Introduction
During the Soviet era, the Russian Far East witnessed rapid economic modernization as well as the development of urban and transportation infrastructures. In addition to a dramatic expansion of local imperial-era cities, a regional population boom was stimulated by the creation of new industrial centres like Komsomolsk-na-Amure, Magadan and Artyom. Many of the region’s planned cities were built with the participation of volunteers from the Komsomol or Communist Youth League. Celebrated as pervostroiteli, or ‘first-builders’,Footnote 1 some of these cadres chose to stay in the cities they helped to found. This article draws on the case of Komsomolsk-na-Amure – the region’s largest and most iconic Soviet-era military-industrial complex – to explore the role of pervostroiteli in shaping the city’s memory politics and a multi-decade struggle over the meaning and legacy of early Soviet modernization.
Located more than 400 kilometres north of the regional capital of Khabarovsk and built on the right bank of the Amur River, on the site of a remote nineteenth-century peasant village known as Permskoe, Komsomolsk was meant to foster regional development and reinforce the Soviet Union’s defence capacity on its eastern borders. The rapid advance of the Japanese Imperial Army into Manchuria in 1931 forced Soviet authorities to engage in expedited development of the sparsely populated Far-Eastern frontier, whose infrastructural underdevelopment and lack of military fortifications rendered it highly vulnerable to land invasion.Footnote 2 Originally conceived as a secondary shipyard, built in an inconspicuous location removed from the Chinese border, Komsomolsk evolved into the region’s largest industrial complex, featuring a shipbuilding plant (1932), an aircraft factory (1934), a metallurgical industry (1937) and an oil refinery (1939). The city derived its name from the Communist Youth League or Komsomol, whose members volunteered to travel to the wilderness to construct a new socialist city in the taiga. Between 1932 and 1934, more than 6,000 Komsomol members from different parts of the USSR participated in the city’s construction – an episode that would define the Soviet mythos of Komsomolsk as ‘the city at dawn’ (gorod na zare), built by fervent young communists, for decades to come. Yet, contrary to the popular narrative of individual voluntarism as the primary motivating force, the initial mobilization of Komsomol members largely relied on a system of recruitment quotas assigned to each regional branch.
The historian Jonathan Bone reports that as a result of the military secrecy accompanying these mobilization campaigns, many recruits were poorly informed and utterly unprepared for the harsh working conditions that awaited them in the depths of the Far East (e.g. heavy snowstorms, lack of adequate shelter, sparse provisions).Footnote 3 As a result, the first Komsomol members dispatched to the site from Khabarovsk in May 1932 via river steamers with telling names – such as ‘Columbus’, ‘Komintern’ and ‘Klara Zetkin’ – suffered numerous incidents of mass desertion.Footnote 4 Concerned with the rapidly diminishing labour force, but unable to provide better living or working conditions, in the autumn of 1933, Soviet authorities ordered the formation of a Special Military Construction Corps to be deployed to the Far East to assist in the creation of industrial facilities. Several battalions, consisting of more than 6,000 people, arrived in Komsomolsk in January 1934 following a multi-day ski-trip from Khabarovsk over the frozen Amur. Their 400-kilometre long walk through the snow at the height of winter frosts was subsequently celebrated in local history as ‘the ice crossing’.
Although the mobilization campaigns of the 1930s succeeded in producing a compelling frontier mythology that continues to shape popular representations of the Far East to this day, the voluntary labour force they attracted fell far below the numbers required to proceed with construction, prompting Soviet authorities to rapidly expand the network of regional Dal’lag camps in order to deploy prison labour.Footnote 5 About 90,000 prisoners laboured in Komsomolsk during the key building years.Footnote 6 In the post-war period, their ranks were replenished with more than 14,000 Japanese prisoners of war, who were kept in special camps on Komsomolsk’s territory. In the words of Bone, although Komsomolsk ‘was not born as an ur-GULAG city’, it ‘mutated into one’, with the great majority of the city’s municipal and residential buildings eventually being built with prison labour.Footnote 7 In the Soviet era, these facts were mostly excluded from the city’s official histories, with Komsomolsk’s public image remaining firmly rooted in the mythos of youth voluntarism and the sacrifices of its Komsomol ‘founding fathers’. This situation shifted in the 1990s, following public revelations about the scale of repressions in the Stalinist era and use of prison labour, with the honours granted to Komsomol first-builders becoming an object of popular contention.
In this article, I draw on archival research to explore how Komsomol first-builders exerted influence over urban memory politics and used their own position in this founding history to police the boundaries of inclusion in the category of pervostroiteli. I argue that first-builders’ activism (e.g. lobbying for creation of monuments, commissioning of books about their feats, participation in public meetings with students, workers and Komsomol youth), which intensified after the 1960s, embodied an attempt to rehabilitate the memory of the Komsomol of the 1930s by separating it from the violence of the Stalinist era and demonstrating that mass construction projects relied on genuine popular mobilization and a volunteer ethos.
As an iconic Soviet internationalist project, Komsomolsk is a unique case for investigating the vicissitudes of socialist urbanism and its memorialization. Despite being assigned the status of ‘closed city’ in 1959, meaning it was off limits to foreigners and that Soviet citizens wishing to visit had to apply for special permits, Komsomolsk, as a pre-war and highly publicized construction project, was also spared the extreme forms of secrecy and physical isolation that came to define post-war ‘restricted’ urban settlements.Footnote 8 Likewise, despite its gruesome Gulag history and brief attempts to overhaul its founding narrative in the 1990s, Komsomolsk escaped popular perceptions of ‘prison towns’, and its public image remained rooted in romantic tales of a wilderness subjugated by socialist volunteers. Although the city’s industries experienced dramatic decline, the city’s economy managed to partially stabilize by the mid-2000s, narrowly escaping the fate of single-industry settlements that turned into ‘ghost towns’.Footnote 9 Meanwhile, with the city’s architectural and spatial design being dominated by Soviet toponyms, the city’s socialist past remains an enduring, if ambivalent, legacy that occasionally becomes an object of contestation, but which can never be fully erased.
Creating a legend
Starting from the late 1930s, Soviet authorities launched a popular agitation campaign in the official press, highlighting the strategic urgency of modernizing the Far East and encouraging citizens to take part in this heroic mission. During that period, the region featured prominently in the all-Union press, art and culture, as Soviet leaders strove to increase the region’s population density to supply labour for its escalating industrialization campaign and potential defenders in case of invasion. As Elena Shulman puts it, the region became a new centre stage for ‘performing patriotic fantasies’ and ‘dramatizing threats to national integrity’ via official propaganda that sought to instil a sense of duty and adventure in its audience, and convince Soviet youth of the need to join the great construction projects in the East.Footnote 10 The 1938 film Komsomolsk directed by Sergei Gerasimov documents the tribulations and feats of Komsomol volunteers engaged in construction of the new city. The film emphasizes the energy, commitment and heroic selflessness of young idealists who labour tirelessly to transform the unruly wilderness into a utopian urban landscape that bears witness to the greatness of the Soviet state.Footnote 11 Similar themes dominate Vera Ketlinskaia’s novel Fortitude published in 1938 and later adopted for the eponymous 1939 film and 1981 television series as well as Aleksei Arbuzov’s 1957 theatre play City at Dawn, which was advertised as a ‘romantic chronicle’ of Komsomolsk’s construction. These works of art, alongside numerous other novels and movies glorifying the heroic conquest of the Far East, captured the imagination of young people across the USSR and were cited by many Soviet citizens as sources of inspiration in their written requests for relocation to the Far East.Footnote 12
One of the most publicized accomplishments of the Soviet propaganda campaign aimed at encouraging migration to the Far East was the so-called Khetagurovites movement. Valentina Khetagurova, wife of a Far-Eastern officer, published an open letter in Komsomol’skaya Pravda newspaper in 1937 drawing attention to the dramatic gender imbalance in this remote region and calling on Soviet women to volunteer to resettle in the Far East. Khetagurova’s letter prompted a massive response, with over 11,000 women, many of them Komsomol members, relocating to the region in 1937 alone.Footnote 13 As Elena Shulman argues in her study of the Khetagurovite movement, the dream of transforming the Far-Eastern frontier proved highly appealing to young Soviet women as an arena of revolutionary and historical struggle where ‘womanly virtues seemed to be a decisive force’.Footnote 14 During 1937–38, over 8,000 Khetagurovites arrived in Komsomolsk, where they were often celebrated as first-builders alongside the first Komsomol brigades and Special Military Construction Corps.Footnote 15
Throughout the Soviet era, the celebration of Komsomol builders’ sacrifices was a major touchstone of the city’s identity and socialist mythos. Already during the first year of the construction, the city had its own newspaper, Amurskii Udarnik, which was launched on 1 June 1932, and featured contributions from amateur journalists among the builders.Footnote 16 The newspaper gave the young builders an opportunity to chronicle their work of creating a new socialist city, while offering them a platform for voicing their initiatives for its development. In 1935, in preparation for Komsomolsk’s third anniversary, Aleksei Smorodov, who at the time headed a carpentry brigade, published a call to create the city’s own historical museum.Footnote 17 His proposal, the author claimed, was prompted by the nostalgia induced in him by a photograph of the builders’ tents taken in 1932, and he suggested organizing a photographic exhibition documenting the first years of construction, with the hope that this collection could become the core of a historical museum. This call marked the start of intensive efforts for the collection of images, oral testimonies and artefacts pertaining to the Komsomol builders as well as the regions’ pre-Soviet history, which formed the basis for the collection of the Regional Studies Museum opened in 1938.Footnote 18
Yet, despite the high degree of authority and public respect accorded to the status of ‘first builder’, it did not provide its bearers invincibility from Stalinist repressions, to which several Komsomol builders fell victim. Nor was the influence exerted by these figures on urban politics unlimited. Often, their memorial initiatives received formal approval, but were never implemented due to lack of resources and a rapidly changing political climate. One such striking example was an attempt by Komsomol activists to create a monument to their fellow builders who died from disease and industrial accidents. In 1937, local authorities created the foundation for a monument near the aircraft factory in which a capsule containing the names of the dead was entombed. However, the monument itself was never created, and the city’s authorities later gave up on the idea, turning the site into a public garden with a decorative fountain placed on the foundation in 1949.Footnote 19
Likewise, even though many early journalistic accounts of the city feature pledges by Komsomol builders to preserve one of the huts created by the first Komsomol brigades on the Amur’s shores as a monument, all temporary constructions were eventually demolished to give way to modern buildings and squares. These failed attempts at inscribing the memory of builders into the city’s urban fabric were likely connected to the manifest lack of co-ordination during the first two decades of Komsomolsk’s growth. Although Komsomolsk enjoyed the status of ‘a planned city’, in practice, its urban development bore a chaotic character, necessitated in part by the urgency of creating a local military-industrial complex in preparation for a potential military confrontation with Japan. During the pre-war era, the creation of shipbuilding and aircraft factories, which took place on different sides of the Silinka River separating the city, was prioritized over the production of urban space – a dynamic that persisted throughout the war and first post-war decade.Footnote 20
While the city’s Komsomol builders were occasionally referred to as ‘first builders’ (pervye stroiteli), the portmanteau ‘pervostroiteli’ did not appear in popular discourse until much later. Instead, during the first decades of the city’s existence, its builders were often referred to simply as Komsomol’tsy, or ‘Komsomol members’ – a term that effectively erased the contributions of all other individuals, from prisoners to non-partisan workers. The latter category was mostly comprised of peasants from the region, who relocated to the city to flee collectivization, as well as skilled wage-labourers recruited from across the USSR. Early discourses on the city’s founding occasionally made a distinction between different waves of Komsomol based on the year of their arrival. This is how writer Vera Ketlinskaia, who visited Komsomolsk in 1935, summarized the atmosphere on the construction site in her essay in a 1936 edited volume dedicated to Komsomolsk:
The Komsomol’tsy of 1932 are pressing on. They love their young, yet unadorned, dear city. They remember the tree stumps at this very site, where now one can find patterned curtains, flowers on tables, napkins…The Komsomol’tsy of 1934 enter the fray with their comrades. Yes, they also remember quite a lot. They lived in the hallway of a movie theatre 50 people side by side. They built their own shelters. They remember – no, no longer the tree stumps, but another, dark canteen – a barrack at this very spot.Footnote 21
This distinction between workers by year of arrival was central to upholding images of originality and the dawn of a new era at the heart of the city’s mythology. Nevertheless, in the pre-war period, the category of ‘first builder’ lacked rigid temporal boundaries and was commonly extended to all Komsomol members participating in the construction. This is how Komsomol members summarized their achievements in a letter to Stalin written in 1937, on the eve of the city’s fifth anniversary:
We passionately love our young city, created by our will, with our hands, our unremitting toil. Hundreds of first builders of Komsomolsk became its permanent residents. Hundreds of young men drafted to the Red Army upon completing their service return to our factories and constructions. One of the first builders, Comrade Poida, returned from the Red Army to the construction and brought along with him his entire unit. Hundreds of demobilized Red Army soldiers remain living and working in Komsomolsk and bring over their fathers, mothers, wives and children…We are proud that the city of youth – ‘the capital of the taiga’ – is known and loved by the entire Komsomol, the entire youth of the Soviet Union. Komsomolsk is becoming a symbol of courage and unbounded loyalty of the Soviet youth to their Motherland, their preparedness to complete any order of the party or the government.Footnote 22
The official state awards created to recognize Komsomolsk’s builders did not differentiate among the recipients based on the year of arrival or when they joined the effort. The first award established by the Komsomol Central Committee on 23 May 1937, in preparation for celebration of the city’s fifth’s anniversary, was titled ‘Honorary Builder of Komsomolsk-na-Amure, 1932–1937’ and was granted for ‘exemplary dedication demonstrated during the construction’.Footnote 23 More than 600 Komsomol builders were honoured with the award during celebration of the Day of the City on 12 June 1937. Similarly, the ‘Honorary Builder of the City Komsomolsk-na-Amure, 1932–1947’ award institutionalized in 1947 was meant to honour particular achievements, rather than the mere fact of having participated in the city’s early construction.
While Komsomolsk’s development slowed during World War II, the post-war years witnessed rapid expansion of industrial production, acceleration of housing construction, development of light industries and stable population growth. The successes of the ‘City of Youth’, were widely covered in the regional and all-Soviet newspapers, fostering a sense of pride among residents. It was also during this period that the term pervostroiteli, popularized in the Soviet press in the late 1950s in connection to the revival of Komsomol-headed construction projects and mobilization of Student Building Brigades across the USSR, was retrospectively applied to Komsomolsk’s builders. In the official propaganda, these new construction projects were often compared to the feats of the 1930s. In 1958, the construction of a pulp-and-cardboard mill, headed by the regional Komsomol branch, began about 50 kilometres south of Komsomolsk. Located on the Amur riverbank, the mill later evolved into the satellite town of Amursk. The construction was covered in detail in the local press, with Amursk’s builders being celebrated as spiritual successors of Komsomolsk’s pervostroiteli. Footnote 24 Similar metaphors would later be applied to Komsomol builders of the Baikal–Amur Mainline Railroad, which began in the Siberian town of Taishet and ended in Komsomolsk, an endeavour hailed as the ‘project of the century’.Footnote 25
The 1960s were marked by ‘the heritage turn’ in the Soviet Union, with the emergence of the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments (VOOPIK) in 1965 and the government’s active promotion of regional studies, or kraievedenie as a tool for mobilizing popular patriotism.Footnote 26 This period witnessed rapid proliferation of memorial initiatives dedicated to Komsomolsk’s founders, a great number of them lobbied by Komsomol builders who ended up occupying key positions in the city’s administration and cultural institutions. In 1962, the Union of the Veterans of Lenin’s Komsomol, colloquially known as ‘the Union of First-Builders’ (Soviet pervostroitelei), was created in Komsomolsk.Footnote 27 The organization included in its ranks 350 Komsomol builders who still resided in the city and met regularly on 10 May, the anniversary of the first brigades’ disembarkation at Permskoe.Footnote 28 One of the Union’s stated goals was passing on the traditions of the Komsomol of the 1930s to a new generation of Soviet youth. The organization took an active part in propaganda work, with its representatives giving talks in schools, universities and pioneer summer camps as well as visiting new Komsomol construction sites in Siberia and the Far East.Footnote 29 The Union was closely involved in the work of the Regional Studies Museum, headed by one of its members, Vasilii Tkachev, and helped to collect testimonies and historical objects for exhibitions dedicated to the city’s first years.Footnote 30
The organization also co-operated with the All-Union Soviet of First-Builders (Vsesoiuznyi sovet pervostroitelei) founded in Moscow in 1964. The latter organization was meant to represent Komsomol members who participated in Komsomolsk’s construction, but ended up living elsewhere.Footnote 31 At the time, in Moscow alone, there were more than 250 Komsomolsk first-builders, including Iosif Kattel’, the chief engineer who supervised the city’s construction in 1933–34.Footnote 32 The Union members met regularly in the headquarters of the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper to reminisce about their youth and learn the latest news about the city from comrades who remained in Komsomolsk. The close connections of Komsomol builders to the Moscow-based literary intelligentsia, forged during visits to the new city by notable cultural actors, often enabled the former to make open calls for more memorial initiatives. One such example is an article on the city’s builders authored by the famed poet and journalist Konstantin Simonov, who visited the city in 1967 on the eve of its 35th anniversary. In it, Simonov quotes first-builder and journalist Efim Dorodnov, who expresses concern about the lack of recent literary works dedicated to Komsomolsk and calls upon the Soviet Writers’ Union to address the problem.Footnote 33 Dorodnov’s appeal was later echoed in a call by Mikhail Opolev, head of the Komsomolsk branch of the Union of First-Builders, made during the Union’s meeting in Moscow in 1979 in which he lamented the scarcity of books about Komsomolsk:
I ask you, please pass it on to our writers – we are waiting for them in the city! It is important to tell the entire nation how Komsomolsk was built in the 1930s, how the first-builders fought during the war, how the city developed after the war and how it lives today. After all, we are approaching the half-century anniversary.Footnote 34
While anticipating new literary works from famed Soviet writers, the first-builders also actively produced their own autobiographical and documentary accounts. Such examples include Aleksander Grachev’s The First Glade (1965), Efim Dorodnov and Gennadii Khlebnikov’s A Feat on the Amur (1967), and Gennadii Khlebnikov’s The Trial by Trust. The Notes of a First-Builder (1975).
The celebration of the city’s 35th anniversary in 1967 marked an important milestone in first-builders’ memorialization. In preparation for the festivities, a large commemorative granite stone was installed on the city’s riverbank. The inscription on the stone reads ‘Here, on 10 May 1932, disembarked the first Komsomol members, builders of the city.’ In the same year, a monumental sculpture dedicated to ‘The Komsomol Members of the 1930s’ was erected near the city’s House of Youth. In May 1967, the city institutionalized the award ‘Honorary Citizen of Komsomolsk-na-Amure’. Out of the 27 individuals bestowed the award between 1967 and 1990, 20 were first-builders of either the 1932 or 1934 dispatches. The rest included celebrated figures like the famed Soviet cosmonaut Yurii Gagarin, who visited the city in 1967 and the cosmonaut Valerii Riumin, who was born in Komsomolsk, as well as local residents who were awarded prestigious state awards like Hero of Labour.
In addition to shaping representations on the national stage, the first-builders occasionally tried to use the central newspapers to leverage urban memory in Komsomolsk. In 1970, the country’s leading literary journal Literaturnaia Gazeta featured a short story about a letter it received from Lev Miroshnichenko, a Komsomolsk first-builder, who reproached the city’s local Komsomol organization for neglecting the memory of the first-builders. The piece paints a stark picture:
The square, where the memorial to ‘Komsomol Members of the 1930s’ was erected, is all covered with wild grass. Next to it is the House of Youth, inside of which nothing reminds one about the city’s heroic past. Recently, the first hut built by Komsomol members in the taiga was demolished. The city has no streets named after the first-builders.Footnote 35
The newspaper’s editors forwarded the letter to the city’s Komsomol bureau and reported that after discussions, the critical remarks were taken into account by the local council, resulting in a motion to rename the city’s central streets after the first-builders. In 1974, one of the city’s major streets, the Amurskii Avenue, was indeed renamed the Avenue of First-Builders (Prospect pervostroitelei). As this episode illustrates, while the first-builders who continued living in the city were sometimes integrated into the municipal government, they did not always have sufficient influence to shape policy on the local level. As a result, they frequently sought the aid of colleagues in Moscow or attention from the all-Union press to influence city authorities.
The city’s 50th anniversary, which was celebrated in 1982 with great pomp, prompted the opening of another monument to the first-builders. Installed in the vicinity of the riverbank, the monument consisted of five large bronze figures – one woman and four men – representing the Komsomol youth. The event also honoured 81 first-builders still residing in the city with different prestigious state awards, including the Order of the October Revolution and the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.Footnote 36 Yet, despite the fact that by the 1980s, the term pervostroiteli had become both celebrated and commonplace, the category was never formally defined by officials. Semantically broader than ‘Komsomol builders’, the category came in popular parlance to apply to all individuals who arrived on the construction site in 1932 as well as to members of the Military Construction Corps. Although the Union of First-Builders has functioned in the city since the 1960s, its formal name – ‘the Union of the Veterans of Lenin’s Komsomol’ – excluded non-partisan individuals, while also extending membership to those Komsomol members who arrived in the city after the key construction years, including Khetagurovites. It was not until 1987, when a separate award entitled ‘First-Builder of the City Komsomolsk-na-Amure’ was established, as advocated for by the Union of the Veterans, that local authorities formally delimited the category’s boundaries. The title was awarded to Komsomol members who arrived between 1932 and 1934, members of the Military Construction Corps deployed to Komsomolsk in 1933–34 and to individuals recruited by other organizations who relocated to Komsomolsk between 1932 and 1934 and were still living in the city.Footnote 37 While the decision to include non-partisan workers who participated in the city’s construction signalled an attempt to democratize and broaden the category of pervostroiteli, this recognition proved woefully belated. By the late 1980s, the equation between ‘Komsomol builders’ and ‘first-builders’ was solidified in the popular consciousness, setting the stage for widespread criticism of the category after the Soviet collapse.
Destabilizing the category of pervostroiteli
The raft of structural economic and political reforms instituted in the Gorbachev era, known as ‘Perestroika’ and ‘Glasnost’, opened space for a new debate about the city’s past, forcing the public to grapple with the previously silenced history of violence and repression at the heart of Komsomolsk’s construction – an imperative that became even stronger after the Soviet Union’s dissolution. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, a fierce polemic about Komsomolsk’s founding myths unfolded between local historians, journalists and cultural workers. In January 1989, a chapter of Memorial – an organization dedicated to the collection of information about the Gulag system and aiding victims of Soviet-era repressions – was formed in Komsomolsk. One of the stated goals of the organization, headed by Marina Kuzmina, a historian and regional studies expert, was ‘retrieval of previously unknown pages of the city’s history’.Footnote 38 Its publications about Komsomolsk’s history featured regularly in the local press, and in 1990, the organization began compiling materials for a book meant to destabilize ‘the myth of Komsomol first-builders’ and detail contributions of other labourers. Although the organization claimed it did not aim to negate the sacrifices of Komsomol youth, the book nevertheless sought to decentre the role of Komsomol members by demonstrating that the great majority of individuals working on the construction were non-partisan. Kuzmina, along with several other regional studies specialists, adopted the position that only the individuals who arrived on the construction site in 1932 and survived the deadly winter of 1932–33 could be rightfully considered pervostroiteli. Footnote 39
Recognized first-builders occupied an ambiguous role in this process of re-evaluating local history. Celebrated as ‘founding fathers’ during the Soviet era, after Glasnost and Perestroika, they inevitably became targets of public enquiries aimed at ‘demystifying’ the city’s history. At the same time, as the few remaining witnesses to the first years of construction, their memories and testimonies continued to hold great authoritative power. During the first year of Glasnost or ‘openness’, many of the first-builders eagerly took part in the revisioning of history, authoring publications about comrades who fell victim to Stalinist repressions and/or narrating their encounters with prisoners at the construction site. However, in the following years, some became disaffected with discussion of repressions and came to view it as an ‘attack’ on the memory and personal integrity of Komsomol builders. An accusative tone towards the first-builders was indeed pervasive in many of the era’s publications, leading the former to adopt an increasingly defensive posture.
On 25 October 1989, Dal’nevostochnyi Komsomol’sk published a letter by labour veteran M. Zagodskii, entitled, ‘We shall not rush’. In it, the author reproached the first-builders for destroying the Permskoe village on whose ground Komsomolsk was built:
A lot is written about the city’s first-builders. Three monuments were built so that the memory of them is preserved. And what have they done to preserve the site where they came?…how could they have allowed a complete liquidation of the ancient Russian village Permskoe, how could they have dug up and destroyed the village cemetery? And even now one cannot hear their voices in defence of anything, they are more worried about benefits (l’goty).Footnote 40
Zagodskii goes on to express his perplexity over the life-long benefits granted to first-builders, sardonically observing that they presumably ‘came here following the call of their hearts, rather than [chasing] benefits’. The author also denounces glorification of the Military Construction Corps and ‘the ice crossing’, claiming the magnitude of their ‘feat’ was grossly exaggerated, as they were well-equipped military men who merely crossed a distance that was already routinely crossed a century earlier by local villagers transporting goods and mail. Adding that the Construction Corps cannot be included in the ranks of first-builders, he concludes the article by calling for restoration of ‘historical justice’ and memorialization of the ‘faceless victims’ of the Gulag who laboured on Komsomolsk.
Zagodskii’s letter was followed by a response collectively authored by six first-builders, ‘It was we who built the city.’Footnote 41 In their piece, the authors clarify that the demolition of Permskoe’s original buildings was necessitated by their location, adding that Permskoe did not have any architectural monuments that could be reasonably described as ‘ancient’ or ‘historical’. The letter goes on to draw attention to the first-builders’ fading ranks, suggesting that with the passing of the generation who participated in the first years of construction, it would be harder to produce a truthful account of the city’s history. The authors also objected to Zagodskii’s assertion that the military builders whose presence on the site was temporary should not be included in the ranks of the first-builders, highlighting that the military men shared all the hardships that plagued the builders during the first year – from ceaseless work to malnutrition, scurvy and typhus. The letter proceeded to assert that prison labour during the first years of construction was minimal, as the first group of not more than 350 prisoners did not arrive until the autumn of 1933, and their involvement was limited to the construction of an oil depository. ‘Therefore, all the talks about prisoners having built Komsomolsk-na-Amure, probably, cannot be regarded as ultimate truth. It was Komsomol members who built the city, including, of course, military builders and Khetagurovites, the great majority of whom were also Komsomol members. They are rightfully called first-builders’, the letter concludes.
Characterized by polarizing narratives, more concerned with defending or ‘debunking’ Soviet-era historiography than with careful examination of facts, these public debates taking place across the country proved particularly inimical in Komsomolsk, where the human cost of Stalinist modernization could be partially sublimated in the self-sacrificing figure of the Komsomol volunteer. One of the most active first-builders in the debate was the writer and former brickmaker Gennadii Khlebnikov, whose prolific publications on Komsomolsk’s history earned him the title of the city’s ‘major chronicler’. Having himself authored several articles about repressions in the late 1980s, Khlebnikov published a series of responses in Dal’nevostochnyi Komsomolsk to what he perceived as distortions of historical facts. In his two-part article titled, ‘Facts and myths’, he praised the ‘noble work’ of regional historians and journalists aimed at ‘restoring the good name of Komsomolsk residents subjected to Stalinist repressions’, but expressed concern over the lack of objectivity and historical accuracy in such publications, which often ‘built on speculations, guesses and emotions’.Footnote 42 In his writings, Khlebnikov underscores the extensive presence of labour camps in the region and recounts his own youthful encounters with prisoners, adding that he considers it important to rectify historical injustices against those individuals. However, he took a strong stand against the idea that ‘Komsomolsk was founded and built not by Komsomol members, but by prisoners’, which runs through the great majority of publications dedicated to the history of repressions. He also rejected the notion that revelations about repressions should mean that all previous writings or statements about the city require radical revision. While conceding that many authors might be genuinely misguided by their lack of historical knowledge, he also pointed out that this confusion is not entirely innocent, since it deliberately misrepresents the role of Komsomol builders, implying that they ‘usurped the glory of trailblazers in the history of Komsomolsk’.
Suggesting that the role of prisoners is grossly exaggerated in revisionist publications, Khlebnikov calls for a separation of the first-builders’ heroic history from the violence of the Stalinist era, suggesting the latter history should not be allowed to overshadow the former:
The birth of Komsomolsk is connected to the words ‘tents’, ‘the first demonstration’, ‘the first cleared path’,…which express the patriotism of youth. And no one will be able to replace them with words like ‘Dal’lag’, ‘Amurlag’, ‘prison’, which insult the feat of the Soviet youth as well as the memory of those…whose lives were crossed out by these inhumane formations.
Khlebnikov’s article was followed by a response published by the regional studies expert and Memorial member Aleksei Grigoriev. In it, Grigoriev denounces Khlebnikov’s incriminatory tone towards regional studies experts, suggesting the writer uses his authoritative status as first-builder to create the appearance of historical objectivity for what is, in essence, a partial and partisan text. He suggests that Khlebnikov mistakenly ascribes to Memorial members the reductive view that ‘Komsomolsk is the product solely of the labour of prisoners’ as part of an attempt to hold on to his ‘lone and indivisible…monopoly on truth’.Footnote 43
The heat of this debate further intensified in the 1990s, when conversations about the city’s past were no longer confined to the pages of regional newspapers but made it to the national press, where Komsomolsk began to be listed as an example of a ‘Gulag town’ alongside Magadan and Vorkuta. Such classifications were popularly perceived by surviving first-builders and their descendants as an attempt to entirely erase the history of the Komsomol’s feat. In July 1990, Khlebnikov authored another piece titled, ‘It is not our fault that we survived’, in which he summarized the discussions he had with fellow first-builders during their commemorative meeting on the occasion of the city’s 58th anniversary.Footnote 44 The discussion was prompted by the statement of the famous poet Bulat Okudzhava published in Literaturnaia Gazata, in which the poet expressed unease about the screening of Gerasimov’s 1938 film Komsomolsk on TV, suggesting the film glorified the first-builders, while remaining silent about the prisoners who worked alongside them. The first-builders expressed their concern that Okudzhava was ‘misinformed’ and ‘confused’ by rumours circulating about the city’s history. An increasingly emotional Khlebnikov made the following embittered plea:
The best years of my life – from 18 to 30 – I spent in the brick factory producing bricks for Komsomolsk’s first buildings. And my comrades had similar fates. We have given to the city our entire lives. Our children, grandchildren have grown to adulthood, our great-grandchildren are growing up. And suddenly, 58 years later, they declare to us that we are the usurpers of someone else’s glory and labour…Following the general revelatory wave, full of rightful anger, some people included Komsomolsk in the rank of ‘prison’ cities…The authors of this version [of events] are convinced that our city in the taiga, on the far-away outskirts of the country, could have emerged only on the basis of prison labour. They question the volunteerism and selflessness of the Komsomol members of the 1930s, who undertook such a construction.Footnote 45
Khlebnikov’s relentless defence of the Komsomol builders’ memory in the local press, however, quickly evolved into an outpouring of frustration about the exclusionary nature of the first-builder category during the Soviet era. This is how Fedor Boltov – who, together with his three brothers participated as hired wage-labourers in the construction after 1933 – narrated his experience in response to Khlebnikov:
We, the first builders of Komsomolsk, understand well Khlebnikov’s desire to glorify the Komsomol of the 1930s and 1940s: after all he is also a Komsomol member of those years. This [glorification] speaks to the fact that the party and Komsomol accomplished all the great deeds: built the new world, destroyed the old one. At the same time, it was often the case that wherever some object was being built, [there] worked thirty Komsomol members and three hundred non-partisans (bespartiinyi).
Boltov proceeds to describe his arrival to the Amur’s shores on the Komintern steamer, together with a group of mixed-age individuals – mostly hailing from rural areas and striving to escape the hunger and violence of collectivization. He suggests that the discourses of the city’s ‘heroic origins’ obfuscate the era’s tragic reality, which pushed many individuals, who were not Komsomol members, to join the construction as wage-labourers:
This mixed mass of people, among whom an insignificant number of Komsomol members dissolved, arrived here not due to heroism, but due to misfortune, together with their meagrely belongings, in order to…save themselves and their children from hunger and devastation. They laboured without sparing themselves for a piece of bread and a bowl of soup with saltbush that they were served in the canteen. No one had any thoughts about heroism, in those times people were saving themselves from repressions. And the Komsomol was being glorified during meetings and gatherings, where a hundred Komsomol members stood among thousands of non-partisans, everyone was applauding them, creating a myth similar to that of Aleksei Stakhanov.
Emphasizing that ‘the non-partisans are not trying to take away comrade Khlebnikov’s accomplishments’, Boltov suggests the achievements ascribed to Komsomol members should be divided between all categories of individuals who laboured. ‘Otherwise, it turned out that we never had the right to talk about ourselves or glorify ourselves and it is as if we were not there, all the deeds were accomplished by Komsomol and the Party’, Boltov observes with frustration, as he enquires rhetorically, ‘Why are we, the four Boltov brothers, unknown? Because we are all nonpartisan.’Footnote 46
Expanding the category of first-builder continued to be a central bone of contention throughout the 1990s. The open letter by I. Volkov, a participant of the city’s construction after 1937, in which he complained about the neglect of labour veterans like himself, who were not commonly included in the ranks of first-builders, generated a strong public response.Footnote 47 The editors of Dal’nevostochnyi Komsomol’sk received numerous letters from readers, some of which were published in a subsequent issue. One of the readers lamented that her mother, who relocated to Komsomolsk in the early 1930s and witnessed the first years of construction, still resisted calling herself a ‘first-builder’, saying she has no right to do so ‘without the corresponding documents’. Her story was echoed by another reader:
My mother, Borodina Olga Ivanovna also came to Komsomolsk in 1935 to reunite with her husband, our father, a participant of the ice crossing (he died in 1943). We are not insisting on her being granted any material support or benefits. But if on the city’s anniversary she received accolades and an invitation for the traditional celebratory demonstration – how much more energy and maybe even health she would have! There are already very few such non-first-builders (ne pervostroitelei) like our mom left. Why do we still observe a baffling division into ‘pure’ and ‘non-pure’ [first-builders]?Footnote 48
In addition to authoring publications in the local press, first-builders occasionally attempted to make their position heard by attending public events dedicated to historical discussion. In her book devoted to Memorial’s history, Marina Kuzmina recalls that the organization’s first meetings in 1989 were frequently attended by first-builders.Footnote 49 This is how she describes an exchange that took place between her organization’s members and the first-builder Aleksandr Vyskubenko during one such meeting in April 1989:
Nikonov: Which group was bigger: Komsomol members or prisoners? Mostly there were prisoners.
Vyskubenko: Back then there was little difference between ourselves and the prisoners. Only that we were free…
Seledkov: I saw them bringing consignments of prisoners to Komsomolsk…The entire city was made of labour camps.
Vyskubenko: There were no camps in 1932–34 on the old construction site.
…
Karchevskaia: You keep talking about Komsomol members. But they were only brought with the first steamer, all arrivals after them were recruited wage-labourers.
Burmistrova [head of the Y.A. Gagarin factory museum]: We have the memoirs of the first-builder Korshunov confirming that already in 1933 there were prisoners in Dzemgi.Footnote 50 It is very hard for us [to deal] with first-builders. Over the past 50 years, they developed a stereotype. We should gradually, delicately and tactfully convince them that history must be supplemented with the information about the participation of prisoners in Komsomolsk’s construction.Footnote 51
A similar account of the uneasy dynamic between first-builders and Memorial activists can be found in an autobiographical book about Perestroika authored by Evgenii Khoroshilov, a former secretary of the City Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union:
The romantic images of the city of youth have not previously intersected with the Gulag system. This question was not discussed anywhere publicly. In spring 1991, the Party’s City Committee held a meeting in the House of Political Enlightenment aimed at finding common ground between the first-builders’ and Memorial representatives’ views on the city’s history. I led this difficult public meeting…The majority of attendees did not even want to hear the presenters’ conclusions about the participation of prisoners in the city’s construction. I had to constantly call on the first-builders and secretaries of Party organizations for restraint.Footnote 52
Contrary to the expectations of the local chapter of Memorial, which hoped that publicization of previously silenced facts about the horrendous death rates among the Komsomol during the first year of construction would desacralize tropes of Soviet heroism by exposing the incompetence or cruelty of the Soviet state, these revelations ended up having the opposite effect. Retrospectively fitted into the narrative of Komsomolsk’s factories’ crucial contribution to victory in the Great Patriotic War, the deaths and hardships experienced by the city’s builders came to be popularly understood as ‘sacrifices’ required by the Soviet Far East’s rapid industrialization in preparation for the looming war.
Concluding remarks
Despite the fact that throughout the 1990s, the position of regional studies experts affiliated with Memorial dominated the local press, from the 2000s onwards, commemoration of the city’s first-builders returned with renewed vigour. As a utopian socialist project and borderland stronghold, Komsomolsk was intrinsically tied to the ideology and productive logic of the Soviet state, with its hyper-dependence on a centrally planned home market, setting the stage for a rough transition in the post-Soviet era. Since the 1990s, Komsomolsk – whose economy revolved around arms manufacturing – has experienced dramatic decline. Between 1991 and 1997, the city’s industrial production decreased by 90 per cent, forcing local residents to grapple with mass layoffs, forced administrative leaves and wage arrears.Footnote 53 By the late 1990s, however, Komsomolsk’s economic situation had slowly started to improve, after concerted efforts by federal authorities to prevent the shutdown of its ‘town-anchoring enterprises’ via authorization of new defence orders. Yet, the city continues to be plagued by outmigration and cascading infrastructural failures. In this context of fragile recovery and an uncertain future, the trope of the first-builders’ ‘sacrifice’ and ‘pride’ in their achievements continues to be a foundational aspect of local public culture. The powerful Soviet-era mythology continues to be reproduced in museum exhibitions, promotional leaflets, city day parades and other state-sponsored events. Lacking a pre-revolutionary urban history as well as a coherent vision for the city’s future, the ‘heroic’ Soviet past inevitably becomes the cultural grist used both to cultivate a local patriotic identity and to present the city and its industries to tourists and potential investors.
More broadly, the protracted debate about Komsomolsk’s history reflects the complexities of popular memory of the Stalinist era in post-Soviet Russia. The commemoration of the city’s first-builders intensified in the 1960s, during the partial rehabilitation of Stalinist aesthetics and heroic ideals under Leonid Brezhnev, when Komsomol veterans leveraged this historical opening to solidify their control over the memory of the first-builders, asserting moral agency by highlighting the voluntary and conscientious nature of their feat. After Glasnost and Perestroika, however, the grip of the first-builders on the city’s historical narrative began to slip. Uninterested in taking the position of hapless victims of a ‘senseless’ construction project that claimed the lives of thousands of people, they continued to argue that neither Stalinist repressions nor the presence of involuntary labour diminished the magnitude of the heroism of the Komsomol youth. Having lost a tactical battle, the first-builders, one could say, have nevertheless emerged victorious in the post-Soviet memory wars.
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