Volume VIII, Issue 2, 2014

Abstract

The Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed, fractured the Russian society, and the nascent Scout movement in Russia was not spared by these events. Scouts fell apart into three factions: those supporting the Whites or the Reds, and those who remained neutral.
The neutral scouts, who remained faithful to the non-political character of the Scouting model, continued their work, until having been finally eliminated by the OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate). Red scouts in this time helped Bolsheviks to create communistic youth movements: YuKi, ROUR, pioneers, etc.
This study is focused on the process by which ideology influenced a childrens movements under the extreme conditions of a civil war, and later under the no-less stressful confrontation with the power of the state.

Keywords: scout movement, pioneers, Civil War, young communists, Komsomol, repressions

Abstract

The authors investigate specific features and stages through which the image of the Soviet child construct was shaped. By analyzing three 1946-1948 Primers they demonstrate the emergence of the social iconography of children’s images, and show how different ideologically-charged constructs were selected. Research is based on the historical and cultural methodology founded on recording a wide range of semantic visual and verbalized meanings. By elucidating the principal block of meanings, one can arrive at when and how the image of the Soviet child was coded and re-coded. The authors define three such blocks: existential, culture-producing, ideological and political. The tenet of the article is that each of these blocks would be foregrounded depending both on the overall ideological situation and on the socioeconomic tasks of a particular post-war year.

Keywords: primer, elementary school, childhood, Soviet history, Stalin and education

Abstract

The aim of the article is to compare the system of values constituting the foundation of the social identity of generations born in Poland in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s through the analysis of “childhood media heroes” who, according to Geert and Gert Jan Hofstede (2007), are a personified link between cultural symbols and rituals. The authors of this article assume that “heroes” personify important generational features and values, particularly appreciated in a given culture and therefore they constitute a type of role models guiding life choices of particular generations of Poles.

Keywords: culture, values, childhood heroes

Abstract

This paper is an historical analysis of practices to conceptualize childhoods in Czechoslovakia during communist governance. Through the lens of the children’s magazines and literature, it explores the microcosm of everyday governance against the backdrop of the political changes of the 1950s, and then the 1970s and 1980s. The production of political subjectivities occurred as early as kindergarten age, and children’s literature and magazines were important carriers of these notions. This paper argues that the youngest children were productive powerful actors that shaped their own totalitarian childhoods, and not merely passive recipients of the strong, punitive, ideologically charged dogma of education. Through their use of literature, children in kindergartens are shown as agenting citizens, in totalitarian Czechoslovakia.

Keywords: childhood, Czechoslovakia, Havel, children’s literature, politics

Childhood experiences in Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1989 were influenced by moral habitus shaped by the political events in 1948. I discussed the concept of moral habitus as it is embodied in the historical-political processes in context of social suffering of children of the political prisoners. Focus on life history of the son of a Czech political prisoners Peter and I examine his sense of difference from other children through distinct experiences, the value of morality in his family, and the urgency to survive. Peter’s childhood memories reflect his co-lived suffering with his parents in the past. His experiences within the process of reconciliation reveal new forms of social suffering immerged in post-socialist Czechoslovakia.

Keywords: morality, social suffering, memory, childhood, socialism, trauma, reconciliation, violence, kinship, family

Abstract

The individual life stories are valuable source of data about the childhood in Bulgaria during the recent past. In this paper the “child” is depicted in the Bulgarian capital during the period of the 60s and the 70s of the 20th century. An attempt is made to explore the everyday space-time of children between 6 and 12 years old, who spend most of their lives in school rather than at home and were totally dependent of the existing ideological system of education and personal formation. Several generations of Bulgarian children grew up in an atmosphere of tension, anxiety and fear whether they have fulfilled the prescribed by the totalitarian state duties, whether they have met the expectations imposed by a social system devoid of basic human rights and freedoms – a system depriving its members from the right of life choice.

Keywords: childhood, communism, school, family, education, socialization, responsibility, guilt, fear

Abstract

With the proliferation of generational life writing focused on exploring experiences of childhood in communist Romania (particularly the decades 1970s-1980s), a new discourse on the recent past has penetrated the public sphere as an alternative to the dominant anti-communist discourse that has so far focused on intellectual and political elites or members of the resistance. This article puts forward the claim that instead of relegating this discourse to the all-too-often dismissed category of pop-culturalization of history or commodification of nostalgia, researchers would be better advised to take their cue from this return to the child’s perspective on the everyday as a potential means to disentangle the binary perspective that plagues post-communist memory studies. Following de Certeau (1984), this article explores educational strategies targeted at school-age children in communist Romania, while giving equal importance to the tactics that children employed in response, as they appear in oral history projects or autobiographies. It focuses particularly on children’s organizations and media, highlighting the need to account for a multiplicity of childhood experiences and to factor in the child’s agency. As communist structures of feeling find their articulation from the perspective of the traditionally marginal child-figure, we might find we need to start talking about communist childhoods in the plural.

Keywords: communism, childhood, children’s organizations, children’s media, structures of feeling, strategies and tactics

It is a well-known fact that in the socialist states children were seen as the main force for social changing, especially in those states having a long term perspective regarding their lasting. Education, child care or supportive measures were far from being sufficient for such a purpose; over organization, over-regulation and a strong discipline had to be enforced since the very first years of every child! The pre-school and school children were going to be integrated in the process of revolutionary education of the young generation. Soimii Patriei (The Country’s Hawks), an original creation of Nicolae Ceausescu no other country of the communist block had a similar organization) and The Pioneers, played their role in the creation of the multilaterally developed society and in the revolutionary education of the young generation.
In this paper I will analyse the main children organizations, their statute and regulations, but also their printed materials – magazines for children with the purpose to present the ways and means used by the state to indoctrinate the children. The indoctrination goes so deep that, in many circumstances, we can think that the children did not belong to their parents but rather to the party and its leader, Nicolae Ceausescu. This type of analyse, including the degree of implication of the children in these organizations (especially the Pioneers) can reveal very interesting aspects about the sociological and psychological impact on children: numerous accounts testify that the position of group, detachment or unity commander (the three divisions in organization) was the first leadership experience in their personal history.

Keywords: pioneers, Country’s Hawkes, communism, childhood, Romania