The Engineers of Children’s Fingers: Children’s Music, Soviet Internationalism, and the Problem of Ukraine’s National Instrument

Abstract How can an icon of romantic Ukrainian nationalism be refashioned into a tool for building Soviet internationalism? This article tells the story of the bandura—the musical instrument constructed in the nineteenth century as an icon of romantic Ukrainian nationalism—and its fraught integration into the culture of Young Pioneers in early Soviet Ukraine. Focused on the shift in cultural policy from Leninist korenizastiia to Stalinist socialist realism, this article examines how the emancipatory and universalizing claims of Soviet internationalism became premised on Russified culture that inhibited the possibility of non-Russians’ full assimilation into the project of Soviet revolution. In the hands of Young Pioneers, who were appointed as Soviet “revolutionary agents” and as targets of the state’s pastoral care (“Stalin’s flowers”), the bandura became a particularly vexed symbol, epitomizing the irreconcilable tensions and the apparently inevitable violence inherent to nationalities policies in Soviet Ukraine. Following the intergenerational saga of a family of bandurists, the article shows how the disciplining technologies of Soviet musical-political education yielded often unexpected results.