In the play, a little girl named Mytyl and her brother Tyltyl find the bird of happiness and release it into the world. In her diary, Didrikil described the Soviet Union as “that miracle-producing magic garden of Communism, from which blue birds fly to every corner of the world, spreading the news of Communist happiness.”

The key to finding the blue bird of happiness was education, and the sacred center of Soviet education was Alexander Pushkin. “We spoke of Pushkin as if he were alive,” wrote Lydia Libedinskaia, who attended the Moscow Exemplаry School in the 1930s. “We kept asking each other if Pushkin would like our metro, our new bridges that spanned the Moskva, the neon lights on Gorky Street.”

After ushering in the New Year of 1937, the 16-year-old Libedinskaia and her friends went to the Pushkin Monument in the center of Moscow. According to her memoirs, they gathered around Pushkin’s statue and took turns “reading his poems to him — one after another, on and on.”

Suddenly, in the frosty silence of that New Year’s Eve, a boy’s voice, trembling with excitement, rang out: While freedom kindles us, my friend, While honor calls us and we hear it, Come, to our country let us tend The noble promptings of the spirit. It sounded like a vow. That is how, in solemn silence, warriors take their oaths. Happy are those who had such moments in their youth ... The snow kept falling, melting on our flushed faces and silvering our hair. Our hearts were overflowing with love for Pushkin, poetry, Moscow, and our country. We yearned for great deeds and vowed silently to accomplish them. My generation! The children of the 1920s, the men and women of a happy and tragic age! You grew up as equal participants in the building of the Soviet Union, you were proud of your fathers, who had carried out an unheard-of revolution, you dreamed of becoming their worthy successors ...

Many of these boys and girls would be killed during World War II, better known in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War. Some would be arrested and sent into exile. Some, like Libedinskaia, would go on to welcome Khrushchev’s thaw and then Gorbachev’s Perestroika. Most would continue to be proud of their fathers. None would consider themselves their spiritual successors.

Bolshevism — and Marxism in general — had a remarkably flat conception of human nature: A revolution in property relations was the only necessary condition for a revolution in human hearts. The dictatorship of the proletariat would automatically result in the withering away of whatever got in the way of Communism, from the state to the family. Accordingly, the Bolsheviks never worried much about the family, never policed the home, and never connected the domestic rites of passage — childbirth, marriage and death — to their sociology and political economy.

No one knew what a good Communist home was supposed to look like, and no one came to check whether Nina Avgustovna Didrikil and her husband, the commander of the assault on the Winter Palace and later president of Red Sports International, Nikolai Ilyich Podvoisky, were reading Marx, Engels and Lenin to their children. They were not, and they were not expected to. They were reading Goethe, Heine and Tolstoy instead.