User:Aru Akimkhanova/Children of the festival

Children of the festival or festival children — a household stereotype established in the USSR in the 1960s – 1970s, a cliche implying Soviet people, one of whose parents was non-European from Africa, Latin America, or, to a lesser extent, foreign Asia

First of all, this phraseologism refers to the children born in the Soviet Union to representatives of the Negroid race - people from “black Africa”, as being most noticeably different in appearance. It is believed that for the first time the mass appearance of Russian-Métis and Mulat-Russian caused the VI World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow in 1957, hence the name. The appearance of a sustainable combination could have been influenced by the opening line of the hymn of the festival: “Children of different nations, we live with a dream of peace ...” (“The Anthem of Democratic Youth”).

Postage stamp of the USSR with the emblem of the festival (1957)

For a long time, the migration to Russia of people of the Negroid race and their subsequent rooting in a new homeland because of geographical remoteness could occur only sporadically, as isolated cases.

.The relatively noticeable beginning of the appearance of blacks in Russia can be considered the period of the industrialization of the USSR in the 1930s, when negroes were part of the engineers, businessmen and intellectuals who came from the US In a certain number they settled in the Soviet Union for years, and sometimes they started families and remained for good (see, for example, Patterson, James Lloydovich). At this stage, such cases across the country, however, remained rather isolated and not evaluated by the indigenous population as a special phenomenon.

James Patterson, Lyubov Orlova and Sergey Stolyarov. Frame from the movie "Circus" (1936)

The World Festival of Youth and Students of 1957 thus caused a “new wave” - unlike the previous ones, noticed by the Soviet society.In an article about the Moscow festival, Artem Krechetnikov, BBC, notes:

The Thaw brought with it new principles: foreigners are divided into good and bad, and the latter are immeasurably more recent; all working people are friends of the USSR; if they are not yet ready to build socialism, then they certainly want peace in the whole world, and on this basis we will face them ... Now everything Western has ceased to be rejected by chok ... A special term has appeared: "people of good will." Not absolutely ours, but not enemies. They came to Moscow. "

Festival

The Dove of Peace, invented by Pablo Picasso, became the symbol of the youth forum, to which tens of thousands of delegates from left-wing youth organizations from 131 countries of the world arrived. During the festival, the fashion for jeans, sneakers and badminton was rapidly spreading. Popular music superhits became Rock Around the Clock, “The Hymn of Democratic Youth”, “If the Boys of the Whole Earth ...” and “Moscow Nights”. The festival has become in all senses a significant and explosive event for boys and girls. Famous jazzman Alexey Kozlov later writes about those days:

Neither tourists nor businessmen have yet arrived in the country, diplomats and rare journalists just did not appear on the streets. Therefore, when we suddenly saw on the streets of Moscow thousands of foreigners with whom it was possible to communicate, we were seized with something like euphoria ...
I remember how on bright nights on the pavement of Gorky Street there were groups of people, in the center of each of them several people were hotly discussing something. The rest, surrounding them with a dense ring, listened attentively, gaining mind-mind, getting used to this process itself - the free exchange of opinions.

Versions

Among the thousands of delegates there were quite a few representatives of the Negroid race - these were the envoys of Africa, which was in the midst of the process of decolonization. A number of delegations did not represent the state, but national liberation movements, often in their homeland underground. Last tried to take especially sincere. The Soviet press often and in detail told about the difficulties and dangers that they had to overcome in order to get to Moscow. Writer Anatoly Makarov says:

Years of independence for African countries

From Manezh Square right on the pavement, neglecting the whistles of cars and police trills, a crowd rose, never seen on Moscow streets. Bright, almost carnivally dressed up, irreverent, cheerful, tinkling with guitars, beating drums, blowing in pipes, screaming, singing, dancing on the go, intoxicating not from wine, but from freedom and the purest and best feelings, unfamiliar, unknown, different language - and to chill, dear to the pain ...

The festival traveled around Moscow in buses and in open trucks (there were not enough buses for all the guests). He sailed on the Garden Ring, which was a vast human sea. All of Moscow, simple-minded, just coming to its senses after military cards and lines ... somehow dressed up, barely starting to get out of basements and communal cabinets, stood on the pavement, sidewalks, rooftops, and yearning for the passing guests like warm human hands. Geographical map has found a concrete embodiment. The world really turned out to be amazingly diverse. According to generally accepted ideas, later replicated by the perestroika and Russian press, the close emotional contact of young Muscovites and Muscovites with their foreign peers was not limited to conversations about peace and friendship, and sometimes went much further. A simple Soviet man had a lot of questions about black people, including not very decent questions. Yegor Telitsin, who worked as a patrol officer during the festival, recalls:

In the area of the Lenin Hills detained a group of men. They are located behind the bushes in the middle of the lawn, in the center - two young Africans. Drunk and naked. Began to understand, and one of the men explains: they say, they argued with friends, what color they have "farm". To resolve the issue, we bought several bottles of vodka and persuaded (with gestures!) The delegates walking past to wrap them up for a picnic. When they properly loaded, they managed to convince to arrange a striptease. Just in time, we arrived at the height of events. Africans were sent to the hotel, and ours - to the nearest branch ...

According to participants of the events, “there were a lot of foreign people whom no one in Russia had ever seen before. I mean primarily Negroes, and simply other nationalities. Our girls went crazy. "Telekritik Irina Petrovskaya writes in Izvestia about the festival days, that then" love between Soviet Komsomol members and envoys from all countries and continents flared up on its own, without asking anyone for permission. " Aleksey Kozlov publishes juicy details in his acclaimed memoirs The Goat on Saxon:

I myself was not a participant in these events, but I heard many stories that were similar in basic details. And that's what happened. By nightfall, when it was getting dark, crowds of girls from all over Moscow made their way to the places where foreign delegations resided. These were various student dormitories and hotels located on the outskirts of the city ... It was impossible for Soviet girls to break into the hotel buildings, since everything was cordoned off by professional KGB men and amateur military men. But no one could forbid foreign guests to go outside the hotels

... Events developed with maximum speed. No courting, no false coquetry. The newly formed couples were rather moving away from the buildings, into the dark, into the fields, into the bushes, knowing for sure that sex and than they would immediately be engaged. Especially they did not move far away, so the space around the hotels was filled rather tightly, the couple were located not too far from each other, but in the dark it didn’t matter. The image of the mysterious, shy and chaste Russian Komsomol girl not only collapsed, but rather enriched with some kind of new, unexpected trait - reckless, desperate lewdness. Here, really, "in a still waters ..."

... Urgently, special flying motorized squads were organized on trucks, equipped with lighting devices, scissors, and hairdresser's hair clippers bald. When the trucks with vigilantes, according to the plan of the raids, unexpectedly went to the fields and turned on all the headlights and lamps, this was where the true scale of the “orgy” was taking place. Love pairs were big set. The foreigners were not touched, only the girls were dealt with ... some of their hair was cut off, such a "clearing" was made, after which the girl had only one thing - to cut her hair barely and grow her hair again ... Rumors about what was happening immediately spread through Moscow. Some, especially curious, went to the hotel "Tourist", to the Luzhniki and other places where they were raided just to stare at a rather rare sight.

Nine months after the World Festival of Youth and Students in the spring of 1958, “children of the festival” began to appear. It was difficult for young mothers to hide the fruits of those fleeting connections due to the black skin of babies, and each outing for a walk turned into a clear demonstration of what happened. Conservative public opinion was negatively disposed: a negro in a wheelchair was considered a sign of his mother's easy behavior. Vladimir Kontrovsky in the story “The Last Officer” gives such a derogatory characterization to one of her heroes:

His grandmother, her heavenly kingdom, was one of the Komsomol enthusiasts, with outstretched knees meeting the guests of the Moscow International Festival of Youth and students arriving from Asian and African countries who had just liberated themselves from the yoke of the damned colonizers.

International friendship knew no bounds, and when a wave of enthusiasm subsided, on the sand, soaked from the girl's tears, there were numerous “children of the festival” briskly crappy - in the Country of the Soviets it was tight. This bowl and Valery Granny didn’t pass: her little son was born - all in dad. The fighter for independence returned to his homeland, without any hesitation about the consequences of his ardent but brief love in a distant northern country, and his son grew up. In Valeriy Todorovsky's film “Hipsters”, the problem of the children of the festival is viewed retrospectively, with a touch of lyrics and nagging nostalgia. It emphasizes the protest of young people against Soviet soullessness and formalism, as well as the best features of the Soviet people - tolerance, readiness to accept any child in the family, regardless of the circumstances of their birth. Despite attempts of some kind of romanticization and rethinking of the past, the film clearly shows all that negative, which was caused by the unexpected birth of a black mulatto child in a simple Soviet family.

Negative attitudes towards mothers were often transferred later on to the children of the festival themselves. For example, Dmitry Bykov, like the previous author, believes that the latter very often filled up with criminal communities or simply hung out on the street, as they grew up without fathers. The newspaper “The Foreigner” notes that many of the children of the 1957 festival and their descendants “stuck” between two civilizations.

Some estimates of the total number of children of the festival reach “many” or “more than 40 thousand” people. Some publications even believe that after the festival in 1957 a new ethnic group appeared in the USSR. Nevertheless, the authoritative estimate of the number of black children of the festival ranges from "units" to "dozens".

Statistics

Journalist A. Dobrovolsky mentions a summary statistical statement allegedly caught his eye, prepared for the leadership of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, which recorded the birth of a total of 531 mulattos. It should be noted that the search for the traces of children of the festival of non-European races in various state, public and human rights structures (Metis Foundation, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Center for Interethnic Cooperation, Moscow House of Nationalities) organized by the Trud newspaper did not produce results.

The festival was held from July 28 to August 11, 1957. In total, 34,000 foreigners arrived in Moscow. The most numerous were the delegates of European countries; in particular, two thousand people each came from the whites of France and Finland. Natalya Krylova, Doctor of Historical Sciences, chief researcher at the Institute of African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, notes that the black guests of the festival of both sexes numbered about 5-6 thousand - and they were not left to themselves, over two hundred events were held in the framework of the festival program in two weeks their active participation. So even if we assume a mutual hypersexuality of the parties, for the allotted time there could not have been any significant number of intimate contacts, and their results can amount to dozens. Moreover, between the Soviet and foreign youth there were strong cultural differences, to which in this case were added racial.

So, according to the “Foreigner” newspaper, even in present-day Russia, the number of descendants of inter-ethnic relations with foreigners reaches only 7–9 thousand a year per country, and a 30-year-old Russian, on average, of the total number of his partners (about ten to this age) has less than 0.001 foreigners - while his coevals are American of the same ten of their women have 0.2 foreigners, and the Frenchman of 15 - 0.5. That is, there is no reason to talk about “crowds” of thirsting for exotic love in 1957: the protecting civilization barriers are too high. The society thus protects its members from inter-ethnic contacts not from racism as such, but from a large difference of cultures, which significantly reduces the chances of a potential couple for a happy marriage.

The future Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in 1957 to no one yet known Colombian journalist, testifies in his memoirs about the Moscow festival weekdays and holidays: the Soviet comrades wanted to be friends, however

The interior of the Soviet apartment of the 1950s

Muscovites resisted suspiciously stubbornly when we expressed a desire to come to visit them. And only a few people gave way to our pressure. however, connected this with their sense of restraint from the poverty of their living conditions. Which, however, does not fit well with the memories of Makarov, who was "on the other side of the barricades":

We brought the company of the French to our classmate, in a huge Moscow communal apartment, converted from the former numbers. Somehow, the whole old courtyard found out that young Parisians were taking in the apartment on the second floor, and the people pushed us with cakes, with jam, of course, with bottles and other gifts of a simple Russian heart. French women roared in a voice. By the way, all this happened on Pushechnaya Street, a hundred meters from the famous building, which Muscovites passed by in those years, reflexively lowering their eyes and quickening their pace. Some light on the cause of the appearance of various legends is shed by the data of the internal affairs and state security organs shared by Vladlen Krivosheev, then the instructor of the organizational department of the Moscow-City Komsomol Committee. On the eve of the festival, a meeting of “thieves in law” took place, deciding to completely curtail criminal activity in Moscow these days and to ensure appropriate control over the unorganized criminal element. The reason is simple: the event is political, so if anything happens, we would have to answer not with the criminal articles of the Criminal Code, but “with the policy” in the load.

Before the festival, real prostitutes began to come to Moscow from all over the Union. Authorities feared an outbreak of sexually transmitted diseases. Therefore, several especially well-known professional women were taken out of town by the police, spoiled their hairstyles and ordered to warn the others. This had the effect: no cases of organized commercial sex were recorded during two festival weeks. Natalia Krylova:

The girls with pigtails in the fashion of that time, white socks, brought up on the books of Gaidar, simply could not provoke a sexual pandemic. Then reigned romantic infantilism, and not the need to copulate. We just crawled out from under the ideological cap. It was like contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. But no one is going to immediately enter into intimacy with green men.

The legend about the frivolity and carelessness of foreign daddies does not find evidence either: members of foreign delegations who remained in Moscow under various pretexts were a big post-festival problem for the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB. All of them were harvested and quietly sent out of the country on an individual basis.

Phenomenon

Causes of

In the late 1940s - early 1950s, when the “second world” headed by the USSR (socialist countries) was at the peak of its foreign expansion, the leadership of the Central Committee of the party realized and made a number of decisions on organizing mass training for the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America - both by organizing the training of Soviet specialists (which required a significant number of speakers of the respective languages), and by attracting students of these countries themselves to Moscow and other cities of the USSR with the aim of proper advanced training Astoyan and future local administrative, military and business elites of the pro-Soviet orientation.

As a result, already in 1944, the Institute of International Relations (IMO, now MGIMO) was established, a year before the festival, in 1956, the Faculty of Oriental Languages was established at the Moscow State University, evolved into the Institute of Asian and African Countries (ISAA), and three years later after the festival, in 1960, the University of Friendship of Peoples was opened, the current RUDN. The admission of students and the hiring of teachers, initially carried out through public organizations, was then singled out as a separate and important task for the embassies and consulates of the USSR in their respective countries.

All this naturally led to an abrupt increase in the number of foreigners from Asia, Africa and Latin America in Moscow at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. Only one UDN named after Patrice Lumumba annually graduated about 300–350 specialists in those years — that is, for five years of study in only one of these high schools in Moscow there were permanently about one and a half thousand representatives of non-European races. These figures, however, below are given by Evgeny Zhirnov in the magazine "Power"

In the second half of the 1950s, the number of foreign students in the USSR increased sharply. The first representatives of developing countries began to appear in Soviet universities. [...] From the beginning of the 1960s, the Soviet leadership switched from piece production to friends of the Soviet Union abroad to mass ... Formally, they were given scholarships to train Soviet public organizations, from trade unions to friendship societies with foreign countries. And with the opening in 1960 of the Patrice Lumumba Peoples' Friendship University (UDN), each of the developing countries got a quota for student enrollment ... In 1970, the majority of foreign students were citizens of socialist countries - 4301 people. 1057 students came from Asia, 1414 from Africa, 347 from Latin America.

Obviously, they, as well as the staff of the rest oriented to the relationship with the "third" and "fourth world" of Soviet universities, contributed to the emergence of the children of the festival to a much greater extent than the two-week festival of 1957 that inspired Muscovites to the neupid euphemism that characterized the real phenomenon. REN-TV commentator Sergey Karamaev, however, concludes:

The overwhelming majority of the Soviet Union knew about Africa except from Chukovsky's poems - Africans, in turn, knew exactly the same amount about the USSR ... Another problem arose - since the number of African students was much larger than female students, very soon Africans drew Your attention on Russian girls. The fair sex itself was probably pleasant, but now the male part of the Russian population took it, to put it mildly, with unfriendliness.

And so it began ... According to the Africans themselves, the Russians treated them extremely roughly - they shoved them on the streets and called them “black monkeys”, most often Africans heard “back to the palm tree”. In 1963, the highly liberal Daily News from Natal wrote: “The tension between African students and Russians began to appear seriously. Africans who travel to the United States, implicitly waiting for them to be beaten on the streets, but instead it turns out that they are not even insulted there. At the same time, they come to Moscow, believing that there they will be met as heroes and fighters for national liberation - and instead of laurel wreaths they stumble upon hostility. ”

... By the mid-1960s, the leadership of the socialist countries ceased to have illusions about Africans and the "liberated" countries of Africa ... Speaking more simply, the socialist countries faced a dilemma: they extended Africa a hand of friendship, but when Africa came close to them, they suddenly realized that Africans do not like them. On the other hand, it is worth noting that in Africa there was no great sympathy for the USSR.

Competitor Terms

The metaphor of the “children of the festival” tolerantly and, at the same time, ironically called the phenomenon of Soviet mulattoes and until the 2000s served as the main designating term. Nevertheless, public opinion from time to time generated on the topic of the day additional ones. Specialized dictionaries, press publications mention among these:

"Children of Patrice Lumumba" or "Children of Lumumba" (from the name of the Patrice Lumumba Peoples' Friendship University) "Children of the Olympiad" (from the XXII Summer Olympic Games, held in 1980 in Moscow).

In addition, after the XII World Festival of Youth and Students was held in the capital in 1985, the well-established phrase “children of the festival” often spread to periods after both festivals, 1957 and 1985 (sometimes modifying to “children of festivals”).

However, none of the terms described was able to supplant the original, until at the turn of the 1990s-2000s the concept of “Afro-Russians”, created by analogy with “African Americans”, was more successful due to the lack of chronological and circumstance binding, as well as thanks to the active popularization in the media with the filing of the Russian mulattos themselves. The authorship of the term in 2002 was attributed to itself TV presenter Elena Hanga.

Literature

Africa in the memoirs of diplomatic service veterans. 5 (12) / Institute of African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Council of Veterans of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. - M., 2004. - 306 seconds - ISBN 5-201-04926-5
African studies of the young. Materials of the first All-Russian scientific conference "School of the young Africanist". (Moscow, November 25-27, 2001). - M., 2004. - 189 p. - ISBN 5-201-04930-3
Krylova N., Prozhogin, S. Metisa: who are they? Problems of socialization and self-identification. - M .: PML Institute of African Studies of RAS, 2004. - 275 p.
African countries and Russia (Handbook). - M., 2004. - 280 p.
Africa in the foreign policy priorities of Russia. // Reply ed. Deutsch T.L. - M., 2003, - 127 seconds - ISBN 5-201-04867-6
Vasiliev, A. Africa - the stepdaughter of globalization. - M .: Izd. firm Vost. liters, 2003. - 263 seconds - ISBN 5-02-018355-5
Sinitsyn, S. At the dawn of African independence (From the memoirs of a diplomat). - M., 2003. - 171 with - ISBN 5-201-04910-9
The formation of African nationalism, 1920s - early 1960s. // Reply ed. A. B. Davidson. - M., - 2003. - P. 391 - ISBN 5-02-008900-1
Orlov, I., Bagdasaryan, V., Fedulin, A., Mazin, K., Shnaydgen, Y. Soviet looking-glass. Foreign tourism in the USSR in the 1930-1980-ies: Tutorial - Moscow: Forum, - 2007. - p. 256. ISBN 5-91134-149-2
Smolyanitsky, M. Children of Festivals // Anthology of the modern story, or Stories of the end of the century. - M .: Olympus, AST - 2000. - P. 109—139 ISBN 5-271-00373-6 (Astrel). - ISBN 5-8195-0110-1 (Olympus).
Makarov, A. Children of the Festival - Izvestia, July 10, 2007.

[[Category:Soviet phraseology]] [[Category:Cold War]] [[Category:1958 establishments]] [[Category:History of Moscow]] [[Category:Youth]] [[Category:Ethnic groups in Russia]] [[Category:Ethnic and religious slurs]] [[Category:Ethnic minorities]] [[Category:African diaspora]]