{"id":160,"date":"2012-07-15T16:49:01","date_gmt":"2012-07-15T20:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/?p=160"},"modified":"2012-07-15T16:49:01","modified_gmt":"2012-07-15T20:49:01","slug":"julie-degraffenried-children-in-the-russian-history-survey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/2012\/07\/15\/julie-degraffenried-children-in-the-russian-history-survey\/","title":{"rendered":"Julie deGraffenried, Children in the Russian History Survey"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Integrating Children, Childhood, and Youth into the Undergraduate Russian Survey<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since Jackie so ably made the case<\/a>\u00a0for the importance of introducing childhood and youth to history students, I\u2019ll move on to discuss how this can be done in the undergraduate classroom. Like many of you, I teach a two-semester introductory survey, broken into \u201cRussia to 1861\u201d and \u201cRussia Since 1861.\u201d<\/p>\n

Getting students to think about age as a useful category of analysis is both easier and harder than you might think. For whatever reasons, exercises involving children\/youth are among the most popular I do in survey courses. Maybe analyzing children seems \u201ceasier\u201d to undergraduates than probing gender or class or economics. After all, students know<\/em> they have experience as children. For traditional college students, their childhoods are still quite near. The idea that age (both chronological and developmental) is a key factor in how people experience, interpret, and engage the world around them makes sense to them. Students often express that they find sources about or by children relatable, and their collective reactions \u2013 often passionate and empathetic \u2013 affirm this engagement.<\/p>\n

The flipside of this enthusiasm is that students tend to think they \u201cget\u201d childhood and youth because they ARE (or were) children and youth \u2013 in the same way that American college students think they \u201cknow\u201d American history simply because they are American. Without some prodding, their analysis can be limited in depth or sophistication, or limited by their own childhood experiences. There is a tendency to overpersonalize and underanalyze \u2013 i.e., \u201cIf I were in this situation, I would \u2026\u201d or \u201cThis was not a normal childhood because \u2026\u201d \u2013 which is not necessarily the point of the exercise. The trick, then, is to draw students in with the accessibility and interest that sources about children seem to generate, while continually pushing them to think like a historian.<\/p>\n

There is a wealth of resources available for and relevant to childhood and youth in Russian history, though most are applicable to the second half or a twentieth-century survey. In addition to those listed by Jackie in her previous post, here are some of my favorite primary sources.<\/p>\n

Russia to 1861<\/em> \u2013 Domostroi<\/em> is a great way to introduce the concept of childhood, and to questions about parent-child relationships, gender and childhood, definitions of childhood, upbringing, Orthodoxy and childhood, and, as an elite document, class and childhood. Students can use Carolyn Pouncy\u2019s edition<\/a> or excerpts like these<\/a>. Another kind of childhood can be explored using either A Life Under Russian Serfdom<\/a>: The Memoirs of Savva Dmitrievich Purlevskii<\/em> by Savva Purlevskii, translated and edited by Boris B. Gorshkov, or Up from Serfdom<\/a>: My Childhood and Youth in Russia, 1804-1824<\/em> by Aleksandr Nikitenko, translated by Helen Jacobson. With these, childhood can be related to serfdom, society, material culture, family, and transitions to youth and adulthood. A comparison of Nikitenko\u2019s memoir with Leo Tolstoy\u2019s semi-autobiographical Childhood<\/a> <\/em>could be productive. Karolina Pavlova\u2019s A Double Life<\/a><\/em> helps to illuminate the position and options of girls in elite imperial society, while Turgenev\u2019s Fathers and Sons<\/a><\/em> is the quintessential generations novel.<\/p>\n

Russia Since 1861<\/em> \u2013 Tian-Shaanskaia\u2019s Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia<\/a><\/em>, edited by David Ransel, leads to excellent discussions about \u201cmodern\u201d childhood. Memoirs about childhood include S. I. Kanatchikov\u2019s From the Story of My Life<\/a><\/em>, Nina Lugovskaya\u2019s I Want to Live<\/a><\/em>, Anatole Konstantin\u2019s A Red Boyhood<\/a><\/em>, Ella Fonyakova\u2019s That Winter\u2019s Bread<\/a>: A Child\u2019s View of the Leningrad Siege<\/em> (fiction, but autobiographical), or Elena Gorokhova\u2019s A Mountain of Crumbs<\/a><\/em>. Don Raleigh\u2019s recent oral history project, Soviet Baby Boomers<\/a><\/em>, provides another way to explore Soviet childhood and youth. The website Seventeen Moments<\/a> has a wealth of resources: for example, the 1921 subheading \u201cHomeless Children\u201d includes an essay by Lewis Siegelbaum, 8 images, a musical selection (with lyrics translated into English), and two videos. Children feature prominently in Soviet posters, and good collections can be found in the Swarthmore Peace Collection<\/a> and Sovietposters.com<\/a>, where you can create a customized collection based on date or topic. Young Pioneer music can be found here<\/a>. Film excerpts \u2013 i.e., Eisenstein\u2019s Odessa steps scene<\/a> or the Teutonic Knights burning children in \u201cAleksandr Nevskii<\/a>\u201d – \u00a0provoke discussion about the constructs and uses of childhood\/children in the arts and propaganda, as can whole films such as \u201cIvan\u2019s Childhood<\/a>,\u201d made available with English subtitles by MosFilm, and Soviet animation such as \u201cPioneer Violin<\/a>\u201d or \u201cThe Millionaire<\/a>.\u201d Material culture and questions of place and space can be explored at the excellent virtual museum at \u201cCommunal Living in Russia<\/a>\u201d where students can create their own tours utilizing the site\u2019s essays, photographs, videos, and documents.<\/p>\n

Incorporating childhood and children\u2019s history into your Russian survey courses has several benefits. For most of your students, children offer a \u201cnew\u201d historical voice they have never considered. Talking about children or the construction of childhood will complicate their perceptions of the family, education, and culture in Russian history. It will certainly enrich your discussions about Soviet society, generational change, and memory: because the creation of the New Soviet Man so depended on the state\u2019s success (real or imagined) in bringing up children properly, children were critical symbols of Soviet achievement. Pedagogically, the topic adapts easily to primary source, media, or image analysis, writing assignments, or book discussions. Perhaps most importantly, you will provide your students with a set of questions and an approach that can be used productively in their other history courses or future research.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Integrating Children, Childhood, and Youth into the Undergraduate Russian Survey Since Jackie so ably made the case\u00a0for the importance of introducing childhood and youth to history students, I\u2019ll move on to discuss how this can be done in the undergraduate classroom. Like many of you, I teach a two-semester introductory survey, broken into \u201cRussia to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1133,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1181,22261,22267,22264,1],"tags":[88927,46219],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-children","category-featured","category-film-and-music","category-soviet-history","category-uncategorized","tag-children","tag-degraffenried","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}