A Revealing History Of The Soviet Boy Scouts....

The haunting photo above has, in recent years, taken on a new life thanks to the internet. However, few seem to know the story behind it.

The image shows members of the Young Pioneers youth group in Soviet Russia donning their gas masks during a civil defense drill near Leningrad in 1937. These days, the image appears to depict a people consumed by fear of war. At the time, however, the image was meant to be one of strength, meant to convey the efficiency and preparedness of the youth organization.

The Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization, commonly known as the Young Pioneers, was a youth organization in the Soviet Union that promoted communist ideals of cooperation and hard work.

The organization was formed in 1922, when the Scouts, the larger movement that encompasses the Boy Scouts, was banned from Soviet Russia. They were banned for not supporting the new communist government, but citizens still recognized the good that the Scouts did. In order to fill that gap, the Soviet government created the Young Pioneers in order to teach life skills to young kids while also indoctrinating them into communist ideology.

Children between the ages of 10 and 15 joined the Young Pioneers and participated in sports, games, summer camps, and the like. Though membership was hypothetically voluntary, social pressure ensured that almost every child in that age range was a Pioneer.

The Soviet Young Pioneers were part of a larger Pioneer movement that sought to foster communist ideology within the youth. This larger Pioneer organization had chapters across the communist world and beyond, including Cuba, China, Mexico, and Finland.

When The Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets refer to World War II, broke out, the Young Pioneers applied the skills that they had learned in their organization in order to aid the war effort.

During the war, children of the Soviet Union were exposed to much of the violence of the war. Instead of cops and robbers, children in the Soviet Union during the war played Soviets against Germans.

In the midst of the war, children would play with discarded shells, grenades and clips. One Soviet newspaper article from 1942 quoted a child at a youth summer camp saying, “We practice grenade throwing and play with our pets.”