Many institutions—religious, familial, educational—act upon children to form both their character and the adults they might become. Modern states all seek to influence the development of the next generation of citizens, and in authoritarian states with a greater centralization of power, this includes restructuring education, youth groups, and play—and yet we know far less about the latter. Scholars have investigated educational practices, state-sponsored youth groups, and children’s literature, but we often fail to consider games as formative experiences even though leisure occupies much of childhood and is often far more pleasurable. Because of a dearth of consumer products like children’s toys during the period of rapid Soviet industrialization in the 1930s and the Second World War, children’s magazines became one vehicle to both entertain and develop the Soviet child. The USSR in the 1930s, however, was quite different from its German Nazi and Italian Fascist counterparts.

Describing their experience of the 2015 and 2016 floods in northeastern Tamil Nadu, Priya (sixth grade) said “When the water started entering the house, it was twigs and leaves. As it started rising, it pulled along so much plastic and things stuck to it. It took days to clean all the plastic out when we went to the house again.” I listened as we sat on the cement floor of the craft room of a peri-urban school in the region in 2019. We were sitting in two circles, learning to braid wires into bags. The strands made of sturdy nylon were just “wires” that the girls had witnessed their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers braid into grocery bags for sale, gifts, and family use. I did the braids well, the girls said. I smiled and, encouraged, pursued more questions about their opinions of plastics in their everyday environment.