Elizabeth White - A Modern History of Russian Childhood: From the Late Imperial Period to the Collapse of the Soviet Union

The Bloomsbury History of Modern Russia Series

Series Editors: Jonathan D. Smele (Queen Mary, University of London, UK) and Michael Melancon (Auburn University, USA)

This ambitious and unique series offers readers the latest views on aspects of the modern history of what has been and remains one of the most powerful and important countries in the world. In a series of books aimed at students, leading academics and experts from across the world portray, in a thematic manner, a broad variety of aspects of the Russian experience, over extended periods of time, from the reign of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century to the Putin era at the beginning of the twenty-first.

Published:

Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin: Accommodation, Survival, Resistance, Boris B. Gorshkov (2018)

Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin , Jonathan Daly (2018)

Marx and Russia: The Fate of a Doctrine , James D. White (2018)

A Modern History of Russian Childhood: From the Late Imperial Period to the Collapse of the Soviet Union , Elizabeth White (2020)

Forthcoming:

The History of the Russian Worker: Life and Change from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin , Alice Pate (2020)

Dissidents, migrs and Revolutionaries in Russia: Anti-State Activism in International Perspective, 18482015 , Charlotte Alston (2021)

A Modern History of Russian Childhood

From the Late Imperial Period to the Collapse of the Soviet Union

ELIZABETH WHITE

In the sixteenth century Domostroi , a late-medieval Russian text on household advice for Muscovite elites, children as a social group were not differentiated from servants and lower relatives. In common with the rest of Europe, parental authority had been absolute in medieval Russia; parents could even sell their children into slavery. Secular law did not recognize the murder of a child by its parents. While canon law did view infanticide as a crime, the Orthodox Churchs main concern was with the regulation of female sexuality rather than the intrinsic value of a child or its integral being. The 1649 Muscovite Law Code, the Ulozhenie , declared the infanticide of illegitimate children murder and punishable by death; yet the murder of a legitimate child by its parents incurred a years imprisonment followed by a public confession:

3. If a father or mother kills a son or daughter: imprison them for a year. After having sat in prison for a year, they shall go to Gods church, and in Gods church they shall declare aloud that sin of theirs to all the people. Do not punish a father or mother with death for [killing] a son or daughter.

Yet by the second half of the eighteenth century, children and childhood had begun to be seen as the preserve of the state. When Catherine the Great sought to transform the Russian Empire, childhood was key: Assisted by Lockean psychology, the field of education proper came to occupy the center of attention and hope. This book maps out the process of why that came to be, as well as examining childhood in the following centuries.

Childhood is intertwined with so many aspects of the organization of modern states and societies that its study embraces a wide range of topics. A history of childhood can include the everyday life of children, their material culture and their leisure activities (organized and unorganized), schooling and Childhood does not only affect children, a category that we now see as both biological and socially constructed. The political, economic, cultural and social institutions and structures of childhood (schools, welfare states, medicine, material cultures and spaces) have extensive influences as well and we are all drawn into their sphere at various points.

The fact that it is hard to know where the study of childhood ends is in part because the dominant model of a modern childhood in the West, with which we are most familiar, is closely connected to the rise and spread of the state and associated processes of modernization. Since the 1960s, beginning with the publication of Philippe Ariss influential book Centuries of Childhood , academics have interpreted childhood as a historically and culturally constructed phenomenon, rather than a universally given common experience of a biological life stage.

Later research focused on how the eighteenth-century Enlightenment produced a radical change in ideas about childhood, if not necessarily in the lived experiences of most children. Philosophers and natural scientists such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau pushed forward the ideas that education and upbringing were key to the development of human potentiality and that children should be treated differently to adults, and separated from them. Then the Europe-wide romantic movement of the early nineteenth century valorized childhood as not just different to adulthood but superior, and fundamental to the later adult self. Children were messengers from heaven, close to God, unique, blessed and a source of inspiration. The child was becoming a symbol. All these ideas were extremely influential on elite thought across Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including in the Russian Empire.

Further layers were added onto views of childhood in the nineteenth century. The uneven processes of industrialization, nationalism, bureaucracy and record keeping, education, globalization and the development of market relations, the privatization of the family and the spread of the franchise all affected how childhood was framed, regularized, valorized and understood. One of the greatest changes for children was the idea, underpinned by compulsory state legislation at an accelerating speed across the nineteenth century, that all children should receive some kind of formal education outside of the family home for a set number of years. For most of human history, children had been essential to the household and general economy as labour forces. Very gradually, in the modern age children were pushed out of the economy through labour legislation and the spread of compulsory state primary education. This shift from labour to education is key to the modern Western model of ch ildhood. Enforcement of primary education remained problematic until the twentieth century and the form and content of primary education a child received varied enormously according to ethnicity, gender, class and location. Compulsory universal primary education gave states potentially enormous power and resources to reach children and organize childhood.

As well as changing relations between the child and the state, Viviana Zelizer, among others, has shown that as children were pushed out of the labour market into schools and became economically worthless, they became emotionally priceless to their families.

By the late nineteenth century, children and childhood had gained a new social and political significance and both had become a focus of intense concern for states and societies. The Swedish social theorist and educational activist Ellen Key published The Century of the Child (Barnets rhundrade ) in 1900, in which she argued that childrens education, well-being and rights should be the central work of the new twentieth century. Translated into English in 1909, her book became an international bestseller. At the same time, children also began to be constituted as objects of international politics. In the Soviet Union, the state indeed described children as the privileged class.

This privileged state of childhood became an ideal of citizenship and a benchmark to judge the backwardness (or not) of modern states. The Christianity and the civilization of a people may both be measured by their treatment of childhood, wrote Benjamin Waugh, the social reformer and founder of the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, in 1886. By the twentieth century, childhood as a life stage had become an important signifier of modernity.