Merry Pictures of the Little Folk: The Cartoon Magazine Veselye kartinki, or What’s Left of the Socialist “Children’s World”

My paper deals with Veselye kartinki (Merry Pictures), a monthly children’s cartoon magazine launched by the Komsomol in 1956 and dedicated to the youngest generations of the “new socialists” (age 4–8). In its heydays in the early 1980s the magazine reached a circulation of 9,5 million, which indicates that Merry Pictures had become an essential part of post-Stalinist childhood. Generations of small readers found it attractive for several reasons. The journal was indeed comparatively “merry” und funny – not least because it was exempt from censorship, and so it was the only publication of that kind in the Soviet Union. Moreover, among its illustrators were a number of artists who are today well known for their participation in the nonconformist art scene (for example Ilya Kabakov and Victor Pivovarov), which gave the merry pictures their specific visual quality. The magazine proved to be an “image machine” even after the end of the Soviet Union. It survived the Soviet childhood by a good two decades and granted its characters, the little folks, an afterlife in the mass culture of the new Russia. However, this is not only the story of the magazine and its attempt to visually shape a newly created concept, arising with the Thaw, of a merry childhood that entered the currently emerging canon of visual socialism. Rather, there are two other, contradictory understandings of Merry Pictures and its Merry Folks’ Club that can be found currently. According to one, the Merry Folks are considered the first Soviet comic heroes, who were correspondingly free of politics and harmless for their readership. The other regards them as socialist “pathos formulas” in a format for children that populate the art of Moscow Conceptualists as thoroughly ideological Soviet symbols. This paper attempts to augment these two selective “remnants” with the primary history of Merry Pictures and demonstrate a productive arsenal of images and figures was developed over a half-century, precisely in the tension between everyday free spaces and political stipulations.