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Komsomol membership has remained virtually stagnant over the past three years, despite the Kremlin's efforts to stir a revival. Recent party decisions make Komsomol membership almost mandatory for acceptance into the party. Even the Komsomol hierarchy, a professional bureaucracy of some 100,000 apparatchiki, has been affected by Moscow's tightening of control. Historically, a top job in the Komsomol hierarchy could lead to adult power: Aleksandr Shelepin, Komsomol first secretary for 5½ years, rose to head the secret police. So did his successor, Vladimir Semichastny.
Virtual Unknown. But last summer Moscow, apparently unhappy with the way in which the Komsomol was being run, launched a massive purge among the leadership, dismissing Sergei Pavlov,. 39, as its first secretary, along with four members of the Komsomol central committee and countless provincial and local cadres. Pavlov's ouster was puzzling: archconservative, harshly orthodox in his view of dissent, he should have been the ideal man to guide a Komsomol revival along party lines.
To replace him, Moscow named a virtual unknown, Evgeny Tyazhelnikov, 40, a history lecturer and college administrator from Chelyabinsk, who has not been in Komsomol work for ten years. His elevation violated the Komsomol constitution, which stipulates that the first secretary be picked from among the members of its own central committee. One widely accepted explanation for Tyazhelnikov's ascendancy is that he is a protége of Brezhnev.