Summer Camp Soviet-Style: A Pioneer's Tale

The battered bus shuddered while we waited for the steel gates of the Yolochka Pioneer camp to be opened. I squirmed in my itchy white Pioneer shirt, clutching a copy of Huck Finn, trying to remember the Russian words for "bathroom" and "telephone" and "I want to go home." For an 11-year-old American in Moscow, who had never been to an overnight camp before, I felt I was definitely in over my head.


It was the summer of 1981 and I had arrived in the Soviet Union only 3 1/2 weeks earlier, the 11-year-old son of an American journalist. In the fall, I would be attending a Soviet school and I had agreed to try out a Pioneer camp in order to strengthen my Russian.


The Yolochka Pioneer camp was almost entirely enclosed by a cement wall. Inside, the regime was equally unyielding. The camp's schedule of daily events was timed to the minute, starting with the mandatory lineika, where we lined up in the early morning dew to salute the raising of the Soviet flag. The pioneer camp system, organized by ministries and factories, was essentially an arm of the communist regime and served as an ideological summer cradle for children after school's end.


For fun Yolochka offered peeling ping pong tables, a fraying volleyball net sagging between rusted poles, several gazebos used primarily by the older campers or counsellors to sneak cigarettes, and a five-foot deep pit, bordered by wooden planks, which served as the swimming pool, lily pads and all.


One of the most important parts of the day was the uborka uchastka or cleaning up one's assigned area -- picking up litter from the tall grass or sweeping dirt from the road -- a children's version of the subbotnik, a Soviet ritual where citizens would volunteer to spend a Saturday cleaning up their neighborhood.Today, however, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the children's and youth organizations have also evaporated, leaving hundreds of thousands of children suddenly jettisoned from the collective with seemingly no place to go.


Deprived of state funding and willing inmates, most camps either have folded or have been converted to doma otdykha -- rest homes -- which have proved far more lucrative. The buildings of the Yolochka camp were taken over by one such enterprise about six years ago, while the summer camp moved to a smaller, adjacent site.


Central Statistics Committee figures show that in 1988, 8.4 million children attended 47,100 Pioneer camps, while in 1992 the number dropped to 4.4 million at 33,500 camps. Now even fewer state-run camps remain.


"There used to be 42 camps around Moscow," said Valentina Ladygina, current director of the former Pioneer camp at Yolochka. "Now there are only 17. We've gone down here from 400 to 130 kids."


Camp Yolochka, outside the town of Domodedovo, is still run by the Finance Ministry, as it was in 1981, but the facilities have improved. A new cafeteria has been built, replacing the rows of wooden benches with res aurant style tables adorned with decorative table cloths and flowers.


"The food's much better now," said Ladygina. "For breakfast, we have tea, or coffee if they choose, oatmeal, bread and cheese, even red and black caviar."


Ladygina said Finance Ministry children now paid 20,000 rubles for a 26-day summer stay. For others, the price was 215,000 rubles per child -- hardly a fortune, but enough for most Russian families to think twice.


Although video games, a disco club and new pool have replaced the austere conditions and red scarves of Leninist ideology, an air of militarism still lingers. A large poster hanging in a dormitory window meticulously details the day's schedule.


The children, according to the head cook, Zinaida Gerasimova, who has been at the camp since 1956, "have become a lot more aggressive." One camp janitor spoke ominously of drinking sessions, although Ladygina denied this.


But for most children camps are no longer an option. The expense is deterrent enough, and even for those who can afford it, there are too few beds. Many parents are afraid to send their children away anyhow.


Svetlana, 62, a retired construction engineer, refuses to send her 11-year old granddaughter to summer camp, for fear of unknown elements that she believes have sprung up in the rubble of Soviet-era Pioneer camps. "There could be some maniacs lurking around the camp," she said.


She felt that the Soviet state had a very good relationship with children and regretted the passing of this aspect of the old regime.


"Now she sits at home, doesn't do anything, or else she plays in the streets or maybe goes swimming," she said of her granddaughter. "That's the whole problem, what is there to do without the camps?"


Vladimir Zimonenko, a spokesman for the Justice Ministry, which registers youth organizations, conceded that the demise of the camps had left a gap. "It's a serious problem. Something needs to be done for the children," he said.


Twelve-year-old Petya, selling newspapers in the Park Kultury metro station, seemed to agree, saying: "I'd rather be at camp. There's a pool and fresh air and woods."


But Zhenya, a 15-year old who makes 30,000 rubles a week at a shooting gallery at Gorky Park, took a different view: "There's nothing to do there -- especially in this stupid weather."


There were times, back in that summer of 1981, when I might have agreed with Zhenya. But my old red pioneer scarf, covered with the signatures of my fellow Yolochka campers who befriended and helped me along, remains amongst my most treasured possessions.