bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1992) — Summer 1992 // Été 1992, pp. 38–40
Children of Glasnost: Growing Up Soviet
by Landon Pearson, Lester and Orpen
Dennys, 1990. 505 pp., $18.95.
Recent years have seen a massive outpouring of works that have attempted to describe and account for the revolution that Mikhail Gorbachev unwittingly launched in 1985. Few have successfully met the dizzying challenge of Soviet change. Events there have been moving so fast that analyses and predictions are often irrelevant by the time they make it into print. As a result, much of the literature on “Gorbachev’s Russia” has suffered a very short shelf-life, particularly where the daily politics of reform is concerned.
The avenue of inquiry pursued in Landon Pearson’s Children of Glasnost: Growing Up Soviet seems more promising. As the title suggests, Pearson’s focus is the first offspring of the Gorbachev revolution — the generation reared and educated in the 1980s that will shape “new thinking” and the Soviet future into the 21st century. Given Pearson’s assertion that the survival of the human race will ultimately depend on our children’s ability to cooperate with their Soviet counterparts, the reader is led to expect that the book’s attempt to describe the “children of glasnost” will have more staying power than an exploration of who’s up and who’s down in the Kremlin.
The author brings a good list of credentials to her task. In the 1970s, the mother of five took a master’s degree in educational psychology to “consolidate and make sense out of twenty years of hands-on experience.”
Dissatisfaction with Western theories of child development fuelled Pearson’s curiosity about Soviet perspectives, a curiosity she indulged during three years in Moscow with her husband Geoffrey, who was Canada’s ambassador to the USSR from 1980 to 1983. Pearson made good use of her diplomatic status to win access to a range of people and institutions that in the early 1980s was likely beyond the reach of the typical Western student. After 1983, she returned to the USSR five times to update her research, visiting most recently in the spring of 1989.
The result is a remarkably thorough account of what it was like to “grow up Soviet” in the 1980s. The Soviet child, Pearson tells us, is the unique product of the interaction between two worlds: the “affectionate, indulgent, yet somewhat constricting world of the Soviet family” ’, and the “carefully planned collective world” of the Soviet school and other state organizations that see to the proper “upbringing” of the country’s youngest citizens. Pearson draws on a great wealth of material — scholarly writings, interviews, and months of first-hand observation — to bring these worlds to life for the Western reader. We are shown children at work in the classroom and at play in the schoolyard; we learn what they read and what they watch on TV; we hear of the music they listen to and the stories they hear at home; we visit a children’s puppet theatre in the city and see Soviet families at play at the beach. No detail has been overlooked. We learn, for example, that the new Soviet baby Will begin toilet training at four months and be introduced to meat at seven months; when the youngster goes to school, he or she will have a snack at ten in the morning that might consist of “hot milk with a little tea in it” and a sweet bun. Anything that one could conceivably wish to know about the daily life and world of the Soviet child seems to be here.
Pearson is careful to place her everyday observations in their broader historical context. Chapters on Soviet child psychology, labour education, youth organizations, and children’s theatre, for example, are all enriched by brief accounts of how theory and practice have evolved since the early days of the Bolshevik regime. These passages are nicely integrated into a text that is clear and informative but never dry and academic. The style is well-suited to the very human touch that the author brings to her material. Whether discussing special schools for the handicapped or the trials and pitfalls of Soviet sex education, Pearson never lets the reader forget that hers is a story about real people – about children, parents, educators and bureaucrats whose concerns and expectations are not entirely unlike our own.
In her efforts to demonstrate the “human” component of “growing up Soviet”, however, Pearson seems to be knocking on an open door. She writes of the fact that Soviet families go to the park together on Sundays and on beach holidays in the summer as if this might be news to a Western reader. While this might well have been the case when Cold War stereotypes held sway a couple of decades ago, journalistic accounts from the 1970s and early 1980s, such as those by Hedrick Smith and David Shipler of The New York Times, have long since put to rest the notion that Soviets live and think in alien ways. Thus, while Pearson’s vignettes of Kolomenskoye and Gorky in Moscow and Yalta in the Crimea add a nice touch of colour to the book, in analytical terms they appear dated.
This seemingly minor item is worth raising because it points up the principal weakness of Children of Glasnost. Despite the author’s return to the USSR for several visits during the Gorbachev era, her analysis is burdened by the fact that the bulk of her fieldwork was completed almost two years before the upstart General Secretary came to power. In and of itself, of course, this is not necessarily a problem. Since history did not start from scratch on the day the Central Committee elected Gorbachev to its top post, one would expect any study of contemporary Soviet society to explore the pre-1985 phenomena that helped to make more recent transformations possible. Yet given the place of glasnost — the bulwark of perestroika — in Pearson’s title, and her emphasis on the impact of “new thinking” as a justification for the study, the volume that she has produced draws far too heavily on information gathered in the early 1980s.
Time and again, Pearson’s discussion of a given issue will centre on a detailed reconstruction of an interview she conducted or a meeting she attended some time in 1982 or 1983. A briefer update on subsequent developments usually follows, to culminate in a frustratingly vague statement to the effect that things are changing under Gorbachev. To be sure, no work of Soviet-ology written in these tumultuous times should be judged harshly simply for failing to keep up to date. Yet, to repeat, for a book that purports to inform about the children shaped by these times, the balance of Pearson’s discussion is badly skewed. Surely events such as the abrupt cancellation of senior history exams in the spring of 1988 and declining enrollments in the Komsomol deserve more than the passing mention they receive.
In her preface, Pearson acknowledges that “writing about any aspect of a society that is as deep in the throes of social and political change as the Soviet Union today is a daunting task”. Unfortunately, recognizing this challenge and meeting it are two different things. Children of Glasnost suffers from the author’s failure to adapt her content and method to the changing times. Pearson set out in the early 1980s to write a magnum opus on what it is like to grow up Soviet. In the tradition of journalistic and other chroniclers of the Soviet Union at that time, the unique qualification that Pearson brought to her subject was the experience of first-hand observation. Reported nearly a decade later, however, much of the resulting material has lost its immediacy. The pace of Soviet change, it seems, has claimed yet another victim.
It is a pity that Pearson did not decide to write two separate, shorter books: an account of daily life in Moscow in the late Brezhnev and Andropov eras, written with special reference to children, and a second work focused specifically on growing up under perestroika. Her attempt to combine the two in what she terms a “history of the present” gives short shrift to the more recent developments that one might expect to find treated at length in a book on the Children of Glasnost. If the reader expects, however, a richly detailed survey of the forces shaping Soviet youth on the eve of the Gorbachev revolution, he or she will not be disappointed.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1992) — Summer 1992 // Été 1992, pp. 38–40. Read the rest of this issue →
