William B. Husband

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William B. Husband | 'Correcting Nature's Mistakes': Transforming the Environment and Soviet Children's Literature, 1928–1941 | Environmental History, 11.2 | The History Cooperative

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

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	1
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 1930s, a small but symbolically significant number of apolitical characterizations of nature still reached the young despite the official posture of the state.	2
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.	3
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.	. . .

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