Word: komsomols
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...primacy of the Communist Party in Soviet government and life. The country's only legal party is identified as the "nucleus" of the system and its sole authority on ideology. To maintain control, the party tightly restricts its membership: a candidate must have been a member of Komsomol, the Communist youth organization, be recommended by three people who have each been members for three years, and pass other screening procedures, including serving a year on probation. Of the 193 million citizens who were 18 and older in 1979, only 16 million, or 9%, were party members. (In Khrushchev...
...Young Pioneers, the Soviet equivalent of the Cub Scouts. He had been asked to reprimand another boy, did it blisteringly well, felt ashamed of himself and decided that "I couldn't and wouldn't play this idiotic role any longer." At 14 he refused to join the Komsomol, and at 16 he was running with a harmless group of youthful Pimpernels who sympathized with the Hungarian uprising...
...summer camp calls itself an "experimental lab." The director insists that even swimming is "political." The children put on plays about heroic workers. Mao's China? A Soviet youth Komsomol? No, Santa Barbara, Calif. Situated in a rundown redwood ranch house nestled among the scrub oaks and laurels in the hills above the city, a unique camp run by those indefatigable activists Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda opened this summer for 150 youngsters from...
Shelepin's meteoric rise through the Communist Party apparatus under Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev showed him to be outstandingly adroit in cultivating useful political alliances and cutting through the ossified Soviet bureaucracy. He established a substantial power base as head of the Komsomol organization of young Communists and later as chief of the KGB, the Soviet secret police...
...lifting of the burden of a war mentality means more concentration on getting ahead within the system. Competition for higher education seems fiercer, especially among those trying to get into the Komsomol, the party youth organization, the traditional path to full party membership. Though long hair is still frowned upon, youth is becoming more individualistic. A friend claims that the students in one Moscow school got together and refused to wear the standard brown wool uniforms. "Now," he says, "they wear what they please." Communist Party membership is still the criterion for advancement, but a plan to issue new party...