Picturing Soviet Childhood

Abstract

Using the key concept of socialist realism as interpretational frame, the paper investigates the visual construction of the spaces of the ‘happy Soviet childhood’ in provincial contexts. Sources are photo albums of pioneer summer camps from the 1960s and 1970s situated in the southern Urals and in the Moscow region, interviews with former camp leaders, and instruction materials. The elaborate albums were conceived as internal reports for local authorities and submitted to a regional competition for the best camp. As adult narrations of a happy childhood, the albums are part of a cultural system that created and represented a specific topography of Soviet happy childhood. At the same time, the photographic reports are witnesses of the gaze upon this childhood. The paper explores not so much the single photographs, but the albums as artefacts. The emphasis is on the social practices surrounding the (re)production of the images and narrations by making, choosing and arranging photographs with slogans and emblems in the albums. The visual approach is combined with a spatial one: The summer camps were part of a Soviet topography of childhood offering heterotopic spaces in the context of the Soviet cult of childhood. They also provided the opportunity, namely for women, to escape temporarily from the mind-numbing and controlled spaces of work and family chores.