From Einstein to Lenin

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By Katerina Bodovski Last summer I gave a talk at the University of Oxford, sharing my work on the comparison of childhood and education between Russia and the US. My husband and I decided to prolong our European stay and spent a week in Switzerland. We were sitting inside a small cafe in Bern named “Einstein” on a warm day in late June. Suddenly we heard a female voice coming from the street, saying in a very loud Russian: “Renowned physicist…

Good-bye, Lenin!

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by Nelli Piattoeva It happened at the end of the 1980s during perestroika or right after 1990, I cannot remember the exact time. My parents were eagerly absorbing liberal newspapers that were full of revelations about the cruelties of the Soviet regime and the hypocrisy of Soviet leaders. Once I picked one such a newspaper – Argumenty i Facti – and read a short article about Lenin. It accused Lenin of ordering the killing of his critics. I was astonished…

Fairy Tales and Princesses Against Soviet Realism

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by Iveta Silova I grew up listening to beautiful fairy-tales of all kinds, including Latvian and Russian folk tales, Brothers Grimm, Pushkin, Lewis Carroll, and fairy stories my grandmother told me almost every night. My dad loved reading fairy tales aloud to me and he always chose books with the most beautiful illustrations. Later, when we bought a much coveted record-player, I also listened to the recordings of different fairy tales. These recordings, especially the 1976 release of Lewis Carroll’s…

‘Her New Friend’

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by Zsuzsa Millei A girl, Patricia, joined us in the kindergarten group in a regional town in Hungary. We have never had a child visiting before. Now we had someone from Chile. I remember being full of questions but don’t remember how and when I received answers. It was in 1974 or 1975, just a couple of years after the start of the Pinochet regime in Chile. Many who were active in the Communist Party have left Chile. My mother…

Our book has just been published!

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Check it out here! “The authors of this beautiful book are professional academics and intellectuals who grew up in different socialist countries. Exploring “socialist childhoods” in a myriad ways they draw on memoirs and memories, personal experience and collectively history, emotional knowledge of an insider and a measured perspective of an analyst. What emerges is life that was caught between real optimism and dullness, ethical commitments and ideological absurdities, selfless devotion to children and their treatment as a political resource.…