[80] "Sosrav Proletkul'tov," Al'manakh Proletkurta (Moscow, 1925), p. 183.
[81] See Diane Koenker, "Urban Families, Working Class Youth Groups and the 1917 Revolution in Moscow," in The Family in Imperial Russia , ed. David Ransel (Urbana, 1978), pp. 289–90, 294–97; and David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime (New York, 1983), pp. 40–41.
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ship rules to exclude those under eighteen.[82] However, this was not the case for the Proletkult. Although central leaders clearly preferred experienced, skilled, and hence adult workers, they did not enforce age restrictions. Local groups made their own rules, but their age limits were usually low. The Novoselsk village circle took members from age fifteen on, the Tula Proletkult from age sixteen.[83]
The preference of Russian youth for the most radical and extreme solutions to social problems has been well documented. During 1917 young workers turned much more quickly to support the Bolsheviks than did their older colleagues.[84] As a result, the Bolshevik Party could claim a very youthful membership, as could the Red Guards, special units formed to defend the revolution.[85] The Proletkult's reputation as the most revolutionary and utopian cultural organization clearly won it friends in the same circles. In the words of Maksim Shtraukh, who came to the Moscow Proletkult as a teenager and eventually became a famous actor and director: "We wanted to serve the kind of art that would answer the combative spirit of the times, that would be a weapon in the revolutionary struggle. That's why we went to the Proletkult. . . . We young people chose this theater because we were burning with the desire to serve not simply art, but a new and revolutionary art."[86]
At the local level many Proletkult organizations had close ties to the Komsomol, the Communist Party's youth org anization, which encouraged a young following. In the small town
[82] Isabelle A. Tirado, "The Socialist Youth Movement in Petrograd," Russian Review , vol. 46, no. 2 (1987), pp. 139–41.
[83] "Novosel'skoe Prosvetitel'noe Obshchestvo 'Proletkul't,'" TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 430, l. 73; "Ustav," d. 1536, l. 1.
[84] Mandel, Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime , p. 41; and Smith, Red Petrograd , pp. 197–200.
[85] Koenker, "Urban Families," pp. 281, 300; and Rex A. Wade, Red Guards and Workers' Militias in the Russian Revolution (Stanford, 1984), pp. 173–75.
[86] Quoted in G. A. Shakhov, Maksim Maksimovich Shtraukh (Moscow, 1964), p. 31.
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of Lukino, in Tver province, the Proletkult president helped to start the local Komsomol division. A Proletkult club on the Moscow-Kazan railroad line catered exclusively to Komsomol members.[87] In Samara the Komsomol and the Proletkult even had overlapping leaderships.[88]
Surely another attraction was the fact that the Proletkult advanced young people into responsible positions. The records of the 1921 national congress offer many examples of teenagers in leadership roles. Iakov Smirnov, assistant head of a theater section in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in 1921, was only eighteen years old but he had already been in the Proletkult for three years. Nina Polekova, age nineteen, was president of the Rzhev organization. At twenty Pavel Karpov was part of the governing presidium in Saratoy. Anatolii Stepahoy, metalworker and Komsomol member from Rzhev, was on the presidium of his local organization at age seventeen. He had first joined the Proletkult when he was fourteen years old.[89]
Proletkult organizers valued young people because they were seen as the future of the revolution. Work with adolescents and children insured the survival of proletarian culture and the Proletkult as an institution.[90] Although class origins were a dominant theme in discussions about adult workers, the same standards did not apply to the young. In both local and central records Proletkultists counted the children of workers as part of the proletariat, regardless of their current occupation.[91] Unlike adults, young people were to some de-
[87] Proletarskaia kul'tura , no. 11/12 (1919), p. 66; and the 1919 questionnaire for the Perovskii raionnyi klub, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 430, l. 10.
[88] From a local questionnaire, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 117, l. 98 ob. See also reports for the Shchelkovo and Archangel organizations, d. 117, l. 70, d. 1209, l. 85.
[89] Delegate list for the 1921 national congress, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 144, ll. 114, 117, 124, 116.