Stalin's Ninos: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-1951.

Stalin’s Niños explores the remarkable history of the refugee children who left Spain during the civil war of the late 1930s for the Soviet Union, where they were welcomed, celebrated, fed, and educated as evidence of international solidarity against fascism. As historian Karl Qualls illustrates in this thorough and meticulous study, while these children were immediately transformed into symbols of Soviet propaganda domestically and internationally, they were also individuals whose lives were shaped by the political conditions of Stalinism, the tensions of Soviet education, and the challenges facing refugees in new conditions. By exploring the intersection of representation, context, and experience, Stalin’s Niños tells a remarkable human story while also illuminating central themes of twentieth century European history at the intersection of political power, educational institutions, and individual survival. The strength of this book is the use of a wide range of source materials that collectively allow Qualls to make effective and persuasive arguments about key themes in the lives of Spanish refugee children. This book makes three major contributions to scholarship in educational history, childhood studies, and comparative twentieth century history. First, Stalin’s Niños examines the experience of the Spanish refugee children in the Soviet Union in terms of the modern practice of transforming children into citizens through educational institutions, practices, and ideologies inherently part of the state project. Second, the educational experience of these children is explored in relation to transformations of Stalinist schooling, which imposed a distinctive character on seemingly universal issues such as classroom instruction, the authority of teachers, and the social life of boarding schools. Finally, Qualls uses this case study of a remarkable cohort of refugee children to address broader questions about the experience of children whose lives were shaped by difficult contexts beginning with the Spanish Civil War, encompassing the most repressive years of Stalinism, and including the extraordinary devastation of World War II.