A lot joined when they were young *not* for the reasons that they'd have had as adults. The "ideologies" promulgated included a lot of things, most of the reprehensible things weren't crucial to the way that the teens or young adults would think. Looking back 30 years later, it's hard to believe. But writings at the time by members and for members, plus their recollections, all say pretty much the same thing. There's a large set of "them"--values and beliefs. There was a small set of "them" that provided the basis for individual actions.
In many cases, peer or public pressure helped them along.
What disagrees are suspicions and later attributions of motives. You can think of it as "rationalization" at the time, but if you join an organization with 30 planks because you agree or can agree with 5 or 10, it says nothing about your support for the other 20. There are a lot of Democrats that vote (D), contribute (D), but if you say they obligatorily must agree and support every party plank would laught uproariously in your face until they realized you're serious.
It was a serious problem late in the lives of many of the pionery and komsomol'tsy. They knew what the "ideologies" said and had accepted them at some level and in some way. Then they were told what the *consequences* of those ideologies were and what the "one true" interpretation of those ideologies had been. They met the facts with complete denial. They had accepted the ideologies but not with the meaning the rulers had given them; instead, they had given them the meaning they thought most likely. The disconnect between their interpretation and what official writings said could be parsed away or ignored. To say that they had accepted the official meaning and believed it was simply a falsehood imposed by people who refused to understand teens, young adults, or other peoples, and provide a modicum of good will to those that they fervently wished to despise.
I knew atheists in Boy Scouts in the '70s. My patrol leader was gay and when other kids bullied him the adults stopped it. The local troop interpreted the morality guidelines in their own way and since the BSA hadn't been compelled to make its guidelines explicit there was no problem. For the central leadership, making the guidelines explicit didn't signal a change in the BSA, it was just putting in a different form the intended content of the language that had been in place for years. For my troop, it was a change--in the '60s, '70s, and '80s nobody had interpreted the language to be homophobic or explicitly anti-atheist. They could point to places in the text where the troop's interpretation was sketchy. It didn't change what the prevailing local interpretation had been, nor the way that the adult leaders had implemented their interpretation.
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