Ieva Daujotaite

To what extent playgrounds in Soviet Lithuania are cultural icons of Soviet politics?

Throughout my independent research project, I studied the history of Soviet Lithuanian playground design between 1940 – 1990. To most people from Lithuania who were born in the 20th century, the sight of a Soviet playground anywhere in the former USSR region will bring back memories from their own childhood. Thanks to a centralised system of industrial construction, playground design in the Soviet Union was nearly identical across all the former USSR countries. Therefore, by the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, Soviet playground design had become so ubiquitous that in the lived experience of the former USSR generations, playgrounds are intrinsic to the idea of a typical Soviet childhood.

According to a Russian journalist A. Sorokina, Soviet play life was marked by homogeneity and fixity where “kids from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok played nearly identical games, and despite the distances, they shared the same childhood dreams”. As Soviet communism aspired to a vision of a classless society which exists on the basis of common ownership and no competition, the idea of a homogenous childhood across different nations and social classes is symptomatic of an effectively implemented communist regime. Therefore, by arguing that homogenous childhoods were a product of communism, the dissertation investigates how playgrounds, being one of many cultural factors that shapes the experience of childhood, contributed to the production of communism.

To analyse the extent to which playgrounds perpetuated the culture of communism, I examine playgrounds through a theoretical framework of cultural icons. Most notably, my work tries to contextualise the lived experience of changing playground design, by identifying several case studies and giving an insight into the lives of Soviet Lithuanian playground designers, architects, children and women.

Image: ‘Typical Elements of External Improvement for the Residential Area of Microdistricts of the City of Leningrad’, Playground Design Specification Manual,1966.