DEMOBILIZATION OF CHILDHOOD: IDEOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN UKRAINIAN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE OF THE LATE STALINIST PERIOD

Abstract

The article offers a comprehensive analysis of the transformation of the image of childhood in Ukrainian children’s prose of the late Stalinist period (late 1940s – early 1950s) within the broader context of postwar ideological change. It examines the gradual departure from the heroic-mobilizational model of the 1930s, in which the child was represented as an active subject of socialist transformation, toward a postwar concept that redefined childhood as a distinct, vulnerable, and supervised stage of life requiring state care. Drawing on prose works by Oksana Ivanenko (Ridni dity [Our Children]) and Ivan Bahmut (Shchaslyvyi den suvorovtsia Krynychnoho [A Happy Day of the Suvorov Cadet Krynychnyi]), as well as in comparison with prewar and wartime texts by Mykola Trublaini, Oleksandr Kopylenko, Yurii Zbanatskyi, and other authors, the study traces a shift in the literary paradigm of representing the child. The prewar image of the “child-vanguard,” capable of autonomous action and equal participation in social life, gradually gives way to the figure of the pupil subordinated to a system of state guardianship and pedagogical control. Special attention is paid to the role of the Second World War as a catalyst for ideological change. The war experience prompted a reassessment of childhood subjectivity: the child ceased to be portrayed as a heroic actor destined for sacrifice and instead emerged as a victim of historical circumstances in need of protection, supervision, and “proper” upbringing. Postwar prose constructs a model of an isolated childhood space (the orphanage, the Suvorov military school), in which the adult functions as a bearer of authority and moral legitimacy, while childhood itself is framed as a regulated stage of socialization. The article argues that Ukrainian children’s literature of the first postwar decade reflects a profound transformation in conceptions of childhood shaped by wartime experience and postwar ideological restructuring. The child is no longer conceived as an active participant in social transformation but as an object of state care and pedagogical control. This process entails both a loss of subjectivity and a partial restoration of specifically childlike qualities – emotionality, vulnerability, the right to play, and immaturity. Such ambivalence produces a transitional model that combines ideological regulation with elements of humanization in the representation of the child. In this sense, children’s prose of the period constitutes an important source for understanding the mechanisms of Soviet cultural policy and the transformation of anthropological conceptions of childhood, laying the groundwork for the literary shifts of the Khrushchev Thaw