her aspirations to respectability and in her preoccupation with domestic happiness. But ideologically she was committed to the Communist ideal of sweeping away this old bourgeois culture and creating a new type of human being. A pioneer of Soviet pedagogical theories and a close associate of Krupskaia in her educational work, Alisia saw the schooling of her son as a laboratory for his communistic education. Her theories were derived largely from the ideas of Pyotr Lesgaft, the founder of Russian physical education, whose lectures she attended in St Petersburg in 1903–4, and from the writings of Maksim Gorky, in whose honour she had named her son (Gorky’s real name was Aleksei Peshkov). She taught Aleksei languages, made him study the piano and the violin, set him chores around the house and the garden allotment to encourage his respect for manual labour and arranged visits to the houses of the poor to develop his social conscience. The head of Shatura’s United Labour School from October 1917, Alisia organized the school as a commune, combining academic lessons with agricultural labour on a farm so the children would understand from the beginning what it was to live a communist life.34
Aleksei was brought up to venerate his father and other revolutionaries. A sickly boy who suffered from a spine disease that made it hard for him to walk, Aleksei lived in a world of bookish fantasies. He idolized Lenin and took to heart his father’s words of encouragement that he ‘should become like him’. Hearing about Lenin’s mortal illness in December 1923, he confessed to his diary: ‘I would run away from home and give Lenin all my blood, if that would help save his life.’ After the Soviet leader died, Aleksei set up a Lenin Corner in his room, covering the walls with pictures of the Soviet leader and texts of speeches which he learned by heart. Alisia kept a journal of Aleksei’s political development, which she filled with entries from his diaries, examples of his school-work and drawings, supplemented by her own commentaries on the education of her son. As she herself described it, her journal was a ‘scientific log’ that might serve as a ‘guide to the question of Communist education in families and schools’. Alisia encouraged her son to mix with the other children in Shatura – who came from the families of the mainly peasant workers at the power plant – and tried to make him feel that he was a leader of these less privileged friends by arranging games and activities for them at their large house. ‘Follow the example of your father,’ Alisia wrote in the margins of her son’s diary.
Aleksei and Ivan Radchenko, 1927
‘Learn to be a leader to your little friends, just as he is a leader to the working class.’ Encouraged by his mother, Aleksei established a ‘secret’ organization with some of his school comrades: the Central Bureau of the Russian Committee of the Association of Children of the World. They had their own insignia, their own revolutonary song (‘The Beginning’) written for the children by Alisia and their own home-made red banners, with which they marched through Shatura on public holidays.35
The children of 1917 were encouraged to play at being revolutionaries. Soviet educational thinkers were influenced by the ideas of ‘learning through play’ promoted by European pedagogues such as Friedrich Froebel and Maria Montessori. They saw structured play as an educational experience though which children would assimilate the Soviet values of collectivity, social activism and responsibility. The whole purpose of the Soviet school, with its wall newspapers, Lenin Corners, councils and committees, was to instil in children the idea that they too were potential revolutionaries and should be ready to rise up in revolt – if necessary, against their own parents – if called upon to do so by the Party leadership. Raisa Berg, who grew up in an intelligentsia family in Leningrad during the 1920s, recalls her schoolfriends’ comradeship and readiness for battle:
The students of our class were united by a great spirit of friendship, trust and solidarity. Between ourselves and our wonderful teachers, whom we all loved, without exception, there was nevertheless a ceaseless battle, a real class war. We had no need for calculated strategies or conspiracies, we lived according to an unwritten code: the only thing that mattered was loyalty to our comrades. We could not tell our parents anything: they might betray us to the teachers.36
One of the most popular courtyard games of the 1920s was Reds and Whites, a Soviet Cowboys and Indians in which the events of the Civil War were played out by the children, often using air-guns (
We would fight for the right to play the role of the leader. Everybody wanted to be the Reds, the Bolsheviks, and no one wanted to be the Whites, the Mensheviks. Only the grown-ups could end these quarrels – by suggesting that we fight without assigning names, and whoever won would be the Bolsheviks.
Another game was Search and Requisition, in which one group (usually the boys) would play the role of a Red Army requisitioning brigade and another group (the girls) would act as ‘bourgeois speculators’ or ‘kulak’ peasants hiding grain.37
Games like Reds and Whites and Search and Requisition encouraged children to accept the Soviet division of the world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Studies carried out in Soviet schools in the 1920s showed that children, on the whole, were ignorant about the basic facts of recent history (many pupils did not know what a tsar was) but that they had been influenced by the dark and threatening images of the supporters of the old regime in Soviet propaganda, books and films. These images encouraged many children to believe that ‘hidden enemies’ continued to exist, a belief that was likely to produce irrational fears, hysteria and aggression against any sign of the old regime. One young schoolgirl asked her teacher: ‘Do the bourgeois eat children?’ Another, who had seen a classmate wearing an old shirt with a crown embossed on the starched cuff, suddenly shouted out in class: ‘Look, he is a supporter of the tsar!’38
Many of the children of 1917 had their first experience of politics in the Pioneers. Established in 1922, the Pioneer organization was modelled on the Scout movement, one of the last independent public bodies in Communist Russia which had been outlawed by the Soviet government in 1920. The ethos of the Scouts, which had sought to foster in its youthful members a sense of public duty through practical activities, continued to prevail in many of the Pioneer organizations (as it did in some elite Soviet schools) during the 1920s. About one-fifth of Soviet children between the ages of ten and fourteen were enrolled in the Pioneers by 1925, and the fraction increased in subsequent years. Like the Scouts, the Pioneers had their own moral codes and rituals. They had an oath which every Pioneer was meant to learn by heart (many can recall it after three-quarters of a century): ‘I, a Young Pioneer of the Soviet Union, before my comrades do solemnly swear to be true to the precepts of Lenin, to stand firmly for the cause of our Communist Party and for the cause of Communism.’ The Pioneers did a lot of marching and singing, gymnastics and sport. They had a responsive chant (‘Pioneers, be prepared!’ Answer: ‘Always prepared!’) which was borrowed from the Red Army. They were organized in brigades. They had their own banners, flags and songs, and their own uniform (a white shirt and a red scarf), which was a source of immense pride and, it seems, for many the main attraction of the Pioneers. ‘I did not understand the obligations of the movement. Like everybody else, I just wanted the red scarf,’ recalls one Pioneer. Vera Minusova, who joined the Pioneers in Perm in 1928, remembers: ‘I liked the uniform, especially the scarf, which I ironed every day and wore to school. These were the only smart and neat clothes I had. I was proud and felt grown-up when I wore them.’ Valerii Frid, a schoolboy in Moscow in the 1920s, was so proud of his red scarf that he slept with it on for several nights after he joined the Pioneers.39
Through the Pioneers Soviet children experienced a strong sense of social inclusion. Every child wanted to become a Pioneer. It was glamorous and exciting to be a Pioneer, and the red scarf was an important mark of social acceptance and equality. Children excluded from the Pioneers – as many of them were, because of their social background – experienced intense feelings of shame and inferiority. Maria Drozdova was expelled from the Pioneers because she came from a ‘kulak’ family. So intense was her desire to be reinstated that she wore the scarf concealed underneath her shirt for many years. Sofia Ozemblovskaia, the daughter of a Polish nobleman, was banned from the Pioneers after she was spotted in church. She still recalls her expulsion with emotion:
Suddenly they posted an announcement – a ‘news flash’ – on the wall- newspaper in the corridor at school: ‘Form lines immediately!’ Children came running out of all the classrooms and formed ranks in the playground. I was made to stand in front of the whole brigade to be shamed. The children shouted: ‘See what shame she has brought to our brigade by going to the church!’ ‘She is not worthy of the scarf!’ ‘She has no right to wear the scarf!’ They threw dirt at me. Then they tried to tear the scarf from me. I began to
