Unter dem Roten Stern geboren: Sowjetische Kinder im Bild

Children and childhood had an important place in the Soviet collective imaginary. Pictures of children acted as social glue, they mobilized people for the construction of a new society, motivated them to sacrifice and renounce and conveyed central utopian promises. Pictures of the children of the peoples of the Soviet Union represented the cohesion of the empire. Soviet pictorial formulas drew on the cultural repertoire of European art history and Christian iconography. But the boundaries of what can be seen and shown have shifted again and again. Pictorial formulas could be ironically questioned and lose their pathos. The representations, formulas and metaphors of Soviet childhood encompassed a broad spectrum from utopia to escape room, from child hero to infantile man, from the promise of collective prosperity to the promise of private happiness. The thaw in particular brought about a renaissance of the natural, romantic, yes ‘godly’ child. Nostalgic practices of remembering ‘the Soviet childhood’, but also their political exploitation, prove the lasting effect of this symbolic politics, which shaped strong normative ideas.