The Komsomol

During our time at Sovietsk, we had the pleasure of touring the local history museum with some of the kids. I've spent a fair amount of time in museums, but I can safely say that this was the most memorable tour I have ever experienced. In four or five separate rooms and in about thirty minutes, we covered the highlights of the history and pre-history of the town. The guide was very efficient with her words and they did not let us linger or stray from the group. (Another lady followed us and turned the lights off in each room as we left--I have to admire their thrift). The information was comprehensive and the displays had lots of great artifacts and photos. In the natural history section, Sarah and the girls got to be photographed with this strange taxidermied creature that they claimed was a type of dog--I have my doubts.

But of all the great things that we saw, what sticks out most in my mind was near the end of our tour. We were walking through the section on the twentieth century, which of course was most notable for the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. One of the displays had the uniforms of the Leninist Communist Youth League, or the Komsomol, the Soviet's version of the boy scouts and girl scouts.One of our interpreters leaned over and told me when he was younger he signed up to join the Komsomol and was about to be inducted when the Soviet Union fell. I had read about the Komsomol and the end of socialism in Russia in my history books, but had never really thought about what it was like to actually experience it. To be so close and to ultimately fail in gaining membership into the Komsomol was almost certainly not the most traumatic part of the fall of the USSR for our interpreter. But his story reminded me that history happened to real people and even something as momentous as the end of the Soviet Union can be broken down into millions and millions of tiny little experiences like his.