The Young Guard (novel)

The Young Guard (Russian: Молодая гвардия) is a 1946 Russian-language young adult historical novel (rewritten in 1951) by Soviet writer Alexander Fadeyev.

The novel describes the operations of the Young Guard, an anti-German resistance organization operating in 1942–1943 in and around the city of Krasnodon in the eastern Ukraine. Many of the Young Guard were executed by the Germans.

Most of the main characters of the novel – Oleg Koshevoy, Juliana Gromova, Lyubov Shevtsova, Ivan Zemnukhov, Sergei Tyulenin, etc. - were actually existing people, although aspects of their characters, actions, and dialogues were invented or creatively embellished by the novelist, and there are also fictional characters in the novel.

The Young Guard was the second most popular work of children's literature in the Soviet Union for the period 1918-1986, with total sales over 276 editions of 26,143,000 copies.

Krasnodon was liberated from German occupation on 14 February 1943 (it had been occupied for less than a year, beginning in the summer of 1942). Immediately afterward, exhumation began of several dozen corpses of members of the Young Guard underground resistance organization from a pit at the Number Five Mine in Krasnodon, who had been tortured before execution by the Germans.

On the advice of Soviet head of state Mikhail Kalinin, the Central Committee of the Komsomol (Young Communist League) proposed to Fadeyev (an established writer who had already published several novels) that he write a book about the Young Guard.

Fadeyev, after reviewing materials collected by the Commission of the Central Committee of the Komsomol Krasnodon, agreed to the project and immediately went to the scene. Fadeev spent most of September 1943 in Krasnodon, collecting materials and interviewing more than a hundred witnesses (although many parents of Young Guards were too heartsick to speak to him). A few months later, Fadeyev published the article "Immortality" in Pravda, then – shocked and captivated by the Young Guards story – set his pen to work for a year and a half to create a large multidisciplinary artistic novel. The first version was published in 1946.

...
Wikipedia