When Robert Baden-Powell started the scouting movement a century ago, he could never have imagined that his followers would one day be pitted in an ideological battle with some of the worst despots and dictators of the 20th century.

Today the movement boasts 28 million Scouts in 216 countries. But in some corners of the globe Scouts have had to struggle against fascists, communists and most recently Islamic extremists.

Scouting is still regarded with suspicion in some countries and remains banned in mainland China, Cuba, Laos, Burma and North Korea.

“There has always been a strong link between the scouting movement and democracy,” Richard Amalvy, a spokesman for the World Organisation of the Scout Movement, said.

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“This is why it is such a threat to dictatorships.”

The first significant challenge was posed by Communist Russia, where Baden-Powell’s book Scouting for Boys was denounced as bourgeois and banned for 60 years.

One of its main detractors was Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife and socialist stalwart.

The Communists replaced Scouts with their own red-capped “pioneers”. They were taught survival skills in the woods, Marxist dogma and the evils of capitalism.

Russian Scouts remained an unlikely underground dissident movement until the collapse of Communism, when scouting was reborn in Russia and across the former Soviet bloc.

Today the movement is once again under threat, this time from President Putin, who has relaunched the “pioneers” and stopped all support for the Scouts. The scouting movement fared even worse at the hands of the fascists.

The Spanish dictator General Franco replaced Scouts with his youth wing, the notorious Phalange. Hitler followed the trend, coopting the Scouts into the feared Hitler Youth.

In its 90-year history the Czech scouting movement was banned three times, first by the Nazis in 1940, then by the Communists in 1951 and then a second time by the Communists in 1968, after it resurfaced briefly during the Prague Spring. Not until 1989, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, was it relaunched.

China too has posed a huge problem for Scouts. Although there are strong scouting organisations in Hong Kong and Macau, on the mainland the authorities have still not allowed the emergence of a truly independent scouting association based on the principles set out by Baden-Powell.

Communists are not the only challenge.

Scouting associations were banned by Ayatollah Khomeini when he came to power in Iran in 1979 and again by the Taleban when it controlled most of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.

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