ABSTRACT
By examining the visual and verbal rhetoric of Soviet propaganda booklets and paper recycling posters from 1956 to 1991, this article discusses the changing political-didactical rationale of wastepaper campaigns addressed to pioneers and schoolchildren in relation to late Soviet concepts of childhood, adult-child relations, play and work, books and literature. While early Soviet propaganda stressed pioneers’ patriotic duty to collect wastepaper for the sake of industry and national economy, late Soviet campaigns added new environmental and cultural meanings to paper as both a valuable natural resource and a source of a future allegedly blossoming abundance of children’s literature and schoolbooks. On the background of the so-called “paper and book deficit,” the posters imagine Soviet children as active co-producers of new ABCs. Furthermore, the children assume a leading and organizational role by guiding their parents to collect wastepaper. Hence, the posters present child labor as both a pleasurable and “productive” play.
