A Modern History of Russian Childhood by Elizabeth White

Author:Elizabeth White [White, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474240253
Google: lLJ1zQEACAAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2020-01-15T01:44:11+00:00

6

Post-war Soviet childhoods, 1953–91

Introduction

Children are our future, our joy and happiness. Our first thoughts are about them. Theirs must be a life of smiles. For their sake, we are fighting and working. Our children are destined to live in a communist society and in the Soviet Union everything is being done to give them a happy life so that they should grow up to be healthy, vivacious citizens of the state, its future masters.1

The Stalinist period was key to the creation of a new and stable model of Soviet childhood, although it did incorporate some of the aspects of the revolutionary child of the 1920s. It was in the period after Stalin’s death in 1953 that a modern model of childhood became something approaching the reality of most children’s lives. The 1950s and 1960s were decades of great change in the Soviet Union. Universal schooling, a functioning welfare state and medical infrastructure, and a clear advance in standards of living transformed the lived experience of children and the structures of childhood from the 1950s. Children remained at the symbolic centre of Soviet life. The state described children as the ‘only privileged class’. One of the obligations of a Soviet citizen outlined in the 1977 Constitution was ‘to bring up children, train them for work and raise them as worthy members of society’.2 The programme of the CPSU declared: ‘To ensure that every child will have a happy childhood – that is one of the most important and noble tasks of the building of a communist society.’

Nikita Khrushchev (1956–1964) gradually emerged as Stalin’s successor as Secretary General of the Communist Party. He initiated an era of reform, known as the Thaw, to improve the daily lives of Soviet citizens and reduce state terror but also to reinvigorate the commitment to a communist future. Khrushchev launched a de-Stalinization campaign, most famously in his ‘Secret Speech’ to the 20th Party Congress in February 1956. At the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, Khrushchev introduced the Third Party Programme of the Communist Party and promised that communism would be built by 1980. Those who were children then, those born in the 1950s and early 1960s, would complete this task, making them a vital social group for the state. The state constantly pushed the message of their importance to them, although the reception was mixed. Many recall the enthusiasm of the early 1960s and the shared belief in a future scientific and humanistic utopia:

Our teachers and the whole atmosphere of school life undoubtedly, was pushing the childish organism of the pupils to the discovery of some kind of new hormone, some new kind of energy, beyond the human. We felt this energy around us and within us and not only at school but also at home as we had to participate in the life of adults with almost obligatory marches during the demonstrations on the ‘red days’ of the calendar and then the evenings around the table as state holidays turned into family ones.3

One woman, a

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