Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991 (review)

Reviewed by: Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991 J.-Guy Lalande Kelly, Catriona — Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. 714. This meticulously researched and eminently readable book (which includes 95 pages of endnotes) tackles a vast subject — growing up in Russia — that extends from the last years of the Russian empire to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The time period is further subdivided into four parts: the [End Page 480] pre-revolutionary years, 1891-1917; the early utopian years, 1917-1935; high Stalinism, 1935-1953; and post-Stalinism, 1953-1991. Part I, "Imagining Childhood," offers a history of representations of and attitudes towards childhood (a period of life that extends here to the age of 13 or 14) in propaganda, art, legislation, pedagogy, child psychology, and journalism. Part II, "Children on Their Own," acknowledges the huge impact of revolution, famine, purges, and war, then discusses boarding schools, colonies, orphanages, fostering and adoption, Pioneer camps and palaces, and waifdom. Organized around four stages of childhood development, Part III, "Family Children," considers nurseries and kindergartens, schools, hobbies, children's games and leisure activities, theatre and cinema, radio and television, as well as the circus. Catriona Kelly pays due attention to differences according to age and gender, social status, ethnicity (focusing primarily on Russians and, to a much lesser extent, Tatars and Jews living in European Russia), and residence (urban or rural) — a nuanced approach that rightfully makes her chary of generalizations linking, for example, the practice of swaddling to certain significant elements in the Russian character (as Geoffrey Gorer hypothesized in a 1949 article). Broadly, in the Soviet period in particular, she finds a few paradoxes. The authorities accepted childhood as a period of innocence, wonder, and magic, but at the same time regarded children as the fabric of future adulthood to be nurtured, shaped, disciplined, and regimented. Secondly, the state promoted the potentially conflicting virtues of radical self-transformation and social conformity. Thirdly, the state was committed to institutionalized child-care, but a significant gap (largely due to budget constraints and staffing shortages) existed between its claims and the achievements and conditions (the persistence of hygiene problems, for example) prevailing in children's institutions. The dichotomy is all the more noticeable, Kelly argues, given that the Soviet state "placed children's affairs at the heart of its political legitimacy, emphasising that children were treated with greater care than they were anywhere else in the world" (p. 1). In other words, the ideal of the USSR as a children's paradise on earth — a staple of Soviet propaganda — was a myth. Whatever the period, the messages from official sources, and the contents of child-rearing books, children's immensely varied experiences depended to a significant extent not only on the personality of adults, whether camp administrators, teachers, caregivers, directors of orphanages, or parents, but also on economic and political conditions and on precious advice passed orally from one generation of mothers to the next. Arguably, the most interesting part of this opus is the way the author captures how children experienced their lives and their world, whether in her discussion of their play indoors and out, their sense of vulnerability associated with medical inspections, their fear of tests in the pre-revolutionary period, and their sufferings in orphanages. Though her focus is on children, Kelly provides nevertheless important material on jurisdictional conflicts among the ministries of health, social welfare, and education, as well as on the careers of children's writers Samuil Marshak and Kornei Chukovsky. She also reminds readers that "work in art forms directed at children [End Page 481] . . . became a recourse for artists whose aims to do innovative work were hampered by the continuing hegemony of Socialist Realism in art forms aimed at adults" (p. 153). Kelly has used an impressive number of sources, mainly located in archives in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Sverdlovsk: popular and professional journals, children's artwork and literature, diaries and memoirs, encyclopaedia articles, syllabi and curricula, films and novels, the observations of Western visitors, caregivers, parents, and teachers, as well as an impressive number of interviews (a crucial source...

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