Festival children () was a household stereotype or cliché that appeared in the Soviet Union in the 1960s–1980s, referring to children born to Soviet people and people from non-Russian countries.
Specifically, this phraseologism designated children born in the Soviet Union from different ethnic groups or peoples, geographically distant across the world. It was believed that the first mass appearance of mestizos and mulattoes (mixed race) was caused by the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students, held in Moscow in 1957. Presumably, the expression was also influenced by the opening line of the festival anthem: "Children of different nations, we live with the dream of peace..." ("").
Background
Due to Russia's geographical remoteness, the migration of African peoples into Russia only occurred sporadically in pre modern times.
A relatively noticeable beginning of the appearance of black people in Russia could be considered the period of industrialization in the USSR in the 1930s, when some of the engineers, businessmen, and members of the intelligentsia who arrived from the United States were black. In certain numbers, they settled in the Soviet Union for years, and sometimes even started families and remained permanently (see, for example, James Lloydovich Patterson). At this stage, however, such cases remained rather isolated across the country and were not perceived by the native population as a particular phenomenon.
The World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957, therefore, caused a "new wave"—unlike previous ones, it was noticed by Soviet society. In an article about the Moscow festival, Artyom Krechetnikov, "BBC", noted:
The Festival
The symbol of the youth forum, which brought tens of thousands of delegates from leftist youth organizations from 131 countries of the world,Двинина А. Дети фестиваля — «Карелия», No. 42 — 21 апреля 2005 года was the Dove of Peace, created by Pablo Picasso. During the festival, fashion for jeans, sneakers, and the game of badminton spread rapidly. Popular musical super hits were Rock Around the Clock, the "Hymn of Democratic Youth," "‘If All the Boys on Earth..." and "Moscow Nights." The festival became, in every sense, a significant and explosive event for young men and women. The famous jazz musician Alexey Kozlov later wrote about those days:Neither tourists nor businessmen had yet visited the country, and diplomats and the occasional journalist did not simply appear on the streets. Therefore, when we suddenly saw thousands of foreigners on the streets of Moscow with whom we could communicate, we were overcome with a kind of euphoria...
I remember how, on bright nights, groups of people would stand on the pavement of Gorky Street, with a few people in the centre of each group discussing something heatedly. The rest, surrounding them in a tight circle, listened, gaining wisdom and getting used to the very process of freely exchanging opinions.
Versions
Among the thousands of delegates, there were many representees from various African nations, which was in the midst of a decolonisation effort throughout much of the continent. A number of delegations represented not states, but national liberation movements, often operating underground in their home countries. The latter were given a particularly warm welcome. The Soviet press often reported in detail on the difficulties and dangers they had to overcome to get to Moscow. Writer Anatoly Makarov recounts«Вести». Елена Ханга: «Я люблю все, что связано с СССР» — 17 июня 2007.:From Manezhnaya Square, straight along the pavement, ignoring the honking of cars and the trills of the police, a crowd rose up, the likes of which had never been seen on the streets of Moscow. Colourful, dressed almost like carnival revellers, irreverent, cheerful, strumming guitars, beating drums, blowing pipes, shouting, singing, dancing on the move, intoxicated not by wine but by freedom and the purest and best feelings, unfamiliar, unknown, multilingual – and yet so familiar it made your blood run cold, so familiar it hurt...
The festival travelled through Moscow in buses and open trucks (there weren't enough buses for all the guests). It floated along the Garden Ring, which was an endless sea of people. All of Moscow, simple, just coming to its senses after ration cards and queues... dressed up as best they could, barely beginning to emerge from basements and communal flats, stood on the pavement, sidewalks, and rooftops, reaching out to passing guests, longing for the touch of warm human hands. The geographical map took on a concrete form. The world really was amazingly diverse.According to popular belief, later propagated by the press during perestroika and in Russia, the close emotional contact between young Muscovites and their foreign peers was not limited to conversations about peace and friendship, but sometimes went much further. Ordinary Soviet citizens had a lot of questions about dark-skinned people, including some that were not entirely appropriate. Yegor Telitsyn, who worked as a patrol Militsiya (policeman) during the festival, recalls:A group of men were detained in the Leninsky Hills area. They were sitting behind some bushes in the middle of a lawn, with two young Africans in the centre. They were drunk and naked. When asked what was going on, one of the men explained that they had made a bet with their friends about the colour of their ‘equipment’. To settle the matter, they bought several bottles of vodka and persuaded (with gestures!) some delegates who were passing by to join them for a ‘picnic.’ When they were properly drunk, they managed to convince them to perform a striptease. We arrived just as the events were reaching their climax. The Africans were sent to a hotel, and our men to the nearest police station...According to participants in the events, "There were a lot of foreigners whom no one in Russia had ever seen before. I mean, first and foremost, black people, but also people of other nationalities. Our girls went crazy,". Television critic Irina Petrovskaya writes in Izvestia about the festival days, saying that "love between Soviet Komsomol members and emissaries from all countries and continents flared up on its own, without asking anyone's permission". Alexei Kozlov published juicy details in his sensational memoir Kozel na sakse (The Goat on the Saxophone):I myself was not involved in these events, but I heard many stories that were similar in their main details. And this is what happened. At night, when it got dark, crowds of girls from all over Moscow made their way to the places where foreign delegations were staying. These were various student dormitories and hotels located on the outskirts of the city... It was impossible for Soviet girls to break into the hotel buildings, as everything was cordoned off by professional security officers and amateur vigilantes. But no one could forbid foreign guests from leaving their hotels.
...Events unfolded at maximum speed. There was no courtship, no false coquetry. The newly formed couples quickly moved away from the buildings, into the darkness, into the fields, into the bushes, knowing exactly what they were going to do. They did not go very far, so the area around the hotels was quite crowded, with couples not too far from each other, but in the darkness it did not matter. The image of the mysterious, shy and chaste Russian Komsomol girl did not so much collapse as become enriched with a new, unexpected trait — reckless, desperate debauchery. Indeed, ‘still waters run deep...’
Special mobile motorised squads were urgently organised on trucks, equipped with lighting devices, scissors and barber clippers for cutting hair. When the trucks with the patrols, according to the raid plan, unexpectedly drove out into the fields and turned on all their headlights and lamps, the true scale of the ‘orgy’ taking place became apparent. There were a great many couples. Foreigners were left alone, only the girls were dealt with... part of their hair was cut off, leaving a ‘parting’, after which the girls had only one option — to shave their heads and grow their hair back... Rumours of what was happening spread instantly throughout Moscow. Some, who were particularly curious, went to the Tourist Hotel, Luzhniki and other places where the raids were taking place, just to gawk at the rather rare spectacle.Nine months after the World Festival of Youth and Students in the spring of 1958, the ‘children of the festival’ began to appear. It was difficult for young mothers to hide the fruits of those fleeting relationships because of the black skin of their illegitimate children, and every outing turned into a visual demonstration of what had happened. Conservative public opinion was negative: a black baby in a pram was considered a sign of his mother's loose morals. Vladimir Kontrovsky, in his novel The Last Officer, gives such a derogatory description of one of his characters:
His grandmother, may she rest in peace, was one of the enthusiastic Komsomol members who, with open knees, welcomed guests to the Moscow International Festival of Youth and Students, who had arrived from countries in Asia and Africa that had only just been freed from the yoke of the accursed colonisers.
International friendship knew no bounds, and when the wave of enthusiasm subsided, numerous ‘children of the festival’ remained on the sand, wet with girls' tears, like nimble crabs — contraceptives were in short supply in the Land of Soviets. Valery's grandmother was not spared this fate either: she gave birth to a dark-skinned son — the spitting image of his father. The independence fighter returned to his homeland without giving a thought to the consequences of his passionate but short-lived love affair in a distant northern country, and his offspring grew up.
Statistics Journalist A. Dobrovolsky mentions a summary statistical report allegedly prepared for the leadership of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, which recorded the birth of a total of 531 mulatto children. The search for traces of children of non-European races from the festival, organised by the Trud newspaper in various relevant state, public and human rights structures (the Metis Foundation, the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, the Centre for Interethnic Cooperation, the Moscow House of Nationalities), yielded no results at all.
The festival took place from 28 July to 11 August 1957. A total of 34,000 foreigners arrived in Moscow. The most numerous were delegates from European countries; in particular, two thousand people came from the predominantly white countries of France and Finland.
Natalya Krylova, Doctor of Historical Sciences and Chief Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, notes that there were about 5,000–6,000 dark-skinned guests of both sexes at the festival — and they were not left to their own devices; over 800 events were held with their active participation as part of the festival programme over two weeks. So even if we assume mutual hypersexuality on both sides, it would have been impossible to have a significant number of sexual encounters in the time available, and the results could be counted in the dozens. Moreover, there were strong cultural differences between Soviet and foreign youth, to which racial differences were added in this case.