Jessen & Richter (Eds.) (24 page)

I N T E G R A T I O N , C E L E B R A T I O N , A N D C H A L L E N G E

91

Komsomol hierarchy or the local Party officials.31 As such, youth participa-

tion in Komsomol elections, in similarity to elections to Soviet government

organs, functioned overwhelmingly as a means of political socialization and

legitimization. Young people hardly ever departed from the planned elec-

tion process, showed little or no initiative in using elections to push for

reforms, and did not act as a loyal opposition—especially in large-scale

elections in central sites. In fact, any expression of political non-conform-

ism under Stalin, in any venues, drew harsh repression from the state

(Zubkova 1998, 1–51, Alekseeva and Goldberg 1990; Fürst 2010, 64–94).

Yet the election practices of Komsomol election conferences under-

went some changes in the Thaw. Half a year after Stalin’s death, the au-

tumn 1953 Komsomol election conference of the physics department of

the Moscow State University (MSU), a highly prestigious department in the

most prominent institute of higher learning in the USSR, erupted in con-

troversy. At the election conference, the students of the physics depart-

ment expressed outrage over the poor quality of education in theoretical

and nuclear physics, a result of the fact that many of the best physicists had

been forced out of the MSU due to the attacks by ideological conservatives

in the anti-cosmopolitan campaign of the late Stalin years (Esakov and

Levina 2005). Under the influence of the Thaw as well as the recent trans-

fer of the physics department of MSU to a newly-built building, the stu-

dents felt “intolerance to all phenomena hindering them from living and

studying in the new manner”. Consequently, at the autumn 1953 Komso-

mol election conference, the students, in an unprecedented step, decided to

send a letter to the PCC expressing their “distrust toward the administra-

tion and the Party organization of the physics department”, and criticizing

the conservative traditions established there. This move proved “com-

pletely unexpected” for the MSU administration: the Komsomol organiza-

tion, while in accordance with the formal norms of the law, acted in “sharp

contradiction” to the real, unwritten rules-of-the-game. The Party and

leading administrative officials at the department strongly argued against

the letter, suggesting that the students lacked political maturity and respon-

sibility, but the student leadership of the physics department Komsomol

refused to budge, and sent it to the PCC. As Kovaleva rightly notes, under

Stalin such behavior would have “inevitably resulted in harsh punish-

——————

31 To confirm this, I examined the archives of the Moscow city Komsomol cell, and the Kransopresnenskii district Komsomol cell for the postwar Stalin years: TsAOPIM,

f. 635 and f. 667 respectively.

92

G L E B T S I P U R S K Y

ments”, including accusations of a lack of political sense, the expulsion of

the organizers from the Komsomol and the department, and possibly even

arrest and trial. Certainly, the organizers of the letter suffered certain re-

pressions, as the university administration tried to use any excuse to punish

them, yet only managed a few penalties. The PCC launched an investiga-

tion into the situation in the MSU in December 1953, and, by August 1954,

had passed a resolution that resulted in the appointment of a new chair for

the department, and the invitation of prominent theoretical and nuclear

physicists, such as L. D. Landau, to teach at the MSU (Kovaleva 2003, 12–

31; Gaponov et al. 2002).32 Some recent research suggests other factors

also played a crucial, perhaps even a determining, role in this decree, such

as the attempts to strengthen physics for the needs of the Cold War or the

general turn from Stalinist political repression (Tromly 2007, 192). Still, this appeared to the physics students at MSU, as well as to many young intellectuals across the Soviet Union, as a victory for the reformist spirit of the

Thaw (Kovaleva 2003, 28). This letter and its results both mirrored and

were simultaneously constitutive of the spirit of the Thaw, which inspired

many young people to engage actively in reforming the system for the sake

of an ideal, communist society, and in opposing hard-line, orthodox offi-

cials, but with support from more pluralistically-inclined figures of author-

ity. Furthermore, it reveals how Komsomol election conferences offered a

crucial venue for the expression of youth agency, challenging existing

political practices regarding elections, and serving as a source of instability

in times of reform.

Further evidence of this is found in the first election conference held

by the Moscow city Komsomol committee after Stalin’s death, in February

1954. After the Moscow Komsomol secretary gave his keynote speech, a

series of delegates gave response speeches, and, at one point, the confer-

ence organizers—the Moscow city Komsomol committee—suggested

ending the responses. Yet, in an unusual move, a Komsomol delegate from

the police department, Artamonov, stood up and said he would like to

address the conference. The conference leadership, clearly reluctant to

——————

32 My description of this incident is based on an excellent composite memoir by a former student in the physics department, Svetlana Kovaleva, who used interviews with participants, memoirs, and quotes from archival documents in addition to her own recollections to write a history of what she calls the “informal traditions” of the physics department. I also draw on a paper written by her and other participants in the events, Iu. V.

Gaponov and A. V. Kessenykh.

I N T E G R A T I O N , C E L E B R A T I O N , A N D C H A L L E N G E

93

allow this speaker a platform, called for a vote on either ending the re-

sponse speeches or letting the police delegate speak—and the conference

participants voted to let the delegate speak, going against the will of the

higher-up Komsomol officials, something that would certainly not have

occurred in late Stalinism. Most probably, the conference organizers did

not want the police delegate to speak because they realized the intended

content of his address. Their worries proved accurate, as Artamonov se-

verely censured the Moscow city Komsomol committee for its lack of

attention to policing the city.33 The Moscow city Komsomol conference of

1956 reveals a similar pattern. Vavilov, the Komsomol secretary of a fac-

tory in “Enterprise 765”, severely criticized the problem of hooliganism in

the city.34 The Moscow city Party committee representative at the Komso-

mol conference, Marchenko, insisted that Vavilov’s comments were too

extreme, since “the situation in Moscow is not that frightening”. The tran-

script of the conference indicates that, in a clear breach of election confer-

ence protocol, one delegate shouted out, “Sokol’niki and the Gorkii Park

of Culture and Leisure have a lot of problems” with hooliganism.35 These

two incidents illustrate how Komsomol members used election confer-

ences to address issues they felt required attention, even if this meant going

against the Komsomol hierarchy and expressing strong criticism of its

actions.

In some instances, the disparities between Komsomol members and

their elected officials grew too great to be addressed through criticisms of

single issues and resulted in broad confrontations in which cliques of

Komsomol members removed some or all of the Komsomol leadership

and elected new members to the committee. In one case, a memoir by

Ronkin, a former Komsomol patrol member, describes how he and his

patrol friends who studied at a Leningrad institute in the mid-1950s de-

cided to seize power in their institute’s Komsomol committee. They

brought their friends together and managed to elect several people, in-

cluding Ronkin himself, to the Komsomol committee of the institute.

Once in the leadership, they promoted issues such as making political edu-

cation not obligatory, and called for a radical struggle against alcoholism.

These activities, in Ronkin’s words, aimed to “try to return its ‘true’ face to

——————

33 TsAOPIM, f. 635, op. 13, d. 267, l. 279.

34 TsAOPIM, f. 635, op. 13, d. 484, l . 204–07.

35 TsAOPIM, f. 635, op. 13, d. 484, l. 249. For a list of critical statements made at Komsomol conferences, see RGASPI, f. M–1, op. 3, d. 1028.

94

G L E B T S I P U R S K Y

the Komsomol” (Ronkin 2003, 120). De-emphasizing political education

and speaking out against alcohol, and returning a “true” face to the Kom-

somol—a phrase reminiscent of “socialism with a human face”—mark

Ronkin’s clique as a group of reformist, ideologically committed young

people striving to improve the USSR. Other memoirists recall similar fac-

tional struggles in their institutes (Shakhnazarov 2001).

Intriguingly, data suggest that such conflicts in elections occurred even

after Khrushchev’s removal from office in 1964. Returning to the MSU

physics department in 1966, we witness another student uprising due to

outrage at the activities of the Komsomol secretary Borish Ishkhanov, who

was too conformist for the wishes of the university administration, which

saw a new committee voted in (Kovaleva 2003, 98). A student at the phys-

ics department, Volodia, recalled the organization of this election coup.

The students met in dormitories, led by student activists: they “strategized

how, who, and what should be said, and how to vote”. Volodia agitated for

his classmates to vote against the current Komsomol committee, and

helped make sure that more pluralistically-oriented Komsomol officials

would be elected to lead the physics department Komsomol committee

that year.36 In doing so, the Komsomol members of the MSU physics

department used the opportunities and resources made available by the

institution of elections to pursue their own agenda.

One of the fundamental practices that enabled the Party leadership to

maintain control over the system involved higher-level organs appointing

lower-level officials, even if the rules called for such cadres to be elected

from below. Such methods characterized the Komsomol as well, and, in

the Khrushchev era, Komsomol members occasionally opposed such ap-

pointments. In most cases, as recalled by Ol’ga as well as many others,