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Integration, Celebration, and Challenge:

Soviet Youth and Elections, 1953–19681

Gleb Tsipursky

At the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in 1956, when the new So-

viet leader N. S. Khrushchev gave the Secret Speech that launched the de-

Stalinization campaign, the First Secretary of the Komsomol Central Com-

mittee (KCC, the ruling organ of the Komsomol), A. N. Shelepin, also

addressed the Congress (Kassof 1965, 14–18).2 He stated that “The Kom-

somol and all Soviet youth assure the Congress that they will give all their

strength, knowledge, and energy to the selfless service of the noble task of

constructing a communist society in our country”. While this mirrored

analogous rhetoric in the post-World War II years before Stalin’s death in

1953, other elements of the speech illustrate a shift in accent in the

“Thaw”, the decade and a half after Stalin (Bittner 2008, 1–13; Condee

——————

1 I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to the participants of the “Elections under 20th Century Dictatorships” workshop, whose stimulating feedback on my presentation helped improve and clarify my own ideas, and in particular Ralph Jessen and Hedwig Richter, whose comments on the article draft itself resulted in a stronger final manuscript. More broadly, Donald J. Raleigh’s insightful suggestions on my book-length project, “Communist Fun: Youth and State-Sponsored Culture in the Cold War Soviet Union, 1945–1968,” found their reflection in this article as well. The funding to gather materials for this project came from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, awarded by the Educational Information Program Service, and also from the Doctoral Travel Research Award, awarded by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for Global Initiatives. I am grateful for their support.

2 The Komsomol, the Soviet mass organization for those aged between fourteen and twenty-eight, which was dedicated to socializing youth, grew rapidly in the 1950s, with half of all those eligible becoming members by 1958. With participation essential for attending college or joining the Communist Party, most members belonged to the middle class. Like the Party, it was composed of a hierarchical pyramid of cells, with the KCC at the top, followed by Komsomol organizations at the republic and province (
oblast’
) levels, with city and district (
raion
) Komsomol branches next, then Komsomol cells of large enterprises and institutions, with primary-level Komsomol cells subordinated to the enterprise-level cells.

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2000, 160–76).3 Thus, in contrast to the emphasis on discipline and milita-

rism of the late Stalin era, Shelepin repeatedly underlined that excessive

bureaucracy and centralization, and lack of attention to grassroots activism,

posed serious challenges to the Komsomol’s organizational work (Krylova

2009).4 This discursive shift represented part of a broader move away from

Stalinist authoritarianism and toward a more populist method of govern-

ance under Khrushchev. In this chapter, I investigate how the breaks and

continuities in youth policy during the Thaw impacted upon the Soviet use

of “elections without choice” as a tool of social management.

My study contributes to the recent debates about the nature of the

Thaw. According to the traditional historiographic paradigm, and much

current scholarship, Stalin’s death was a monumental break for the USSR

(Taubman 2003; Ilic 2009, 1–8; Vail and Genis 1988; Brusilovskaia 2001;

Cohen 1980; Jones 2006; Aksiutin 2004).5 Some recent authors, however,

have cast doubt on this opinion, questioning the attention given to 1953 as

a fundamental caesura in Soviet history, and suggesting strong continuities

between the period from 1945 to 1953 and the subsequent decades, while

still acknowledging the transformative impact of Stalin’s death on some

areas of life. This approach sees much of the Thaw era innovations as

having their roots in the postwar Stalin era, and argues that they came to

fruition in the mid-1950s as a result of broader processes such as the com-

pletion of postwar reconstruction, rather than due to policy shifts resulting

from a new leadership (Fürst 2010, 1–31; Fürst et al. 2008, 201–07; Hessler

2004).

This chapter also furthers our understanding of the Soviet Party’s youth

policy. Work with young people constituted a basic element of Party policy

due to the key role of young people in communist ideology (Lenin 1982,

41). Simultaneously, the large proportion of youth in the Soviet Union

during those years, due to massive World War II casualties, made their

——————

3 While recognizing the debate over the use of the term “Thaw,” this article continues to use it as the best means of conveying the sense of quickening change during the post-Stalin years. For more on this term, see Stephen Bittner and Nancy Condee’s works, cited above.

4
XX s’’ezd KPSS. Stenograficheskii otchet. Ch. 1
(Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1956), 603, 606–07.

On militarism and discipline as central to Stalinist youth policy, see Anna Krylova’s work.

5 These works generally voice this opinion.

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

83

successful social integration particularly crucial.6 Much of the early scholar-

ship on the USSR viewed Soviet youth as comprising a mass of politically

brainwashed people and a small minority of autonomous rebels: even in

the Thaw, the Komsomol, in its view, prohibited opposition (Kassof 1965,

171–86; Fisher 1959, 285–86). More recent literature, though, without

claiming that the Soviet Union achieved its aim of integration, has still

underlined the Party’s intent to form a monolithic, disciplined, ideal young

constructor of communism, and has emphasized its censure of those devi-

ating from this task (Konecny 1999, 258–64; Pilkington 1994, 46–78; Silina

2004; Gorsuch 2000, 1–11; Fürst 2010, 1–31). Recent historical publica-

tions have given us excellent insights into this latter group, focusing as they

do on alternative youth cultural practices, as well as political dissent, in the postwar Stalin years and under Khrushchev. (For alternative cultural practices, see Fitzpatrick 2006, 1–32; Edele 2002, 37–61; Fürst 2006, 209–30;

Stites 1992, 123–47; Bushnell 1990; Riordan 1989; Tsipursky 2011; Tsipur-

sky 2008, 629–49; for political dissent, see Zubkova 1998, 1–51; Alekseeva

and Goldberg 1990; Fürst 2010, 64–94).

However, the everyday political life of Thaw era youth who publicly

conformed to mainstream norms remains largely in the shadows (Tromly

2007).7 Informed by Sheila Fitzpatrick’s recent call for a more conscious

focus on political practices in Soviet history, this essay opens the curtain

on how post-Stalin youth participated in elections, thus stretching the

boundaries of current historiography (2004). In the process, it considers

the applicability to Soviet elections of the framework proposed by Werner

Patzelt in this volume for elections in authoritarian states. These consist, in

his hypothesis, of four key functions: a democratic “legitimating function”