Moscow Boarding School Pupils in the Ural Rear: Reflection of Military Reality in Synchronous Ego-Documents

The Relevance of studying the features of childrens’ perception of extreme conditions transformationis is dictated not only by the need to preserve the traumatic experience of the great Patriotic war. Ongoing military conflicts in the modern world lead to the fact that the victims are civilians including children. Their perception of extreme situations and adaptation mechanisms are of scientific and practical interest. Based on synchronous egodocuments written by children the author examines childrens' perception of the evacuation road to the Ural rear and the image of the enemy during the great Patriotic war. The purpose of this study is to examine the perception and representation of military reality in childrens' writings. The main part of the sources were school essays, notes and poems for the local wall newspaper, written by the Moscow boarding school’s pupils evacuated to Molotov region. The value of children's ego-documents is determined by the fact that they allow us to identify the value system of war children and the degree of influence of official propaganda on the child's psyche. The topic of children's perception in a military reality has been covered in Russian historiography, but researchers rarely use such sources as children's texts intended for wall newspapers. The methodology of the research is based on the theoretical positions and methods of military-historical anthropology, methods of studying and representing oral history. This study highlights the stories that left a mark on the child's psyche: the road to evacuation, living conditions and training of boarding school students in the Soviet rear, ideas about the war, the enemies and the Red Army. It is concluded that in the conditions of war there was a further militarization of children's consciousness. The peculiarities of children's perception of the war are emotionality, simplicity, a clear differentiation between friend or foe categoricalness. The image of the enemy is not different from the key national-Patriotic stereotypes associated with the great Patriotic war. Children's assessments of what is happening and their attitude to the enemy are mostly formed by rhetoric, ideology, and propaganda.