Youth In Soviet Russia

First published in 1933, Youth in Soviet Russia presents Klaus Mehnert’ s honest and personal account of the state of the youth in USSR. It contains themes like living human beings, student and class, student and the state, the idea of the Komsomol, the literature of the youth, youth and the theatre, the youth commune, trends and attitudes towards sex and marriage with the development of new morality. Mehnert, a German born in Russia offers valuable description of his personal experiences while living with Russian youth during four successive autumns. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, Soviet history, Russian history, and communist history.

No detailed description available for "The Soviet Youth Program".

Studies the Komosol, the Communist League of Youth, as the chief instrument of indoctrination and control of young people ages fourteen to twenty-five from 1918-1959.

Since the political whirlwinds of the mid-1980s and the fall of communism in 1991, Russia has undergone dramatic social change, much of which has escaped the attention of Western media. In her new book, Hilary Pilkington applies the methods of cultural studies research to the study of Russian youth. She does this by `deconstructing' the social discourses within which Russian youth has been constructed and by providing an alternative reading of youth cultural activity, based on an ethnographic study of Moscow youth culture at the end of the 1980s. The book also charts the passage of western youth cultural studies in the twentieth century and suggests some new ways forward in the light of the Russian experience. Hilary Pilkington traces the cultural themes of youth culture in the Anglo-American tradition and within the Soviet Union, before examining the impact of perestroika on the media and its ramifications for the discussion of youth. The book ends with a study of young people in Moscow and youth cultural groups; the product of field work and interviews in the city.

The study of Soviet youth has long lagged behind the comprehensive research conducted on Western European youth culture. In an era that saw the emergence of youth movements of all sorts across Europe, the Soviet Komsomol was the first state-sponsored youth organization, in the first communist country. Born out of an autonomous youth movement that emerged in 1917, the Komsomol eventually became the last link in a chain of Soviet socializing agencies which organized the young. Based on extensive archival research and building upon recent research on Soviet youth, this book broadens our understanding of the social and political dimension of Komsomol membership during the momentous period 1917–1932. It sheds light on the complicated interchange between ideology, policy and reality in the league's evolution, highlighting the important role ordinary members played. The transformation of the country shaped Komsomol members and their league's social identity, institutional structure and social psychology, and vice versa, the organization itself became a crucial force in the dramatic changes of that time. The book investigates the complex dialogue between the Communist Youth League and the regime, unravelling the intricate process that transformed the Komsomol into a mere institution for political socialization serving the regime's quest for social engineering and control.

This study is the third and culminating work by Kitty Weaver on Soviet youth. The first, Lenin's Grandchildren, studied the Soviet child from birth to age seven. The second, Russia's Future, studied Soviet children from ages seven to fourteen, the years of the Young Pioneers. This study examines the Soviet system and its education of young communists in the Komsomol (the Young Communist League) and at Moscow State University. Given the events of recent times, Weaver also shifts from examining how Soviet young people learned communism to considering how they unlearn communism. Her first-hand account is based on her travels and her study in the Soviet Union and in Russia and the other fourteen republics. The question Weaver most frequently asked, and the question implied by many of her other questions of her Soviet friends and informants was, Who are you? Their illuminating answers and her pithy comments and observations sprinkle her narrative with a sense of the everyday, providing the reader with a three-dimensional portrait of Soviet life, of the hopes and the fears of Soviet youth.

What were the consequences if prerevolutionary and "bourgeois" culture and social relations could not be transformed into new socialist forms of behavior and belief?".