It is fair to assume that any volume with space for a discussion of the “crisis” in mid-20th-century Soviet children’s theater is aimed at a specialist audience. That said, if the subject of “Children’s World” (Yale University Press, 736 pages, $45), Oxford professor Catriona Kelly’s immense, imaginative, and thoroughly researched new book — a history of child-rearing in Russia between the twilight of the tsars and the fall of Gorbachev — is somewhat academic, her prose style is not. She writes clearly, keeps her use of pedagogic jargon to a minimum, and even leaves room for occasional flashes of dry, donnish humor. Describing the shabbily manufactured playthings of the inter-war years, she recounts how “smudgy and ungainly wooden figures passed for dolls, shaggy and savage-looking hairy lumps for toy animals.” Meanwhile, locating a kindergarten on the top floor of an elevator-less Moscow building was evidence of the way that “the eccentricities of centralized planning made themselves felt.”

High Table witticisms aside, this book’s real value for the lay reader comes from the unusual perspective it offers on the wider Soviet experience, a perspective sharpened by its author’s eye for the telling detail. Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, educationalist, scold, and harridan, was, Ms. Kelly records, opposed to birthday parties (they served no educational purpose and, horrors, emphasized a child’s individuality). Opposed to birthday parties! That tells you almost everything you need to know about the elaborate fanaticism of the dreary Mrs. Lenin. It also says quite a bit about the cause she served: The Bolshevik revolution was designed not only to remake Russia, but to transform human nature itself.

Not all aspects of the approach taken by the fledgling Soviet bureaucracy to the treatment, education, and upbringing of children were, as Ms. Kelly shows, negative. That’s not to claim (and she wouldn’t) that the early period of communist rule was a time of educational liberalism — at least in any meaningful sense. Youngsters may have been given more opportunity to express themselves than in either the typical tsarist or Stalinist school, but only within strict ideological limits. What’s more, many of the reforms of that era, and even some of the freedoms, must primarily be understood as devices to promote the state’s assault on the family, an institution the Bolsheviks regarded with deep suspicion. Under the circumstances, it’s easy to imagine that the return to social conservatism (and, with it, more regimented schools and a more conventionally organized curriculum) that accompanied Stalin’s rise to supreme power in the 1930s was welcomed by many parents: One of this book’s rare weaknesses is that we are never really told if that was indeed the case.

The inspiration for the change in direction under Stalin was, of course, neither philanthropic nor democratic. It merely reflected his willingness to use the appeal of both restored order and, for that matter, revived Russian nationalism (something that would have been taboo in Lenin’s Kremlin) to shore up support for his dictatorship. In schools, as elsewhere, the revolution’s egalitarianism — or, more accurately, collectivism — was overlaid with the cult of state and leader. The collective had been transformed into a congregation. Egalitarianism evolved into patriotic obligation as much as moral duty. The primary function of the educational system became the production of docile, loyal and subservient citizens. In some of the most interesting passages in her book, Ms. Kelly explains
how this effort was orchestrated — and, often, how subtly. Its traces could be detected even in the way that children were portrayed in fiction, reportage, and textbooks. They were demoted from being the spunky, assertive heroes of revolutionary lore into altogether more
passive creatures, forerunners of the dutiful and deferential Homo Sovieticus they were being molded to become.

Now, it could be argued, quite reasonably, that most schools in most countries try to churn out good citizens, however they define the term. Furthermore (as Ms. Kelly also acknowledges) what may seem like extreme regimentation to us would have appeared far less startling to the Western observer of, say, half a century ago — an epoch when schools on either side of the former Iron Curtain would have generally been much more disciplined than they are today.

Nevertheless, this book leaves no doubt that Soviet regimentation was indeed extreme. While Professor Kelly doesn’t dwell on the cruelties of communist despotism, she never succumbs to the usual bien-pensant temptation of trying to find a supposed moral equivalence between East and West. This is demonstrated most strikingly, perhaps, by her decision to include (among a consistently well-chosen range of illustrations) a page of mug shots taken from the archives of a secret police home for “Family Members of Traitors to the Motherland.” These particular family members cannot have been more than 9 or 10 years old. Their faces stare out, bewildered, haunted, trying to please, victims of a tyranny that could not, would not, forgive their genes.

In the end, ironically, the successes of Soviet education — standards rose, facilities were upgraded, some degree of independent thinking came to be acceptable — helped foment the widespread disillusion that contributed so much to the regime’s eventual implosion. “In a pattern that comes up again and again in Soviet history,” Ms. Kelly writes, “rising standards brought rising expectations.” She might have noted the additional irony that those rising standards also taught the Soviet population that its expectations would never be met by the system in which they had been trained for so long, so hard, and so cynically to believe. The rest is history.

Mr. Stuttaford is a contributing editor of National Review Online.