Stalin's Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937–1951 by Karl D. Qualls

Reviewed by: Stalin's Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937–1951 by Karl D. Qualls Julie Hessler Stalin's Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937–1951. By Karl D. Qualls Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. xvi + 243 pp. Paper $37.95, cloth $95, e-book $37.95. At the height of Stalin's terror, when it was dangerous to be a foreigner in the USSR or even to maintain foreign ties, the Soviet Union accepted 2,895 refugee children from war-torn Spain. This was a large-scale humanitarian aid program, the true dimensions of which were not immediately apparent. Although their stay was intended to be temporary, the defeat of the Spanish Republic in 1939, followed by World War II, meant that the niños de la guerra (children of the war) remained wards of the Soviet state, housed and educated in dedicated boarding schools at considerable expense, for the next fourteen years. Most had the opportunity to return to Spain only in 1956–57, at which point they found their homeland nearly as alien as the Soviet Union had seemed back in 1937. [End Page 319] Karl D. Qualls has written the first book-length study in English of this cohort's experiences. Unlike previous scholarship in Spanish, he views the education and acculturation of the refugee children primarily through the prism of Soviet archival documents rather than first-person accounts. Although Soviet historians often emphasize the hardship of urban life during the Stalin era, the Spanish children described their initial reception as "paradise." Monitored with solicitude by Dolores Ibárruri and other Spanish Communist exiles, the children received excellent medical care, nourishing food, luxurious housing in prerevolutionary palaces, bilingual schooling, and ample opportunities for arts and leisure. Qualls stresses the extent to which the educational approach to these children mirrored that of schools for Soviet non-Russians. In both cases, children were encouraged to identify with "two homelands," one based on ethnicity and the other on the Soviet polity. Spanish children were taught primarily in Spanish, with a nod toward the diverse ethnic and regional cultures of Spain, but they also studied Russian language and literature and the Soviet constitution. During World War II, the balance of Russian to Spanish curriculum shifted in favor of Russian as it became clear that the young Spaniards would be joining the Soviet workforce rather than returning to Spain. For the same reason, the curriculum shifted in the direction of practical skills and labor preparedness—changes that also affected ordinary Soviet schools. The war years of 1941 to 1945 were a turning point for the niños in several respects. Adolescents as young as fourteen moved out of the children's homes into labor training programs and continuing education. The younger children were evacuated to the eastern USSR, where the sheltered upbringing they had enjoyed in the late 1930s gave way to wartime privations. In this setting, with reduced adult supervision, moral values and discipline, which featured prominently in Soviet educational philosophy, were eroded. Children fended for themselves by obtaining food, soap, and other necessities on the black market, and there were many instances of theft. They seldom faced severe repercussions for illegal actions, though, and the numerous instances of poor work discipline on the part of Spanish adolescents merely elicited redoubled efforts to improve character education in the Spanish children's homes. The war taught the children important lessons in resilience and gave them a taste of ordinary Soviet peoples' lives, but their privileged status was restored at the end of the war when all of the homes were relocated to the Moscow region. Even adolescents who left the homes for the workforce benefited from Soviet largesse in the postwar period; Spanish young people in higher education, vocational programs, and industry received stipends from the All-Union [End Page 320] Central Council of Trade Unions that amounted to nearly twice what was paid to Soviet single mothers with multiple children (149). The case of the Spanish children is unique but suggests broader points. First, socialist internationalism did not wither away completely in the tense international...

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