Changing Lifestyles : The Soviet Komsomol needed a new image after a poll showed it with a lower approval rating than the KGB. Now the organization has shed ideological indoctrination in favor of helping youths find work.

Julia Garmash wants to be a journalist, but she knows that it takes more than wishes and hopes. And to get an idea of how the press operates--and perhaps some experience herself--she’s working part time in a foreign news bureau in Moscow.

What could be more natural for a university-bound 17-year-old?

In most places, nothing. But Garmash is a Soviet teenager, and Soviet youth typically have not worked their way through school in the past.

Moreover, this aspiring journalist found her job through the Communist Youth League, or “Komsomol”--an organization better known for its efforts at political indoctrination than for finding jobs for its members.

And therein lies a story of how the vast social changes now under way in the Soviet Union are transforming the country’s institutions and affecting the daily lives of almost everyone.

Unlike past generations of Soviet youth, which depended on political connections to get ahead, Garmash’s generation recognizes the need to prepare for jobs for which they will have to compete in a changing workplace.

And the Komsomol is revamping its operations to help young people like Garmash prepare for a new future based on training and competence rather than politics and ideology.

The 72-year-old organization also feels pressure to change its image and find a place for itself in a future Soviet Union where Communist Party and Komsomol membership will not be necessary for success.

The Komosomol now ranks among the most discredited of Soviet institutions. In a recent opinion poll, those surveyed said they trusted the youth organization even less than the KGB, the Soviet security and intelligence agency.

“It is no secret that our Komsomol structure sticks in people’s throats, and an ordinary, real person in the street can’t, as a rule, see what the organization can do for him,” Vladimir Zyukin, first secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee, said in a television interview.

For decades, the Komsomol’s main role was to train future Communist Party members, and membership between the ages of 14 and 28 was considered virtually essential for anyone trying to build a good career. As recently as five years ago, there were still 42 million Soviet youth in the organization.

Today, there are only 28 million dues payers, with four million having deserted the organization’s ranks in the last four months alone. “Membership began dropping significantly a year and a half to two years ago,” Vladimir G. Shugaev, an aide to Zyukin, said.

When Garmash and her friends joined the Komsomol upon entering high school three years ago, all eagerly took part without question. But now Garmash is among the few still involved.

“Most of my friends are no longer Komsomol members,” Garmash said. “They think there is no hope in the organization.

“Honestly, I am a Komsomol member because I have not found another organization that I can join,” Garmash added. “The Komsomol is better than nothing at this point.”

Like a sort of Marxist Junior Achievement, the Komsomol has long embraced scores of activities under its wing, ranging from the manufacture of T-shirts to operation of multi-million circulation newspapers. But the times clearly call for something new.

“The priority task is to ensure that the organization really does become something that people, young people, need,” Zyukin said.

One such effort is the Komsomol-sponsored Youth Initiative, a temporary employment bureau for young people which since 1987 has placed tens of thousands in temporary jobs.

Garmash, for one, got her job after spotting a Youth Initiative advertisement while leafing through a copy of Moskovsky Komsomolets, one of the organization’s newspapers. She applied to the bureau and was chosen to work in a Western news bureau because she speaks English and wants to learn about journalism.

In the past, the state assigned all graduates to their first jobs, partly to compensate the government for their free education, partly to allocate the labor force where it was most needed and partly to honor the Soviet constitutional guarantee of employment for all.

But, like many social benefits once guaranteed, jobs are no longer assured in the Soviet Union. Just last year, 145,000 of the 547,000 new graduates from Moscow’s schools and institutes were unable to find work in their specialities.

Present attempts to transform the Soviet economy by replacing central planning with market forces and allowing private ownership have increased unemployment. Some 3 million people will have lost their jobs between 1988 and the end of this year, according to estimates by the State Statistics Committee, and that number could grow to 16 million by 2005.

Operating much like a temporary personnel service in the West, Youth Initiative lines up clients with temporary jobs that need doing, contracts to do them, and then pays young workers up to 80% of the fee depending on how difficult or specialized the work.

Youth Initiative collects $5.50 an hour from the Moscow bureau of the American newspaper which employs Garmash, for example, and the aspiring journalist gets the equivalent of 75% of the total in rubles.

“The money allows me some sort of independence,” said Garmash, who hopes to attend a Soviet university and spend some time abroad, studying in America. “But it is the experience I’m after.”

In the past year, Youth Initiative sent 35,000 youths to do temporary jobs ranging from sewing bedding to repairing tram lines. The eager young people are often twice as productive as the workers whose places they are filling.

Another venture that got its start from the Komsomol is the Center for Scientific and Technical Creations of Youth, which aims to develop scientific and technical inventions.

One project still on the drawing board is a state-of-the-art asphalt-laying machine, said to be energy and cost efficient. It’s goal is to save Soviet drivers from the country’s notorious potholes, the biggest of which are reputed to swallow sub-compact cars.

The center hopes to have their machines on the roads within a year--lightning fast by Soviet standards, because its inventors are not bound by bureaucratic red tape.

The Komosomol provides the legal footing--and sometimes financial support--for Youth Initiative, the Technical Creations center, and other such spin-off organizations. But the leaders of the new organizations pride themselves in their independence from the Komsomol leadership and its old ideology.

“The fact that we are associated with the Komsomol has no effect on us,” Vyacheslav A. Kartoshov, executive director of the Technical Creations center, said. “Our moral and psychological orientation is different; it is based on economics.”

In Leningrad, the Komsomol is about to free almost all of its more than 200 affiliate enterprises to go commercial, transferring the operations to their employees, individual owners, and publicly held companies.

“While they in the Communist Party’s Central Committee think about what to do with party property, we decided without waiting for a push from below to transfer our enterprises to collective and private ownership,” Oleg Kontonistov, the economic director of the Komsomol in Leningrad, explained.

“We were prompted by the emerging market in the Soviet Union and the conditions in which youth enterprises will need total independence from the Komsomol apparatus in order to survive.”

Although Komosomol leaders suggest the ideological bent of the Communist Youth League will be downplayed in the future, they stress that its political basis will not be abandoned. “The relationship between the (Communist) Party and Komsomol remain unchanged,” delegates to the Komsomol congress in April declared.

Both Komsomol supporters and those who wish to see the organization disbanded agree that sweeping changes are necessary to survive at a time when the country as a whole is shifting toward a market economy and perhaps the capitalist philosophy it will bring.

“The Komsomol won’t die,” Kartoshov said. “It will change with a changing society, and that will not affect the separate organization that we have created.”

Elizabeth Christie is a researcher in The Times’ Moscow Bureau.