Young adults would have many opportunities to test their would-be heroism. The state was keen to acquaint them with weapons, drill, and maps. By 1938, the voluntary organization Osoaviakhim, which translates roughly as the Society for Air and Chemical Defence, had been training youngsters for more than a decade. Its membership topped 3 million each year. Serious and hearty in what had become the Soviet tradition, it offered classes in everything from marksmanship and map-reading to first aid.27 Young volunteers spent weeks in summer camps, embarking on forced marches, digging practice foxholes and bandaging notional fractures of each other’s healthy limbs. Osoaviakhim’s members also led the way when the state needed loans. They were the ones who painted campaign banners to raise the cash for funding new planes, and on some pay days they would even stand in lines, red armbands to the fore, to collect workers’ money outside factory gates.
The dream that teenagers all shared was powered flight. This was the fantasy of progress and modernity that caught a generation’s mood. For a time, in the early 1930s, the trademark craft was the dirigible, and youngsters campaigned for the cash to fund an airship named for tubby, smooth-faced Voroshilov, the Defence Commissar. Airships hung over Red Square on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in November 1932, and more were planned as part of the new state’s invincible defence. But by the late 1930s, it was the plane, albeit just a wooden biplane, and above all the parachute, that inspired youths to join the military clubs. Parachuting became a national craze. Towers were built for practice jumps in many city parks. By 1936, there were over 500 of them, backed up by 115 new parachute-training schools. Young Soviet citizens would make nearly 2 million jumps in that one year. The state-run Krokodil, the satirical magazine, even suggested that the bell towers of churches could be converted for the new sport.28 Joking apart, it has been estimated that the Soviet population included more than a million trained parachutists at the end of 1940. It was ironic, one of many ironies, that parachute troops would prove marginal to the war effort when the crisis came.29
The craze for training camps was not purely about defence, at least as far as the young people who took part in them were concerned. Social activity of approved kinds was regarded as a sign of good citizenship. Young people who wanted to get on in the world knew that they had to join things, show their zeal. The élite of clubs was the komsomol, the young communists’ league, and anyone who aspired to a good career, or even to a place at university, would join it. But most had joined already anyway because this was a place to make new friends. ‘It was only later,’ a former officer recalled, ‘that I realized that in fact it was necessary for my career.’ This man, Lev Lvovich Lyakhov, would study geology before the war, a subject that he chose because, like so many of his generation, he was entranced by travel and adventure. Komsomol and Osoaviakhim were largely routes to social contact and good field trips. To grow up in these years was to enjoy the clutter and collective discipline of hiking boots and summer camps and marching with red flags. It was also a matter of gymnastics, and not just the physical kind.
Belonging was also treated as a proof of faith. Lectures on ideology were so much a part of daily life that no one thought it odd to hear them in a social setting, including at the Osoaviakhim camp. The days of philosophical analysis and free debate were gone. Instead, youths who itched to try out their new skis or parachutes would have to sit through lectures on such topics as ‘Let us strengthen the international links of the working class of the USSR with the working class of capitalism!’30 The clumsy phrases sounded as ungainly in Russian as they do in translation, but these people had grown up with them. The Russian language had evolved in step with Soviet man, losing the sharpness and elegance of the last tsarist years. The multisyllabic, Latinate slogans of the new regime were now as common as the garlic on a peasant’s breath. Even ungainly acronyms – partkom for party committee, komsomol for the young communists’ league, kolkhoz for collective farm – were ordinary currency by 1938. Each innovation from the government needed a set of new slogans and several longer words. Young people knew no other way.
Another acronym made sure that no one ridiculed it all. In 1917, Lenin’s comrade, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, was put in charge of internal security in the new state. He assembled a secret police force with terrifying powers and called it the Extraordinary Commission, Chrezvychainaya Kommissiya in Russian, abbreviated to Cheka. By 1938, it had gone through several changes of title, although its fondness for murder, torture and imprisonment without trial remained the same. For the entire period of the war, it would be known as the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Its main task was to enforce the state’s will, and its victims included party members, army officers, intellectuals and even loyal engineers. It was police force, spy and prison warder, provider of forced labour, judge, executioner and burial service. It also had a paramilitary branch. This monitored dissension and indiscipline among soldiers, though certain detachments were also trained to fight. But in the last few years of peace its main role was to operate a system of surveillance, summary arrest and state terror that would almost destroy the regime that it claimed to serve. Young komsomols and parachutists would have known of its work. Many of the arrests and even the death sentences were public. But protest was not possible, and nor, in any real sense, was discussion. There were no outlets for dissent, and critics would have found no public audience. ‘You become an accomplice even though you are an adversary,’ a former Bolshevik wrote later, ‘because you are unable to express dis approval even if you are ready to pay with your life.’31
Illegal arrests and mass executions were state policy during the civil war. Thereafter, the scale of police terror was greatly reduced, at least for a decade or so. However, in December 1934, the popular chairman of Leningrad’s communist party committee, Sergei Kirov, was shot by a member of the public while working late in his office. It was the pretext for a fresh campaign of fear. First came the arrests and the show trials in which leading figures from Lenin’s time were disgraced and sentenced to death in public view. But these were followed by more secretive operations, including mass arrests and disappearances. Piles of bodies appeared in city-centre cemeteries, each one of which had been shot at close range with a police gun. The purges, the process by which tens of thousands of innocent people were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and ultimately, in unnumbered cases, executed without trial, cast a shadow across all areas of public life. The armed forces were not immune, despite the certainty of war. In June 1937, the Deputy Minister of Defence (and former Chief of the General Staff), Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevsky, was arrested. Many of his senior aides, including several civil-war heroes, were also implicated in the trumped-up case. The entire group was put on trial, found guilty and sentenced to death on charges that included conspiracy and treason. No one fully believed the tales, but no one could express their disbelief aloud. Two years later, a local official in the city of Kursk would be arrested for using old newspapers to protect the surface of his desk during a public meeting. One of them, dating from before the purge, showed a photograph of Tukhachevsky’s face.32