Children with Swastikas
School Inspector, Report on Petr Grishin. February 13, 1937
A troubling symptom of school life in the 1930s that was not supposed to be discussed was the prevalence and popularity among schoolchildren of the swastika. An inspector who visited one school in Mordovia in 1937 was shocked by this fact and decided to conduct a genuine investigation. There are similar reports about pranks by schoolchildren involving the swastika in other schools and regions as well, indicating how widespread the phenomenon was. It was turned into a political issue, of course, and the guilty individuals were punished.
Original Source: TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 1265, l. 50.
I personally detained a pupil in grade 4-A named Petr Grishin in the hallway of this school during recess on 13 February 1937. He was pressing his hand (the fascist symbol had been written in chalk on his palm) on the back of a fourth-grade pupil in the school named Chertopolokhov. In a conversation with pupil Grishin, the latter said that this has been common in school for a long time and indicated that insignia are also imprinted by Cherniaevskii, Cheprygin, Kolzakov, Lytkin, Sitnikov, Glazov... Such incidents have also taken place in the upper classes. For instance, on 28 January 1937 Pupil Sobolev in grade 7-B drew a fascist swastika with chalk on a desk, and pupils Savchenko and Moiseev in grade 8-A drew fascist symbols with chalk on a desk. It was also established that a fascist symbol was drawn on the heater in the 5-C classroom at the beginning of January 1937. In addition, during my inspection of the school's rooms I personally noticed a fascist swastika on the walls in the hallways.
Source: Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov, eds., Stalinism as a Way of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 267.