The post-Stalin Komsomol and the Soviet fight for Third World youth

Abstract

Based upon evidence from archives in Russia, Georgia, Latvia and Estonia, this article examines the ways in which the USSR’s Communist Youth League (Komsomol) worked to advance the Soviet cause among world youth during the Cold War. These ranged from cultural propaganda through to attempts at political subversion, and played a role not just in fortifying the regime’s international standing but also serving important domestic purposes at the same time.

Notes

¹ M.M. Mukhamedzhanov et al., eds., My internatsionalisty: dokumenty i materialy s’ezdov, konferentsii i TsK VLKSM, AKSM i KMO SSSR ob internatsional’nykh svyazakh sovetskoi molodezhi i mezhdunarodnom molodezhnom dvizhenii (1918–1971gg) (Moskva: Molodaya gvardiya, 1972), 266–7.

² L.I. Brezhnev, Molodym stroit’ kommunizm (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1970), 207. Quote taken from Brezhnev’s address to the February 1967 plenum of the Komsomol Central Committee.

³ On such aspects of Komsomol work, see, e.g., B. LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia: Defining, Policing and Producing Deviance during the Thaw(University of Wisconsin Press, 2012); W. Risch, “Soviet ‘Flower Children’: Hippies and the Youth Counter-Culture in 1970s L’viv,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 3 (2005): 565–84; G. Tsipursky, “Having Fun in the Thaw: Youth Initiative Clubs in the Post-Stalin Years,” Carl Beck Papers, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012).

⁴ On Soviet isolation and youth during the late Stalin years, see, in particular, J. Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

⁵ On the Khrushchev era as a time of re-engagement with the outside world, see, e.g., A. Fursenko and T. Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York: WW Norton, 2006).

⁶ Neither man moved directly from the post of Komsomol First Secretary to KGB chairman, though in both cases the transition was a rapid one. See V. Semichastnyi, Bespokoinoe serdtse (Moskva: Vagrius, 2002) and L. Mlechin, Shelepin (Moskva: Molodaya gvardiya, 2009). Semichastnyi’s successor at the KGB, Yuri Andropov, also had a substantial Komsomol career, having served as First Secretary of the Komsomol in Soviet Karelia during the Second World War.

⁷ See A. Kozovoi, “Dissonant Voices: Soviet Youth Mobilization and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Journal of Cold War Studies 16, no. 3 (2014): 29–61.

⁸ See also A. Kassof, The Soviet Youth Programme: Regimentation and Rebellion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).

⁹ Other Soviet public organisations worthy of research on their Cold War work include the ‘Soviet Women’s Committee’ and the ‘Soviet Committee for the Defence of Peace’.

¹⁰ Brezhnev, Molodym stroit’ kommunizm, 207.

¹¹ On the US failure in this regard, see L. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: US Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadalephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 6. On the failure to propagate a fully convincing view of Soviet modernity, see, e.g., K. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

¹² See E. Cobbs Hoffman, All You Needs is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1–9.

¹³ In December 1956 a second body was also created: the International Department of the Komsomol Central Committee. This was specifically for communication, co-ordination, and study of activity with the various youth movements of fellow socialist countries.

¹⁴ See, e.g., E.M. Tyazhel’nikov, Soyuz molodykh lenintsev (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1980).

¹⁵ Mukhamedzhanov et al., My internatsionalisty, 183–4. This declaration of solidarity also included a statement to the effect that Egypt was within its rights to nationalise the Suez Canal.

¹⁶ On unrest linked to events in Hungary, see, e.g., B. Tromly, Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Soviet Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); R. Hornsby, Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

¹⁷ See, e.g., Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. m-3, op. 3, d. 239, ll. 109-111.

¹⁸ See P. Koivunen, “The 1957 Moscow Youth Festival: Propagating A New, Peaceful, Image of the Soviet Union,” in Soviet State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev, ed. J. Smith and M. Ilič (London: Routledge, 2009), 46–65; T. Rupprecht, “Soviet Internationalism after Stalin: The USSR and Latin America in the Cultural Cold War” (PhD diss., European University Institute, 2012).

¹⁹ See, e.g., RGASPI, f. m-5, op. 2, d. 1088.

²⁰ See A. Gorsuch, All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); D. Koenker, Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).

²¹ RGASPI, f. m-5, op. 1, d. 3, l. 23.

²² When, in February1964, a KMO group headed off to participate in the Second Congress of Latin American Youth in Chile, the leader of their delegation had already visited 15 different countries on KMO work over the preceding six years. Another member of the travelling party was about to embark upon his nineteenth such trip: see RGASPI, f. m-1s, op. 1s, d. 224s, ll. 52–55.

²³ RGASPI, f. m-1s, op. 1s, d. 224s, ll. 1–157.

²⁴ RGASPI, f. m-1s, op. 1s, d. 224s, l. 12.

²⁵ S.V. Mazov, “Sovetskii soyuz i zapadnaya Afrika v 1956–64 gody,” Novaya i noveishaya istoriya 2 (2007): 87. At the time, Pavlov’s proposed involvement in West Africa fell through on grounds of finance, but it had nonetheless been approved by the CPSU leadership before coming to naught. As Hoffman notes, the Peace Corps took a rather more ambiguous position in regard to its position in the Cold War confrontation.

²⁶ Y.A. Padornyi and B.P. Zyryanovyi, Spravochnik komsomol’skogo aktivista (Moskva: Voennoe izdatel’stvo ministerstvo oborony SSSR, 1972), 82. Strenuous efforts were made to cultivate friendship with Algerian Youth, seemingly to little avail. At a Dakar meeting in 1970 the Algerians invited a Komsomol delegation to Algeria; the Komsomol invited the Algerians to the USSR and promised them material help. Nonetheless, over the course of the congress the two parties ended up at loggerheads and the above offers were promptly withdrawn before the KMO had even left Dakar. RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 3, d. 520, ll. 1–95.

²⁷ In October 1961, for example, the Komsomol Central Committee resolved to send 300 young agricultural specialists to Cuba for a year to in order to help develop agriculture there and to ‘learn about Cuban youth’. A thousand Cuban youth would in turn come to the USSR for study: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (RGANI), f. 5, op. 31, d. 180, l. 47.

²⁸ RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 5, d. 240, l. 69.

²⁹ Cultural groups also travelled within Western Europe, and seemingly proved popular. See, e.g., RGASPI, f. m-1s, op. 1s, d. 3s, l. 31 on performances given by Komsomol troupes in Sweden and Iceland during 1962.

³⁰ The collection of Leniniana included 1500 Lenin badges, 50 bas-reliefs of Lenin, 1000 postcards of Lenin, 5000 portraits and 30 busts, along with a number of photo albums and written materials on Lenin, as well as four ‘libraries of Marxist literature’. RGANI, f. 89, op. 46, d. 10, ll. 1–14.

³¹ In addition to those studying medicine, regular seminars and talks were held on issues relating to healthcare in the developing world, blending practical advice with political commentary. See, e.g., Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiisskoi federatsii (GARF), f. 9576-r, op. 17, d. 9, ll. 1–62 on the seminar series ‘the Soviet Union and New Africa, 1964–70’.

³² G. Mukhamedzhanov, KMO chairman Yanaev wrote that the Komsomol had sent medicines and doctors to help around 45,000 people in Peru: My internatsionalisty, 13.

³³ RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 3, d. 520, l. 17.

³⁴ Archive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia (MIA), f. 96, op. 27, d. 182, l. 14.

³⁵ Tsentral’nyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Moskvy (TsAOPIM), f. 635, op. 1, d. 3566, l. 13.

³⁶ T. Krasovitskaya et al., ed, “Vozvratit’ domoi druz”yami SSSR”: obuchenie inostrantsev v sovetskom soyuze, 1956–1965 (Moskva: Mezhdunarodnyi fond Demokratiya, 2013), 189.

³⁷ This was also the case inside the USSR. Calls for young volunteers to up sticks and participate in any given construction project at the other end of the (vast) country were by no means rare. See, e.g., C. Ward, Brezhnev’s Folly: the Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

³⁸ See, e.g., RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 5, d. 240, ll. 1–355.

³⁹ See A.G. Belofastov et al., eds., Mushavery: neizvestnye stranitsy afganskoi voiny (Moskva: Kuchkova pole, 2013).

⁴⁰ See, e.g., I.N. Chernyak, “Internatsionalisty,” in Mushavery, ed. Belofastov et al., 64–81.

⁴¹ Komsomol documents also show some, far more limited, agreements for youth organisations in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Mongolia, and Yemen to render additional material assistance, though they did not always fulfil their promised contribution. RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 13, d. 21, ll. 1–29.

⁴² To give some idea of the scope of this assistance, a 1981 agreement between DOMA and the Komsomol included provision for the supply of 400 footballs; 400 volleyballs; 250 basketballs; 200 tennis balls; 110 chess sets; 500 leotards; 2 gymnastics mats; 120 tennis rackets, and 100 pairs of dumbbells. Musical equipment included 20 accordions; 5 bass guitars; 5 pianos; 15 flutes; 20 clarinets, and a larger number of traditional Afghan instruments RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 13, d. 8, ll. 1–14.

⁴³ The editorial board of the Afghan youth newspaper Znamya molodezhi, for example, was invited to Moscow (at Komsomol expense) to learn best practice at the offices of Komsmol’skaya pravda. RGANI, f. 89, op. 46, d. 74, l. 1.

⁴⁴ RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 13, d. 8, ll. 1–14. Even as its membership roll grew to over a hundred thousand, Komsomol advisers reported that DOMA failed to carry out basic tasks like collecting memberships dues, and its military formations simply collapsed under pressure.

⁴⁵ RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 13, d. 4, ll. 20–25.

⁴⁶ MIA, f. 96, op. 27, d. 182, l. 11.

⁴⁷ Checheno-Ingushskaya oblastnaya komsomol'skaya organizatsiya, 1920–1984 gg. : tsifry i fakty (Grozny: Checheno-Ingushskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1985), 129–131.

⁴⁸ There was of course a political colouring to these studies. In particular, the House of Friendship (Dom druzhba) was set up, with Komsomol assistance, to get students from the developing world in particular interacting with their Soviet hosts’ ideological work. See, e.g., GARF f. 9576-r, op. 17, d. 14, ll. 1–93.

⁴⁹ Krasovitskaya et al., “Vozvratit’ domoi druz”yami SSSR”, 264–7. Figures given here show over one thousand students from Africa, almost 700 from Southeast Asia, over 750 from the Americas, and over two thousand from Arab lands and the Near East.

⁵⁰ FRELIMO leader Eduardo Mondlane did complain that two of the female recruits he had sent to Moscow were found to be pregnant upon their return to Mozambique. RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 5, d. 202, ll. 14-16. FRELIMO had been sending students to the School since 1962, but the relationship seems to have soured following this pregnancy scandal.

⁵¹ RGASPI, f. m-1s, op. 1s, d. 1010s, ll. 7-34. Of the 6815 foreign cadres trained, 3617 were from socialist countries, 420 from capitalist countries, 1004 from Latin America, 1386 from Africa, and 388 from Asia.

⁵² RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 5, d. 202, l. 18.

⁵³ The director laid out very detailed proposals for the new facility, which he specified should include 10 auditoriums, facilities for simultaneous translation into five different languages, a foreign language library of over 50,000 books, a microfilm reading room, a photo laboratory and a canteen capable of serving up 3000 meals per day. The projected cost was over 450,000 roubles.

⁵⁴ RGANI, f. 89, op. 39, d. 24, ll. 1–5. This aid was to be distributed as follows: Argentina – 20,000 roubles; Chile – 16,000; Brazil, Venezuela, Columbia, Costa Rica, Peru and Panama – 7000 each; Bolivia and Ecuador – 5000; El Salvador and Uruguay – 3000 and an additional 10,000 for the Sandinista youth movement in Nicaragua. Unfortunately, the available documents do not give any indication of exactly what the requested financial aid was to be used for.

⁵⁵ RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 3, d. 239, ll. 73–75.

⁵⁶ .See, e.g., RGASPI, f. m-1s, op. 1s, d. 1081, ll. 8-9, in which the Komsomol Central Committee requests permission from the CPSU Central Committee to invite youth leaders (along with their wives and children) from 37 different countries to the USSR during the summer of 1977.

⁵⁷ See, e.g., RGANI, f. 89, op. 27, d. 33, ll. 1–8.

⁵⁸ See RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 3, d. 74, ll. 1–398; and f. m-3, op. 3, d. 239, ll. 1-241.

⁵⁹ RGASPI, f.m-3, op. 3, d. 73, ll. 1–4. Those delegations who were reported to have sided with China included Albania, North Korea, Indonesia, Zanzibar, Guadeloupe and North Vietnam. Those seeming to be wavering from a pro-Soviet position included delegations from Colombia, Cambodia, French Guyana, and Surinam.

⁶⁰ See RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 3, d. 520, ll. 1–18. A Komsomol delegation was duly sent to Sudan (see above).

⁶¹ As Jonathan Haslam has observed, in spite of the condemnation heaped on Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964 for his ‘foreign policy adventurism’, the blunders of the Brezhnev years were at least as egregious: J. Haslam, Russia’s Cold War (London: Yale University Press, 2011), 270.

⁶² On this theme in the US Cold War, see, e.g., F. Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 2000).

⁶³ Vladimir Semichastnyi, for example, took to the pages of Komsomol’skaya pravda in 1959 to refute claims made by the head of Yugoslavia’s youth organisation (the Yugoslav People’s Youth) that the Komsomol was ‘interfering’ in the affairs of fraternal organisations and claiming for itself the leading role among socialist youth: Komsomol’skaya pravda, January 25, 1959: 5.

⁶⁴ See V. Semichastnyi, Bespokoinoe serdtse (Moskva: Vagrius, 2002), 384.

⁶⁵ For example, in the mid-1960s, as the IUS hit financial problems once China stopped paying its dues, the Komsomol bailed it out to the tune of $17,000. RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 3, d. 73, ll. 118–119. In May 1979 10,000 roubles worth of emergency financial assistance also passed from the Komsomol to the WFDY. RGANI, f. 89, op. 31, d. 2, l. 1.

⁶⁶ See, e.g., MIA, f. 96, op. 27, d. 182, ll. 1–26.

⁶⁷ RGASPI, f. m-1s, op. 1s, d. 3s, ll. 6–11.

⁶⁸ On the National Student Association in the Cold War, see T. de Vries, “The 1967 Central Intelligence Agency Scandal: Catalyst in a Transforming Relationship between State and People,” Journal of American History 98, no. 4 (2012): 1075–92.

⁶⁹ KMO reports repeatedly indicated that anti-communist and anti-Soviet speeches were made at some events. At the 1967 MSS congress in Ulan Bator, for example, ‘openly rude and anti-Soviet speeches’ were delivered from the rostrum by Brazilian, Puerto Rican, and Ecuadorian delegations, among others. See RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 3, d. 239, l. 2.

⁷⁰ RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 3, d. 74, ll. 1–398. It is worth noting that this trio represented ‘one martyr each’ for Africa, Asia and Latin America.

⁷¹ Various documents show that Cuban delegations helped the KMO in securing consensus for such statements. See, e.g., RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 3, d. 239, ll. 1–241 on the 1967 IUS congress in Ulan-Bator.

⁷² RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 3, d. 74, ll. 1–21.

⁷³ RGASPI, f. m-3, op. 3, d. 520, l. 7.

⁷⁴ See J. Hessler, “The Soviet Public and the Vietnam War: Political Mobilization and Public Organizations, 1965–1973,” unpublished manuscript. Thanks to Julie Hessler for sharing this draft article.

⁷⁵ W. Taubman, The View from the Lenin Hills: An American Student’s Report on Soviet Youth in Ferment (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968), 164.

⁷⁶ The period following the entry of Soviet forces into Afghanistan showed much the same tendency, though that time the focus fell mostly upon resistance to the US stationing Pershing-2 missiles in Europe.

⁷⁷ TsAOPIM, f. 2907, op. 1, d. 164, l. 15.

⁷⁸ See “O provedenii v ramkakh mesyachnika solidarnosti sovetskoi molodezhi s boryushchimsya narodom i molodezh’yu V’etnama kampanii ‘pionery SSSR – V’etnamu,’” in Dokumenty TsK VLKSM: 1968 (Moskva: Molodaya gvardiya, 1969), 228–9.

⁷⁹ Natsional’nyi arkhiv Respubliki Belarus’ (NARB) (Minsk), f. 63, op. 19, d. 34, l. 73.

⁸⁰ MIA, f. 96, op. 25, d. 68, ll. 1–5 (1973) and f. 96, op. 23, d. 157, ll. 1–10 (1969).

⁸¹ Mukhamedzhanov et al., My internatsionalisty, 11.

⁸² MIA, f. 96, op. 27, d. 182, ll. 1–18.

⁸³ AIS (Tallinn), f. 31, op. 127, d. 111, ll. 1–2.

⁸⁴ See Tsipursky, “Having Fun in the Thaw.”

⁸⁵ RGASPI, f. 6, op. 17, d. 88, l. 18.

⁸⁶ MIA, f. 96, op. 27, d. 182, l. 14.

⁸⁷ TsAOPIM, f. 635, op. 1, d. 3566, l. 1–2.

⁸⁸ See, e.g., A. Mikoyan, Tak eto bylo: razmiyshleniya o minuvshem (Moskva: Vagrius, 1999); B. Pastukhov, Druzei moikh prekrasnye cherty (Moskva: Molodaya gvardiya, 2012), 48.

⁸⁹ Latvijas Valsts arhivs (LVA) (Riga), f. 201, op. 3, d. 28, l. 1.

⁹⁰ See Hornsby, Protest, Reform and Repression.

⁹¹ D. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 158.

⁹² On this theme see in particular the works of Sergei Zhuk, including “Hollywood’s Insidious Charms: The Impact of American Cinema and Television on the Soviet Union during the Cold War,” Cold War History 14, no. 4 (2014): 593–617; S. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

⁹³ TsAOPIM, f. 635, op. 1, d. 3566, l. 13.