Unused Chapter: Youth in Evolving Revolutions
This chapter was included in the very first draft of “Teenage” but, after a drastic rethink, was chopped along with the Italian and Russian storylines. There is much fascinating material on the way that fascist Italy and Communist Russia aimed to control their youth. In particular the story of the bensprizorni – the wandering, penniless youth of the 1930′s – is worthy of a book in itself.
‘The problem of youth is the central problem of fascism’
Guiseppe Bottai: “Funzione della gioventi”
(Critica Fascista, March 1 1933)
In October 1932, Italy celebrated the first ten years of the Fascist regime with the Deccenale of Mussolini’s March on Rome. Lasting over several months, the anniverary was designed as a huge tourist draw, with massive displays, parades, art exhibitions, which had at its heart Il Duce himself – depicted on the cover of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution as a chin made of stone, surrounded by the word ‘Du-ce’ typographised like a chant. Whether eulogised as an ‘Infallible Chief’ or issuing slogans like ‘better to live one day as a lion than one hundred years as a sheep’, the established dictator was completely identified with his country: ‘the new Italy is called Mussolini’.
Youth was still the vital ideological principle in the New Italy, relentlessly discussed and redefined by debates in the fascist press. Indeed, Mussolini spoke at the Deccenale of the need to make room for the next generation: ‘We want the young to take up our torch, flaming with our faith, and to be alert and committed in continuing our labours.’ If fascism was to endlessly regenerate through successive waves of youth, then Mussolini himself was imbued with ‘a wonderful youthfulness’; indeed, as Gioventu Fascista had it in early 1932, his youth extended ‘beyond space and time’.
This vaunting rhetoric cloaked an increasingly problematic reality. In 1932, Mussolini turned forty-nine, and looked it. If, as the rising generation of fascists held, ‘by the age of thirty a man is worthless’, then Il Duce was twenty years past his prime and indeed, could be considered one of those ‘lifetime youths’ who, like Marinetti, were castigated by the polemical writer Luigi Russo as singing ‘the hymn of eternal youth to young fifty year olds’. As if to confirm a crisis, at the age of fifty Mussolini took a twenty-one year old lover, Claretta Petacchi, who, like any lovesick teenager, had only a few years before had papered her bedroom with pictures of Il Duce.
The problem with the fascist definition of youth was that it had been heavy on quasi-mystical rhetoric, short on practical fundamentals. Despite humanity’s best efforts, Youth doesn’t last forever. This had been identified as early as 1927, when first wave propagandist Manlio Morgagni wrote: ‘fascism is youth, but the inexorable law of time is that of ageing; what will become of fascism as it ages?’ His answer was that ‘Fascism, born of the most vibrant energies of our Race, so as not to degnerate and age in turn, must…follow nature, identifying itself with the Race, and every year drawing the vigor of life from upcom-ing generations’.
By the late twenties, the fascists had become the establishment, and, despite the paramilitary Balilla and Piccole Italiane, it was becoming difficult to maintain the same commitment and excitement that had fuelled the first fascist giovanezza. The poor training of Italy’s youth from the mid-twenties on was apparent when they actually assumed the regime functions demanded by dicta like ‘give the power, all the power, to the younger generation’. The result, as identified by Critica Fascista in 1930, was a cohort of ‘rabid, eleventh-hour youths’ who, once in power as ‘Vice Secretary of the local leisure centre’, were ‘inflated like Blimps, proclaiming themselves “hierarchs”.’
In early 1930, Mussolini published his Punti fermi sui giovani, Firm Ideas on Youth, which laid out a youth policy for the regime, included structures of totalitarian training and political apprentice-ship, and both spiritual and moral education in fascist priniciples. This was celebrated by Giuseppe Bottai as guaranteeing that ‘the continuity of the fascist revolution is entrusted in the young, on the condition however, that this desire for will, for creation, and for political tangibility is not extinguished in them, features that distinguish the real youth from the fake youth, in other words, those whose age seems to give them the right to an easy irresponsibility’.
Enrolment in fascist youth groups was not yet obligatory, and from 1930 on, greater efforts were made to bring Italian adolescents into the fascisti, both by exhortations and controls affecting primary and secondary education. During that year, a series of Youth Groups were set up as a preliminary stage to party entry. In 1931, the year during which Mussolini declared his intention to ‘go decisively towards the people’, all university professors were required to pledge an oath of allegiance to the regime, while party membership became obligatory for all new teachers in 1933.
And yet even here the rhetoric was confusing. Bottai criticised the Youth Groups as a bureaucratic scheme contrary to ‘youth’s heightened spirit of subversion’. This hardening of the arteries was also commented on by the competing fascist magazine, Il Selvaggio: ‘they teach them not to doubt or discuss anything, which isn’t bad at all; but when they want to think for themselves, we see clearly that they have neither the necessary character nor the training, and that they fall into the most vain and ridiculous heterodoxies. Hence, during a second phase, they evolve towards an attitude that oscillates between lethargy and hypocrisy, beneath a façade of discipline’.
It’s hardly surprising that for many Italian adolescents in the early 1930’s, there was a pervasive feeling of ‘being foreign’. The principal thrust of the regime valorised all the qualities of youth, defined in 1929 as ‘enthusiasm, impulsiveness, promptness, and active passion’, but what actually faced the individual was an increasingly coercive and stratified system of requirements – for political indoctrination and self-control, to name but two – that contradicted these essential qualities. The problem was confounded by the inevitable piling up of age cohorts, each one growing further away from the founding moment, ten years or so before, of fascist inspiration and action.
In the early 1930’s, Il Selvaggio defined a ‘third wave’ of volunteers for the revolution, but they also marked a generation both younger than and different from the wartime and the pre-war generation (from which most of the fascist leadership was taken). Bottai thought that they should be encouraged to merge even more closely with various organs of the state in a ‘corporative revolution’, but that was hardly likely to set young Italian hearts on fire. Nor was Il Duce’s pronouncement in early 1933 that young Fascists ‘had to faithfully and silently serve in positions of obedience before being able to command’ calculated to promote youth freedoms.
Behind the grand phrases, Mussolini’s youth programme contained little more than sport, bureaucracy, and militarism. That same year, this flaw was summarised in an autobiographical Critica Fascista article by Romano Bilenchi: ‘I am speaking of those of us between twenty and twenty-four, and who are, somewhat comically, youths, extreme youths, promises, dawns etc.’ As he cyncially admitted, Italian youth ‘couldn’t care less about the discussions, and worse still, about who are doing the discussing… they’ve forged a new, rather convenient “so what” attitude, so that “getting into a position not to care about anything” has become the fashionable goal’.
The Nazi accession to power in 1933 changed the course of Italian politics. Hitler had already promised the previous year that ‘National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy will be friends for tens and tens of years or at least until I die’, and he also made explicit the importance of Mussolini’s pioneering work in creating a new kind of totalitarian state: ‘Don’t suppose that events in Italy have had no influence on us. The brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt’. Indeed, Hitler took much from Italian fascism: the construction of the one party state, the militaristic colour coded uniforms, the simultaneous organisation of and appeal to youth’.
Mussolini, however, did not reciprocate Hitler’s admiration: the relationship between the two leaders and their countries, was, in R.J.B. Bosworth’s words, characterised by ‘irritation, imitation, and evasion’. With an instinctive rather than a ‘scientific’ racism, Mussolini was puzzled by the systemic nature of Nazi ‘community alien’ purges, and troubled about the ruthless violence used against the SA in June 1934. By the time that Hitler made his state visit that same month, Il Duce was less than impressed with this ‘plumber in a mackintosh’, although there was no hint of this in the official accounts.
His contempt was seasoned by the knowledge that the pupil had outstripped the master, that in fact age did make a difference: not only to his own personal standing, but to a regime based on youthism. Within the terms of fascism, Nazi Germany went further and faster than Italy had ever done, and Mussolini could only attempt to keep up with a sequences of measures, like compulsory enrolment in the Gioventu Universitara Fascista for all students, or greater fascist involvement in the Italian media. By the end of 1934, his regime became involved in an Ethiopian war that, pursued with extreme violence, irrevocably twinned Italy and Germany in the eyes of the world.
So were the contradictions of the first explicitly youth-based revolution resolved: in the same old manner that countries had dealt with youthful energy from time immemorial. The Ethopian war might well have been pursued in a spirit of colonialist lebensraum, but it exposed the hollowness of an ageing autocracy’s youthful obsession. This bankruptcy was exposed by none other than Mussolini’s son eldest Vittorio, who in the mid thirties told a class mate still starry-eyed about the fascist future: ‘It’s useless. Fascism is nothing but a “bluff”. Daddy hasn’t done anything he wanted to do. The Italians are Fascists out of cowardice and don’t give a stuff about the revolution’.
Like Italian fascism, although not for the same reasons, Soviet Russia was protected from the worst aspects of the Crash at the same time as it shared similar problems of how to deal with its young in a permanently rolling revolution. By 1930, the USSR was into its fourteenth year of existence and the third year of Stalin’s absolute power. Although not a youthist, Stalin was sensitive enough to his country’s social problems and the need for dynamic rhetoric to describe Komsomol youth as ‘the nucleus of a new and numerous generation of Bolshevik destoyers of capitalism, of Bolshevik builders of socialism, of Bolshevik deliverers of all who are oppressed and enslaved’.
Stalin inherited a numerous and problematic generation. In 1927, there were nearly 29 million people in the Soviet Union between the ages of 14-23, the year that the Soviet Union media was full of articles and books about the increase in youth ‘hooliganism’ and suicide. The ‘bestial’ and ‘primitive’ activitees of the hooligans – eptimosed by a notorious September 1926 gang rape of a young woman – reflected the traditional lawlessness of a geographically vast nation as well as a perceived crisis in the revolution itself. The ‘unhealthy’ withdrawal of youth from Komsomol life was seen to be the result of the comparatively liberal New Economic Policy (NEP).
If hooliganism could at least be rationalised away as an – albeit unappealing – facet of youth, then the wave of suicides that began in 1926 went straight to the heart of the regime. The USSR was thought to have made such ‘old capitalist’ leftovers redundant but now significant numbers of 20 to 24 year olds were casting a negative vote on the soviet’s future in the most definite and resounding way possible. Some of this had to do with the same hardening of the arteries that had happened in fascist Italy, as the constant comradeship and forward movement of the pioneers gave way to ‘unenlightened careerists and bureaucrats’ – to quote one Komsomol youth’s final note.
The trigger for this wave of suicides was the death, by his own hand, of the bohemian poet Sergei Esenin in December 1925. Like Ageyev before him, Esenin’s poems presented him as shot by both sides, ‘with one leg in the past’, slipping and falling as he tried to adapt to the regime’s rigid, militaristic demands. Ill-reported at the time, this charismatic self-destruction struck a chord with a lost generation: formed by war, raised in a revolution which was changing so fundamentally that all their values were in turmoil. As Mikhail Koriakov, wrote: ‘Sergei Esenin was not just a poet, a literary figure…he was part of our lives…like no other poet in the history of Russian literature’.
A participant in what became known as the ‘Esenin cult’, Koriakov joined a group of young men and women who drank, danced, and read out Esenin’s work despite official disapproval. Any follower of the dead poet (Eseninschinist) could be expelled from school, prevented from going to university or getting a job. Despite being labelled ‘ideologically lacking in self-control’, Koriakov could sense that ‘there was something in the air that lay heavy on the soul, that foretold a coming storm—a new revolution. We soviet youth needed these poems because as youth who were always sensitive and responsive—we were frightened at the approach of this turning point.’
The instincts of Koriakov and his fellow-cultists were correct. Once Stalin had tightened his grip on power, he replaced the gradualist and comparatively liberal NEP with a mass social experiment of such magnitude and impracticality that it remains of the greatest disasters of the 20th century. Beginning in 1929, the First Five Year Plan aimed to enforce total agricultural collectivisation at the same time as it imposed rapid industrialisation throughout the whole of the USSR. At the same time, the regime’s policy became completely isolationist: the borders were closed, trade with outsiders nearly eradicated, and the whole country placed in a ‘pre-mobilization’ state.
Aimed at the class of rich peasant farmers, the kulaks – millions of whom were displaced and purged – the collectivisation drive devastated the countryside, augmenting the disastrous famine of the 1932-33, during which up to four million people died. So successful was Stalin in sealing the borders that the outside world would not know of this humanitarian disaster for at least fifty years. Between 1929 and 1933, up to ten million peasants migrated into Russia’s cities, putting such an intolerable strain on resources that the state introduced internal passports and urban residence permits, administered by the secret police, the OGPU.
After the comparative relaxations of the NEP era, Soviet city dwellers suffered extreme shortages of food and clothing, let alone less essential consumer goods. These scarcities, initially thought to be temporary, became a permanent and systemic feature of life in 30’s Russia. Just as bad was the housing situation, as construction totally failed to keep up with the influx of immigrants: just like Jacob Riis’ East Side, whole families crammed into tiny single rooms with shared kitchens and bathrooms. For the mass of people, life became a basic struggle for survival: if that wasn’t difficult enough, there was the increased intrusion of the state into everyone’s private life.
The totalitarian tendencies of Bolshevism were refined and infinitely expanded under Stalin. After the climactic Shakty show trial of 1928, which brought an end to the NEP, Stalin ruthlessly crushed any remaining open opposition and put himself at the centre of Soviet Russia as the ultimate charismatic leader, the Vozhd, and as such, the object of an organised cult. This almost religious status went hand in hand with other elements of Stalinism, as it would come to be known: a mass social organisation which included state control over production and distribution, rampant bureaucracy, total communist party rule, and ruthless social engineering.
Another principle feature of early Stalinism was the Cultural Revolution that backed up collectivisation and forced industrialisation with a strong cultural and social ethos. At the heart of this was the paranoia that had already flourished in the first few years of the regime: the first ‘class enemies’ were former nobles, the bourgeoisie, or priests who, with some good reason, were suspected of actively working against the revolution to return to their former privilege. Under Stalin, the process was refined to the ‘liquidation as a class’ of certain designed enemies: kulaks, priests, and NEPmen – the intellectuals and specialists of a now discredited era.
Along with this stigmatisation of whole classes went affirmative action for workers and peasants, to create a new professional class that would supplant the NEP ‘bourgeois intelligentsia’. As in Mussolini’s regime, the fast-tracking of the correctly born resulted in a generat-ion – epitomised by Leonid Brezhnev – coming to power at a young age and, unlike in fascist Italy, remaining there for decades. Hand in hand with this went the aggressively promoted new cultural ethos, Socialist Realism, initiated in the summer of 1934, which aimed to replace the post-revolution avant-garde with art that, according to Lenin, ‘should be comprehensible to the masses and loved by them’.
These measures were backed up by an increasingly sophisticated system of terror. Once purged, the kulak or NEPman was not considered neutralised but, as a hidden enemy, an even greater danger to the state. OGPU surveillance and the use of informers increased rapidly and secretly throughout the thirties, creating a world where the wrong opinion or association could result in denunciation, arrest, and ‘administrative exile’ in brutal work camps. With the restrictions on free movement and an intense secrecy about government and state surveillance, Stalin’s Russia became a dangerous country, characterised by what Anne E. Gorsuch calls a ‘pathological anxiety’.
Youth was prominent in this drastic regime change. Even during the height of the NEP, youth brigades had championed the return of socialist competition and shock work in industry, and this became a sustained movement after 1929. Young workers were mobilised against NEP bosses and managers within the arts and the universities; they also worked on a local level to ensure school attendance and factory discipline. Dressed in their uniform of short trousers, boots, semi-military tunic, and the diagonal Sam Brown belt – also favoured by the Hitler Youth – Komsomol activists were also prominent in the collectivisation and anti-religious campaigns of the early 30’s.
As a vanguardist system, Communism relied on its youth to shape the future course of the revolution, and the Komsomol worked as a laboratory of political purity. In the words of a former activist, W.I. Hryshko: ‘In spite of material difficulties, such as the constant food shortage which was particularly acute at the time, neither I nor the young people around me had any anti-Soviet feelings. We simply found in the heroic tension involved in building a new world an excuse for all the difficulties…the atmosphere of undaunted struggle in a common cause—the completin of the factory—engaged our imagination, roused our enthusiasm, and drew us into a sort of front-line world where difficulties were overlooked or forgotten’.
Generational conflict fuelled Komsomol ardour: as one former activist wrote, ‘the older generation, worn after the years of the war and the postwar chaos, were no longer in a position to withstand the difficulties involved in the construction of socialism’. According to Hryshko: ‘of course it was only we, the younger generation, who accepted reality in this way. Our parents were full of muted but deep discontent. The arguments of our elders, however, had little effect on us, being as they were, wholly concerned with material things, while we found in the official justification of all these difficulties a superficial idealism which had considerable appeal to the young’.
Remembering the 1930’s, activist Raisa Orlova noted that her peers ‘shared the same kind of rough, provisional slapdash way of life. Fast-er, faster toward the great goal, and there everything would begin in a genuine sense. It was both possible and necessary to alter everything: the streets, the houses, the cities, the social order, human souls. And it was not all that difficult: first the unselfish enthusiasts would outline the plan on paper; then they would tear down the old (saying all the while, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”); then the ground would be cleared of the rubble and the edifice of the socialist phalanx would be erected in the space that had been cleared’.
Everyday life in Stalinist Russia fell short of these Utopian dreams. The new towns thrown up by industrialisation were inadequately planned and, with all their human flotsam and jetsam, more like the Wild West than any gleaming futuropolis. Their high populations of rootless young single men caused a rapid increase in petty crime and violence during the early 1930’s. Among the ‘hooligan’ acts noted in 1934 were ‘insults, fist fights, breaking of windows, shooting off guns in the streets, challenging passers-by, breaking up cultural events in the club and smashing plates in the cafeteria, disturbing residents’ sleep with fights and noise late at night’.
More serious than worker or gang hooliganism was the massive increase in homeless and starving youth. The number of besprizornye had reduced in the late 1920’s, partly through the institution of orphanages, detdoma, and OGPU labour colonies, partly as the result of a generation growing up. However the social chaos that ensued after the application of the Five Year Plan swamped the existing structures, as groups of children orphaned by famine or purging roamed through the countryside and congregated around city parks and railway stations. Their numbers made the besprizornye problem of the 1920’s seem nugatory.
A window into this Social Darwinist world is given by an extraordinary memoir, published under the pseudonym Voinov, which recounts the adolescence of a ‘Soviet waif’. When his engineer father was purged in 1929, Kolya – as he is addressed in the book – is placed, at the age of six, in an orphanage full of ‘tattered and filthy’ children. After a few years of this life, his initial terror turns into toughness and indifference: ‘each of us felt that he was an outcast, that ordinary normal living was impossible for him, that the outside world had become alien and hostile. One had to struggle to survive, and only those succeeded who ruthlessly fought for the right to live’.
Voinov’s attitude hardens into hatred of the regime and all those ‘who were well fed and lived in warmth and contentment’: ‘I began to understand my waif comrades—their sullenness, bitterness and hatred, their suspicion of everyone else outside their own world. For the first time in my life, I felt the chasm separating me, as a waif, from all the people who did not live as I did. It became clear to me that the waifs were my friends, my family, and that I would have to stick to them or die.’ Befriended by some adolescents, he embarks on a course of petty theft and violence – a young Artful Dodger taught the tricks of his new trade by Fagins like his older friend Mishka.
‘In the winter of 1932-33 our “work” became increasingly difficult and dangerous; we had to use more resourcefulness than ever before. I had acquired a hunting knife, and always wore it up my sleeve, strapped to my wrist. This was a time when a stolen chunk of bread could cost your life and hardly any of us ventured out unarmed. The once crowded market-places were now almost empty. A few beet-roots and a rare roll, half flour, half sawdust, were displayed on the stalls. Starving, we acted with desperate recklessness. We were hunted like mad dogs and indeed it was like mad dogs that we prowled around the town. Who could be expected to pity us while we were taking the last piece of bread from starving people?’
‘Hundreds of waifs tramped the streets, gathered near the railway stations, died under the hedges…Those who had joined the ranks of the waifs in the last two years were mainly the children of peasants who had been arrested, deported, or starved to death by the forced collectivisation. It was difficult to stir the imagination of waifs, but even we were shaken by the children’s accounts of the disaster that had struck the countryside. Many of the children that came from the country had not had time to get used to the hardships of a waif’s life, and were not strong enough to stand the ordeal of those terrible years. They perished by the thousands.’
After a brief spell in prison, Kolya teams up again with Mishka to ride the rails: ‘at that time the waifs’ activities were concentrated around railway junctions. Like nomads, they stayed nowhere for long, but travelled all over on the railways. The conductors usually preferred to avoid open clashes, and although they often noticed our presence, generally they merely warned the passengers to take care of their suitcases. They knew that waifs did not travel alone, and that we would revenge ourselves. If a waif was handed over to the police, the news spread quickly… sooner or later the official responsible for the waif’s arrest would be stabbed in the back or pushed under a train’.
Such desperate behaviour created an authoritarian backlash. In response to an increase of juvenile crime, ranging from delinquency to theft, violent attacks and murder, Defence Minister Klim Voroshilov made a public splash by claiming that Moscow authorities had under surveillance ‘about 3,000 serious adolescent hooligans, of whom about 800 are undoubted bandits, capable of anything.’ Castigating the criminal courts’ leniency, he advocated extreme measures on the part of the NKVD to deal with youthful offenders: ‘I don’t understand why we don’t shoot these scoundrels. Do we really have to wait until they grow up into still worse bandits?’
Soon afterwards, Stalin issued the April 1935 Politburo decree entitled ‘On measures of struggle with crime among minors’. This made juveniles from 12 upwards punishable with the same severity as adults if they committed violent crimes. This was quickly followed up by another decree, ‘On the liquidation of child homelessness and lack of supervision’, which instituted penalties for parents who failed to adequately control their children and authorised the NKVD to take an active part in dealing with homeless and delinquent youth. At the same time, the whole system of detdoma and work camps was overhauled and upgraded.
Unrepentant besprizornye like Voinov, if they were not picked up in a police swoop, were driven even further underground. Making his way with Mishka to the south, he accidentally discovers a waif hang-out completely hidden within an old fortress. Inside they find a complete micro-society presided over by the very kind of person they have been taught to despise – ‘an intellectual’ – but Voinov’s suspicion is dispelled once the older man begins to tell the story of the Knights of the Round table: ‘Never had I felt so happy. The tale transported us to an unknown world, and the contrast with our own world was fascinating’.
Quoting Esenin, Ivan Mikhailovitch launches into a personal history that parallels a revolution now consuming its own children: ‘There was a time when I, too, was running round the streets of Moscow with a red flag. I believed in the Revolution. I was ready to give my life to serve it. Well I served it…Article 58, Enemy of the People!’ While incarcerated in the work camp, Mikhailovitch caught tuberculosis. Released on a ‘wolf’s passport’ that denies him the chance to live and work where he wants, he has chosen to live rough: ‘I won’t last long but there is one joy left to me—that I have found a place where I can breathe freely before I die’.