Abstract
A major innovation of the twentieth century, across many different types of political system — constitutional monarchies, republics with elected multiparty democracies, and one-party ‘totalitarian’, states — was the emergence of genres of political propaganda aimed explicitly at children.1 Children had a firm place in Soviet political propaganda from the start. ‘Ruler and child’ icons proliferated; model biographies were ubiquitous. Children learnt by heart songs and poems praising Lenin and Stalin; they were taught to ornament their essays with Lenin and Stalin quotations. They read, and commented upon, selected texts by the leaders, and paid eulogistic tribute to them in lessons. Exposure to such material was obviously crucial in shaping attitudes to the regime, both at the time when children were learning about the leaders and later on. Yet despite the centrality of the leader cult for children to the operation of the regime, and to the mentality of its growing citizens, it has received remarkably little attention in historiography. Existing treatments are largely iconological in character — that is, they deal with the content of representations rather than with how these were used and what impact they made upon children.2 Accordingly, this chapter, though paying some attention to icon types, will be more closely concerned with other issues: first, children’s specific experience of ruler cult practices: the rituals employing ruler icons that they experienced, the artworks and letters that they dedicated to leaders; and second, the extent to which the ruler cult was able to inspire belief and trust in the leaders among children, both in their youth and when they came to maturity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
N. Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass. 1997), pp. 227–32, carries a brief discussion of Lenin imagery for children, based on a handful of mid-1920s sources only. My own essay, ‘Riding the Magic Carpet: The Stalin Cult for Little Children’, forthcoming in Slavic and East European Journal, 2004, concentrates on the content of texts rather than their uses.
Poem by a group 3 collective in N. Sats (ed.) Deti o Lenine (Moscow, 1925), p. 14. This very interesting anthology consists of poems and pictures by children, mostly aged about 12–14, from the L. B. Kamenev First Experimental School in Moscow.
Z. Lilina, Lenin malen’kii. Dlya detei mladshego vozrasta, 3rd edn (Moscow and Leningrad, 1930), pp. 4, 7, 13.
V. N. Shul’gin, Obshchestvennaya rabota shkoly i programmy GUS’a (Moscow, 1925), pp. 8–9.
A. I. Volkova, Podarki V. I. Leninu i N. K. Krupskoi (Moscow, 1970): see e.g. the birthday present (file decorated with bright applique of the hammer and sickle) sent to Lenin by denizens of the V. I. Lenin Children’s Home in Vyatka, April 1923, p. 6.
Tumarkin, Lenin Lives, p. 129, quoting P. N. Lepeshinsky ‘Po sosedstvu s V. I.’ in D. Lebed’ (ed.) Lenin (Khar’kov, 1923), p. 76.
N. Krupskaya, Pedagogicheskie sochineniya v 10 tomakh (Moscow, 1957–62), vol. 6, pp. 219–21.
The fourth edition of Lenin’s Sochineniya, for instance, can muster only a handful of references: vol. 19 (Moscow, 1948), pp. 182–5 (children’s work in the peasant household); vol. 29 (Moscow, 1950) p. 303 (prospects for children in the socialist society of the future). Trotsky on several occasions did speak on this theme: ‘A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not take the greatest care possible of the children — the future race for whose benefit the revolution has been made.’ (‘The Struggle for Cultured Speech’ (1923), in L. D. Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life, trans. anon. (New York, 1973), p. 53.)
A rare exception was V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, ‘Lenin v gostyakh u detei’, Pioner, 2 (1929), pp. 2–3, which described a school visit on 24 December 1919 by Lenin and Krupskaya at which Lenin became ‘the best friend of children’. It was illustrated by a picture of Lenin and Krupskaya with some small boys. It was in the Stalin era that pictures of Lenin with children proliferated: see e.g. Detskii kalen-dar’ na 1946 god (Moscow, 1945), image for first half of January, which shows Lenin and a small girl.
L. Bochin, ‘U kostra’, Vozhatyi, 15–16 (1933), p. 12.
Pionerskaya pravda, 18 December 1939, p. 3, and 20 December 1939, p. 3. Cf. a similar item by L. Stepnaya, ‘V shkole’, Druzhnye rebyata, 12 (1939), pp. 12–13, and in Pioner, 12 (1939), pp. 3–4, etc.
I. Petrov, ‘Shkol’nye gody Iosifa Vissarionovicha Stalina’, Vozhatyi, 12 (1949), pp. 4–5, or the item in the same issue by L. Semenova, a Pioneer leader in school no. 1, Vladimir, describing the ceremonial meetings for the jubilee, the content of which included material about Stalin’s school years. (‘Sbory posvyashchennye I. V. Stalinu’, p. 11).
N. S. Panova, ‘Iz opyta raboty pionerskogo lagerya’, Sovetskaya pedagogika, 6 (1952), pp. 11–22.
Reproduced in M. Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven, Conn., 1998), p. 235.
See further in Kelly, ‘Riding the Magic Carpet’. One might note, for instance, the popularity of the riddle form in texts for and by children about Stalin: see e.g. Ivan Eroshin, ‘Stalin’, Kolkhoznye rebyata, 12 (1936), p. 3.
Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! (Princeton, NJ, 2000), p. xvi.
See the cover of Druzhnye rebyata for October 1936. For a later example, see e.g. the photograph of the Trekhgorka Factory’s summer dacha in E. I. Papkovskaya (ed.) Knizhka o malen’kikh trekhgortsakh (Moscow, 1948), p. 37. See also the carnival scenario — Detskii karnaval. Letnii prazdnik dlya detei srednego vozrasta (Moscow, 1939), pp. 16–17.
C. Kelly, ‘Byt and Identity’, forthcoming in S. Franklin and E. Widdis (eds.) All the Russias Cambridge, 2004); id., ‘Shaping the ‘Future Race’: Regulating the Daily Life of Children in Early Soviet Russia’, in vol. edited by Eric Naiman (Christina Kiaer(as) Everyday Life in Revolutionary Russia (Indiana, 2005).
Larisa Vasil’eva, Deti Kremlya (Moscow, 1997), p. 85.
S. Bogomazov, ‘Deti o Staline’, Krasnaya nov’, 12 (1939), p. 254.
On using a Stalin statue as a lever for indoctrination, see K. N. Grekova, ‘Nash rodnoi gorod Magnitogorsk’ in E. I. Volkova (ed.) Vospitateli detskikh sadov o svoei rabote (Moscow, 1948) p. 118;
for Stalin and patriotic education, see Radina, ‘Oznakomlenie detei’, in A. P. Usova (ed.) Voprosy obucheniya v detskom sadu (Moscow, 1952), p. 102 (Georgia), p. 94 (schools), p. 96 (Pioneers).
A. Nekrasov, ‘Dve pobedy’, Pioner, 12 (1949), 4. On this side of the cult, see further Kelly, ‘Riding the Magic Carpet’.
Ira Dmokhovskaya (class 6, school 329, Moscow), ‘Prazdnik’, Pioner, 12 (1949), p. 28.
A. D. Sergeeva, ‘Deti v dni narodnoi skorbi’, Sem’ya i shkola, 4 (1953), pp. 6–9.
G. Kononenko, ‘Deti i Stalin’, Sem’ya i shkola, 5 (1953), pp. 5–7.
See Polly Jones, Strategies of De-Mythologisation in Post-Stalinism and Post-Communism: A Comparison of De-Stalinisation and De-Leninisation (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2002) esp. chapters 3 and 4, for more information on de-Stalinising school textbooks.
‘Chto kasaetsya Khrushcheva/On dovolen ot dushi’: S. Mikhalkov, ‘Bud’ gotov!’, Sobranie sochinenii, 1, (Moscow, 1963) pp. 320–9.
A. I. Ulyanova, Detstvo i otrochestvo V. I. Lenina (1955). In the post-Stalin era, too, it was customary to hold admissions to the Pioneers in Lenin museums and other such Lenin-commemorative places.
On Pavlik Morozov, see C. Kelly, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London, 2004).
Lidiya Ivanova, Vospominaniya: Kniga ob otse (Paris, 1990), p. 112.
G. Vishnevskaya, Galina: istoriya zhizni (Paris, 1984), p. 35.
E. Evtushenko, Volchii pasport (Moscow, 1998), p. 58.
A. Sergeev, Al’bom dlya marok, in Omnibus (Moscow, 1997), p. 9.
M. G. Semenova, extract from unpublished memoir held in Arkhiv Memorial, in S. S. Vilensky A. I. Kokurin, G. V. Atmashkina, I. Yu. Novichenko (eds) Deti GULAGa 1918–1956 (Moscow, 2002), p. 252.
Anatolii Rybakov, Roman-vospominanice (Moscow, 1997), p. 51.
L. Anninskii, ‘Monolog byvshego Stalintsa’ in Kh. Kobo (ed.) Osmyslit’ kul’t Stalina (Moscow, 1989), p. 54.
On the popular following for the Chelyuskin pilots, see Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, Ind., 2000);
for a book about Soviet crack pilots’ devotion to Stalin, see G. Baidukov (Geroi Sovetskogo Soyuza), Vstrechi s tovarishchem Stalinym (Moscow and Leningrad, 1938).
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times — Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999), pp. 85–8, p. 224.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki (ed.) Meine Schulzeit im Dritten Reich (Cologne, 1988), pp. 105–14 (Walter Jens), 93–103 (George Hensel).
For an account of teaching in a remote Ukrainian village from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, see Dora Shturman, Moya shkola (London, 1990), esp. pp. 112–16, 133.
Larry E. Holmes, Stalin’s School: Moscow’s Model School no. 25, 1931–1937 (Pittsburgh, 1999).
Paola Messana, Kommunalka: Une histoire de l’Union soviétique à travers l’appartement communautaire (Paris, 1995), p. 91.
Valentina Bogdan, ‘Memoirs of an Engineer’ in S. Fitzpatrick and Yu. Slezkine (eds) In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 415–16.
A. Belousov (ed.) Russkii shkol’nyi fol’klor: ot ‘vyzyvanii’ Pikovoi damy do semeinykh rasskazov (Moscow, 1998), p. 436.
On the 1930s, see Gabor Rittersporn, ‘Formy obshchestvennogo obikhoda molodezhi i ustanovki sovetskogo rezhima v predvoennom desyatiletii’ in T. Vihavainen (ed.) Normy i tsennosti povsednevnoi zhizni: Stanovlenie sotsialisticheskogo obraza zhizni v Rossii, 1920-e i 1930-e gody (St Petersburg, 2000), pp. 347–67.
For the re-emergence of the 1920s interest in child creativity, see e.g. Vladimir Glotser, Deti pishut stikhi (Moscow, 1964).
For the letter by N. Shvetsova, aged 12, see Kommunist, 1 (1990), pp. 95–6 (reprinted in M. E. Glavatsky (ed.) Khrestomatiya po istorii Rossii 1917–1940 (Moscow, 1994), pp. 415–17.)
Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 168–82.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2004 Catriona Kelly
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kelly, C. (2004). Grandpa Lenin and Uncle Stalin: Soviet Leader Cult for Little Children. In: Apor, B., Behrends, J.C., Jones, P., Rees, E.A. (eds) The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230518216_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230518216_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-51714-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-51821-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)