The All-Union Leninist Young Communist League — Vsesoiuznyi leninskii kommunisticheskii soiuz molodëzhi — commonly known as Komsomol, was a communist youth organization in the Soviet Union. It is sometimes described as the youth section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), although it was formally independent and referred to as "the helper and the reserve of the CPSU".
The Komsomol in its earliest form was established in urban areas in 1918. During the early years, it was a Russian organization, known as the Russian Young Communist League, or RKSM. During 1922, with the unification of the USSR, it was reformed into an all-union agency, the youth division of the All-Union Communist Party.
It was the final stage of three youth organizations with members up to age 28, graduated at 14 from the Young Pioneers, and at nine from the Little Octobrists.
History Background
Prior to the February Revolution of 1917, none of the three primary Marxist political parties of the Russian empire — the Social Democratic Labor Party Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, or Party of Socialist Revolutionaries — had the possibility of establishing or maintaining a formal youth section owing to their illegality and the pervasiveness of state repression. The war did provide the impetus for underground circles of young workers to emerge in Russia's biggest cities as early as 1915 and 1916, however.Isabel A. Tirado, Young Guard! The Communist Youth League, Petrograd, 1917–1920. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988; p. 16. These organizations, typically organized at the factory level, gathered to read and discuss political literature and did not typically have a "specific youth consciousness," but rather functioned as typical radical study circles, albeit composed of youthful members. There was no common organizational structure to unite these independently functioning groups.Tirado, Young Guard pp. 16–17.
Historian Matthias Neumann indicates that the initial rise of a radical youth movement in the city was "clearly linked to the protests of women workers who brought their grievances onto the streets on 23 February, International Women's Day.Matthias Neumann, The Communist Youth League and the Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1917–1932. London: Routledge, 2011; p. 20. With female activists transiting from factory to factory, calling out their peers, "young metalworkers in particular responded" to the women's appeal. Many young workers had been radicalized by three years of bloody world war, and young, urban workers were particularly aggressive in the spontaneous street protests which had overthrown the old regime.
Young workers made up a substantial percentage of armed revolutionaries in the street during the February uprising. About half of the forces defending the Tauride Palace during the revolution were youths, while at the factory level, between a quarter and a third of the participants in the factory Red Guards were young workers.Tirado, Young Guard p. 17. Over the first few months of the revolution, these independent groups of young workers began to think of themselves as a separate, focused subdivision of the revolutionary movement.
Trud i Svet (Labor and Light)
On 13 April 1917 a citywide conference was held in Petrograd attempting to organize these disparate grouplets, with an organization bureau resulting from the meeting.Neumann, The Communist Youth League, pp. 20–21. This bureau was given the task of expanding the organization of radical youth from the heavily industrialized Vyborg and Peterhof districts and for establishing youth commissions to monitor occupational safety and provide professional training and education in all factories.Tirado, Young Guard! pp. 18–19.
May Day 1917 marked an important turning point for the Russian radical youth movement, with the Petrograd youth movement gaining an organizational identity as Trud i Svet (Labor and Light) and successfully mobilizing 100,000 young workers, who marched in their own separate columns through the streets of the city in honor of International Labor Day.Tirado, Young Guard! p. 19. By the summer of 1917, Trud i Svet had emerged as a mass organization, claiming 50,000 members, with Peter Shevtsov the group's outstanding leader. Shevtsov's place was formalized in the middle of May, when he was elected chair of a new All-District Youth Council for Petrograd.Tirado, Young Guard! p. 20. This would mark a high water mark for the organized socialist youth movement in the capital city; one year later only 1,500 people would remain in the ranks.Neumann, The Communist Youth League, p. 32.
Trud i Svet believed the path for developing a strong organization capable of fighting for its rights revolved in large measure around worker education. The group's program called for the foundation of grammar schools and a university for young workers and for the establishment of polytechnical and industrial trades schools for the training of young workers, who were frequently newly arrived members of the peasantry. The organization also sought to achieve wage equivalence for young and older workers, the six-hour workday, and for the participation of young workers on the decision-making bodies of factory committees. While identifying itself as socialist, Trud i Svet placed a premium on class unity across party lines to acieve results — a rigid "non-partyism" (bezpartiinost) that would soon bring it into conflict with the hardline Bolshevik organization.
These moderate goals of the central leadership of Trud i Svet were not accepted by many local groups in the increasingly radical environment of Petrograd in 1917, however, and clear signs of a split of the largely decentralized organization began to be observed.Tirado, Young Guard! p. 22. This dissatisfaction grew throughout June, with a number of district branches rejecting the proposed education-first charter of the organization.Tirado, Young Guard! p. 23.
The July Days street protests against the Provisional Government over its refusal to terminate Russian participation in World War I market another decisive turning point. In the aftermath of the failed revolt, for which the Bolsheviks were blamed and which generated a sweeping series of arrests of Bolshevik leaders, Trud i Svet head Shevtsov criticized the uprising and defended the organization's controversial proposed charter — a grave political mistake since most members of the organization had participated in the protests. A formal split would result.
Socialist League of Young Workers (SSRM)
At a meeting of the Petrograd All-District Council of Trud i Svet held 27 July 1917, the internal conflict within Trud i Svet came to a head when Shevtsov's opponents voted in a majority for the dissolution of the council. This new majority group called for a citywide conference of radical youth to be held 18 August. A dissident youth organization known as the Socialist League of Young Workers (Sotsialisticheski soiuz rabochei molodëzhi, or SSRM), based in the Narva–Peterhof district of the city, had already emerged, positioning itself as an uncompromisingly radical alternative to Trud i Svet, which retained loyalty to the Provisional Government.Tirado, Young Guard! p. 24. This parallel radical organization was headed by a lathe operator at the Putilov Works, , a 21-year old member of the Bolshevik organization.
The SSRM drew up its own charter and program in July, calling for a 6-hour day for workers under age 16, establishment of a minimum wage for young workers, and demanding voting rights for 18-year olds.Tirado, Young Guard! p. 27. The organization declared its intention to develop class consciousness among young workers and to develop them intellectually and politically in the fight for socialism and in order to better defend their economic interests. The Petrograd-based SSRM declared its formation preparatory to the establishment of a national All-Russian League of Young Workers, with its direction to be conducted by an 11-member Petrograd Committee that would appoint editors, print pamphlets, provide speakers, conduct mass meetings, and pass resolutions binding upon subsidiary organizations."Charter of the Socialist League of Young Workers," in Tirado, Young Guard! pp. 229–230.
The Bolshevik-oriented Socialist League of Young Workers, with its strongest support provided by young metal workers, counted about 13,000 members at the end of a conference it held in Petrograd from 18 to 28 August.Tirado, Young Guard! p. 29. Unlike Trud i Svet, whose summer membership of 50,000 attenuated rapidly as moderates withdrew from the movement, the SSRM grew as the political situation in the capital city intensified in the summer and fall of 1917, with its membership variously estimated between 20,000 and 32,000 by the time of the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power.Tirado, Young Guard! pp. 29, 33. This number would plummet over the year that followed, in tandem with the crumbling of the factory committees in the increasingly disorganized factories.Neumann, The Communist Youth League, p. 33. By the time of the 5th Petrograd City Conference in September 1918, the SSRM had dwindled to fewer than 700 members.Neumann, The Communist Youth League, p. 34.
It is worthy of note that the Socialist League of Young Workers, while closely oriented to the Bolshevik Party, was not a homogeneous or disciplined organization. During the last month before the October revolution, many of the rank-and-file members of the organization sought to push the SSRM to economic tasks, such as creating factory committees of young workers that would act almost as a youth section of the trade union movement, coordinating workers and management on wage rates, working conditions, and hiring and firing.Tirado, Young Guard! p. 42. In addition, these factory committees were to oversee a range of educational activities, including factory schools, shop libraries, and the booking of lecturers.Tirado, Young Guard! pp. 42–43. Another part of the organization, including top leaders, contended that the SSRM was a political, not an economic, formation.
Establishment of the Komsomol
With the SSRM at low ebb in the summer of 1918, the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (RKP) stepped in, setting up an organizing committee to host a 1st Congress of Worker and Peasant Youth in the fall. An appeal was made to small local radical youth organizations around the country and the SSRM refused a large infusion of members from the Bolshevik organization proper, culminating in a decision in early October to make participation in the SSRM compulsory for party members up to the age of 20. The Central Committee also instructed its local organizations to help their local youth organizations send delegates to the forthcoming convention, thereby exerting decisive influence on its composition.Neumann, The Communist Youth League, p. 35.
On 29 October 1918, 176 elected delegates assembled in Moscow for what would become the founding convention of the Communist Youth League. Of these 88 were card-carrying members of the RKP, with another 38 formally identifying themselves as sympathizers. The remaining delegates were mostly not members of any party (45), with one delegate claiming to be an anarchist, one a member of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, and three Menshevik-Internationalists.Neumann, The Communist Youth League, pp. 35–36. These delegates claimed to represent some 120 youth groups, with a combined membership of 22,100.