A Modern History of Russian Childhood

From the Late Imperial Period to the Collapse of the Soviet Union

Elizabeth White

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781474240246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

A Modern History of Russian Childhood examines the changes and continuities in ideas about Russian childhood from the 18th to the 21st century. It looks at how children were thought about and treated in Russian and Soviet culture, as well as how the radical social, political and economic changes across the period affected children. It explains how and why childhood became a key concept both in Late Imperial Russia and in the Soviet Union and looks at similarities and differences to models of childhood elsewhere. Focusing mainly on children in families, telling us much about Russian and Soviet family life in the process, Elizabeth White combines theoretical ideas about childhood with examples of real, lived experiences of children to provide a comprehensive overview of the subject. The book also offers a comprehensive synthesis of a wide range of secondary sources in English and Russian whilst utilizing various textual primary sources as part of the discussion. This book is key reading for anyone wanting to understand the social and cultural history of Russia as well as the history of childhood in the modern world.

1

Introduction: The history of modern childhood

In the sixteenth century Domostroi, a late-medieval Russian text on household advice for Muscovite elites, children as a social group were not differentiated from servants and lower relatives. In common with the rest of Europe, parental authority had been absolute in medieval Russia; parents could even sell their children into slavery. Secular law did not recognize the murder of a child by its parents. While canon law did view infanticide as a crime, the Orthodox Church’s main concern was with the regulation of female sexuality rather than the intrinsic value of a child or its integral being.¹ The 1649 Muscovite Law Code, the Ulozhenie, declared the infanticide of illegitimate children murder and punishable by death; yet the murder of a legitimate child by its parents incurred a year’s imprisonment followed by a public confession:

3. If a father or mother kills a son or daughter: imprison them for a year. After having sat in prison for a year, they shall go to God’s church, and in God’s church they shall declare aloud that sin of theirs to all the people. Do not punish a father or mother with death for [killing] a son or daughter.²

Yet by the second half of the eighteenth century, children and childhood had begun to be seen as the preserve of the state. When Catherine the Great sought to transform the Russian Empire, childhood was key: ‘Assisted by Lockean psychology, the field of education proper came to occupy the center of attention and hope.’³ This book maps out the process of why that came to be, as well as examining childhood in the following centuries.

Childhood is intertwined with so many aspects of the organization of modern states and societies that its study embraces a wide range of topics. A history of childhood can include the everyday life of children, their material culture and their leisure activities (organized and unorganized), schooling and education, juvenile crime, children’s rights and the legal system, philanthropy and the development of welfare states, the family and the home, and children’s culture and literature. A history of childhood can be structured around cultural representations of children, beliefs about children, or emotions considered appropriate for children or towards children. It can also include children’s participation in social movements and historical processes and events as well as the norms and expectations for childhood. Vouching for the importance of the history of childhood, the American historian Stephen Mintz writes, ‘Childhood … is the true “missing link”: connecting the personal and the public, the psychological and the sociological, the domestic and the state.’⁴ Childhood does not only affect children, a category that we now see as both biological and socially constructed. The political, economic, cultural and social institutions and structures of childhood (schools, welfare states, medicine, material cultures and spaces) have extensive influences as well and we are all drawn into their sphere at various points.

The fact that it is hard to know where the study of childhood ends is in part because the dominant model of a modern childhood in the West, with which we are most familiar, is closely connected to the rise and spread of the state and associated processes of modernization. Since the 1960s, beginning with the publication of Philippe Ariès’s influential book Centuries of Childhood, academics have interpreted childhood as a historically and culturally constructed phenomenon, rather than a universally given common experience of a biological life stage.⁵ Following on from his pioneering work, the history of childhood as written in the West has been derived from, and mapped onto, the history of modernization. Ariès claimed that childhood was an invention of early modern Europe and in fact most of his sources came from France. Before then, once children had achieved some biological autonomy and had developed sufficient physical and mental capabilities, usually at the age of around seven, they became immersed in the adult world. He argued that prior to the sixteenth century there had been no separate ‘children’s world’; children played, worked, slept and shared the same physical spaces as adults. They were also depicted in cultural representations as merely small adults. They were not considered to need special treatment or any specific separation from the world of adults. Paradoxically, despite their ubiquity, ‘the child was a marginal figure in the adult world’.⁶ Ariès argued that from the early modern period childhood was gradually ‘discovered’ by European societies as a result of wider changes in family life, religious beliefs and the growth of capitalism and print culture. European societies began to see childhood as a special phase of life, distinct from adulthood and therefore requiring its own spatial and temporal arrangements. The very slow shift to seeing children as amusing and enjoyable, rather than as strange beings, imperfect adults cursed by original sin, began to take hold in societies at this time as well.

Later research focused on how the eighteenth-century Enlightenment produced a radical change in ideas about childhood, if not necessarily in the lived experiences of most children. Philosophers and natural scientists such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau pushed forward the ideas that education and upbringing were key to the development of human potentiality and that children should be treated differently to adults, and separated from them. Then the Europe-wide romantic movement of the early nineteenth century valorized childhood as not just different to adulthood but superior, and fundamental to the later adult self. Children were messengers from heaven, close to God, unique, blessed and a source of inspiration. The child was becoming a symbol. All these ideas were extremely influential on elite thought across Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including in the Russian Empire.

Further layers were added onto views of childhood in the nineteenth century. The uneven processes of industrialization, nationalism, bureaucracy and record keeping, education, globalization and the development of market relations, the privatization of the family and the spread of the franchise all affected how childhood was framed, regularized, valorized and understood. One of the greatest changes for children was the idea, underpinned by compulsory state legislation at an accelerating speed across the nineteenth century, that all children should receive some kind of formal education outside of the family home for a set number of years. For most of human history, children had been essential to the household and general economy as labour forces. Very gradually, in the modern age children were pushed out of the economy through labour legislation and the spread of compulsory state primary education. This shift from labour to education is key to the modern Western model of ch ildhood. Enforcement of primary education remained problematic until the twentieth century and the form and content of primary education a child received varied enormously according to ethnicity, gender, class and location. Compulsory universal primary education gave states potentially enormous power and resources to reach children and organize childhood.

As well as changing relations between the child and the state, Viviana Zelizer, among others, has shown that as children were pushed out of the labour market into schools and became economically ‘worthless’, they became emotionally ‘priceless’ to their families.⁷ Children were now meant to be cherished and protected, and childhood was considered as a stage in life that should be free of care and pain. This process of valorization was partly caused by a dramatic reduction in infant mortality, due to advances in medicine and public health. Along with the shift from labour to education, the reduction in infant mortality was another key building block in the creation of a modern childhood.

By the late nineteenth century, children and childhood had gained a new social and political significance and both had become a focus of intense concern for states and societies. The Swedish social theorist and educational activist Ellen Key published The Century of the Child (Barnets århundrade) in 1900, in which she argued that children’s education, well-being and rights should be the central work of the new twentieth century. Translated into English in 1909, her book became an international bestseller. At the same time, children also began to be constituted as objects of international politics.⁸ At this point, childhood had moved from the margins to the very centre. Over several centuries and due to many different inputs, modern childhood had become what Paula Fass has described as ‘privileged state’.⁹ In the Soviet Union, the state indeed described children as the ‘privileged class’.

This ‘privileged’ state of childhood became an ideal of citizenship and a benchmark to judge the backwardness (or not) of modern states. ‘The Christianity and the civilization of a people may both be measured by their treatment of childhood,’ wrote Benjamin Waugh, the social reformer and founder of the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, in 1886.¹⁰ By the twentieth century, childhood as a life stage had become an important signifier of modernity.

By the modern era, states had begun to partly define themselves through their treatment of children and the lives that children lived in them. Both state legislation and state penetration were needed to create this model of modern childhood. In addition to the shift from work to school, lower birth rate and reductions in infant mortality, historians have argued that there was a fourth factor that contributed to the production of a model of modern childhood: the nation state as it formed after the French Revolution.¹¹ States became interested in children as future military recruits, obedient citizens, taxpayers and cultural reproducers. As the sociologist Nikolas Rose has written:

Childhood is the most intensively governed sector of personal existence. In different ways, at different times, and by many different routes varying from one section of society to another, the health, welfare and rearing of children have been linked in thought and practice to the destiny of the nation and the responsibilities of the state.¹²

As well as enforcing schooling, modern states developed and spread medical provision for children, although access to this too was greatly differentiated. The ability of the state to register its population correctly led to finer meanings of age gradation, which had an impact on childhood and children’s lives. Once education had become synonymous with childhood, measurable intelligence became one of a child’s most important attributes and age segregation became even more important. The state wanted to define the ‘normal child’ and new sciences of measurement of children’s development were founded.

This book is an attempt to trace the history of childhood in Russia through a similar period as just outlined. It examines some of the developments in ideas about childhood, as well as children’s experiences, from the late seventeenth century to the early twenty-first century in Russia. It looks at these developments within their Russian context, but also to see how, if at all, they differentiated from the developing model of childhood in Western states.

Childhood was ‘discovered’ in Russia in the late seventeenth century when Russian elites began to take an interest in childhood, at least of noble children.¹³ Enlightenment ideas about childhood had a strong impact in Russia, and Catherine the Great inaugurated the state’s interest in ‘appropriating’ childhood and harnessing it to fashion an imperial subject and strengthen the Russian Empire, although these ideas only affected a minority of children. While the first half of the nineteenth century saw little change, except for the slow growth of education, after the Great Reforms of the 1860s, ideas about what childhood should involve changed rapidly, broadly in line with developments elsewhere. These concepts included the exclusion of children from labour (or more specifically, industrial labour); the need for general primary education; a focus on children’s health and welfare; and a belief that children should be separated from adults, protected, cherished and celebrated. However, the political, economic and social structure of Russia acted as a block to the realization of these ideas, which is why debates about childhood, particularly concerning children’s education and their place in the family, gained greater prominence and fused with demands for radical reform and eventually with the revolutionary movement. By the end of the nineteenth century the Russian intelligentsia’s desire to transform the authoritarian state structure by changing everyday life endowed childhood with ‘radical implications’.¹⁴

Imperial Russia had the highest infant mortality rate in Europe in the early twentieth century. Its reduction was a major priority for the new Bolshevik regime, although it did not achieve this for several decades, when a dramatic drop in the birth rate accompanied it. These developments, added to the enforcement of compulsory primary education from the 1930s, put into place in the Soviet Union some of the fundamental building blocks of a modern idea of childhood, although as we shall see there were still significant differences from the standard Western model. In the Soviet state’s view, childhood was political, revolutionary, placed in the public sphe re, connected with labour and children were taken seriously as a social group. Children were so important to the state because they were the material for the creation of the Soviet ‘new person’ (novyi chelovek), a form of humanity never seen before in the world. The model of childhood in the early Soviet years was one that was influenced by the peasant model of childhood, however, as much as it was by Marxism. By the late Soviet period, concepts of childhood in Russia did not differ so much from the Western model, though there were specific features of children’s daily lives that did. The current political leadership of the Russian Federation has taken us back to Catherine and her version of the Enlightenment; asserting the state’s role through controlling childhood through strategies of ‘vospitanie’, or moral upbringing, in the service of the state.

Age categories are social constructions and what is considered the ages of childhood changes. The boundaries of childhood shifted across the twentieth century, becoming longer as the school-leaving age was raised from twelve to fourteen and then to sixteen. I have taken the approach that childhood begins approximately at age six or seven. Around seven (‘the age of reason’) was the age that many societies viewed children as developing some biological autonomy. This came then to coincide with the approximate ages of compulsory school attendance, which is fitting because as elsewhere in the modern world, in the Soviet period children became constructed by the state above all as ‘pupils’. This book therefore does not examine pregnancy, maternity, birth, babyhood, preschool years or at the other end later adolescence to any great degree.¹⁵ There is now a substantial body of research on marginalized children and children in Soviet institutions: juvenile delinquents, orphans and the bezprizornie (homeless).¹⁶ Despite the Soviet state’s claims about how seriously they took child welfare, institutions for children were notorious for being unhygienic, badly housed and undersupplied. The staff running them, or the local government officials responsible for supplying the institutions, were often corrupt as was proved by endless investigations throughout the decades. I have tried here to examine more deeply ideas of childhood and experiences of children who were embedded in Russian/Soviet families, which is where the vast majority of children experienced their childhoods, albeit partially and temporarily at times. I have tried to avoid being over-normative while drawing out broader patterns and experiences and continuities. ‘Russian’ is a flexible category of identity, as is ‘Soviet’. I have looked mainly at ideas about childhood coming from ethnic Russian/culturally Russified spheres. In the Soviet period, the state created a standardized ‘Soviet childhood’, which it tried to roll out across the Union. The book adopts a chronological approach, mov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: The history of modern childhood
• 2 Education, the state and the Russian child in the eighteenth century
• 3 Childhood in late Imperial Russia
• 4 Childhoods in Revolution, Civil War and austerity, 1917–29
• 5 Stalinism and the making of Soviet childhood
• 6 Post-war Soviet childhoods, 1953–91
• 7 Postscript: Childhood in the modern Russian Federation
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright