"Today's Pioneers"

"Today's Pioneers"

Last month there was some talk about the revival of the Young Pioneer organization in Russia. Russia Today did a talk-show segment asking, "Do Children Need Ideology?" All the fuss coincided with the anniversary of the organization's founding in May, which was marked more widely a year ago on the 85th anniversary of the Pioneers' founding.

RIA Novosti ran a photoset last year to mark the occasion ("День рождения Пионерии") with images from the organization's history, including one from a 2006 Pioneer induction ceremony on Red Square that could have been from 1986 except for the prominent involvement of post-Soviet Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov.

День рождения Пионерии

www.rian.ru

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Here are a few more pictures of that day's ceremony by RIA Novosti's photographer which didn't make it into the photoset linked above.

In May, a friend emailed me this somewhat amazing video clip from a news broadcast by ProTV of Chisinau (which unfortunately can't be embedded), showing a bemused news anchor reporting on the Pioneers' induction ceremony in Moldova's capital last month. The ceremony was timed to mark the 86th anniversary of the Soviet Pioneer organization's founding and involved the induction of around 70 children.

ProTV asked a few of the kids what they were there to celebrate and got responses like "I don't know...Victory Day" and "our teacher told us to come." The TV station titled the report "Pioneers Help Their Elders," which is part of the Pioneer's oath but also no doubt a tongue-in-cheek reference to these children's utility to Moldova's ruling Communist Party.

I pulled a few screen-shots from the video of the ceremony (below), but it's worth watching the video. The ceremony was conducted in Russian, and many of the kids interviewed were not able to answer questions put to them in Romanian, which explains the subtitles in the screen-shots:

[part of the Pioneer's oath]
"...to conscientiously fulfill the duties of a Pioneer..."

"Be faithful to the Pioneer ideal!" says the
elderly man sporting a St. George's ribbon.

One enthusiastic young inductee tried to explain what exactly those ideals meant to her:
"It's very important to be a Pioneer, because [Pioneers]
defend...their city from different...well, how can I put it..."

"...from different enemies and those who damage the environment."

Perhaps she just couldn't think of anything else to say, or perhaps for at least one young member, the ideals of the Pioneer movement in its ninth decade are morphing from red to green.