Document 142

Speech by Krupskaia at Orgbiuro session "On Young Pioneer Work," 7 May 1933

RGASPI, f. 17, op. 114, d. 236, ll. 206-208. Typewritten copy.

KRUPSKAIA: What shortcomings do I see in the Pioneer organization? First, we have a mechanical quality: whoever wants to can join the Pioneer organization. As soon as he reaches ten years of age, he joins it. Whether he knows anything politically or not, either way he is accepted. There is no probationary period. There is no period when he aspires to be a Pioneer. There is no practice of having somebody briefly sum up at the time of acceptance: now such-and-such a child has completed this and this, let's elect him to this, he has done such and such well. This doesn't exist. And so the most diverse kinds of people turn up at Pioneer meetings: people from the older groups, people from the younger groups, they don't listen to one another, everybody talks at once. I have attended several meetings. All these general detachments discuss within each detachment so-called political issues and they are discussed in the same formulations as adults discuss them. No connection is made between a political issue and real life. Our Pioneer organization used to be different. The Pioneers in the countryside, if one of them saw something that was wrong, he would take the floor and speak. But now at a ceremonial meeting they single out a group that begins to recite the latest resolution of the TsK. It will finish reciting, walk by to a drumbeat and that ends it. There is no real political work being done.

Now they are saying here that a Pioneer leader is unable to give an answer if a Pioneer asks him a question. But after all, there is nothing terrible about that, it is very easy to deal with that situation: say that the leader doesn't know this, he will read up or ask someone and then will give an answer. No, [people say,] that must not happen. He cannot do that. There is an awful lot of formalism. For example, with respect to reading books. There were these courses for juvenile correspondents. I asked them what kind of books they like a lot. Everybody kept quiet. I kept asking and asking, and they were silent. Finally one of them said: Katorga i ssylka. [["Hard Labor and Exile"] was a journal of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles that was published between 1921 and 1935. It carried articles about the revolutionary movement in tsarist Russia.]. Well, all right, I said, and the books that interest you, the kind you can't put down? No discussion ever got going. Yet there is a lot that interests the youngsters.

KAGANOVICH: He didn't answer because he was afraid, because adventure literature is forbidden.

KRUPSKAIA: But who knows, if you say any book, you could get into trouble, but if you say Katorga i ssylka, that's all right.

The youngsters are formalistic about expressing their opinions. A certain number of kids speak, always the same ones. And they ask hackneyed questions. I was recently corresponding with some Pioneers and I've written for Pionerskaia Pravda [Young Pioneer Truth]. I have written some letters, particularly about relations between boys and girls. The people at Iskra and Pionerskaia Pravda sent me a pile of letters, and some of the letters are formalistic while some are very interesting. You get the impression that the Pioneer organization is not satisfying the youngsters. They are not finding their kind of work there. They are afraid of organizing groups, they don't think it is related to the Pioneers.

. . . There is somehow no initiative, good beginnings and good ideas are not picked up and there is no community work at all. There are work assignments, but no real work. For example, they will assign Pioneers to collect refuse for use as raw materials. A little girl climbs onto a table and reads off how much refuse she has collected. But stirring up an idea, having a child outraged about something--that doesn't happen. It is this situation that must be changed, we must rethink the work itself so that there is no situation like the one now, so that there is every possible kind of group, and not just on paper, but groups that actually function in real life. We have to carefully rethink the programs of these groups and organize them well, so that initiative develop on a wide scale there and organizational abilities and skills develop there. After all, the Pioneer organization is of tremendous importance because it can begin to mold organizers in the early years. And in some places where the work has been set up well, we see children developing organizational abilities. It is an abnormal situation when all youngsters are doing is deciding how to sew on a kerchief or where to hang a banner and they are not doing any really useful, really essential work.

The Pioneers have laws and an oath that in large part have been copied from the Boy Scouts. But now that the Boy Scouts have degenerated into totally bourgeois organizations, it seems to me that we should repudiate these laws for the Pioneers.

We must do a tremendous amount of work to reorganize the Pioneer organization and do away with the formalism that now constitutes the principal evil in our Pioneer organizations.