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What Were the Bolshevik Ideas About Childhood?
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Russia – Childhood and Education, 1917-1953
In this course, Dr Elizabeth White (University of the West of England) discusses childhood and education in the early decades of the soviet Union, from the Revolution, through Stalin’s years. In the first lecture we explore Bolshevik ideology and theories around childhood, building on Marxism. In the second lecture we examine the early Bolshevik approach to education. In the third lecture we inquire into what life really looked like for children in the early Soviet Union in the face of a transformed political landscape, but also a world marked by war and famine. Fourth, we identify how conceptions of childhood shifted under Stalin. Finally, in the fifth lecture we look at education through the late 1920s to the early 1950s, as Stalin’s reforms transformed life and education for children across the USSR.
What Were the Bolshevik Ideas About Childhood?
In this lecture we think about the Bolshevik’s ideology about childhood, focussing on: (i) the aims of the Bolshevik Revolution, seeking to transform social life, including family structures and childhood; (ii) the introduction of progressive reforms like equal rights for all children and state-controlled education; (iii) although some radical ideas about abolishing the family were suggested, the focus remained on shaping children into future socialist citizens.
So my name is doctor Elizabeth White,
00:00:06and I teach Russian and Soviet history at the University of
00:00:08the West of England, which is in Bristol.
00:00:10And what I'm gonna talk to you to you today about is,
00:00:13Soviet policy towards children and also something of
00:00:17children's lives as well in the Soviet Union,
00:00:21predominantly in the earlier period,
00:00:24Lenin and Stalin, up until the nineteen fifties and sixties.
00:00:27So thinking about Lenin and the Bolsheviks and the early
00:00:32Russian Revolution and children and childhood,
00:00:36it's important for us to remember that the Russian
00:00:39Revolution was a social revolution.
00:00:43It wasn't only a political revolution.
00:00:45So it wasn't only about overthrowing the czar,
00:00:48and installing a communist party,
00:00:51a dictatorship of the proletariat.
00:00:53The the Bolsheviks wanted to completely
00:00:55reconfigure and reimagine family relationships and family
00:00:58life, and the everyday life,
00:01:01of the Soviet people.
00:01:05So they wanted to enact, and as soon as they came to power,
00:01:08they tried to enact the this radical social revolution,
00:01:11in idea, and that included ideas about children and childhood.
00:01:15It included a lot of ideas about women,
00:01:19and that has an impact on children and childhood.
00:01:22So for example, they were very keen to get women out of the home,
00:01:25out of domestic slavery and into workplaces,
00:01:29which which meant that they wanted to provide creches and and childcare.
00:01:32So so a lot of it was about women,
00:01:37but a lot of it specifically was about children as a social group.
00:01:39So this was building on they didn't come up with all these
00:01:44ideas themselves.
00:01:46This built on ideas going back to Marx and and Engels,
00:01:47who who saw the family as something that could change and was not eternal,
00:01:52but there could be different forms of the family.
00:01:56And they saw the the middle class family,
00:01:59the bourgeois family,
00:02:01as a site of kind of exploitation of women
00:02:02by men, and children by their parents.
00:02:05And they they felt that children should should be
00:02:08liberated as well.
00:02:10And and they were very keen on ideas of social education.
00:02:11The idea that that society should have a role should have
00:02:15the main role in how children should be educated and children
00:02:18should not be left at the mercy of their parents to decide how
00:02:21they should be educated.
00:02:25And other socialists after Marx and Engels agreed with this.
00:02:27And and again, they they gave more attention to women as
00:02:30such, but but they did they agreed that
00:02:33part of the social revolution of ending what they called as
00:02:37patriarchy, like male dominance of the family,
00:02:40included liberation of children and also that children should
00:02:44have state education.
00:02:47And the state,
00:02:48the the socialist states,
00:02:50should be the main person deciding what what happened to
00:02:52children and what childhood should be like and certainly in education.
00:02:55They also took these ideas from from Russian liberals and
00:03:00Russian thinkers before the revolution.
00:03:03And and if you've studied the Russian revolution,
00:03:06you'll know that the Bolsheviks didn't come up with all these
00:03:09ideas themselves.
00:03:11There was a kind of radical tradition.
00:03:12So so some of these ideas had been floating around in Russia,
00:03:13particularly about education actually and progressive
00:03:17education and ideas about, the liberated child, etcetera.
00:03:19So anyway, when they take power eventually, the the family,
00:03:24is one of their main priorities in terms of legislation And and
00:03:29they passed, several acts in nineteen
00:03:32eighteen, which were very radical for the time.
00:03:35And and one of the most radical things they do is abolish the
00:03:38concept of illegitimacy.
00:03:41Now we don't have that concept anymore.
00:03:44It doesn't exist in modern law,
00:03:46the the idea that a child should be treated differently
00:03:47if their parents were not married.
00:03:50But but in the past, that that was, you know,
00:03:52not only a social stigma,
00:03:54but had legal ramifications for children.
00:03:56And the Bolsheviks said that that was wrong.
00:03:59For for start, they they didn't agree with bourgeois morality that, you know,
00:04:01that there was such a concept of sin because they were
00:04:05against religion.
00:04:08But also they saw that that was a way of replicating the
00:04:09bourgeois family and keeping wealth to legitimate children.
00:04:12So one of the very progressive things they did is that there's
00:04:16no difference between a child born to married parents or
00:04:18unmarried parents.
00:04:21They all deserve exactly the same, chances in life,
00:04:22the same education,
00:04:25the same right to support from their parents.
00:04:26They have the same legal standing.
00:04:29They they also said that children
00:04:32in imperial Russia,
00:04:35that the legal system had been very patriarchal.
00:04:36So so the father really owned the family and and if parents
00:04:38got divorced, should they get divorced,
00:04:41obviously that was quite taboo,
00:04:44then, the, the child belonged to the would belong to the father.
00:04:46The child had to take the father's name,
00:04:50then patronymic in Russian.
00:04:53The child had to take the father's religion.
00:04:54So so the Bolsheviks completely upended,
00:04:56the the law that supported patriarchy and said that both
00:05:00parents had a right to know what to care for their children
00:05:03in the event of divorce.
00:05:07And, children could take either parent's name.
00:05:09They weren't the property of their fathers anymore.
00:05:11And so that was another way of them sort of trying to liberate children.
00:05:15And in fact, they went further than that really and sort of dissolved
00:05:18all concepts of marriage,
00:05:21or or rather they made divorce very easy to access.
00:05:24So so that was a a way of changing the family.
00:05:27Now I I mentioned that because that might not sound as if it
00:05:30directly impacts on children.
00:05:33But actually in late in the nineteen twenties,
00:05:35the Soviet Union then had the highest divorce rate in the world.
00:05:38You know, something like one in two or one in three divorces.
00:05:42Marriages ended in divorce.
00:05:46And and later on, they start to backtrack on that.
00:05:47And I'll pick that up when we look at Stalinism because they
00:05:49started to realize that this,
00:05:52liberal attitude to divorce mainly benefited men.
00:05:54Sorry to say it.
00:05:57And what was happening was that a lot of children were growing
00:05:59up in single parent families, at the with the mother.
00:06:01And and that was a big social became a big social problem
00:06:04because the the state was having to support these families.
00:06:07So that so they do start tightening up family
00:06:10legislation in the nineteen thirties under Stalin,
00:06:12which I will talk about.
00:06:15So but anyway, going back to the Russian Revolution,
00:06:16the early some of the early Bolsheviks,
00:06:19they they weren't a monolith,
00:06:21had very radical had sort of more radical ideas, you know,
00:06:22than just ending illegitimacy and and giving both parents
00:06:25rights over children.
00:06:28They they started to say that family should be entirely
00:06:29smashed up and it played no role.
00:06:31It it had no role in in a in a future socialist society,
00:06:35that that parents,
00:06:40you know, who in nineteen seventeen, eighteen,
00:06:43nineteen can only have been brought up under the old
00:06:45regime, you know, were sort of dangerous to their children.
00:06:48You know, they teach them about religion and and that kind of old
00:06:53fashioned ideas the Bolsheviks didn't want anymore.
00:06:55So so they had so some of them came up with these kind of very
00:06:58grand, and completely impractical ideas,
00:07:01which were which were never, ever acted on in reality of,
00:07:03taking children away from their parents full stop.
00:07:08And they were gonna build they had plans to build children's
00:07:10towns, towns where, you know,
00:07:13where where children would be removed at birth and grow be
00:07:15brought up in these kind
00:07:18of sanitary progressive institutions.
00:07:20There's a famous Bolshevik, Lydia Zlatina,
00:07:24who was the wife of Zinoviev,
00:07:28who gave this fiery speech saying, you know,
00:07:29give us your child.
00:07:31We will tell the mother to give her child to the Soviet state.
00:07:33And,
00:07:35in their book, The ABC of Communism,
00:07:37Bukharin and Preobrazhenski said this as well, you know,
00:07:39that the that the the family is a completely outdated institution.
00:07:41It has no no sort of place under socialism.
00:07:45As I say, these kind of very shocking plans,
00:07:48to to the outside world never really came to fruition because
00:07:52the Bolshevik state couldn't possibly afford to look after
00:07:55every child in the Soviet Union.
00:07:57They could barely look after the few that were in institutions.
00:07:59So so the family comes under attack, in in early Bolshevik,
00:08:01Russia, but but it somehow does kind of survive through.
00:08:06But children were seen so apart from the kind of legal ideas of
00:08:11what a child was,
00:08:14that there were mental ideas of of what a child should be.
00:08:15And and the nineteen the early Bolshevik period,
00:08:18the nineteen twenties,
00:08:20saw a model of the child as revolutionary,
00:08:22rational, powerful, empowered, autonomous,
00:08:27and the harbinger of of a new future.
00:08:32You know, children were not
00:08:34infected with religion, you know, religious beliefs.
00:08:38They weren't brought up in the old old world.
00:08:41So so they were the future.
00:08:43They were the people that would and and the Soviets clung to
00:08:45that throughout the Soviet period that children would take
00:08:47everybody into the future of communism.
00:08:50So so as well as education, which I'll talk about in a bit,
00:08:53there there was an array of
00:08:57child centered organizations at the Bolsheviks.
00:09:00Again, you know, they were fighting a civil war,
00:09:03but they still had time to to focus on all this because it
00:09:05was so important to them.
00:09:07Child centered organizations that they set up in the early
00:09:09Bolshevik period, which you're probably familiar with,
00:09:12the the most well known is the Komsomol.
00:09:15Komsomol is, an abbreviation for,
00:09:18communist youth, socialist, essentially.
00:09:22Communist.
00:09:25And it was for fifteen to twenty five year olds,
00:09:30which is a bit of an odd age range if you think about it.
00:09:32So, you know,
00:09:35we tend to think of teenagers as separate to people in their twenties.
00:09:37So so it wasn't really for children.
00:09:40It was more for adolescents and young people.
00:09:42And they also set up,
00:09:45so that was set up in in nineteen eighteen.
00:09:46And they also set up the Pioneer Organization,
00:09:49which more specifically was for children and what we would
00:09:51think of as children.
00:09:54So sort of seven to eight to fourteen was the pioneers.
00:09:55And both these organizations and particularly the Comme Somol,
00:09:59you know, which was more resources were put into it in the early period,
00:10:04you know, were meant in a way to separate that yes,
00:10:08to separate the child from the family and family influences,
00:10:11and to bring them to,
00:10:15to make them into communist and to help with goals such as
00:10:17ending religion, ending superstition, you know,
00:10:20building the new world together with the Communist
00:10:22Party.
00:10:26
Cite this Lecture
APA style
White, E. (2024, October 14). Russia – Childhood and Education, 1917-1953 - What Were the Bolshevik Ideas About Childhood? [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/russia-childhood-and-education-1917-1953
MLA style
White, E. "Russia – Childhood and Education, 1917-1953 – What Were the Bolshevik Ideas About Childhood?." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 14 Oct 2024, https://massolit.io/courses/russia-childhood-and-education-1917-1953