stephanieNY

As part of my Moscow research, I've been looking at public spaces in communist Russia...spaces that were designed to facilitate the social, communal "new way of life" in the Soviet Union. One of the typologies that I looked at today is the Pioneer Palace. Pioneers were like little communist boy and girl scouts; and the "palaces" were like camps or campuses. Children of the Communist Party members spent their summer and winter vacations at these facilities where they learned discipline, self-reliance, and community. Press accounts at the time described the children returning home after camp "tanned, fit, and yearning for the collective." !!!! So anyway, I found this goldmine of photographs from LIFE magazine of children at a Pioneer Palace in 1959. Aaaand, I spoke with our teacher today and she told me about her experience at one of the camps in Moscow. She was a little pioneer until the collapse of the Soviet Union when she was twelve. !!!!