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:
Section I: Social History and Politics
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 postrevolutionary 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. In the last two decades the concept of generations has seen a revival in both history and the social sciences. It is a concept which has long permeated the public discourse and is frequently invoked by political commentators to explain social and political change. Beyond the often rather superficial usage of the term, more scholarly attempts have been made to re-conceptualize the idea of “generations” and utilize it as an analytical tool in social history, anthropology, and other social science disciplines. Nevertheless, there is still widespread confusion over the concept which is understood and used in many different ways. Whereas for some the emphasis is upon the importance of a unique formative experience of a special birth cohort, others focus on collective identities, while others, in turn, understand “generations” as a purely discursive phenomenon. The common confusion over the question of what actually constitutes generations, whether they really exist or whether they are a constructed myth, has led many historians to neglect the concept outright. On the other hand “generations” have appeared as a distinct analytical category in many social histories because Journal of Social History vol. 46 no. 2 (2012), pp. 273–304 doi:10.1093/jsh/shs098 © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. they are often seen as a driving force behind social and political change. Robert Wohl highlighted the surge in generational thinking during the early twentieth century across Europe, stressing how the idea of historical generations has come to serve as an alternative to class. In German history, the “generation of 1914,” those born in the years leading up to the First World War, was identified by Detlef Peukert as a distinct generation shaped by the experience of long-term unemployment in the Weimar Republic. They were not only drawn to radical parties, but would also become the “missing link in the discontinuous social history of the German working class”—“the lost generation.” Historians of Soviet history have also invoked the concept in recent years. Anna Krylova recently examined the emergence and agency of the “First Soviet Generation” during the 1930s, young people born just before or after 1917 who therefore lacked experience of the revolution and pre-revolutionary social division; Diane P. Koenker has explored the “father against sons“—“sons against father” paradigm in the early Soviet workplace; and Juliane Fürst has studied the experience of being young by “Stalin's last generation” in the post-war years of his rule. As Stephen Lovell, pointed out, “historians have sensed that generations are important, being closely bound up with longue durée of social change, with the distribution of economic resources, and with never-ending competition for political legitimacy and authority.” Historians cannot simply ignore them because “generations” can be part of the way society understands itself and consequently organizes itself. This is also evident in the study of revolutionary Russia where historians encounter the image of “generations” frequently. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, Turgenev made the contemporary generational conflict a major theme of his novel, Father and Sons. Furthermore, it is possible to distinguish successive generations of the studenchestvo, the Russian student movement, according to their changing collective self-definition. The Bolsheviks too, were aware of the discursive political capital linked to the image of the young generation as a progressive force. In the “Crisis of Menshevism,” Lenin evoked this popular image for the Bolshevik party declaring: is it not natural that youth should predominate in our Party, the revolutionary party? We are the party of the future, and the future belongs to the youth. We are a party of innovators, and it is always the youth that most eagerly follows the innovators. We are a party that is waging a self-sacrificing struggle against the old rottenness, and youth is always the first to undertake a self-sacrificing struggle. Admittedly, the backwardness of rural Russia meant that generational tensions were less developed than in the socially rapidly changing urban space, because young people were traditionally incorporated into the community life from a very young age. This, in many ways, corresponded with the Bolsheviks' vision of the continuity of generations in a post-revolutionary socialist society. Soviet culturologists understood generations as vehicles of social inheritance (nasledovanie) making generational conflict a characteristic of the past. This was the vision for the Socialist future. In 1917, however, generational tensions played a significant role in the emergence of an autonomous proletarian youth movement in Russia's urban centres. Young people tried to express their particularistic interests in a rapidly changing and challenging social and political Journal of Social History Winter 2012 274
Fragment Rotational State Distributions From The Dissociation Of NeIBr: Experimental And Theoretical Results
The IBr fragment rotational state distributions that result when the NeIBr van der Waals molecule undergoes vibrational predissociation have been measured in a pump–probe laser‐induced fluorescence experiment. Independent of initial vibrational state and the number of quanta of vibrational energy lost from the I–Br coordinate, the rotational distributions extend over the full range of energetically accessible states. From the observation of energetic constraints on the rotational distribution, the dissociation energy (D0) is calculated to be 65.5±1.2 cm−1 for the A electronic state, v=16. For the X electronic state, v=0, D0=71.8±1.2 cm−1. Quantum mechanical bound state calculations carried out on a model A electronic state potential energy surface are in quantitative agreement with this result. The rotational distributions are broader than that predicted by either a Franck–Condon or classical impulsive model for the dissociation. The distributions are qualitatively in accord with classical trajectory calc...