Legkaia Kavaleriia

(Light Cavalry), a movement of Soviet youth that sprang up in 1926 on the initiative of Komsomol members as a form of participation in state and public control.

Groups or brigades of the Legkaia Kavaleriia movement were established by lower organizations of the All-Union Lenin Communist Youth League (VLKSM). The work of the groups was directed by bodies of the Central Control Commission of the ACP (Bolshevik) and by the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection of the USSR, which enlisted them in investigating and checking up on the work of institutions and enterprises. The groups’ methods of work consisted of sudden checks, which were referred to as “sorties” and “raids,” hence the name of the movement. The movement became mass in nature as of December 1928, when the Central Control Commission of the ACP (Bolshevik) and the Central Committee of the VLKSM issued the circular On the Legkaia Kavaleriia Groups, which defined its tasks: to struggle against bureaucratism and mismanagement in the state, economic, cooperative, and trade union systems; introduce a policy of economy; and exercise control over the shock construction projects of the first five-year plan, the grain collection campaigns, and trade and supply.

Uncovering and helping to eliminate shortcomings in the work of the state and economic apparatus, the Legkaia Kavaleriia movement contributed to the acceleration of the rate of the construction of socialism. The movement’s activity was evaluated highly in the resolution On the Work of the Legkaia Kavaleriia Groups, which was a joint resolution of the Central Control Commission of the ACP(B), the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection of the USSR, and the Central Committee of the VLKSM in 1933, and in a resolution of the Seventeenth Congress of the ACP(B) in 1934. In subsequent years, the participation of young people in state and public control assumed other forms. Since 1962, detachments of the Komsomol group Prozhektor (Searchlight) have been engaged in similar activity, following the traditions of the Legkaia Kavaleriia movement.