Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War

2. The “Other” Child

42 c h a p t e r t w o The “Other” Child The construction of the Cold War child was inextricably bound to the formation of social and cultural identities on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But visions of containment could only perform their desired functions if they had a counter-ideal against which they could be compared. In the first two decades of the Cold War, this antithesis came in the form of the “Other” child living on the enemy side, who provided a sufficiently harrowing vision of the enemy to justify and legitimize the war. In the Soviet Union, this meant identifying American youth as cursed by material want and poverty, lost in an ideological vacuum, and impoverished by violent, racist, bourgeois imperialism. In the United States, this meant seeing Soviet kids as bound and roboticized into a state of conformity and inhumanity by an oppressive regime. Both sides engaged their domestic audiences and each other in a wide-sweeping, visual and rhetorical dialogue of victimhood about the enemy’s children. Both sides did this in order to identify themselves and their own young as not persecuted by a systemically destructive and predatory sociopolitical system. By contrasting positive images of the lives of their own children with representations of the destitution of the other side’s youth, politicians, lobbyists, advertisers, domestic propagandists, party members, and educators participated in a campaign of differentiation that defined the cultural currency of the war. As the Cold War progressed, these visions of suffering children on the other side of the Iron Curtain became more complicated. New and arguably far more disturbing images of the “Other” child emerged bearing traits that were, in the context of the Cold War, potentially to be envied. The discipline of Soviet children became something to be admired in an age in which the war was sure to continue into the next generation on the battlefield and in the laboratory. The seemingly free lives of American youth allowed for a kind of self-expression and creativity that could foster the inventive leaps that were necessary to continue competing. American pedagogues and politicians looked longingly at the high number of disciplined engineering and physics graduates that the Soviet Union seemed to be producing. Similarly, educators The “Other” Child 43 and Communist Party leaders in the Soviet Union expressed grudging admiration for the apparently inventive capacities of American youth. These images of the “Other” child performed important functions in shaping Soviet and American culture. As in many wars before it, the specter of the suffering child reinforced the moral underpinnings of the conflict for domestic populations. It identified the enemy as a predator for children and justified the role of the state as protector of the young. When, in the late 1950s, the perceived discipline and freedom of the enemy’s child became increasingly desirable, these images helped to justify increased funding and reforms to both side’s educational systems. Yet, at the same time, for many on both sides of the Iron Curtain, this tentative recognition of the “Other” child as having enviable traits represented a fraying of the images that supported the Cold War consensus. It forced each side to question (albeit tentatively) the validity of its own approach to child-rearing and its own leadership. It introduced increasingly problematic visions of both sets of children into the mainstream. It turned education into a Cold War issue in ways that led both sides to question if the state was in fact intervening in the lives of children for the children, or for the war. “American Children Are Starving and Violent” In the Soviet Union, the official image of the capitalist child in the 1950s was based on historical perceptions of Western childhood dating back to the Communist Manifesto. To Marx and Engels, child labor, having emerged from the Industrial Revolution, was an integral part of the capitalist drive to exploit the worker whenever possible. They contended that this exploitation had created generations of children who faced futures of continued violence and destitution.1 In the Soviet Union, in 1937, the writer Sergei Ostriakov wrote that “in bourgeois societies, the human being absorbs with the mother’s milk a consciousness that either you rob another, or he robs you; either you are the slave-owner or the slave.”2 By the time the Cold War arrived, the image of the capitalist child had become an integral part of the Communist Party’s larger effort to convince...