Just like chil­dren any­where in the world, the Soviet kids needed toys to play with. Cer­tainly the range of toys designed and pro­duced was an envi­able one, by some stan­dards. How­ever, the aes­thetic appear­ance of toys was not a pri­or­ity for Soviet design­ers — toys had to be func­tional and edu­ca­tional. Any­thing beyond that, like pleas­ant looks, was not con­sid­ered to be impor­tant and, more­over, it was seen as an unnec­es­sary indul­gence. The lack of com­pe­ti­tion from the imports due to the  planned econ­omy and severe short­ages  of qual­ity prod­ucts in the shops actu­ally resulted in the very poor deliv­ery and lim­ited vari­ety of toys. The Soviet par­ents were able to get only these kinds of toys as imported toys were lit­er­ally impos­si­ble to buy.

Var­i­ous kinds of car mod­els were very pop­u­lar with boys…

With­out a ques­tion,  minia­ture mod­els of real cars were of the best qual­ity and were of great suc­cess with the Soviet chil­dren. Nev­er­the­less these mod­els were not actual toys for chil­dren: rather, they were rare col­lectibles for adults.

The minia­tures of mil­i­tary equip­ment were another range of car mod­els.  Unlike the above lot,  these ones were usu­ally made solely from steel and there­fore were very durable and more appro­pri­ate for chil­dren games.

No doubt that children’s toys always reflect the cur­rent trends of the time. One of the most pop­u­lar top­ics ever was the space explo­ration  — so the Soviet toys design­ers cre­ated astro­nauts and moon robots.

Dolls are pop­u­lar with girls, in any given time in history.

Arguably, the Soviet design­ers also cared about small chil­dren: some­thing strange like mod­ern days pokemons.

The Soviet ide­ol­ogy had a huge influ­ence over the toys’ designs.

At the end of 1980s, the Soviet elec­tronic indus­try intro­duced a range of pocket playsta­tions, where the player would pick up some falling stuff (pic­tured: the wolf catch­ing eggs in a basket).

This review will not be com­plete with­out some pic­tures of over­seas toys of the same epoch.

Related posts:

1. Tech­no­log­i­cal Advance of the Clas­sic Rock­ing Horse
2. Soviet Cars: His­tory of the Copy-and-Paste Indus­try  —  Part 3 of 3
3. Soviet Auto­mo­bile Indus­try  —  Part 1 of 2
4. How Much Watch? Ten Watch!
5. The Soviet Video Arcade Machines