Childhood and Youth in the Soviet Union under Stalin

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]).