Utopia's Discontents: Russian Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s-1930s

Abstract

them; the same is true of another theme of the text, on family and labour law. Children’s lives were touched by state power, as it placed limits on child labour, and as it reaffirmed (in the tsarist era) and then removed (in the Soviet era) patriarchal control within families. Other subjects of family law, like the regulation of legitimacy and illegitimacy (the distinction between the two was abolished with the coming of the Soviet state but then reestablished as a counterintuitive pro-natalist measure after the Second World War), adoption (also abolished by the new Soviet state on the grounds that it was often a form of exploitative child labour, but then encouraged again in the aftermath of the demographic shock of the Second World War), and divorce, all influenced the lives of children on a basic level. Another theme, however, straddles the experience of childhood itself and people thinking about it: children’s culture. In several sections White treats the idea of culture narrowly, as cultural products (books, starting with Karion Istomin’s delightful alphabet books, eventually cinema, and finally tv) produced for the child consumer. These sections tend to be brief but suggestive of the concerns of children at different times. In additional sections, White looks at a broader concept of culture, getting at the everyday experiences of children in certain social groups at certain times (particularly the children of the elite, but in one interesting section tsarist-era peasant children). These are all themes in many discussions of childhood, but the Soviet chapters, in particular, feature another theme that is (somewhat) less universal: the effect of crisis and trauma on children. Sections on the Civil War and Second World War, on dekulakization and on the impact of the family disruptions caused by the arrests and deaths of the Great Terror make clear the ways that twentieth-century Russian childhood, at least, often meant grappling with ‘unchildish’ things. White examines the ways that the Soviet state sought to cope with the effects of these events – soaring numbers of orphans and single parents – while also using memories of childhood experiences to give a sense of their impact on individual children.