The participants in the battle would carry the memory of that day—and the hope of its reenactment, over and over again—for as long as they lived. Few of them lived as long as Svetlov (who died, his youth “aged” but not used up, in 1964), but none of them—Chekist or poet (they made no such distinctions themselves)—would ever grow old. The son of a Jewish artisan from Zhitomir, author of the official Komsomol song (“The Young Guard,” 1922), and one of the Party’s most uncompromising crusaders against old age and degenerate art, Aleksandr Bezymensky wore his Komsomol badge until his death at seventy- five. He did not need to wear it: “My very old mother, who is but a speck / In our struggle, / Cannot understand that my Party card / Is a part of me.” Nor did he need to die: People! Sharpen your swords and knives! People! Wouldn’t you rather Live forever? These are the thieves of your lives: Sleep and death. Death to both! 32 And then there were those—“the younger brothers”—who were raised by the Komsomol of the 1920s to “besiege the fortresses” of the First Five-Year Plan. Too young to have fought in the civil war and too “young at heart” to live in peace under NEP, they battled vulgarity, cupidity, mediocrity, inequality, patriarchy, and, above all, “philistinism.” As one of them, Lev Kopelev, described the evil they were up against, NEP stood for private stores and small shops stocked much more abundantly and decorated much more colorfully than the drab workers’ cooperatives; dolled-up men and women in restaurants, where bands blared through the night, and in the casinos, where roulette wheels spun and dealers screamed “The Bets are down!”; girls with bright lipstick in short dresses who walked the streets at night accosting single men or laughing shrilly in cabs. NEP stood for farmers’ markets swarming with dirty, brightly colored crowds: kulak carts drawn by overfed horses, loud women hawking their goods, unctuous speculators, and ragged street children black with dirt. NEP stood for newspaper reports about village correspondents killed by kulaks; trials of embezzlers, bribe-takers, and quacks; satirical stories