Abstract

Innocent Weapons: Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War, by Margaret Peacock. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 304 pp. $34.95 US (cloth). Margaret Peacock has produced a superb comparative study of images of children constructed and used by Americans and Soviets to maintain or oppose Cold War policies from the end of World War II to the late 1960s. Delving into a multitude of published and archival sources in English and Russian, Peacock deftly illustrates the reworking of images over this period to respond to audiences' new concerns. She also discusses audiences' appropriation of images of children to criticize their nations' Cold War demands and dangers. Images are broadly defined, encompassing conceptualizations of children in print, audio, and visual media. Part I, an Image, Building a Consensus, moves between the US and the USSR within each chapter. Chapter one examines what Peacock calls the Happy, Afforded Child images used to proclaim the superiority of each nation's political and economic systems. In chapter two, Peacock focuses on The 'Other' Child, the image used to represent what each nation was for and against. She also finds that the imagined rival children possessed desirable traits lacking in their own offspring: Americans worried that Soviet children's discipline gave their nation a formidable advantage in the future of the Cold War, while Soviets fretted that American youngsters' freedom and creativity were the foundations of their nation's long-term success. Chapter three first focuses on images of external threats posed by the enemy. Soviets' rhetoric of Cold War external threats stressed unified opposition to the enemy, embodied in alliances between children and youth in communist and post-colonial countries. Yet people in both nations grew concerned that internal threats posed more immediate dangers: faulty parenting characterized by neglecting or spoiling children, and perceived crises of juvenile delinquency, could enfeeble each nation from within. To counter excessive feelings of vulnerability and hopelessness that dwelling on external enemies could generate, Peacock demonstrates in chapter four that image-makers promulgated positive visions of children and youth as activists promoting international friendships. These images assured domestic audiences that children and by extension their nations were not defenseless. second part of the book, Revising an Ideal, further demonstrates the pliability of images of children, now used to question and criticize the Cold War consensus that Soviets and Americans had been pressed to support. Chapter five examines films created between the late 1950s and mid-1960s when the post-Stalin Communist Party permitted greater artistic freedom. Many films from this period featured young protagonists and, though not necessarily intentional, could be interpreted as creating the Soviet government and Cold War's demands on the populace. …

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