:Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991

Abstract

The title of Catriona Kelly's book suggests that childhood is not just a phase of life that adults leave behind; it is another planet with its own norms, rituals, insults, joys, stories, and songs. For those familiar with Russia, “children's world” also calls to mind the Soviet-era department store chain of the same name (Detskii mir), whose Moscow flagship still operates from a grand building on Lubianka Square. The square itself is better known as the former headquarters of the Soviet political police (KGB). The juxtaposition of the KGB prison and the child consumer's paradise “dramatically confronted children with the alternatives to which the two extremes of behavior—obedience and delinquency—might lead” (p. 144). On Lubianka Square, the world of children is both a wonderland and firmly embedded in adult ideologies and institutions. This work thus confronts the conundrum that faces all histories of children and childhood: how to give due attention to the history of adult ideas about children without losing sight of “mentality on the ground” (p. 13). Kelly's solution is to organize the book into parallel narratives of childhood and children in the years 1890–1991. The first section, “Imagining Childhood,” traces the “history of representation of children” (p. 13) in a dizzying array of fields, including the visual arts, child psychology, pedagogy, law, journalism, and literature for both children and adults. Having quarantined “discourse analysis and institutional history,” which, she asserts, “do not get one very far in understanding childhood” (p. 13), she focuses the bulk of the book on exploring the real worlds in which children lived.

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