Soviet television could never boast of being very entertaining, and yet, Soviet children enjoyed a happy abundance of very good TV shows for kids, animation films for kids, feature films and TV series produced specifically for kids none of which was really bad: in fact, they could compete with films for older demographics in terms of their artistic value. Not to forget board games for kids, magazines for kids, and books for kids, starting from nursery rhymes and reaching up to regular novels—saying ‘novels’ I do not mean graphic novels of today with their cheap sensationalism and with their characters who are as flat as a table. Do you know that Dunno on the Moon, a famous book for children of the Soviet era written by Nikolai Nosov in 1965, has approximately as many words as an average novel by Jane Austin? The book was supposed to be read, not looked through; just believe me when I say that
Dunno on the Moon, created as a satire on Western capitalism, is a very good novel. Soviet writers never underestimated the intelligence of ‘the little ones,’ they never spoke to their young readers in a condescending manner; their never appealed to children’s consumeristic instincts (could you speculate about why they didn’t?). I forgot to say about various extracurricular activities available at each school or at special institutions called ‘houses of young pioneers.’ You may want to criticise the Soviet Union for its lack of political freedoms, for regular shortages of most essential goods, for its quick and easy manner of dealing away with dissidents, for God knows what else, but you absolutely cannot criticise it for what it made for its children. Soviet mass education, in the broadest sense of the term, was exemplary. Soviet Russia was very good at creating and maintaining both the green and the yellow zone of childhood—of our childhood, I am tempted to say. These days, in Russia as much as in the United Kingdom, both of the zones begin to look as a thing of the past, as a ‘lost icon’ of our culture that we are unable to restore, even though some of us are still capable of understanding what exactly—and how much—was lost.