The Komsomol

Abstract

Not to put too fine a point on it: the Communist Youth League (Kommunistichesky soyuz molodyozhi — Komsomol) is in crisis. Widely accused of being staffed by careerists and time-servers, of forcing young people to join by threats to their careers, of tedium and formalism in its political training, of, as Mikhail Gorbachov has put it, ‘marching down one side of the street while young people are walking down the other in the opposite direction’, it has clearly lost control over many, if not the bulk of, Soviet young people, as well as their confidence and respect.

The older generation often does not know how to deal properly with young people who are bound to approach socialism differently, by a different route, a different form, in different circumstances. That is why, incidentally, we have to be unreservedly in favour of the youth league’s organisational independence, and not just because the opportunists are scared of that independence. Without complete independence young people will not be able either to make good socialists or to prepare themselves for taking socialism forward.

V.I. Lenin ¹