Peasants into Soviets : Reconstructing Komsomol Identity in the Russian Countryside of the 1920s
Growing up in the village of Bogorodskoe, Penza province, Aleksei Soldatov loved school, but he had to quit when he finished grammar school to help support his family. After six years of war and revolution, Aleksei’s household was unexceptional: it had no father or older brother. The fourteen-year-old described his oppressive isolated life as that of a “monk,” filled with hard work and devoid of friends and fun. In his narrative, his dismal life took a turn for the better when, following his sister’s footsteps, he joined the local Politprosvet. At first, he couldn’t understand what they were discussing. A few weeks later, he joined a new Komsomol cell established five versts from his home. There, he began to understand the new language and rediscovered reading. Soon, he organized a village reading room and became its librarian (izbach). To his family’s dismay, throughout 1924 and 1925 he did little farming; instead, he read magazines and newspapers and familiarized himself with current events and with Party and Komsomol life in order to answer the many questions readers asked him. While continuing to work as village librarian, when a Komsomol cell was founded in his own village, he became its secretary, head of its political reading circle, and Pioneer group leader. At the ripe age of eighteen, he could say:
“Youth, It’s Your Turn!”: Generations and the Fate of the Russian Revolution (1917–1932)
In the last two decades the concept of generations has seen a revival in history and the social sciences. This article employs a discursive-pragmatic concept of generation in history, deduced from Karl Mannheim’s seminal concept of generation, as a theoretical framework to examine the role played by young Communists and their official youth organization, the Komsomol, during the revolutionary transformation of the Soviet Union, 1917–1932. It shows how both experientially and discursively a cohort of young Communists who actively took part in the Revolution and Civil War coalesced into a distinct generational unit whose ideas, attitudes, and culture found a home in the Komsomol. Contrary to the Bolsheviks’ ideas of continuity of generations in a post-revolutionary society, the youth league became an outlet in which generational tensions were nurtured and expressed throughout the 1920s. In this process, formative expectations and aspirations were generated and cultivated among the younger members who had missed out on their own revolutionary experience. By employing social theory, the article advances our understanding of the process by which young people, organized in the Komsomol, became a major constituency for the Stalinist turn of the late 1920s. The article emphasizes the agency of youth, showing how their organization became a political and social driving force that shaped the fate of the Russian Revolution. Furthermore, the case of the militant Soviet youth is used as a case study to improve our understanding of the emergence and development of generations and generational cohorts, and thus of the concept itself.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.