Raised under Stalin: Young Communists and the Defense of Socialism by Seth Bernstein (review)

This book analyzes the history of “communist upbringing under Stalin,” focusing especially on the socialization and militarization of Soviet youth from 1934 to 1941. Seth Bernstein also recounts the early history of the 1920s Soviet youth organization Komsomol, and he includes the period of the Great Patriotic War, 1941–45, and even “the aftermath of this war” (v). He promises to study a history of Soviet “young communists, who grew up in the wake of revolution and in the midst of war” (1). Bernstein explains that “examining Soviet youth culture across the 1941 divide highlights the continuities between the prewar and wartime periods” (2). He does a great job of uncovering a precious trove of archival sources in Russia and Ukraine devoted to the transformation of Soviet Komsomol during the Stalinist period of its history.

At the same time, Bernstein acknowledges the epistemological limits of his own archival research. “Although the primary focus of this book is [Komsomol] organizers,” he explains, “it also explores the experiences of ordinary youth under Stalinism as far as source limitations allow” (10). Still, he claims that his study will provide a “more correct” picture of the Komsomol by avoiding “anti-Soviet” memoirs, including “the recollections of those who left the USSR during or after the war,” which “were influenced by the Cold War divide” (10). Another ambitious claim of this book is its attempt to present a “wide general history” of its subject matter: “Studies that rely on individual accounts or regional sources often face the choice of creating case studies or weaving these materials into a broader narrative. This book opts for the latter, integrating the stories of individual, regional and central actors in Soviet youth culture into a wider account of Stalinism” (10).

After all these claims, in eight chapters of his book Bernstein meticulously presents and analyzes new evidence he found in post-Soviet archives, adding some new insights and interpretations to the available studies of Soviet Komsomol youth under Stalin, including those written by such Western scholars as William Husband, Isabel Tirado, Mark Edele, Julianne Fürst, and Matthias Neumann. But overall, this study also demonstrates the author’s limitations of general historical knowledge about Soviet youth. While trying to support his main argument that World War II cemented Stalinist youth as a core part of socialism, Bernstein completely ignores the iconic role of the image of Pavel Korchagin, hero of the popular novel How the Steel Was Tempered, and Korchagin’s creator, Nikolai Ostrovsky, who inspired many characters Bernstein’s book, from Aleksandr Kosarev (41–45) to Zoia Kosmodemianskaia (193–94). Writing about abandoned and orphaned children, who would later become a majority of Komsomol members (84, 100, 103), Bernstein likewise neglects to mention classic sources about this story of Soviet youth—books by the legendary Anton Makarenko, who educated thousands of Soviet young people who would become later the Soviet heroes in World War II, and the memoirs of Leonid Panteleiev from an orphanage “Republic of ShKID,” whose stories would inspire millions of Komsomol members, Soviet patriots.

At the end of his book Bernstein analyzes the future developments of Soviet Komsomol after Stalin, ignoring the recent studies about post-Stalin Soviet youth by Vladislav Zubok, Andrei Kozovoi, and Robert Hornsby. Moreover, Bernstein’s book has a Moscow-centered and Russian-biased approach. Despite his research in Kyiv’s archives, the author ignores the famous debates about national identity and communism among young Ukrainian borotbists and other groups of Komsomol members in Soviet Ukraine under Stalin. New research by Serhy Yekelchyk and other Canadian scholars offers the detailed story of Ukrainian youth during this period of time. Ironically, Bernstein’s research, which was funded by various Ukrainian research grants from Canada, ignores the recent studies of Komsomol and youth culture in Soviet Ukraine written by Yekelchyk and William Risch, as well as my own work in this area. Paradoxically, engagement with these new...