Copyright by Margaret Peacock 2008 The Dissertation Committee for Margaret Elizabeth Peacock Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: CONTESTED INNOCENCE: IMAGES OF THE CHILD IN THE COLD WAR Committee: Joan Neuberger, Supervisor Mark Lawrence Charters Wynn David Oshinsky Julia Mickenberg CONTESTED INNOCENCE: IMAGES OF THE CHILD IN THE COLD WAR by Margaret Elizabeth Peacock, B.A., M.S.I.S., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December, 2008 Dedication For my husband, D.Jay Cervino Acknowledgements I owe a great debt of gratitude to many people for making this project possible. I received financial support from the U.S. State Department as a Fulbright-Hays scholar, the Society for the Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Department of Education. I also received a number of grants from the University of Texas at Austin, including the Gardner F. Marston Fellowship, the Alice Jane Drysdale Sheffield Fellowship, and a Continuing Education Grant, all of which were granted through the Department of History. Several librarians and archivists, crossing two continents and eleven archives, were crucial to the success of this project. I owe special thanks to Galina Mikhailovna Tokareva at the Russian State Archive of Political Science, who took me under her wing and gave me access to Pioneer materials. She was herself a Komsomol leader and provided valuable insights for my research during our daily breaks for tea. Other women who were former Pioneers or Komsomol leaders gave their time to help me. Of particular note was Marina Strikalova, who also helped me translate documents when they were written in seemingly illegible handwriting. Zaour Ismail-zade assisted me in “reading” some of the more obscure films of the Thaw period, providing cultural and linguistic insights that I might have otherwise overlooked. In the United States, Wendy Chmielewski at the Peace Archive in Swarthmore was very helpful in directing my research, as was Steven Price at the Boy Scout Archive in Irving, Texas. The archivists running the Vietnam archive in Lubbock, Texas are also to be commended for their v professionalism and willingness to talk at length with me about digitizing and declassifying documents. My most supportive reader was Joan Neuberger, my dissertation advisor. This project would not have been possible without her sound advice and constant encouragement. In the early stages of this project, support and advice were also given by Josephine Woll, Kate Brown, Catriona Clark, and Deborah Field. I cannot express how thankful I am to Joan Neuberger, Charters Wynn, and Mark Lawrence, my mentors in the history department at the University of Texas, who guided me through graduate school. Karl Brown, Mary Neuburger, and Paul Rubinson were very helpful in the weeks building up to the defense. The other members on my committee, Julia Mickenberg, Mark Lawrence, Charters Wynn, and David Oshinsky, provided sound editing and advice as well. To my family I owe my greatest debt. My husband, D.Jay and my three daughters, Amelia, Sylvia, and Mira, have experienced this dissertation with me. They travelled with me for my research year in Moscow, braving the cold and the unfamiliar schools and language, so that I could do this. My mother has provided constant encouragement, has asked a number of important questions about my argument at key moments in my writing, and has offered financial help. My father was also an important driving force in this project. He passed away while it was being written, and I like to think that he was a part of it as well. Finally, I must thank my husband, who listened to me talk through this dissertation and wail and moan for the past three years. He has been a constant source of strength and inspiration, a great reader and an even greater listener. I could not have accomplished this without him. vi CONTESTED INNOCENCE: IMAGES OF THE CHILD IN THE COLD WAR Publication No._____________ Margaret Elizabeth Peacock, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2008 Supervisor: Joan Neuberger Abstract: This dissertation examines the image of the child as it appeared in the propaganda and public rhetoric of the Cold War from approximately 1950 to 1968. It focuses on how American and Soviet politicians, propagandists, and critics depicted children in film, television, radio, and print. It argues that these groups constructed a new lexicon of childhood images to meet the unique challenges of the Cold War. They portrayed the young as facing new threats both inside and outside their borders, while simultaneously envisioning their children as mobilized in novel ways to defend themselves and their countries from infiltration and attack. These new images of the next generation performed a number of important functions in conceptualizing what was at stake in the Cold War and what needed to be done to win it. Politicians, propagandists, and individuals in the Soviet Union and the United States used images of endangered and mobilized children in order to construct a particular vision of the Cold War that could support their political and ideological vii agendas, including the enforcement of order in the private sphere, the construction of domestic and international legitimacy, and the mobilization of populations at home and abroad. At the same time, these images were open to contestation by dissenting groups on both sides of the Iron Curtain who refashioned the child's image in order to contest their governments’ policies and the Cold War consensus. What these images looked like in Soviet and American domestic and international discourse, why propagandists and dissent movements used these images to promote their policies at home and abroad, and what visions of the Cold War they created are the subjects of this dissertation. This project argues that the domestic demands of the Cold War altered American and Soviet visions of childhood. It is common wisdom that the 1950s and 60s was a period when child rearing practices and ideas about children were changing. This dissertation supports current arguments that American and Soviet parents sought more permissive approaches in raising children who they perceived as innocent and in need of protection. Yet it also finds substantial documentation showing that American and Soviet citizens embraced a new vision of idealized youth that was not innocent, but instead was mobilized for a war that had no foreseeable end. In the United States, children became participants in defending the home and the country from communist infiltration. In the Soviet Union, the state created a new vision of idealized youth that could be seen actively working towards a Soviet-led peace around the world. By using the child’s image as a category for analysis, this project also provides a window into how the Cold War was conceptualized by politicians, propagandists, and private citizens in the Soviet Union and the United States. In contrast to current scholarship, this dissertation argues that the Soviet state worked hard to create a popular viii vision of the Cold War that was significantly different from the “Great Fear” that dominated American culture in the 1950s and 60s. While in the United States, the conflict was portrayed as a defensive struggle against outside invasion, in official Soviet rhetoric it was presented as an active, international crusade for peace. As the 1960s progressed, and as the official rhetoric of the state came under increasing criticism, the rigid sets of categories surrounding the figuration of the Cold War child that had been established in the 1950s began to break down. While Soviet filmmakers during the Thaw created images of youth that appeared abandoned and traumatized by the world around them, anti-nuclear activists took to the streets with their children in tow in order to contest the state’s professed ability to protect their young. In the late 1960s, both the Soviet Union and the United States struggled to contain rising domestic unrest, and took the first steps in moving towards détente. As a consequence, the struggle between East and West moved to the post-colonial world, where again, the image of the child played a vital role in articulating and justifying policy. Visual and rhetorical images like that of the child served as cultural currency for creating and undermining conceptual boundaries in the Cold War. The current prevalence of childhood images in the daily construction and contestation of public opinion are the legacies of this era. ix Table of Contents List of Illustrations ………………………………………………………......…...xii Introduction ………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1 Fighters for Peace: The Soviet Cold War Child, 1945-1965…………...25 Stalinism and the Cold War Child ………………………………………......28 Khrushchev, Youth, and the New Cold War Vision…………………………39 Artek and the Pioneers……………………………………………………….60 Images of the “Other” Child………………………………………………....72 New Images: The Threatened Child………………………………………....83 Chapter 2 The American Cold War Child and the Great Fear, 1945-1965………..96 The Communist Menace and the American Child…………………………..99 Threats from Within…………………………………………………….…..110 The Boy Scouts and the Construction of a New Cold War Child………….134 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….164 Chapter 3 Revising and Ideal: Alternative Images of Children in Soviet Film During the Thaw,