Equality, Welfare, Myth, and Memory: The Artek Pioneer Camp at the Height of the Khrushchev Era

Abstract

Equality, Welfare, Myth, and MemoryThe Artek Pioneer Camp at the Height of the Khrushchev Era Mark B. Smith (bio) Artek, with its high-quality buildings and glorious Crimean location, was the most famous Pioneer camp in the Soviet Union. Following its foundation in the 1920s, its significance grew under Iosif Stalin, attracting children from elite families. By 1960, the camp had become an instantly recognizable institution inside the Ukrainian Republic of the USSR, with an all-union cultural presence and an international profile. It was also a gold-standard example of the relaunched post-Stalin welfare system. But if welfare was for everyone, and Artek had an elitist reputation, how did the camp’s social reality and cultural representation match up during the era of apparently proto-communist equality between 1953 and 1964? This article explores the myths and memories that constructed Artek as a Khrushchev-era welfare provider within the Soviet imaginary; it analyzes the lived experience of child welfare in Artek during that period; and it tests the competing pressures of elitism and equality in modulating access to Artek in the example year of 1960. Artek was an exceptional institution in the USSR, and its history is important in its own right, but it also offers a case study of how myths, memories, and social policy shaped childhood experiences during the Khrushchev era. ________ Established in 1925, Artek was inspired by Zinovii Solov́ev, a health-care reformer who imagined a “camp-sanatorium” for children. He found the [End Page 255] location he wanted on the Crimean coast, near the foothills of the Aiu-Dag mountain range. At the start, the camp had places for only 80 children and depended on funding from the RSFSR Red Cross, which Solov́ev himself chaired. Yet within three years, the camp was open year-round, based in permanent buildings, not summer-only tents. By 1930, the complex was divided into a “lower” and an “upper” camp with a total annual capacity of 2,040 children.1 At its post-Khrushchev peak, the Artek complex connected eight camps along the Crimean coast. It had 250 buildings, a canteen for 1,000 diners, a stadium for 10,000 spectators, a staff of 2,000, health-care facilities, classrooms, cinemas, swimming pools, and a post office. Four thousand five hundred Pioneers attended simultaneously in high season.2 Artek was a Pioneer showcase. Established in 1922 within the All-Union Leninist Communist Union of Youth (VLKSM), or Komsomol, the Pioneers were the core extracurricular club for boys and girls aged between 10 and 14. For all their ideological significance, the Pioneers were more akin to Boy Scouts plus Girl Guides than Hitler Youth, even in the Stalin period. By the Khrushchev era, the Pioneers were deeply entrenched in Soviet society. In 1960, 93 percent of eligible children were members.3 More than one-quarter of them (4.4 million) spent time in a Pioneer camp during that year.4 The quality of these rural or seaside facilities was inconsistent. While they were usually located in ecologically clean and quite often in beautiful surroundings, many were spartan, a few had extremely poor facilities, some had insufficient staff, and most offered strikingly unvaried cuisine. Other camps were located within cities, where children spent the day undertaking activities with child-care professionals, sometimes in temporary facilities in housing districts, before going home in the evenings. It was a surprising truth of the Soviet welfare system that the quality of such institutions as children’s camps depended on the identity of their formal owner. The Soviet “welfare state” did not fit within an undifferentiated “state” but melted into an overlapping landscape of varied public institutions. Welfare facilities, from housing blocks to pensions offices, from kindergartens to polyclinics, were the property of different institutions within the Soviet economy. Some of these institutions were “central”: ministries, the Party, and related agencies, including the Komsomol. Often the most [End Page 256] sought-after welfare providers, such as Kremlin Polyclinic no. 1, were owned within this sector. Unsurprisingly, the top-of-the-scale Pioneer camps, most famously Artek, Orlenok (on the Russian side of the Soviet Black Sea coast), and Zerkaĺnyi...