Young Pioneers Research Articles

Initiation Ceremony and Child Political Identity Education

The initiation ceremony is a large political ceremony organized by primary school. The purpose of initiation ceremony is to let the recipients feel oneself formally joined the sacred group, and confirm their identity of young pioneers, to produce a sense of organizational identity. This repeated ritual performance is also a way for school to make a political education for children. In this process, school should selectively filter children's experience, consider the characteristics of children's growth, and provide suitable space for children's moral life.

Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Utrecht

The Gaudeamus Muziekweek is now in its sixty-ninth year and, as ever, it focuses on young music pioneers, in hopes of presenting a snapshot of the newest ideas in contemporary music being developed across the world. The festival's dense and diverse programming is compressed into five full days, in 2016 from 7 to 11 September, squeezed principally within one labyrinthian building, the TivoliVredenburg, whose impressive monolithic glass exterior imposes itself as a pillar of cultural life in central Utrecht. Amid this density, it is impossible to provide anything but a partial account of the festival, and my presentation is far from impartial, as I was one of the five nominated composers for this year's Gaudeamus Award. If only from these fragments and particular foci, then, I will present my own reactions and estimations of how the festival has highlighted some of the innovations and interests of a few of the newest practitioners of new new music.

Гости в будущее: «пионерская утопия» и советская действительность

Гости в будущее: «пионерская утопия» и советская действительность

Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, 1979–1983 ed. by Nicole Phillip-Dowe and John Angus Martin

Reviewed by: Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, 1979–1983 ed. by Nicole Phillip-Dowe and John Angus Martin Robert Sierakowski (bio) Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, 1979–1983 Nicole Phillip-Dowe and John Angus Martin (ed.), Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 189 pp. In the space of several days in October 1983, the Grenada Revolution, the first socialist revolution in the English-speaking Caribbean, came to its truly shocking conclusion. Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, the charismatic and internationally renowned leader of the New Jewel Movement (NJM), was treacherously assassinated along with several associates as part of an internal power struggle with other members of the revolutionary movement. Six days later, the United States administration of Ronald Reagan – which had long antagonized and threatened the People's Revolutionary Government– dispatched American military forces in a full-scale invasion of the tiny island nation (with the complicity of regional governments). The revolution's inspiring promise of a popular transformation that would provide health, education, and employment for the masses had not only been crushed by foreign intervention, but also discredited by the fratricidal violence within the NJM itself. This new edited volume by Nicole Phillip-Dowe and John Angus Martin returns to the dramatic events of the early 1980s and "captures the Grenada Revolution from a Grenada perspective" (xi). Aside from one essay, all of the papers were written by Grenadian authors from various personal perspectives and academic disciplines. The 12 chapters were selected from 16 papers presented at a 2016 University of the West Indies Open Campus conference held in Grenada. Given the more than three decades that have passed since the revolution's tragic denouement, the writers seek to foster a more nuanced and complex interpretation, transcending Manichean visions of "saints and devils, martyrs and traitors", as Shalini Puri puts it (176). Indeed, some of the early chapters prove rather polemical and controversial revisions of received wisdom. Lawrence A. Joseph, for example, looks back on the March 1979 uprising that toppled the regime of Eric Gairy, arguing that in strictly juridical [End Page 203] terms "the revolution" amounted to a mere coup d'état by "usurpers" (17), given the NJM's inability to impose a new institutional order through democratic elections. Joseph Ewart Layne, on the other hand, writes from the first-hand perspective of a revolutionary leader who spent 26 years behind bars following the American invasion for his role in the events of 1983. While he offers something of a mea culpa for NJM errors and abuses, he insists that it was the leadership's "missteps in strategy formation and implementation" that led to the disastrous outcome, rather than "ideological conflict and personal ambition for power" (29–30). Many of the chapters in volume's middle section look back on the revolution's four-and-a-half years of social transformation in areas such as women's rights, youth engagement, and church–state relations. In many of these spheres, the papers aim to document both the hope, creativity, and promise of these idealistic revolutionary projects, while acknowledging the far messier historical realities. Nicole Phillip-Dowe's chapter on the National Women's Organization (NWO) established during the revolution demonstrates the many successes of this group in educational and social projects directed at children, as well as its leading role in community development, such as improving roads and cleaning up neighbourhoods. At the same time, she shows how the NWO functioned as a subsidiary of the NJM and, despite successful reforms (such as the Maternity Leave and Equal Pay Laws), it remained very difficult for prominent women to balance party work and family obligations. In her chapter, Claudette Joseph describes her experiences as a part of the revolution's Young Pioneers movement as a child, recalling the early 1980s as a period with "a deep sense of community, national pride and patriotism" (79). Her memories of childhood in the revolutionary era are extremely positive, as she reflects on the various initiatives that she personally experienced during that heady period of social transformation. As with Phillip-Dowe's discussion of the NWO, however, Joseph also details the darker aspects of the years of New Jewel rule, such as...

Time in 1:72 Scale: Plastic Historicity of Soviet Models

Time in 1:72 ScalePlastic Historicity of Soviet Models Alexey Golubev (bio) A scale model of Lenin’s car will be a perfect addition to your school’s technology corner or Soviet history room. —Article from a Soviet technical journal It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection. —Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project When the Soviet government ordered the construction of the national exhibition center in Moscow in 1935, it was initially conceived as a showcase of Soviet agriculture and was named, accordingly, the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. Two decades later, with the dawn of the space era and the rapid industrialization and urbanization of Soviet society, this focus on agriculture no longer seemed relevant, and in 1959, the exhibition center was renamed the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy (VDNKh). As part of this reorientation of the Soviet national exhibition, a pavilion that had previously been devoted to bog peat was renamed Young Technical Designers (Iunye tekhniki) and started featuring the craftsmanship produced by schoolchildren’s extracurricular hobby groups (kruzhki) and centers of young technical designers (stantsii and kluby iunykh tekhnikov), such as hand-built vehicles and agricultural equipment, scale models of ships and planes, and designs of existing and future spacecraft. [End Page 69] Click for larger view View full resolution The Young Technical Designers Pavilion at VDNKh in Moscow, Early 1980s, a Soviet-Era Postcard Source: https://pastvu.com. The allocation of a special pavilion at the Soviet national exhibition to “young technical designers” highlighted the importance that Soviet education officials gave to extracurricular activities of school-age children. The Department of Extracurricular Education was established within the People’s Commissariat of Education of Soviet Russia as early as November 1917. In 1952, the Council of Ministers of the USSR passed a resolution that harmonized the networks of extracurricular clubs and centers. Over the course of the decades that followed, palaces and houses of Young Pioneers, centers of young technical designers, school hobby groups, and other forms of extracurricular activities sprang up all over the Soviet Union.1 In 1988, there were 464,384 extracurricular clubs and centers in the Soviet Union, or roughly four times the number in 1950. The official statistics claimed that 7.5 million schoolchildren attended them, with technology-related clubs and groups being the most popular (2,132,659 children).2 According to the 1989 Soviet census, the number of schoolchildren (aged 7–17) in the USSR exceeded 45 million, which means that approximately one in every six Soviet school-age children attended extracurricular activities at any given time.3 Given high turnover rates, the proportion of Soviet students who at some point in their education enrolled in hobby groups was considerably higher, in particular in urban centers.4 The development of extracurricular technical activities served a pragmatic function: the incorporation of labor into the productive forces of the Soviet economy. The idea of spreading technological literacy among schoolchildren was, in fact, borrowed from late imperial pedagogy: in particular, from [End Page 70] the works of Evgenii Medynskii, a prominent theorist of extracurricular education who continued to work under the new authorities.5 During the 1920s and especially the 1930s, technological literacy became increasingly associated with one’s civil obligation to serve the national cause in peace and in war.6 The Young Technical Designers Pavilion reflected the post-Stalinist development of this political fantasy of schoolchildren’s contribution to the national economy, which was also prominently featured in educational theory and—hardly surprisingly—Soviet teen science fiction.7 At the official level, Leonid Brezhnev emphasized in a speech to the 16th Congress of the Komsomol that its leaders should “develop the scientific and technological creativity of working youth” as a prerequisite for the evolution of socialism into communism.8 This logic, which treated extracurricular activities of schoolchildren as viable assets of national development, placed them in the context of the Cold War competition between ideological blocs. For Soviet officials and education theorists, youth mastery of technology was a way to secure the USSR’s position at...

‘중국소년선봉대’를 통해 본 중국의 어린이 교육

‘중국소년선봉대’를 통해 본 중국의 어린이 교육

Dal diario di una piccola comunista. Ricostruzione della vicenda umana nella Cecoslovacchia di Husák

This article aims to present Dal diario di una piccola comunista (From the diary of a young communist girl), the first novel by the Slovak writer Michaela Sebőkova. Through the main character’s voice, the eleven-year-old Alžbeta, Sebőkova portrays Czechoslovakian society in the years of “normalization” and also offers a deeper understanding of children’s ideological manipulation under the regime of Gustav Husak through to the Young Pioneers Organization. Growing up as a member of this organization, Alžbeta, initially driven by strong Communist ideals, ends up realizing the undeniable contradiction between Communist rhetoric and its actual behaviour. She will reach awareness that lies and pretence are the only values underpinning the communist system of those years.

Breaking the tongue: language, education, and power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934

List of Illustrations List of Terms A Note on Transliteration A Note on Administrative Division in Soviet Ukraine Introduction 1: Primary Lessons 2: Adapting to Place 3: The Conversion 4: Treading Carefully 5: Learning the New Language of Pedagogy 6: Limited Urgency 7: The Question of the Working Class 8: Children as Salvation: The Young Pioneers and Komsomol 9: Ukrainization in a Non-Ukrainian City 10: The Correction 11: Children Corrupted and Exalted 12: The Path Ahead Conclusion Biographical and Informational Sketches Bibliography Index

Through the Lens of Israeli Cinema: A Review

Through the Lens of Israeli Cinema A Review Rachel Harris Raz Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2011. 218 pp., ISBN 978-0415876889 (hc). US $130.Anat Y. Zanger Place, Memory and Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema. London Vallentine Mitchell, 2012. 286 pp., ISBN 978-0853038450 (hc). US $79.95.Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg, eds. Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. 391 pp., ISBN 978-0292743991 (pb). US $35. ISBN 978-0292725607 (hc). US $49.50.ABSTRACTThis review essay examines three recently published books on Israeli cinema. Raz Yosef's The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema; Anat Y. Zanger's Place, Memory and Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema; and Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg's edited volume, Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion. It considers the ways in which Israeli cinema is inextricably linked to the history of Israeli nationalism and reflects on the treatment of this issue within these three texts. Examining major issues in the field and considering theoretical models relevant to the individual essays, chapters, and books, this essay offers a context from which to explore Israeli cinematic scholarship.In the past decade Israeli cinema has undergone a dramatic transformation in both cinematic and academic terms, as evidenced in three recent books on the topic: Raz Yosef 's The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema; Anat Y. Zanger's Place, Memory and Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema; and Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg's edited volume, Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion. Now the darlings of the international community, Israeli films have been chosen to open major international festivals, receiving numerous awards throughout the world and frequently being nominated for best foreign language picture at the American Academy Awards. Correspondingly there has been a rise in interest in Israeli films on academic campuses, with the occasional public screenings or film series giving way to the inclusion of Israeli films in courses on Israel across the humanities and social sciences, and to the rise of courses focused on Israeli cinema. Yosef 's and Zanger's books are scholarly monographs on the major theoretical shifts in the development of Israeli cinema in recent years, and they are aimed at scholarly audiences. By contrast Talmon and Peleg's edited volume gives more of an overview of the history of Israeli filmmaking and seems aimed at undergraduate students and university courses.Israeli cinema began in the early twentieth century with the entrepreneurial endeavors of Yaacov Ben Dov, the first person to own his own movie camera in Palestine. The documentary footage he shot recorded General Edmund Allenby's arrival in Ottoman Palestine in 1917, during the final days of the sultan's reign, and the early establishment of Jewish settlement projects. Unlike the case in Soviet Russia, where filmmakers were often forced to create propaganda works highlighting the successes of the new regime, filmmakers in Palestine-such as Ben Dov; his successor, Baruch Agadati, who purchased Ben Dov's film archives in 1934 upon his retirement; and others, including Helmar Lerski and Natan Axelrod-eagerly produced films and newsreels that patriotically represented the Zionist spirit and its enterprises. Many of these films were funded by or later sold to the Jewish Agency, the Jewish National Fund (KKL), Keren Hayesod, Hadassah, and other groups, which used them both for fundraising purposes and to encourage immigration.The first feature films in Israel were often scripted around documentary footage, sometimes telling the story of an individual or group working to redeem the land-such as Labor (Avodah, Helmar Lerski, 1935)-using hard labor as well as modern farming techniques, while defending the fledgling settlements from marauding bandits. These films, like Oded the Wanderer (Oded Hanoded, Haim Halakhmi, 1932), simplistically divided the Arab population into two archetypes: the sympathetic Bedouin, whom the Zionists might civilize while he in turn would teach the young pioneers secrets of the land, and the dangerous and ignominious Arab, who could not be trusted. …

An Unpromising Land: Jewish Migration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century by Gur Alroey (review)

Reviewed by: An Unpromising Land: Jewish Migration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century by Gur Alroey Ori Yehudai Gur Alroey. An Unpromising Land: Jewish Migration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 285. $65. ISBN 9780804790871. In the scholarship on the Zionist movement, as well as in Israeli collective memory, the Second Aliyah—a wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine which began in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom in Russia in 1903 and lasted until the outbreak of World War I—is regarded as a formative chapter in the history of Jewish settlement in Palestine. Accounts of the period relate the story of idealistic young pioneers who left their homes in Eastern Europe determined to rid themselves of their exilic past and create a new Jewish society based on Zionist and socialist values. Advocating the principles of manual labor, self-reliance, self-defense, and the revitalization of Hebrew culture, these Jews changed the face of the new Yishuv by introducing highly influential institutions such as Palestine’s first collective agricultural settlements (e.g. Sejera and Degania) and paramilitary organizations (Bar-Giora, Hashomer), as well as cultural and academic establishments like the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts. It was from among this cadre that many future leaders of the Yishuv and the State of Israel—including David Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi—emerged. Although this elite group was but a small minority of the 35,000 Jews who reached Palestine between 1904 and 1914, they attracted so much scholarly and popular attention that the period came to be identified solely with their aspirations, struggles, and achievements. Gur Alroey’s An Unpromising Land is an important and convincing corrective to this perception. Rather than dealing with the socialist Zionist pioneers, the study focuses on “the average Eastern European immigrant who was light-years away from Zionist ideology and who came to Palestine for various prosaic reasons.” (19) As Alroey explains, Zionist historiography ignored the experience of the “ordinary immigrants” as it interpreted Jewish immigration to Palestine as an exceptional phenomenon in the history of Jewish migration, or in the words of one historian, as “a pure, clean current rooted in elevated, distant national and social goals… current that is all idea and vision.” (9) [End Page 209] An Unpromising Land brings the discussion down to an earthly level. Instead of viewing the movement to Palestine through the prism of Zionist ideology, it provides a detailed analysis of the relationship between “push” factors in Eastern Europe and “pull” factors in Palestine, the demographic composition of the immigrants, the obstacles they faced on their migration routes, and the degree to which they were absorbed into their new environment. Alroey uses a variety of secondary and primary sources, including memoirs, newspaper articles, lists of passengers compiled at the ports of departure and arrival, and, most interestingly, letters from prospective immigrants to information bureaus established by Zionist institutions at several points along the migration pathways. Alroey’s main conclusion from the letters (and from his other sources) is that most of the migrants were artisans, peddlers, and small tradesmen who sought to escape the intolerable economic conditions in tsarist Russia, and who moved to Palestine not in order to join the Zionist enterprise but in search of better economic opportunities. They did not wish to shed their diaspora identities and become tillers of the soil, but rather to settle in cities and pursue their old occupations. They saw themselves “as immigrants, wanderers, or simply incomers—not as olim.” (7) In this respect, Jewish immigration to Palestine was no different from Jewish immigration to any other country, and indeed, a central theme of this book is a comparison between the Eastern European Jews who went to Palestine and those who departed to the United States. Alroey insists on the similarities between the groups, but his fascinating findings in fact suggest that the differences are no less, and perhaps even more telling. Although in both cases migrants were driven by economic distress, the movement to Palestine was to a large extent caused by the “fright and panic” of the pogroms. (236) Whereas both migrations...

‘Time for the Orient has come’: The Orient as a spiritual–cultural domain in the work of Uri Zvi Grinberg

The Yiddish–Hebrew poet Uri Zvi Grinberg migrated to Eretz Yisrael on 4 December 1923. It was the end of the Third Aliyah, a time of stagnation and decline, of hunger, housing shortages and fighting for a half-day’s wages. Young pioneers were leaving in droves, disappointed and bitter. Why did he choose to migrate just then? Why not earlier, when the Third Aliyah was at its height? Why did Grinberg absent himself in the early 1920s, when the Zionist-pioneering discourse was being shaped? What did Grinberg himself think about his belated move and the fact that he had not taken part in the formative stages of the Third Aliyah? This article is an attempt to examine from a cultural-historical perspective the evolution of Grinberg’s attitude towards Eretz Yisrael and the ‘Orient’ as a spiritual and cultural concept.

Labor Demonstrations: Aleksei Gan's Island of the Young Pioneers, Dziga Vertov's Kino-Eye, and the Rationalization of Artistic Labor

Of Russian Constructivism's manifold demonstration pieces, the model workers' club that Aleksandr Rodchenko exhibited in Paris in 1925 is one of the best. It s economy of mater ials and transparent structural logic exemplify Constructivism's rationalist bid for a socialist aesthetics, while its function as a club models the ideal of enlightened recreation as the partner to unalienated labor. Visible in the well-known photograph of the club are posters for the two films that are the subject of this essay. Both were conceived as demonstration pieces in their own right. The poster in the center, also designed by Rodchenko, is for Dziga Vertov's first feature-length film, Kino-Eye. The one to the right, with the pared-down typographic layout, advertises Aleksei Gan's Island of the Young Pioneers. Both films were made in 1924 and featured the Young Pioneers, the Soviet youth organization for children ages ten to fifteen founded in 1922 on the model of the Boy Scouts. Both were produced as examples of a new approach to filmmaking called “the demonstration of everyday life.” But while Kino-Eye has gone on to be celebrated as the closest thing to Constructivism in cinema, Island has only been mentioned in passing, and even then as a complete disaster.

Woman with a Movie Camera: My Life as a Russian Filmmaker by Marina Goldovskaya , Antonina W. Bouis (review)

120 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g materials more accessible. Indeed it is the museum's intention to make the greater part of the archive publicly available online. This attitude is born of a desire to do more than simply describe the collection. The book's purpose is also to stimulate 'further academic and artistic projects' (p. 5). One way inwhich itdoes this is through a number of short and longer pieces which contextualize the collection and itshistory.The other way inwhich the book sets out to promote research into and under standing ofVertov is by reproducing and translatingmeaty portions of the archive. Most valuable are the translations of a number of the many Vertov writings which do not appear in thewidely available edition of his works such as Vertov's 1947 annotated CV, the 'ArtisticCalling Card' ('Tvorcheskaia kartochka'). This fascinating document was published inKinovedcheskiezapiski in 1996, but is here for the firsttime available in both English and German. This document grants us considerable insight into a number of things such as the strivingby Vertov tomake the kinoki into a genuine mass journalistic organization after the model of the worker correspondents. Some of the other fascinating documents include a montage list forKinopravda No. 13 and a musical scenario for One Sixth of the Earth. As ever, it is possible to take issue with some of the translations such as thepersistent rendering of zhizn' vrasplokh as 'life caught unawares', rather than 'life off-guard' and neigrovoe kino as 'non feature film' rather than 'unplayed' or 'non-fiction' film. Nevertheless, theyare generally good, and an immense boon to thosewithout Russian. The volume reproduces a number of the collection's previously unpub lished photographs including fascinating images of Vertov in conversation with the young pioneers from the filmKino-Eye and a picture of Svilova and Vertov working together on the direction ofEnthusiasm.As the commentary suggests, this may be visual corroboration of the couple's closer and more equal artistic collaboration after the splitwith Vertov's brother, Mikhail, in I929 We also have translations here of a number of Vertov's poems, which while not great poetry (andVertov never attempted topublish them) grant valuable insight intohis thinking.Along with the restof the collection, theyopen a new path to the dizzy vertex ofDziga Vertov. Queen Mary, Universityof London JeremyHicks Goldovskaya, Marina. Woman with a Movie Camera: My Life as a Russian Filmmaker.Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. University ofTexas Press, Austin, TX, 2006. xii + 263 pp. Illustrations. Filmography. Appendix. Index. $24.95 (paperback). Woman with aMovie Camera, thememoirs of one of themost accomplished Russian documentary filmmakers, provides a unique gendered perspective on theRusso-Soviet film industry from the Stalin era to the present. The tide of Marina Goldovskaia's book harkens back toDziga Vertov's seminalMan with aMovie Camera, and evokes one of Vertov's favourite themes: the fate of the Soviet woman. These memoirs also pay homage to the genre of the personal REVIEWS 121 essay-film. Through her overtly subjective stance and autobiographical meditations, Goldovskaia creates a verbal counterpart to thepersonal filmand animates themore familiar picture of Soviet filmhistory. In the firstpart of the book, Goldovskaia examines her childhood and youth in Stalinist and early post-Stalinist Russia, and discusses what influ enced her to become a filmmaker. Goldovskaia opens her book with a chapter dedicated to her father,Evsei Goldovskii, the chief designer of Soviet film technology. She skilfullyintertwines the general and the personal in the chapters about her apartment building, where most of the Soviet film elite lived, and the filmmakers' resort in theMoscow suburb of Bolshevo. The author recollects her encounters with major Soviet filmmakerswith humour and sometimes with irony, thus commenting on this exclusive community's lifestyle during Soviet times.While most Soviet film histories deal with cultural politics, Goldovskaia presents a very personal account of Soviet film culture, the cinematographer's everyday life. The second part of the book is organized by film. Each chapter discusses the inspiration forGoldovskaia's films, as well as the actual production cir cumstances and the reception of the films by the authorities and the public. Interspersed with these chapters are discussions of her opinions on topics related to filmmaking, such as 'Once...

The Wall: Growing Up behind the Iron Curtain (review)

The Wall:Growing Up behind the Iron Curtain Peter Sís and Elizabeth Bush Thirty sentences, give or take the odd ellipsis, form the armature upon which Sís recontructs his early growth as an artist, and a few dozen journal entries add a lean layer of flesh to the tale. The real substance of this inventively fashioned autobiography, however, lies in the images—some tidily sequential, others boldly sprawling double bleeds—that trace Sís' creative journey from a toddler compelled to doodle to a young professional compelled to leave his native Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s for liberty in the West. And if readers just happen to find themselves inadvertently expanding their knowledge of the Cold War, that makes their own literary journey all the richer. Baby Peter, paper and pencil in hand and head turned to an impossible rotation, glances over his shoulder in the opening scene to fix his audience with sky-blue eyes of astonishing clarity and near magnetic force (the text reads, "As long as he could remember, he had loved to draw"). Boxing in the baby are three additional lines of fine-print text defining the Iron Curtain, the Cold War, and Communism, the intangible entities that will form a restrictive perimeter around his life over the coming thirty-some years. In the following pages, a series of small scenes finely textured in black ink introduce us to a happy little kid who's free to draw anything he likes in his own home, safe in the care of his obviously loving parents. A splash of Communist red infiltrates each frame, though, usually in the guise of a flag or a ubiquitous star, and by the time Sís leaves the nest and has to draw "what he is told to at school," flashes of red have made their way into Young Pioneers neckerchiefs, hammer and sickle paintings on the classroom easels, missiles sprouting from a map of Cuba, bloodstains pocking the dying John Kennedy slumped in his Dallas limo. There's no escaping the pervasive influence of global political drama, and in this "time of brainwashing," an enormous red cloud bearing a host of Russian leaders tails the young boy as he walks down Prague's cobbled streets. The first of three sets of journal entries closes out this segment, presenting Sís' own youthful take on events ("The Soviet Union launched a rocket carrying a little dog named Laika into space. I wonder how the dog is going to land?"), and offering clues to readers on the content of several of the scenes they had just witnessed. A turn of the page brings an unexpected smattering of fresh hues as Sís begins to question the party line and, under the relatively liberal leadership of Alexander Dubcek, the Prague Spring of 1968 explodes with the music of the Beatles, Elvis, and the Rolling Stones. Now the preponderantly black-and-white images are sprinkled with colorful bits of Sís' own work—roiling in the air above [End Page 69] the apartment building, painted on a drum set, fastened to the wall—and a tiny monochromatic Sís cavorts through a fantasy panorama of players and symbols of the contemporary popular arts. Again a set of journal entries adds Sís' personal commentary, and another page turn ushers in the grim crackdown of Soviet occupation as tanks roll into Prague and Sís' world reverts to black, white, and red. Slowly, pockets of livelier color reemerge, evoking the rebellious spirit of muralists who wage a battle of wits and paint with the government, and in Sís' paintings, which are attracting official censure. In the concluding segment, Sís dreams of escape, clutching his pictures under his arm as he bicycles through an imaginary landscape of wild plans to cross the Iron Curtain and finally taking flight across the Wall on the wings of his own artwork. Snippets of italicized commentary run along the sides of most pages, providing historical context in a timely and unobtrusive fashion ("June 17, 1969. The Prague [Beach Boys] concert takes place in Lucerna Hall. Police with dogs wait nearby"), and an afterword recaps thhe benchmarks of...

A “Vital Feeling” of “Humanist Hatred”: Narratives of Sovereignty and Totalitarian Childhoods

After the German Democratic Republic suddenly collapsed in 1989/90, the Junge Pioniere (“Young Pioneers”) youth organization became, overnight, a closed object of research—as did the GDR's children's and youth literature. From the perspective of totalitarianism scholarship, the process of reassessing the GDR dictatorship is intimately bound up with the question of commonalities and differences with the National Socialist state. The present study into the Young Pioneers organization and its received children's and youth literature is to be understood in the context of this comparative perspective. The study of the Young Pioneers and “their” genuine socialist CYL will reveal how much the “Stunde Null” idea of starting entirely afresh in East Germany remained fraught with complexities. 1 Translated by Andrew Boreham.

An examination of the Role of the National Youth Service/Militia in Zimbabwe and its Effect on the Electoral Process, 2001-2005

What explains the re-emergence of the National Youth Service / Militia, launched in Zimbabwe in August 2001? This paper argues that, amid the intense political struggle between the ruling party and a largely worker- and urban-society-based political opposition, there was an urgent need to have in place a cheap and available institution that could be relied upon both to toe the party line religiously and to execute state supported extra-legal activities, including violence. The institution, drawn from the country's earlier political history, was the Zimbabwe Peoples' Militia, now reincarnated as the National Youth Service (NYS). This assertion is supported by the role and function of the NYS, deployed to 'police' the results of Operation Murambatsvina, the forced removal of the poor from the country's urban centres, which has been universally condemned, even by the African Union. However, if this analysis is correct, post-crisis Zimbabwe will be faced with the challenge of having to put down the NYS, a situation similar to what happened in Malawi, towards the end of the reign of the late Malawian President, Kamuzu Banda, and his Young Pioneers.

The Young Pioneers and the Rituals of Citizenship in Revolutionary Zanzibar

Inspired by Eastern European precedents, Zanzibar's revolutionary regime in the 1960s and 1970s established the Young Pioneers as an institution through which to inculcate the sort of discipline perceived as necessary for nation building. I argue that through an emphasis on Pioneer parades, revolutionary elites allowed themselves to be persuaded by forms and appearances. They prized marching bodies of young men and women more for their visual effect than for the discipline they produced. Parades provided periodic evidence of good citizenship and conformity; they functioned as a strategy of display and a ritual of citizenship, more than as a discipline in the Foucauldian sense. This distinction explains how a rare accumulation of power on the part of a postcolonial elite in Africa could be both spectacular and ephemeral at the sametime.

The Young Pioneers and the Rituals of Citizenship in Revolutionary Zanzibar

The Young Pioneers and the Rituals of Citizenship in Revolutionary Zanzibar

Henry Gilman: American Pioneer in the Rise of Organometallic Chemistry in Modern Science and Technology

AbstractFor Abstract see ChemInform Abstract in Full Text.

The Current Status of Chinese Children

The report highlights results from a collaborative research program coordinated by the China Youth and Children Research Center. Trends are based on responses from over 4,000 children ages 6 to 14 in 45 districts, counties, and county-level cities as well as from other surveys and assessments of Chinese primary and secondary school children. Some comparisons are made between rural and urban children. The following issues are addressed: physical development, health, parent-child relationships, self-acceptance, awareness of rules and laws, awareness of equality and tolerance for differences, awareness of environmental concerns, consumption attitudes and behaviors, use of leisure time, academic pressures, participation in the Young Pioneers, and the influence of children on adults. The report addresses areas of progress as well as concerns facing modern Chinese children in a rapidly changing economic, political, and cultural climate.