Abstract
By the 1950s, utopian visions of completely socialised child rearing had mostly withered away and it was widely assumed that parents were necessary for raising children.1 Radical proposals for reorganising the family did arise from time to time, but they were never seriously implemented. For example, the state-run boarding schools introduced in 1958 proved quite controversial and unpopular, and by the early 1960s experts were hastening to explain that they were meant not to replace parents, but merely to help families, especially those headed by single mothers.2 Yet pedagogues and officials worried that while parental love and care were vital, mothers and fathers did not always understand that because they were raising future citizens, they had a social obligation to mould their children into hard-working communists. In order to convince parents of the social importance of their role, the pre-eminent Stalinist pedagogue, Anton Makarenko, among others, had spent the 1930s producing materials delineating the correct methods of vospitanie (upbringing) and in 1946 the journal Sem’ya i shkola (Family and School) was established in order to propagandise these principles more thoroughly.3 This barrage of advice for parents continued under Khrushchev and took on new importance in the changed political climate.
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Notes
On early Soviet plans for socialised child rearing, see L. Attwood, Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women’s Magazines as Engineers of Female Identity,
1922–1953 (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 7–8; W. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 60–7; A. Kollontai, ‘Communism and the Family’, in A. Holt (ed. and trans.), Selected Writings ofAlexandra Kollontai (New York, 1977), pp. 250–60.
J. Dunstan, ‘Soviet Boarding Education: Its Rise and Progress’, in J. Brine et al. (eds), Home, School and Leisure in the Soviet Union (London, 1980), pp. 124–5; A. G. Kharchev, Sem’ya v sovetskom obshchestve (Leningrad, 1960), p. 105; M. I. Lifanov, Za kommunisticheskii byt (Leningrad, 1963), p. 74.
L. Liegle, The Family’s Role in Soviet Education (New York, 1975), p. 22.
G. Breslauer, ‘Khrushchev Reconsidered’, in S. Cohen et al. (eds), The Soviet Union since Stalin (Bloomington, 1980), pp. 51–2.
For scholarly treatment of communist morality, see R. De George, Soviet Ethics and Morality (Ann Arbor, 1969); D. Field, ‘Communist Morality and Meanings of Private Life in Post-Stalinist Russia, 1953–1964’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1996; P. Juviler, ‘Communist Morality and Soviet Youth’, Problems of Communism, vol. 10, no. 3, 1961, pp. 16–24. For contemporary works, see, for example, Akademiya nauk SSSR, Nvravstvennye printsipy stroitel’ya kommunizma (Moscow, 1965); S. M. Kosolapov and O. N. Krutova, Voprosy vospitaniya trudyashchiekhsya v dukhe kommunisticheskoi nravstvennosti (Moscow, 1961); A. F. Shishkin, Osnovy kommunisticheskoi morali (Moscow, 1955).
A. Bardyan, ‘Samyi blizkii, rodnoi chelovek’, Sem’ya i shkola, no. 3, 1961, p. 7.
During this period, the Soviet government greatly expanded social welfare programmes, reforming the social insurance system in 1956 and creating new institutions aimed at helping families, such as the minors’ commissions, discussed below. See B. Madison, Social Welfare in the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1968).
O. Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: a Study of Practices (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), pp. 279–80, 302–3.
These commissions operated under a 1957 Russian Republic Law. See ‘Polozhenie o komissiyakh po ustroistvu detei i podrostkov’, Sovetskaya yustitsiya, no. 10, 1957, p. 67. I have found little information about these colonies or the conditions inside them. They were first established in 1943, and by 1958 they numbered 66. The colonies were subdivided into 2–5 groups of 25–30 young people, who lived, studied and worked together. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 32, d. 951, 1. 77.
D. Burg, Oppozitsionnye nastroeniya molodezhi v gody posle ‘Ottepeli’ (Munich, 1962), p. 30; A. Kassof, The Soviet Youth Program (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 149.
Burg, op. cit., p. 35. For a description of stilyagi.in the 1940s, see V. Aksenov, In Search ofMelancholy Baby (New York, 1987), pp. 12–14. Juliane Furst draws a distinction between stilyagi and overtly political youth opposition groups. See J. Fiirst, ‘Prisoners of the Soviet Self? — Political Youth Opposition in Late Stalinism’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 54, no. 3, 2002, p. 369.
E. Crankshaw, Russia without Stalin (New York, 1956), pp. 242–3; B. Grushin and V. Chikin, Ispoved’ pokoleniya (Moscow, 1962), p. 200; S. F. Starr, Red and Hot: the Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917–1980 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 239–40; R. Stites, Russian Popular Culture (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 124–8; E. Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1956 (Armonk, 1998), pp. 192–3.
Public lecture delivered in Moscow and published as I. F. Svadkovskii, 0 kul’ture povedeniya sovetskoi molodezhi (Moscow, 1958), pp. 16–17.
S. Boym, Common Places: Mythologies ofEveryday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), p. 105; V. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middle-Class Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976), p. 22; S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999), pp. 79–83; V. Volkov, ‘The Concept of kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process’, in S. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (London, 2000), p. 216.
C. Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender fromCatherine to Yeltsin (Oxford, 2001), pp. 317–21; S. Reid, ‘Destalinization and Taste’, 1953–1963’, Journal of Design History, vol. 10, no. 2, 1997, pp. 177–202.
G. M. Sverdlov, Sovetskoe zakonodatel’stvo o brake i sem’e (Moscow, 1961), pp. 54–5.
See for example Zdorov’e, no. 3, 1960, p. 12. See also O. Kitaigorodskaya, ‘Kakaya pishcha nuzhna rebenku’, Sem’ya i shkola, no. 5, 1960, p. 42.
S. Kukhterin, ‘Fathers and Patriarchs in Communist and Post-communist Russia’, in S. Ashwin (ed.), Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (London, 2000), p. 80.
See, for example, Z. Efimova, ‘Sekret nashego avtoriteta’, Sem’ya i shkola, no. 6, 1963, p. 17; T. Panfilov, ‘Put’ k myslyam i serdtsu yunosti’, Sem’ya i shkola, no. 4, 1963, p. 2.
A. Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice about Children (New York, 2003), pp. 367–70.
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Field, D.A. (2004). Mothers and Fathers and the Problem of Selfishness in the Khrushchev Period. In: Ilič, M., Reid, S.E., Attwood, L. (eds) Women in the Khrushchev Era. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523432_6
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