Can a quite open and public action be a kind of (very tricky and unlawful) concealment?

A GROWING BURDEN OF RESPONSIBILITY

It was a year since I had started working at the Komsomol krai committee. I had spent most of the time traveling on official business, but I had also established good relations with the Stavropol intelligentsia and students and knew about their problems. Yet -- since I was somewhat of a newcomer in the city -- I did not expect to be considered for the post of first secretary of the Stavropol Komsomol city committee (footnote in original: The Komsomol was organized on parallel lines to the Communist Party). Nevertheless, I was nominated and endorsed, and assumed my new duties in early September.

I spent a long time considering what to do first -- there were scores of problems to be solved. It was hard to find work not only for school-leavers but also for graduates from higher education. A disorganized life it was, with people doomed to live in idleness and the concomitant negative phenomena -- yes, we in Stavropol had to face these problems too. On the other hand, intellectual ferment was spreading in society since the XXth Party Congress, specially among the young people who nurtured growing expectations.

I began by organizing a discussion club. Later, in the 1960s, clubs like this and 'talk programs' (footnote in original: These took place in the evenings and consisted of songs, political discussions, debates, satirical sketches and so on) appeared in many cities and became, to a certain extent, the standard forum for ideological work. But when I and Larion Anisimovich Rudenko, faculty head at the college of education, decided to found such a club in our home town, it was considered (at least in our krai) an unheard-of novelty.

The topic of the first discussion seemed innocuous enough: 'Let's talk about taste'. But the way we defined it touched on the most acute problems. We invited everyone to participate in the debate, which was to take place in the House of Teachers (footnote in original: A kind of civic center for teachers). The reaction was immediate: vigilant, well-meaning citizens started calling the secretary of the city Party committee to draw his attention to the event '... taking place right in the center -- some kind of camouflage ... an obvious provocation!'