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94 c h a p t e r f o u r Mobilized Childhood Responds to the Threat On 26 June 1960, the Soviet government marshaled the schools, the Pioneers, the Komsomol, and workers across the country to gather for the first annual Day of Soviet Youth. Writers and editors in the Russian press argued that this upcoming holiday was being held in order to honor the peace-loving children of the nation, who were diligently pursuing a better and brighter life for themselves and their compatriots around the world.1 “This day has been established,” announced one radio reporter, “in commemoration of the huge service that our boys and girls give to their motherland. They will face the challenges ahead as fighters for peace.”2 Throughout the day, adults gathered with children in parks, in stadiums, and on the streets—finally meeting, 100,000 strong, in Red Square, where they marched past the Lenin Mausoleum . “The Soviet children not only express their greetings, but are also gladdened by their international peers, who study in the Soviet Union,” one Russian reporter announced over the radio.3 Continuing, he described the young people around him on the streets of Moscow: “Our children devote their talent and their abilities to their work and their studies. . . . [They] think about peace, about friendship, about the future. Every day, [they] convey [prinosiat ] proof of the vitality and rightness of the politics of the Soviet Union and its leadership in strengthening peace and friendship around the world.”4 Standing in Red Square as the evening sun began to set, the Vietnamese delegate , Nguyen Van Ty, announced that the “boys and girls of Vietnam are happy that together with their Soviet friends they can struggle for peace and higher human ideals.”5 The evening ended with a stirring speech from Khrushchev, who called upon the Pioneer youth organization to marshal the next generation for the cause of peace. One week earlier, the KGB Chairman, Alexander Shelepin, had warned Khrushchev that the Pentagon was looking for an excuse to launch a preventative war on the Soviet Union. Secretly, Khrushchev was preparing a statement in defense of Cuba in case of an American invasion. Mobilized Childhood Responds to the Threat 95 Publicly, he was declaring his commitment to peace. “Youth and peace are inseparable,” he announced. “We must have peace in order to work, to dare, to love, and to dream.”6 With dove-shaped pins attached to their Pioneer ties, with the flags of the Soviet Union’s favored countries flying in the warm, dry evening air of Red Square, and with no images of Stalin on display, these children represented a new way of conceptualizing the Cold War. They conveyed the message that the population was now prepared to take organized, international action for the cause of peace. They promoted a revised imagining of the Cold War as a new crusade for cultural and economic supremacy over the West and for the promotion of national liberation movements around the world that were struggling against perceived American imperialism.7 A similar story played out in the United States. Less than two years later, John F. Kennedy stood before representatives of the Children’s Bureau at the Statler Hilton Hotel in Dallas, Texas, and delivered a speech on the future of America’s children. He declared the importance of youth organizations in working with kids to “further the cause of freedom and peace and dignity throughout the world.”8 This speech fit well with Kennedy’s emerging language of popular, organized, and peaceful activism. Thirteen months earlier, he had written the executive order that launched the Peace Corps. In the coming years, the first American delegates in the People-to-People Ambassador program went abroad, while organizations like the Boy Scouts of America embraced new initiatives to widen the international awareness and reach of its members. As the 1960s dawned, it appeared that American children, like their Soviet counterparts, now had a new role to play in the promotion of an American agenda abroad. The days of domestic containment seemed to be waning and a new kind of international activism for the young was on the rise. In the 1950s and 60s, domestic policy paralleled the foreign policies of Soviet and American leaders. Just as both sides had sought to contain the enemy and create buffers against the possibility of resurgent power in the early 1950s, so too had they encouraged their populations to mobilize defensively in their homes...

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