Vasily Krylov, 17, used to live a double life.
Sometimes, like a good Soviet child, he'd wear the red kerchief of the Pioneers. But more and more his thoughts would be turning to a strange new youth cult, with seductive initiation rites, tents and the mastery of knots which the elders of the USSR had dreaded for so long.He couldn't resist. He joined the Scouts.
"I was a model Pioneer," said Vasily, 17. "But I got very bored with the organization. You just went because everybody else did. If they'd become more like the Scouts, maybe I would have stayed."
Soviet Russia defined the Scouting movement as "a bourgeois system of extracurricular education."
Sitting in the cluttered hall of Khimki Scout Club on the edge of Moscow, with its ping-pong table, VCR and portraits of Queen Elizabeth II and scouting movement founder Lord Baden-Powell, Vasily defined it as "always having something to do during the holidays."
As the state-controlled Pioneer movement began its spectacular collapse along with the USSR, young victims of the Chernobyl disaster were returning from trips abroad with tales of bourgeois fun at Western Scout camps.
Inspired by their stories, the Russian Scouting movement grew from nothing to the point where the Moscow Scout Union alone, covering European Russia, now claims some 4,000 members. Next summer, Scouts from all over the world will attend a jamboree at a military base in Moscow.
Meanwhile, the Pioneers, who once regimented summer camps for millions of Soviet children, are fighting for survival.
"You can't have an organization without an ideology," said Vladimir Nesevrya, head of the Khmiki Scouts. "The ideology of Scouting is the freedom to take decisions. The Pioneers have to have a different ideology, but I don't know what."
The growth of Scouting in Russia in the 1990s restores a movement with a tragic history. In 1908, with the ink barely dry on his book "Scouting For Boys," Robert Baden-Powell was summoned to St. Petersburg by Czar Nicholas II. The czar must have been impressed: Imperial Russia became the second country in the world, after Britain, to have a Scout movement.
Scouting survived the revolution and the czar's death, but in 1925 Soviet authorities gave the Pioneers - who adopted the motto "Be Prepared" - a monopoly on organized youth relaxation, and the Scout clubs were broken up. Scoutmasters were shot or sent to labor camps.
Until the collapse of the USSR, the very word "Scout" - the Russians use the English term - was a synonym for the brutal offspring of the wicked exploiter class.
Neither the Scouts nor the remnants of the Pioneers are seeking confrontation. Supervising gatherings of children in northern Moscow who share one red kerchief between five, Pioneer leader Oxana Sinyavskaya, a 29-year-old teacher, said: "The Scouts have a right to exist, like any other movement which isn't fascist.
"We don't think our youngsters suffer because our organization is called `Pioneers.' Sometimes they try to paint us in political colors. But that's already in the past."
And what a past it was. At the age of seven, usually at around the time of the anniversary of the October Revolution, a Soviet child became an "oktyabryonok" or "little October one."
Three and a half years later, around the time of Lenin's birthday, they joined the Pioneers. "Entering the ranks of the All-Union Lenin Pioneer Organization, I solemnly swear before my comrades to love my motherland passionately, to live, study and struggle as the great Lenin willed and the Communist Party teaches, and always to obey the law of a Pioneer of the Soviet Union," they vowed.
Today's oath has been purged of all political references. Inductees are even urged to append their own pledges. The Pioneers still try to help the elderly and play their "summer lightning" wargames in the woods, but the movement seems to run on dying momentum from the past.
Not that the Scouts are open to all, as Nesevrya admits. The boys' parents have to be able to afford the basics - a good pair of hiking boots, a backpack and a sleeping bag for camping trips and preferably the occasional plane ticket for a foreign jamboree. T
That means they have to be - well, middle class.
"If we've caught the spirit of Scouting right, then we would have to be an organization for the middle classes," Nesevrya said.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)