Острова утопии - [213]

The struggle for autonomy

Dmitry Kozlov (Nickolai Karamzin fellow, Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow), “Unofficial groups of Soviet schoolchildren in the 1940s – 60s. Typology, ideology and practices”

The chapter deals with the unofficial teenagers’ “organizations” which appeared in the USSR in the 1940s – 60s. Kozlov analyses how adolescent psychology, Soviet culture (Russian history teaching, fiction and cinema) and official political bodies (Communist Party, Komsomol) influenced the discursive and pragmatic appearance of young people’s political protests. The article also addresses the transformation of official Soviet discourse on adolescents. The conception of the value of puberty dismissed the taboo on it in the early 1960s (C. Kelly). This took shape not only in new initiatives of Soviet educational specialists, but also in the Soviet judicial system. Adolescents were primarily subject to punitive measures other than imprisonment, although for decades before this, they had been treated as adults by the law.

Joakim Landahl (University of Stockholm), “Two utopias: the history of Swedish schoolchildren’s councils”

In this chapter, Landahl investigates the history of schoolchildren’s councils in Sweden in connection with the history of the movement for self-government in high schools. He identifies three basic phases of the movement. During the first phase (1928 – 1952), the predominant function of schoolchildren’s councils was disciplinary. The second phase (1952 – early 1980s) was connected with the revival of various forms of local activity on the part of students and the struggle for their rights at the national level. Finally, the third phase (mid – 1980s – the present day) constitutes a period of steady decline in the political influence and significance of schoolchildren’s councils. Using archival materials, Landahl examines the activity of the schoolchildren’s council at a specific high school during the first phase of the movement; for the second phase, he employs periodicals to elucidate the activity of a nationwide schoolchildren’s organization.

Evgenii Kazakov (University of Bremen), “The schoolchildren’s movement and school self-government in Western Germany”

The historiography of the West German youth protest movement of the 1960s has traditionally focused on the activities of university student groups. But schoolchildren also played an important role in these events. This chapter is about the political work of West German schoolchildren in relation to educational policy questions, in particular, the question of the creation of self-governing bodies in schools. The sources are archival materials of various student groups and political self-government bodies, contemporary media reports and interviews with former activists who participated in the movement between 1950 and the 2000s. There have been some very widely publicized studies of the history of the student movement in the 1960s – 70s; the later decades remain largely unexplored.

After the Second World War, the Western Allies insisted on the creation of self-government at the level of individual schools, which was hoped to lead to a “democratic transformation” of German youth. By choosing class representatives, students would learn democratic processes in practice. However, the object of the class representatives in the postwar years was first and foremost to steal coal for heating the classrooms. Essentially, however, the joint responsibility or co-administration of the pupils (SMV, Schülermitverantwortung or Schülermitverwaltung) was seen as a bonus for schoolchildren, rather than a representation of their interests. The elections had to be confirmed by the school principal, and all attempts to link SMV-structures across schools were suppressed. In the 1960s, the old SMV conception, based on the idea of “non-conflicting partnership” between teachers and students, was being increasingly criticized by education experts. Around 1966 – 67, there was an explosion of uncontrolled student activities, initially sparked by the issue of censorship of the student press.

Representations

Vadim Mikhailin (Saratov State University, Saratov, Russia), Galina Belyaeva (Saratov State Alexander Radishchev Art Museum), “Soviet ‘school film’: birth of a genre”

This chapter is the first part of a bigger work entitled “Soviet ‘school film’: between the Communist project and the late Soviet utopia of privacy,” which has yet to be published. We propose that the “school-film” genre appeared in the course of updating and refurbishing the stock of ideologically-pointed means by which Soviet elites constructed a set of projective realities acceptable for their primary audiences and exploitable in their managing practices – as a part of the last full-scale Soviet mobilization project known as “the Thaw.” At its birth, the genre was aimed mainly at inculcating the already customary collectivist models of behavior into the audience, as well as at discrediting (no less customary) of any off-public micro-group contexts. In this context, however, these actions were performed using somewhat finer strategies, relying on attempts to build personally oriented empathic ties: “sincerity” (which was to become a legendary shibboleth not only for school films but for all of Thaw culture) basically lay in imitating private empathy regimes. The primary audience of school films was, naturally, teenagers, who were seen as the most appropriate social stratum to be targeted by the new mobilization strategies. The article traces the preconditions that gave rise to school film, as well as the main stages of its early (1960s) development.