Communist Camp Songs

One of the more interesting aspects of communist camp life, as revealed in Paul Thorez's Model Children: Inside the Republic of Red Scarves, is the myriad camp songs that expressed the ideological hopes of the U.S.S.R. for its emerging citizens, the youth who were, according to socialist teachings, perfectly malleable. Here are a few of these songs:

Such joyful laughter

Such flames in the eyes

Down there--it's the changing of the guard

It's the Communist youth, the Young Leninists.

Pioneer, don't waste a minute

Don't leave time on your hands

Don't leave time on your hands

When the sun comes up

Salute it with your Pioneer sign

Salue the sun of the Motherland

Rushing, powerful,

Invincible,

My homeland,

My Moscow.

It's you that I love above all.

When night falls across the sea,

At Artek it's bed for me.

All over the world,

In Russia, In China, in Hungary,

The sun is shining on everyone.

The winter is over.

Flag of the nation

Flag of the people

Leading the country

On to victory.

Georgian, Estonian, Russian, and Uzbek

We're all one great big family

Him, her, you, and me

Artek, Artek!

On nights like tonight

In the campfire light

We will hear the story

Of our country's glory

And of workers and heroes

Building a new world.

The seagull flaps its wings

Telling us to hurry

Comrades, friends, Pioneers,

Follow me on another journey.

Russians and Chinese are brothers forever,

Moscow-Beijing, Beijing-Moscow

The people are advancing

Stalin and Mao are at our command.

We believe in the cause of Lenin and Stalin.

In the vast territories of our marvelous land

Tempered in battle and in toil

We have written a song of joy

Of Stalin--of the Guide

Stalin--our glory in battle

Stalin--our youth in song

Victorious ever, a song on our lips,

The people are on the march,

With Stalin at the fore.

Communist Camp

Paul Thorez, son of longtime French Community Party leader, Maurice Thorez, has had a long and complex history with the Soviet Union. For Paul Thorez's parents found refuge in the country during the Second World War and maintained close contact with Moscow, the epicenter of global communism, in the post-war world. In fact, Maurice Thorez made frequent political as well as health-related visits to Russia until his death. Not surprisingly, Maurice's sons grew up in the shadow of their father's (and mother's) affection for the motherland of proletarian revolution. Paul's small book, Model Children: Inside the Republic of Red Scarves, examines one concrete manifestation of this affection: his father's decision to send both sons to the U.S.S.R.'s most famous youth camp, Artek, located long the coast of the historic, scenic Crimea.

The pan-Soviet camp, which always admitted fraternal guests from around the socialist world, was a workshop for the production of faithful communists. Camp members exercised, watched thinly veiled propaganda films, learned socialist songs, and deepened their commitment to personal hygiene, collective responsibility, atheism, socialism, Party-loyalty, and pan-Soviet patriotism. Pan-Soviet patriotism was a key dimension of camp life, since the Soviet Union, even in the aftermath of the war, was riven by ethnic and linguistic divisions. At camp, the children were constantly reminded of everything that made the country great, including its vast size, peaceful disposition, military strength, and putative sophistication in the realm of science and technology.

At the time, the children earnestly believed that Russians had invented almost everything, that Lysenko's twisted genetics would revolutionize Russian agriculture, and that the U.S.S.R. was poised to win a third world war, since everybody knew that the First World War had led to the emergence of the first worker-state, and that the Second World War had led to a communist bloc that extended from China to East Germany.

The camp even prepared young people for communist politics. As Paul Thorez describes camp elections, power operated in mysterious ways. Somehow, behind the scenes, a select group of children were nominated for official positions. Somehow, in an aura of mystery, no more than one child actually ended up running for any one office. So, in the end, all elections were unanimous, and the children as a whole believed that they had participated in a genuinely democratic political process, but one that had the merit of expressing the unanimous will of the collective.