In the Soviet Union, the disciplined child, as opposed to the ‘wild’ and ‘dangerous’ one, served as an agent of a luminous, utopian Soviet future, a future that would be homogeneous, prosperous, and modern at the same time. Obedient and uniformly behaving children conformed to the ideals of a standardised, industrial society. Building blocks were used as a model and metaphor for building this new society through engineering expertise and hard work. Childhood was a social construct; play-related iconography from the Soviet Union illustrates the ways adults co-opted children according to the dominant Communist paradigm. Nina Sakonskaia’s book Mamin Most (Mother’s Bridge), published in 1933, is an illuminating example of how construction toys were embedded in political narratives. The woman ‘hero’ of this book is an engineer who works to design a bridge. Her little girl is shown sitting on the floor beside her, playing with building blocks. As the mother is busy creating a complicated, innovative technical structure, so is the girl absorbed in building something new on the small scale.
