Carlson and Winnie the Pooh, Buratino and Electronics, Aibolit and the cat Leopold, Cheburashka and Piggy - all these characters make up the pantheon of Soviet childhood, until now never studied as a single sociocultural phenomenon. This collection of articles written by specialists in different disciplines (literary historians, anthropologists, folklorists, film scholars... ), represents the first experience of such a study. The characters to which this book is devoted have long gone beyond the books, films or television programs where they appeared for the first time, and have gathered around themselves a lot of new meanings, becoming a kind of hieroglyphics of the cultural consciousness of modern Russia. Understanding the history and current perception of these "hieroglyphs" allows you to see with unexpected previously unknown aspects of the aesthetic preferences of Soviet and post-Soviet society , This allows for a deeper understanding of ,. before , Describe socio-anthropological and psychological shifts, occurred in the history of Russia in the XX-XXI centuries.