The Flowers of Life on Their Parents' Grave

That the birth rate in Russia is plummeting does not exactly mean Russians don’t love kids – they do, it’s just that Russia can’t afford large families anymore.

Parents here now pay an arm and a leg to support a newborn baby – what with all these Pampers and other Western stuff on offer. To say nothing of supporting and bringing up older kids. For, as the Russians say, “small children, small worries; big children, big worries” (маленькие детки – маленькие бедки, а вырастут велики – будут большие). Nevertheless, as Sting sang in a song that went over very well in Russia: “...Russians love their children too.” Those parents who have both a daughter and a son are thought to be especially lucky, for they have what old Russians call “golden children” – золотые дети.

The father of Soviet literature, Maxim Gorky, had this to say about kids: “Children are the flowers of life” (Дети – цветы жизни). Hopeless cynics rephrased the stock phrase to: “Children are the flowers of life on their parent’s grave” (Дети – цветы жизни на могиле родителей). But then this was probably invented in a moment of despair and most likely refers to the big worries brought on by big children...

These same cynics probably belong to the category of parents who hire babysitters and will not consider making any sacrifices to bring up their children in a healthy, homey atmosphere. About such parents, Russians have a fairly morbid saying: у семи нянек дитя без глазу (“seven babysitters can’t say why their only baby lost her eye,” or, if your prefer a looser translation, “too many cooks spoil the broth”). Neglectful parents never bother finding out why their baby cries. Instead of checking the baby’s diapers or stopping for a few minutes to play with the child, they would rather give him something to play with, to distract its attention. For, as Russians say, чем бы дитя не тешилось, лишь бы не плакало (anything to keep the baby quiet). And the children of such parents? They will probably bring up their kids in the same fashion. After all, яблоко от яблочка недалеко падает (the apple never falls far from the tree).

In the Soviet era, kid-idioms were often used in an adult context. Suffice it to mention Lenin’s famous book, Детская болезнь левизны в коммунизме (The Infantile Disease of Leftist Communism). And there is the cliché Lenin used when he was disagreeing with his opponents, думать так было бы ребячеством (to think so would be childish).

Soviet children were steeped in the spirit and language of communist ideology from the earliest days of their childhood. Or, to put it in an old, bookish way, “from their young fingernails” (с младых ногтей).

Meanwhile, the senile ideologues at the top were occasionally entering their second childhood (впадали в детство – literally, “fell back into childhood”). So, in a way, the Soviet children were on a par with their educators. But their parents, disillusioned with the political regime, were unmoved by communist educational dogmas. A famous joke of the late 1970s has it that, when communist leader Leonid Brezhnev professed the famous Soviet cliché, “наши дети будут жить при коммунизме” (“our children will live under communism”), a parent in the crowd of listeners chuckled: “Так им и надо!” (“They deserve it!”)

Luckily, for Brezhnev, by then surrounded by seven babysitters, he would not have gotten the joke even if he had heard it. By that time, he was already falling deep back into his childhood...