Childhood and communist revolutions

The process of spreading versions of the modern model of childhood continued in the twentieth century in many parts of the world, though legacies of colonialism, economic dependence, and even the prior experience of slavery complicated global change. The West and Japan continued to adjust to still-novel patterns. Latin American cities worked toward a more schooled childhood, but social divisions complicated the process. The most striking new force in childhood change in the first half of the twentieth century, however, came from the new burst of political and social revolutions that became such a vital part of the century’s landscape. Major revolutions marked twentieth-century world history at many

points, and most of the really important ones – Russia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam – occurred under communist inspiration. All the twentieth-century revolutions attacked Western influence, with communist leaders deliberately intending to introduce arrangements vastly different from those of the bourgeois West, dominated by capitalism. On the whole, however, the revolutions advanced the major elements of the modern model of childhood, and indeed they provided one of the major vehicles for the spread of this model during the twentieth century. The challenge in dealing with the cases of Russia and China (and their huge populations) is to tease out the standard modern features, some special traditions that survived change, but also the deliberate attempt to forge a distinctive communist childhood. Some halting reforms of childhood had begun to spread in Russia and

China before their revolutions, which helps explain why the revolutionaries, even amid their zeal for systematic change, found the modern pattern logical, particularly when it came to schooling. The leaders also believed that education could be shaped to offer particular advantages for a communist future, that it did not have to be guided by specifically Western models. Communist regimes also introduced other innovations in their approach to children – for example, in a heightened emphasis on youth groups – that added to the force of change. It is also important to note that simply introducing the modern model in a context such as Chinese society, with its longstanding traditions concerning childhood, often involved factors very

different from those present in the West. Distinctive kinds of disruption and opportunity might arise, heightened by the heady fervor of a revolutionary experience. The communist approach to childhood certainly involved an even more

explicit recognition of the role of the state than had developed in the West and Japan. Substantial government control of childhood, not only through schools, but through youth groups and other mechanisms, aimed at socializing children to be better workers and (sometimes) soldiers, and certainly to be loyal citizens – goals shared with other modern states; but it also sought to mold children to be different from their parents, to develop values and characters more appropriate to communist goals. In principle, at least, children had to be remade. In fact, of course, communist manipulations did not always work; even efforts to control children’s reading might misfire. And the big changes in reality focused more on transitions to schooling and low birth and death rates than on the special communist flavor. The state’s role, however, did take a significant further step. We’re dealing, then, with another set of cases of fundamental trans-

formation, overlapping with the experience of the West and Japan in many ways, but distinguished by separate traditions and by the power of revolutionary aspirations. The revolutions themselves were heavily staffed by youth and young adults, willing to risk violence to tear down established structures in societies where the percentage of young people in the population remained very high. This fact, along with an ideology that sought to create new kinds of people according to communist values, and along with the obvious power of the modern model itself, assured dramatic change. Familiar modern patterns blended with the special circumstances of a new revolutionary age. The Russian Communist Party had not formed special youth groups prior

to the 1917 revolution, in large part because the whole party had to operate clandestinely. Nor had tsarist Russia developed a particular interest in childhood – there was virtually no Russian research on childhood before the twentieth century – beyond the gradual expansion of education. In a heavily agricultural country, the basic conditions of agricultural society, including frequently harsh discipline for children, largely prevailed. New attention to children, however, surfaced almost immediately after the

1917 rising, even as the communist revolutionaries struggled to seize and then maintain power. A first congress of youth organizations, for example, occurred in 1918. A year earlier, a new law forbade work before age 14 (though it was not well enforced). A Decree on the Eradication of Illiteracy followed in 1919, and while some of this was designed for propaganda – a key problem in dealing with Russian communism was its desire to trumpet its beneficence to children to score points with its own people and internationally, not always with strict regard to truth – the regime early on began to establish new schools, including a network of nursery schools

and kindergartens. Efforts to improve children’s health and also to abolish the use of physical punishments on children began early as well – the latter a really interesting effort explicitly to reverse common patterns of prerevolutionary Russian schools and society. The overall commitment to children was remarkable, given the many problems confronted in the early years of revolution and the real poverty of Russian society. Why – propaganda goals aside – this extensive interest? Schooling had

already been expanding in tsarist Russia, so it probably seemed logical to build on the effort – though in dramatic new ways. The new regime also faced several years of real crisis among children: the results of World War I, including malnutrition, and of the revolutionary years and civil war, including widespread famines, greatly increased the death rate among children. The mortality rate for young children, about 30 percent before 1914, soared to 50 percent or more by 1921 (some estimates as high as 90 percent of newborns). New attention to children was partly prompted by truly menacing problems. It was also true that the new regime, though defiant of much of the rest of

the world, wanted international approval, and committing to more of the modern model for childhood was appealing for this reason. Above all, however, communism as an ideology was deeply imbued with the belief that children were born good, innocent, and improvable; problems with childhood resulted from imperfect social arrangements, poverty, and inequality among classes. The new Russia must be built, as a result, on the strengths of greatly enhanced efforts to protect and educate children. This belief, born of the same basic Enlightenment ideology that had informed the early phases of the modern model in the West, strongly shaped revolutionary aspirations and policies. It pushed both toward the modern model, and to a concerted effort also to produce a different kind of child from the emphases current in the West, viewed as fatally corrupted by capitalism. The communist belief in the innocent child, but also in the faults both of

capitalist childhoods and of prerevolutionary conditions in Russia itself, had several interesting corollaries. One was, simply, that revolutionary experts believed they knew far more than parents did about what children needed. This was a belief among experts in the West as well, but it had even greater vigor in Russia: to improve childhood, parents needed to be guided and their hold over children limited. Revolutionaries even believed that well trained communist children should assume the task of educating their backward parents in key respects. The state had to gain an active hand in childrearing – this meant schools, of course, as in the modern model more generally, but in additional activities as well. “The child is the object of state upbringing,” one party leader claimed, and while families remained extremely important, the state role loomed large as well. The beliefs in childish innocence and a communist mission for children also helped explain the fervent propaganda: improving children was so fundamental to the revolutionary ideal that it was

almost impossible publicly to admit basic problems (except insofar as they could be blamed on prerevolutionary remnants such as religion). Issues such as juvenile delinquency, as a result, were largely swept under the rug. The restructuring of childhood under communism had four components:

the modern model itself, with its usual facets, one of which, however, was hotly debated. Second, the specifically communist apparatus added to the modern model. Third, continuities from earlier Russian conditions that persisted despite considerable objections from the leadership. And finally, some changes, particularly toward a more consumerist childhood, that began to emerge from the 1950s onward despite equally considerable official objections. As we have seen, the regime quickly resolved on extensive schooling, at

least in principle, and improvements in children’s health, including the effort to reduce mortality rates. Progress in schooling was truly remarkable, even as the revolutionary leadership continued to struggle with limited resources; the commitment ran deep. Primary schools spread quickly, in a society where literacy rates had reached only 28 percent in 1914. Expansion of secondary schools and universities quickly followed. Between 1929 and 1939, there was a doubling of students in grade schools but an eightfold increase in attendance at middle schools and an elevenfold increase in secondary schools. University slots quintupled by 1939, and more than doubled again by 1951, to 1.3 million students. The government also invested in extensive research on pedagogy, seeking new teaching methods that would be compatible with communist goals and would bring out the best in students’ learning capacity; there was a real, if possibly naïve, hope that in a socialist state learning would be enjoyable and spontaneous. Prizes were established for good students. Families, realizing the importance of education for their children’s prospects, increasingly worked to support school success, particularly in the growing cities. This was a real conversion: childhood now meant schooling, above all. Much of this development was a fairly standard illustration of the modern

model, but there were some distinctive twists. The regime wanted schools to combat vestiges of the old regime and prepare for a better society to come, so much effort was invested in attacking religion (“superstition”) and in instilling the principles of Marxism, along with a strong emphasis on science. Enthusiasm for Marxism sometimes involved memorization exercises for very young students, who probably understood little of what they were told to drill into their heads; by the 1950s, more careful age-grading saved Marxism for the later primary grades and beyond. Most interesting was the ambitious attempt to expand kindergartens and nursery schools, in order to begin the preparation of children early and to reduce family influence. The program also responded to the large number of mothers who worked in the Soviet Union, and the resultant need for childcare provision. Kindergartens did spread rapidly, though resource constraints sometimes reduced the effort;

by 1929 about 10 percent of the relevant age group had formal kindergarten slots, though other institutions added to the program somewhat. Rural families accepted kindergartens slowly if at all, preferring more conventional family supervision, so this aspect of the process of change was more halting in the countryside. The push to reduce child mortality was impressive, though events –

including the German invasion in World War II – could generate setbacks. A 1918 decree insisted on new goals, claiming that too many children had died “as a result of the ignorance and irresponsibility of the oppressed populace and the stagnation and indifference of the class [tsarist] state.” The government rapidly expanded clinics and prenatal services, and tried to expand the corps of pediatricians as well. Increasingly, clinics actively reached out to parents, particularly mothers, sending reminders and even venturing personal visits if children were not brought in for checkups, a far more interventionist approach than in the West. The state also issued a series of advice manuals, again on the assumption that parents were not fully reliable – as one authority put it early on, “family upbringing is in need of additional guidance.” Or again, as another expert claimed, discussing basic housing and feeding standards for children: “even this, most parents do not do well.” Hygiene was strongly emphasized, in schools and elsewhere, again a pattern very similar to that in the West and Japan. By 1960, infant mortality rates had dropped 900 percent from 1918, to 3.8 percent of all children born, and by 1989 the figure was 2.5 percent. These rates remained a bit higher than in the West, reflecting lower overall standards of living and some undeniably substandard medical facilities; but the change was dramatic, nevertheless, and clearly brought the Soviet Union into the modern model of childhood in this important respect. With children increasingly going to school instead of working (at least for

the family economy), with a falling death rate, and with other issues such as endemic housing shortages and problems with childcare, it was hardly surprising that the people of the Soviet Union began participating in the third area of modern change, the reduction of the birth rate. Attacks on religion also, if unintentionally, reduced some of the traditional barriers to birth control, and it was interesting that the more religious minorities in the Soviet Union, notably Muslims, retained higher birth rates than average. Government policy, however, vacillated. During the 1920s there was open discussion of birth rate reduction and experimentation with various methods. But Stalin returned the nation officially to a pronatalist policy, seeking a larger population for economic and military purposes. The state outlawed abortion in 1926. Birth rates continued to drop, however, in part because of widespread illegal abortion; here, Russian families and Russian women drove behavior in quiet defiance of government goals. The state, recognizing the ill effects of illegal abortions, reversed its policy here in 1951; by the 1980s the majority of Russian women were experiencing at least one abortion.

With some interesting internal variations, the Soviet Union became a lowbirth-rate society. Increased parental attention to individual children was one common result, including parental support for success in school, linking this society to modern patterns in Japan and the West. Communist additions to modern childhood were at least as interesting

as the substantial conversion to modern childhood itself. Marxist indoctrination and the propaganda claims about Soviet children were fairly obvious, though not unimportant. The Soviet Union eagerly supported international human rights movements for children, partly at least as a means of suggesting its own special virtue. Citing the tremendous hardships for children in World War II, for example, Soviet spokespeople used the theme as a means of opposing what they argued were Western efforts to promote militarism: “We must direct the attention of all who love children to the effects of the arms race.” More substantive developments, for Soviet children themselves, involved

the extensive youth-group apparatus established as a supplement to schooling and as a means of furthering Communist Party influence over children, while limiting independent parental controls. Youth groups were an important development in modern world history generally, beginning with programs such as the Boy Scouts in Western Europe and the United States; they aimed to help discipline young people and make them socially useful. Fascist governments employed youth groups such as the “Hitler Youth” for indoctrination and paramilitary training. But the Soviet system took the widespread impulse much further. Almost all children by age nine were organized in the Young Pioneer

organizations, which sponsored a variety of activities – dance lessons, sports training, summer camps – and collective work efforts. Many who graduated from Young Pioneers at age 14 then went on to participation in the Komsomols (communist youth groups), where the party controls were more overt, and the explicit political indoctrination more intense. Youth groups, schools, and official advice all pointed to the seriousness

of childhood and its collective focus. Children were still meant to do quite of bit of work; schools organized various production activities, appropriate to the age level, and the youth groups certainly called on children’s service in harvesting grain, helping take care of veterans, making toys, and a wide variety of other activities. The goals were to aid the state – not the family economy – while not interfering with the primary educational mission, and to teach children both relevant skills and the nobility of work itself. While youth groups provided leisure activities also, and in schools children managed, when called upon for “social labor,” to put more emphasis on the social than the labor, the state itself was not very interested in play, but rather in readying children for adulthood. In this it reflected a mixture of communist beliefs and some strong remnants of agricultural tradition, both providing interesting variants on the modern model. In 1984, an education code

urged honesty, courage, and so on as character goals for children, but also “exactingness toward one another,” a duty to the collective good – not a combination that would be found in Western manuals by this point. Youth organizations were highly moralistic, another sign of the seriousness of childhood and children’s social responsibilities. One Komsomol chided a girl who threatened to wander off to find her divorced father, “But Galena is a Komsomol, she should have the courage and honesty to tell her comrades what kind of life she is going to lead.” Intensive involvement of talented children in dance academies or sports training institutions provided another example of the effort to use childhood for social purposes and to inculcate adult-like seriousness. The Soviet system also toyed with some changes in gender divisions, based

on its formal belief in male-female equality in a communist society. Various lessons attacked traditional downgrading of women. But school uniforms emphasized gender division, with very feminine outfits for secondary school girls. The state itself soon began placing emphasis on women’s family duties, including motherhood. And children themselves picked up gender cues, noting as one boy did when asked to treat girls a bit better, “Lenin was a boy.” The spread of education undoubtedly reduced gender divisions in childhood, but there was no full revolution. The communist approach to childhood was by no means entirely successful.

Partly because of wars and dislocations, many children suffered from abuse and poverty; there were many strays and orphans. Divorce rates also rose, and so did the number of children in female-headed households. Juvenile delinquency and, by the 1980s, drug-taking were undoubted problems, though their dimensions were hidden by official secrecy. The communist system also failed in disrupting family control of childhood and traditional pleasures as fully as intended. Many Russian children continued to play traditional games and listen to traditional stories, including very superstitious ones. Their parents took them to puppet shows and circuses, both widely popular. Many adults recalled happy excursions to the woods or the countryside with families. Official campaigns themselves revealed the persistence of family celebrations regarding children. A major effort against Christmas trees, for example – “we must battle against the old way of life” – showed the pervasiveness of older habits. Finally, new kinds of rebellion, particularly by adolescents, emerged by

the 1950s, directed not against the modern model so much as against some of the communist additions, headed by undue seriousness and preachiness and the increasingly inflexible bureaucracy of the Komsomol movement. As early as 1955, a Komsomol intoned, “we have begun to wage an uncompromising struggle against these idlers who imitate trashy foreign ‘fashion’.” Consumer-minded youth were “completely divorced from the varied, full and beautiful life of labor and romanticism lived by our Soviet youth.” Growing interest in Western music, clothing styles including blue jeans, and

other early hints of a global youth culture, though battled against by the government, gained increasing interest from young people as the communist system slightly loosened its grip from the death of Stalin until the collapse of the system in 1991. The Russian revolution included a revolution in childhood, though not, of

course, a complete overturning of all traditions. The purposes and activities of children shifted dramatically. As the Soviet system did finally end, there seemed no doubt that the modern model would retain its force. The real questions involved the sudden disappearance of the communist organizations and doctrines that had impinged so heavily on Soviet childhood. Even though many children had not fully accepted the system, it was not clear what kinds of alternatives would become available. Chinese communists, as they assumed full control over the mainland by

1949, were even more fiercely determined than their earlier Soviet counterparts to construct a society radically different from modern Western models. They also had to contend with the powerful Confucian tradition and its implications for childhood. Not surprisingly in this context, the regime periodically introduced some dramatic experiments, concerning schooling, for example, and the role of youth in the wider society. There was also an even stronger impulse than in the Soviet Union to encourage large families as a source of economic and military strength, part of the sense of embattlement against the rest of the world, and a symptom also of more traditional thinking about the usefulness of large numbers of children. In the long run, however, the new regime did work toward the main features of the modern model, ultimately including a particularly dramatic birth control policy. Youth groups and a strong emphasis on social service resembled features developed by the Soviets. Two assumptions, similar to those of the Soviets, guided policy toward

children: first, an optimistic belief that children were innocent and improvable with the right kind of guidance; and second, a deep conviction that past policies toward children, including Confucian traditions and extensive parental controls, were deeply flawed, responsible for crucial problems in China’s past. Family influence, as a result, had to be curtailed in the interests of appropriate training. School reform was not a new topic in China. Chinese reformers and

Western missionaries had worked hard, from about 1900 onward, to create more modern schools, freed from Confucian assumptions about the need to instill conformity in children, and more open to scientific subjects and to intellectual inquiry generally. Communist experts, borrowing in part from Russian research, emphasized the need to identify individual characteristics and to encourage creativity. How much this actually affected schooling is open to question. Chinese teachers, according to outside studies, continued to assume that children should measure up to established norms for each age; the emphasis was on the standards rather than on individual development.

In the early grades, getting children to recite in unison, partly as a means of controlling individual impulses, was a common ploy, suggesting more than a hint of Confucianism. Furthermore, the new emphasis on Marxist indoctrination added another layer of memorized conformity for many children. Children were taught about communist heroes, beginning with Chairman Mao, and the need to devote their lives to the struggle for communism – though as one interviewee noted, recalling his school days, “to tell the truth we didn’t quite yet know what communism was.” There was no question, however, about the rapid spread of schooling

itself. During the 1950s, the number of children in primary schools tripled, to 90 million – an immense investment in a still-poor nation. The increase at the secondary school level was even greater, in percentage terms. This process of expansion continues to the present day. The regime in 2003 made a commitment to educate 15 percent of the relevant age group in universities – this is a lower percentage than in Japan or the West, but given the size of the population, a tremendous assignment, leading to a massive building boom in new campuses. For children themselves, and for their parents, schooling increasingly replaced work as a focus. As in the Soviet Union, a huge effort also went into the development of

nursery schools and kindergartens, to provide childcare for parents, both of whom increasingly worked outside the home, and as an opportunity for indoctrination. A variety of youth groups served the same goals. The communists had established Little Red Soldiers during the revolutionary struggle itself, using children for sentry duty and other tasks. This group continued for grade (primary) schoolers, and was supplemented by Young Pioneers and the Communist Youth League. Tremendous pressure was applied to shame children into joining. Young Pioneers, for example, got to wear a distinctive scarf, and if a child lacked a scarf by the sixth grade, he or she could be ostracized by peers. Work duties were combined with schooling and the youth groups, again

both for serious production on behalf of the state-run economy and for training in proper values. Middle schoolers could spend as much as a month in school workshops, making items such as electric circuits for cars and trucks; and they also were often sent for labor stints in the countryside. A fascinating use of some children involved street patrols to prevent adults from spitting in public: this coincided with a strong hygiene emphasis in the schools, but more significantly it stood Confucianism on its head by making children the monitors of wayward elders. During the 1966-67 Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong almost turned against education itself, worrying that too many students were picking up bourgeois values. Millions of secondary school and university students were sent to the countryside to do agricultural labor. This impulse was transitory, and emphasis on educational achievement resumed in the 1970s, but it was an interesting moment. The Cultural Revolution also saw a use of communist youth gangs to intimidate

adults – tradition-minded teachers, for example – in another deliberate inversion of Confucian hierarchies. Here, youth themselves sometimes found outlets for rebellion against the discipline and competitiveness of the school system itself. In addition to schooling, the new regime worked hard on improving

children’s health. Neighborhood clinics were established in the cities, while “barefoot doctors,” combining modern and traditional medicine, provided care in the countryside, including immunizations against the major childhood diseases. Child mortality dropped rapidly from the 1950s onward; at an 18 percent annual average between 1955 and 1960, infant mortality had dropped to 3.7 percent by 2003. Chairman Mao raised some questions about the final element of child-

hood’s modern model, arguing in the 1950s that a high birth rate was an asset to China, supplying needed labor, and attacking Western population experts, who were urging nations such as China to cut back. By the 1960s, however, the turn to population control began. State policy was heavily involved, but so was parental reaction to the decline of children’s work for the family economy and the pressures of parental jobs outside the home. By the mid-1960s, clinics and the barefoot doctors were distributing birth control devices, including pills and IUDs, and were performing abortions. Led by the cities, birth rates began to drop rapidly – in some neighborhoods, 50 percent reductions were registered in two-year intervals in the middle of the decade. In the 1980s, the post-Maoist regime tightened policies even further, banning marriage before age 25 and penalizing couples who had more than one child. Here was a tremendous assertion of state power, and an equally tremendous departure from China’s customs concerning children. In practice, revolutionary innovation combined with selective traditions –

and not all the innovations actually followed communist scripts. Parents and children alike were told that the family must be downplayed, that children must be “concerned with the people’s benefit and the state’s interests.” Specific measures attacked parental control: a 1950 Marriage Law, for example, allowed young people to choose their own spouse, without parental consent. But the hand of family remained strong. While up to 30 percent of Chinese children were in kindergartens by the 1970s, particularly in the cities, far more were being cared for by grandparents. Tradition also shaped reactions to new population policies: with only one child allowed per family, many rural people undoubtedly returned to a practice of female infanticide (so that their “one child” would be a boy); and the ratio of girls to boys in orphanages was 9:1. A considerable excess of males developed in consequence. The one-child policy also encouraged new levels of emotional investment and material indulgence of children, creating tighter parent-child bonds in some respects – a familiar development in the modern history of childhood, but not exactly the communist goal. By 2000, school authorities were reporting tremendous pressure from “4-2-1 groups” to make sure beloved

only children were treated well. The four were the grandparents, grouping with the two parents, all banking on the success of the one child, and introducing a significant new ingredient in the conduct of schools themselves. With the adoption of market economic policies by the communist regime

in 1978, and with rapid economic growth ensuing, urban Chinese childhood in fact began to overlap with childhoods in many other societies in additional ways. Some of the experiments with collective work faded in favor of outright emphasis on school success and advancement toward university. (Demand for university slots in fact exceeded supply.) New consumer interests developed, on the part of children and parents alike. Imported baby goods became fashionable in the 1980s, for example, including toys, diapers and, for older girls, cosmetics. Many urban Chinese children began to participate in a global youth culture. The communist contribution to changing the nature of childhood in the

twentieth century was of great significance. Wherever communism seized control, changes in concepts of childhood and in government initiatives toward children followed quickly. The communist example could have influence as well in other parts of the world, pushing toward elements of the modern model. The particular emphases brought by communism itself were intriguing and vital to many children for over half a century, as they devoted themselves to youth groups and political awareness. With communism receding after the mid-1980s – even in China, with its swing toward a market economy – the durability of these emphases came into some question, and with it the range of options for a modern childhood that would not be defined by Western standards.