The Media Agenda in Soviet Children’s Magazines: Events and Chronotopes (the 1970–80s)

Abstract

The relevance of the study is predetermined by the necessity to comprehend the social practices of the Soviet era, including media practices aimed at educating a younger generation. The author sets the task to establish correspondence between the media agenda of Soviet children’s magazines and current events in the ‘adult world’, identify the main types of events, disclose their typical chronotopes and semiotic ways of their mediatization, as well as reveal the characteristics of the society model. The study draws on two main methodological categories, which are the media event and the chronotope. The latter is construed as the intersection of spatio-temporal characteristics of important events. The analysis found that the media agenda of Soviet children’s magazines was associated with several types of events: holidays and memorable dates, socio-political events, major state projects, large-scale incidents, and events in schoolchildren’s everyday life. These types of events can be discussed in terms of the chronotopes of holiday, meeting, construction (creation), disaster, and renewal. The chronotopes are actualized through both specific linguistic forms (nominations of events and their participants, lexemes with the semantics of time and space, toponyms and chrononyms, ideologemes, tense forms of verbs) and compound semiotic units, including visual elements and intertextual links between the structural components of the magazine. Because the magazines were targeted at the children’s audience, events were represented through the prism of children’s vision. As a result, adults and children are portrayed as members of the same society, sharing the epoch and space with their typical values and social practices. Thus, childhood is depicted as relative to adult life, and the unity of the socio-political spatio-temporal continuum is discursively constructed.