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.
Discursive Strategies in the 1905 Revolution: Peasant Petitions from Vladimir Province
The Russian peasantry at the turn of the century, for all the appearances of amorphous homogeneity, backwardness and crisis, was a much more heterogeneous, adaptable and complicated body of groups and individuals than much of traditional scholarship would have had us believe. Only in the past decade or so have historians, especially in the United States and Germany, begun to break out of the rigid framework that insisted on endowing the peasantry with essential characteristics and ignored both the context and contingency of peasant actions.' Thus a promising foundation exists for building a more complex and sophisticated understanding of the Russian peasantry, albeit one that is messier and less reducible to neat categories. Unfortunately, the very nature of the sources used to study Russian peasants has helped to perpetuate simplistic notions. Starting with prerevolutionary reports by well-intentioned Russian ethnographers, those sources usually have been of nonpeasant origin and thus have themselves been the products of a binary world view. Even in the relatively rare instances when the peasants have been allowed to speak for themselves, those utterances have usually been invoked selectively and impressionistically to illustrate certain a priori conclusions. More grievously still, there has been a pronounced tendency to treat the meaning of these unique documents as transparent, with the ironic result that their very existence and language have been interpreted in terms of nonpeasant discourses, whether Tsarist, Soviet, liberal or socialist, Populist or Marxist.2 Nowhere has this tendency been more in evidence than in the treatment of the thousands of peasant petitions that poured forth from the countryside in late 1905 and 1906 and that were varyingly addressed to Nicholas II, the new Duma, and its