How to Parent Like a Bolshevik

The Bolsheviks were inspirational. We don't even teach civics or the history of our economic and social development. The news of the day consists of ten thousand articles criticizing Trump. What effect on the children does this have? How do they develop a connection to society and our folkways (industry, inventiveness, frugality) so that it can be improved upon for future generations? They are not even sure how to participate.

A pleasure to learn something. Thank you.

How many children did Lenin kill in his years as a Bolshevik? Over half a million Russians - men, women, and children - died between 1917 and 1924, at Lenin's orders. All because they weren't Bolshevik enough. Or because they had property Lenin and his thugs wanted for their own. How many children did Stalin kill in his years as a Bolshevik? Estimates range from 3,000,000 to 60,000,000. Mostly this depends on whether you believe his directives creating the famine or sending people to the gulags amount to killing those people who dies as a result. But still, 30,000,000 (average) deaths because of Stalin means "parenting like a Bolshevik" increased the possibility that your parenting could be a death sentence. Yet again, NYT and its delusional journalists once more white-washing and glorifying the utterly despicable hell that Communism is.

So, what did the original Boksheviks read as children, that made them grow up to be revolutionaries, unlike their children after them?

Great reflections, tinged with melancholy for hopes that have been lost, if not forgotten. One nitpick: Nina Didrikil's heartfelt letter to her teenage daughter should probably be translated “You are fortunate, and you will be even happier when you realize just how fortunate you are.” The Russian word счастливый is, happily for the Russians, a very flexible word.

We Russians lack the good sense and refinement of Westerners, or so goes the usual condescending myth of the West. Once again, our culture is seen as feeble and acquiescing in the face of the tyranny of thugs. Or so sensible people in the West think they know, as they think they know for every few decades of this ghastly century. But, during the other phase of fluctuating Western conventional wisdom, a returning phase that lasts only a decade or so each time, Westerners breathe easily, coming now to know that things aren't really that bad for us. Coming now to know that, after all, the regime does propel us toward a saving modernism, if, sadly, with acceptable collateral damage. You are wrong on both counts. Deep in our Siberian mine (a phrase from our Shakespeare, mixed-race Aleksandr Pushkin, taught to every Russian child), we keep alive the tradition of our and your classical cultures that the West has abandoned. It sustains us through horrors about which you know nothing. In 1991, we overthrew Stalinism in "the greatest non-violent revolution in history": the words of George F. Kennan, your architect of Containment. Do you really think that in our good time we won't overthrow the pipsqueak neo-Stalinism of Putin? We have a poem from the War. It ends: We went through that long darkness. We passed through corridors of fire. You used to say We are like the stones: We will survive. No. You were wrong. We are stronger than stone. We are alive.

The Bolsheviks "never worried about the family" or "policed the home" and were "secure in their economic determinism"?? That doesn't square with all I've read. I'd be interested to know what period the author is referring exactly. Even early on, the Soviet state policed nearly everyone, including members of the same family and in fact they believed children should be raised by the state, "parenting" being a purely bourgeois preoccupation. Similarly, from at least as early as 1920, the Bolsheviks saw their economic policies were failing dramatically.

Very interesting to think that an idea like Bolshevism infused almost every aspect of life. People fervently believed with everything they had that time, history, civilization would change quickly for the better after incredible hardship. My first instinct was to say that we're no longer a society motivated by grand ideas but I guess you just have to look at Trumpism or the liberal dream of a social democratic US with the former being more alike to the scale of Bolshevism than the latter. The "grand" ideas may come in internet memes and media snippets instead of manifestos and fiery eloquent speeches but they're there.

"Bolshevism — and Marxism in general — had a remarkably flat conception of human nature" this is true, and i have sadly found that many people who might otherwise be my political colleagues have a reductionist understanding of the human experience - but not all of them. my own politics conform closely with councilism, and the people i've met in this milieu are clear that what we're wanting to build is, first, a new set of work relations, not a "new person," though if everything worked out right, the experience of life would be much enhanced.

An essay full of illuminating insights into the literary education of at least the elite class of Soviet children. What remains unclear, however, is how children schooled in the humane values that permeate much of this literature could mature into adults who would support a tyrant who slandered and then murdered many of their parents, while using slave labor to construct the public works so celebrated by young Libedinskaia. On a related topic, the Marxist belief in the plasticity of human nature, the idea that property relations shaped human attitudes and behavior, contrasts sharply with the outlook of another group of revolutionaries, the founders of the American republic. The framers of the Constitution had initially hoped that the revolutionary fervor sparked by the clash with Britain would forge a generation of virtuous republicans, willing to sacrifice for the public welfare. But the grim reality of the war for independence, during which states and individuals inconsistently supported the struggle, convinced Washington and other leaders that human nature remained the same tangle of passions and reason that it had been before the revolution. Accordingly, they crafted a Constitution that incorporated a system of checks and balances designed to restrain the passion for power they identified as an inherent characteristic of human nature. This less romantic view of humanity inspired the creation of a system of government that effectively protected individual freedom.

There is more to life than past literature, great as that may be. These young people seem to grow up in a news vacuum. Could they have had little or no knowledge of the Ukraine famine or the purge trials? If not, how did these events affect their thinking and feeling about their country?

Interesting piece. By comparison the Maoist Chinese took this lesson to heart only allowing for the little red book to maintain political purity. The lack of interest among religious extremists of any book but their particular bible or the koran seems to also keep new or different ideas from potentially polluting the next generation.