ABSTRACT
The promise of a happy childhood was one of the great casualties of the fall of the Soviet Union, when the collapse of the state caused hundreds of thousands of children to enter state orphanages and untold numbers of women to enter the sex trade for lack of a better way to support their children. 2 Of the cultural institutions that contributed to the notion of the happy childhood before 1991, children’s literature occupied a privileged place. From the early 1930s until the end of the Soviet period, children’s writers created scores of tales of strong fathers and selfless mothers under the aesthetic program of Socialist Realism-a doctrine that shaped fantastic narratives under the guise of Realism, including stories of imagined children with blissful upbringings in such nurturing collectives as the Communist family, the state school, and the Octobrist and Pioneer youth organizations. Not surprisingly, the childhood portrayed in Soviet literature more often reflected aspirational ideals than the lived experiences of actual children (Clark 2000; Kelly 2007; O’Dell 1978).
