Spring 1965: An eighth-grade class photo of some of Donald Raleigh’s Russian interviewees. “I’m exactly the same age as this group,” Raleigh says. “We have children the same age, parents getting sick, empty nests — all of these have to do with age as much as where we grew up.” Photo courtesy A.A. Konstantinov; ©2007 Endeavors; click to enlarge.
Sputnik Generation
by Margarite Nathe
As a kid, Donald Raleigh knew that America was the biggest, strongest country in the world. He almost didn’t believe My First Book of Countries when it showed him the Soviet Union sprawling over the globe, vast and sinister. Then the air raid drills began in his elementary school in Chicago in the 1950s. “At church, we prayed for the conversion of the atheist communists,” he says. “I logged hundreds of hours on my knees.”
And when the Soviet Union’s Sputnik — the world’s first artificial satellite — surged into space in 1957, “it electrified the world,” Raleigh says. American education felt the jolt, and suddenly science and physical fitness were the big subjects in school. “Don’t eat candy!” Raleigh’s German gym teacher had growled as she snatched a piece away from him. “Eat bread, like the Russians!” Rumors of the Russians’ advanced educational system rippled through the country. They’re beating us, Americans thought. Russian and East European study centers sprang up at universities all over the United States.
“What’s ironic is that Russians were then studying our educational system and concluding that ours was better,” Raleigh says.
Saratovian students before graduation in 1967. Photo courtesy of V. N. Kirsanov; click to enlarge.
From Sputnik to Dr. Strangelove
Fascination with and fear of the Soviet other — “these people who wished us harm,” Raleigh says — occupied a vital place in his childhood. “I was very much a product of Sputnik, and the Cold War, and Dr. Strangelove’s America.” As an undergraduate in 1971, Raleigh was in one of the first groups to study abroad for a full semester in the Soviet Union. And he saw something that his American education, which cast the Soviet Union only in terms of communism and ideology, had left out.
“These were people just living ordinary lives,” he says.
For Raleigh’s newest book, Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk about Their Lives, he interviewed thirty graduates of a school in the provincial Russian town of Saratov. Russia’s Sputnik Generation consists of eight interviews with men and women who had been children on the other side of the map, hardly the faceless enemies Raleigh had imagined.
The Saratov group is from the first generation conceived during a relatively peaceful time in the Soviet Union after World War II. “Between World War I and 1945, it was cataclysm after cataclysm after cataclysm,” Raleigh says. World War I, revolution, civil war, famine, Stalin’s revolution, collectivization, industrialization, the Purges, World War II, more famine. “And then — forty years of peaceful, evolutionary, organic change,” he says.
Published first-hand accounts of everyday Russian folks are hard to come by, Raleigh says. “We have no idea about people growing up in these provincial towns or what their attitudes were.” What accounts do exist were generally written by dissidents, and don’t reflect the lives of ordinary Russians. These Saratovians’ stories, Raleigh says, “give human expression to otherwise remote historical developments.”
In chatting with the former students about their youth, it didn’t sound all that different from Raleigh’s own teen years. For example, every one of the interviewees mentioned the Beatles. But there were some differences. Almost all the students admitted to drinking in the staticky BBC’s Voice of America from their radios. Some of the techier students used converted phonographs to press recordings of banned Western rock ‘n’ roll songs onto used X-rays, which were cheap on the black market. Kids sat around together straining to make out the words to the song “Michelle.”
“Is it saying ‘we shall’?” they asked each other.
A. Konstantinov twists in defiance of Russia’s ban. Photo courtesy of A. A. Konstantinov; click to enlarge.
Another difference between his own classmates and the group from Saratov, Raleigh says, is that most of the Russians weren’t frightened by the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. It simply wasn’t a dominating memory during their childhood, they said. Some mentioned that they felt a little anxious about the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, but even then, Raleigh says, their view of events was a watered-down version that came from the Soviet government.
“We didn’t realize that we had been on the verge of war,” one interviewee said. “I, for one, didn’t know.”
Liquid history
“Memory was dangerous in the Soviet Union,” Raleigh says. “Ideology had replaced it.” Unsavory historical figures were airbrushed out of photographs and clipped from encyclopedias. History became fluid as people went in and out of favor. “There was an official national text, and Stalin himself had edited it — The Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” After Stalin died and Khrushchev publicly denounced him, the canon was redone for the first time — the past reconstructed on the printed page.
“I believe there are alternative histories to the official history, which are passed down orally in families,” Raleigh says. “Russia’s Sputnik Generation is about how people remember the past, and our memory is very malleable. Simply put, people tell their stories in different ways throughout their lives. This book is not only about specific events but also what they mean to Russia’s Sputnik generation today.”
Donald Raleigh is Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor of History in the College of Arts and Sciences. Russia’s Sputnik Generation is part of a larger book project entitled Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of the Class of ’67, which will include interviews from alumni of schools in Saratov and Moscow.
