“Pionerskaia pravda” newspaper in the 1920s − early 1930s as a new soviet childhood constructor

Resumen

The relevance of this problem lies in the necessity of deep, consistent and comprehensive study of the history of the Soviet childhood as an integral and almost the main part of an ambitious Soviet project to construct a "new Soviet man". Among the most important means and ways of its implementation, a special place was always occupied by the Soviet children's periodicals, designed to present the image of an ideal Soviet childhood in an accessible and understandable for the young readers form in order to expand and popularize it as swiftly as possible. In this case, while the Soviet power educational policy was investigated in the historiography well enough, this cannot be said about the study of the Soviet children's periodicals as a historical source. The object of our study is the newspaper "Pionerskaia Pravda" (“The Pioneer Truth”) (1925-1991), which began to form purposefully the image of an "ideal" Soviet child – young pioneer as an adherent and translator of a new Soviet ideology already from the first years of its existence. The applied research methods have been the method of hermeneutic reading and comprehensive analysis of various genres of the newspaper texts and the method of their comparative analysis. The results of study are the characteristics of the information opportunities of such an unexplored type of the historical sources, as the Soviet children's periodicals. It is proved that the requirements for an "ideal" Soviet child was little different from the requirements for older generations that led eventually to the loss and neglect of children's "childishness". The article may be used for teaching socio-cultural history of Russia, history of childhood and school in the USSR, history of everyday life, and in the source studies of the media, particularly periodicals.