'correcting nature's mistakes': TRANSFORMING THE ENVIRONMENT AND SOVIET CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, 1928-1941

Environmental History, Apr 2006 by Husband, William B

ABSTRACT

As it sought to reconfigure the natural environment and simultaneously create new citizens in the USSR, Joseph Stalin's dictatorship strongly emphasized the conversion of children to socialism. Representations of nature in Stalinist children's literature encompassed not only crude propaganda, but also less adversarial, more scientific expressions of human entitlement vis-à-vis the environment as well as a small but significant number of apolitical celebrations of nature. In so doing, early Soviet children's literature demonstrated the limitations of dictatorial power as well as its extent.

"ELECTRICAL LIGHT AND energy are demonstrating how man is subordinating the forces of nature to himself, and this will be a mighty blow to age-old darkness and religious prejudices."1 This sweeping characterization of the conquest of nature in a 1932 work of Soviet children's literature was not at all exceptional. The Bolsheviks worked from their first days in power to begin molding Russian citizens for the socialist society of the future, and no topic was too serious or delicate for the sensibilities of children and adolescents.2 Mass propaganda systematically and routinely promoted applied science and technology to adults and children alike as the antidote for Russia's "backwardness," and from the outset Soviet pronouncements rejected bucolic representations of nature in favor of a planned, improved environment.3 When Joseph Stalin became Party leader in 1928 and began his consolidation of the Soviet dictatorship, the effort intensified.4

This Stalinist campaign to "correct nature's mistakes" entailed more, however, than making the exploitation of the environment more efficient. Party pronouncements maintained that the subordination of natural systems would profoundly reshape the humans who carried it out, and the slogan "man, in transforming nature, transforms himself" came to underlie a series of projects that ranged from the benign to the benighted: on the one hand, the scientific improvement of the chronically anemic peasant agriculture, but on the other hand the environmentally calamitous attempts to reverse the flow of rivers and reconfigure regional biospheres.5 Three modes of children's literature mirrored these pronouncements and projects. One mode assertively promoted the conspicuously ambitious efforts of the regime. A second, more circumspect mode presented the natural environment in less adversarial terms, even though the authors affirmed a sense of human superiority and entitlement vis-à-vis the environment. A third mode survived as well. Even as the Stalinist dictatorship greatly increased its ability to silence criticism in the 19303, a small but symbolically significant number of apolitical characterizations of nature still reached the young despite the official posture of the state.

This essay explores the diversity of writing on the natural environment for Soviet children and adolescents from Stalin's rise to power to the Soviet entry into World War II (1928-1941). I argue that as much as children's literature promoted the radical transformation of nature-defined simplistically and largely by implication in mass propaganda as the physical environment plus its nonhuman inhabitants-it also strongly endorsed a scientific approach toward exploiting a resource that held the key to a better material life for humans.6 Despite the censorship, a small number of unabashed celebrations of the natural environment and animals also continued to appear: Some of these ultimately affirmed human superiority over nature but others stressed the human dependency on nature's greatness.

Every society conveys its highest aspirations and ideals through the messages it creates for the young, and Stalinist children's literature communicated more than simple advocacy of the unbridled plunder of resources. Zealotry, scientific detachment, and circumspect nonconformity coexisted.

NATURE IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE BEFORE STALIN

REPRESENTATIONS OF NATURE in Stalinist children's literature had their roots in the intellectually and politically turbulent nineteenth century of Tsarist Russia. Voices among the Russian intelligentsia-not all of whom supported revolution as the best solution to Russia's perceived political and economic backwardness-made nature and the popularization of science featured themes in writing for and about children. As they competed with the light entertainment, religious tales, and adventure fantasies that dominated the marketplace, the intelligentsia promoted the inculcation of critical thinking in the young and constructed stories around earthy topics such as factories. Writers framed their case in terms of fostering realism, but their creations were equally grounded in a belief that was as deterministic as it was hopeful: that the rationalism that underlay science would inculcate a more egalitarian society in Russia, in addition to improving its material existence. In this view, children's literature was a didactic tool in the service of modernization, and public taste and the market were unacceptable arbiters of quality. Leading figures in early Soviet children's literature, such as Nadezhda Krupskaia and Maxim Gorky, emerged from this tradition.7