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Chapter Three Flowers of Evil Mass Media, Child Psychology, and the Struggle for Russia’s Future during the First World War Aaron J. Cohen How does media violence affect children? This question is as difficult to answer now as it was during the First World War, when Russian pedagogues, teachers, and journalists first began to grapple with the problem. For them, the Great War loomed as a watershed event in human history, an event with the power to remake nations, peoples, and individuals. Today historians have little doubt that World War I introduced a new level of brutality into the European experience, but the precise relationship between the war and the subsequent violence of the twentieth century remains unclear. Was the First World War a product of long-term developments in the politics, economics , and culture of modern life? Or did it enable and legitimize the use of mass political violence on a qualitatively new scale? Educators and public figures in wartime Russia could not imagine the violent future that awaited Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, but between 1914 and 1917 they did seek to discover how imaginary violence might shape the future. Ironically, they found not the answer to the question but the question itself. Scientific investigation into the effects of media violence on children seems to have begun in earnest during World War I. There was some scattered interest in the subject of war and children before 1914, but formal studies were rare, if they existed at all.1 After the war began, however, scienti fic and popular interest in the topic increased dramatically.2 Europeans suddenly faced warfare on an unimaginably large geographic, economic, and military scale, and they felt a strong need to understand this new war 38 experience. Moreover, modern psychology was still evolving as a scientific discipline in the early twentieth century, and the institutions, practices, and theories of child psychology, like many of the social and human sciences, were not as well defined as they are today.3 The issue of children and media violence,for example,was not yet institutionalized as a field of research,and investigative techniques were crude compared to present-day practices.4 In 1914, the appearance of a specific type of war at a specific stage in the development of scientific culture helped create a new area for psychological study: children and media violence. The war’s almost immediate mesmerizing effect on children helped spur this new line of inquiry in Russia. To adults, Russian children appeared overwhelmed by the intense public patriotism that became pervasive in 1914 and early 1915. “Everyone who has had contact with children in this troubled year has probably observed the reflection of war fire and the echo of war thunder in children’s lives,” noted the pedagogue V. Voronov in late 1915.“Conversation, drawing, play, letters, questions, day-dreams—they all shine with the fire of war.”5 This overwhelming enthusiasm for war among children was to some extent a media invention, for it helped demonstrate both the war’s popularity among the Russian people and the supposedly deep-rooted Russian national characteristics of hardiness, selflessness, and courage that would ensure victory.6 Academic studies suggested, however, that children’s interest in the war was real. Voronov found in December 1914 that 69.4 percent (107 out of 154) of pupils at one urban school answered the question“What do you want to be when you grow up?”with occupations that showed the “clear imprint of the war” (such as soldier, pilot, or doctor).7 Late in the war, 24 percent of girls in one eighth-grade class still wanted to be doctors, a marked increase over prewar numbers.8 In the experience of adult observers, the war remained important in the lives of children long after patriotic culture weakened in 1915. Teachers, educational theorists, and social commentators wanted to know what to do about the fascination that many children had for the war. These specialists claimed, after all, to be the professional guardians of the child’s psychological health. “How great and wonderful is the role of the pedagogue in guarding the child’s soul from the poisonous ‘flowers of evil’ that grow so easily in difficult times,” wrote one, “but how terrifying and critical is that role at the same time!”9 Young Russians, they knew, learned about the war from family members, but they also learned from the...

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