From State to Society: The Komsomol in Yeltsin’s Russia

Abstract

From State to SocietyThe Komsomol in Yeltsin’s Russia Kristiina Silvan (bio) In September 1991, Vladimir Elagin, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Leninist Communist Youth League of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (LKSM RSFSR), was speaking to a sparse audience. It was the first time in the organization’s history that the attendance was so low: only two-thirds of both the Central Committee and the Central Control Committee members had arrived to hear what Elagin had to say about the organization’s future a week after the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had been outlawed on Soviet territory.1 Contrary to one contemporary interpretation,2 he did not, however, take the floor to confirm the youth league’s liquidation but instead urged his listeners to revive it: “To keep up with the current turbulent time, we need to make serious, responsible, and radical decisions on the transformation of the Union.… We must transform ourselves into a public organization [obshchestvennaia organizatsiia] … [and] say that we will continue to develop and participate in the youth movement and help revive it.”3 Speaking almost three decades after the meeting, one of the members of the organizing committee of the LKSM RSFSR, interviewed for this study, claimed that the dismantling of the Russian Komsomol organization was never even considered. “It was because they were real organizations that genuinely worked with youth. They were real organizations, projects, and programs. The activity was real.”4 [End Page 289] In Russia, the centenary of the Komsomol in 2018 was commemorated by special exhibitions and events.5 It also stimulated discussions of the history and legacy of the Soviet youth league.6 In the 2000s, historians’ interest in the Komsomol has primarily concentrated on the first decades of the youth league’s existence, demonstrated by the publication of a number of in-depth scholarly works that have succeeded in capturing not just the transformation of the Komsomol but also the changes in the Soviet political system as a whole. Juliane Fürst, Matthias Neumann, Seth Bernstein, and others have demonstrated that once the Komsomol changed from a quasi-autonomous association into the party-state’s tool of mass socialization, it “hollowed out” to such an extent that when the time was right, the youth league simply “disappear[ed] overnight, leaving almost no traces.”7 Those examining the youth league in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras have followed up on the story of the Komsomol’s erosion, demonstrating that the youth league could generate genuine support among young people only when it downplayed its practices of political education and accommodated its activities to the (cultural) wishes of young people.8 Finally, scholars looking at the last years of the Komsomol’s existence point to the lack of commitment among both the rank-and-file and the officials. They note that once alternative platforms of entertainment and social engagement emerged and binding Komsomol enrollment targets were lifted, both [End Page 290] young people and Komsomol bureaucrats left the youth league en masse.9 As has been demonstrated by the literature on the construction of the market economy in the USSR, Komsomol officials were among the first to become engaged in business activities, and they were quick to appropriate the league’s lucrative enterprises when that became possible.10 Returning to the research on the Komsomol of earlier decades, it is easy to point out why Komsomol officials did not mourn the loss of their constituency: youth upbringing and welfare had become of secondary interest a long time ago. Any lingering hopes of the Komsomol’s reform to overcome the “crisis”—a topic of heated discussions throughout perestroika—were crushed by the failed coup of August 1991. In September 1991, the organization would finally “reach … its logical conclusion,” declaring that “the political role of the All-Union Leninist Communist Union of Youth [VLKSM, Komsomol] as a federation of young communist leagues has been exhausted,” and self-dissolving into oblivion.11 In his case study of the Komsomol’s demise, Steven Lee Solnick convincingly argued that the Komsomol collapsed because of the breakdown of hierarchical control. This article does not challenge that claim...