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Raised Under Stalin: Young Communists and the Defense of Socialism
Seth Bernstein has produced a valuable institutional history of the Soviet youth organization, the Komsomol. By tracing the Komsomol from its origin after the October Revolution, through the years of high Stalinism in the 1930s and World War II, and into the immediate post-war period, Bernstein argues that the group went from being an iconoclastic (and, from the state’s point of view, unwieldy) collection of politically active youth, to a structured organization designed for ‘disciplining youth for socialism.’ (p. 222) Moreover, in drawing upon an impressive range of archival sources, Bernstein is able to create a full picture of the Komsomol, including both the debates over its political role at the top of its hierarchy, and the repercussions of those policies on ordinary members and would-be members. This presentation is particularly useful for scholars interested in gender history, as Bernstein regularly addresses the ways that men and women navigated the changing dynamics of Komsomol politics.