Spanish Children in the USSR in the 1930s: Education, Everyday Life, Historical Memory

The social processes taking place in the world between the First and Second World Wars are filled with a large number of contradictions, the study of which is actively engaged in modern humanities. The cataclysms of the first half of the twentieth century give rise to the phenomenon of "displaced children", children who, for one reason or another, were separated from their parents for a long time or lost them altogether. During the Civil War of 1936-1939 Spain is facing massive emigration. The peculiarity of this phenomenon is that a significant part of the refugees were children who left the country in organized groups unaccompanied by their parents. A significant part of the Spanish children were taken to the USSR, where young Spaniards faced difficulties arising from the peculiarities of Soviet society. The top leadership of the USSR was faced with the task of early social adaptation of Spanish-speaking children who found themselves without parents in an environment completely unknown to them. The study raises questions of the national policy of the USSR and the peculiarities of the formation of national identity, the organization of the public education system, the role of propaganda in shaping public opinion, using the example of the community of Spanish "war children", the stages and mechanisms of the formation of collective memory are analyzed.