THE LEAGUE OF COMMUNIST YOUTH. 303

question. It was the young folk, the youths and even the children. Youth, in Soviet Russia, occupies a quite special position. It is not only the object of propaganda for the so-called " old Bolsheviks "- Bolsheviks from the times of the conspirative period-but it is also the chief instrument which the Government handles with the greatest skill to carry through its measures. That is why the question of " fathers and children " is at present so acute in Russia, and why it is so important to study the physiognomy of this young generation, which is now the support of the Government and in the future its successor. It is characteristic, by the way, that even in West European organisations of the Communist Party the young predominate, that is even the quite young, often almost children of I4 to i6. If in the Socialist parties there are at work persons sedate, elderly, taught by the experience of many years, on the other hand, the chief leaders of the Communist Party are trying to rely on the young and enlist them far more readily than elderly workers. It might also be mentioned that elderly workers do not readily join the Communist Party. So in Russia, where all possible means are.used for propaganda and for bringing recruits from the proletariat into the party, workers of over 40 are hardly ever registered. They are not drawn in even by those great privileges which in Russia are possessed by the party men, these new noblemen, members of the new privileged class.

On what rests this mutual attraction? By what charms does Bolshevism draw the young, and which of the qualities of youth are of service to Bolshevism?

II. Bolshevism is not only a dogma, a theory, a peculiar kind of

religion. Bolshevism from earlier times, the times of conspiracy, was always distinguished from the other parties by an exceptional keenness for action, for the creation of new facts, which had to be called into being by energetic work. Propaganda was very important, but far more important was a strike, a mass movement on to the street, a conflict with the police, any kind of exercise of the muscles and training in revolutionary work, risk, contempt for danger, the secrecy of conspiracy, a heightened imagination, _en- thusiasm. These are characteristics of its work by which Bol- shevism in the past attracted the young. The director of the Red Archives, Professor M. N. Pokrovsky, does not only analyse and systematise important documents; he tries to recall lively memories of the growth of the revolution and of the methods used by the




various parties in their struggle with the autocracy. Here is what we read in one of these books of reminiscences (Fleer, The Petersburg Committee of Bolsheviks in the War Years): " The young folk played a considerable part in the life of the Petersburg works and factories, not only in a revolutionary sense, but also in their proportionate strength. In I9I4 in Petersburg industry the " lads " were 9 per cent. of the whole number of workmen, in I9I5 9.5 per cent. by the statistics of the factory inspectors. The shortage of working hands in I9I6 increased this still further. The proportion rose, especially in the big works. In the Putilov works, the Baltic, the Triangle (Trekhugolnik), the Old Lesner, the Trubochnoy, there were 25 per cent. of these at work. If we take into account the custom of adding to the ages of boys in order that they could more easily enter the works, the total number of youths in Petersburg industry in I9I4-I7

must be taken as 45,000 to 50,000. Up to the war and in the time of the war there were no separate organisations for the young; the wide mass movement of the young began only in March I9I7; but the young none the less entered eagerly into the movement, to circulate manifestos, to announce strikes in the works, to collect a workers' meeting, to bar the doors, to prevent the very " domesti- cated" workers from creeping home, to keep spies away from the speaker, to stand on sentry in order to warn the meeting of the appearance of the police when they were called in by telephone by the management, to guard a hasty consultation of party men from a visit of the foreman, standing somewhere in the corridor or on the staircase of the works, to agitate at the ballot-box in factory elections. This is by no means a full list of the revolutionary activities of the young."1 - Thus even in conspirative work the young attracted the strong attention of the Bolsheviks: " Young people," writes Fleer, " are regardless and disinterested. The events of factory life, strikes, street meetings, and so on, were for the young a regular holiday. Where the older workmen came out with hesitation, thinking of wife and children, the young acted without worrying themselves as to the consequences. The Bolsheviks for the service of.the workers' movement grouped the young around them." So here is the value

1 The causes of the Russian revolution are profound and very various, and of course, it is not alone factories and workshops, that is, not only the proletariat that defined its scope and its course; but it cannot be denied that it was precisely the work of the extreme revolutionary parties that had the greatest success among the factory masses, convulsed by the war, and hindered the elements which had more sense of state responsibility from giving the movement forms which would have been less destructive.




of the young-that they did everything with enthusiasm, " not worrying as to the consequences."

But if the young rendered such invaluable services to the revolu- tionaries at the time when the old order still held firm and it was necessary to act cautiously within its limits, how far greater was their importance when this system broke up and left open the very widest field for experiments of all kinds? Elder people did not willingly go to the advance posts even then, when the police had vanished and when the construction of a new life might be carried out more or less without obstacles. They still had always a strong tie with the past; there were habits, there was the belief that even in time of revolution they could remove the unneeded remains of the old system and the old life gently, painlessly, " bloodlessly." They knew well from books that in revolutions the extreme elements are always for a time triumphant. The faith in the bloodlessness of the Russian Revolution, its mildness, lasted right on to October (November). But all this time the Bolsheviks were recruiting the young, organising them in special columns in factories and workshops, and most of all in the dissolving army. The young listened with contempt to the speeches of the men who had " the wisdom of experience." What was this? A revolution and again caution? Here too, as to the consequences of extreme measures they did not worry. On the contrary, all that was moderate, neither hot nor cold, weighing and calculating, repulsed them. They dashed into the battle; their enthusiasm and thirst for novelty sought where it could apply itself.

It was so not only in the Red camp. When at the time of armed civil war the White movement sprang up, there, too, the young played an enormous part. Sixteen- or seventeen-year old schoolboys streamed as volunteers into the White army. Young girls worked in the hospitals as sisters of mercy. At all the advance posts the young were to be found. We also know how many young people perished during the fighting in Moscow in the six days October 25-3I (November 7 to I3), I9I7. At this time there were in Moscow 30,000 adult officers,2 but of them not more than i,ooo took part in the fighting against the Bolsheviks. The war was waged by schoolboys, militarycadets; above all, bythe young. Atalltheseposts of attack and defence the young showed extraordinary enthusiasm and undoubted heroism.

2 The figure established by the later registration of officers by the Bolsheviks.

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III.

After their victory in November I9I7, the Bolsheviks were compelled to reckon with the open opposition of the intelligentsia and the officials of the public offices. But it was clear that their victory had to be realised quickly, in order not to give the enemy time to recover and again to pass to the offensive. The first need was to seize the machinery of government. The Bolsheviks needed hands, and again we have the same picture: the elder men hesitated to carry out their duties of " cleansing " Russia from the forces of the past. They had still pretty strong ties that bound them to the old world. Even convinced Bolsheviks, long-standing members of the party, were more ready to pass the watchwords, to give orders than to execute them. At the outposts in this " uprooting of the old " again were to be found the young. Young workmen, students, schoolboys, schoolgirls. They burst into the Ministries, they formed guards, they entered the quarters of the middle class and conducted searches, they at once rushed to the very centre of the machine and filled the posts in the camp of the new masters of the situation. They saw, they felt, that there was no longer any government. Not stopping to weigh the consequences, they wanted themselves to be the government. In their country there had come a period of the establishment of a new force, and only force: no one as yet talked of the new rights. The first thing that was done was to render "rightless " the elements which did not support the new power.

In this establishment of the new power by the hands of young people who had not yet grown up to a sense of responsibility for the work that they were doing, the future historian will note a mass of tragic episodes. Thus in I9I9 at Archangel the head of the Cheka was a young man of seventeen. Intoxicated by his unlimited power, he himself interrogated those accused of counter-revolution. His manner of doing this bore all the marks of sadism. The Head sat on a chair close to a hole made in the ice of the river, with a note- book in hand and a revolver at his belt. The accused was tied into a sack and let down into the hole. This was in the north, where the frost is sometimes as much as 35 or 40 degrees Reaumur. The accused was then questioned. The sentry kept hold of the bag, the body being let down into the water, and it was in this position that the accused had to give his answers. When the Central Cheka of Moscow heard of this manner of torture, the young man was imme- diately arrested. It proved that he had gone mad, perhaps from the excess of his enthusiasm in the cause of the revolution.




In the period when militant Communism developed (I9I9-2I),

the young found themselves on a new front. A bloody war was conducted against the country districts, which were not supplying bread to the towns. This bread was to be taken. Also its sale on the market at free prices was to be prevented. By this time the party cadres were already sufficiently organised. There were already in the country too young lads who had registered with the party. Bands of organised collectors set out from the town accom- panied by troops of the Red Guard. The country lads were against their old fathers. They showed the collectors where grain was hidden, broke into the courtyards of the " kulaki " and afterwards often fell victims to the vengeance of those whom they had despoiled and injured. The young were militant. They enjoyed fighting, action, confusion. They were inspirited by the consciousness of power. They saw by experience that they could do what they liked, that by resolute action in the spirit of the watchword of the moment they would earn some reward from the Government. The rewards were not given for nothing; the young were always at the posts of danger. When in the time of famine the order was given to seize the church properties, the party men of elder age could not always bring themselves to do such work. They feared the religious fana- ticism of the population, and perhaps they themselves in their hearts were not free from a certain feeling of fear of punishment from God for sacrilege. In I92I the religious instincts even of the party men had far from disappeared; thus very often at the head of the commission for seizing the church properties there were lads of i6 or I7, members of the local Communist cell.

Events developed, and so did the opposition to Communism, especially in the country. It can be said with confidence that the elder peasants were in the mass opposed to the Bolsheviks, and the Government knew that this was their mood. But a general knowledge was not enough in order to counteract this; there were needed concrete details, eyes and ears for the discovery of " counter-revolutionary " work. Who could do this better than the young people? There were formed extensive cadres of village correspondents, worker correspondents, and even children correspondents. This army, half of children, flooded the papers with news and accusations of the behaviour of the elders, often their own parents. These letters were really remarkable. "As I am a child correspondent," writes Evlampy Rychkov, a thirteen-year-old, " I ought to follow anything wrong and report it." And report they will, even children, not only youths. They report with enthusiasm, not reckQning what

U 2




will happen to those whom they report against.3 The Government fully understood the advantage of having these child correspondents. The children were organised into pioneer detachments and now serve the revolution not merely as individuals, not in isolation, but as an organised force. They have their own periodicals, their own congresses, their own clubs. The pioneer organisation of children in I93I had 2,ooo,ooo members, the Komsomol (the organisation of youth) 5,ooo,ooo.4 These organisations have a military basis; they are divided into brigades. In summer, they set up camps, teach their members military gymnastics, etc. Obedience to the brigadier or the leader is complete, under threat of exclusion from the organisation.

Children and youths have to follow out the execution of the party watchwords. Thus they make their parents take part in the election of soviets, watch over the maintenance of the " class line," conduct agricultural propaganda, address meetings on when the fields should be sown, whether they should be sown with sorted seeds, the advisability of replacing the plough by the tractor and individual farming by collective. In Tashkent, I2,000 children arranged a demonstration at the time of the elections. They carried placards with the motto: " Shame to him who will not bring his father and mother to the poll. Other relations should be brought, too." In a village in the country, on the walls of the huts one often finds inscrip- tions scratched in childish handwriting: " Mamma, don't be behind. Go to the election of the soviet," or " Drive the kulak and masters out of the soviets." Often, too, children arrange demonstrations of thousands against drunkenness of fathers, which is very common in Russia. They carry placards, " Drunkenness is a disgrace in the land of the Soviets. Let us deny our parents if they drink."

It need not, of course, be pointed out that the whole collective movement, the expulsion and arrest of the kulaki, was in considerable measure carried out with the help of the young folk. However,

3 These letters of children and youths were, of course, handed on by the editorial offices of the papers to the organs of political administration. On the charges of children, investigations were carried out and the guilty punished. It was on the basis of letters from schoolboys that teachers were arrested or dismissed, also kulaki, etc.

4 How wilhngly children serve as child correspondents is shown by their number. The newspaper Pionerskaya Pravda has Io,ooo regular correspondents in every part of Russia. It receives daily 400 to 500 letters written in children's handwriting. The newspaper Pioneer has 5,ooo correspondents. The total number of child correspondents is given as 30,000. See the periodical of Maxim Gorky Our Achievements (Nashi Dostizhenia), No. 4, 1930.




the opposition of the peasantry to the collective farms frightened even these young enthusiasts of collective action. At the Ninth Congress of the Komsomol, the president, Kosarev, announced that in the Komsomol there was beginning to appear " fluidity" (teku- chest). Some openly left the organisation, others ceased to attend the meetings and practically dropped out of the work of the union. The Communist Friedmann5 explained this exit by fear of the " socialist attack on the village." At the time of Ioo per cent. collectivisation, i,ooo,ooo members left the Komsomol.6 This kind of attack on the peaceful population of the village was more than could be stood even by young men who were candidates for the Communist Party.

Consequently it is evident that there is a limit even to youthful militancy. Clearly the young people felt that there was something wrong with this attack on individualist peasants, and their ardour was abated. Perhaps this refusal of young people to serve as "hands " for the Government in the matter of collectivisation influenced the Head of the party. The well-known letter of Stalin on " Dizziness from success' called for a stoppage of the attack and a slower rate in the movement of collectivisation. If the young folk did not want to carry out these orders, that means the dictator- ship had gone too far, and concessions were required.

IV. It is with enormous enthusiasm, as we learn not only from the

Soviet papers, but from Russians who have nothing to do with the Government, that the young folk have welcomed the Five Year Plan. Private letters tell us that this was the attitude to that grandiose task not only of the Young Communists, but also of the non-party youth. At last it seemed that the peaceful era had started; the new life, the new ways could be realised not only in word but in fact. Young people have a great capacity for imagination, and the Bolsheviks were good psychologists. The NEP had run into a blind alley. An outlet had to be found for energy in construction, which is always all the keener after a revolution, after a period of destruction. Such an outlet could only be given either by a further development of the NEP or, on the contrary, by destroying the NEP and by taking all initiative and construction into the hands of the Government. This second path was chosen. The Government again needed hands and enthusiasm to carry out its plans.

5 See the periodical The Young Guard (Molodaya Gvardia), No. 7, I93I. 6 Statement of Kosarev at the Ninth Congress of the Komsomol.



3I0 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.

Many of the elder folk have gone down, unable to make themselves believe in the miracle of the Five Year Plan. Many valuable specialists are now in prison, only for protesting in thought against the rate of industrialisation. Removing all unbelievers from the work, even their own Communist right opposition, the Government very well knew from experience of former years that believers would be found. The picture of the transformation of Russia had to be drawn in such a way that a keen imagination would be fired by it. By I928 life had become so dull, revolutionary watchwords seemed so to have lost their spirit, that even the young folk were becoming " bourgeois." Dancing, flirtations, the love of finery on one side and the pursuit of learning and knowledge on the other, were drawing the young away from the outposts and lowering their enthusiasm. The Five Year Plan opened a new period of fighting for a grandiose task and called for hands and for inspiration. Again there was revolution, on a new plane.

The hand of the Government marked out the points of attack; here petrol; there coal; there exploiting the virgin riches of the Ural-Magnitostroy; in the south the Don Basin; in the north the timber works; in Stalingrad (formerly Tsaritsyno on the Volga) the colossal tractor factory; in Kharkov another; in Kuznetsk coal; in Kazakstan cotton; in Leningrad and Moscow furious work in the factories; in the country collective farms; and on the top of all this the nerve of the country, transport. And everything in gigantic proportions. Take Magnitostroy. It was a waste place in the Urals near Mount Magnatny, and in a short time it became a town of I40,000 inhabitants, 40,000 workmen, with foreign engineers and the hiss and clank of machinery brought from abroad. In the villages and country districts the silence of the Russian plains is broken by the roar of tractors, " those instruments of anti-Christ," as the peasant regards them. Tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of workmen are thrown across from one place to another, wherever something is being constructed in " shock fashion." These people are seeking everywhere for new ways of astonishing the world. The Americanisation of life. The Russian Klondyke. Company promotion. Enterprise on an " unheard of " scale, as the Soviet papers write. And all this without private enterprise, without the capitalist, without the masters. Young folk of I7 and i8 do not remember the time when the private capitalist in Russia, too, was the chief director and master, and at the congresses of the Kom- somol the older leaders tell them: "You are the masters of all these riches of the Soviet land. It is for you that all this is being built



THE LEAGUE OF COMMUNIST YOUTH. 3II

up, and you must help it. You are the masters of life. With you we must equal and surpass the rotten West and America.)'

The young folk welcome these speeches with furious applause, and as they pass out of the meeting hall, they hasten to take up the posts of direction. These they are holding. Brigades of the Komsomol have the right " to investigate and control the execution of the Plan," and these brigades are marching everywhere with their masterful stride. Quite early Komsomol youths become also respon- sible directors of separate branches of the work. In Pravda7 we see the portrait of a young woman. This is the Komsomolska Lida Kovarskaya. She is director of a machine-knitting factory. She directs the work. When she was assistant forewoman of the knitting staff at the age of i8, she distinguished herself by being very obser- vant, and made a number of suggestions which were found valuable for the work. Among others, for instance, was an adaptation of machinery for knitting on the model of an Austrian firm. This had not been investigated by any of the Soviet engineers. She also invented an automatic device for stopping machinery to avert accidents. And she became director. In general, there are quite a number of Komsomols who have become Red directors. If they are not so inventive as Lida Kovarskaya, then they are given a specialist as assistant, a second technical director. The first has to see that the party class-line is maintained and must be the " eye in the execution of the Plan.

It is thus that young individuals of the Komsomol rise to respon- sible positions, but what work is there at the same time for the mass of them, for that means 4,000,000 organised young folks8 ? Since the beginning of the so-called socialist construction the Komsomol has been the real support of the Government in the execution of its plans. The fact is that so far in Soviet Russia there is no regular steady work gradually rising in rate and in quality. Everything is started straight off ad hoc, in rough daubs, without any exact working out of details. We must remember that even earlier in Russia there was very little of such skilled labour as had gradually by its work come to identify itself with the details of the enterprise in which it was engaged. After the Revolution the position as to reserves of skilled labour became catastrophic. Also labour discipline had fallen. Thus in the execution of the Plan there are everywhere breaks, disconnection of the parts, absence of co-ordination. Thus

7 No. 274, I93I. 8 In the last two months as many as 2,000,000 more members have joined

the Komsomol, so that its total number now reaches the figure of 6,ooo,ooo.




millions of acres are sown with potatoes, but when the crop is being gathered in there are no bags. The potatoes are lying on the ground exposed to the frosts. In such cases the Komsomol are expected to collect the bags. They mobilise in brigades and hunt everywhere for bags.

Sometimes the situation is even worse. Everywhere individual farming has been ruined and collective farms have been formed. To these farms have been brought in the cattle and the fowls, thousands of heads of them, but the collective farms have not yet got warm winter quarters for the cattle and poultry. There is not the required amount of food for them, and in front lies the long, hard Russian winter; so the order is given that the Komsomols are to save the position. They must " throw themselves " into action, to solve the problems of cattle breeding-" the fight for milk, -meat and eggs." "We," write the Komsomols of one district (the village of Aleshino in the district of Moscow), " have already taken under our control the building of shelters for the cattle, developing shock action and socialist competition, mobilising the youths. . . . Kom- somol signal outposts have been detached to each building."9

It is, of course, rather strange that trouble was taken to find housing and food for the cattle only in October, when in November it will already be full winter. But this is " neglect of the elders." The young will carry out their task if there are to be found on the spot materials for building and for food supply, and they will scatter in brigades over all Russia. The collective farms will have to feed them, -give them shelter, and that is difficult. But they will work

in shock fashion,"' and will do all that can be done. And then, another " front," transport, is in a shocking state.

There is delay in the output of locomotives; there are stoppages. Goods are going to rot, meat and vegetables which are so necessary to the towns, and at the same time in the factories the tasks set must be carried out. In the proletarian mechanical factory in Leningrad there is wholesale shirking. From I January to i June, 2,394 hours were wasted. The staff for making up the trains wasted 3,805 hours. In the smithy I93 workmen wasted 2,878 hours. The Liteiny staff wasted 3,028 hours. If all this is added up, 29 fuly- equipped locomotives or 540 goods wagons might have been turned out in the time.

As a result the Plan is not being carried out. The factory gets a black mark, and again the Komsomol 'come to the rescue. A non-

9 Komsomolskaya Pravda, No. 276, 6 October, I93I.



THE LEAGUE OF COMMUNIST YOUTH. 3I3

party workman who has served for thirty years in the factory Savely Lvov organises shock brigades. The Komsomol sets to work in vanguard column. The factory is shaken up, and feverish work begins under the lead of these youths. After desperate efforts there is triumph. The factory sends a report to Comrade Stalin, Head of the Communist party: " Engines programme carried out, ioo per cent. Wagons programme carried out, I02 per cent. Orders for the line -carried out, I28 per cent. The 'break' has been stopped."10

Sometimes these gaps are filled only with great difficulty. The most frequent of failures in the Plan are in the output of coal in the Don Basin. To this time there are not even tolerable quarters for the workers. The food is bad, the mines are dangerous; so the workmen are flying in hundreds and thousands. Meanwhile, the importance of the coal output for the development of the Plan is enormous. When the output gets less, the young folk are called in to help; even lads of I2 and I5 go to work at it. " In clouds of smoke and coal dust there are working 340 brigades of lads," writes a Soviet correspondent. They want to save the Five Year Plan. This child-like enthusiasm fears no dangers. At the pits of Nagol- chan and Ziolinovka there had been a failure in output. " A savage snowstorm was raging. Snow and hail scourged them with biting cold. In the whirlwind of dust even the outlines of the mines were invisible. ... The grown-ups went away. There remained at work thirteen lads. They were joined by nine more. The wind tore them, whipped them. The gusts knocked them over, dashing them against the sharp lumps of coal. The cold froze their fingers. The children fell, climbing on the heaps of coal, jumped to keep warm, blew on their frozen fingers. They beat the snowstorm. Many were carried away from the stacks of coal with frozen fingers. Some were sent to the miners' hospital. Everyone was struck with the heroism of these lads. In the name of the proletariat of the whole republic, twenty-two lads received the proletarian thanks. Even our enemies now say: ' Yes, with them the lads alone will finish the Five Year Plan in four years.' ""1

And here is another example of the enthusiasm of the young. In I930, on the fields of the " White Gold "-that is cotton-a cruel frost descended. The fingers of those collecting the cotton were frozen. The local organisation of the Komsomol sent out the summons: " Don't leave the fields till the last box of cotton has been picked." The summons met with an immediate response.

10 Zvezda, No. 6, 1931. 11 Our Achievements, No. 4, 193I.




There began a mass movement of boys and girls in Merv, Kitad, and Tashkent. At Andizhan notices were put up: " The Committee of the Komsomol is closed. The whole organisation has gone off to the cotton." They went, ill-clothed, ill-shod. The Komsomol put 32,000 youths on to the frost-bound fields. The nearest field of cotton was I2o miles from the town; the farthest was 250 to 300 miles. For food they had only dry bread, and they rested in the huts of the natives on the clay floor. But the " storming of the cotton" suc- ceeded. The roads were black with the number of carts, closely packed bags of raw cotton swung on the backs of the camels. In this " storming" took part 400 brigades of youths, almost children.

Quite military is the way in which the youths carry on their various work in the collection of grain or at the lumber works, but very special is the enthusiasm which they show in such tremendous constructions as Magnitostroy or Dneprostroy. The most difficult work is at Magnitostroy. The frost was more than 40 degrees; yet at this time the dam was being constructed over the Ural River. All the work was out of doors, and from time to time hands and feet were frozen. They work at " beating records," a kind of sport. The leading part is taken by the Komsomol organisations; the giant of metallurgy is made by the hands of the young. Lads of i8 and 20 are everywhere: in the offices of the local newspapers, as agitators for better work, at the laying of the furnaces, the cement works, the underground work in the mines. Everywhere they are working, they are striving for peaceful records. Foreign engineers tell them what is the pace of this or that work in Germany, America or England. At once they set themselves to beat the record. Girls work shoulder to shoulder with the boys. Sometimes strength fails. Thus in May of this year, the Komsomol received a stern reprimand from the Party. Not more than 28 per cent. of the Plan for April had been carried out. They were ordered to " pull themselves together." Of the 40,000 workmen in Magnitostroy only an insigni- ficant fraction consists of skilled labour. Most of them are quite raw and have not even a simple understanding of how to work. So the battle must be won, notbyunderstanding, but bythe concentration of all forces. Men are very quickly worn out at such a rate of work, and then the conditions of life! No dwellings where one can take any kind of rest; no strengthening food, disgusting eating-rooms. One of the Soviet correspondents describing this life adds: "There was not even a church, no gods, no priests."''2

The Komsomol also got a severe rebuke for the poor execution 12 V. Polonsky, The New World (Novy Mir), No. 8, I93I.



THE LEAGUE OF COMMUNIST YOUTH. 3I5

of what is the most important task for the Government, the collecting of the autumn harvest. The chief organ of the Komsomol, the Central Committee, speaks of " the unsatisfactory conduct by the Komsomol of the campaign for the harvest," and thereupon gives the order " to form shock brigades at the threshers for threshing the grain and without interruption to carry it straight from the threshers to the station roads, practising freely the formation of special transport brigades in the kolkhozy and sovkhozy for the carriage of the grain, making wide use of the formation of special transport brigades on the collective and Soviet farms for the carriage of the grain; to mobilise at once the whole Komsomol organisation of railway transport for the conveyance of grain. Within five days to detach no less than two-thirds of the Komsomol workers for the execution of this resolution."

The cause of such an appeal to the youths was the fall in grain collection (up to i October, I93I, there was a big deficit on the Plan), from " attempts of the class enemy to hide and squander the disposable remains of grain in the collective farms with a division of the grain to the consumers, and attempts first of all to divide the grain among the collective farmers and only afterwards to hand over to the State."''3 The young folk were to " put on pressure" and turn the helm of the crop gathering first to the State and only afterwards to the collective farmers.

The children and the pioneer organisations do not fail to support the youth. Children, schoolboys-pioneers, also form brigades. They " storm " the utilisable rubbish. They collect old rubbish, rags or paper, hunt in the sweepings and carry off what they find to appointed places for utilisation.14

This autumn a revolutionary reform has been carried out in the schools. Every school is now attached to an undertaking of some kind. The children will be taught and at the same time will work in gangs. The passion for a quicker mastery of technical work has compelled the Soviet Government to make an attack on general education, that is, almost to destroy it.

V. In making such sacrifices to the construction of the Five Year

Plan-sacrifices of health, of teaching and sometimes even of life- 13 Komsomolskaya Pravda, No. 283, IO October, 193I. 14 The French socialist Fourier could not imagine who in the future

socialist order would consent to do dirty and unpleasant work, and he went on to say, " The children, for they have an instinctive liking for dirt." (Charles Fourier, The'orie de 1'Unite' Universelle, IV, p. I49, 156-7.) In Socialist Russia the children are following Fourier's advice.




do the young folk believe in the execution of the Plan? At present undoubtedly they do. There are, of course, sceptics among them. Then, the young folk know about all these " breaks," about the absence of co-ordination in the sections of the Plan, not by hearsay, but by experience. This is really concrete and unquestionable knowledge. Their belief in the Plan will rise and fall according as this furious rate of construction yields results. At present they are in indescribable rapture when the first blast furnace of the Magnito- stroy sends forth its smoke or the first set of " our own" tractors, not foreign ones, leaves the works of Stalingrad or Kharkov. " That's patriotic work; that's a Soviet tractor which we have made our- selves." It is not merely the result of their work. It is a seal of approval on this new system on which the Soviet papers are every day writing passionate articles, of whose glorious achievements the broadcast carries word into the farthest depths of the country.

Knowledge by experience and not from books will make these young folk able in the nearest future to form an estimate of the Plan as a whole. If at the end of the Five Year Plan there is as much hunger in Russia as now, as much misery in the sense of failure to satisfy the most elementary human needs, if things are just as dirty, as congested, as disorderly, why then-then, of course, the enthusiasm will die out. The effects of such a failure will compel these young folk to put other questions beyond the programme of building. The masters of life will understand that the plans are going wrong, that high speed is not everything, that enthusiasm alone is not enough, and that the root of the evil is not in a lack of shock work or of sacrifice. But so far it is precisely the young who are the trusty support of the Government.

It may naturally be asked, what is the moral physiognomy of these new masters of life, what is this new man, the eastern neigh- bour of old Grandmother Europe? But that is a separate subject. It falls into two sections of equal interest. On the one side it is important to know what is the type of new man which the older generation of Bolsheviks, the leaders, wish to produce. On the other side, how is this new man being shaped by life, by surround- ings, by his experience and the natural inexorable development of the Revolution? There is no doubt that this new man is being formed now, in the hardest conditions of struggle, not only for the Five Year Plan, but for the life of an enormous country.

KATHERINE KUSKOVA.



Documents

The League of Communist Youth: Enthusiasm as a Driving Force