Educating Igor

EDUCATING IGOR

Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, has lost three million members since 1985. On January 24, 1988, Pravda complained of a growing interest among young people in “abstract pacifism.” Senior Soviet military officials writing in Red Star (May 7, 1987) are nervous about the increasing influence of Western music, styles, and fads, leading some young people to “parasitic dispositions.” Igor Mikhailovich Ilinsky, a director of Komsomol, writes in Kommunist (No. 6, 1987) that “the number of young people displaying political naïveté, lack of interest in politics, nihilistic views of the future, and loss of clear class vision in the assessment of phenomena and events in social reality, has increased noticeably.” Has the counterculture finally hit Moscow?

PS

About the Author

Peter Schweizer

EDUCATING IGOR

Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, has lost three million members since 1985. On January 24, 1988, Pravda complained of a growing interest among young people in “abstract pacifism.” Senior Soviet military officials writing in Red Star (May 7, 1987) are nervous about the increasing influence of Western music, styles, and fads, leading some young people to “parasitic dispositions.” Igor Mikhailovich Ilinsky, a director of Komsomol, writes in Kommunist (No. 6, 1987) that “the number of young people displaying political naïveté, lack of interest in politics, nihilistic views of the future, and loss of clear class vision in the assessment of phenomena and events in social reality, has increased noticeably.” Has the counterculture finally hit Moscow?