Children Of the Revolution

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.”