Against the Current: Schoolchildren’s Informal Organizations in the 1930s and Early 1940s

Abstract

The article is devoted to the schoolchildren associations of the 1930s and early 1940s, which were created as grassroot initiatives, bypas sing—and often standing in opposition to—the pioneers and the Komsomol. These forms of activity make it possible to see adolescents in an unusual light—as the subjects of history—and to imagine how the socio-political realities and ideology of this period were refracted in their minds. The above material shows that, as in other periods, children’s amateur activity in the 1930s and early 1940s grew out of needs that were not met within the state system of education and upbringing. The political repressions that swept the country in the second half of the 1930s did not become an obstacle for these movements. However, a strong “formatting” effect was exerted by the focal points of the policy aimed at children of that time. The tightening of school discipline and normative pressure on the recalcitrant, ideological pressure with emasculated revolutionary meanings provoked reactions like Merton’s retreats and rebellion. Their organizational projections were, respectively, interest clubs, sometimes with a delinquent bias, and protest groups of various kinds. The weakening of Soviet isolationism and the decrease in ideological pressure during the war years stimulated the emergence of gaming communities to model state activities through the perspective of the rapprochement of nations.