| Abstract: | This article explores the role of children’s literature in the formation of Stalinist identity and assembles a list of moral principles developed in the most popular early works of Arkadii Gaidar. It is not in Marxist texts nor in Pioneer slogans, but in these simple stories that the essential narrative structures of Soviet morality were created. Gaidar’s books are representative of a whole group of Soviet children’s literary classics published in the late 1920s–early 1930s and written by young people whose coming of age coincided with the years of political and social turmoil. This study argues that Gaidar’s own personal experiences as a youthful Red Army commander during the Civil War underpinned the moral vision of these popular novels. A new military-like value system, with courage (not kindness or love) as its central value, originated in Gaidar’s books and moulded several generations of Soviet children. |
