Young Communist League Is Too Old Hat

Once every five years the Young Communist League, known as Komsomol, convenes in the Kremlin’s Palace of Congress to elect officers--and to hear from the very top party leadership. The meeting that ended Sunday was Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s first opportunity to address the organization that claims a membership of 40 million --more than half the Soviet population between the ages of 14 and 28.

An outsider might have thought that Gorbachev would make a dramatic appeal to the young people as natural supporters of his efforts for modernization, openness-- glasnost. While he did speak of this, his speech was comparatively conservative. For Komsomol, being the traditional entry point to a party career, is an organization of conservatives, conformists, bureaucrats.

Komsomol was founded in 1918, created from small cells of Bolshevik youths during the civil war. It became known as “the school of the party cadres,” and was used by Josef Stalin in his collectivization campaign, which cost the peasantry millions of lives, and to replace those whom he purged from the party in the 1930s. Later, members were sent by the thousands to develop the so-called virgin lands in Kazakhstan and, more recently, to help with construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

Gradually Komsomol grew from a volunteer organization of young zealots to an unofficial ministry for youth affairs. As an indoctrinational agency, it has been charged by the party with overseeing all aspects of young peoples’ lives, including prescriptions on how to have fun. Of course, when a government organization is in charge of fun, it’s no fun.

In fact, for many years Komsomol has been vigilantly opposed to anything that would be attractive to young people--anything that might foster a youth subculture. People of Gorbachev’s generation remember well how in the 1950s the Young Communist League activists would accost anyone caught wearing tight pants and give him a choice: Take them off or we’ll take them off, with scissors. In the 1960s the targets were long hair and rock music, in the 1970s punk music and T-shirts with English-language logos.

Young people know that success in adult life depends on membership in Komsomol; it is required for college entrance, permission to travel abroad and career advancement. By the early 1980s league offices were occupied by young (and not so young) careerists busy mostly with collecting dues and writing reports about their achievements to impress party leaders. This preoccupation was totally alien to day-to-day interests of young people. As a result, informal clubs and organizations began to spring up where those who loved literature, rock music, martial arts and such could pursue their interests without the heavy hand of Komsomol supervision. This exceeded the patience of party leaders, who began to pressure younger colleagues to get out of their offices and start working more closely with Soviet youths.

Then Gorbachev came onto the scene, and certain trends that Komsomol was fighting suddenly became allowed, even encouraged. Underground rock groups, including those playing the extremely popular heavy-metal style, are now allowed to perform in sports arenas and to release record albums. Break dancing and aerobics are common on television. Western fashions are featured in high-price boutiques; a major European fashion magazine is starting a Russian-language edition.

Komsomol is now charged with keeping all this within accepted bounds. The new executive officer of the country’s only record label, Melodiya, is a former Komsomol official.

Soviet youths of the late 1980s appear to be not much different from their peers abroad. However, the malaise of being young is worse in a restricted, tightly controlled society lacking the traditional venues for young people to channel their frustrations, to let off steam. One cannot run off to the beach in the Soviet Union, or ride around in cars, or “hang out” anywhere; discos and “youth clubs” are run by Komsomol.

Now, with glasnost, suddenly there is widespread public discussion of the serious problems arising from the youth malaise, especially delinquency and alcoholism--and now drug abuse. These are problems that the Young Communist League has always denied or attributed to decadent Western influence. Today it is in charge of rooting them out.

Can Komsomol do that? The answer most probably is no , since the organization itself is a large part of the disaffection of Soviet youth. Put in charge of political indoctrination, it made communist ideology into something that puts young people to sleep. Put in charge of party activism, it became a bureaucracy for careerists. It would be no exaggeration to say that Komsomol has become a dinosaur, useless in the computer age.

Gorbachev needs young people to support his policies and ensure that they are implemented and made part of the Soviet future. But, as a former Komsomol official, he is aware of its limitations; he knows that it is a formidable obstacle to change. In his speech last Friday he said that there is no party opposition to his plans for “restructuring,” but that changes are impeded at lower levels, “even in Komsomol.”

If Gorbachev truly wanted to draw Soviet youth behind him, his best move would be to abolish the conservative and youthless Young Communist League. Instead, he left the convention to get on with its endless days of meetings and speeches and reports. The only relief that the delegates were likely to have was the Moscow premiere of a new film, “Is It Easy to Be Young?”