RUSSIA: To Rear Communists

The first big snow of the season hit Moscow last week. It soon began to melt and turn to slush. In spite of the slush, young Muscovites turned up coated and booted in several of the city’s squares where wooden platforms had been laid for dancing. The gala occasion: the 30th anniversary of Russia’s Komsomol (Young , Communist League), the elite, junior grade, of the Soviet Union.

No Postoffice. The Moscow festivities were the windup of a month-long celebration of Komsomol accomplishments in which praise and exhortation were about equally mixed. Aram Khachaturian’s young son Karen, a fledgling composer himself, published a cantata, Youth! Live Long and Blossom! Celebrating in their own way, members of the Chkalov Air Club made a record parachute jump without oxygen equipment, from 21,325 feet.

The Komsomoltsy of the Yaroslavl locomotive roundhouse proudly reported that they had already reached their production goals for 1948 and were taking on more. Comrade Ilichev, secretary of the Altai committee of the Komsomol, was in dutch because there had been a drop in membership in his area, and the secretary of another group, in Barnaul, Siberia, had just had his knuckles rapped for organizing a bourgeois kissing game of postoffice one evening. On the whole, however, the jubilee tone was one of Soviet satisfaction. Moscow announced that the Komsomol (for youths 15 to 25) now numbered 9,000,000 members.

There were good reasons for joining. In Russia the choicest careers are open only to members of the Communist Party (some 6,300,000), and the Komsomol is the recruiting ground of the party. A Komsomol song tells who can belong:

“Those who don’t fear worries, those who read Stalin with their hearts . . .” Lenin, who started the whole thing, put it very simply: “It should rear Communists.”

No Machinations. The Komsomoltsy last week promised Stalin “always to be vigilant so that no machinations of international reaction can catch us off guard.”

For a jubilee, these were somewhat chilly and impersonal phrases, and it was perhaps significant that of all the songs written for the occasion, one of the most popular with the Komsomoltsy themselves was a sentimental little lyric entitled Farewell, Accordion Player. It records the unhappiness of the girls in the village on learning that their town’s young musician is going off to study engineering: “That means you’re not returning here . . . You’ll work in a factory and forget our gay song.” Everyone is silent for a moment, thinking. Then the young Komsomolets replies: “Don’t be sad; wait till I finish the Institute. There’s plenty for an engineer to do here too.” This cheers everybody, somewhat.