Raising the red standard health club

At the beginning of The Whisperers, his recent book about Stalin's Russia, Orlando Figes claims that through schools and youth organisations the Bolsheviks "aimed to indoctrinate the next generation in the new collective way of life".health club In her book about children in Russia, Catriona Kelly introduces her chapters on Soviet education with the words: "In the earliest days, the mood was one of iconoclastic euphoria combined with democratic utopianism. Children had been regimented and dragooned; now they were to be free to learn for the joy of it. Pupil organisations had been banned; now every school was to have its pupil organisation."

The contrast is startling, and though it is possible to recognise their awful compatibility, these claims characterise the books' divergences. Kelly begins her story earlier than Figes, in 1890, so that the extraordinary convulsions from 1917 onwards, as they affected children, are seen in terms of the preceding years, health club when a majority of Russia's population was still illiterate and unschooled.

The Bolsheviks inherited an inadequate education system along with new ideas from abroad about child development (Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon, devisers of the Binet-Simon intelligence scale, were first published in Russian in 1909, and Freud from 1910), while Tolstoy's writings about education were widely read. Some of the progressive ideas - which included no beating, "rational education" and the exclusion of religion and all forms of superstition from the curriculum - came to be thought of later as contaminated by their bourgeois origins, but they were enthusiastically incorporated into the earliest attempts to create a system of public nurseries, kindergartens and primary and secondary schooling for all children.

Kelly's account of the development of childbirth services over the same period takes a similar course: from its "very low base" in 1917 to some successful local attempts to modernise care for mothers and babies. Once again the new edifice toppled on its frail and chaotic foundations, to collapse beneath the weight of poverty and starvation in the 20s. Women were often worse off than they had been, because modernisation had severed the old reliance on amateur midwives and friends and relations. Even in the 50s, women were often expected to work until their waters broke, when they might give birth on the factory floor or in a ditch, unattended by anyone. Femininity was suspect, and girls were encouraged to be more like boys.

If Kelly is good on historical context and change, and fair to the infinite variety of what went on, from the appalling to the heroic and imaginative, her focus on children entails the exclusion of wider questions of undoubted relevance to them: employment and income,health club or the impact of shared housing on children's friendships and family relations. There is little sense of the pressures on parents - economic, political, sexual and social - which cannot have failed to affect their families. The consequences for health and life expectancy of adult alcoholism get little attention here, yet this, more than anything, must have produced the astronomical numbers of abandoned children and, indeed, child alcoholism.

Kelly concentrates on public policy and pronouncements, on provision for orphans and abandoned children, who roamed the streets during the whole of the 20th century (there are, apparently, a million of them now), and finally on educational and cultural provision. She is good on the contradictions visible in all this and on the sudden abandonment in the 30s of talk about children's rights or the importance of self-expression and creativity.

There are fascinating glimpses of that same trajectory in Kelly's discussion of recommended reading for the young, and a good deal about exceptional children, whether "prodigies" or delinquents or orphans, who seem to contribute to a Russian tradition that is simultaneously sentimental and cynical: always a touchstone for communism's successes and hidden failures. A report published in 1989, claiming that a third of kindergartens occupied defective buildings, was met with shock and disbelief by, as Kelly puts it, "a society used to believing that children were always given the best possible treatment".

Work done by the Soviet psychologists Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria in the 30s has had an important influence on research in the west into the dynamism of children's intellectual and linguistic development. Very little of that saw the light of day in the Soviet Union until the 60s and even then it made arguably less impact than it did in the west. There is disappointingly little here about how that work came to be done and how and why it was eventually revisited. Kornei Chukovsky and Anton Makarenko, their admired contemporaries, get more attention, though there is no analysis of their interestingly equivocal relation to official policy.

In the end, Kelly reaches the point where Figes began: "The causes behind the collapse of the Soviet system lay not just in failure to deliver, materially speaking. They also, it is clear, stemmed from the very relentlessness of political indoctrination - which in time generated indifference to dogma among many, and a critical attitude among a minority."

Her level-headed tackling of her subject serves to remind us that an account of public provision for children in Britain from 1890 onwards would not be a tale of unalloyed triumph, and that there were impressive achievements in the Soviet Union: the move from very low literacy levels to a respectable position among the developed countries of the world, an expanded education system and access for most children to sports and the arts. Kelly ends her story in 1991, so that she can only hint at the undermining of state provision during the last 20 years and the haphazard introduction of the market into education and other vital areas of young people's lives.