What’s in and Game: Play and Games as a Window into the Ideal Stalinist Child(hood)

• In Event: Liberation through Play?: Toys and Games as Objects of Indoctrination and Remediation

Abstract

Many institutions—religious, familial, educational—act upon children to form their character and the adults they might become. However, we often fail to consider games as formative experiences although leisure occupies much of childhood and is often far more pleasurable. In creating entertaining ways of learning, children are more likely to internalize lessons whereas overt indoctrination can become tiresome. Because of a dearth of consumer products like children’s toys during the period of rapid industrialization, children’s magazines became one vehicle to both entertain and develop the Soviet child(hood). This paper provides initial exploration of “board games,” crosswords, riddles, and samodelki toys during the mid-Stalin years as a window into what characteristics children’s magazines wanted to develop in the youngest builders of communism and what was particularly Soviet about them by making tentative comparisons to other contemporary authoritarian states.

Author

• Karl D. Qualls, Dickinson College