Social HistoryA documentary history of childhood in 20th-century Russia, Children's World is a work of exhaustive, scholarly devotion. Catriona Kelly, a professor of Russian at the University of Oxford, has built a detailed picture of juvenile life and conformity under the Soviet dictatorship, using a variety of previously unseen sources, ranging from diaries and sketches to school work.
During the Stalin years, Kelly writes, loyalty to the communist state instilled a nationwide sense of belonging. Teenagers threw themselves enthusiastically into the armed defence of Stalingrad in 1942-1943. With its cult of self-sacrifice and destruction, indeed, the Red Army might have been designed for adolescence.
Was there something innately obedient and complaisant in the Russian character? The Soviet children's movement, known as the Pioneers, founded in 1922, brooked no criticism of the dictatorship and members displayed an unthinking, starry-eyed devotion to Stalin. ("Thank You Dear Comrade Stalin for a Happy Childhood," they parroted obligingly.) The cruelties that often accompanied this blind adherence to ideology, however, were legion. So-called "problem" children - usually the offspring of Gulag internees - were shut up in reformatories and often not seen again. Their blighted personal lives (in Soviet speak, "spoiled biographies") ill-conformed to the Communist "golden childhood" stereotype.
THUS THE SOVIET state placed children's affairs at the heart of its "political legitimacy", no matter how inhumane the consequences. Political indoctrination began at nursery and continued into early adulthood. In Kelly's analysis, the Pioneers resembled the British Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, if with a more martial cut. Boys were required to form fours and slope arms, though not all of them appreciated the button-cleaning and shoe-polishing (few seven-year-olds would).
Pioneer girls were no less regimented. Amid hand-clapping and flag-waving, they would march in rank or lay commemorative wreaths at All-Soviet rallies and other state jamborees. Pioneer activity was often supervised by Stalinist ideologues blown out with rank and self-importance, who demanded more than military drill or gymnastics of their charges. Pioneers also had to demonstrate an appreciation of Soviet collectivisation and the triumph of Stalin's Five Year Plan.
According to Kelly, gender differences became more accentuated during the second World War. Boys were offered map-reading and orienteering classes, while girls had to stick to domestic science and childcare classes. Previously, Soviet pedagogues had sought to reverse the "gender asymmetry" (as Kelly calls it) prevalent under the czars, when girls were portrayed as beribboned, apple-cheeked dolls, and boys as sailor-suited Little Lord Fauntleroys. But, argues Kelly, the exigencies of war overrode the political idealism of the early Soviet period.
The war disrupted children's lives differently, depending on their social background, and where in the USSR they lived. Populist stories of hearty Soviet partisans overcoming the Nazi enemy were nevertheless devoured by all children. Aleksander Fadeev's novel The Young Guard (1945), about Soviet partisans who courageously go to their death in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine, was typical of this edifying sort of literature. (The book's inflated rhetoric has not worn well, Kelly suggests.)
Children's World, as well providing a title for this book, was the name of a toy store that opened in Leningrad (St Petersburg) in 1936. The store sold "morally improving" toys such as alphabet blocks and the Soviet equivalent of Meccano, Konstruktor. With the Khruschev thaw in the mid-1960s, however, it began to stock "frivolous" toys imported from the West such as furry white elephants and acrylic panda bears. Now, in the post-Soviet age of PlayStation and Nintendo, street games such as hopscotch and "off-ground-he" (or their Russian equivalents) have all but disappeared from Moscow. Like big cities anywhere, Moscow is increasingly home to pasty-faced, indoor children glued to a computer screen.
IN THE FINAL chapter, "The End of Childhood", Kelly explores sex education in Soviet Russia, a time when innocence is left behind and questions are asked about the grown-ups: their sexual lives, as well as their dissembling and intentions. This book ends on a valedictory note, however, as the author comments on the decline of institutional provision for children in post-Soviet Russia, and the accompanying resurgence of child abandonment. The motto of Russia's dispossessed, "Things were better before", is increasingly heard.
Ian Thomson's biography of Primo Levi (Vintage) won the Royal Society of Literature WH Heinemann Award 2003
Children's World: Growing Up in Russia 1890-1991 By Catriona Kelly Yale, 714pp. £29.99