Lenin Youth And The Future

Situated in a particular historical moment marked by the violent crises of capitalism—the rise of the alt-right, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement—The Future of Lenin collects essays by an international cohort of scholars to assert Lenin's relevance for twenty-first-century politics and thought. Taking different and sometimes opposing vantage points on Lenin's value for the future, the contributions to this volume reveal an unexpected Lenin, one who escapes the stale Cold War-era discourse of demonization and hagiography. Instead, the future-oriented Lenin in these pages comes to life as our contemporary: an interlocutor who is surprisingly relevant for Black and anticolonial struggles in the US and beyond; for building the new Left; and for assessing Bernie Sanders' movement as well as alt-right anti-statism. In short, Lenin's concrete development of Marxism for his historical conditions may yet offer lessons for revolutionaries to come.

This study is the third and culminating work by Kitty Weaver on Soviet youth. The first, Lenin's Grandchildren, studied the Soviet child from birth to age seven. The second, Russia's Future, studied Soviet children from ages seven to fourteen, the years of the Young Pioneers. This study examines the Soviet system and its education of young communists in the Komsomol (the Young Communist League) and at Moscow State University. Given the events of recent times, Weaver also shifts from examining how Soviet young people learned communism to considering how they unlearn communism. Her first-hand account is based on her travels and her study in the Soviet Union and in Russia and the other fourteen republics. The question Weaver most frequently asked, and the question implied by many of her other questions of her Soviet friends and informants was, Who are you? Their illuminating answers and her pithy comments and observations sprinkle her narrative with a sense of the everyday, providing the reader with a three-dimensional portrait of Soviet life, of the hopes and the fears of Soviet youth.