History
The Young Guard was established soon after Krasnodon was occupied by Nazi Germany on 20 July 1942. Several youth groups amalgamated, calling themselves the Young Guard. One of the first meetings of the organization was held on October 2 of the same year.
The organization was led by the local Communist Party underground of Krasnodon, headed by Philipp Lyutikov. Lyutikov was the former head of the parents' committee of the 4th secondary school of Krasnodon, where many members of the organization had studied. There is some controversy concerning the leadership of the Young Guard. It is widely accepted that the commander was Ivan Turkenich and the commissar was Oleg Koshevoy, but recent sources claim that the leaders were other members of the Staff of the Young Guard, namely Viktor Tretyakevich, Sergei Tyulenin and Ivan Zemnukhov.
There were about 100 members of the Young Guard, all young boys and girls - workers, 8th-10th form schoolboys and schoolgirls from Krasnodon and surrounding villages and settlements. Due to the secret nature of the Young Guard, only people well-known to other organization members, and who took the special oath of faithfulness, could become members. Most of them either belonged to the Komsomol or were accepted into Komsomol upon joining the Young Guard. 15 were members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The most active members and founders of the organization made up the Staff of the Young Guard: Ulyana Gromova, Oleg Koshevoy, Vasily Levashov, Lyubov Shevtsova, Viktor Tretyakevich, Ivan Turkenich, Sergei Tyulenin, and Ivan Zemnukhov.
Read more about this topic: Young Guard (Soviet Resistance)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)