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Humanitarian sciences in Siberia

2014 year, number

“THE POWER AND FREEDOM TO ALL PEOPLE”: THE HISTORY OF THE ILLEGAL YOUTH ORGANIZATION IN THE LATE 1920S: BASED ON INVESTIGATION DOCUMENTS

E.N. Savenko
State Public Scientific Technical Library of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPSTL SB RAS), Russia, 630200, Novosibirsk, Voshod str., 15
Keywords: youth, protests, illegal organizations, clandestine printing, leaflets

Abstract

The purpose of the article based on the previously unknown sources is to study the history of a clandestine student organization that existed in Omsk under the name of the Russian National Party Rights. Investigation materials stored in the archives of the Federal Security Service in the Omsk region allow us to clarify the views existing in the historical literature on personal composition, organizational structure and purposes of the association. Documents show that young people focused on the democratic traditions of revolutionary populism in creating an underground organization. The article presents fragments from proclamations published in the underground press giving the idea of Siberian students’ protest moods at the end of the 1920s. The keynote of the youth protest was dissatisfaction with the ideological and political monopoly of the Communist party. The rejection of Soviet reality and resistance to the dictates increased in proportion to the strengthening of authoritarian tendencies in the government policy. Slogans of illegal proclamations issued by the youth were accordingly transformed. Initially appeals focused on the need for consolidation of the student youth in order to resist the dictates of the Komsomol minority. Over time, the main slogan of the leaflets turned into the call for armed struggle against the dictatorship of the Communist party and for the establishment of a free People’s Republic. The protest activities of the illegal student groups, whose members were natives of villages, reached a peak in 1929 in connection with the beginning of the state repressive policy in the village. Based on the investigation materials the author comes to conclusion that youth protest actions were spontaneous and of local significance. However, the security organs, relying on a thesis about the sharpening of the class struggle, used student protests for large-scale repressions against members of the politically unreliable social groups.