7. Progress and Frustration

In my view, the policy of Soviet power toward the “besprizornyi” and the “socially-dangerous individual” has yielded and is yielding results which it can proudly count as one of the most remarkable achievements of its wise, deeply-humane work.

…those numerous homeless children for whom Russia is always going to do something and never does…

Whatever their differences, all strategies for reclaiming street children demanded money. Nobody realized this more acutely than central and provincial government officials, whose treasuries provided the lion’s share of resources.^[1] They also knew that their regular budgets could not stretch to embrace every waif, and the shortfall drove them after extra revenue from diverse sources. Most directly, they tapped the local population with additional taxes, including surcharges on specific groups (usually private traders), on various commodities (among them playing cards, tram fares, movie tickets, and alcoholic beverages), and on establishments (typically restaurants, taverns, theaters, and other places of leisure). Some assessments did not outlive brief campaigns to assist the homeless, while others remained on the books for years.^[2] In either case, the levies often revealed a desire to place more of the bill on idle, prosperous, or otherwise “bourgeois” citizens.

Another supplementary conduit of money ran through the Children’s Commission and its Ukrainian equivalent, the Central Commission for the Assistance of Children. These bodies and their provincial branches acquired funds through (1) government subsidies, (2) contributions from individual citizens and ODD, (3) income from businesses operated by commissions, and (4) proceeds from bazaars, concerts, movies, andother shows they staged.^[3] As further encouragement, the government shielded a variety of the commissions’ enterprises (including dining facilities, dairies, workshops for abandoned youths, and stores that sold goods produced in the workshops) from state and local taxes.^[4] Casinos, lotteries, and billiard halls opened by commissions around the country often proved especially lucrative. Indeed, the Ukrainian division planned for gaming rooms to generate fully half its budget in 1925/26.^[5] The Children’s Commission eventually instructed branches to cease such fund-raising practices because of their unwholesome aura, and by 1928 demanded as well that its network close taverns and other facilities selling alcoholic beverages. The appeals for reconsideration presented by a number of local offices underscored how profitable these ventures had been.^[6]

Lenin’s death early in 1924 inspired creation of yet another revenue channel. On January 26, in memory of the nation’s father, the All-Union Congress of Soviets called for a V. I. Lenin Fund of Assistance to Besprizornye Children, and in July the All-Union Central Executive Committee issued a decree to this end. The All-Union Lenin Fund was set at 100 million rubles—50 million from the central government and 50 million to be provided by Lenin Funds at the republic level. The government was to make its contribution over five years, with no yearly payment less than 10 million rubles. Only the interest generated by this money could be spent, and decisions regarding distribution rested with a committee of the Central Executive Committee’s Presidium.^[7] In the spring of 1926, a newspaper reported that the fund had already disbursed 600,000 rubles around the country. While hardly approaching the tens of millions of rubles budgeted more directly through Narkompros for work with street children, this did represent more than trivial assistance. In certain regions with large concentrations of detdoma, Narkompros viewed the Lenin Fund as an essential supplement to the budgets of its local offices.^[8]

These offices needed such reinforcement because the duty to maintain detdoma fell on their shoulders soon after the famine. By 1924/25, 80 percent of the sixty million rubles spent to run the institutions came from provincial budgets.^[9] Just a few years before, when millions of homeless youths swarmed across the nation, the central government had taken the lead in funding detdoma. But 1923 saw Moscow busy depositing this financial obligation on the doorsteps of Narkompros branches around the country, where it represented a staggering burden. In 1923/24 detdoma typically swallowed a third to a half of local Narkompros budgets, roughly a quarter in 1924/25, and often a fifth or more in 1925/26—debilitating expenses for authorities with many other responsibilities, including regular schools.^[10]

Once Narkompros offices discovered themselves obligated to support most detdoma in their areas, they sought not only to raise revenue but to reduce expenses. Across the country they began dismissing children from institutions and closed thousands of facilities altogether by 1925, leaving less than half the number that existed only three years before. Narkompros headquarters itself urged the discharge of older inhabitants and those whose parents or relatives had been located—but with the goal of making room for an equivalent number from among the multitude still on their own. Local officials generally required no prodding to implement the remedy’s first stage, sending juveniles out to face the world, but they displayed no enthusiasm for bringing new candidates into places vacated by those departing.^[11] According to data from twenty-five provinces in the Russian Republic, the number of youths discharged from detdoma more than doubled the total crossing institutions’ thresholds in the opposite direction. During the period January–September 1926, thirty-six provinces reported bidding farewell to approximately 26,000 boys and girls from facilities that accepted only 9,800 replacements during the same interval. In Moscow province the numbers discharged and admitted were 4,334 and 1,616, respectively; in Siberia, 3,537 and 705; and in Saratov province, 1,877 and 323.^[12]

This trend continued throughout the decade, impervious to frequent orders from Moscow to halt further attrition in the nation’s system of detdoma.^[13] Instructions to preserve children’s facilities did not move the head of Narkompros’s office for Stalingrad province, in whose view “[some district officials] are carrying out their work without sufficient vigor, often appearing too soft-hearted and trying to preserve detdoma. This must cease. The course of reducing the number of detdoma and emancipating local budgets must be pursued resolutely.”^[14] From one end of the country to the other, such concerns closed homes for abandoned children. In the Ural region, 311 institutions dwindled to 189 between 1925 and 1927. The Crimean Autonomous Republic’s total fell from 47 to 30 over a roughly similar period, and Moscow province’s network withered from 386 to 208.^[15] Of course, the quantity of detdoma required to meet the nation’s needs diminished along with the number of homeless juveniles after 1922. But financial considerations swayed local authorities to close detdoma at such a brisk rate that those remaining could not accommodate thousands of youths still on the street. In the summer of 1925, according to an article in the Komsomol’s principal newspaper, surviving institutions could shelter little more than half the nation’s waifs. Moreover, many of those hastily discharged found themselves alone, without employment or training, and soon rejoined the homeless world.^[16]

Short of closing buildings, officials conceived other ways to curtail support for detdoma. Some shifted as much of their financial responsibility as possible to the Children’s Commission or, less often, to ODD. Numerous reports and reprimands from Moscow focused on local authorities who received funds from the Children’s Commission and then trimmed their own expenditures by the same amount or spent the contributions on inappropriate projects.^[17] In at least a few instances, provincial Narkompros offices displayed a determination to regard labor colonies and communes as self-sufficient institutions requiring no support at all. Budgetary concerns rendered them immune to abundant evidence that few children’s facilities could long flourish on their own.^[18]

In some regions, especially localities that attracted large numbers of young refugees and vagrants, authorities provided aid only to those identified as natives of the province, district, or city in question. Others they simply left on the street or shipped back to areas thought to contain their original homes.^[19] In addition, rural officials commonly placed local urchins they could not or would not support on trains bound for the nearest city. Thus launched, a child arrived in the metropolis with no money and only a document identifying him as an orphan requiring placement in an institution. All too often he landed on the street instead. As far back as 1924, various government agencies forbade these unsanctioned transfers, but the practice continued along with the prohibitions throughout the decade. Occasionally, the dumping of youths from one area into another (what one newspaper called the “get out of our sight” approach) assumed mass proportions. Officials in Baku, for example, decided to “cleanse” themselves of rootless juveniles in the autumn of 1930 and jettisoned eight hundred into the territory of their Georgian neighbors. One wonders how many soon headed back across the border.^[20]

By the middle of the decade, then, detdoma were harried on multiple fronts. Local officials begrudged them funds, while others promoted alternatives such as labor communes and foster care. It may have seemed that detdoma faced an institutional equivalent of the abandonment experienced earlier by the children they housed. But despite these threats, the welfare of homeless youths remained primarily in the hands of Narkompros’s original network of facilities. No other option caught on sufficiently to displace them. Throughout the 1920s, the overwhelming majority of orphans who left the street via officially devised channels entered receivers and detdoma without ever seeing communes or foster families.

Of the two institutions—receiver and detdom—the latter played by far the more important role. Numbers alone erase any doubt. Receivers (including observation-distribution points) never reached a total of even 300 in the Russian Republic, increasing from 175 to 284 between 1921 and 1926 according to one calculation, while detdoma towered above these sums by a multiple of over thirty in 1921–1922 and nearly ten in 1926.^[21] Children often moved directly from the street to permanent institutions, with perhaps a visit to a night shelter enroute, in either instance never entering a receiver.^[22] For that matter, many receivers themselves came to resemble detdoma. Originally, they had been expected to provide little more than preliminary screening and preparation (haircuts, baths, clean clothes, and the like) before passing a child along to a detdom for education and training. But as the number of candidates continued to exceed vacancies in detdoma, receivers could not place youths promptly. The average stay stretched into months, confronting facilities with upbringing duties previously reserved for detdoma.^[23] A majority of those eventually dispatched from receivers continued on to detdoma, but the transition had ceased to be striking.^[24]

In short, the aggressive pruning of their ranks did not challenge the position of detdoma as the state’s principal means for rehabilitating waifs. Underscoring this point in 1926, Lunacharskii noted that the government spent forty-five million rubles per year on the struggle with juvenile homelessness—“almost exclusively on raising children in detdoma.”^[25] The Russian Republic’s complement of facilities surpassed 6,000 during the famine and still topped 2,000 during the first half of 1927, as evident in the following totals.^[26]

According to less complete information, Ukraine contained nearly 2,000 detdoma early in 1923 and 788 in 1925. The Soviet Union as a whole supported 5,119 detdoma on January 1, 1924; 3,827 a year later; 3,119 in 1925/26; and 2,493 in 1926/27.^[27] The numbers of children housed in the Russian Republic’s institutions are shown in the following list.^[28]

Ukrainian detdoma sheltered an additional 114,000 juveniles at the beginning of 1923 and approximately 72,000 by the summer of 1925. One source estimated that all detdoma together in the Soviet Union contained “about 1,000,000” youths in 1922/23—an immense figure compared to that of 1917, but only a fraction of those in need of care. For reasons just presented, the nation’s detdom population plunged in the years thereafter, but it nonetheless totaled roughly 359,000 on January 1, 1924; 317,000 a year later; 293,000 in 1925/26; and 222,000 in 1926/27.^[29] During this period, as officials began discharging children whose relatives could be located, two-thirds to three-fourths of those remaining in most detdoma were classified as full orphans, and over 90 percent had lost at least one parent.^[30]

These statistics should be viewed as approximations, useful in revealing trends and the rough scale of action, but scarcely precise measures of detdoma. Complete information never arrived from many remote provinces and autonomous regions, especially during the period’s chaotic early years. In addition, despite instructions from Moscow to standardize institutions’ names (as detdom, agricultural colony, or labor commune, for example), numerous facilities around the country bore other titles such as “besprizornye shelter” or “handicraft school.” Moreover, some changed their names when the concept of “moral defectiveness” came under attack in the middle of the decade. The “Saratov Home for the Morally Anomalous” continued on as a “Children’s Agricultural Labor Commune,” for instance, and the “Rostov Children’s Home for the Morally Defective” became the “Rostov Institute for Social Rehabilitation.”^[31] The bewildering variety of titles contributed discrepancies to data, as some investigators were more inclined than others to regard a detdom by any other name as a detdom.

Further complicating the statistics, some sources divided institutions into numerous subcategories, with different bodies (notably Narkompros and the Central Statistical Agency) employing their own, slightly varying lists.^[32] Column headings might include detdoma for preschool children, detdoma for school-age youngsters, “experimental demonstration” facilities, labor communes, agricultural colonies, agricultural detdoma, handicraft detdoma, homes for adolescents, and a variety of institutions (including detdoma, colonies, and communes) specifically for “difficult” inhabitants or those with physical impairments.^[33] While all these categories could be maneuvered into a coherent array on paper, they acquired an air of unreality when applied to actual establishments around the country. Waifs outstripped the capacity of facilities by such a margin that local officials often had no choice but to send groups of disparate age, health, and experience to the same place. Thus a detdom designated for relatively unscarred youths might also contain a sizable complement of teenage delinquents for whom no other institution could be found. In similar fashion, authorities lacking more suitable options deposited emotionally disturbed and retarded wards in “normal” detdoma and even in colonies for unrepentant veterans of the street.^[34]

Subtleties and confusion aside, most facilities bore the general characteristics and often the title of a detdom.^[35] According to figures published in 1926 that arranged children’s institutions into several categories—including three labeled detdom, agricultural colony, and labor commune—detdoma accounted for nearly 90 percent of the total.^[36] The vast majority of these establishments, whatever their name, were administered by Narkompros. Other agencies (including the Children’s Commission, the Central Commission for the Assistance of Children, the OGPU, and the commissariats of health and transportation) did operate their own detdoma, colonies, and clinics. But Narkompros’s share of institutionalized street children, estimated by one account to exceed 90 percent, dwarfed the rest.^[37]

The mission desired for detdoma, namely education and upbringing (as opposed, say, to alms, quarantine, or punishment), explains Narkompros’s dominant role. From the beginning, Lunacharskii’s commissariat strained to provide all residents an opportunity to attend school—though not often, as it turned out, inside detdoma. Fewer than 20 percent of the Russian Republic’s detdoma contained primary schools in the spring of 1924, and fewer than 10 percent offered advanced instruction.^[38] Generally, detdoma did not possess the resources and staff to furnish more than rudimentary education, which prompted Narkompros to order that most instruction take place in regular schools outside institutions. However numerous the shortcomings of general public schools, they seemed better able than detdoma to conduct the training desired by Moscow, and they also represented to reformers a means of integrating detdoma into the surrounding society.

But the absence of classroom activities at a detdom did not guarantee youths an education elsewhere. Inadequate resources that precluded instruction inside facilities also reduced the accessibility of classes “beyond the walls.” Numerous accounts described children unable to walk to school during cold weather (a substantial portion of the academic year in much of the country) because they lacked coats and other outdoor attire. Although statistics listed most detdom inhabitants as attending school, a Narkompros report for 1923/24 added that a “majority” missed many lessons for want of shoes and warm clothing.^[39] An overall assessment of the schooling provided is colored by the direction in which one gazes. Much improvement stood out compared to the desperate conditions of 1921–1922, when the struggle for survival all but eclipsed education. Who could doubt that a larger percentage of institutionalized juveniles received instruction in the second half of the decade? Still, turning to face the future, it was clear as well that a long interval remained before most teenagers who walked out the doors of detdoma for the last time would carry with them a secondary or even primary education.^[40]

From the first years after the Revolution, and as reformers emphasized again in the middle of the decade, detdoma were expected to provide an upbringing much broader than instruction in traditional classroom subjects. Reading, writing, and arithmetic represented a small part of the process and could not by themselves insure employment. To survive—and contribute to the construction of socialism—adolescents required vocational preparation. Most detdoma (except those whose charges received training in factories and other enterprises outside the home institution) were urged year after year to open workshops, and many scrambled to comply. According to a study of approximately 1,300 workshops in the Russian Republic’s detdoma in 1926/27, the trades most commonly taught in these settings (roughly 300 of each) were carpentry, leatherworking, and sewing. Close to 100 shops engaged in metalworking, and a similar number bound books. A variety of other handicrafts, such as basket making, were also represented, and some detdoma maintained smithies.^[41] While training remained the workshops’ primary purpose, some of the healthier operations also acted as businesses and accepted orders from state agencies and the surrounding population. Such transactions helped motivate the young craftsmen (who were allowed here and there to keep a small portion of their shops’ earnings), and they also brought in revenue for the detdoma.^[42]

Most workshops, however, appear to have sold little if anything to customers outside the institutions. In some cases the reason boiled down to competition from factories and artisans, or the failure of local Narkompros offices to purchase goods produced by their detdoma.^[43] More often, the impediments were internal. Shortages of equipment, instructors, and raw materials, along with poor discipline and low morale, resulted in products of distressing quality or no output at all.^[44] Furthermore, detdoma could not afford to provide proper labor training for everyone and thus frequently limited instruction to adolescents closest to discharge. While the percentage of residents with access to training in workshops increased from year to year, the figure amounted to only about 40–50 percent for teenagers as late as 1926/27, and no more than half that for children of all ages.^[45] Even toward the end of the decade, then, workshops did not serve as a means of rehabilitation for many who entered institutions.

Facilities for homeless youths were also expected to introduce their wards to agricultural labor. Colonies and communes in particular, while not shunning workshops, devoted large portions of their resources to farming, as did rural detdoma. Even some of their urban counterparts sent children to work on state farms during the summer.^[46] Each year, the agricultural season’s opening moved such institutions to abridge or eliminate activity in schools and workshops in order to focus effort on the fields.^[47] The scope of their projects ranged from little more than a kitchen garden to well over one hundred acres of crops and orchards. Successful undertakings also acquired dozens of pigs, horses, cows, and, in a few cases, a tractor and steam-powered mill.^[48]

Some rural institutions so flourished that they could boast herds of pedigreed livestock and harvests surpassing yields obtained by neighboring peasants—a situation that occasionally stirred the latter to adopt new agricultural and animal husbandry practices. A bountiful harvest also left facilities less dependent on government agencies and permitted dietary improvements, no small matter in an institution’s well-being.^[49] In general, though, the work of agricultural detdoma, colonies, and labor communes remains difficult to evaluate. Almost by definition, they lay off the beaten track, frustrating a comparison of them with individual success stories publicized in some districts. A survey of detdoma in the Northern Caucasus region concluded that labor training (in workshops and fields) functioned poorly in many facilities but proceeded effectively in others, “especially in detdoma of an agricultural type.” Less encouragingly, a second study asserted that agricultural work in a “majority” of Soviet children’s institutions suffered from deficits of equipment, seeds, and funds for hired assistance with heavy tasks. In a similar vein, Narkompros estimated that detdoma utilized no more than 40 percent of their land in 1923/24 owing to such shortages.^[50] The success of their agricultural endeavors was far from universal, in other words, but precisely how far eludes specification.

Schools, workshops, and agriculture did not exhaust the means of rehabilitation. Detdoma were also instructed, as previously observed, to occupy youths’ leisure hours with a variety of clubs and circles.^[51] Here boys and girls could work productively with others, expand their knowledge, and acquire a social and political outlook congenial to the Party. The groups, ideally several in each institution, featured activities and hobbies as diverse as sports, military drill, photography, model airplanes, singing, and drawing.^[52] Most detdoma claimed the existence of at least a few circles by the second half of the decade, though questions surfaced regarding their vigor. Observers pointed out that personnel often formed clubs on paper in order to improve an institution’s appearance in their superiors’ eyes, but with little concern that the ventures thrive.^[53] There were exceptions to this rule, however, and considerable evidence reveals energetic activity at scattered institutions. Some, for example, maintained libraries offering thousands of volumes and several current periodicals. These collections, and those of more modest dimensions elsewhere, attracted literary circles whose members (children and staff) read stories aloud, discussed works, and occasionally took up pens themselves.^[54]

Drama circles, too, burst into view, though the young thespians’ volatile nature and the rowdy audiences they sometimes faced lent additional meaning to the label “drama.” Generally, a group worked under an adult’s direction and staged anything from frothy, raucous pieces to classics from previous centuries. Productions with political subjects (revolutionary themes, the Civil War, or the menace of religion, for instance) also figured prominently in repertoires. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk, youths prepared a play based on Lidiia Seifullina’s story “Lawbreakers,” an account of street children’s lives. This amounted to the cast playing themselves, which yielded a most convincing performance, a spectator recorded, except when the actors forgot their lines. At some institutions the productions developed such an appeal that they drew audiences from beyond the facilities’ walls, especially in the countryside, where fewer alternative forms of entertainment existed.^[55]

In Moscow, the absence of girls in Labor Commune No. 8 complicated rehearsals of a play on the Paris Commune. Evidently, none of the boys would consider a female part, and thus an invitation went out to a local Pioneer detachment. The Pioneers responded with a girl named Budkova, who filled in effectively and earned the cast’s respect—so much so that cursing diminished in her presence. Later, when the drama circle embarked on a play about a fascist plot uncovered by Pioneers, the previous success with Budkova prompted the group to request that she bring a second girl to act in the new production. But unlike Budkova, the newcomer’s discomfort and affectation drew laughter with every entrance, and her acting did not improve with anger. Additional harassment awaited offstage, beyond the staff’s capacity to intervene. Soon the girl’s mother arrived to complain of nocturnal attention shown her daughter by commune members, and the beleaguered youth withdrew from the drama circle shortly thereafter. Her departure left open the second female role and gave rise to a new problem. Some of the older boys caroused with girls still on the street, and one of these adolescents dreamed of stationing his favorite inside the commune. Was an actress needed? He knew of a lass who might be available. Unfortunately for the young couple and others that would have followed, the circle’s adviser had divined the ambitions of the institution’s Lotharios and scrambled to prevent the transformation of her troupe into a conduit for paramours. A quick amendment of the group’s “charter” thwarted such levies of talent. In the end, the company supplemented its ranks with two more Pioneer girls, though only one managed to win the boys’ acceptance.^[56]

Many detdoma, colonies, and labor communes also issued their own wall newspapers (stennye gazety), which typically assumed the form of a thick paper scroll, often several yards long, on which articles and illustrations were pasted for display.^[57] Literary circles and other groups of children and staff assembled the papers with a frequency ranging from every few days to a handful of times per year for official holidays.^[58] Certain papers focused mainly on life in the home institution—day-to-day activities, problems, accomplishments—and contained numerous drawings, poems, and stories contributed by the youths themselves. Much of this material was lively and easy to read, no doubt more appealing to juveniles than the heavily political essays (often written by adults) that dominated other wall papers at some children’s facilities. Typical articles in the paper “Young Leninist,” prepared at a detdom in Maikop, groaned under such titles as “The Red Army,” “Why There Is No Soviet Power in America,” “We Set Up a Bond with the Peasants,” and “Our Participation in Elections to the Rural Soviet.” The contents, an investigator concluded, were too dry and required the spice of more humorous, buoyant selections.^[59]

While literary circles, drama clubs, and wall newspapers did not shun themes from the world of contemporary politics, the most concentrated exposure usually occurred in another setting, the “political circle.” These bodies organized an institution’s most “conscious” residents to discuss articles in Pravda and other papers, conduct ceremonies in honor of special events and people (the October Revolution, May 1, Lenin, and local revolutionary heroes, for example), and perhaps compose their own wall newspapers.^[60] Frequently, participants belonged to the Komsomol (or, in the case of the youngest, the Pioneers), sometimes in such numbers that a Komsomol cell assumed a political circle’s place.^[61] According to published figures, as many as three-fourths of the children in detdoma wore the Pioneers’ red neckerchief, and approximately 60 percent of the adolescents joined the Komsomol.^[62] Behind these impressive totals, however, lay a somewhat different reality. As with circles and clubs, the existence of a Komsomol cell on paper did not guarantee that it met regularly or kindled any fervor. Some groups plainly did; others clearly did not. In most cases a cell’s vitality is obscure.^[63]

Narkompros’s array of rehabilitation measures culminated in a sense with the policies of “self-service” and “self-government.”^[64] Spurred on by reformers in the middle of the decade, facilities often adopted the policies’ trappings. Youths attended general meetings along with the staff to assess performance and approve future courses of action. They elected representatives to various committees, councils, and brigades to oversee daily work.^[65] In numerous institutions they assumed more responsibility for cleanliness and order: washing floors, sweeping the grounds, tending animals, helping to prepare food, serving meals, guarding storerooms and kitchen gardens, mending clothes, and collecting firewood, to list jobs commonly mentioned.^[66] A few establishments reportedly went far beyond increasing juveniles’ involvement in routine chores. Young voices were portrayed as decisive in resolving what to plant and whether to take on more animals at the Perm’ labor colony, and they allegedly dominated general meetings at a detdom in Tobol’sk. In some facilities, children accused of infractions were tried and sentenced by panels of their peers. More surprising, sources occasionally described special meetings called by youths to judge staff members accused of misdeeds (such as striking a child). As the proceedings unfolded, teachers and even a director humbly asked forgiveness or sought in shame to resign.^[67]

Whatever the reliability of these firsthand accounts, one can scarcely imagine similar assemblies in the vast majority of institutions. Observers more often described “self-service” and “self-government” as measures implemented to enhance discipline and control rather than bestow greater independence. Reports sent to superiors might stress the adoption of “self-government,” but the actual consequences likely amounted to a more effective harnessing of children for mundane duties. While this sometimes trimmed reliance on hired help (cooks, cleaning ladies, and so forth), the consequent reduction of expenses did not rank high on the list of benefits heralded by advocates of “self-government.” Far from developing a positive attitude toward work, some argued, piling domestic tasks on youths (without additional measures to win their enthusiasm) encouraged them to view labor as a burden or even a punishment.^[68]

At the same time that Narkompros promoted the policy of “self-government,” it was “administering” some detdoma, colonies, and communes in which children already ran their own lives in a different fashion. They smashed windows, obstructed meetings, and crawled over buildings and grounds at will. Ignoring or intimidating their teachers, they roamed streets and markets during the day and cavorted with juveniles yet at large.^[69] D. Sergeev, the boy discovered hiding behind a dresser after breaking into a dwelling, had previously spent several years in a detdom. He passed a good deal of this time in the bazaar, absorbing lessons on theft and striking up an acquaintance with youths on the street. Evenings commonly saw him slip out to spend the night playing cards in a shed with his friends.^[70] Problems such as theft, widespread at the beginning of the decade, succumbed only slowly as residents persisted in spiriting away sheets, blankets, clothes, food, and anything else that could be sold in adjacent markets. Rarely did cohabitants reveal thieves’ identities, for the “law” of the street maintained its sway tenaciously.^[71] Here and there, as before, seasoned adolescents greeted newcomers with beatings and tormented the defenseless, especially girls and young boys. Rival groups of occupants continued to mar institutions on occasion, transforming them into arenas of gang warfare.^[72] Certainly, improvement over the years left fewer detdoma out of control by the mid-1920s. But many still suffered to one degree or another from the foregoing afflictions.

Narkompros had hoped that detdoma would be able to develop cordial relations with the surrounding population in order to ease the introduction of former waifs into society. Institutions could (and did) make encouraging progress by inviting neighbors to attend plays and festivals and by opening their schools, workshops, and reading rooms to those living nearby. Some facilities provided agricultural assistance (even electrical power in one instance) to local peasants and took part in election campaigns for rural soviets. Children also participated now and then in various civic ceremonies, notably May Day, and in municipal projects (helping to clean up a park, for example, and move a library).^[73]

But incidents common in earlier years (such as thefts by detdom residents from neighboring apartments) did not diminish rapidly enough to win applause from much of the population.^[74] Reports arrived from numerous cities attributing acts of hooliganism to aggressors from institutions. Here they attacked schoolchildren, seizing their books and caps; there they loitered menacingly around stores and movie theaters, looking for opportunities to make off with possessions briefly unattended. A group of boys ranging daily through a Siberian town amused themselves from time to time by pelting a statue of Lenin with stones.^[75] In Rostov-on-the-Don, 14 percent of the delinquents processed by the Juvenile Affairs Commission in 1924 were already living in detdoma, and the figure climbed to 16 percent the next year.^[76] However benign the conduct of many other “state children,” boarding institutions established for them gained little popular favor as the years passed.

While detdoma contained fewer youths in the middle of the decade than in 1921–1922, a larger percentage of this dwindling number had spent years on the street and in relief institutions. The famine victims who had earlier flooded detdoma included accomplished thieves, but these crowds were more often harmless—new to their condition and crushed by hunger—than the less abundant street children of subsequent years.^[77] Novices continued to appear among the latter, of course, but the passage of time left an ever more incorrigible residue of juveniles confronting Narkompros. Steeped in the ways of the underworld and scornfully familiar with receivers and detdoma, they resisted the government’s efforts to reclaim them. Schools, workshops, and circles ran a poor second, in their view, to gambling, tobacco, alcohol, and cocaine. Indeed, a desire to obtain money for such pastimes frequently lay behind the youths’ thefts from detdoma and other facilities.^[78] Along with gambling and narcotics, they brought with them sexual experience, which forced some educators to contend with the rape of younger boys, with girls who worked as prostitutes, and even with abortions on the premises.^[79]

Institutions that had managed to conceive reasonably effective programs found them disrupted temporarily by the arrival of these veterans. Thefts increased, discipline waned, and teachers despaired. Time and again, like Sisyphus, they saw hard-won progress threatened as facilities approached for a time the troubled condition that had marked their inception. Authorities responsible for apprehending urchins often sent them to any institution at hand, regardless of suitability. Thus a detdom for comparatively manageable youths might receive a truculent group completely unfit for activities devised by the staff. Perhaps this was unavoidable, given the shortage of detdoma, colonies, and labor communes; but the immediate result left instructors anything but poised to boast of their wards’ rehabilitation.^[80]

Leaders of street gangs represented a special challenge. In facilities where they retained (or rebuilt) a band of cohorts, they could undermine a staff’s authority. Other children, fearing reprisals from the gang, dared not ignore the leader’s will. If he told them to shun the classroom, perform his own chores, or turn over the best food, they did not have to think twice about obeying. Dominant figures of this sort (perhaps several at a single institution) sometimes ordered younger lads to slip out and steal money or treats.^[81] At a colony near Khar’kov, Anton Makarenko encountered the following situation:

They [the older boys] call the little ones their “pups.” Each of them has several “pups.” In the morning they say to them—“go where you like, but bring me this or that in the evening.” Some of them steal—in trains or at the market, but most of them don’t know how to steal, they just beg. They stand in the street, at the bridge, and in Ryzhov. They say they get two or three rubles a day. Churilo’s “pups” are the best—they bring in as much as five rubles. And they have their norms—three-quarters to the boss, one-quarter to the “pups.”^[82]

Where leaders flourished, attempts to implement “self-service” and “self-government” commonly fell under their control and enabled them to exploit others more efficiently. Thus entrenched, they could be neutralized only by deft maneuvering on the part of the staff.^[83] Some administrators preferred to wash their hands quickly of troublemakers through a variety of artifices: by engineering their transfer, conveying them to the courts, or simply discharging them back to the street.^[84]

Directors often strove to assert control through stern discipline—sometimes executed by monitors in rooms and guards outside buildings—even demanding absolute silence during meals, lessons, and activities. At least a few institutions (among them Makarenko’s) assumed features of military schools, with uniforms, banners, and strict marching drills.^[85] Despite objections from Narkompros officials, especially those opposed to the concept of “moral defectiveness,” corporal punishment endured. This included not only beatings but such practices as forcing children to remain standing for long periods, driving them out into the cold clad only in shirts, and ordering them to wash their bodies with snow. At a detdom in Odessa, iodine smeared on a boy’s tongue served as the penalty for a rude comment. The staff punished two other youths by sewing their underwear together, turning them into so-called Siamese twins.^[86]

Institutions frequently maintained an “isolator” (kartser), a room in which disruptive youths could be held for a few hours or even days. Those in less drastic disfavor might be confined to the buildings in which they lived. In the town of Nikolaev, children guilty of infractions in a detdom were prohibited for a time from leaving to attend school—a restriction usually enforced by removal of an offender’s outer clothing. One girl had been barred from school in this fashion for nearly a year. Administrators also employed as punishment the assignment of extra chores or particularly unpleasant duties, such as cleaning latrines. At a detdom in Barnaul, several residents were sent to work on a state farm as a penalty for their misdeeds.^[87] Some facilities for “difficult” juveniles divided occupants into categories, with different rules applied to each. The least desirable status belonged to newcomers and others deemed especially unruly. Rarely allowed out of the buildings, they were often kept in their underwear or housed behind bars to prevent escape. Those in more advanced categories, thought to have shown progress toward rehabilitation, received such privileges as greater freedom of movement, better food and clothing, and permission to smoke.^[88]

Despite all precautions, however, children continued to flee. At some poorly administered facilities they received so little attention that many vanished without ever being registered. Even strict-regime establishments failed to hold the most determined spirits.^[89] Each year at the Moscow Labor Home, for instance, spring’s advent germinated a flurry of escape attempts that occasionally succeeded, despite the institution’s barred windows and armed guards. The most popular method required a stolen knife blade or similar object to rub on a rock until the metal developed the teeth of a primitive hacksaw. On the chosen night, with other youths deployed to warn of approaching guards or teachers, the tool’s creator severed a window bar and waited. When the guard outside occupied himself in another sector of the yard, out the window flew a “rope” made from torn sheets and towels down which the fugitive slid in hopes of making his way undetected to a low point in the wall.^[90] Few detdoma presented such a challenge. Over a period of years, many children fled up to ten times from sundry institutions, and some compiled dozens of escapes.^[91] At a number of facilities for delinquents, close to half the youths ran away in 1923/24. While the rush for the road gradually diminished thereafter, escapees still accounted for a third of all departures from these sites in 1927. At “normal” detdoma, Lunacharskii wrote in 1928, fewer than 2 percent of the inhabitants now disappeared—a worthy achievement for Narkompros—though the total sometimes exceeded 10 percent at receivers and institutions for “difficult” juveniles.^[92]

Motives for escape abound in the preceding pages. Dilapidated or crowded buildings, inadequate supplies, and harsh personnel all inspired flight. So, too, did beatings and other abuse received from stronger youths. Even gambling setbacks lay behind some exits, as losers disappeared to evade debts or obtain funds to pay them.^[93] The most resolute young fugitives abandoned facilities because they felt stifled by the structured life. Long accustomed to rough freedom and mores remote from those preached by Narkompros, their restlessness seemed beyond the reach of detdoma.^[94] Chainik, after his removal from the basement of the Alexander Station, entered a detdom and became a model resident. He studied diligently, and his art was soon displayed as evidence of the achievements possible in work with wayward adolescents. But time did not reinforce this progress. Chainik’s inclination for travel and adventure resisted the institution’s routine, which grew ever more monotonous for the boy. He ran away, returned, and fled again.^[95]

Some transient residents chose to enter institutions temporarily, just to obtain food, clothing, and perhaps shelter for the winter. With no intention of staying long, they proved troublesome for teachers—who may thus have shared the boys’ sense of release when spring’s warmth called them back to the street.^[96] Youths could avoid even the modest challenge of escape if they convinced staff members to send them “home,” a technique mastered by one Grisha M——ov. After his father’s death, his mother placed her son in a children’s shelter in the town of Sudogda (Vladimir province), where Grisha’s misbehavior began a series of transfers to institutions around Vladimir’s environs. These steps finally reached a colony in which severe discipline sent Grisha fleeing to board a train for Moscow. Over the next month he wandered the capital’s markets and stations amid a group of boys, supporting himself with thefts from street vendors and with begging receipts generated by acrobatics and lewd songs. When this life grew tiresome, he presented himself at Moscow’s Narkompros office, whose staff decided to return him to Vladimir. Grisha had no intention of rejoining his mother—who “was always yapping at us,” he maintained later, “and now she’s probably glad that she doesn’t know where I am”—and hopped onto another train after arriving in Vladimir. His travels eventually brought him back to the thoroughfares of Moscow and later the Pokrovskii receiver, where he requested passage “home” to Vladimir. The receiver’s personnel obliged with clothes, shoes, and food for the journey, and off he went to initiate another cycle. Time and again the emaciated, lice-covered boy appeared at the “Pokrovka” to lounge in the receiver before another trip. Grisha claimed to have set out for Vladimir ten times—clothed, washed, and fed—and boasted with a smile of his ability to deceive administrators of children’s institutions.^[97]

As noted earlier, the pressure placed by detdoma on local budgets prompted provincial authorities, in defiance of orders from Moscow, to reduce sharply the ranks of detdoma after 1922 and to limit supplies allocated to those that survived.^[98] Consequently, conditions at institutions improved less rapidly than the declining number of waifs might otherwise have permitted. Homeless juveniles continued to exceed the much-reduced capacity of the nation’s network of detdoma in the middle of the decade, as confirmed by reports from around the country. Though congestion did not approach that of the famine period, over 40 percent of residents slept two or three to a bed, and inadequate resources long hindered elimination of other problems endemic in 1921–1922.^[99] Years later, those in some establishments still greeted winter shivering in frosty rooms, barefoot and without blankets. Poor sanitation and shortages of clothing remained, as did complaints from detdoma forced to feed each child on five rubles (or less) per month.^[100] A large majority of facilities entered the second half of the decade without medical personnel and with no clinics or rooms in which to quarantine the sick.^[101] Lists of diseases encountered by investigations seemed to contain every conceivable childhood ailment as well as afflictions normally restricted to adults. A summary includes malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis, anemia, syphilis, gonorrhea, trachoma, and other eye, skin, tooth, and gum infections.^[102] In the Northern Caucasus, a survey of 130 detdoma detected such illnesses among 45 percent of the occupants, while another investigation of several thousand youths housed in the detdoma of Saratov, Kazan’, Simferopol’, Verkhnedneprovsk, and Ekaterinoslav discovered 25 percent suffering from trachoma alone. In a few of the nation’s detdoma fully 85–100 percent of the children had tuberculosis.^[103]

Along with the inhabitants, the buildings themselves were frequently in poor condition or of otherwise dubious suitability. Many required urgent repairs, and only a few—about 13 percent in the middle of the decade—had been designed originally as boarding institutions for juveniles. Instead, approximately 8 percent of detdoma turned up in monastery buildings; another 9 percent on estates confiscated from nobles; 29 percent in stables, barns, and previously private quarters; and 41 percent in former schools, barracks, almshouses, infirmaries, libraries, clubs, rest homes, community buildings, and so on.^[104] Whatever the structure, it rarely shined, as detdoma did not command high priority when local authorities allocated quarters. Even institutions fortunate enough to be situated in stout, well-appointed rooms could lose them later. Officials in search of buildings risked little by drafting instructions to move orphanages, for Narkompros was not among the most powerful of government agencies. Authorities in the Northern Caucasus, uninhibited by the irony, transferred a detdom to an inferior site so that the original facility could serve as an incubator for chicks. In disregard of restrictions that Moscow placed on such transfers, moves took place (from cities out to rural locations more often than not) with great regularity in the second half of the decade. Occasionally, youths and staff ousted from a building had to live under the open sky for a time before another dwelling materialized. Even where a new home awaited, its decrepitude had sometimes reached the point of broken windows, collapsed ceilings, and frigid interiors.^[105]

Another chronic weakness of detdoma—stemming once again from the familiar lament of insufficient resources and the prickly disposition of many street children—centered on the quantity and quality of teachers and other personnel. A shortage of capable educators persisted, especially in the provinces and at facilities for delinquents, because work in conditions described above struck few as appealing.^[106] Turnover remained high, pay and training low. As late as 1926–1927, a Narkompros report lamented that a quarter of the teachers (pedagogicheskie rabotniki) in the Russian Republic’s detdoma possessed no more than a primary school education, and virtually all the rest had not gone beyond secondary school.^[107] The problems of rapid turnover and low motivation emerged vividly at a detdom in Kaluga province. A new director, Smirnova, was assigned in 1926 to replace a man who had scarcely bothered to visit the institution. Though Smirnova sought at first to administer the facility, she soon discarded the mission in favor of a love affair and other personal pursuits, thereby triggering her removal in favor of a man named Sedov. He, in turn, seemed primarily concerned with living comfortably on his own property and devoted no attention to the detdom. On Sedov’s heels came a director, Gerasimov, who swiftly made clear his partiality for vodka. In this case, neglect of the children might have been preferable, for he dispatched youths to purchase liquor and invited them to share it with him. Following Gerasimov’s dismissal, a sick, irritable man assumed the director’s position—and soon died. Alas, concluded the account, his replacement represented no improvement over the others.^[108]

Dedicated teachers and administrators, undeterred by inadequate facilities and meager pay, still faced myriad disappointments in raising waifs.^[109] Adolescents who had embraced the criminal world’s practices over a period of several years were especially difficult, but others as well acquired characteristics that sorely tried instructors. Only combativeness or cunning, the street had taught, deterred abuse at the hands of others. Initially, and sometimes for months after entering a detdom, youths remained suspicious and mistrustful—qualities ingrained by even a comparatively short period of victimization in train stations and slums. Numerous reports described them as high-strung, irritable, belligerent, and coarse, ready with tears or rage at the slightest imagined provocation. All this, combined with an advanced disinclination to sit quietly, made them daunting pedagogic challenges.^[110]

Grisha M——ov, the boy who had repeatedly convinced personnel at the Pokrovskii receiver to send him “home,” grew so disruptive during his last stay that the staff routed him to a colony administered by the Commissariat of Health. Here, they hoped, he could be examined and then raised in a manner calculated to overcome his vagrant ways—a task that proved formidable. Grisha flouted the facility’s rules and revealed no interest in classroom activities, preferring to slip away and balance on window ledges, clamber up trees, or penetrate locked rooms. Teachers who upset him became targets of the searing epithets that had served as a means of attack and defense on the street. These qualities alone were sufficient to aggrieve the colony’s instructors, but Grisha undermined their efforts further with periodic escapes. The institution’s daily log noted: “He often runs away from the colony to the Smolensk Market [in Moscow], where evidently he steals, because in the evenings he returns with makhorka [coarse tobacco], candies, and seeds.” When told that further escapades would bring his transfer to another facility, he fled with a companion. A few days later they returned and secured readmittance with a promise to obey the establishment’s rules (though Grisha soon disdained them much as before). Then, amid inaccurate rumors of the colony’s imminent closure, he and a handful of other boys departed once again for the neighborhood of the Smolensk Market. This time, ten days elapsed before an emissary from the group appeared with a request to return. “Don’t think that we are mangy,” he insisted. “It is clean where we are. We cleared out a corner in a tumbledown building, piled up fresh straw, and do not let in outsiders. We always have someone on duty, just like in the colony. Each day we go to the river to bathe.” The staff detected grounds for hope in this declaration and granted the runaways’ desire. Shortly thereafter, Grisha allowed that he would remain in the colony “for the time being” (where he was well fed and not forced to do anything), while flatly refusing to stay “forever” or participate in classroom instruction. He did not rule out spending some time in a cobbler’s workshop but never retreated from his view of stealing as an honorable occupation. More than once he stated without hesitation (or bravado), “I am a thief and will remain so.”^[111]

Teachers entrusted with Aleksei P——iaev (the boy who had entered apartments to steal Primus stoves under the pretense of begging) also found their hands full. Aleksei appeared unmanageable, though his impetuosity occasionally turned engaging, as during a stay in the colony’s clinic for treatment of an eye ailment. The young patient refused to remain in bed and scurried around the ward looking for something to read, until a book on the meaning of dreams turned up. Armed with this manual, he pressed staff members to divulge their nighttime visions for interpretation and longed himself to dream of diamonds, said to foretell happiness and wealth. However, no sense of restraint moderated this youthful exuberance. While still in the clinic, Aleksei slipped outside to gather wood and then fired the stove so hot that emergency measures were required, much to his delight, to cool the metal. On returning to the colony’s general quarters, he displayed the same troubling qualities—irritability, aloofness, and suspicion—that were evident during his first days in the facility. He rejected the institution’s rules and refused to participate in schooling and other group activities. When rebuked, he fell into a rage, swore savagely, and threw nearby objects at instructors. They, in turn, despaired at his intransigence and decided to confront him with an ultimatum: either obey the colony’s rules (general decorum and attendance in classes and workshops) or leave to stray wherever he pleased. Aleksei did not require time to ponder the options and, cursing everyone encountered in parting, disappeared.^[112]

On top of everything else, men and women who worked with former street children doubtless wondered now and then if the adolescents would assault them. Attacks on staff members rarely erupted in most institutions, but at some, especially those for “difficult” adolescents, they arose with enough frequency to intimidate or even drive teachers away. Though abuse more often remained verbal—nevertheless unnerving and vulgar for those unaccustomed to the street’s argot—beatings and even attempted rapes did take place. So did other harassment, including batches of lice dumped on instructors.^[113] At a detdom in Leningrad, a boy threw a rock at a teacher and was sent to the director’s office. Roughly twenty-five of the youth’s comrades rose on his behalf and set to smashing the institution’s windows and thrashing personnel. This so terrorized the latter that many tendered notice.^[114] Much the same thing transpired regularly during the first few months of a clinic for juvenile drug users in Moscow. The entire staff had to be replaced several times following their mistreatment by young patients ever primed to sack the facility and escape.^[115]

A compendium of problems common to detdoma dominated newspaper articles about a colony in the village of Pushkino, fifteen miles outside Moscow. Altogether, the site contained approximately 1,500 children housed in nearly a hundred structures—by no means the worst of which was the Voroshilov detdom, a coeducational facility for some 45 youths, none older than fourteen. A correspondent expressed shock upon entering this dismal, cold building whose broken windows and general dilapidation represented in large measure the occupants’ own handiwork. Many of the inhabitants, dressed in rags and such accessories as torn boots of adult size worn over bare feet, appeared indistinguishable from children still on the street. Had their faces been smeared deliberately with mud and soot they could not have been dirtier. As dinnertime approached, the youths huddled together in a room lit by a single kerosene lamp to consume their “meager” fare with “black and revolting” utensils. Afterward, though it was only six o’clock, they went to bed because the home possessed no additional lamps to ward off the darkness. Underworld jargon caught the ear, and thefts occurred, as did other forms of abuse (including rape) suffered by the defenseless—among whom probably numbered several retarded children assigned inappropriately to the home. Girls in particular seemed “intimidated and absolutely cowed,” some even fearing to appear at meals. The visitor expressed no surprise that people living nearby regarded their young neighbors as vandals and hoodlums.

To be sure, the colony’s numerous schools and workshops suggested a model facility at first glance. “But look a little closer,” advised the journalist, “and you will see that all these things remain mere devices and produce no results at all.” The morning school, for instance, was well run but could accommodate only 380 pupils, while the carpentry shop fashioned its crude tools from stolen train rails. All told, fewer than 200 youths frequented the workshops, and even they generally departed “entirely untrained.” In short, worried the author, “we are in danger of producing an army of useless unemployed, thieves, hooligans and prostitutes.”^[116]

How should one assess the condition of detdoma during the middle years of the decade? A case for positive appraisal would stress, quite correctly, significant gains in care and training compared to the fetid chaos that reigned at the beginning of the 1920s. In subsequent years, no matter how many shortcomings observers identified in detdoma, they could hardly fail to recognize that the situation had improved.^[117] Disastrous institutions still caught the eye, but not on a scale to duplicate the crushing hopelessness of 1921–1922. Beyond noting a reduction of debacles, numerous accounts described institutions that had managed to establish schools, workshops, clubs, and features of “self-government” along lines sketched earlier in the chapter. Even authors who criticized many of the detdoma in one region or another commonly identified others as respectable. Nor were the achievements limited to facilities for docile, inexperienced street children. Some of the most heartening successes had been little more than seedy shelters for juvenile thieves before the arrival of devoted personnel.^[118]

At the same time, contemporaries concluded with near unanimity that most detdoma, especially those in the provinces, floundered in defects. The All-Russian Conference of Detdom Personnel heard a report in 1927 that over 80 percent of the children’s institutions in the Russian Republic were not organized or operating properly. Many directors and teachers misunderstood or disliked the changes advocated by Narkompros’s reformers and ignored these measures where possible.^[119] Furthermore, whatever one’s opinion of the reforms, the actual state of affairs in most detdoma hardly ignited enthusiasm. Excluding the best and the worst facilities, life inside appears to have been drab and monotonous. Children generally received rudimentary shelter and some food, but little in the way of clubs, excursions, well-supplied workshops, or stimulating instruction. No longer did they die by the thousand in the state’s hands, but the goal of a socialist upbringing had scarcely moved within reach. In the meantime they sat idly, according to one report, with the same bored expressions encountered among people waiting for hours in a train station.^[120]

Efforts to overcome the predicament by forming new types of facilities made little headway. Along with labor communes, the innovations included “children’s towns” (detskie gorodki), usually amalgamations of a few (sometimes many) detdoma, similar in configuration to the Pushkino colony. Here the goal was bigger institutions that could pool facilities, equipment, land, and personnel to provide a more fruitful upbringing. A few children’s towns took shape as early as 1918, but most lumbered into existence after the famine. They ranged in size from undertakings equivalent to an ample detdom (roughly a hundred inhabitants) to sprawling ventures totaling as many as several thousand youths.^[121] In some cases all lived in close proximity, while elsewhere they remained in what had been a series of independent detdoma, separated from one another by miles. As it turned out, the settlements generally suffered from the same problems as detdoma, though their unwieldy size and loose structure also saddled them with shortcomings all their own.^[122] Like labor communes, they never assumed a major role. Less than 5 percent of all institutionalized waifs lived in them during the mid-1920s, and Narkompros soon discouraged the opening of any more.^[123]

For better or for worse, then, detdoma continued to receive most youths removed from the street as the Soviet regime marked its first decade of existence. Authors who paused on this anniversary to assess the ten years of raising “state children” could rarely avoid misgivings. They might note certain accomplishments, but they emphasized enduring deficiencies more forcefully. An article in the journal of Narkompros’s Moscow division went so far as to claim impressive progress in all areas of education save one: facilities for homeless juveniles.^[124] Anxious questions thus persisted as detdoma began their second decade. Did their “graduates” find promising opportunities to begin independent lives upon departing the institutions? If so, how successfully did the young men and women navigate thereafter in a society that often regarded them warily? These concerns loomed large at the same time that Stalin and his supporters launched the Soviet Union on its own dramatic voyage—in the process, confronting detdoma with new opportunities and new obstacles.

Notes

The overwhelming majority of detdom residents came from the peasantry and the urban working class—hardly a surprise. According to data from the middle of the decade, slightly over 50 percent of the inhabitants of detdoma in the Russian Republic were classified as children of peasants; roughly 25 percent were the offspring of workers; over 5 percent were the progeny of artisans; and the rest came from other social backgrounds. In Ukraine, almost exactly half the youths in detdoma came from peasant families, with another third labeled children of workers. For the Belorussian Republic the shares were 37 and 40 percent, respectively. See Tizanov et al., Detskaia besprizornost’, 186–187; Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia 5: