Raising young Russia: The family, the state, and the preschool child, 1917-1931

Within a year of the October revolution, despite the desperate situation of a bloody civil war, foreign intervention, and a shattered economy, the Bolshevik government considered it important to begin the process of building a set of preschool institutions. Many Bolsheviks, along with other Russian Marxists, populists, and European socialist generally, had long held that a socialization of childrearing chores was an integral part of the revolutionary agenda. Initially, interest in kindergartens stemmed from the conviction that the "withering away" of the family was imminent, if not already well under way. In practice, profound material constraints, the desire to free women from the burden of childcare, and efforts to revolutionize education all shaped the emerging preschool institutions. By 1931, the goal of eliminating the family had been abandoned and the Bolshevik leadership approached the kindergarten with a totally different set of priorities than they had had in 1917. The kindergarten curriculum gained importance as a means of influencing children in the most impressionable years of life.;The present study traces the Bolsheviks' ambivalent reconciliation with the family through an examination of family-kindergarten relations and of changes in preschool pedagogy. During the Civil War the Bolshevik leadership concentrated on efforts to replace the family and tolerated a broad range of preschool programs, regardless of their potential incompatibility with socialism. In the 1920s, as the possibility of establishing socialized child care became increasingly remote, the Bolsheviks turned their attention to devising revolutionary preschool curricula. Recognizing that parents would continue to play a role in childrearing did not necessarily entail a rejection of the kindergarten as an agent of social transformation. The utopian dream of eliminating the family faded, only to be replaced by a perhaps equally utopian faith in the ability of the kindergarten to remake childhood and the life of the entire family.