Soviet Union’s school for capitalists

MOSCOW — In its heyday, the members of the Young Communist League of the Soviet Union liked to think of themselves as shock troops on the front lines of agriculture and construction. They were building a better USSR, and making themselves better communists in the process.

But by the fall of 1991 the Communist Party had been kicked from power and it was clear there wasn’t going to be a better USSR. On Sept. 27, the leaders of the 73-year-old organization, known as the Komsomol, met in a hotel here in Moscow and agreed it was time to put it to rest. There were no tears — there was too much property at stake.

The Komsomol, whose members ranged in age from 14 to 28, had been straying from the straight-and-narrow path of Marxist fervor for quite a while by that time. It was an organization for strivers, and for people who didn’t want to look like they didn’t belong. It was a career ladder for apparatchiks, who had used it during the years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika to create a surprisingly lucrative empire....