How to Raise an Independent Soviet Citizen? Pedagogic Technologies of the Exemplary Pioneer Camps Artek and Orlyonok (1957–1991)

Abstract

The article discusses attempts to actualize the popular idea of the Soviet child as an active and autonomous subject; specifically, the way this project was realized by counselors and content developers of Artek and Orlyonok, exemplary camps of the USSR, in the 1960–1980s. The study is based on archival documents and retrospective interviews with employees of these children’s centers. The article investigates the reasons that led the ideologists of the Komsomol Central Committee to transform the health facility (where the actions of children were regulated by a strict regime) into a school for so-called pioneers and Komsomol activists (i.e. creative and initiative children) in 1957. Moreover, the reflections of tutors on the methods of implementing this task in the conditions of an “overorganized” institutional order are analyzed. Attention is drawn to the fact that the technology developed in the late Soviet era for raising “self-sufficiency and initiative” in children (triggered by the request of the Komsomol Central Committee) began, over time, to be interpreted by former Artek and Orlyonok employees as a grassroots innovative child-centred approach, defined as radically different from the Soviet pedagogical tradition. To explain the conflict between the appointment of state order and its perception, the article employs the theory of “strategies” and “tactics” developed by Michel de Certeau.