Copyright by Julie Kay deGraffenried 2009

vospitanie) of the young.        
                                                 
 
7
 Max Okenfuss, The Discovery of Childhood in Russia:  The Evidence of the Slavic 
Primer (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1980). 
 
8
 Andrew Baruch Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth 
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 2. 
 
9
 Two notable exceptions exist: Catriona Kelly‟s forthcoming and much-anticipated work 
on children and material culture in Russia/the Soviet Union, and David Ransel, Mothers of 
Misery:  Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 

6 
 
 
The field is almost limitless in Soviet history.  Fewer than ten English-
language monographs directly address children and/or childhood in the Soviet 
Union, though there are more that touch on issues affecting children such as 
education or women.
10
  Felicity O‟Dell and Katerina Clark investigate the uses 
and meanings of Soviet literature for children.
11
  More recent works explore 
interactions between society, state, and children.  Two scholars consider the issue 
of children‟s homes:  Alan Ball describes conditions of abandoned children and 
the state‟s efforts to deal with them in the 1920s, and Judith Harwin examines 
state-sponsored child care in the late Soviet period.
12
  Lisa Kirschenbaum focuses 
on preschool children, “trac[ing] the shifting and contested meanings of childhood 
in revolutionary Russia as well as the consequences of the child‟s status as the 
personification of the whole enterprise of cultural revolution for teachers, parents, 
and children themselves.”
13
  Her study of pedagogical policies for kindergarteners 
affirms the ideological importance of children‟s malleability for the Bolsheviks, 
yet demonstrates that practical resources often lagged behind theoretical concerns.   
                                                 
 
10
 See, for example, Larry Holmes, Stalin‟s School: Moscow‟s Model School No. 25, 
1931-1937  (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), and The Kremlin and the 
Schoolhouse: Reforming Education in Soviet Russia, 1917-1931 (Bloomington, IN:  Indiana 
University Press, 1991); Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family 
Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).   
 
11
 Felicity O‟Dell, Socialisation Through Children‟s Literature: the Soviet Example 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978);  Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as 
Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 
 
12
 Alan Ball, And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 
1918-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Judith Harwin, Children of the 
Russian State, 1917-1995 (Aldershot, England: Avebury, 1996).  Harwin‟s book focuses primarily 
on the Gorbachev-Yeltsin years despite the book‟s title. 
 
13
Lisa Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 
1917-1932 (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001), 2. 

7 
 
  
Soviet youth have been considered in greater depth and breadth.  
Beginning with Ralph T. Fisher‟s landmark study of the Communist Youth 
League, or Komsomol, many scholars have examined the relationship of youth to 
twentieth-century events in the Soviet Union.
14
  The term “youth” introduces a 
somewhat problematic semantic issue.  The dividing line between child and youth 
is rather murky:  when exactly does childhood end and youth begin?  At what 
point does adulthood arrive?  Do these categories overlap?  Clearly, there is a 
greater expectation of independence, maturity, and physical development as age 
progresses, but these factors vary wildly from individual to individual – much less 
culture to culture and era to era – as do evolving expectations.  For the sake of 
clarity and given the centrality of the Pioneer organization to this project, this 
dissertation will use the artificial limits imposed by the Communist Party to 
designate between children and youth.  The term “youth” (molodëzh‟) will be 
those persons able to apply for membership in the Komsomol – young men and 
women ages fifteen to twenty-six.  The terms “children” or “schoolchildren” (deti 
or shkol‟niki) will be used to describe both those ten- to fourteen-year old boys 
                                                 
 
14
 Ralph T. Fisher, Pattern for Soviet Youth:  A Study of the Congresses of the Komsomol, 
1918-1954 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).  Other monographs on Soviet youth 
include Anne E. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents 
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), and Flappers and Foxtrotters: Soviet Youth in 
the “Roaring Twenties” (Pittsburgh, PA: Center for Russian and East European Studies, 
University of Pittsburgh, 1994); Albert Hughes, Political Socialization of Soviet Youth (Lewiston, 
NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992); James Riordan, ed., Soviet Youth Culture (Bloomington, IN: 
Indiana University Press, 1989); Isabel Tirado, Young Guard! The Communist Youth League, 
Petrograd, 1917-1920 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988); Allen Kassof, The Soviet Youth 
Program: Regimentation and Rebellion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). 

8 
 
and girls able to apply for membership in the Young Pioneers and those younger 
children still of school age.
15
  Since the political organization, accompanying 
messages, and state expectations changed at age fifteen, it makes sense to adopt 
the Party‟s distinction between children and youth for the purposes of this 
dissertation.
 
 
Acknowledging the “importance but also the separateness of youth,”
16
 the 
Bolsheviks created organizations designed to disseminate party messages and to 
regulate activism among them, a sort of mass mobilization borne out of twentieth-
century modernity.
17
  The Communist Youth League, for youth ages fifteen to 
approximately twenty-six, was a group for Communist Party hopefuls, populated 
by those with proper backgrounds, suitable recommendations and connections, 
and outstanding grades and achievements.  The organization was viewed as a 
stepping stone to party candidacy, a good job or university placement, and future 
security, offering a fine combination of idealism and opportunism.  Members of 
the Komsomol were the most visible and vocal of the younger generation:  
Komsomoltsy participated in partisan warfare during the Great Patriotic War, 
Komsomoltsy tilled the Virgin Lands for Khrushchev, and Komsomoltsy manned 
                                                 
 
15
 Soviet children began school around age six.  A party organization for children ages six 
to nine, the Little Octobrists, existed, though it was largely inactive during the period of the war. 
 
16
 Peter Stearns, Growing Up: The History of Childhood in a Global Context (Waco, TX: 
Baylor University Press, 2005), 58.  Stearns suggests that “the Marxist approach to children” 
demonstrated a “fervent dedication to the formation of youth groups.” 
 
17
 Claire Wallace and Raimund Alt, “Youth Cultures Under Authoritarian Regimes: The 
Case of the Swings Against the Nazis,” Youth and Society, 32, 3 (March 2001), 292. 

9 
 
huge construction projects such as the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway.  Youth, 
indeed, were targeted by the Party as a special sub-population and “organized” 
accordingly. 
But it was children, not youth, who occupied a “privileged place in the 
Soviet way of life.”
18
  Central to cultural transformation, the child “stood as the 
icon of the Revolution‟s future,”
19
 “impress[ing] all who ever go to the Soviet 
Union.”
20
  A popular state slogan declared children to be the only privileged class 
in the Soviet Union.  Not content to allow these icons to absorb socialist ideals by 
osmosis, the party created an organization for them as well:  the Young Pioneers.    
Who were these Young Pioneers?  The V. I. Lenin All-Union Pioneer 
Organization was the Bolshevik (later, Communist) Party‟s organization for 
children ages ten to fourteen.
21
  In 1922, after five years of experimentation and 
debate, the Fifth All-Russian Congress of the Komsomol announced the official 
installation of the Young Pioneers, a thinly-disguised communist version of the 
                                                 
 
18
 Paul Thorez, Model Children, trans. Nancy Cadet (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 
1991), 41. 
 
19
 Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades, 161. 
 
20
 Major A. S. Hooper, Through Soviet Russia: 1937 (London: Hooper, Purnell and Sons, 
Ltd., 1937), 102. 
 
21
 The provenance of the word “pioneer” should be explained.  Although the term 
“pioneer,” as used in English, usually implies some sort of relation to trailblazing or innovation, 
the term did not seem to have the same connotations in Russian.  The word pioner (пионер) was 
first used in Russia in 1705 in the letters and papers of Peter I, adopted from the seventeenth-
century German “Pionier,” which was adopted from the French “pionnier,” or infantryman.  
Though pioner was later replaced by pekhotinets in common usage, the term retained its military 
association.  Thus, the Young Pioneers were supposed to be the little foot soldiers of the 
Communist Party.  Max Vasmer, O. N. Trubachev, B. A. Larin, Etimologicheskii slovar‟ russkogo 
iazyka: v chetyrekh tomakh, Izd. 2-e, (Moskva: Progress, 1986-1987), Tom III, 264. 

10 
 
previously successful Russian Boy Scout program.
22
  The stated goals for the 
Pioneers were “to inculcate class consciousness, instincts of group formation and 
of competition, a sense of social living, an esteem for creative labor, a striving for 
knowledge, and a willingness to subordinate personal interests to those of 
society”;
23
  in short, the Pioneers were to learn how to live communism.  
Widely known as the “darling of the Party” or the “Boy Scouts of 
Russia,”
24
 the Pioneer organization functioned for almost seventy years as the 
primary link between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its children.  
The Pioneers cannot accurately be described as either darlings or Boy Scouts, and 
the goals, structures, and activities of the Pioneer organization remain largely 
unknown, obscured by such stereotypes and misnomers. Historians have generally 
neglected the story of the Pioneers and their role in the Soviet system, perhaps 
concluding that, as one scholar succinctly puts it, “as the junior counterpart of the 
Komsomol, it [the Pioneer organization] does not have a separate history.”
25
  
To dismiss the Pioneer organization as a sort of Kiddie-Komsomol, 
however, ignores several crucial differences between the two groups.  The 
Komsomol was never conceived as a mass organization, that is as an association 
                                                 
22
 See Julie deGraffenried, “The Origins of the V. I. Lenin All-Union Pioneer 
Organization,” (unpublished paper, The University of Texas at Austin, 1999). 
23
 V Vserossiiskii s”ezd RKSM, 11-19 oktiabria 1922 g.,  as cited in Fisher, Pattern for 
Soviet Youth, 346-348. 
24
 George S. Counts, The Challenge of Soviet Education (New York:  McGraw-Hill Book 
Company, Inc., 1957), 104–107. 
25
 Kassof, The Soviet Youth Program, 20. 

11 
 
that seeks to include everyone who meets eligibility requirements such as age, 
whereas the Pioneer organization, from its inception, actively recruited children of 
all backgrounds and in all areas and instituted very few obstacles to membership.  
The Komsomol represented the “best and the brightest” on their way to Party 
candidacy;  the Pioneers, on the other hand, were much more inclusive.  As a 
mass organization striving for an ever-larger membership, the Pioneers‟ goals and 
tactics differed significantly from those of the Komsomol.   
The activities of the Komsomol and Pioneers varied as well, primarily 
because of the age groups participating in them.  Teenagers and young adults 
comprised the membership of the Komsomol, whereas, the Pioneer organization 
included children between the ages of ten and fourteen – although at times in its 
history, the age range was nine to sixteen.  The “grown-up” activities of the 
Komsomol were not always appropriate for the Pioneers, so the types of programs 
often differed.  A solitary campaign, such as the liquidation of illiteracy, often 
produced widely-varying tasks for the Komsomol and Pioneer organization as 
well as the motivations for participating in them.  Multiply that one campaign by 
hundreds – for there were many such “fronts” on which to struggle – and the 
expectations and activities for Komsomoltsy and Pioneers become exponentially 
distinct. 
Finally, an entire iconography replete with symbols, ceremonies, oaths, 
and sacred sites developed under the aegis of the Pioneer organization for the 

12 
 
edification (and entertainment) of its young members, a characteristic setting the 
Pioneers completely apart from the Komsomol, which “disdained uniforms, 
salutes, and so forth, but . . . considered [them] appropriate for children.”
26
  
Indeed, it could be argued that a Pioneer culture emerged in the Soviet Union that 
encompassed and institutionalized Pioneer iconography.  This Pioneer culture, 
complete with newspapers, literature, music, the performing arts, and radio, even 
designated sites specific to its development, from Artek, the famous summer 
camp, to the ubiquitous Pioneer corner in each Soviet schoolroom. 
Thus, the Pioneers, a mass organization designed to appeal to a broad, 
young audience, should not be viewed as a minor-league Komsomol.  The Pioneer 
organization challenges simplistic depictions, such as “character educator,”
27
 
“political indoctrinator”
28
 or “behavior control program”;
29
  sometimes Pioneer 
troops were all of these of these things – sometimes none.  The multi-faceted 
Pioneer organization, above all, was an attempt to reach every child in the Soviet 
Union with the message of the Communist Party, its mass audience providing 
Party leaders the opportunity to influence and mobilize, for better or for worse, an 
impressionable yet unpredictable swath of the population, a group bounded 
neither by nationality, gender, nor socioeconomic status, seemingly omnipresent 
                                                 
26
 Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 
1917-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 193. 
 
27
 Urie Bronfenbrenner, Two Worlds of Childhood: U.S. and U.S.S.R. (New York: Pocket 
Books, 1970), 2. 
 
28
 Kenez, Propaganda State, 192. 
 
29
 Kassof, Soviet Youth Program, 21. 

13 
 
within the public and private spaces in society.  Accordingly, the creation of the 
organization, its goals, methods, activities, and problems must be posed as a 
distinct set of inquiries, addressed in relation to other Party components, such as 
the Komsomol, and placed within the historical framework of the Soviet era, but 
also treated as a unique, state-sponsored, socialist children‟s organization without 
historical precedent.   
Recently, historian Laurie Bernstein wrote, “The picture that comes to 
mind when we think of Soviet youth is that of the communist scouts, the „Young 
Pioneers‟ decked out in their red neckerchiefs and impossibly neat outfits, looking 
like a cross between Hitler youth and reverent bobbysoxers.”
30
  The Pioneers 
might indeed be the symbol of Soviet childhood;  however, there is a dearth of 
recent work specifically discussing the organization, and in works with a broader 
scope, it usually merits merely a colorful anecdote or two.
31
  Though neglected, 
the Pioneer organization is enormously important as an intersection of state 
interests, ideology, society, and children.  As one former Pioneer official put it, 
the Pioneers were “essentially an adult organization in which children 
                                                 
 
30
 Laurie Bernstein, review of Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, 
Delinquents by Anne Gorsuch and Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 
1917-1932 by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, in History of Education Quarterly, 43:1 (Spring 2003); 
available from The History Cooperative at http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/heq/ 
43.1/br_2.html; Internet; accessed May 2, 2005. 
 
31
 A spate of fellow-traveler accounts of the Young Pioneers published primarily in the 
late 1920s and 1930s exist.  While useful, they are not sufficiently critical nor scholarly to qualify 
as monographs.  A few examples:  Samuel Northrup Harper, Civic Training in Soviet Russia 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929); Beatrice King, Changing Man: The Education 
System of the USSR (New York: Viking Press, 1937);  Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet 
Communism: A New Civilisation? (New York: C. Scribner‟s Sons, 1938). 

14 
 
participated.”
32
  Thus, the state‟s definition of childhood – appearance, values, 
activities, and so on – is made accessible through the programs and 
pronouncements of the Young Pioneers.  Studying internal documents of the 
Pioneer organization illuminates the party‟s attempts to define Sovietness, to 
propagandize, to direct the actions of the nation‟s children as well as the struggles 
associated with insufficient resources and staff, overwhelming circumstances, and 
a sometimes uncooperative population.  Not only does analysis of the 
organization demonstrate the shifting nature of the state‟s ideals for and 
expectations of Soviet children, but also the difficulties involved in disseminating 
and “selling” those same ideals and expectations to children. 
Apparently, this task became immeasurably more difficult in 1941.  At the 
onset of the Great Patriotic War, children ages ten to fourteen comprised an 
estimated 11.4 percent of the population, and children under nineteen, a whopping 
44.8 percent of the total population of the Soviet Union.
33
  According to 
membership reports, some 61 percent of eligible children were members of the 
                                                 
 
32
 Alexandre Strokanov, personal interview by author, Birmingham, Alabama, March 23, 
2007.  Strokanov was a high-level official in the Young Pioneer organization prior to the fall of 
the Soviet Union in 1991. 
 
33
 See Table 23.2 in Evgeny M. Andreev, Leonid E. Darsky, and Tatiana L. Kharkova, 
“Population Dynamics: Consequences of Regular and Irregular Changes,” in Wolfgang Lutz, 
Sergei Scherbov, Andrei Volkov, eds., Demographic Trends and Patterns in the Soviet Union 
Before 1991 (London: Routledge, 1994), 430.  Andreev, Darsky, and Kharkova provide 
population projections for mid-1941 based on official census data from the 1920s, 1930s, and 
1950s, accounting for demographic catastrophes such as the civil war and 1933 famine and 
considering the expansion of Soviet territory after 1939.   Projections suggest that children 10-14 
comprised the second largest age cohort in the Soviet Union at 22,325,000;  only the group aged 
0-4 (26,514,000) exceeded this group.   

15 
 
Young Pioneers.
34
  The war brought with it unprecedented challenges and 
conditions for the organization and for Soviet children, as it did for the entire 
population.  It is at this intersection of children, state, and circumstance that I pose 
the questions which frame my dissertation:  what was the war like for children?  
How did the state interact with children during the Great Patriotic War?  What did 
the state expect of children during wartime?  This study primarily focuses on 
children aged ten to fourteen – those whom the state expected to reach via the 
Young Pioneers.  Though this project does not pretend to be an exhaustive 
account of children, the state, and the Great Patriotic War, many of the 
expectations and experiences described herein can be and should be extrapolated 
to children of all ages.    
 
This study joins other recent explorations into the relationship between 
children and war.
35
  Long viewed solely in the one-dimensional role of victim – 
and, indeed, children often are the greatest victims of war – scholars now agree 
                                                 
 
34
 RGASPI, f. M-1, op. 7, d. 77, l. 33.  Statistics in a 1944 memo on Pioneer membership 
give comparative figures for 1939-1943.  Membership in January 1941 is listed as 13,694,560.  As 
noted above, Andreev, et.al., estimate population of children ages ten to fourteen in 1941 at 
22,325,000.   Evidently these membership figures were not widely-known, as there is obvious 
discrepancy between the organization‟s number and other accounts.  For example, Boris 
Skomorosky claims that there were ten million Pioneers, ages ten to sixteen, at the beginning of 
the war.  The Anglo-Soviet Youth Friendship Alliance estimated a membership of fifteen million.  
Skomorovsky and E. G. Morris,