Fears of Late Soviet Childhood: Cultural Sources and Representations

Drawing on 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews with those who spent their childhood in the late Soviet period (born in 1970s by Linor Goralik’s definition), this research studies the socio-cultural phenomena and cultural works that were sources of children's fears and anxieties, and in which these fears could have been reflected. Childhood fears have usually been studied in two theoretical fields: psychology and folklore studies. The latter has more relation with the scope of this work but it is focused usually on children folklore (scary stories, urban legends etc.) which is not the only representation of fears in childhood, as this research shows. The study of other theoretical approaches to the definition of "fears" and "anxieties" in culture (such as “Unheimlich”, the paranoid fear of the Cold war etc.) makes it possible to conceptualize and categorize them. Based on this, an introduction and initial commentary on typology of the fears in the late Soviet has been created. The main categories that were marked are as follows: uncanny, micro (bullying, family issues) and macro (fear of nuclear war, foreign agents) socio-historical anxieties, and personal-imaginary (irrational) fears. Then follows an analysis of Media (cinema, animation, literature), in which some aspects of the "terrible" were highlighted by respondents. Based on this analysis, the subgenre "Soviet Gothic" is conceptualized as characteristic of the late Soviet period.