How The Perks Of A Corrupt Childhood

The Perks of Corrupted Childhood
When people hear about childhood in totalitarian society they first think about the Nazi regime in Germany and its political and educational influence on the youth. They frequently forget about the former USSR, which brought up several generations of the counties’ citizens under the same political structure. And despite the censorship, such writers as Joseph Brodsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Varlam Shalamov in their works shed the light on what was happening beyond the iron curtain, including what were the role and the place of children in that society. Although both the characters of the stories and the writers themselves experienced their childhoods very differently, they come up with similar ideas about
Most of those accusations may appear laughable for the modern society, however, at that time children paid a very high price for the adults’ ridiculous decisions. And as a result of Joseph Stalin’s politics the “wide gate” for children into the Archipelago was a subsequence of the massive execution of that time (Solzhenitsyn, 245). The thing which both Solzhenitsyn and I could not understand is how adults with their own children of the same age, especially those adults which participated in “stamping the arrest warrants” allowed something like this to happen (243). Their attitude represents the very basis upon which the totalitarian state existed, that is fear. The repressions, the fear of being repressed were the instruments of ruling which supported the balanced functioning of the state. And as those children entered the camps at the very young age, they could not understand that their childhood was corrupted and used by the regime: firstly, as an illustrative example for others; secondly, as a defenseless and free labor supply. However, living in the camps cannot pass without leaving any marks. As those kids were learning to perceive the world at that age, the experience and knowledge they received from the first days in the camps shaped their views and characters. They were
The influence of the regime on the children was not important for anyone. This indifference is also argued in Solzhenitsyn’s work as he discusses the attitude towards under age accused kids. At that time everyone was so busy with their own issues, so that when the character of the story in the combat for his own survival found those pictures he was disillusioned by what reality he as well as the others are living. Shalamov addresses it as the result of the collective action rather than the regime. The way totalitarian society unconsciously enforces onto children the reality of that time is so shocking for the character at the beginning, it makes him forget about his own problems. As the character recollects his memories, he draws a parallel between his and the child’s of that totalitarian society perceptions on the world (Shalamov, 137). What was considered immoral and inhumane for the adults of that time represented common norms and ordinary life for that society’s kids. Supposedly, they could not understand the atrocities posed by the regime to the full content. Yet, it represented the part of their life. I feel that Brodsky would argue this point of view as he overturns in his own autobiographical work “Less Than One” Karl Marx’s dictum that “existence conditions