Childhood and Youth in the Soviet Union under Stalin

Abstract

In the Soviet Union, youth was central to official ideology and the effort to build socialism in the 1920s and 1930s: young people made up a large proportion of Soviet society, and children were seen as malleable, easily formable into socialist people; they signified the bright socialist future. Correspondingly, the topic of youth has been quite present in research about the Soviet Union.1 A solid body of research focuses on young people in revolutionary Russia and 1 Most notably, Catriona Kelly’s monumental study about Russian childhood (Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006]).