Michael Rosen examines four very different historical attempts at moulding the minds of the young. 2: Russia: the Imagination at War Meet the man who never was and the cockroach who might be Stalin.
The early experiments of the first years of the Russian Revolution saw the folk tale elevated to a new status in the people's regime, the fairy tale attacked for its lack of reality, and the classics newly revered. As the new Communist ideology hardened, Kornei Chukovsky fought and won a lone battle for the fairy tale, while others found the forest of children's literature a place of refuge. Repeat