2017-11-30
418A Soviet Fairyland
The first dedicated department store for Soviet children, with the pre-revolutionary name Children’s World, opened in Leningrad in August 1936. The store was meant as a leisure venue as much as, or more than, a place where purchases could be made: it contained a hairdresser and a cafe as well as various departments for clothes, games, and toys, and was planned to have rooms where children could try out games, photographic equipment, and musical instruments alongside the facilities for sale. The emphasis on secondary facilities was just as well, given that the contents of the store (as with other Soviet department stores) comprised a strictly limited selection of shoddily crafted items. But the point was that this was supposed to be a paradisiacal venue, one where the perfect happiness of Soviet childhood was demonstrated and enacted. A publicity shot of the opening, which showed ‘Pioneer activists’ from the nearby palace staring admiringly at a window display containing no more than statues and flower arrangements, set the tone: mere acquisition was the very least of the stores functions.
Nevertheless, acquisition by children of material goods was considered licit, particularly if these arrived in the form of gifts, as at the ritual of the ‘New Year Tree’. In.1935, the ban on trees was suddenly overturned (it is generally thought that Pavel Postyshev was behind this reform, as he was with parties for prize pupils). Traditional Christmas festivities were renamed ‘New Year’ festivities, and brought forward from 6 January to New Year’s Day. Towering firs, were obtained by institutions such as work collectives and trade unions, as well as Pioneer palaces, where the tree formed the centerpiece of children’s parties attended by adults dressed up as Grandfather Frost (a suitably secular version of St Nicholas) and his glamorous female companion the Snow Maiden. No longer was the accoutrement of an individual family festival, the festive tree now the ornament of collective celebration.
At some real-life parties, children would be given ‘practical toys’, such as miniature telephones, that were considered to offer training for their future careers. But the main point of the festivals was still to allow the children to enjoy themselves. Even at ‘model’ parties run by exemplary nursery teachers, trees wereusually decorated with sweet-boxes, toy cottages, holly berries and the like, and the children themselves were usually costumed as snowflakes and bunnies, not as Red Army soldiers or Stakhanovism factory workers. Any remaining Bolshevik sensitivity about political symbolism was quickly shed: in December 1935, officials visiting a nursery school had objected to paper chains as ‘emblems of slavery’, but by 1937 these decorations had become de rigueur.
Along with the arrangement of these new facilities and festivals, insistence that the Soviet Union was the best place in the world for children became ever more shrill. ‘In not a single country of the world is there such enormous concern for children, a concern felt by the broadest strata of the laboring peopleclaimed a leading article in Soviet Justice, published in rmd-1935. The apogee of this myth was reached in Aleksandrovs enormously popular film Circus, whose heroine played by the glamorous Lyubov’ Orlova, was an American star driven to the Soviet Union because her parentage of a mixed-race son had made her the targe’ of racist calumny. The culminating scene showed the small child passed thorn hand to hand among spectators who had just watched Orlova’s daredevil act as s human cannonball, singing as they did so the films number one hit song, ‘Broad Is My Motherland’.
As the case of Circus indicates, skazkawas an ambiguous term: It could be applied to the ‘fairy-tale reality’ that supposedly characterized Soviet existence and skazka was not only, or even mainly, a genre marked out by obviously fantastical events, even when the intended audience was children. The Little Golden Key was in fact rather unusual in its unabashed evocation of a fantasy other work In most respects, children’s literature was a version of Socialist Realism writ small It, too, was supposed to deal (in a manner suited to the child s mentality with the themes of socialist production, revolutionary history, and scientific progress Among the possible skazka subjects mentioned by Marshak were the really’.
Good Children, Bad Children
Stalinist children were not onlyrewarded; the towards stricter governance in schools was matched by the harder line on juvenile crime. A law passedon 7 April 19 of full criminal responsibility in cases of ‘theft,causing viol mutilation and murder’ to 12were forbidden. To be sure, professional lawyers (whom the changes, almost certainly made on Stalin’s personal initiative, had taken by surprise) did all they could to mitigate the severity with which children were treated. However, this was a question of legal professionals attempting to frustrate the intentions behind top-level policy, not of a rethink at the top.
The assertion of the authority of teachers and police officials in no sense represented a realization of the utopian visions of collective upbringing that had been popular in some quarters during the 1920s. The ‘nationalization’ of childhood at this level was accompanied by the reinforcement of parental authority at another. Propaganda now hymned the achievements of exemplary parents (concentrating upon skilled workers as a model for less ‘cultured’ members of the working class), and castigated the signal failures of those who did not realize that ‘if a person brings up his children properly, he is a good Communist’. Parents were supposed to be the primary line of governance within the quasi-autonomous ‘social cell’ of the family. As an article in Soviet Justice put it in 1937, family life was a profoundly intimate sphere’.
In line with the shift in attitudes towards parents, official versions of PavlikMorozov’s life underwent change. Now, there was stress on the heart-searching that Pavlik s action had cost him. Rather than making his confession with relish in public, Pavlikformentedly blurted it out in private, requiring assurance from another adult - the local teacher in some versions, the local representative of the secret police in others — that his action against his father was legitimate. Scenes of this kind not only stressed that inter-generational rebellion was permissible only in exceptional circumstances, but also engaged a compensation mechanism whereby the patriarchal authority of the representatives of the state replaced the patriarchal authority of the child’s real father and of his blood relations more generally. In the words of a story published by Our Achievements magazine in 1936:The family should not be comprised merely of blood ties. We will pay for such blood ties in blood In other words, the family was to be encouraged where it was a force for social harmony, but controlled where it appeared to threaten the collectiveideal.
As the PavlikMorozov story revealed - even in this reworked version - the new emphasis on parental authority did not grant carte blanche for parental will.
The rights of parents were endorsed only in so far as these suited the central purpose of legislative change, to make the family the instrument of social control.
Parents were held to blame if children went to the bad (since the caring Soviet state, which had provided every resource for infant welfare, was clearly not culpable in this respect). The mid-i930s saw a hardening of attitudes to ‘neglectful’ mothers. There were calls in the legal press for longer sentences to be handed out to women convicted of infanticide and of child abandonment. The most famous family reform of the 1930s, the 28 June 1936 decree ‘On the Protection j of Motherhood and Infancy’, not only presented a package of welfare measures?
Improved arrangements for maternity support, promises of huge expansion in child-care facilities), but also outlawed abortion, which was now seen as a dereliction of maternal duty.In 1937, divorce arrangements were tightened up; in of the leader with his own daughter Svetlana appeared in the paper. On 29 June 1936, ‘Happy Childhood Day’, a photograph of Stalin embracing a small girl with the resonant name of Angelina Markizova (known as Gelya for short), who had presented him with a bouquet when a delegation from the Burat-Mongofian Autonomous Republic visited the Kremlin, was published on the front page of Pravda, The photograph was later, in its poster version, to become one of the most famous images of the Stalin era, with copies pinned up in schools, pioneer camps, clubs, and other children s institutions.
This genre was not invented by or for Stalin. Occasional representations of Lenin with children had begun appearing after the leader’s death in 1924 (such as a group portrait by the modernist painter Pavel Kuznetsov). However, the status of such images was relatively marginal (Kuznetsovs painting received much adverse criticism, as a result of which he destroyed the canvas), and it was not until the 1960s that ‘Lenin and children’ images became a mainstream genre. Unlike the cult of Lenin, too, the Stalin cult presented the leader as the patron and guide of children, rather than a model for their emulation. There was a genre of Stalin biographies for children, but far more prominent were images in which he was shown embracing them and patting them on the head, or protecting them from harm. Stalin’s help was available when that of ordinary (one might say, mortal) parents failed, as in the case of the boy narrator of the Yiddish writer Lev Kvitko’s poem ‘Cradle-Song’, a poem sung by the boy to his mother. The boy tells how, when walking in the woods, he has been attacked by various wild creatures, most of which he was able to chase away himself But then, along comes a more threatening foe, a pack of wolves:
Once more I leaned against the green pine.
And suddenly grey wolves crept up to me:
They opened their great teeth - Now they’d tear me to pieces!
For sheer terror I couldn’t stir...!
Mum, mum, mummy, my sweetheart, come here!
But Stalin found out that I was in the wood,
And Stalin spied, heard I was in deadly danger,
So he sent a tank out for me,
And I rolled off down the forest path.
Stalin was by no means the only Soviet leader to make his appearance in children’s literature, propaganda images, and ceremonials. Other members of his inner circle, notably Molotov and Voroshilov, also figured routinely. (It was Molotov who was considered the patron of Artek, the most famous Pioneer camp, and fulsomely thanked for allowing an extension of the camp’s territory in the late 1930s. It was Voroshilov to whom propaganda Soviet boys vowed their resolution to grow up fast and fight for the motherland.) However, just as in real-life politics, the leader’s prominence was always underlined. An anthology Happy Childhood published in 1939 (the year of Stalin’s sixtieth birthday celebrations) showed an indicative sense of proportion: of thirty-one pieces, seven contained tributes to Stalin, while Molotov and Voroshilov clocked just one paean each.
