From Kazakhstan with Happiness The Soviet Myth of Happy Childhood and Its Reception in Kazakhstan

The happy childhood was one of the most powerful and influential myths of the Soviet regime constructed in Kazakhstan, largely under Stalin. It came to define childhood more than any other notion in Soviet and post-Soviet Kazakhstan. This article combines the construction of the myth in Kazakh-language sources in the 1930s with its reception by Kazakh children through an examination of post-Soviet memoirs and other autobiographical accounts. I argue that childhood happiness in these accounts is almost never connected to state or ideol-ogy. In contrast, memoirists make sense of their Soviet childhoods in a very depoliticized or de-ideologized way. Simultaneously, the great majority of these accounts cannot be categorized as anti-Soviet either.