From propaganda idyll to starvation. Pedagogical views on the situation of a child in Soviet Russia in the Stalinist period

Abstract

Communist propaganda, both in the USSR and in other countries of the communist bloc, constantly raised – usually exaggerating – problems related to the hardships of childhood in capitalist countries and contrasted them with the almost idyllic conditions for the development and upbringing of children in the Soviet Union. Such assessments were also in force in Polish propaganda from the years of the People’s Republic of Poland. Omnipresent hypocrisy, which is an immanent feature of the communist system, did not allow to reveal the real dramas and tragedies that happened to millions of children and their parents in Soviet Russia during Stalin's rule. This study, referring to the goals and assumptions of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, recalls the real, dramatic fate of most children born and raised in traditional families in the first decades after the victorious Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which the communists decided to destroy in order to create a subor- dinate Soviet family on their ruins – a “new type” family.