One day in 1932, in the obscure village of Gerasimovka, a young boy’s courageous actions became a model for the Soviet nation.
Here’s what happened: thirteen-year-old Pavel Morozov, whom everybody called Pavlik, realized to his horror that his father, the head of the local soviet, had been fabricating official documents and selling them to peasants who had lost their land to the collectivization campaign. This was a serious breach of ethics and a betrayal of the communist cause.
Pavlik was a fine young man with impeccable revolutionary morality. He headed the local chapter of the Young Pioneers (a communist youth group), and his teachers frequently held him up as a model student. So he didn’t hesitate. He went straight to the authorities and made sure that his father was arrested.
He had put the collective good above his love for his own family.
Not everyone admired him for this. After this incident, Pavlik went foraging in the woods with his brother but never came back. Their bodies were found a few days later, riddled with stab wounds. Investigators found a blood-stained knife in his grandparents’ house. The grandparents were arrested, along with Pavlik’s cousin and godfather, and sentenced as terrorists. Three of them were executed.
Pavlik’s story made him a hero of the Stalin-era USSR. He was the subject of poems:
Joyful and curly,
He won’t come to school.
But his great glory
Will outlive everything.
“Pavlik is with us,
Pashka the Communist!”
Out in front, like a banner,
Friendly and merry.
(That’s how
Everyone should live).
How much
Every schoolchild
Resembles him
Somehow.
All of their shirts
Are abloom with red ties:
“Pashka! Pashka! Pashka!
Here! There! Everywhere!”
And his face appeared on monuments:
He was truly “Pioneer Hero #1,” a model to be emulated by communists all over the world. Most significantly, his story became a centerpiece of moral education for Soviet kids.
The problem is that the story, like so much else in the Soviet Union, wasn’t true.
Pavlik did exist. Here’s a picture of him (in the center with a hat):
But that’s about the only part of his story that checks out. Pavlik wasn’t a great student; in fact, he was kind of a troublemaker. There was no Young Pioneer group in his little village. He wasn’t even called Pavlik (his family called him Pashka). And he probably never ratted out his dad. He was murdered in the woods, but his death was a sad, random crime — the result of a dispute with some local teens.
Though his story was a lie, in some ways, Pavel Morozov did represent his fellow Soviet children. As with so many things in the USSR, his truth was twisted to serve the desires of the state, which wanted more than anything for kids to subordinate themselves to the larger communist project.
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One way to look at Soviet childhood in the 1920s and 1930s is through the books that were available to children in the USSR. Princeton University has a fascinating digital collection that gives us a sense of the cultural waters in which children were swimming at the time.
It will not surprise you that there were lots of books glorifying the history of the Russian Revolution. This one shows revolutionaries gathering in 1917:
Children were encouraged to revere communist heroes like Lenin, who here is depicted as a boy reflecting on history. On the left, we see the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II; on the right, a gathering of the revolutionary masses.
You’ll notice the smokestacks in the background of the revolutionary meeting above. Soviet children’s books contained a lot of industrial content. Authors seemed to want to use kids’ love of machines to get them excited about Soviet industrial progress.
Some of the books focused on pretty mundane infrastructure. It’s hard to imagine kids getting excited about this book describing the building of a massive dam with an output of 80,000 horsepower:
Everyone had a role to play in the Soviet Union’s industrial progress. One book, A Song About Mother, tells the story of a mom whose life is defined not by her role as a parent but by her work in a factory. Books like these reminded children that their mothers’ work, though it took them away from home, was helping to build a new proletarian paradise:
Mother stands at the machine. From whistle to whistle, Her hand is working. Her hand is working, it is thorough, At the machine a different mother is working.
Bread Factory #3 also celebrates industrial labor and the people who subordinate their lives to it:
The Song of the Dirigible tells the true story of a German airship’s visit to Moscow in 1931. After it left, Soviet leaders promised to produce one themselves as a symbol of the USSR’s industrial prowess.
And what about children themselves? There’s surprisingly little depiction or discussion of kids in these books, but, where they are shown, they’re encouraged to conform, subordinating themselves to the needs to the group. These boys have learned the importance of the Red Army and hope to someday serve in its ranks:
Propaganda posters — presumably aimed at adults rather than children — tried to make sure parents were raising useful Soviet citizens.
Some of the posters conveyed practical advice, like how to properly carry a baby. In the USSR, it was the state’s job to teach basic childcare techniques, and the government seems to have regarded its citizenry as devoid of common sense:
This one tells parents that children can lose their eyesight if they get a hold of sharp objects — keep that sword out of reach of the little ones!
As we saw in some of the children’s books, Soviet mothers were expected to go to work rather than stay at home and care for their children. Orlando Figes writes that Soviet schools and daycare — removing the child from the family whenever possible — were an integral part of the social project in the USSR:
For the Bolsheviks, education was the key to the creation of a socialist society. Through the schools and communist youth leagues they aimed to indoctrinate the young in the new collective way of life. “Children, like soft wax, are very malleable, and they should be molded into good communists,” declared one theorist. “We must rescue children from the harmful influence of the family…We must nationalize them.” The cultivation of socialist values was the guiding principle of the Soviet school curriculum. There was an emphasis on teaching children science and economy through practical activities. Schools were organized as microcosms of the Soviet state: work plans and achievements were displayed in graphs and pie charts on the walls; pupils were encouraged to set up councils and monitors to police the teachers for “anti-Soviet” views; there were even classroom “trials” of children who had broken the school rules.
Government posters portrayed the government-run daycare system as idyllic:
Here, a child says, “I’m bored at home; I’m happy in the creche!”
Some posters, perhaps put up in schools, seem more aimed at kids. This one, from 1930, informs children all about the exciting technological and economic possibilities of the five-year plan:
Outside of school, children were encouraged to join youth groups like the Young Pioneers, which further pushed them to unquestioningly accept the state’s ideology.
As we’ve seen, the Soviet Union restructured childhood in the 1920s and 1930s. They organized children’s lives and educations around service to the collective projects of the USSR. The state tried to weaken family ties in order to ensure that children would subordinate themselves to the communist struggle.
When the ultimate struggle came in the form of World War II, children were expected to participate. Some children became famous for their service. A boy named Sergei Aleshkov gained fame as the youngest Soviet soldier — an orphan, he was taken in by a military unit at age 6:
Zhenya Seryogin won a medal for his military service at age 14:
Throughout the early years of the Soviet Union, parents were encouraged to surrender their children to the state and children were taught to surrender themselves to the collective. And, for the most part, they did. The Soviet project to reshape childhood worked, creating several generations of kids who were ready and willing to do what the state asked.
But Soviet childhood was often a hall of mirrors. As we’ve seen, official images showed happy, obedient children, but the reality was often much more complicated.
Let’s look at more image — one of the most famous propaganda photos of the 1930s:
The photo shows Stalin with Engelsina Markizova. She was the child of an official in Buryatia, near Mongolia. When Stalin visited her region in 1936, she presented him with a bouquet of flowers and Stalin scooped her up to give her a big hug. The photo was published all over the USSR and hung in many schools. Engelsina became, like Pavlik Morozov, a symbol of Soviet childhood.
It was a cute moment, but the picture didn’t tell the whole story. About a year later, Engelsina’s dad was arrested and executed for being a Trotskyite spy. Her mother, who vigorously protested her husband’s arrest, was imprisoned and sent to a work camp where she later died.
Engelsina was now a child of counterrevolutionary enemies, and her photo was hanging in hundreds of Soviet schools. What would the government do?
No worry — the photos stayed up. They were simply recaptioned. Engelsina’s name was erased and replaced with the name of another girl who was more ideologically palatable. Like so much of Soviet childhood, the reality of Engelsina’s childhood didn’t matter to the state nearly as much as the image of it.
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George thanks so much for this great article… it casts light on the Soviet project in a way we don’t usually see it…