print“Children of War” as the Last Eyewitnesses of the Great Victory
Britvina I.B.
Dr. Sci. (Soc.), Associate Professor of the Department of Integrated Communications and Branding, Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russia irina.britvina@urfu.ru
Britvina I.B. “Children of War” as the Last Eyewitnesses of the Great Victory. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2025. No 5. P. 73-79
The article contains the results of an analysis of interviews with residents of the Kurgan region who experienced the Great Patriotic War as children. The author relied on the theory of children’s reflection of culture and parental behavior, as well as on the dispositional theory of personality by V. A. Yadov. For the analysis, 14 interviews and memories of military childhood were selected, collected by local historians in the city of Shadrinsk. The problem of the article is related to the identification of the phenomenon of contrast between the sharply negative attitude of “war children” to “enemies symbols” with a condescending attitude to “enemies humans”. The results show that children' attitudes to events were greatly influenced by films about the war, cartoons in newspapers and on propaganda posters, and conversations at school. Children aged 12–13 felt hatred for Hitler, and younger children felt anger against the background of the hardships they had to experience. The attitude towards the prisoners was cautious, without a feeling of hatred. The children learned their attitude towards the internees from their mothers, who pitied them. The author comes to the conclusion that the memories of the “children of war”, the last bearers of “living” memories, can write important pages in the social history of the Great Patriotic War.
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