The New Generation and the New Russia: Modern Childhood as Collective Fantasy

This essay exposes a confluence between the modern idea of a "new generation" and that of a "new Russia." For many radicals, progressives, and liberals, revolutionary Russia represented hopes for a more equitable social order, in which culture and common good would count for more than profit, and in which children would be raised to become citizens of the world. Focusing on two best-selling texts of the early 1930s, New Russia's Primer: The Story of the Five-Year Plan, a Soviet schoolbook by the Russian engineer M. Il'in, and The New Generation: The Intimate Problems of Modern Parents and Children, a collection of essays by prominent psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, physicians, and social critics, the essay argues that fascination with Soviet Russia was as tied to the possibility of social engineering via children's education as it was to the engineering of machines and the "romance of economic development."