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’.