ABSTRACT
"The cultivation of Soviet patriotism is the most important task of moral education." In the Soviet Union, motherhood may be an attribute widely and democratically distributed, but fatherhood, or at least the incarnation of the father-image, was reserved for Stalin alone. As the rules for school children, adopted by the Soviet of People's Commissars in 1943 and repeatedly referred to, make abundantly clear, this "tradition" is in many ways singularly like the tradition of the bureaucratic-hierarchical tsarist regime. Auditory discrimination, for instance, must be trained so that children may be able "to hear the faintest sounds even to a barely perceptible rustling," because "in modern warfare the future defenders of the Motherland, and particularly the scout, must possess powers." Films like The Death of Ivan Susanin should cause "the hearts of children to be filled with a feeling of hatred toward the enemies of the Fatherland."
