What youth organisations are there in the USSR?
No public organisation is closed to the youth - and we have a great many of such organizations.
But, naturally, some are geared exclusively to the needs of the young. The biggest (38 million members) is the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, or the Komsomol.
Apart from that, there are a quarter of a million youth associations that help the young to develop their engineering and design abilities.
More than one and a half million students with a keen interest in scientific research belong to student scientific societies and student design bureaus. Both these organisations can, under their Charters, sign contracts with Ministries, government departments and enterprises for carrying out specific jobs. What the students like about these organisations is that they enable them to try themselves out in research and design work while still at college. Many of the problems they work on in these organisations later become the subject of their term papers or graduation theses.
The creative unions including the writers', composers', artists', and cinematographers' unions also have special youth sections.
And at factories, offices, colleges, collective farms and schools there are sports clubs and various other hobby clubs for book-lovers, and people interested in music and art. The number of such clubs runs into hundreds of thousands.