Women and Girls in the Post-Stalin Komsomol

Abstract

Tens of millions of girls and young women aged between fourteen and twenty-eight years passed through the ranks of the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) between the mid-1950s and mid-1980s. Indeed, they constituted over half of its members and also a majority of its most active organisers at the grassroots level. While there were always at least some women at or around the apex of the Komsomol—and the organisation’s hierarchy did take measures to ensure considerable female representation in key settings like congresses—the organisation nonetheless reproduced familiar structures from wider Soviet society, such as a markedly declining female presence in the upper levels of the organisation, and some well entrenched notions of exactly what was considered ‘women’s work’.