Aleksandr Vasilyevich Kosarev (Russian: Алекса́ндр Васи́льевич Ко́сарев; 1 November 1903 – 23 February 1939) was a Soviet politician and Communist Party official who was active in the youth movement. He served as the 7th First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol. He played a critical role in promoting the idea of Nikolai Starostin in establishment of professional football competitions in front of the Soviet Council on Physical Culture.
Early career
Born into a working-class family in Moscow, Kosarev lost his father during childhood. When he was nine years old, his widowed mother could not afford to keep him in school. He worked in a knitwear factory from 1914. After the February Revolution, he joined the 'Union of Working Class Youth', organised by the Bolsheviks, and joined the ranks of the Komsomol when it was founded in 1918, and the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1919.
There are contradictory accounts about Kosarev's record during the Russian Civil War. He is reported to have joined the Red Army as a volunteer, or alternatively to have avoided serving by pleading ill health.
After the civil war, he achieved rapid promotion through Komsomol, firstly in Moscow, where he was first secretary of the Bauman district committee, January 1922-July 1924, then as first secretary of the Penza provincial committee in 1924-26. In January 1926, when a majority of Komsomol members in Leningrad supported Grigory Zinoviev against Joseph Stalin in the latest rift in the communist party leadership, Kosarev was one of the officials sent to purge the provincial Komsomol and impose a new leadership loyal to Stalin. In March 1926, one of Zinoviev's supporters, Grigory Yevdokimov complained to the Central Committee that 'hundreds' of members of the Leningrad Komsomol had lost their jobs during the purge.
Kosarev served as secretary of a district committee in Leningrad until April, when he was transferred to Moscow as head of a department. In March 1927, he was appointed a secretary of Komsomol, and later in 1927 was elected to the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
In 1928, there was another rift in the communist party leadership, between Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin, who opposed Stalin's decision to drive the peasants onto collective farms. Bukharin had been the main contact between the party and Komsomol. In February 1929, Stalin launched purge of Komsomol's leaders, which resulted in the removal all but 22 of the 120 members of Komsomol's Central Committee, including almost the entire top tier of the leadership, except for Kosarev. On 24 March 1929 he was elected him First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol.
Head of the Komsomol
Under Kosarev's direction, all members of Komsomol were required to renounce religion - and their parents, if their parents were religious - and were encouraged to vandalise churches and church property. Thousands were sent to the villages to help force the peasants to join collective farms.
In February 1934, he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At 31, he is likely to have been its youngest member. He was also promoted to the Orgburo.
In 1935 Kosarev founded the Spartak Sports Union, with the footballer Nikolai Starostin, and others. He was also the initiator of the Soviet Top League. Starostin's younger brother Andrei, also a footballer, paid a posthumous tribute to Kosarev:
Starostin also described Kosarev as having dressed in public in a civilian suit, white tie, and shirt. Kosarev is credited with playing a leading part in getting Soviet officials to abandon the military uniforms that were standard in the 1920s. Reputedly he "one day declared a new slogan: 'Work productively, rest culturally.' After that, he always wore European clothes."
Great Purge
Kosarev was a willing participant in Stalin's Great Purge, before he was himself caught up in it. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov, he was appointed to the three-member commission headed by Nikolai Yezhov who supervised the investigation and, against resistance from the head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda, attributed political responsibility for the murder to Zinoviev and other ex-oppositionists. Kosarev was personally close to Yezhov's wife, Yevgenia Gladun: he may even have been one of her lovers.
