Small Comrades: Revolutionising Childhood in Soviet Russia 1917-1933
By Lisa Kirschenbaum
RoutledgeFalmer, 2001
232 pages, $45.10 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/24519
"Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood", proclaimed the poster that hung in every school from 1932 in Stalinist Russia. The "little Leninists" in the kindergartens stared determinedly from the posters as they busily, and gladly, set about "building socialism". The Stalin regime's efforts to harness the little ones to the needs of the Stalinist state bore little relation to the dreams and plans of the Bolsheviks of Lenin's time, writes Lisa Kirschenbaum in her history of pre-school education in Russia after the 1917 October Revolution.
Public upbringing of pre-school children was central to the Bolsheviks' emancipationist aims for women, by freeing them from the burden of domestic labour, and for very young children, by liberating them from the authoritarian constraints of the family, the conservative superstitions of the Church and the cultural backwardness of Tsarist Russia.
Bolshevik plans for revolutionising childhood were predictably reviled by conservatives as an attack on "family values". They were suspicious of kindergartens as the incubi of revolutionary social change. Collective child-raising promoted the public against the private, and gelled with the socialist critique of women's oppression, to alarm all the defenders of the capitalist order who feared that the anti-authoritarian values embedded in the sand pits of the kindergarten could create an adult community of free equals committed to socialism.
They were right to worry. Kindergarten progressives argued that "punishment and the rod" in home and school "produces slaves", while Bolshevik revolutionaries like Nadezdha Krupskaya (teacher, educational theorist and Lenin's partner) took the analogy further, arguing that "women are no more made for housework than slaves for slavery".
The Bolshevik Revolution inherited a bare pre-school cupboard from the Tsarist state. The Bolskeviks began a program of construction of new facilities and, by 1919, around 12% of all children in the cities (compared with less than 2% under Tsarism), attended a pre-school institution (playground, kindergarten, children's home).
The Bolsheviks did not lack the will for achieving their goal of public child upbringing but they did lack resources. Most of the kindergartens were officially classified as "basic" rather than "model" institutions. Inspections in Moscow in 1921 found that three quarters of the city's 213 kindergartens and 183 children's homes were unsatisfactory in terms of health and pedagogical standards. A coloured pencil was a highly prized rarity.
As Leon Trotsky noted, there was "a gross imbalance of ambitions and resources" caused by the civil war, the Western-imposed economic blockade and famine, all of which threatened the workers' state — "society was too poor and too little cultured for the plans and intentions of the Bolsheviks to be realised in many areas, especially in the sphere of everyday life". The immediate need was for saving the children most at risk (over 80% of enrolled pre-school children were war orphans) rather than the political task of providing an alternative to the family.
If scarcity doomed these early efforts at fully socialised child care, however, the putting of revolutionary visions into practice was not abandoned under the pressure of catastrophic conditions.
Anatoly Lunacharsky, the education commissar, saw scarcity as transitory and no excuse to defer raising cultural levels and fostering socialist values in the pre-school. The family, he said, "raises children as egoists", not social beings, and a new generation of socialists could be raised on values of social collectivism instead of narrow individualism. The socialist vision persisted in the face of severe material constraints — thus pre-schools had the contradictory status of "high ideological but low budgetary priority".
Bolshevik pre-school policy was marked by a high degree of ideological pluralism. There was free-wheeling debate in the pre-school community over when socialised child-rearing could, or even should, replace the family, a debate between Bolsheviks themselves as well as between Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks. Few, however, shared the view that the nuclear family is the natural social unit, or that "maternal instincts" are impervious to social structure. The advocates of cultural transformation of "human nature" had much the best of the debate.
With the end of the Civil War in 1921, Soviet Russia faced "an economic and social crisis of staggering proportions". The Bolsheviks' New Economic Policy (NEP) reluctantly introduced limited capitalism and diverted government spending to immediate tasks of economic recovery. Up to 90% of pre-school institutions were forced to close, the remainder becoming dependent on families for material support, and tuition charges re-emerged.
The goal of universal free public upbringing, however, was abandoned only grudgingly and the NEP years "were not yet the complete victory of authoritarianism or bureaucratic rigidity". There were, however, noticeable changes in the daily life of the kindergarten. Teachers exerted more control, there were more connections to "contemporary life" (visits to factories, for example) and less emphasis on "mystical and fantastic fairy tales". More trains and technology featured in pre-schoolers' art work.
Although pre-schoolers were increasingly regarded as "miniature adults" and raised accordingly as "hearty builders of the Soviet state", much kindergarten life fortunately continued as before. Play was still play although repackaged to the bureaucrats as "productive labour". Less positively, some things remained largely immune to change. The Bolshevik curriculum promoted May Day and other secular socialist celebrations. However, the tradition of religious celebrations such as Christmas and Easter proved hard to break.
Gender stereotypes also felt the deadweight of the past. Krupskaya argued that gender roles were culturally constructed not biologically determined but, despite International Women's Day being celebrated in the kindergarten by boys doing girls' chores, there were not enough Bolshevik teachers (less than 10% of the total) to challenge conventional feminine and masculine stereotypes. The adherents of the quasi-anarchist "free upbringing" method, which rejected the imposition of any adult authority in the pre-school classroom, did nothing to counter external social influences and custom which pushed girls towards dolls and boys towards machines.
Despite the bureaucratic distortions of the NEP years, pre-schoolers were taught how to live and work collectively, and they had a sense of belonging to a unique, historic generation — "children clearly felt the Revolution in ways that adults could not predict", concludes Kirschenbaum. However, if the Bolsheviks' goal of raising socialists had been complicated by scarcity and leaden custom, then the "Stalinist Revolution" of the late 1920s moved the goalposts entirely. In Stalin's drive to strengthen the political power and material privileges of the party-state bureaucracy, women and children were not spared.
Rapid industrialisation sucked more women into the labour force, and primitive pre-school facilities grew to facilitate this, but this was not liberation for women. Women's double burden of paid social and unpaid domestic labour increased and pro-natalist policies (outlawing abortion, rewarding large families, making divorce harder) also strengthened the role of the mother as primary care-giver in the family. The link between public upbringing of young children and women's liberation, weakened by NEP, was severed by the Stalin regime.
Inside the Stalinist kindergarten, children were short-changed on play, fantasy, imagination, fun. The "socialist" curriculum "educated" the young in the Stalinists' Lenin cult, inculcating loyalty to the bureaucratic regime ruling in Lenin's name. There was almost zero unstructured play. Tractors were in, magic was out. The child's interests were identified with those of the state, producing hardworking, disciplined (and "boundlessly happy") children for a similar role in the adult economy.
In the kindergarten, Stalinism had "attached the Revolution's most powerful icon" — the emancipatory image of the liberated rising generation building the bright Soviet future — to an authoritarian state "committed to family order, productivity and discipline".
Although Kirschenbaum is a trifle ambivalent about the genuineness of the Bolsheviks' liberationist social vision in kindergarten and society, she has nevertheless written a well-researched and lucidly presented book on "what pre-school children made of the Revolution and what the Revolution made of them", a book which reveals a distinct contrast between the Bolsheviks' goal of women's and children's liberation through socialism and the dark years of oppression that followed during Stalin's "war on the revolutionary dreamers" of October 1917.