Figure 1.--Here we see a Soviet school class in 1940. No other information was available except the year. We would guess the winter of 1939-40. This of course was before the great catastrophe of the NAZI invasion (June 1941). The portrait shows the teacher and princioal along with 38 children. They look to be about 9-10 years old. The girls wear dresses. The boys wear shirts and pants. We see a few boys with jackets and white collars. One boy wears a sailor suit. Several boys wear short pants amd long stockings, but this difficult to tell because the stockimgs and pants are the same dark color. It was not common to see school uniforms until the 1950s.

Stalin as Europe moved toward war forged an alliance with Hitler (August 1939) which made World War II possible. The NAZI-Soviet Pact led to a massive increrase of NAZI power. It was a major factor in the German defeat of the French Army (June 1940). Occupied France would prove to be a major support for the German war economy helping to launch and support the Ost Krieg. Hitler has anticipated supporting the NAZI war effort by the resoueces of the East. As the War progressed, rheresoyrces of thgeEastb barely supported the Osdt bheer. Occupied Western Europe, especially France, supported the NAZI War effort. Soviet education was relatively unaffected during the first 2 were realtively unaffected and continued to go to school during the early War years of the War (1939-41). Stalin only mobilized a fraction of vast Soviet military. Thus Doviet children continued to go to school. Unlike World War I, howver, Stalin's alliance with Hitler created a situation that did not have a large French Army in the West that forced the Germans to divide their forces between an estern and western fronts. Thus Stalin actually made the NAZI Barbarossa invasion possible (June 1941). The Soviet people suffered terribly. Some 25 million Soviets citizens perished in the War, most were civilians. An this was not just unitended casualties of military opertrations -- collateral damage. A major NAZI war goal was to kill civilans and not only Jews. Slavic people were another major target as part of Generalplan Ost. This was why civilian casualties were so muvh higher in World war II than World War I. The Soviets also targeted civilan populations, both in the Soviet Union itself and in the countries that the Soviets occupied, especially in the early War yars (1939-41). The Red Army eventually prevailed, but not before million had been killed in the Soviet Union. The War had a huge impact on education. Our information at this time is limited. The younger children continued to go to school when possible in the unoccupied areas. although many male teachers were conscripted for mlitary serice. Soviet children no longer went to school in the occupied areas. The Germans closed the schools. The NAZIs did set up schools for ethnic Germans. In the unoccupied areas, teenagers began working in war industries or on the farm to produce food. A major factor here were rations. Workers received extra rations. The Germans occupied huge areas in the Western Soviet Union, including a great deal of the country's best agricultural land. As a result food became a huge problem for the Soviet war economy and the populatioin. At about 12 years of age, children stopped getting reasonable rations. Only if they worked in the War economy did they get survivable rations. Older teenagers were conscripted. It took years for the Soviet Union to recover fom the War. Factories, homes, farms, and schools were destroyed both as part of Soviet burned earth or NAZI military operations and burned earh policies as they retreated. The War ended (1945), but unlkike the capitalist West, the Soviets and their Eastern European Empire did not recover qwuickly. Part of the reason was the level of damage, but Germany was also massively damaged, but recoveed much faster. The major reason was the Soviet socialist economy. The German and other Western economic miracles shocked Stalin, he has expected the Soviet socialist economy to out perform better than the capitalist economies of the West. As the Red Army moved West, schools were resesablished. We do not see many Soviet school children wearing uniforms in the 1940s. We do not have all that many images, but the images wee have found so far show the children wearing their own clothes and not uniforms.

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Created: 8:08 AM 1/2/2022
Last updated: 8:08 AM 1/2/2022