The image of the child hero as an emblem of the Soviet people’s unfailing dedication to the communist cause dominated Soviet media discourse years before the beginning of WWII. And yet, shortly after the war commenced on Soviet territory, reports on children’s valor nearly disappeared from the pages of Pravda, the country’s leading daily of the time. In contrast, the wartime journalistic portrayal of child fatalities of the Great Patriotic War prevailed over heroic representations of children. Overall, the newspaper graphically and insistently depicted the Soviet young as murdered, maimed, and brutally tortured victims, thus helping to launch and sustain the “hate-and-revenge” campaign which lasted until the allied victory appeared irreversible. In the 1940s, Soviet children’s literature inverted the central rhetorical tropes of the wartime propaganda discourse by representing children as heroes, rather than victims, it offered its readers a more nuanced portrayal of a deeply traumatized, psychologically vulnerable, and often bereaved child. That said, the inconsistencies of tone, voice, and characterization children’s fiction inherited from the media accounts of war childhood occurred in even such celebrated children’s novels as Syn polka (The Son of the Regiment, 1944) by Valentin Kataev and Vasek Trubachev i ego tovarishchi (Vasek Trubachev and His Comrades,1947–1951) by Valentina Oseeva. 