homeless children 1945

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Between Salvation and Liquidation: Homeless and Vagrant Children and the Reconstruction ofSoviet Society Author(s): Juliane Frst Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 86, No. 2, The Relaunch of the Soviet

Project, 1945-64 (Apr., 2008), pp. 232-258Published by: the and Modern Humanities Research Association University College London,

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SEER, Vol. 86, No. 2, April 2008

Between Salvation and Liquidation: Homeless and Vagrant Children

and the Reconstruction of Soviet Society

JULIANE F?RST

The Second World War devastated Soviet society. The physical damage ruined many Soviet cities, towns and villages, incapacitated large parts of the country's industry and destroyed most of the civil infrastructure in its western half. The social trauma, however, was even

more destructive: the loss of twenty-seven million Soviet people, the destruction of homes and family and the annihilation of much of the social work carried out by the Soviet regime in the previous decade.

The strongest embodiment of this trauma were the homeless, orphaned street children who, soon after the outbreak of war, began to inhabit train stations, markets, abandoned buildings and disused cellars. They flooded into the big cities from both the embattled western region, where they had lost their homes and parents, and from the mainland, where separated families and harsh working conditions had robbed them of attention and care. Some were so young or had been on the road for so long that their loss of abode meant a loss of personal identity. They did not remember their names, their families or their birth dates. Their reality was the street, where life revolved around

food, and the acquisition of food revolved around theft and begging. Painfully reminiscent of the days of the Civil War and the period of

collectivization, they were also strong reminders that the war not only had a firm grip on the present, but also the future. How were these

lice-ridden, dirty, thieving children, who knew neither their roots nor their place in society, ever to become Soviet citizens, constructors and guarantors of socialism? How could they be made to fit the image of a victorious Soviet Union emerging from the war as a new super

power? And how could their continued presence be explained to main stream Soviet society which was largely prevented from acknowledging, let alone addressing, any damage beyond the physical scars sustained in the Great Fatherland War?

Juliane F?rst is a lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol.


JULIANE F?RST 233

In this article I will suggest that street children1 were subject to two

officially propagated, yet partially contradictory discourses, both of which were central to the Soviet state's understanding of itself and instrumental in shaping post-war policy on, as well as societal attitudes

to, socially marginalized groups. The official rhetoric on children in need ? several groups such as war orphans, street waifs and delin

quent youngsters overlapped and were not always clearly distinguished ? resulted in multiple campaigns to either 'save' wayward or neglect ed children or 'excise' them from public view and consciousness. The

predominant theme of the war years, and one that was closely linked to many pre-war debates concerning childhood in general, evinced a

strong desire to rescue children from the evils of the invader and to offer shelter, home and salvation in the arms of the collective Soviet

family. Homeless and vagrant children were the innocent victims of

aggression, who yearned to return to their happy Soviet childhoods.

Despite their grievous state, they still, by virtue of their young age, represented the future of the Soviet project and were cast as active

participants in its relaunch after the war. Towards the end of the war, however, another, very different discourse emerged, which ran parallel to the rhetoric of rescue and salvation. This theme, which emphasized less the needs of individual children and more the need to eradicate the problem, drew on legal and ideological developments of the later

1930s, which judged children and youngsters under the same Mani chean belief system as their parents and adult relatives. Children, who 'refused to be rescued' and turned into valuable members of Soviet

society had no place in the Soviet Union and ? as a phenomenon ? had to be 'liquidated'. The presence of dirty, unsupervised children

on the street became more and more of an embarrassment to a govern ment that wanted to deny and forget its war scars and traumas, especially those that seemed to defy easy quantification and quick solution. Rather than merely contradicting each other, these campaigns

were indeed dependent on, and mutually re-enforcing of, each other. Far from being static, they were shaped by the changing realities of child vagrancy and delinquency in the immediate and later post-war years as well as by shifts in the Soviet perception of war, damage and trauma. Their implementation often differed from their blueprints,

with individual agents pursuing their own agendas and time-specific circumstances dictating actions and strategies.

This article aims to disentangle this complex web of interacting forces and argues that an understanding of its individual components

1 I will use the term street children to cover both the Russian term besprizornye (homeless

and usually orphaned children) and beznadzornye (unsupervised children, here usually trans lated as vagrant children). Besprizornye had no fixed address, while beznadzornye had a home and were often loitering not far from it, yet could also join the travelling community.


234 SOVIET HOMELESS & VAGRANT CHILDREN

allows a deeper understanding of the often contradictory dynamics that

shaped the post-war relaunch of the Soviet project. Both campaigns formed essential components in the physical reconstruction of the country after a war that in many ways had thrown society back to the days of the Civil War. Yet even more important than the physical relaunch of Soviet social programmes and the reconstruction of Soviet social infrastructure was the resurrection of the Soviet project as an idea that guided collectives and individuals. After a devastating war, confidence in the future had to be rebuilt ? and this confidence rested to a large degree on the re-assertion of happy Soviet childhoods and the presentation of Soviet children as the future of Communism. The need to deal with the problem of besprizornost' and beznadzornost' was thus present on several levels: traces of war were to be obliterated from both the street and from collective memory; at the same time the visi

bility of proper children had to reaffirm the superiority of the Soviet

system to its citizens and to the near and far abroad. Yet the case of homeless children is not only representative of the Soviet attempt to relaunch its successful pre-war project, it also provides crucial insights into the ambiguities and failures of this relaunch. The extreme empha sis on swift social and physical rehabilitation of children precluded the successful integration of many traumatized children, while their removal from mainstream society pathologized them further. Enacting either idealized softness or brutal rigidity, both policies and popular attitudes towards street children ignored and denied the full existence of war-related trauma and the uniqueness of a society in post-war con ditions ? a survival mechanism that set the Soviet case apart from its European neighbours and much of Western post-war social policy.

Ultimately, as this article will show, the mechanisms and underlying ideology applied to the problem of post-war street children set the tone of how the Soviet system talked about, approached and dealt with the marginal elements within (or indeed outside) Soviet society for the entire post-war period.

Narratives of salvation

Children were central to the Soviet Union's self-understanding from the very beginning. Post-revolutionary children and youngsters were to form the new generation, free from capitalist constraints. They embod ied the Soviet system's hope for, and expectations of, the future, and

they consequendy were to be the test case for the creation of a new

society. The care and attention lavished on the weakest members of

society was supposed to right the wrongs of the tsarist regime, while at the same time to signal to the capitalist world the moral and social

superiority of the Soviet system. Homeless, vagrant and orphaned children who found themselves at the bottom of society were singled


JULIANE F?RST 235

out as particularly potent bearers of the Soviet eschatological myth.2 Their entire upbringing and education rested with the state, which aimed to 'fashion youths into productive, devoted members of a Com munist society'.3 Their behaviour and social manners were exclusively those transmitted to them by Soviet educationalists and Soviet collec tives. War, famine and displacement had created a plethora of children in need, who could be collected as participants in this multi-layered rescue mission. Committees were formed, friendship societies created, conferences convened and sociological studies commissioned.4 Most

famously, the NKVD under Felix Dzherzhinskii established special child colonies, one of which became world famous under the leadership of Anton Makarenko as a model of a new style of education and

juvenile social integration. Makarenko's theories on collective self

government, the benefits of manual and productive labour and the

importance of discipline drew attention to the larger purpose of Soviet education ? the formation of the new Soviet man imbued with the

spirit and values of the Soviet and, increasingly, the Stalinist project.5 Following the upheavals of collectivization and industrialization, the

topic of Soviet child welfare gained greater prominence, yet underwent

2 Street children have attracted the attention of researchers for a considerable period of

time, while the topic of children in the Soviet system overall has experienced a recent boom. The classic and most comprehensive work to date on pre-war street children is Alan Ball's And Now My Soul is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, igi8-igjo, Berkeley, CA, 1994 (hereafter, And Now My Soul). Drawing on archival sources as well as memoirs, advice literature and the rich body of work undertaken by early Soviet sociologists, Ball's work ranges from an analysis of policy to a detailed exploration of street children's habitat and everyday practices. Dorena Caroli, L'enfance abandonee et d?linquante dans la Russie sovi?tique (igi7-ig$7), Paris, 2004 (hereafter Uenfanc?) is a much more policy-orientated work, looking in detail at the legal and scientific theories underlying Soviet policy on street children.

Recently, Rachel Green's PhD dissertation has tackled the topic of post-war street children

('"There Will Be No Orphans Among Us": Soviet Orphanages, Foster Care, and Adoption, 1941-1956', unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2006). The topic of street children is embedded in the general discussion surrounding children and childhood in the Soviet Union, a topic which has recently witnessed significant attention. The potential for

moulding young souls was an exciting prospect for a Utopian regime. Childhood became a

cult, but also a site of battle, disappointment and danger. See Lisa Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, igi7~igj2, London, 2001, pp. 34-49; Ann

Livshiz, 'Growing up Soviet: Childhood in the Soviet Union 1918-1958', unpublished PhD

dissertation, Stanford University, 2006; Catriona Kelly, Children's World: Growing up in Russia

i8qo-iggi, New Haven, CT, 2007. Ball, And Now My Soul, p. 87. 4 Alongside Narkompros, Narkomzdrav and the NKVD, a special commission for Minors and

a Council for the Protection of Children was set up in 1918 in order to help Soviet children. Each of them spawned a plethora of sub-institutions such as the Children's Social Inspec tion under the supervision o? Narkompros. There were also regional and local representatives of the All-Soviet Central Executive Committee, who were responsible for child welfare and were later grouped under the Commission for the Improvement of Children's Lives established in 1921. 5

See, for example, James Bowen, Soviet Education: Anton Makarenko and the Tears of Experi ment, Madison, WI, 1962. As a more personal testimony to Makarenko's work see Svetlana

Gladysh, Deti bol'shoi bedy, Moscow, 2004 (hereafter, Deti).



some important modifications. Stalin turned childhood into a cult, which cleverly supported his own cult of personality. 'Thank you, comrade Stalin, for our happy childhoods' was one of the most widely propagated slogans of the Soviet Union. The cult established Stalin as a kind and thoughtful father figure, the incarnation of the Soviet state

itself. Childhoods were sunny places full of laughter and fun. Octobrist, Pioneer and Komsomol work were extended and designed to capture (and thus, by definition, to improve) every facet of a young person's life. Rather than just political agitation, summer camps, dances and

sporting activities dominated the agenda. Yet children were rescued from the darkness and dullness of pre- and non-socialist lives in order to build socialism, not to achieve a personal happiness for their own

sake. Juvenile fun was to be achieved in the collective and serve the

collective ? both on the level of the peer group and on the level of

socialist society at large. This included a rehabilitation of the family, which was now viewed less as an obstacle, as it often had been in the 1920s, and more as a transmission belt for achieving a Soviet

upbringing ? albeit with the caveat that 'small' family values had

to be subservient to the needs of the greater family of the Soviet

collective.6 At the same time the image of destitute but heroic children

finding refuge in Soviet institutions disappeared from official memory and was replaced by the propagation of child heroes with thoroughly solid social origins. The model children of the 1930s excelled in

academic, musical or artistic pursuits.7 While still considered valuable

political capital, children were no longer to be engaged in politics themselves. The self-assertiveness and collective self-government of

Makarenko's former street children was quietly forgotten, just as the existence of new homeless children, orphaned by the purges, was

covered with a veil of silence.8 The new happiness was a passive one:

a gift received by the grace of the Soviet state. The happy Soviet childhoods

? so carefully constructed over

the last twenty years ? were the first victims of the Second World

War. Families disintegrated. Fathers left for the front. Mothers were

recruited into labour programmes. Evacuation, death, destruction and

6 On the rehabilitation of the family versus the orphanage see David Hoffmann, Stalinist

Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity igiy-ig^i, Ithaca, NY, 2003, pp. 106-07. On the

conditions imposed on family values see Cynthia Hooper, 'Terror of Intimacy: Family Politics in the 1930s Soviet Union', in Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman, Everyday Life in

Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, Indianapolis, IN, 2006, pp. 61-91. 7 Catriona Kelly, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of

a Soviet Boy Hero, London, 2005,

pp. 150-51. Corinna Kuhr-Korolev, 'Kinder von "Volksfeinden" als Opfer des stalinistischen

Terrors 1936-1938', in Stephan Plaggenborg, Stalinismus: Neue Forschungen und Konzepte,

Berlin, 1998, pp. 391-418; Gladysh, Deti, pp. 168-72, 232-49.


JULIANE F?RST 237

displacement were the experiences that followed. The propaganda of the Great Fatherland War rested heavily on the image of helpless Soviet children suffering from the brutality of the fascist invader.9 Yet while mothers could be portrayed as victims of torture and rape and

appeared as corpses in wartime poster art, it was more taboo to show a dead or damaged child, especially after the tide of the war turned and Soviet propaganda was geared towards constructing a suitable

image of the war for post-war memory.10 Children were the symbols of the achievements of the Soviet state ? its progressiveness, its inno cence and its earnestness. It was no coincidence that The Anglo-Soviet

Journal, in those days an important conveyor of messages to the allied West, carried a special picture feature in the autumn of 1944, which showcased life in a Moscow Kindergarten full of healthy, well nourished toddlers.11 Children had to be seen to live on ? otherwise the fight was futile. Rescuing Soviet children from the perils of war and its consequences was to guarantee the survival of the nation and the

system.

Consequently, the Soviet administrative and propaganda machinery swung into action. Posters highlighted the plight of war children. Tear ful articles moved the hearts of Soviet mothers and fathers. Pedagogical journals printed reports on life in schools which had been under

9 See, for example, 'Agitprop im Krieg gegen das Gro?deutsche Reich', Deutsches

Historisches Museum Magazin, 4, Winter 1991, 1, pp. 7, 16, 38 (hereafter, Deutsches Historisches); Alexander Snopkov, Pavel Snokov, Aleksandr Shkliaruk, 600 plakatov, Moscow, 2004 (hereafter, 600 plakatov), pp. 94, 96, 98; Argyrios Pisiotis, 'Images of Hate in the Art of War', in Richard Stites (ed.), Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, Indianapolis, 1995,

Pfn144" In 1942, around the time of the battle of Moscow, the depiction of slain Soviet children was more common and found embodiment in the poster 'Revenge!' (Otomsti!) by Shmari nov, who specialized in the production of shocking images of personal suffering. Other artists spared the child from the full horror of their images. A typical example of this is L. Golovanov's poster 'For the Honour of the Wife, for the Life of the Children' (ga chest

'

zheny, za zhizn ' detei ), which depicted a grim German soldier walking away from the dead

body of a Soviet woman (her exposed breast might also suggest a sexual crime), yet her child cries unharmed over its mother. The accompanying poem by S. Marshak calls upon Soviet soldiers to kill the invader, to avenge the mother and to save the child the Soviet future. 600 plakatov, p. 94. Similarly in Mariia Nesterova's poster, 'Papa, kill the German!', a young boy is shown dressed only in his peasant tunic with his dead mother and a burning village in the background; Deutsches Historisches, p. 16. Yet, while modern

perceptions associate a child's demand to kill with psychological trauma, in the Soviet wartime context feelings of hate and revenge were encouraged and fostered. See Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia, London, 2000 (hereafter, Night of Stone), p. 283. Dead children were at times shown in propaganda art and writing, yet the theme of individual suffering declined overall towards the end of the war. Jeffrey Brooks cites one

example of a dead child appearing in a drawing Pravda published in 1942, yet in later years when Stalin assumed his central place in the propaganda depictions of ordinary people's suffering became increasingly rare and certainly did not make it into the national press.

Jeffrey Brooks, Thank Tou, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War, Princeton, NJ, 2000 (hereafter, Thank Tou), pp. 179, 190.

The Anglo-Soviet Journal, 5, 1944, 3, picture inset 1.



German occupation.12 On a more practical level, the Soviet bureau

cracy started to produce directives on how to counter the problem of

displaced children, destroyed childhoods and diminished supervision. The titles of the acts and orders passed in the first few months of the war betrayed the common assumption that a child was rescued as soon as she could be brought back under the guidance and into the

living conditions of a Soviet environment. Decrees were thus mainly concerned with the physical locality of the children rather than their

mental and psychological state and rehabilitation. The very first order issued by the Council of People's Commissars (SNK) in January 1942

was about the 'placement' (ustroistvo) of children, who had lost their

parents or been irretrievably separated from their families. Immedi

ately it was made clear that the measurements proposed in the decree were concerned with those who had lost their adult families and thus their link to the larger Soviet family rather than those who simply suffered neglect and lack of supervision. While these children (beznad zornye) were to be collected alongside the innocent wartime waifs, they were not to be 'placed' with families. Their subsequent fate after the so-called 'collection-distribution centre' (priemnik-rasprediteV) was left

open, but usually meant a return to their defunct families or a period of time spent in a child labour colony.

A decree passed by the Defence Council in June 1942 concerning the forceful exiling of family members of traitors indicates that not all

war waifs were as unproblematic as those who were victims of German

aggression.13 Orphans were created through many circumstances ?

not least because of the extreme chaos on the railways and the massive

evacuation movements ordered by the Soviet government. A report by the Komsomol in early 1943 estimated that 189,953 children had lost

any ties to their families.14 Lack of school and parental supervision meant that ever greater numbers of youngsters with a home and

family became children of the street and formed or joined bands of other vagrant and thieving children.15 The problem of besprizorniki and

12 See, for example, A. Lukin, 'Rabota shkol Moskovskoi oblasti v usloviiakh

voennogo vremeni', Sovetskaia pedagogika, 1-2, 1942, pp. 3-6; Romanovskaia, 'Deti v dni

otechtesvennoi voiny', ibid., 5-6, 1942, pp. 86-87; V. N. Kufaev, 'Zabota o detiakh v dni

otechestvennoi voiny', ibid., 8-9, 1942, pp. 24-31; S. Kobal'shuk, 'Shkola i detskii kollektiv v Riazhevskom i Olenskom raionakh Kalininskoi oblasti', ibid., 10, pp. 52-57. 13 Deti Gulaga igi8-igj6: Dokumenty, Moscow, 2002, pp. 379-80 (hereafter, Deti Gulaga). 14

Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial'no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter, RGASPI), M-f. 1, op. 7, d. 69, 1. 26. 15

See, for example, ibid., M-f.i, op. 7, d. 69, 11. 79-80. This was a problem shared with

other countries at war and had already been observed in studies related to the First World War. See, for example, Victor Evjen, 'Delinquency and Crime in Wartime', Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 33, 1942, 2, pp. 136-46; Katherine Cook, 'The Schools Speed up the War on Juvenile Delinquency', Marriage and Family Living, 5, 1943, 2, pp. 27-29.


JULIANE F?RST 239

beznadzornye grew far faster than the proposed measurements could handle. With an increasing number of territories returning to Soviet

jurisdiction and with ever more war orphans appearing, the problem soon received serious administrative attention ? at least at the desks of concerned politicians and civil servants. In July 1943 special units in the Commissariat of Interior Affairs were formed to direct the efforts undertaken in fighting homelessness and vagabonding of children.16 A

flurry of official decrees followed. The head of the newly formed NKVD unit reported that in the years 1944 and 1945, 113 decisions and orders were issued on the theme, supported by 354 sub-decisions. In addition, Komsomol obkomy and raikomy took another 136 decisions. More than

10,000 assemblies had alerted the population to the problem and

roughly 7,000 raids to collect waifs had been conducted with nearly 44,000 volunteers participating.17 A new Hero of the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Matrosov, revived the myth of the young criminal trans formed into an upright and dutiful member of society. The former inmate of an Ufa colony for young offenders was turned into a shining illustration that even fallen children could be rescued, if placed under Soviet care and tutelage. Matrosov's selfless death

? he threw himself into a German machine gun nest to save his advancing comrades

?

represented ultimate redemption and salvation. The non-Soviet child had become a Soviet citizen. The emphasis on Matrosov's criminal and homeless past contained not only the promise of re-integration to other wayward youngsters, but also asserted that each and every home less and vagrant child could become a valuable, even heroic, member of society.

As often occurred when the Soviet system came under extreme

duress, the state modified revolutionary socialist concepts to respond to the necessities of the time. The fact that the idea of happy Soviet child hoods crumbled under the onslaught of war faster than the authorities could react, meant that the regime turned to its subjects for help

? an act that was very much in the spirit of the first few years of the war, when the country rallied around the idea of a nation of individual citizens rather than under the banner of a collective dominated by a

single leader.18 Part of the campaign to re-establish children within a Soviet environment thus entailed calling upon families and private individuals to adopt or foster an orphan or displaced child. Yet to conclude that this simply represented an admission of failure on the

part of the Soviet state would be to miss the complex connotations that

16 Deti Gulaga, p. 387. 17 Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (hereafter, GARF), R-f. 9412, op. 1. d. 35,

1. 270. 18 For examples of relying on private help, see Mark Smith's article in this volume. On

changes in war propaganda in Pravda see Brooks, Thank Tou, pp. 185-88.



the idea of 'family' had acquired in the war and post-war Soviet con text. The bourgeois nuclear family had been rehabilitated in the course of the 1930s

? in line with developments in other European countries ? not as a harbour of secluded privacy, but as a potent instrument of the state to contribute to the production and upbringing of Soviet children. Indeed, intimate ties suspected between family members had been a particular target during the purges, when many convictions were based on little else but familial connections.19 During the war the

image of the family continued to contain aspects of this uneasy duality that emphasized the homely and private as well as the collective and

public. Rather than regressing into their pre-revolutionary position, families ? and in particular mothers

? became the nexus that power fully linked the two spheres, ultimately merging personal family bonds with ties that bound the Soviet people to state, system and ideology.20 While the family acquired a status that elevated it from its bourgeois roots, the shift in the perception of the family also meant that other collective entities could be included under the banner of family life. The 'family of Soviet people' was a ubiquitous trope. Writers also referred to the 'international antifascist family' or the 'family of human

ity'.21 When wartime and post-war Soviet children found themselves in

need, the call not only went out to (and was answered by) the classical

family, but also to enterprises, kolkhozes and activist groups.22 Saving children in wartime had to rely on the generosity of individuals, but was nonetheless marketed as a collective act.

A national campaign was started that called upon Soviet citizens to

adopt and foster one or several orphans ? a task that was portrayed

as a form of active participation in the struggle at the front and that was propagated with as much rhetoric of hate against the German invader as of care and salvation for the innocent victims. The idea of

rescuing and saving Soviet children both for their own private sake and for the benefit of the Soviet state was readily accepted and adopted by the public at large. The images of children crying out in despair, small toddlers wandering around searching for their parents, or babies being

19 Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, pp. 105-09; Hooper, 'Intimacy of Terror', p. 71. 20 See Lisa Kirchenbaum, '"Our City, Our Hearths, our Families": Local Loyalties and

Private Life in Soviet World War II Propaganda', Slavic Review, 59, 2000, 4, pp. 825-47. 21 Brooks, Thank You, pp. 181-82. 22 Exact data is very hard to come by, since so many children went through the system

several times, were adopted informally or were only recorded locally. Statistics for the

Ukraine, compiled in December 1944, show 33,000 children in orphanages, 52,000 in tem

porary foster-care and only 3,200 adoptions. The temporary foster care, while containing a large number of aunts, grandmothers and private individuals also includes children taken in by kolkhozes, enterprises and other institutions of civil life. Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads'kykh ob'iednan Ukrainy (hereafter, TsDAHOU), f. 1, op. 23, d. 1392, 1. 8. The army harboured more than 25,000 orphans and displaced children, many of whom, however, eventually were sent to orphanages. 'Deti na voine', Istochnik, 1, 1994, pp. 54-55

(hereafter, 'Deti na voine').


JULIANE F?RST 24I

ripped from their mother's breast achieved a successful confluence between personal emotions and official expectations. While Jeffrey Brook has pointed out that the widespread appeal to save women and children from the fascist invader 'validated men's wartime roles at the expense of women', the call to adopt and foster an orphan gave those at the home front (and in particular women) the opportunity to

participate in the war effort and to assuage some of their guilt for living in the safety of the mainland.23 'My husband kills the cursed fascists. I also want to help my state to destroy the Hitlerite murderers and

rapists. Let me adopt this two-year old and I will make him a fearless Soviet fighter', wrote one woman to her local education authority.24 The concept of a Soviet household as a safe haven for children in need, however, played not only to national and patriotic feelings, but also flattered individual families. Speakers in an assembly of workers of a

factory in the Moscow region, who had just recently adopted a war

orphan, were keen to demonstrate that they understood that their foster-care was part of the campaign waged at the front.25 Contribu tions to the assembly show the congruence between the rhetoric of

hate, propagated by Soviet war propaganda, the affirmation of the needs of the Soviet collective and the narrative of rescuing Soviet children. The convenor, comrade Lukin, responsible for education in the Moscow oblast' party committee, stressed that as non-combatants the assembled had at least a duty to fight child homelessness: 'In this harsh struggle, which is currently testing our people, every one of us, young and old, strives to help the motherland in some shape and form.

Many of you present are not builders of tanks and planes or do not take direct action in the fighting, but we have to give the front every possible help and in particular have to liquidate child homelessness and

vagrancy.'2 Reminding parents of the Soviet tradition of 'surrounding children with care' and invoking the indiscriminate killings carried out

by the fascists, she held up the example of citizens, who have selflessly adopted children in need. Interestingly, she included commanders

23 Brooks, Thank You, p. 179. 24 Cited in V. Kulin, 'Zabota o detiiakh v dni otechtesvennoi voiny', Sovetskaia pedagogika,

8-9, i942> P- 24. 25 This assembly, in which recent adoptive parents from the Moscow oblast' met with

regional party officials, was the conclusion of a campaign initiated by the workers of the

factory, Krasnyi bogatyr', who had called upon their co-workers and neighbours to follow their example and take in a war orphan from one of the formerly occupied regions around

Moscow. The campaign resulted in 235 adoptions, which was judged by party oblast'

secretary S. Mosoblono as 'a significant number given the circumstances'. Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Moskovskoi oblasti (hereafter, TsGAMO), f. 4341, op. 9, d. 11, 1. 1. Undoubtedly other similar campaigns were executed in various localities, yet this was the

only detailed protocol of such an assembly that was found in the central and regional archives consulted.

26 TsGAMO, f. 4341, op, 9, d. 11, 1. 2.



and soldiers in her praise, who had rescued orphaned children directly from the battlefield and integrated them into their units

? an action that while officially unsanctioned had resulted in more than 25,000 adoptions by 194527

? indicating that the meaning of 'family' in this

context was by no means that of a private entity. Lukin concluded with a simple reminder that country and children are indeed the same: 'Our

people love their country and all children will be taken into care and found a place in some Soviet institution.'28 The themes outlined by Lukin were lapped up by the foster-parents present in the assembly. Ovchinnikova, a new foster-mother, told the assembly: T consider it a

duty before the state to raise this child.' She continued by affirming that, as well as love for the child, this entailed hate towards the enemy: 'We have to finish with this bloodthirsty enemy, who destroyed the

happy life we had before June.'29 Egorova, a local teacher, explained her motivation: T have worked for 25 years in a school. I thought that if I cannot defend my motherland with a gun in my hand, then I am

obliged to make available some other form of help.'30 Comrade Shteinman echoed her sentiments when he declared: T told myself that I have to take on a child, since every citizen has to give an account of

what he has done for the front.'31 He specifically chose the most visibly damaged child in the orphanage, since he affirmed he 'did not look for a doll, but a child'.32 The prospect of elevating a young girl from social apathy to participation into Soviet life lent the process of saving and salvaging even greater worth. The eschatological journey of foster children featured as a popular trope in the assembly, echoing themes

propagated by the Soviet press. One mother explained: 'When they brought her from the local orphanage, she was ill. She lay in bed. Her toes had frozen off, they were infected. She could not walk. She was

white as this wall. And four months later, you would not recognize this child. She is enjoying life, is healthy and is growing up in normal

circumstances, which are loving and welcoming. She is chirping away and her voice can be heard throughout the whole house.'33 The nar ratives created in the assembly

? which reflected those propagated by the authorities ? cast the child's rescue as an event of quasi-rebirth into Soviet society. Similar to other Bolshevik eschatological narratives, from the moment of entry into the Soviet sphere, the trajectory of the narrative points to the creation of a new Soviet person

? an event

27 'Deti na voine', p. 55. 28 TsGAMO, f. 4341, op. 9, d. 11, 1. 5. 29 Ibid., 1. 6. 30 Ibid., 1. 12. 31 Ibid., 1. 7. 32 Ibid., 1. 8. 33 Ibid., 1. 10.


JULIANE F?RST 243

that, due to the age of the protagonists and their traumatic experi ences, has yet to take place. Egorova, the teacher, drew attention to the fact that the children's salvation was not a private success or even a personal achievement, but rather part of the over-arching care

provided by the Soviet state under the paternal eye of Stalin to every

single one of its citizens: 'Let's banish the word "orphan" from our

usage. There cannot be orphans in our country, where all are mothers.

[...] We are raised by the Great Stalin, educated by the Party of Lenin and Stalin, we live in the Soviet Union. Here we cannot speak of orphans. We will speak of wonderful mothers, loyal to the Party of Lenin and Stalin, and of our own children, not of orphans.'34

The limits of rescue

Even the enthusiastic words spoken at the assembly of new foster

parents in the Moscow oblast' betrayed some fault-lines in the

strongly-worded discourse on Soviet rescue and salvation. There were hints that children were violent with their toys, prone to throw tantrums and demanded extraordinary attention. Others clung to their foster parents with hysterical fear of abandonment, while some refused to speak or interact with strangers.35 The words 'trauma' or 'damage'

were anxiously avoided in a discourse that was to display optimism and

pride.36 Yet many parents used the word 'nervy' to describe their new

charges, recounted the children's extreme reluctance to physically part with their foster-parents and told stories of hysterical upset when these children were confronted with the fact that they had been taken into care by strangers. This was particularly revealing, since this

description had been common among the medical profession (and the advisory literature disseminated by the relevant authorities) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 'Nervousness' was com

monly equated with psychological disorder. Indeed, in the first years of the Soviet Union 'nervousness' was often diagnosed as a symptom of the stresses of war, revolution and radical change through which

people had lived, and was characterized as a malaise not only of the

individual, but of society as a whole.37

34 Ibid., 1. 12. On Bolshevik eschatological texts, see Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light:

Class, Consciousness and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia, Pittsburgh, PA, 2000. 35 TsGAMO, f. 4341, op. 9, d. 11, 11. 10, 11, 12, 13. 36 The term 'trauma' was not in use anywhere in Europe or Northern America with the

same medical connotations it carried today until 1980, when the American Psychiatric Association recognized post-traumatic stress disorder as an independent diagnostic entity. However both medics and historians have grappled with the concept of mental (not physical) trauma and its consequences since the onset of the modern, industrial age in the

Western world. Mark Micale, Paul Lerner, Traumatic Pasts: Memory, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1820-igjo, Cambridge and New York, 2001, pp. 1-27. 37

Frances Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Life-Style Advice for the Soviet Masses, DeKalb, IL, 2007, pp. 82-89.



The process of national rescue highlighted similar imperfections. Parents were not solely motivated by patriotism. Comrade Lukin had to admit that orphanages had run out of the most desirable children; little girls between three and four, indicating that this was driven not

only by the glorious emotions of the great Soviet family, but also the 'selfish' sentiments of the small, nuclear family, whose values were seen as susceptible to

? and potential competition for ?

patriotic and Communist loyalties.38 Clearly, some mothers divulged their desire to find personal, rather than collective, fulfilment in an adoption.39 An article written by an orphanage director from the Leningrad oblast',

published in The Anglo-Soviet Journal, was quite candid about the behavioural disturbances children displayed when they first came to the home: 'They all bore the imprint of some great burden which was

weighing down on them, the mark of which seemed to be utter fatigue and indifference.'40 The subsequent case stories further described some of the difficult children in detail, mentioning theft, silence and hysteria as behavioural disturbances exhibited by the children

? all of which were eventually cured under the loving tutelage of the Soviet orphan age.41 The caring and dedicated atmosphere of the Pushkino orphan age, as described in The Anglo-Soviet Journal, is not one that is reflected in many of the archival documents on children's homes. Indeed, the evidence concerning life in post-war children's institutions is damning. Hunger, poor conditions and routine violence perpetrated by educators were as common, if not more so than the experience of strong shelter and ordered schooling.42 The biggest disappointment, however, was the homeless and vagrant children's lack of cooperation in the rescue

mission. Unlike the heroes of the article, who all find their specific way back into Soviet civilization

? through music, nursing or simple

motherly care ?

many post-war waifs quit Soviet life again and again, running away from orphanages, foster parents and work places and

returning to lives on the street. The rhetoric of rescue was contradicted on a daily basis by a growing army of homeless, loitering and vagrant children, who made their living by begging and stealing. The notion of a swift transformation of vagrant orphans into good Soviet citizens was belied by a disturbing rise in juvenile delinquency and violence, not only among the orphaned and destitute children, but also among

38 On the tension between great and small family values see Hooper, 'Terror of Intimacy',

pp. 61-66.

TsGAMO, f. 4341, op. 9, d. 11, 11. 3, 17. 40 Nina Vostokova, 'Return Them their Childhood!', The Anglo-Soviet Journal, 7, 1946, 3,

p. 38 (hereafter, 'Return Them'). 41 Ibid., pp. 38-43. 42 See, for example, Derzhavnyi arkhiv Kyivs'koi oblasti, f. r-144, op. 7, d. 54, 11. 2-123;

TsGAMO, f. 4341, op. 9, d. 33, 11. 29-31; TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 23, d. 1392, 1. 6-6obo.


JULIANE F?RST 245

youngsters from more solid and stable backgrounds.43 Yet it was the

visibility of the homeless street children that created and fed a general anxiety about the impact of war on the young generation

? an anxiety that was by no means unique to Soviet society, but a common

phenomenon among all nations involved in the war.44 The number of homeless and vagrant Soviet children was difficult

to establish, since many children learned to avoid the police, the Komsomol or any other state authority. They lived and travelled in 'non-Soviet spaces',45 taking advantage of the war and post-war chaos that left large sections of the Soviet landscape under less than adequate control. The number of children who passed through the NKVD/

MVD collection-distribution points established in stations, at markets and most local raion centres, gives a sense of the magnitude of the

problem and the relentlessness with which ever greater numbers of children took to the streets. From 1943 to 1946, more than one million children were registered by the relevant authorities. Although 204,578 children were counted by the NKVD in 1943 (the most unreliable year, since the machinery of collecting and registering street children was

only just starting to work ), in 1944 almost 350,000 waifs were collected. The end of the war brought a brief respite, with numbers dropping below 300,000, yet the famine of 1946-47 pushed numbers to new

heights ? to such an extent that the agency did not even provide

an exact number in 1947. Data is missing for the years 1948-50. The

early 1950s show a marked improvement, yet even in 1956 almost 100,000 homeless and vagrant children passed through the reception centres.46

43 Already in 1942 the head of the militia Galkin stated that up to 90 per cent of all juve

nile crimes were indeed committed not by homeless, but by badly supervised children. TsDAHOU, f. M-i, op. 7, d. 35,1. 10. While in subsequent years besprizornye showed a high involvement in petty crime, in the late 1940s and early 1950s the number of offenders from 'normal' Soviet households rose in the crime statistics as the problems of homelessness and

famine subsided. The attraction of the adventurous life of the criminal underground rather than material need provided the inspiration to these 'middle-class' youngsters. See, for example, TsDAHOU, f. 7, op. 13, d. 825, 1. 14-16. In 1953, 84.1 per cent of the vagrant children picked up by a high-ranking investigation commission in Odessa had families, some of which held respectable Soviet professions or were party members. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 24, d. 2993, 11. 106-07. 44

See, for example, James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the igjos, Oxford, 1986. For a contemporary view across Europe and the USA, see Thorsten Sellin, 'Child Delinquency', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 229, September 1943, pp. 157-63. 45

I am using the term non-Soviet space to denote a space that either temporarily or

permanently is located outside the Soviet sphere of influence and outside the parameters embraced by the Soviet Utopian vision. These spaces could geographically overlap with very Soviet spaces, e.g. the train was both a place of representative power of the Soviet state and a harbour for many subcultures that defied or evaded Soviet forms of life. Both

were 'Soviet' in so far as they were part of the mosaic that made up the Soviet Union, but in certain circumstances certain places could assume non-Soviet connotations. 46

GARF, R-f. 8412, op. 1, d. 18, 1. 1; R-f. 8131, op. 32, d. 1893, 11. 39, 44.



Year Homeless children

1943 204,578 !944 34M34

1945 296,432 1946 323422

1947 360,000 1951 i39>o83 1952 i45>700

!953 135^03 1954 130,339/124,326* 1955 107,730

!956 93.945

Source: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 126, d. 39, 1. 46; GARF, R-f. 8412, op. 1, d. 18, 1. 1, R-f. 8131, op. 32, d. 1893, 11. 39, 44. *

contradictory sources

Initially, war orphans comprised the largest number of those picked up by the police and other organs of the state. Yet in the later war and

post-war years the composition and motivation of youngsters on the street changed significantly. Many homeless and vagrant children had

already undergone one attempt at 'rescue'. They were on the run from

orphanages, factory schools or foster places. Officials acknowledged the

poor living conditions that induced them to quit their Soviet 'havens',

yet did not question the correctness of the general solution of 'collect

ing' and 'placing' them. The idea that these children were damaged and had deep-seated integrative problems was foreign to the agencies that were the street children's first point of contact with respectable Soviet society. Psychology as well as pedology had been victims of the Stalinist purges and if some educationalists still entertained ideas

concerning the value of behavioural studies of street children as carried out in the 1920s, they certainly could not be openly voiced.47

However, a closer look at the origins and social background of home less and vagrant children indicates that the problem was not simply one

of children being separated from their parents against their will. While

besprizornye by definition were outside school or occupation and without traceable parents, beznadzornye, unsupervised children, could originate from all kinds of classes and origins. Besprizornye often chose the street over the orphanage, beznadzornye quit or ignored their families, thus

implicitly casting doubt about the soundness of this Soviet institution.

While the authorities were well aware that Soviet home life did not

47 GARF, 9401, op. 2, d. 168, 1. 70. See also Bernstein, Dictatorship, pp. 185-88.


JULIANE F?RST 247

always live up to the ideal propagated in the media and the arts, the available data on juvenile delinquency led to some worrying con clusions. The lure of the street and petty criminal life seemed to hold attraction even for children of apparently normal families, who were included in the Soviet educational system. Initially the group of 'neither

studying nor working' made up the largest percentage of beznadzornye picked up by the police, yet with school children following close in their

footsteps. In 1945 pupils already made up more than 50 per cent of all

beznadzornye in Moscow.48 By 1953 84.1 per cent of all children that went through the busy Odessa priemnik had parents who were alive and in employment. These figures created not only a system in which more and more blame was shifted to malfunctioning parents, who found themselves held responsible for the misdemeanours of their children;49 they also seemed to suggest that the street culture of homeless and

vagrant children was an infectious disease, which could spread and

engulf ever greater numbers of Soviet children if not eliminated at the root.

Besprizornye and beznadzornye thus constituted a headache for the Soviet regime not only because their unfortunate existence contradicted the official claim to a happy Soviet childhood, but because they were able to establish a world and culture that evaded most forms of Soviet ness. They lived and moved in spaces that were outside Soviet control, engaged in non-Soviet activities and openly or implicitly defied Soviet norms and values. In turn, their concentration in larger cities and

transport hubs and their co-existence and co-operation with other non conformist outsiders, such as small-time criminals, drunkards and fugi tives from Soviet law, made liminal spaces like stations, trains, bazaars and ruined houses areas that not only had an un-Soviet image, but developed a distinct and alternative culture of their own. A short account compiled for the Ukrainian train network in April 1946 pro vides a glimpse of the kind of environment in which besprizornye (and to a lesser extent beznadzornye) lived and moved. In April 1946, the

48 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 126, d. 28, 1. 217. 49 See, for example, a 1945 party report that castigated party members in particular for

neglecting to supervise their delinquent offspring. RGASPI, f. 117, op. 122, d. 103, 11. 14-16. In the following years a system of warnings and fines for parents of delinquent children became common. In Odessa more than a thousand parents had to pay for their children's crimes. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 23, d. 3656,1. 38. This trend intensified in the following years,

when the official picture of the ideal family was increasingly supplemented by a less widely propagated counter-image of the dysfunctional family undermining Soviet educa tion. In a 1964 pamphlet, available only to members of the police force, parents were

singled out as guilty parties to their children's crimes, especially violent, drunk or absent fathers. Vospitanie Molodogo pokoleniia delo vsei obshchestvennosti, Omsk, 1964, pp. 7-9, 29-42. Ironically, such a shift in blame was an acknowledgement of the power and rights of the family, since blame could only be attributed if parents had a duty of education

? a duty that for many years had been claimed as a prerogative of the state.



Ukrainian train network alone reported eleven murders, eight assaults

leading to death, six assaults not leading to death, sixty-nine muggings, twenty-nine forms of rude hooliganism and 243 thefts.50 The train

police intercepted ninety groups of bandits with a total of 242 members.

They collected fifteen machine guns, twenty-six rifles and 139 pistols and revolvers. Among the 993 people they arrested were twenty-five under-age homeless children

? some of them members of a bandit

group.51 Altogether the Ukrainian police flushed out around 10,000 children every three months from the trains and stations. The number in Russia was even higher: around 70,000 homeless and vagrant children were collected each quarter from the trains.52 Vagrant minors chose a life on the train because its constant movement provided both shelter from local police forces and constantly renewed opportunities for begging and stealing. Homeless children from mainland Russia often hoped to blend into the chaos found in the newly liberated territories.53 Children of the formerly occupied territories often came to Russia in the hope of more food and better conditions. At times, the

police themselves would shove them onto a train to the next raion or

oblast', where other local policemen had to tackle the problem.54 Many children simply cruised the USSR, constructing a loose network of like-fated and like-minded people. Imitating the adult underground

world, habitual homeless child travellers were often only known by their nick names such as 'Little Mouse Dyshko', 'Little Box with

Three Legs', 'Vitko the Thief. Crime and violence were integral to the world of post-war Soviet vagrants

? young and old alike.55 Youngsters

stole and pick-pocketed, worked Oliver Twist-style as part of adult

gangs, and offered their services (including sexual ones) at markets and bazaars.56 More often than not they themselves suffered crime and violence. Internal hierarchies among groups of besprizornye and

beznadzornye were established by physical strength. In DzhambuF on the Turksib railway line, investigations into a string of violent crimes

against young boys uncovered a group run by an eighteen-year-old beznadzornye who ruled his clan with an iron hand. His preferred

50 TsDAHOU, f. i, op. 23, d. 3654,1. 33. 51 This refers to children under the age of sixteen. Although twenty-five might not seem

particularly high, children were rarely formally 'arrested', but rather 'collected'. There will have been a much larger number of homeless and vagrant children on the train who, while not directly involved in crime, will have been intimately familiar with the underworld.

Ibid., 1. 35. 52 GARF, R-f. 9401, op. 1, d. 35, 1. 127 ob. 53 TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 23, d. 3655, 1. 1; GARF f. 9412, op. 1, d. 70, 1. 1. 54 GARF, f. 9412, op. 1, d. 70, 1. 15. 55 On post-war crime see, for example, Jeffrey Burds, 'Velikii Strakh: Ugolovnyi banditizm

posle vtoroi mirovoi voiny', in Sotsial'naia Istoriia: Ezhegodnik, Moscow, 2000, pp. 169-88. 56 For life on the markets, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 122, d. 149; for an Oliver Twist-style adult-led gang, see TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 23, d. 3655, 1. 25-26.


JULIANE F?RST 249

punishment for those who either failed to deliver the goods they stole or failed to deliver at all was a knifing. His first lieutenant was a

fourteen-year-old youth, whose father was at the front and who had

literally beaten his mother into silence concerning his activities and

life-style.57 Children who did not gather in groups and gangs were at risk not only from violence within the vagrant and underground community, but also from police brutality and abuse by other adults.

A political prisoner who found herself in the company of several young homeless girls picked up by the police in a Novosibirsk prison described how these girls already knew 'everything and everyone', had sex with anyone who would offer them food, and betrayed a cynicism and crudeness in their conversations and behaviour that stood in stark contrast to their childish features and physiognomy.58

Policies of liquidation In the face of such an unpleasant and persistent reality, the discourse of salvation was soon joined by tougher words and measures. While children continued to be pitied as innocent victims and celebrated as the heralds of a happier future, a strict distinction between good and bad youngsters soon pervaded the policies designed to deal with homeless and vagrant minors. This rougher-handed approach to juve nile disobedience and delinquency built on ground already prepared by edicts in the 1930s, which made children as young as twelve fully responsible for any criminal acts and even briefly introduced the death

penalty for under-age offenders.59 Even more importantly, it was very much in line with the Manichean world view so forcefully established

during the 1930s purges, which allowed even seemingly good Soviet citizens to be classified as wreckers and enemies of the common

good. Fear of social contamination, suspicion of non-conformism and a clear sense of what children should be like were all legacies of the years immediately preceding the war. As 'non-Sovietness' increasingly became a concept based on ethnicity and kinship during and after the war, the Soviet self-confidence in the healing and redemptive powers of the system dwindled, leaving open a policy of strict inclusion or exclusion. As Amir Weiner has pointed out, the process of making sense of war required excision as well as integration and the criteria as to who fell in which category had become increasingly rigid.60 A rise in juvenile crime during and after the war, a loss of social and economic stability, and popular anxiety about the war's impact on the

morals of the young generation all facilitated and aided the emergence 57

GARF, R-f. 9412, op. 1, d. 7, 1. 17-170D0. 58 Deti Gulaga, pp. 430-31. 59 See Caroli, L'enfance, pp. 285-88. 60 Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: Tie Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik

Revolution, Princeton, NJ, 2001 (hereafter, Making Sense of War).


25O SOVIET HOMELESS & VAGRANT CHILDREN

and strengthening of a discourse and policy that were determined to eradicate the juvenile problem through spatial separation rather than to solve it through policies of integration. In many ways the Soviet

Union was not unique in its concern surrounding the effect of war on juvenile delinquency and youth morals

? an anxiety that was soon to lead to virtual moral panic concerning the newly emerging youth cultures of the 1950s and '60s in all Western countries. Yet the Soviet Union stood out in two respects: nowhere else was the pride in the

experience of a physically and educationally perfect childhood so much

part of national identity and nowhere else was thus the desire to keep up the appearance of an ideal childhood as crucial as in Soviet society. Both the more shocking reality of the Soviet Union (with the potential exception of Germany, no other country counted as many displaced children) and the more pressing ideological need thus ensured an

approach that left little room for complexity. An analysis of the vocabulary used by officials when speaking about

waifs, homelessness and youth crime reveals how much emphasis was

given to an aggressive campaign against child evil. The 'fight' (bor'ba) against 'homelessness' and 'waifdom' had to result in the 'liquidation' (likvidatsiia) of these phenomena. Homeless youth were to be 'weeded out' (iz'?at) from their hideouts in stations and trains in 'raids' (reidy) that not only linguistically, but also in reality, resembled animal hunts.

Decrees habitually referred to besprizornost\ beznadzornost' and hooligan ism in one and the same heading.61 It was also no coincidence that it

was the NKVD that dealt with waifs and vagrant children. Partly due to policy roots which lay with the special services from Dzherzhinskii's

days, homeless children were considered a problem of law and order not of social services. The decrees of June 1943 established once and for all the supremacy of the security organs over their Party, Komso mol and educational counterparts. The new NKVD department for the 'Fight Against Juvenile Homelessness and Vagrancy' was to be the ultimate arbitrator on the destination and end fate of arrested

youngsters.62 The only other agency regularly reporting on besprizornost' and beznadzornost' was the state prosecution service, underlining the

general assumption that homeless children were potential or actual

criminals, to be Judged by the same yardstick as other minor or even

adult offenders. The introduction of severe anti-theft laws in 1947

61 Deti Gulaga, pp. 383-84. 62 Ibid., pp. 384-90. 63

Komsomol, Party and Narkompros continued to report on child homelessness, but did so sporadically and using data provided by the NKVD and the prokuratura. From 1944 the

prokuratura had its own department for affairs relating to minors, which interestingly dealt not only with juvenile offenders, but also with children's rights, including the rights of

juvenile delinquents. Yet while reports concerning orphanages and labour schools were

frequent, the NKVD colonies were supervised by their own department and only rarely came to the attention of the judiciary.


JULIANE F?RST 251

meant that subsistence theft (the most common crime of homeless

youngsters) had become a major offence and was punished with several years in a juvenile labour colony.64

Indeed, arrested homeless and vagrant children were not only verbally excluded from mainstream society, but physically removed. By 1943, a complicated system of collection and dissemination was in place for intercepted homeless, vagrant and criminal children. The first stop for most was the priemnik

? the police reception room established pre dominantly at stations and market places and serving as an assessment and collection centre for all kinds of children under the age of sixteen who had fallen out of mainstream society. The rules set out for the work of the priemnik indicate the main concerns of the Soviet state vis-?-vis homeless and vagrant children: to return them to 'Sovietness'.

They were to be held in the centre until referred to a new placement. Their aimless roaming was to be replaced by controlled movement under Soviet authority. They were to be instructed in hygienic and

sanitary behaviour and norms of 'culturedness', transforming them from dirty and unkempt semi-savages into youngsters resembling the image of Soviet children. Staff assessment was to determine the children's future destination: their re-integration into the Soviet world or their exile to its periphery. Children below the age of fourteen quali fied for a transfer into an orphanage. Yet the number of places in

orphanages was extremely limited and was by no means sufficient to house all eligible children. Children over the age of fourteen were

supposed to be sent to factory schools or given a workplace in a

factory or kolkhoz, both of which were in fact extremely reluctant to take waifs, since they had to be fed and housed and were known as difficult and unreliable pupils. Finally, children 'in need of a special regime' (de facto those who had been picked up several times, had been on the street for a prolonged period of time or were judged by the staff as difficult) were to be separated from the rest of the children already in the priemnik and sent to the labour-educational colonies for

juveniles.65 Labour-educational colonies, established in 1943, were

designed to keep the door to the outside world open and even had a Komsomol organizer attached to them. The longer-established labour colonies and the later special labour colonies worked under a harsher and more punitive regime and were reserved for children, who

'persistently destroyed discipline', though an actual conviction was not

64 Peter Solomon has shown that many judges disapproved of the severity of the law and

passed milder sentences. Yet in terms of state policy the 1947 laws were part and parcel of the new desire to clean up the mess of post-war society with unprecedented toughness. Peter Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice Under Stalin, Cambridge and New York, 2001, pp. 210-11. 5

Deti Gulaga, pp. 384-85, 435-42.



required for admission.66 By the late 1940s the Soviet state had estab lished a system of spaces that, to various degrees, removed troublesome children from the view of the rest of Soviet society. While the number of children who ended up in a colony rather than an orphanage was in all years measured less than a quarter of those who went to

orphanages or found employment, the sharp increase in juvenile colony inmates from 1944 onwards clearly shows the severity of the new

policy and hints at a trend of exclusion of social 'misfits' that was to be indicative of the treatment of other marginal members of Soviet

society.

Destination of children 1943-47

1943 1944 1945 1946 1947

Orphanages 81,419 112,641 94,223 93,073 125,000 Factory schools 26,542 50,441 27,988 22,993 25,500

Work in industry 37>oc>9 48,688 49,706 54,552 51,000 and agriculture Children in labour camps 4,624 25,140 23,066 19,034 14,500 Returned to parents 39^93 63,254 66,650 80,914 144,000

Source: GARF, f. 9412, op. 1. d. 18, 1. 1, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 171, 1. 228.

The high expectations that accompanied the policy of punitive incar ceration was demonstrated by the planned capacity of new colonies

(50,000 places in total, as drawn up in 1943). Camps, while representing the pinnacle of Soviet control, were de facto non-Soviet spaces. They

were not only mentally but physically separated from society ?

often located in the furthest republics and in virtually inaccessible loca tions. Official guidelines for calories per day were very limited and

hardly ever fulfilled. A commission concluded in 1945 that 80 per cent of all inmates were severely undernourished.67 Colonies also tended to be overcrowded and provided little living space, often with only half a

square metre available per inmate.68 While colonies were cut off from mainstream society, they were by no means cut off from the criminal world. Most colonies used convicted adults as support staff. With con

victions for murder, robbery and banditry, such staff ran cartels in the

camps, which far outweighed the authority of the guards.69 Violence was a constant feature. Although guards frequently beat and abused

66 Ibid, pp. 453-54 67 RGASPI, M-f. i, ( fi? T, 1 1

67 RGASPI, M-f. i, op. 7, d. 129, 1. 10. 68 Ibid, 1. 9. 69 Ibid, 1. 3.


JULIANE F?RST 253

inmates, regimes of terror could also be established between prisoners, where so-called prefects tyrannized the weaker and younger of their

peers. The physical abuse of camp inmates was a well-documented and

frequent occurrence. Children were often put in the so-called isolator

(a dark room without bed and chair) for no apparent reason and left there for up to a week.70 Murders among camp inmates were the result of conflict among rival groups of prisoners. Reports from a colony in

Archangel' over three months give an impression of the perils of life in a juvenile labour colony. In May a boy attacked two of his friends and almost killed one of them. In July a boy had to be brought to hospital with severe knife wounds. In August a newly arrived inmate was killed in the quarantine block.71 Mass riots were no rarity. In 1945 major unrest broke out in the Chuvash republic over the question of food

supplies. Seventeen inmates stormed the storage room, raped one of the female adult prisoners and forbade the educational staff to leave the premises.72 Two years later, this time in a camp in the Altai, two

guards and one staff member were killed when inmates stormed the

camp kitchen. It turned out that the group responsible for the riots had been allowed to run a regime of personal favours and food extortion

among the children.73 A camp in the Ukraine fell out of control for several days. The appointed prefects had organized a regime of terror. In a mass revolt the inmates attacked their tormentors and then continued to resist all attempts to restore order. The seventy inmates burnt the camp furniture, ripped the windows out of their frames and destroyed other items such as musical instruments. They erected barricades constructed from the debris of their violent rampage, where

upon they retreated to the upper floors and held the police at bay for several hours. When a local battalion of soldiers was called in to help, the children started to take apart the roof construction and bombard the soldiers with burning wood. Nineteen soldiers, six policemen and fifteen inmates had to be hospitalized.74 The strong influence of the

underground criminal world was visible in the strict observance of the 'code of thieves' among the juvenile inmates. Yet many adult prisoners (mainly political) who found themselves in the same camps as juveniles, described young inmates as surpassing even their adult criminal masters. Victims of abuse on the street and in the camps, these children were not only victims, but brutal survivors:

They [the juveniles] feared nothing and no one. The guards and camp bosses were scared to enter the separate barracks where the juveniles lived.

70 GARF, f. 9412, op. 12, d. 210, Tom 1. 71 Ibid.

72 RGASPI, f. i, op. 7, d. 129, 1. 3. 73 GARF, f. 9412, op. 12, d. 210, Tom 1. 74 TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 24, d. 4299, 11. 178-79.



It was there that the vilest, most cynical and cruel acts that took place in the camps occurred. [...] There was nothing human left in these children and it was impossible to imagine that they might return to the normal world and become ordinary human beings again.75

Relaunch and reconstruction

While diametrically opposed to each other in many respects, the narrative of salvation that continued and furthered the myth of happy Soviet childhood, and the policy of exclusion, which weeded out those who contaminated the ideal, were nonetheless both part of the Soviet Union's process of reconstruction and its desire to relaunch the Soviet

project after a bitter, but victorious, war. Not only did they exist side

by side, often even being propagated by one and the same agency, but

they also depended on each other's existence, mutually re-enforcing their main aims. They proposed a solution, which reflected a certain vision of how to deal with societal damage and societal reconstruction ? a vision that was crucial to how Soviet society would make sense of the experience of war and therefore crucial to how Soviet society perceived itself in the post-war period.

A closer look at the undercurrents of both campaigns reveals that

they were indeed two sides of the same coin, ultimately serving the same end: the formation of a new Soviet society inhabited by new Soviet people. To use the term coined by Zygmunt Baumann, both were part of the intensive 'gardening' process undertaken by many of the modern states in the twentieth century.76 The creation of the myth of the 'happy Soviet childhood' and the centrality of Stalin's image as a father to all Soviet children were important pre-requisites for the

practices of exclusion and excision. The existence of homeless children

roaming the streets and the railways placed a question mark over both the reality of happiness and the efficiency of Stalinist paternalism, evoking not only pity but also doubt in the mind of Soviet citizens. Obsessed with the creation of untarnished images rather than the

depiction of reality, the Soviet system held no place for non-conforming children, who posed a danger far exceeding that of their petty crimes.7 The child-hell of the juvenile labour camps was a logical consequence of Soviet visions of a perfect child heaven. Rehabilitation of children in the midst of society, tolerance towards weakness and acknowledge

ment of poverty would all have done significant damage to carefully constructed belief systems. With a society reeling from the experience

75 Lev Razgin cited in Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, London, 2003,

P-305 Zygmunt Baumann, Modernity and the Holocaust, Ithaca, NY, 1991, pp. 91-93. 77 See Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avantgarde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond,

Princeton, NJ, 1992.


JULIANE F?RST 255 of invasion, millions of citizens having been exposed to the West and discontent rumbling in all corners, doubt concerning such a funda mental tenant of faith was not permissible. Officially, therefore, war

damaged children immune to easy integration did not exist and could not be discussed or even acknowledged

? not in the press and not

among medics, psychologists, pedagogues or any other profession. Homeless and delinquent children existed only as objects of police attention or, as in the case of Alexandr Matrosov, as reformed heroes in official iconography. Indeed, The Anglo-Soviet Journal went to so far as to proclaim in 1942 that the current war, unlike the Civil War, had not resulted in any rise in juvenile criminality.78 Journals like Sovetskaia

pedagogika, when confronting the sensitive subject of children and war, reported on dutiful foster-parents and teachers, child heroism and child-hate against the fascist invader. After 1945, even this topic dis

appeared from the content pages entirely.79 Excluded from official dis course, the physical removal of troublesome children was the next

logical step. The conditions of the juvenile labour camps provided the final steps towards the 'liquidation' of the problem. Imprisoned minors were quick to lose any child-like features. Branded as non-Soviet and non-children these minors virtually ceased to exist. The stains on the

image of happy Soviet childhoods had been successfully purged. The shared Utopian vision of the two discourses and campaigns

also precluded a thorough investigation of psychological trauma as a

consequence of war. The narratives of salvation and the politics of exclusion both favoured quick solutions that could fit into targets and

plans, be measured in numbers and run concurrent with the physical post-war re-construction. The extreme silence that hung over the topic of mental distress and psychological damage, especially after the end of the war, was not only designed to silence critical voices. It was designed to be an active mechanism in the process of reconstruction. A call for

material on the experience of children during the war, published in Sovetskaia pedagogika in 1945, illustrates how the topic of trauma was by passed and replaced by quasi-scientific assumptions concerning the

edifying nature of war and hardship. Rallied to investigate the impact of war on children's lives, teachers and educationalists were asked to form conclusions on such issues as the disintegration of the family, children's reactions to the invasion, the effects of evacuation and the

78 B. King, 'The Regeneration of Young Criminals: The Work of Anton Makarenko', The

Anglo-Soviet Journal, 3, 1942, 2, pp. 101-08. 7 A. Lukin, 'Rabota shkol Moskovskoi oblasti v usloviiakh voennogo vremeni', Sovetskaia

pedagogika, 1-2, 1942, pp. 3-6; N. N. Romanovskaia, 'Deti v dnie otechtesvennoi voiny', ibid., 5-6, 1942, pp. 86-87; V. N. Kufaev, 'Zabota o detiakh v dni otechestvennoi voiny', ibid., 8-9, 1942, pp. 24-31; N. D. Levitov and N. A. Rybniov, 'Deti i otechestvennaia

Voina (k voprosu ob isuchenii psikhologii detei v usloviiakh velikoi otechetsvennoi voiny)', ibid., 3-4, 1945, pp. 109-15.



mood after bomb attacks. While superficially probing in its scope, the

investigation actually sought to mould the answers by giving sample replies which expressively denied any ill-effects, asserting that far from

dreaming about peaceful times, children engaged in acts of patriotism and were full of hate for the fascist invader. The proposed bibliography that was to guide the project also demonstrated that the ill-effects of

war were not high on the agenda of the researchers. The list included

headings such as 'Young Patriots', 'Heroic Children', 'Children's Help to Industry' and 'Children's Contact with Frontline Soldiers and their Families'. There was no rubric under which trauma, displacement and loss could have found a suitable home.80 A notable exception to the general amnesia concerning war trauma was the aforementioned article in The Anglo-Soviet Journal, which appeared in 1946 and spoke of the psychological impact of war on children who had lost their home and parents. However, while raising the topic

? and there are indeed several indications in the text that seem to suggest that it was authored

during rather than after the war ? the article is quick to assure that

the Soviet space of the orphanage can and eventually does deal with all traumas.

l With the plan fulfilled the case for rehabilitation was

closed.

The Soviet Union and its people were not alone in their reluctance to address the unpleasant fact that physical normality did not neces

sarily result in mental and emotional recovery. As Svenja Goltermann has shown, Germany, too, found it hard to come to terms with the mental collapse of former POWs, refugees and other people suffering from flashbacks or anxiety attacks. She points out that a society in turmoil is even more prone to deny the concept of anxiety than a

society at ease with itself.82 While Soviet society was largely free from the burden of repressed guilt and unrecognized victimhood experi enced by post-war Germans, it certainly was not free from angst, doubts and internal tensions. Although optimism guided the public discourse, beneath the surface many people

? officials and ordinary Soviet citi zens alike ? expressed great worry about the future of society after the war: children were perceived to be running wild; the societal fabric had broken down because of displacement or extraordinarily harsh living conditions; and life was directed towards a basic survival in which fre

quent exposure to crime and violence stood side by side with instances of mutual help and collectivity. Overall, Soviet society was under

great duress and increasingly retreated into its smallest components,

80 Ibid, pp. 109-15. 81

Vostokova, 'Return Them', pp. 38-43. 82 Svenja Goltermann, 'The Imagination of Disaster: Death and Survival in Post-War

Germany', paper presented to the Modern European History Seminar, Oxford, Michelmas Term 2004.


JULIANE F?RST 257

betraying doubt and distrust of the larger collective and the system as

such. 3 The denial of the existence of trauma sought to repress much

more than the damage done to individual children. The veil of silence drawn over problems that could not be solved by physical measures was part of a survival strategy both for Soviet individuals, who found solace in the narratives of salvation and relief in the practices of

liquidation, and for the Soviet system, whose very conception of vic

tory would have been shattered if horizons had been extended to the

non-material, non-geographical and non-repairable damages sustained

during the Great Fatherland War. As Amir Weiner has argued in his work, the overwhelming evidence

of post-war ideology does not point to a rejection of revolutionary tenets, but rather to a relaunch and reinforcement of beliefs and mech anisms which had guided the Soviet project in the pre-war years.84 The double discourse on children as the incarnation of the Soviet future as well as potential destroyers of the accepted order, the division of the world into suitable participants and wreckers of the common good, the

politics of spatial separation and the need to eliminate harmful topics and terms from both public and private discourse were all present in the pre-war years and especially in the time of the Great Purges. Yet rather than take once more the risk of mass participation, late Stalinism 'excised evil' through a combination of clandestine acts and legal

decrees. Exclusion took place less through labelling of individuals as 'enemies' and 'wreckers' and more through an ever-growing body of law and decrees, which often were not even made public. Ultimately this meant that the relaunch of the Soviet project after the war did not

mean the same thing for all Soviet citizens. The very essence of the

project foretold that some would experience the post-war years of

rallying and reconstruction of society as an inclusive experience, while others were to view the post-war relaunch as outsiders. Yet it was

precisely the existence of the outside, hovering on the edges of society, that made the successful creation of a new, post-war 'inside' possible.

This late-Stalinist version of relaunch became one of the major tar

gets of Khrushchev's anti-Stalinist critique in later years. Khrushchev was in favour of a different reconstruction of society

? one that was based more on joint ideological faith and less on the creation of exclu

sionary boundaries and the strict categorization of wartime experience. Official discourse began to revisit the topic 'children and war' in par ticular and 'childhood' in general. Tvardovskii's film, Ivan's Childhood

(1962), questioned the strict separation of heroism and victimization

83 On turmoil in post-war Russia, see Elena Zubkova, Poslevoennoe Sovetskooe Obshchestvo:

Politika i povsednevnost' ig45~ig53, Moscow, 1999; Juliane F?rst (ed.), Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention, London 2006. 84

Weiner, Making Sense of War, pp. 7-8.



and painted a picture of childhood trauma and misery that would not have been permissible in the immediate post-war years. The very popular film, Respublika SHKID (1966), returned to the theme of

orphanages and child colonies as places of reform and homeless children as potential, good Soviet citizens. The child labour colonies,

much like the whole of the Gulag system, were gradually wound down.

Although more optimistic than Stalinist measures, Khrushchev's reforms were not designed to let the Soviet project slip or relinquish control over its participants. The master narrative of the war as one of heroic victory did not change and indeed gained even greater currency under Brezhnev, who offered veterans and child victims recognition and material rewards in exchange for appropriate memoirs.85 Unlike trends in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, which began to emphasize a social policy of integration and prevention towards marginal groups, Khrushchev's anti-vagrancy and anti-parasite legislation intensified the fight against those who challenged Soviet control over 'space' and

'community'. Unregistered by either the local residence authority (OVIR) or by work, vagrant and homeless people were viewed as refus

ing to participate in Soviet life and thus engaging in a criminal act. This view, as Svetlana Stephenson has pointed out, still informs the

way Russian society relates to its homeless community today, just as the belief in good and bad children and the need for spatial separation between the t

homeless children 1945

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