25479198

Between Salvation and Liquidation: Homeless and Vagrant Children and the Reconstruction
of Soviet Society
Author(s): Juliane Fürst
Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 86, No. 2, The Relaunch of the Soviet
Project, 1945-64 (Apr., 2008), pp. 232-258
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London,
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25479198
Accessed: 13-12-2019 20:38 UTC
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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 esc
Their entire upbringing and education rested with
aimed to 'fashion youths into productive, devoted
munist society'.3 Their behaviour and social manner
those transmitted to them by Soviet educationalist
tives. War, famine and displacement had created a ple
in need, who could be collected as participants in
rescue mission. Committees were formed, friendshi
conferences convened and sociological studies com
famously, the NKVD under Felix Dzherzhinskii
child colonies, one of which became world famous und
of Anton Makarenko as a model of a new style
juvenile social integration. Makarenko's theories
government, the benefits of manual and producti
importance of discipline drew attention to the larger
education ? the formation of the new Soviet man
spirit and values of the Soviet and, increasingly, the S
Following the upheavals of collectivization and ind
topic of Soviet child welfare gained greater prominen
2 Street children have attracted the attention of researchers for

time, while the topic of children in the Soviet system overall h
boom. The classic and most comprehensive work to date on pre-war
Ball's And Now My Soul is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet R
CA, 1994 (hereafter, And Now My Soul). Drawing on archival sou
advice literature and the rich body of work undertaken by early S
work ranges from an analysis of policy to a detailed exploration of
and everyday practices. Dorena Caroli, L'enfance abandonee et d?linquant
(igi7-ig$7), Paris, 2004 (hereafter Uenfanc?) is a much more policy-o
in detail at the legal and scientific theories underlying Soviet po
Recently, Rachel Green's PhD dissertation has tackled the topic of p
('"There Will Be No Orphans Among Us": Soviet Orphanages, Fos
1941-1956', unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2
children is embedded in the general discussion surrounding childre
Soviet Union, a topic which has recently witnessed significant atte
moulding young souls was an exciting prospect for a Utopian reg
cult, but also a site of battle, disappointment and danger. See Li
Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, igi7~igj2, Lon
Livshiz, 'Growing up Soviet: Childhood in the Soviet Union 1918
dissertation, Stanford University, 2006; Catriona Kelly, Children's Wor
i8qo-iggi, New Haven, CT, 2007.
Ball, And Now My Soul, p. 87.
4 Alongside Narkompros, Narkomzdrav and the NKVD, a special com
a Council for the Protection of Children was set up in 1918 in order
Each of them spawned a plethora of sub-institutions such as the
tion under the supervision o? Narkompros. There were also regional
of the All-Soviet Central Executive Committee, who were respo
and were later grouped under the Commission for the Improvem
established in 1921.
5 See, for example, James Bowen, Soviet Education: Anton Makarenko
ment, Madison, WI, 1962. As a more personal testimony to Makar
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 130,33
1955 107,73
!956 93.945
Source: RGASPI, f. 17, op.
1. 1, R-f. 8131, op. 32, d. 189
* contradictory sources
Initially, war orphans co

up by the police and other
post-war years the comp
street changed significan
already undergone one at
orphanages, factory schoo
poor living conditions th
yet did not question the
ing' and 'placing' them.
and had deep-seated inte
that were the street chil
Soviet society. Psycholo
the Stalinist purges and
concerning the value of b
out in the 1920s, they ce
However, a closer look a
less and vagrant children
of children being separate
besprizornye by definitio
traceable parents, beznadz
from all kinds of classes a
over the orphanage, bezn
implicitly casting doubt a
While the authorities w
47 GARF, 9401, op. 2, d. 168, 1.
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 deliv
stole or failed to deliver at all was a knifing. His first
fourteen-year-old youth, whose father was at the
literally beaten his mother into silence concerning
life-style.57 Children who did not gather in grou
at risk not only from violence within the vagrant
community, but also from police brutality and abus
A political prisoner who found herself in the company
homeless girls picked up by the police in a Novosibirsk
how these girls already knew 'everything and every
anyone who would offer them food, and betray
crudeness in their conversations and behaviour th
contrast to their childish features and physiognomy.5
Policies of liquidation
In the face of such an unpleasant and persistent rea
of salvation was soon joined by tougher words and
children continued to be pitied as innocent victim
as the heralds of a happier future, a strict distinc
and bad youngsters soon pervaded the policies des
homeless and vagrant minors. This rougher-handed
nile disobedience and delinquency built on ground
by edicts in the 1930s, which made children as you
responsible for any criminal acts and even briefly int
penalty for under-age offenders.59 Even more import
much in line with the Manichean world view so for
during the 1930s purges, which allowed even seem
citizens to be classified as wreckers and enemie
good. Fear of social contamination, suspicion of non
a clear sense of what children should be like were
years immediately preceding the war. As 'non-Sovie
became a concept based on ethnicity and kinship du
war, the Soviet self-confidence in the healing and r
of the system dwindled, leaving open a policy of
exclusion. As Amir Weiner has pointed out, the pr
sense of war required excision as well as integratio
as to who fell in which category had become incre
rise in juvenile crime during and after the war, a
economic stability, and popular anxiety about the w
morals of the young generation all facilitated and ai
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 t
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
67
fi?
RGASPI, M-f. i, (M-f. i, op. 7, d. 129, 1. 10.
T,RGASPI,
1 1
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 two still permeates the juvenile justice system.86 Moscow
Mayor Luzhkov, who refers to street children as rats bringing crime
and disease to the capital, signed a law in 1996 that aimed to clean
Moscow's street of undesirable groups such as the homeless, refugees
and street urchins. The Moscow police thus regularly deport large
numbers of the city's estimated 50,000 waifs outside Moscow's gilded
boundaries into spaces that are not part of the new and privileged
Russia and are beyond the gaze of those that make up its new and
prosperous society. 7
85 Nina Turnar?an, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in
Russia, New York, 1994, pp. 125-46.
86 Svetlana Stephenson, Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, Homelessness and Social Displacement in
Russia, Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2006.
87 <http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/6038-n.cfm> [accessed September 2007];
Dami?n Schaible, 'Life in Russia's "Closed City": Moscow's Movement Restrictions and
the Rule of Law', New York University Law Review, April 2001, pp. 344-74.

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Between Salvation and Liquidation: Homeless and Vagrant Children and the Reconstruction

Modern Humanities Research Association, University College London, School of

Between Salvation and Liquidation:

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

2 Street children have attracted the attention of researchers for

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

16 Deti Gulaga, p. 387.

19 Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, pp. 105-09; Hooper, 'Intimacy of Terror', p. 71.

23 Brooks, Thank You, p. 179.

27 'Deti na voine', p. 55.

The limits of rescue

Initially, war orphans co

47 GARF, 9401, op. 2, d. 168, 1.

48 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 126, d. 28, 1. 217.

50 TsDAHOU, f. i, op. 23, d. 3654,1. 33.

57 GARF, R-f. 9412, op. 1, d. 7, 1. 17-170D0.

61 Deti Gulaga, pp. 383-84.

Destination of children 1943-47

1943 1944 1945 1946 1947

The high expectations that accompanied the policy of punitive incar

66 Ibid, pp. 453-54

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

Relaunch and reconstruction

While diametrically opposed to each other in many respects, the

80 Ibid, pp. 109-15.

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

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