Petrified Utopia

Happiness Soviet Style

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Contents

A JOYFUL SOVIET CHILDHOOD: LICENSED HAPPINESS FOR LITTLE ONES

Catriona Kelly

In a recent essay, the Russian ethnolinguist Anna Zaliznyak claimed that the word schast'e, usually rendered in English by 'happiness', actually represents a quite specific emotional state. 'Happy' is adequately translated, she asserts, only by dovol'nyi, which suggests a comparable sense of well-anticipated and serene contentment. Schast'e, on the other hand, refers to a kind of elation that is extreme, sudden, and not to be relied on; it is a type of 'earthly bliss' that exists mainly in the future or in the past (i.e., is a potential force), and that cannot be attained by 'some algorithmic means — deserved or earned'. So unusual and accidental is the feeling, that it is also 'slightly shameful'. As always with this kind of exercise in comparative definition, one is tempted to dispute the nationally specific tenor of the analysis; the fact that 'happiness' is not the right translation for schast'e surely does not mean that there is no translation for schast'e ('bliss' would be fairly close), or that the emotional state so defined is unrecognizable to a person without that term in their linguistic range. However, there are two directions in which discussion can usefully run. One is that Zaliznyak foregrounds an association — which is indeed difficult to capture in English — between 'happiness' in the emotional sense and good luck (compare the Latinate term 'fortunate'). The other is that a perception of Russians' exceptional relationship with happiness is an important element in the national autostereotype, or, to put it more simply, in how Russians like to perceive themselves. Unhappiness (or 'bad luck') is, so the idea goes, fatalistically accepted, while happiness descends like manna from heaven and is definitely not going to last; perceiving happiness as somehow deserved or merited would be both foolish and arrogant. An indication of the pervasiveness of such views in what might be termed 'the performance of being Russian' is that the Russian teacher at my London school in the 1970s, a member of the 'first wave' of Russian emigration (she was born in Moscow in 1913 and brought up in a completely Russophone environment in Serbia), emphasised the exceptional meaning of schast'e when she first taught us the word (I can still remember the pantomime of ecstasy into which she contorted her rather set, if not actually lugubrious, small, snub-nosed face).

In terms of a generalisation about Russian culture, as opposed to a self-defining statement by Russians, the claims about schast'e have some limitations. Certainly according to a perhaps apocryphal but plausible story, silent films made before 1917 had two endings, the 'happy end' for Western Europe, and the sad one for Russia. Indeed, the term 'happy end' usually gets used by Russians in transliteration, kheppi end, as though to emphasise the alien nature of the concept.

In classic Russian literature, love affairs, as is well known, generally end badly; the contrast between Pride and Prejudice and Evgeny Onegin, to name two works of roughly similar date by authors of comparable temperament, is instructive. Just so in Tolstoy; happiness is an elusive emotion, as is suggested not only by the cryptic aphorism about happy and unhappy families at the beginning of Anna Karenina, but by, say, the heart-searching of Olenin, the protagonist of The Cossacks. For the Cossacks themselves, schast'e is an opportunity to be seized; thus in the older woman Usten'ka's question to Mar'yana when the latter, courted by Olenin, is reluctant to respond, Schast'ya sebe ne khochesh'? This translates literally as 'So you don't want happiness?' but might more appropriately be rendered, 'Don't you recognise good luck when you see it?' The Russian intellectual outsider's view of happiness is, in contrast, not pragmatic; it means following a course of action that is unlikely to bring social or, indeed emotional, advantage, and happiness is an unreliable and temporary emotional state; Kakya byl vlyublen v etu noch', kakya byl schastliv! (How much in love I was that night, how happy (or more appropriately, 'ecstatic')!)

Yet, as always with national stereotypes, the notion that suffering is proper to Russian culture (and a sign of the distinctiveness, even moral superiority, of same) has not gone unchallenged. Russian radical culture (Chernyshevsky's novel of blissful extramarital love, What is to be Done?, for example), posits quite a different model of human existence, one according to which it actually is possible to enjoy happiness, and indeed to create it. This attitude to happiness was absorbed into official Soviet culture, where — at least from Stalin's declaration in 1935 that 'life had become more joyful' (zhit' stalo veselee) — not recognising one's own happiness/good fortune as a Soviet citizen became tantamount to a political crime. Depressive states were branded 'decadent moods' (upadochnicheskie nastroeniya), and, like British citizens of the wartime years, those suffering such afflictions were expected to 'keep their pecker up' (nepadat' nosom) and not to 'whine' (khnykat').

From the mid-1930s until Stalin's death, with the signal exception of the war years, it was impermissible to acknowledge suffering on the part of any Soviet citizen who was not in one way or another beyond the pale. It followed that admitting to being unhappy was potentially shameful, an act of self-exposure. At the same time, happiness did not simply descend from above; it had to be worked for, and obtaining access to it became a demonstration of righteousness. Honoured citizens of the late 1930s and 1940s, such as Stakhanovite workers or record-breaking pilots, were among those who were understood to deserve happiness, a point registered not just in their privileged access to scarce goods (bicycles, pianos, family flats), but in the fact that they were usually represented in propaganda images with beaming smiles, gazing upwards into radiant sunshine. Yet such an emotion was too precious to be squandered in everyday contexts; thus, official photographs for identity papers (dokumenty), such as the Soviet passport, required that the subject pose face-on and without a smile, and business portraits, such as those of Party members for the 'boards of honour' or for double-page spreads in Pravda, were equally somber. Schast'e belonged to the world of the Soviet holiday or celebration (prazdnik) and not to ordinary days (budni); to leisure (otdykh, dosug) rather than to business (delo).

Something of an exception to this generally operating binary divide was, however, represented by the case of Soviet children, or at any rate, by younger children (malen'kie deti), who were by definition too young to be involved in 'business', and who had not yet reached the stage when they could be perceived as a political threat. The trope of 'happy childhood' was not invented in the Stalin era. An extremely influential example from classic Russian literature is Tolstoy's Childhood (Detstvo), where, in a famous passage later set for learning by heart in the schoolroom, the narrator meditated on his own good fortune:

Happy, happy time of childhood, never to return! How could one not love it, cherish one's memories of it? These memories refresh and elevate my soul and are a source of the greatest delights for me.

In other narratives by Tolstoy as well — for example, The Cossacks — childhood was also represented as a time of heedless happiness, retrievable by adults only if they became 'like children':

And suddenly such a bizarre feeling of causeless delight (schast'e) and love for everything came upon him that, falling into a habit that went back to childhood, he started crossing himself and expressing thanks to someone or other.

Children were recognised from the early days of Soviet power as a key target group of propaganda and agitation, and, given the importance of schast'e to Soviet ideology, it was natural that the idea of 'happy childhood' should be absorbed into propaganda for and about them. In the 1920s, the picture was still mixed: the slogan 'happy childhood' was sometimes used, and it was common for children's stories to have an optimistic flavor (Socialist Realist before their time!). Still, the real heyday of 'happy childhood' began in the mid-1930s. The years 1934 and 1935 witnessed an upsurge of 'joy and happiness' stories in the press; child readers of Pioneer Pravda could read about 'The Happy Life of Children in the Land of the Bolsheviks', 'We are the Children of a Happy Country', 'There is no End to the Joy', and so on. This was the period when 1 September, the start of the school year, was turned into a festival for 'happy children'; in the words of a poem printed in Pioneer Pravda in 1935:

Radiant, joyful, and cheery,
The day rises over the city.
Good day, autumn! Good day, school!
Good day, school year!

Also in late 1935 the famous slogan according to which children themselves expressed gratitude to Stalin (and through him to the Party and the state) for their good fortune was introduced: 'Thank You Comrade Stalin for [Our] Happy Childhood!' The forms of address varied — Stalin was sometimes invoked as 'dear' Comrade Stalin, rodnoi, an epithet usually reserved for family members, lovers or very close friends — but the adjective attached to 'childhood' was much more stable (the variant radostnoe, or 'joyful', was occasionally found, but rarely).

Official literature of the day also harped relentlessly on children's happiness, as in Aleksei Surkov's 'A Song about Stalin', written for the leader's sixtieth birthday in 1939, which was repeatedly anthologised, including in the official primer for the postwar Soviet schoolroom, Rodnaya rech' (Native Tongue, 1946, etc.):

Fairer than the first dawns of Spring
Is the happy time of youth.
Warmed by Stalin's smile
Our children play joyfully.

Stalin is our battle glory,
Stalin is the soaring of our youth,
Singing, fighting and winning,
Our nation follows Stalin.
(Aleksei Surkov, 'Pesnya o Staline' (Song of Stalin), 1939)

As the second stanza quoted here suggests, children were also exposed to the idea of happiness for adults — heroes on the one hand, the entire 'nation' or 'people' on the other. The ethos of 'happiness through self-sacrifice' was impressed upon them, particularly upon older children. In 1935, for example, the newspaper Pioneer Pravda illustrated a topos of the times, 'we are happy/lucky to live in such a wonderful new society,' with the words uttered by a member of the crew of the stratostat (supersonic airliner) USSR-1 Bis in June 1935: 'There is no greater joy than the joy of being the son of a country that is the hope of working people all over the world. There is no greater happiness than the happiness of living and working under the supervision of the great Communist Party. There is no greater happiness than reporting to the Leader about one's achievements.' Young readers learned about heroes such as Pavlik Morozov, who sacrificed the 'personal' in favor of the 'social' and 'collective' when reporting his father's misdemeanors to the authorities, or (in the postwar years) Aleksandr Matrosov, who died when using his own body to defend his comrades from a German gun position. All the same, children were seen, both in texts for children and in texts for adults, as the central group guaranteed happiness in the Soviet nation, a happiness directly conferred upon them by the Party and Leader of the nation.

A direct result of this situation was that it became difficult, from the mid-1930s, to address in print cases of childhood unhappiness within the Soviet Union itself. Unhappiness was the lot of children and adults abroad — in poor families within the rich West, and in Russia before 1917. 'I Don't Remember a Single Happy Day,' read the headline to a piece in Pioneer Pravda about one Petros Muradyan from the Collective Farm of the Name of Stalin: 'Over the seventy years of my life I have seen and experienced many things. Over the fifty-six years before Soviet Armenia was created, I don't remember a single happy day.' A common strategy was to juxtapose the unhappiness of one of these groups with the joyous life lived by Soviet children. An article in Our Achievements magazine contrasted the daughter of a textile worker in Moscow (who had such a talent for the piano that she had been selected as one of only two children to be loaned an instrument by the local House of Culture) with her mother, who in her girlhood had wistfully heard the strains of music played on a mysterious black box drifting from the windows of the local manor-house. By extension, while the Soviet authorities regularly collected reports of abuses in children's institutions, these were not usually made public; and news reports about cases where children had been disruptive or violent, or engaged in misdemeanors, attributed blame not to hardship or want, but to deficiencies in moral education.

The emphasis on happiness as the essential state of Soviet children did not vanish at the point when little Soviet citizens stopped thanking Stalin for their happy childhood. A child's poem published by Kornei Chukovsky in 1960 retained the emotional stereotypes of the past, while reconfiguring the cast of human actors represented:

Let there always be sunshine,
Let there always be blue skies,
Let there always be mama,
Let there always be me.

Shortly afterwards, in 1962, the poem was recycled by L. Oshanin and A. Ostrovsky as the chorus to a children's song for peace; here, it was described as a text written on a child's drawing (a gloss that had not been provided by Chukovsky). Whatever its true origins (was it perhaps even made up by Chukovsky himself?), it became hugely popular, yet the piece, seen as heralding a new era of children's creativity, was, in fact, thoroughly conventional in terms of its sentiments. One only needs to alter 'mama' to 'Stalin' to have a poem that might well have been published fifteen years earlier.

Yet the perception that children's happiness now had different causes ('nature' and 'mama', not the fiat of a political leader) was significant. The phrasing of the poem quoted by Chukovsky drew attention to a 'privatisation' of ideals of happiness that had a significant impact on propaganda during the post-Stalin era. The 1960s, and more particularly the 1970s and 1980s, saw increasing uncertainty about whether institutional life was best for children, and celebration of the (virtuous, Soviet) home as the ideal place for raising useful and well-balanced citizens. What persisted was the conviction that happiness was children's essential condition, a dogma that remained undisputed throughout the Soviet period, and that continued to be widely accepted after 1991. This might in itself seem obvious — what culture does not think that children's happiness is important? — but, in fact, a concern for children's well-being and a desire to make them happy are not necessarily the same thing. The Princess Royal (Princess Anne), the patron of the charity Save the Children, was recorded in the early 2000s as saying, 'One doesn't have to like children to think that they deserve a better deal in life.' She was articulating the rationalistic spirit (care and concern, but without emotional attachment) that was often behind the creation of total institutions for children, from boarding schools to orphanages, right across the world.