Stalin's Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937–1951 by Karl D. Qualls (review)

Stalin's Niños charts the life trajectories of thousands of Spanish children who arrived in the Soviet Union in 1937–1938 as civil war refugees. At a time when the Soviet regime was punishing and deporting some of its ethnicities as "traitor nations," it was also showcasing its international largesse by "spending lavishly to protect and provide for Spaniards" (P. 9). The book's broad scope covers Spanish children's displacement (from the homeland due to the Spanish Civil War) followed by their new placement in Soviet boarding schools, evacuation to the Soviet interior at the onset of the Great Patriotic War, and subsequent reevacuation back to Moscow after the war, concluding in repatriation to Spain for some and the embracing of a new homeland for others.

The book is based on rich primary sources, including oral histories, memoirs, official documents from the Spanish archives in Madrid and Barcelona, and Russian archival holdings in Moscow. This broad range of sources creates a balanced, multifaceted narrative that sheds light on the professional dilemmas that children's mentors and educators faced, as well as the lived experiences of Spanish niños as told in their own words.

To be sure, children became the central concern of many modernizing states caught in the tumultuous events of the twentieth century.¹ For one thing, children were regarded as the source of the nation's recuperation and renascence. Orphaned and displaced children in particular were viewed as the collective national progeny, most malleable and thus suitable for shaping ideal future citizens.² Karl Qualls offers a new conceptual approach to the study of childhood, education, and mobility in the Soviet Union as a modernizing state in the 1930s–1950s, without prioritizing any particular Soviet nationality or constraining the analysis based on the country's territory.

What makes this story unique and at the same time universally relevant is that the Soviet state viewed Spanish children as neither a tabula rasa nor the quintessential "other." Rather than erasing children's national pasts and remolding their identities, Soviet officials and educators attempted to blend and hybridize their hispanidad with Sovietness. "Unlike Americans and the assumptions prevalent in their indigenous industrial schools, for example, the Soviets did not view the Spanish children as 'blank slates' but rather as transformable children who could learn to adapt to Soviet mores" (P. 4). Building on Francine Hirsch's concept of "double assimilation" simultaneously into an ethnoconfessional nation and the Soviet supranational community, Qualls argues that "Stalin's niños" underwent a process of amalgamation that was meant to make them in equal parts Spanish and Soviet. He reconstructs the Soviet take on modernization of its diverse populations as based on an educational system that prioritized "nurture" over "nature," standardized cultural and linguistic diversity, and upheld "dual loyalty" to the nation and to the multinational state. The same framework and line of historical inquiry can be effectively applied to other Soviet nationalities that have gradually progressed from "speaking Bolshevik with an accent" to becoming bilingual model Soviet citizens. Qualls's study also shows that the Soviet universalizing model of "making kin out of a stranger" could be effectively applied to all children, regardless of their ethnic, national, and class origins, as long as they agreed to adding "socialist content" to their "national" identification.

The Soviet educational facilities that were created to accommodate Spanish children under the aegis of "state-sponsored evolutionism" (to borrow a term coined by Hirsch) – casas de niños (boarding schools) – mirrored the organizational principles of schools for non-Russian children. Native language remained the language of instruction, with Russian taught across the board as the lingua franca. The curricula of Spanish boarding schools consisted of reading Spanish literature selected so as to shape a particular canon ("form") of national culture...