Class ascription and class identity: Komsomol'tsy and the policy of class during NEP

This article explores how successful the Bolsheviks were in ascribing class identity to adolescents organized in the Komsomol. It presents an analysis of how class identity was constructed through a dialectical process of self‐identification and external identification and to what extent Komsomol′tsy adopted and internalized the class terminology of the regime, using it to perceive and describe the contradictory environment of NEP and to formulate demands addressed to the Bolshevik regime and their own organization. The question is raised of whether class was solely a category of Bolshevik analysis of NEP society or whether it assumed the power of a category of social practice. In answering this question the article will argue that there was an immanent interrelationship between the perception of class and the organizational evolution of the Komsomol.