Scout's Honor

In late 1910, a renowned Englishman, Lord Robert Baden-Powell, came to Russia to have a look around. Yet this was no ordinary sightseeing trip, and Baden-Powell was no ordinary tourist.

His invitation had come from Tsar Nicholas II, whose affinity for all things English included a deep admiration for his guest. The author of a popular book, Scouting for Boys, Baden-Powell was the founder of the international Scouting movement, which had taken root in Russia with the formation of a troop in Pavlovsk in 1909, one year prior. In stops at St. Petersburg and Moscow, the tsar’s English guest checked out the extent to which his ideas were being cultivated in Russia, where his recently translated book had been very well received.

In fact, Nicholas was such a fan of the Scouting concept that his son and heir, Tsarevich Alexei, became one of Russia’s earliest Scouts. Artists of the present century have even made icons depicting Alexei dressed in a Scout uniform and neckerchief, and holding an Orthodox cross. Indeed, the tsarevich is so revered as a martyr that he is referred to as “the august Scout,” and is first on the list of persons mentioned in the Day of the Faithful ceremony to recognize Russian Scouts’ fallen predecessors.

In a way, Scouting in Russia had not one founder, but two: the husband-and-wife team of Oleg and Nina Pantyukhov. Their original troop of seven boys, which was called the Beavers, soon merged with another, but it lent its name to a prestigious Russian Scouting award: the Order of the Bronze Beaver.

Pantyukhov, like Baden-Powell, was an army officer, and the two shared a belief that military drill and discipline were an undesirable youth training regimen. Importantly, for Pantyukhov, Scouting was also a response to young people who were taking Russia’s defeat in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War especially hard, and wanted to do something for their country.

Piet Kroonenberg’s two-volume work The Undaunted: Keeping the Scouting Spirit Alive relates the history of Scouting in communist countries. According to Kroonenberg, by 1915 over 140 Russian cities had Scout troops, and there were some 50,000 registered Scouts. Another five years later, in 1920, that number had doubled, despite the ravages of world war, revolution, and civil war. [Imperial Russia never had separate Boy Scout and Girl Scout organizations, just troops made up of all one or the other.]

On May 6, 1918, the St. George’s Day celebrations in Bolshevik-controlled St. Petersburg included more than 2,000 Scouts, both boys and girls, decked out in full uniform. A department store on Nevsky Prospect housed Russia’s official Scout shop, which stayed in business at least through late 1918. And that winter, Kroonenberg reports, “Scouts in full uniform were still spotted in the city’s streets, as foreign observers, diplomats and visitors reported.”

The Bolsheviks initially did not pay much mind to Scouting because, as Kroonenberg noted, they “had more pressing matters on their hands.”  However, Scouting’s foes were not about to let it continue much longer, particularly given that most Scouts and their leaders had joined forces with the Whites (Pantyukhov, notably, led the Cadets who unsuccessfully defended the Moscow Kremlin from the Bolsheviks). And so, as the Civil War ended in the Reds’ favor, they turned their attention toward inculcating their doctrines into the younger members of the new society. On May 19, 1922, the Young Pioneers organization was founded, absorbing most all remaining youth organizations such as the Scouts.

Despite the well-rehearsed notion that the Pioneers were a Sovietized version of the Scouts, that characterization is a sore spot. While the Pioneers’ motto, “always prepared,” was a conscious rip-off of the famous Scout motto, “be prepared,” the English origins of Scouting, its prior associations, and its non-ideological content were loathsome to the Soviets and consequently jettisoned. And it was Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who wrote a treatise outlining the importance of siphoning the Scouting corpus into a dogmatically communist youth corps.

In August 1922, Scouting’s international body, which had been apprised of the situation by Pantyukhov (now in emigration), took up the question of how the displaced Russian national movement was to be officially regarded. Exiled Scouts were declared “representatives of Russian Scouting in foreign countries,” and this stipulation was added: “As soon as the situation in Russia changes in such a way that regular Scouting, according to the international rules, is possible again in that country, the recognition will be canceled.”

One wonders whether those present had any inkling of just how much time would pass before “regular Scouting” reappeared in Russia.

In 1926, Nina Pantyukhov created new insignia for the uniforms of Russian Scouts in exile, superimposing the image of St. George over the universal Scouting symbol of the fleur-de-lis. For girls, she designed a supplemental patch with three snowdrop flowers wrapped in a ribbon, and bearing the words Помни Россию (Remember Russia) and the Scout motto Будь готовъ (Be prepared). Later, the exiled organization cleaved into two new entities (one generally thought of as liberal, the other conservative) known by the acronyms NORS and ORYuR.

The members of the Pantyukhov family remained devoted champions of Scouting, all the while writing new chapters of their personal story far from their homeland. In the late 1960s, Pantyukhov penned a family retrospective that doubled as a documentation of the national movement he had founded. At the end of the book, titled О днях былых (Of Time Gone By), he included a collection of decrees he wrote after being designated the “Senior Russian Scout” while stationed with the Whites in Novocherkassk in 1919. For example, in one from Constantinople, he admonished Scouts to be mindful of their studies, whether at school or at home, so they can “put their knowledge to use for the benefit of their motherland, Russia.”

In the wake of the family’s move to the United States, the older son, also named Oleg, went on to lead a particularly noteworthy life embodying the Scouting ideal of service. He joined the Army under his legally changed name, John L. Bates. His fluency in Russian drew notice, and he became the wartime interpreter for General Eisenhower, and also provided interpretation for President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Tehran and Yalta conferences. It must have been a bittersweet homecoming in Yalta, given that there he came face to face with Josef Stalin – the personification of the force that had destroyed his father’s beloved creation.

Much to his satisfaction, Bates lived long enough to return again to his native land in 1990 and play a part in resurrecting Scouting there. According to Kroonenberg, when a delegation of the World Organization of the Scout Movement visited the USSR earlier that same year, a Defense Ministry official revealed that the Russian Scouting archives left behind by its founders in their flight into exile were in storage in the ministry’s cellars. As it turned out, in the 1930s, the persons preserving the documentation were taken away in a police raid, and the archives were to be destroyed. Yet, due to a mix-up, Red Army trucks spirited away the cache before the secret police returned. The long-lost archives were made available for the visitors to see.

Even so, the return path for Russian Scouting was not an easy one. “Every Scouting organization in the world rushed back into Russia to try to re-establish Scouting,” said Michael Danich, who leads the California-based Western American Region of the St. George’s Pathfinders (the American branch of ORYuR). “There was real animosity, with people showing up who were not from the country,” he added.

Besides that, the Soviet persecution of scoutmasters and those in the leadership ranks had been total, meaning the country had no prior institutional knowledge from within to fill the void.

“There was not a good job of unlearning the Pioneer program,” said Srinath Tirumale Venugopal, interim coordinator of the World Scout Bureau Eurasia Support Center in Kiev. “The first ten years in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the USSR were particularly difficult.”

As luck would have it, Russian Scouting had a formidable revivifying force at its disposal. Rostislav Polchaninov was born in Novocherkassk in 1919 to a White Army officer who served under General Anton Denikin and General Pyotr Wrangel. His family lived in exile in Yugoslavia, where, in 1931, he joined the Yugoslav Scouts and then a group of Russian Scouts as well. After World War II, he moved to the US. It is largely through his efforts, in conjunction with those of the Pantyukhovs, that the preservation of Russia’s Scouting heritage was possible. Among other things, he hosted two shows on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for more than 20 years.

Polchaninov’s longevity and his array of contributions also make him a towering figure in Russian Scouting. Since 1945, he has assumed the role of historian for ORYuR, which is now resurgent in Russia after its decades in exile.

As noted, the overwhelming majority of Scouts and their leaders supported the Whites in the Russian Civil War. Among the few who sided with the Reds was Oscar Tarkhanov. According to Polchaninov, he founded a patrol called “Scout with a Mauser instead of a walking stick.” And Polchaninov recalls a tune the Scouts would sing to taunt the Bolsheviks. It went:

Нас десять, вы слышите, десять
А старшему нет двадцати.
Конечно нас можно повесить,
Но раньше нас надо найти.

There are ten of us, you hear me, ten.
And the eldest of us isn’t even twenty.
You can certainly hang us, of course,
But first you’ll have to find us.

For Polchaninov, the exterior trappings of Scouting that the Bolsheviks co-opted in the Young Pioneers were plain to see. But the critical difference, he says, was in the belief system. “Morals, belief in God, Scout values, these were replaced with a belief in Lenin and being true to communism,” he said.

Coincidentally, a Bolshevik editorialist remarked on the same thing, but from the opposite point of view. The last entry in Pantyukhov’s book is an epistolary reflection written in 1967, the 50th anniversary of what he called “the black year.” He cites a piece in a Red publication in which the author described belief in God and other principles that Russian Scouts held dear as “bourgeois morals.” The writer concluded, “Unfortunately, we can’t eliminate the Scouts in other countries, but we can and must do so in Russia.”

Growing up in Yugoslavia, however, Polchaninov saw that the Soviet way of dealing with Scouting was not universal across the Eastern Bloc. “In communist Yugoslavia,” he said, “Scouting was permitted and existed side by side with the Pioneers, and in communist Poland, Scouting replaced the Pioneer organization… The troop leaders were anti-communist and did quite a fine job. Among Poles today, their Scout years are remembered as a happy time.”

These days, Polchaninov lends his talents to Russian Scouts in both the homeland and abroad. He represents a link to their earliest forebears, and has written an assortment of training manuals, learning aids and such, a practice that he has carried on since his childhood Scouting days in Yugoslavia. He and his daughter, Ludmila Selinsky, are active supporters of the four Pathfinder druzhinas (troops) in the US: Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Washington, DC.

“I have always been in favor of Russian Scouts’ participation in all international Scouting endeavors, as I see benefit in that in battling Russophobia,” Polchaninov said. “The Russian government should think about that, and Scouting is one of the ways to wage that fight.” 

Nonetheless, there is a major unresolved issue in Russian Scouting. This stems from a conflict that began in 1945 when Russian Scouts in Exile were expelled from the Boy Scouts International Bureau, of which, in 1922, they were founding members. Then, in 1990, when ORYuR, (Organization of Young Russian Scouts) which carried on Russian Scouting in exile, began returning the movement to its native soil, its presence was not welcomed by persons working on behalf of the World Organization of the Scout Movement (WOSM), the global umbrella body of Scouting, which was attempting to establish its own scouting in the Soviet Union.

According to Polchaninov, after years of negotiations ORUR in Russia attempted to join the WOSM in 1996 but was rejected and then chose to go its own way. This was on top of a slight from a few years earlier: “The WOSM right away started printing millions of copies in Russian of its booklets for Russia about the Scouts,” Polchaninov said. “And they made no mention whatsoever of the fact that, beginning in 1909, Russia used to have Scouts of its own, and there was nary a word about the founder, Oleg Pantyukhov.”

Modern-day Russian Scouting is highly fragmented to begin with. The WOSM-affiliated organization in Russia is in particular disarray, though. It is known as the All-Russia Scout Association, and its official membership figure in 2016 was 6,400. However, local leaders tell Venugopal that membership has dropped precipitously since then, an assertion backed up by the lack of activity on the association’s website since 2017. Meanwhile, ORYuR has nearly 5,000 members in Russia, and its affiliated organization, NORS-R, claims 2,000 participants in 21 Russian regions. Both ORYuR and NORS-R also have vibrant, well-maintained websites.

Furthermore, the Eurasian regional office of the global body is in Kiev – not the most palatable location from a Russian standpoint, given events in Ukraine of recent years. Nevertheless, Venugopal is intent on restoring a sense of direction and cohesion.

 “The fertile ground in Russia is that you have 30 million people of Scouting age. That’s a very large number,” Venugopal said. “We are hoping to target one percent of the youth population; that’s 30,000. That’s the objective, but it takes time.”

He sees Russia’s natural beauty as a major selling point in that effort, and he referred to “the complementarity that is offered by Scouting” to the educational system. The possibilities for teaching such things as wilderness survival, outdoorsmanship, and an array of life skills are as vast as Russia itself – if things can get back on track. 

“When you come back from Russia, you really feel the magic of nature, of the Creator,” Venugopal said.

Meanwhile, back in the US, Danich’s Pathfinders marked the 110th anniversary of the birth of Russian Scouting with a midsummer slyot (jamboree) that featured some 150 kids from the American troops, as well as representation from Australia, Canada, Panama, and Russia. Danich said that, despite an estimated 90 percent of his group of being Russian Orthodox, children of other religions can still find acceptance and be on equal footing with the other Pathfinders.  “I’ve had everything from Buddhists to Muslims, Jewish, and Protestants,” Danich said. “That isn’t such a big deal for my generation. It was in the past.”

Such tolerance can be traced back to the original Russian Scouts. Footnotes in Kroonenberg’s book, The Undaunted, describe at length the safe harbor that Scouting provided amid the rampant chauvinism and bigotry of that era. “The Russian Scouts, being totally open, accepted boys and girls… of all nationalities and denominations, including Jews,” he notes. He also writes that the Scouts’ acceptance of minorities, which contrasted with the treatment of such groups by the authorities and most ordinary Russians in the empire, “was neither understood nor accepted.”

One can’t help but try to imagine what effect such an organization would have had on the post-World War I generations of Russian youth had revolution and communism not intervened.