Problems of importance today are largely a consequence of the Soviet callousness: abandoned children, violence in families and, as a result, cruelty among young people, children's alcoholism, drug use, the lack of positive ideals...
Happy Childhood
TITLE : Happy Childhood
SERIES : U.S.S.R History
RUNTIME : 3' 29''
LANGUAGE : English
GENRE : Thematic short film
CONTENTS :
The new communist ideology was called upon to establish a new morality, a new type of family, to educate a new person, to change and renew society. No one knew how to accomplish that. They were able to destroy immediately that which had been growing for centuries, but building something new did not work out. The Revolution and the Civil War orphaned many children. Dzerzhinsky solved this problem by founding a network of children's colonies. Having affirmed women's right to labor on par with men and be engaged in publicly beneficial work, the government tore women away from the family and doomed children to neglect, which became a considerable problem at the end of the 1920s. It turned out that a baby growing up without its mother, grows up with less of a parental instinct, and tearing children away from their parents over the course of several generations leaves young people psychologically unfit for family life and parenthood.
The U.S.S.R. had already disappeared, but the demographic problem remained, and it is becoming increasingly more pointed. Nowadays, refusing a child in a maternity hospital has become a common event, and there are more homeless children now, than there were after the Civil War. Problems of importance today are largely a consequence of the Soviet callousness: abandoned children, violence in families and, as a result, cruelty among young people, children's alcoholism, drug use, the lack of positive ideals... A multitude of problems grows out of that time, when people tried to survive for so long without God. What will become of today's children who are poorly educated and brutal? Those, who do not know the past? After all, they are "the new people."
