“We Shall Refashion Life on Earth!” Youth in Eurasia

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Fall 2018

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Young Communist League (Komsomol) in Soviet Russia. The Komsomol, and youth organizations established in the late 19th and 20th centuries, was part of a general “cult of youth” where young people represented the hopes and anxieties for the health of the nation state. Indeed, youth became crucial political and culture objects and subjects throughout the 20th century. 

Given the importance youth as a fluctuating modern social category, the Komsomol’s centenary presents a unique opportunity to explore and reflect on young people’s past and present influence in Eurasia and beyond.

 

September 20, 2018

A Live Interview with Matthias Neumann, University of East Anglia

“Youth” emerged as historical agents in the late 19th and early 20th century in response to the social, economic, and cultural upheaval of rapid modernization. As a new social category, young people became the objects of the state capture and surveillance and agents in political and cultural participation in youth specific organizations, institutions, and movements. Communist parties and states, in particular, played a pivotal role in shaping and mobilizing youth. This live interview with Matthias Neumann will discuss the history of “youth” as crucial players in the 20th century.

 

September 27, 2018

A Talk by Elizabeth McGuire, California State East Bay

From 1933 to 1991, Communist Party leaders from all over the world -- including Mao Zedong, Eugene Dennis, Josip Broz Tito, and many more from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East to the Far East -- sent their children to be educated in a single boarding school in Ivanovo, Russia.  They were raised linguistically and culturally as Russians, often forgetting their native tongue.  Many continue to feel enormous affection and nostalgia for the place they consider their true home, and travel across continents to attend reunions every five years.  Based on archival documents, the school's own private archive, and dozens of interviews with alumni across the world, Communist Neverland is the tale of this remarkable school, which tells a new story about the people who dedicated their lives to world revolution.

 

October 4, 2018

A Live Interview with Margaret Peacock, University of Alabama

In the 1950s and 1960s, images of children appeared everywhere, from movies to milk cartons, their smiling faces used to sell everything, including war. Soviet and American leaders too used emotionally charged images of children to create popular support for their policies at home and abroad. This live interview with Margaret Peacock will discuss her work on the deep symmetry in how Soviet and American propagandists mobilized similar images of children to similar ends, despite their differences.

 

October 10, 2018

A Talk by Diana Georgescu, University College London

The talk examines the widespread practice of youth exchanges during the late Cold War through two seemingly peripheral actors: the Romanian Pioneers, the children’s organization of the Romanian Communist Party, and one of its most active partners in the west, the International Falcons Movement, a leftwing youth organization with national branches in Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, and France. Following Romanian and foreign teens who traveled as cultural ambassadors to youth camps organized in the Soviet bloc and Western Europe, the talk examines competing visions and practices of socialist internationalism in order to illuminate the role of “soft power” during the Cold War.

 

November 27, 2018

A Live Interview with Olena Nikolayenko, Fordham University

At the turn of the twenty-first century, a tide of nonviolent youth movements swept across Eastern Europe demanding political change in repressive political regimes in Serbia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine that emerged since the collapse of communism. This live interview with Olena Nikolayenko will discuss these youth movements and their ability to mobilize citizens against the authoritarian governments on the eve of national elections.

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