Conference Report: Southern Conference for Slavic Studies
Book Session: Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing up in Russia, 1890-1991

Gleb Tsipursky, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

In 2007, Catriona Kelly published a monumental volume which romps its way through more than a hundred years of children’s history in Russia in a veritable tour de force. She divided her book thematically: the first section examines the perspective of the state and professionals, the second focuses on the everyday experience of street children and orphanage inmates, and the last spotlights children within families. Within each broader section, she proceeded chronologically, and considered similar themes, including law and children, state welfare, expert advice on child-rearing, education, youth deviancy, art and literature for and by children, and children as consumers. Easily accessible to scholars outside of the field of Russian studies, this well-structured study can be gainfully employed for comparative examinations, as a reference volume, or a teaching tool.

I had the privilege of participating in a panel on Kelly’s book at the Southern Conference for Slavic Studies annual meeting, and will describe what each discussant highlighted before turning to the audience. Rebecca Friedman, emphasized the late Imperial period and gender. She noted that for Kelly, the 1890s represented the origin of a modern Russian understanding of childhood as a unique period, when children needed to be trained for their future adult status, yet also provided special protection. This new conception among experts conflicted with the traditional understanding of children as little adults who need to work from the earliest possible age – a notion shared by most government officials. 1905 served as a watershed moment when the weight of expert advice reached a tipping point, so that some private, though not public educational institutions began to implement child-centered education. Finally, Friedman underlined that the role of gender makes a strong appearance only in the last chapter, on the transition from childhood to adolescence. The reluctance to discuss bodies and sexuality ensures that gender differences became articulated through romance.

Jacqueline M. Olich spoke on the 1920s and early 1930s. She underscored an important paradox: the Soviet state celebrated childhood, promising happiness to all children, but in reality often neglected them. In relation to child-rearing, instead of the hands-off approach of the Imperial government, the state endeavored to employ the most modern methods. This approach paralleled to some extent the modernizing West European states, making Soviet childhood different only in degree, and not intrinsically, from West European childhood. Nonetheless, the crises of the Soviet period certainly made children’s lives significantly more difficult than in most European nations. Olich praised the wide-ranging oral history that Kelly created for her book, and pointed out that the volume successfully strives to bring Russian childhood into the broader historical context, as well as providing a critical mass to the historiography on Soviet children and youth.

Tom Ewing talked about Stalin-era education policy. He pointed out that Kelly’s interests lie more in children’s experience of schooling than in state policy, teachers’ practices, or curricular content. However, she had to overwhelmingly rely on sources that reflect educational experience through governmental documents. The direct sources on childhood experience that Kelly had access to, ranging from memoirs to oral history, reflect post-factum reconstruction of memory – a critical problem that the author does not deal with effectively. Citing the example of a passage discussing romantic relationships between female pupils and male teachers, Ewing pointed out how broad interpretations are based on a narrow source base of diaries, interviews, and anecdotal accounts, which reflects the broader challenges of writing the history of Stalinism and childhood. Overall, he finds that Kelly’s writing on education successfully enriches understanding of the subject, particularly because of her use of an interdisciplinary methodology.

My presentation focused on consumption and the post-1953 period. Kelly wrote that this era witnessed mounting state investments into consumer goods production and leisure opportunities to ensure that children had the “happy childhood” promised by propaganda. Nonetheless, a substantial gap remained between the ideal and the reality of children’s experience, and perestroika-era revelations of governmental failures helped delegitimize the Soviet Union. I questioned Kelly’s tracing of the increase in consumer goods production to Stalin’s death in 1953, and suggested that this phenomenon may have originated in the postwar period. I commended Kelly for bringing Russian scholarship into conversation with the emerging field of childhood studies. I also pointed out the author’s strong advocacy of child-centered education, criticism of the state’s inclination toward institutionalization, and censure of insufficient resources spent on of children, and asked how historians should balance advocacy with scholarship.

The audience offered several insightful questions about the book. One audience member asked whether childhood did originate in the 1890s as Kelly argues, or whether Russian society had a conception of childhood as a unique, separate stage of life even earlier. This led to a fruitful discussion of whether historians should define the origin of childhood as the time when the concept becomes a subject of wide concern in the public sphere and extensively debated by experts, or if scholars need to seek an earlier origin using ethnographic and literary sources. A part of this conversation considered the vital role of the conflicts between the modern and traditional views of childhood in shaping expert opinion, state policy, and popular practice. Kelly’s use of literary sources constituted another major topic of audience interest, and we discussed how she traced what children read and how they thought about what they read through the revealing letters that children sent to authors. Some audience members criticized Kelly’s comparative lack of attention to the suffering of children in crises like World War I, the Civil War, collectivization, and World War II; others wondered why she failed to explore the experience of the children of political elites, and relate them to the vast diversity of childhood experience that she did include. Perhaps some of these questions will be answered in November, since the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies will hold a similar panel on Kelly’s book, with the author present this time.