Part 1

1. Children of the Street

Who has not seen them, sleeping in caldrons and garbage bins, traveling under train cars, singing songs and begging in every station?

. . . waifs in drab tatters who scurried hither and thither thieving and warming themselves at asphalt caldrons on the streets, without whom one could not picture the urban life of the twenties . . .

By the early 1920s, abandoned children crowded cities and towns across much of the new Soviet state. Their wretched appearance advertised misery already endured, and an untold number, weakened by hunger and disease, soon perished as anonymously as they had arrived. Survivors were left to confront a world in which sustenance issued from practices both alien and disagreeable, for little in their lives had prepared most to face the street alone. Their responses, shaped to some extent by age and other personal characteristics, reflected in a broader sense the imperatives of this harsh environment—a setting that must be explored to understand the conduct of besprizornye.

Waifs did not scatter evenly over the Soviet Union. Nor did they always congregate in areas with the greatest population densities. Efforts to account for clusters of them in various regions focused time and again on the following questions: Had a province recently experienced famine or some other misfortune? Did the territory contain a major rail junction or sit astride an important waterway? Was the district’s climate mild? If not, was refuge accessible? Just as important, did the area, if not a goal itself of vagrants and refugees, lie along a main route to popular destinations? The more closely a locale met such criteria, the more homeless children it drew.^[1]

Within these general limits, cities exerted a far more powerful attraction than did the countryside. During the famine, starving children poured from villages to the capitals of their provinces, and subsequent years did not reverse the current. To a homeless youth, the train stations, markets, crowded streets, and derelict buildings of a city offered a more promising field for begging and shelter than did a rural hamlet. For those seeking escape from the street, the concentration of government assistance in urban areas further enhanced their appeal. Others of more incorrigible bent also preferred cities, where amusements and thieving opportunities eclipsed anything the countryside could offer.^[2]

Cities situated at major railroad junctions or along important waterways often acquired throngs of abandoned offspring—not just from their own environs but from throughout the country—while towns well removed from these arteries generally tempted fewer.^[3] In Nizhnii Novgorod, for example, the number of young visitors began to increase each spring with the opening of navigation on the Volga and Oka rivers, and before long the waterfront quarters teemed with dirty, barefoot children. This homeless host continued to expand through the summer months, peaking at the time of the city’s famous fair, which summoned youths from all parts of the nation. During opening day alone in 1925, authorities apprehended over a hundred inside the fair’s boundaries in a largely futile effort to preserve the premises from depredation.^[4]

Numerous cities, not destinations themselves, nevertheless accumulated sizable populations of nomadic children during certain times of the year, owing to their location along well-traveled routes. Orenburg, for instance, found itself the first extended stop for many venturing in early summer from their winter quarters in Tashkent or Samarkand to resort towns of the Northern Caucasus or Crimea. Along the Volga, cities such as Samara did not maintain their large homeless populations solely with local victims of the famine. By linking the river with rail lines leading to and from Siberia and Central Asia, Samara collected year after year a considerable transient community of juveniles, especially during navigation season on the Volga.^[5]

No city, however, could match the potent attraction exerted by Moscow. “It would be difficult,” wrote secret police chief Feliks Dzerzhinskii, “to find in the entire republic a city or town from which there has not been a pilgrimage to Moscow of abandoned children. . . . [Moscow] has become the national refuge to which besprizornye stream from all ends of the country.” Only the most reclusive resident of the capital could fail to notice the bedraggled flocks in central squares, train stations, and markets—a multitude twenty thousand strong according to an estimate for the beginning of 1923. Leningrad, because of its location in the far northwest corner of the country, did not share Moscow’s magnetism.^[6] Asked why they journeyed to Moscow, youths often responded simply, “Moscow is the center,” “Here is the power,” “They say food is given out in Moscow.” Peasant children, traveling to the metropolis to obtain food through begging, stealing, or petty street trade, sometimes described the trip as “going to pasture.” Rumors and reports of better conditions in the center—more food or easier access to welfare institutions, for example—passed among homeless juveniles in all corners of the country, even prompting some to flee remote orphanages and set out for the capital.^[7] This allure produced such an influx that native Muscovites numbered no more than 10–20 percent of the city’s waifs in the middle of the decade, earning Moscow the informal title “All-Russian Receiver” of besprizornye.^[8]

In years following the famine, the Northern Caucasus region possibly contained more street children than any other section of the country, and its principal city, Rostov-on-the-Don, probably absorbed more than any site but Moscow. Many gathered in Rostov with much the same expectations that propelled others to the nation’s capital. Here, they thought, waited opportunities to acquire food, shelter, and perhaps admission to government boarding institutions. In one estimate the Northern Caucasus, with a mere thirteenth of the Russian Republic’s total population, accommodated fully a seventh of all abandoned youths in the republic midway through the decade.^[9] Only a third of these were indigenous. Early in the 1920s, most came as refugees from neighboring famine provinces of the Volga basin, but Rostov continued to woo others long after. The city’s relatively warm climate and location at the hub of a rail network—with tracks leading south to the Caucasus, north to Moscow, and west to the Crimea—insured for years a steady stream of new arrivals.^[10]

One day, on just such a line to the Crimea, a passenger noticed that the railroad bed was covered in sand along stretches near the sea. Well-scrubbed boys and girls, traveling on vacation, jumped out at a stop and plunged under the cars to gather seashells from the sand. No less abruptly they recoiled from the train as if stung, crying to their parents in fright, “Besprizornye! besprizornye!” They had discovered other young passengers ensconced in the undercarriage, as determined as anyone else on the train to reach the sunny resorts.^[11] Hospitable weather and the food it nurtured lured thousands of urchins to the Crimea and Black Sea coast, augmenting the ranks of native youths left adrift by the Civil War and, in southern Ukraine, famine. As word spread among homeless children elsewhere in the country, cities such as Krasnodar, Simferopol’, Sevastopol’, Feodosiia, Kerch’, and Odessa mustered large crowds. In particular, when pale citizens headed south in the summer to Black Sea sanatoriums, waifs followed close behind, hoping to secure a living during the resort season by begging or stealing directly from the crowds of vacationers or from the stores, markets, and restaurants they frequented.^[12]

Many other regions and cities also hosted considerable numbers of besprizornye. In Ukraine, Khar’kov deserves special mention, while along the Volga, in addition to Samara, cities such as Kazan’, Simbirsk, and Saratov retained sizable homeless populations well after the famine. The quest for food and shelter (or warm weather) even carried youths over the frontiers of European Russia. During the famine, they followed the rails to the Urals and often far beyond—to cities in Siberia (such as Omsk and Novosibirsk) and Central Asia (notably Tashkent and Samarkand). In the years thereafter, the prospect of accessible food and a mild climate continued to attract them to Central Asia—and through the Caucasus to Baku and Tiflis. They made these treks in surprising numbers, so large in fact that Tashkent’s population of abandoned juveniles reportedly ranked third among all Soviet cities in the middle of the decade.^[13]

A city’s complement of street children fluctuated considerably during the course of a year, even in the absence of such misfortunes as an epidemic or poor harvest that always produced a local proliferation of homeless minors. More than anything else, apart from famine and war, seasonal changes dictated their travel. As chilly nights heralded the approach of autumn, major cities found their streets sheltering larger numbers of youths. They crowded into train stations, abandoned buildings, and any crevice affording protection from the wind. Some had spent the warm season living on the outskirts of cities or deeper in the countryside, perhaps engaged by peasants for agricultural work.^[14] Others, typically the more experienced and adventurous, had departed in the spring or summer to journey around the country, often south to the resorts of the Northern Caucasus and Crimea. At the end of the season, beaches and mineral baths lost much of their clientele, prompting markets, restaurants, and hotels to close or scale back their activity. Because dormant resort towns could not support large numbers of young beggars and thieves, many left until the following summer. Some remained in the general area of the Black Sea’s mild temperatures, but more headed north again to major cities.^[15]

Veterans of the circuit often entered a city in the fall intending to gain admission to a children’s institution, live there through the winter, and then run away with the return of warm weather. Some repeated this pattern year after year, returning each winter to one city or another like migratory birds. These “seasonals” (sezonniki) effectively transformed certain orphanages into way stations providing food and shelter (but not rehabilitation) to juveniles waiting for the spring thaws to trigger their escape. On occasion, as winter approached, streetwise youths even committed intentionally clumsy crimes, planning to be apprehended and placed in institutions—from which departure in the spring, experience taught, would be a minor challenge.^[16]

Winter survival, then, required that street children avoid exposure to frigid weather in one of two ways. They could seek shelter, or they could attempt to outrun the approaching frost by traveling south to such havens as Odessa or even farther to Transcaucasia or Central Asia. Though the number journeying to remote ranges for the winter did not equal the total remaining in European Russia, southbound traffic of diminutive stowaways on the railroads did strike observers each autumn, as did the swollen numbers of tattered youths in cities as distant as Baku and Samarkand.^[17]

While most homeless juveniles settled in one area or another for at least a few months, some (approximately 10 percent, according to one estimate) traveled incessantly. Whether lodged aboard ships or clinging to trains, they roamed the length and breadth of the land. Astonishing odysseys took them across Siberia, Central Asia, and to every important municipality in European Russia. “They discuss Khar’kov, Moscow, Baku, and Sverdlovsk,” marveled an observer, “as if they were talking about the streets of a single large city.” One boy, hidden on a ship, even reached Marseille and thereafter several other cities in France, Belgium, and Germany before he was evacuated back to Russia along with former prisoners of war.^[18] These travels often amounted to a quest for more favorable living conditions, inspired by rumors of greener pastures down the line. But other youths remained on the move because they enjoyed it or at least felt restless staying long in any one location. Years after reentering society, some reported that, come spring, they still sensed the call of the road.^[19]

Such instincts guided Vasilii G———shev, a thirteen-year-old boy dispatched to a children’s colony at the beginning of 1923. Information gathered during the handling of his case portrayed a difficult life at home. His father, who worked for the postal service and then in a railroad telegraph office, drank heavily and beat the rest of the family. In 1915 he moved in with another woman, leaving his former wife and eight children with nothing but a modest monthly payment, which he cut off two years later. Vasilii’s mother, prematurely aged by her travail, worked as a messenger for wages insufficient to lift the family from poverty. At some point, probably the early 1920s, Vasilii began to disappear from home for periods of a few days. He would return hungry, dirty, and emaciated, refusing sullenly to disclose his itinerary. This pattern continued until he was sent to the colony for examination by personnel from the Commissariat of Health. His mother did not conceal her skepticism and asserted (with Vasilii’s affirmation) that he would not remain long in any institution. He seemed to have a passion for travel and yearned to journey as far as America. According to the colony’s log book, the slender boy with sparkling eyes did not adjust well to the facility’s regimen or the other youths. An entry for January 16, 1923, reads: “Vasilii does not get along with the other children; he fights with them and is always beaten. Even Vitia D———kov, who is always beaten when he fights others, manages to pummel Vasilii and celebrate a victory. Whether as a result of this abuse, as Vasilii claims, or because of his own insurmountable urge to roam, he has already tried to flee the colony three times.” Four days later he escaped. At the end of the month his mother arrived to declare that he had come home and would not be returning to the colony. When questioned later, he spoke with contempt of the institution’s residents, who he felt had surrendered their freedom for life in a “stone sack.” Before long his wanderings commenced again. At first the forays consumed no more than a week, but in the middle of April he departed for two months, apparently turning back only after failing to breach the Romanian border. Shortly thereafter he bolted once more, and his family concluded as the months passed that he had perished. Eventually, word arrived through one of Vasilii’s friends that he had reached the Siberian city of Chita, beyond Lake Baikal, and would not be returning to Moscow.^[20]

Official documents, journalists’ reports, and children’s autobiographical sketches portray rail journeys as routine among homeless youths.^[21] A handful traveled legally, using money they had stolen or begged to purchase tickets.^[22] But far more concealed themselves on board, in a wide variety of locations accessible to slight physiques. Coal bins, storage boxes, footsteps, bumpers, roofs, recesses inside the cars, rods underneath, and cavities deep among the pipes and moving parts of the engine all served as accommodations. At the station in Tashkent, Langston Hughes encountered an insouciant waif who indicated that his destination was Moscow. “ ‘Have you got your ticket?’ we asked. ‘Sure, ten of ’em,’ he said, and held up his hands,” revealing the fingers with which he intended to grasp his perch on the train.^[23]

Many factors—including body size, experience, weather, vigilance of conductors, and availability of spots not already claimed by other young stowaways—influenced the choice of “berths.” Each presented drawbacks that an experienced vagabond knew all too well. Clambering into coal bins was difficult, for instance, and, once inside, lack of oxygen posed a serious threat. Some children carried nails with which to claw air holes in the walls and thus avoid suffocation amid the coal dust.^[24] Nooks in the bowels of a steam engine were hot, grimy, and cramped—not to mention dangerous if located near moving parts. Mechanics tending engines gaped at the dexterity and hardiness of creatures, completely blackened by grease and dirt, who crawled out of the machinery like imps before their eyes.^[25] A boy who traveled to Khar’kov from the Kuban’ described just such a niche under the engine: “It was like a bathhouse there, but I didn’t climb out [at stops]. You can’t do this because you may return too late and find new passengers in your place. In Khar’kov I climbed out and everyone looked at me wondering whether I was a human or a devil. I ran around the station and people hurried out of my way.”^[26]

Those who chose to ride in one of the small storage compartments, or “dog’s box” (sobachii iashchik), underneath a car did not face coal dust, grease, or a boiler’s heat, but they often had to remain curled up in the tiny, dark chambers for long intervals—prepared to defend their quarters from challenges at stations by other would-be squatters, all the while hoping to escape the eye of railroad personnel. Izvestiia reported that, on occasion, conductors who noticed children in these boxes locked the covers and left the victims trapped inside for hours or even days. Farther underneath a car, axles and beams offered billets less cramped but more exposed to cold temperatures. They were also more precarious as the tracks whizzed by inches below, ending suddenly the lives of many a careless or clumsy traveler. Those who hid inside cars sidestepped these problems but risked discovery by conductors, who might administer a beating and hand them over to the police at the next station.^[27]

Hardships associated with the various toeholds aboard trains did not exhaust the list of a young vagrant’s concerns. Simply reaching the train (or ship) was itself often a challenge. Conductors and policemen kept a close eye on children loitering at stations and guarded the cars waiting to take on passengers. If faced with such obstacles, hopeful stowaways usually concealed themselves as close to the tracks as possible and waited for the sound of two bells, signaling the train’s imminent departure. At that moment (or even later, as the train lurched into motion and the conductors climbed into the cars), they darted across the tracks and slipped aboard. Some waited inside a station for the two bells to summon a crowd of passengers pushing toward the train. Inserting themselves into this human tide, they attempted to evade a policeman or conductor at the station door and then disappear into or under the cars.^[28]

Not all boarded successfully, as Theodore Dreiser noticed while on a ship docked at the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk. A girl discovered on the vessel and placed ashore tried repeatedly to dodge sailors and dart back up the gangplank.

But regularly one of the large, genial sailors is picking her up and carrying her a little way down the dock; shooing her off, as it were. But always as he releases her she eludes him and runs screaming toward the plank. And now the other sailor repeats the process. Only, like so much of all that one comes upon in Russia, it is all so casual. No real excitement in so far as any one else is concerned, passengers or sailors or officers all going their several ways. Some soldiers conversing indifferently on the dock. Stevedores taking up hay, crates of geese, boxes of canned goods. Altogether quite a brisk industrial scene. But here is the child, still screaming and kicking. And the sailors always heading her off or carrying her away again, her ragged little skirts far above her waist, her naked legs exposed to the cold. And one sailor carrying her far down the dock to a gate guarded by soldiers.^[29]

No one mourned the passing of summer more deeply than did abandoned children, and no one waited more impatiently for its return. The icebound months racked them so severely that people in Dnepropetrovsk dubbed the unseasonably warm weather of early December 1923 an “orphan’s winter.”^[30] Across most of the country, as the temperaturefell along with the leaves, a source of protection from the icy winds became a matter of survival. Indeed, whatever the season, virtually any location offering concealment and protection from the elements did not long escape attention. Youths slept under boats upturned on river banks, in forests on the edge of towns, under bridges, in discarded trunks and barrels, under or along fences, inside wooden columns set up for displaying posters, and in stalls vacated overnight in bazaars and markets.^[31] The entryways to apartment complexes (and sheds in the yards of these buildings) provided warmth and thus attracted many. Custodians often drove the waifs away, but only the most closely watched or securely locked structures did not acquire new complements of squatters.^[32] Public toilets and garbage bins also served as domiciles. An investigator in Odessa reported that one could walk the streets at night opening trash bins and find in most of them clusters of young lodgers sleeping on top of the litter. In parts of Moscow, during warm weather, there appeared to be something of a rule among them that no more than six could sleep in a single bin. “This is not a tram!” one lad proudly informed an inquirer, meaning that the youths did not wish to duplicate the crowding prevalent in public transportation.^[33] A few turned up in the most unlikely places—on board ships anchored overnight, for example, and even on the roof of a building in the Kremlin.^[34]

The search for shelter sent children burrowing into woodpiles, haystacks, reserves of coal at train stations, drainage pipes, mountains of industrial waste products, and even a cemetery’s burial vaults.^[35] Garbage dumps, in particular, served as refuge for considerable numbers. Here, social workers, newspaper correspondents, and others seeking homeless youths found them living like nests of insects in rotting waste amid an overpowering stench.^[36] Juveniles also fashioned shelters by tunneling directly into the earth. Their warrens ranged from the simple and temporary—a shallow dugout or a cavity scraped out under the edge of a sidewalk—to quite elaborate subterranean chambers. Hillocks, sides of ditches, and river banks engaged these excavators, who sometimes produced extensive networks of tunnels or caverns large enough to accommodate dozens, along with campfires and watchdogs. A group living in a cave near a rail depot in Tashkent even planned to run electrical wires from the station into their dwelling. (They had to abandon the scheme when one of their number, a boy claiming to possess the expertise required for the project, was taken into a reformatory.) Natural grottoes, too, in parks or in hills and cliffs on the outskirts of cities, harbored waifs and highlighted most vividly their animal-like existence.^[37]

Ruined or otherwise abandoned buildings, frequently in slums or on the fringes of town, beckoned irresistibly to the homeless. Virtually any unutilized structure, including cellars, old bathhouses, storage facilities, and buildings destroyed by fire, could provide at least a wisp of shelter—and to far more people than the casual eye imagined. In Odessa, large groups of children lived in the skeletons of buildings destroyed by French naval bombardment and the explosion of German ammunition dumps. The remnants of an edifice in the center of Dnepropetrovsk housed youths in such number that it was dubbed their “headquarters” for the city. Abandoned structures that remained comparatively intact sometimes drew so many new inhabitants (adults as well as juveniles) that investigators entering at night had difficulty proceeding without stepping on the dark shapes sprawled at every turn.^[38] A newspaper correspondent, exploring a large cement granary in the “Rostov slums,” encountered the following scene in 1925:

Snoring, moaning, and delirious babbling can be heard from all corners of the building. We strike a light and behold a scene recalling our train stations during the years of ruin and civil war. Human beings, shivering from the advancing predawn cold, lie along the walls and in the corners in “heaps,” pressing close to each other. . . . Disturbed by the light and our voices, they begin to stir, poking their heads out from under the rags that cover their bodies, and regarding their night visitors with fright.

Half an hour later, as the light of early dawn struggled through cracks in the building, they arose and set off “to fill the streets and bazaars” in their daily search for food.^[39]

Many cities retained ramshackle portions of walls and towers built in earlier centuries as fortifications or embellishments. Often constructed by filling a stone or brick shell with a softer core of dirt and debris, these walls developed large cavities as time erased their original function. But if municipalities no longer valued the protection they afforded, street children had a different view. Just east of Moscow’s Kremlin, stretches of the kitaigorod wall housed a hundred or more at a time, prompting some Muscovites to dub it “the dormitory.” The wall’s inhabitants dragged in junk to serve as furniture, cooked food and warmed themselves over campfires, and, in the case of one group, deployed a watchdog to warn of outsiders approaching. Youths also slept in old structures such as the famous tower at Moscow’s Sukharevskii Market and the watchtower at the Red Gates. Over a period of a few months in 1922/23, the police removed several hundred from the second tower alone, netting up to forty in a night.^[40]

As Soviet cities recovered in the 1920s from the turmoil of the previous decade, repair and construction projects dotted the urban landscape. Pedestrians passing these sites after the working day often noticed strange noises emanating from large tanks used to heat asphalt or tar. If curiosity prompted closer investigation, they discovered children prattling inside. The caldrons, heated during the day, did not surrender their warmth until long after the workers departed, thus attracting those seeking shelter for the night. In Moscow, to cite one instance, city officials decided to remove streetcar rails from the Arbat and repave the thoroughfare with asphalt. During the project, immense boilers for the asphalt stood on each block and soon acquired flocks of urchins. “There were dozens and scores of them there,” recalled a resident of the street, “tattered, half-famished, dirty, all of them sneaking about these big warm boilers like little animals.”^[41] Residue in caldrons, which left inhabitants black and sticky, seemed a small discomfort to endure in return for sanctuary. Even as the night wore on and the vats cooled, they continued to offer some protection from the wind (and the rain or snow, if tenants devised a means to cover them). The tanks could generally accommodate half a dozen occupants, though the bottom of the caldron—the choicest spot in winter because it retained heat longest—could typically hold no more than three or four. In some cases, fights determined the distribution of places, with losers relegated to the vessel’s sides. Once in their vats, youths remained vulnerable to eviction by watchmen and the police—though one group managed to secure a watchman’s indifference by supplying him with stolen food.^[42] In any case, such hazards were routine on the street and did not diminish significantly the caldrons’ appeal.

Almost any other source of heat also enticed waifs. Institutional garbage incinerators, for example, remained warm long after their fires had died, and children often tried to slip onto the premises and crawl into the openings of furnaces. One could sometimes see their rag-covered legs protruding from the brick burrows where they lay asleep. Electric-power generators, too, resembled oases to shivering figures who spared no effort to approach the buildings. Even if unable to secure places near boilers and steam pipes, they might find warmth huddled next to reservoirs of hot water discharged by the plants.^[43] In the absence of shelter and heat produced by other sources, youths sometimes resorted to sleeping on the ashes of their own campfires after lighting second fires alongside. Others, frequently the weakest or most inexperienced and thus the most helpless and exposed, tore down posters tacked up around every city and used them as blankets.^[44] Even those able to secure a niche in a train station or derelict building did not entirely escape the frigid winter temperatures. They often slept—like their less fortunate brethren bunched on the sidewalk under posters—pressed tightly together, resembling a nest of shivering mice. In some cases, these grimy piles clutched live dogs for additional warmth.^[45]

Street children who gained a few coins by the end of the day might opt, especially in the winter, to spend the night in a flophouse (nochlezhka). Moscow’s Ermakovskii nochlezhnyi dom (located near the Riazan’ Station and dubbed the Ermakovka) was the best known, but the capital contained several, as did other major cities. A relatively modest fee, typically ten to twenty kopecks, secured entry and thus a night’s protection from the elements. Adults—thieves, prostitutes, drunks, drifters, the unemployed, and other people down on their luck (including a sixty-two-year-old Princess Viazemskaia, reduced to begging in Leningrad)—made up most of the clientele, but youths were admitted too, as long as they could pay.^[46]

Each day unruly crowds formed outside the institutions, waiting noisily for the doors to open in the late afternoon or early evening. If the “line” contained more people than could possibly be admitted, the pushing, cursing, and pleading grew energetic. Policemen helped restrain the crowds at some locations, but in their absence, fights broke out periodically. At the Ermakovka one afternoon, over twenty men reportedly raped a drunken woman without intervention by the building’s administration. People lacking enough money for admission sometimes tried to beg a few kopecks from others in line or sold pitiful possessions to entrepreneurs on hand for such opportunities. More brazen individuals simply seized money from the docile and weak who waited along with them to purchase admission tickets.^[47]

Some flophouses accepted only adult men or only women and juveniles, but others designated sections for a variety of people. Those who could afford to pay more than the regular entry fee had the option in certain institutions of sleeping in comparatively clean portions of the building. In any case, when the doors opened, children entered along with unsavory company. Thieves tutored them in the underworld’s values and diversions (including cocaine, hashish, and other drugs) and drew them into their gangs. The Ermakovka contained six floors, and as people purchased their tickets, the cashier sized them up and assigned them to one or another of the levels. Women went to the second floor (food was sold on the first), while men able to pay a bit more—and judged by the cashier not to be criminals or unacceptably rank—were directed to one of the three upper floors. Urchins found themselves steered to the third floor, reserved for the most unpalatable lodgers.^[48]

Flophouses commonly sold tickets in numbers far exceeding their legal capacities. An investigation of two institutions in Khar’kov, for instance, found that in 1925 approximately one thousand people occupied space suitable for no more than two hundred. Reports from many cities described rooms so crowded that only the most fortunate lay on bare plank beds. Many slept side by side on the floor—under the beds, in the halls and stairways, and on windowsills.^[49] As one would expect, the level of sanitation left much to be desired. In some facilities people relieved themselves wherever they pleased, but even in the absence of this practice, putrid air remained the rule. Marauding armies of bedbugs, typically reinforced by lice and other vermin, held sway throughout the buildings, and numerous infectious ailments flourished. As the years passed, establishments began to set aside rooms for disinfecting clothing, which improved conditions somewhat. These efforts reportedly purged so many lice from garments in Leningrad’s flophouses that the creatures had to be removed from the floor with scoops and shovels. In fact, lice infested some of this clothing so thoroughly that officials included samples of the apparel in an exhibition at the Pasteur Museum in Paris.^[50]

Unlike flophouses, which few abandoned children could regularly afford, train stations and their immediate environs sheltered more youths than any other area of comparable size in most cities. During the Volga famine, when people fled the stricken provinces in droves, juveniles traveled along the rails in such force that scores might crowd even a minor provincial station. In the years thereafter, while the number of waifs diminished, stations lured many who remained. Several of Moscow’s terminals, none more notorious than the Kursk Station, long bore reputations as their dens. Far to the east, in the Siberian city of Omsk, an investigation of the local station in February 1924 turned up fifty children ranging from eight to seventeen years of age. Repeatedly apprehended in the past and turned over to the police, many reappeared before long at the depot and set about supporting themselves through begging and thievery.^[51]

Railroad stations of ample size commonly housed a wide variety of youths. These included vagabonds who arrived in cities by train, stayed for a time, and then set off again. Newly homeless juveniles, too, fresh from the countryside and completely at sea in the urban environment, typically remained, at least initially, in or near the stations at which they arrived. Conspicuous in their peasant clothing and palpably intimidated by the stations’ noise, they made a painful impression on many observers. They also served as prey for more experienced street children, who beat newcomers and stripped them of their possessions. A lad who arrived at a station wearing relatively serviceable clothes likely found himself forced at knife point in a dark corner to surrender his garments or footwear—in return, perhaps, for foul lice-infested attire.^[52]

Many others as well, neither transients nor novices, spent much of their time at stations. The ever-changing crowds of travelers attracted youths intent on begging or such endeavors as shining shoes, carrying baggage, and selling water in the summer. The bolder or more desperate among them found stations rewarding areas in which to steal from passengers, vendors, or freight shipments. Terminals also sustained those, primarily girls, who had turned to prostitution, for the buildings furnished both customers and secluded nooks. Others went out into the city during the day to beg or steal, returning “home” most evenings to sleep in or around the station. Some clambered aboard local trains to solicit or rob the passengers, ending the day back at the depot to await the next morning’s tide of commuters.^[53]

Children sought refuge in even the most squalid or uncomfortable corners of stations. In Saratov, a census of abandoned juveniles conducted in 1924 found twenty-seven, from six to seventeen years of age, living in a derelict lavatory. Though emaciated and covered with filthy rags, they stubbornly refused to enter an orphanage.^[54] In Omsk, the departure of the last passenger train each evening left the terminal almost deserted. Officials must then have closed the building, for a crowd of youths departed to spend the night in a dilapidated empty barracks behind train cars on the siding. Adopting the station’s language, they referred to their quarters as “first class.” Those with venereal diseases were compelled by the others to sleep “second class” in the station’s latrine—a fetid series of outdoor pits covered by a few boards encrusted with excrement. Here they huddled, soaked by the rain and covered with sores, beseeching investigators for access to “first class.” One even complained that two boys in the barracks had gonorrhea but were not expelled because they stood watch and ran errands for the others.^[55]

Many stations, especially the larger ones in major cities, contained basement cavities and underground passages for heating pipes and other equipment. Offering a measure of security from outsiders as well as shelter from severe weather, these caverns enticed throngs. The maze under the station in Khar’kov, known locally as the catacombs, housed over a hundred youths as late as the second half of the decade. Eerie whistles from invisible children, signaling to their comrades the approach of strangers, greeted census takers (escorted by policemen) descending the dark spiral staircase into the catacombs at the end of 1926. Upon reaching the bottom and electing to push on, the officials negotiated long, narrow corridors lined with burning-hot steam pipes that produced a stifling atmosphere. When the passageway widened at last, they found themselves in a chamber packed with scores of juveniles.^[56]

Others lived above ground in the recesses of main terminal buildings. Here, of course, they were generally more visible and thus more likely to be driven out periodically by policemen and station officials. In this event, they often departed for a few hours, or all night, and then returned. Upon eviction from their train-station home in Khar’kov, two young girls—described as having the faces of children and the voices of old prostitutes—commonly spent the night in a public lavatory across the street but soon slipped back to the terminal. In Moscow, early in the decade, youths (along with adult criminals and tramps) moved from the Riazan’ Station when it closed at 2:00 A.M. to the Kursk Station, which opened at 4:00 A.M., where they lounged in the corridors and waiting rooms.^[57] Investigators choosing to search outside the main buildings could expect to find juveniles living in empty train cars, especially in derelict rolling stock on the fringes of rail yards. At Moscow’s Kursk Station alone, the 1926 census recorded 131 children so sheltered.^[58] Here and at other depots a single car might house an entire colony, as described in an article titled “How I Lived Free,” written for a newspaper issued by a children’s colony:

There were about 30 of us living on the railroad. In the summer we slept wherever we pleased, out in the open on the ground. Winter was a different matter. We did not go into the station building because another group of kids, hostile to us, lived there. If someone from our group appeared at the station, he was driven away immediately with kicks and blows. In turn, if we caught an outsider on our turf, he, too, got it hot. And so came the rainy days of a long autumn. We chose an empty train car with warm boarding and occupied it as our own fine dwelling, feeling ourselves the masters. We worked in the following manner: at daybreak we took sacks to the park where the steam engines were kept. We knew some mechanics there, and they gave us coal in return for cigarettes. Each of us got nearly a sack full of coal, which we carried away and sold. This was what the older boys did. The younger kids, whom we called “patsany,” had their own duties and work. One remained in the train car, swept it out, and kept it warm until evening. The rest went out after food. Into the station came the Minsk-Khar’kov train. Before the passengers had even climbed out of the cars, the “patsany” were scouring the train, looking for bread. On the tables they found pieces of fat, sausage, apples, and the like. We lived on this. It also happened on occasion that a passenger would leave in too great a hurry and forget to take along a bundle, suitcase, or basket. Ten minutes later he would run back to the car—too late. His possessions had long since disappeared. In the evening, after such a success, we enjoyed cocaine, cards, liquor, and all sorts of bread. When the watchmen came by, they were treated royally, given cigarettes, and good-bye! Only by morning did it grow quiet in the car as everyone fell asleep. That is how I lived free.^[59]

Case histories and autobiographical sketches of homeless youths indicate that many, after arriving at city stations, sooner or later shifted the focus of their activity to bazaars. Some discovered the markets rapidly and on their own; others were introduced to these bustling sites only after coming under the influence of those more experienced.^[60] In any case, whether or not their paths had previously taken them through train stations, numerous street children spent their days (and often nights) in and around markets. Moscow’s Zemlianyi Val—a large bazaar located in the relative vicinity of six stations—contained thousands of petty entrepreneurs and a sea of shoppers that beckoned temptingly to abandoned juveniles early in the decade. Of all the city’s markets, however, none matched the fame and notoriety of the Sukharevskii and the Khitrovskii. Known popularly as the Sukharevka and Khitrovka (or Sushka and Khiva in the jargon of the street), these bazaars drew so many waifs that a survey of the Sukharevka in 1925 counted 123 in a matter of two or three hours.^[61]

As sites containing large concentrations of food in accessible booths and stands—as well as numerous customers carrying cash, handbags, and bundles—markets attracted forsaken children all across the country. Hungry young thieves on the prowl found them fertile stalking grounds, and the terrain also offered opportunities to beg scraps of food, perform odd jobs, or engage in petty trade oneself. If nothing else, a youth could wander the rows of stalls, gathering meals from discarded peelings, apple cores, and similar garbage. When policemen or vendors chased them away, they often scattered for an hour or two and then returned to their former activities.^[62]

Wherever they lived, street children frequently did so in groups. Typically numbering under a dozen members (though occasionally much larger), bands developed customs and rules of conduct that were often quite similar from one region of the country to another. In many cases, they patterned their behavior after the example set by gangs of adult thieves, whose domain overlapped their own.^[63] Seasoned toughs predominated, of course, but the very nature of street life often prompted novices as well to join forces. A group could seize and defend more effectively a desirable location to spend the night or lay claim to a section of street or market square. Teamwork, such as the participation of a lookout or decoy, made possible various thefts beyond the capability of loners.^[64] Gangs, in short, enjoyed advantages in most areas vital to homeless youths.

The longer the members of a band remained on the street, the more likely they were to develop a sense of their group as removed or isolated from the society around them. Outsiders came to represent a threat from whom the group’s secrets and turf had to be protected. Whether a nonmember appeared to the gang as a menace or as their intended victim, the person could expect no restraint or pity. The most cohesive, tightly knit bands were those in which a sense of separation and alienation had fully matured. At the other end of the spectrum, clusters of juveniles who still returned occasionally to the homes of relatives for sleep or a meal tended to display a less wary or hostile outlook.^[65]

The suspicion and enmity brandished by gangs toward the outside world often extended to other abandoned children, especially to green youths newly on their own. Regarded as outside the pale (ne svoi) by hardened adolescents, many a novice found himself stripped of his clothing and beaten by a group whose path he crossed while groping about in a harsh, unfamiliar environment. The outcome was grimmer for sixteen-year-old Vasilii Riabov, fresh on the street in November 1924. Facing ever colder nights, he sought shelter in the ruined basement complex of a large building on Moscow’s Tverskaia Street, a frequent refuge of the homeless. As he entered the cellars, other pairs of eyes noted the comparatively good condition of his apparel, and after he had fallen asleep a group of four (three besprizornye and a twenty-three-year-old man) sprung to action. Grabbing his arms and legs, they suffocated him by stuffing ashes into his mouth and then removed his clothing. The corpse they buried in the cellar.^[66]

Recently a Russian student of organized crime pointed to underworld slang as an indication that the nation’s criminal stratum amounted to a subculture distinct from the rest of society.^[67] Much the same could be said of experienced besprizornye in the 1920s. The argot developed in their groups, with hundreds of words and expressions unintelligible to ordinary citizens, underscored the gulf between the street and the sur-rounding population. In Moscow, for example, a committee investigating the case of a fourteen-year-old girl found her testimony so studded with this jargon as to be nearly inaccessible, and youths conspiring among themselves sometimes took advantage of the language barrier to confound adults within earshot. There were even reports that veterans employed their patois as a test to determine whether others just arrived in the area were “genuine”—that is, experienced members of their world. Those unfamiliar with the language of the street found themselves regarded as informers or novices—and thus targets of abuse.^[68]

Waifs acquired much of their slang from the lexicon of adult thieves, testimony again to the close contact between the two groups. However, they also added words of their own and altered the meaning of some terms borrowed from their older neighbors in the underworld, which resulted in a new dialect.^[69] While a thorough study of the language lies beyond this book’s scope, a few examples will provide a sense of the flavor and subjects commonly encountered:

psy:

a derogatory term used to denote children new to the street and unfamiliar with its ways. Sometimes applied contemptuously to youths who supported themselves by begging rather than stealing.

shpana:

a streetwise, veteran besprizornyi.

fraier (sometimes rendered fraer):

a person having no understanding of the street world. Often applied to the victim of a theft.

liagavyi:

a betrayer or informer. Used by some as a strong term of reproach for almost any occasion.

ban:

a train station.

maidan:

a train.

shalman:

a den or haunt.

chinar:

a cigarette butt.

stirki (or stirochki):

playing cards.

marafet:

cocaine.

shmara:

a street girl taken as a lover by a besprizornyi.

puliat’:

to beg.

kanai:

go away!

shirmach:

a pickpocket.

mil’ton or ment:

a policeman.

kicha:

a prison.^[70]

Among a minority of youths, the influence of the criminal world also appeared in the form of tattoos, which urchins as young as nine sought to acquire in imitation of the adornments sported by older thieves around them. Prisons, the street, and even orphanages here and there all sheltered practitioners able to oblige. A study of 146 juveniles in the Moscow Labor Home discovered 37 with at least one tattoo in 1924, and a later investigation reported such decorations on “nearly all” the residents. Popular motifs included nude figures, the sex organs, and emblems signifying membership in a gang. Nearly any part of the body might carry a design, including locations chosen to allow the characters a semblance of animation. A naked man on one shoulder blade, for example, and a naked woman on the other, or a cat and mouse on the buttocks, could be moved in provocative or amusing fashion.^[71]

Some adolescents, including a sixteen-year-old orphan dubbed Odessit, managed as well to ape adult criminals’ lusty, unbridled lifestyle. In Odessit’s case, the models who swayed him inhabited Ukraine and the port that inspired his nickname. Since 1922, this bold and resourceful boy had ranged through all the republic’s principal cities, imbibing the underworld’s habits and vocabulary. Eventually his travels brought him to Khar’kov, where he joined the Sumskaia Street group mentioned in the Introduction and turned the boys more resolutely to crime. Apart from facilitating thefts, membership in the group provided Odessit with a setting for his favorite amusements. He had a passion for gambling, drink, and ostentatious displays of money when treating comrades—among whom he developed a reputation for strictly honoring obligations. A rough-edged dandy, he dressed well by the standards of the street and rarely stood in need of cash.^[72]

Like Odessit, most experienced waifs—and especially those in groups—went by nicknames. In fact, with the passage of time, many forgot their original surnames and identified themselves only with street names.^[73] This evolution, too, symbolized and further emphasized the void between them and the surrounding society. Nicknames often sprang from a youth’s physical appearance—hence appellations such as Krivoi (one-eyed), Kosoi (cross-eyed), Riaboi (pock-marked), and Ryzhii (redhead). Those with a countenance wasted by heavy consumption of cocaine or vodka might answer to Starik (old man). One pale thin lad acquired the name Monashka (nun), and another, whose blanched, oblong face suggested an icon figure, became known on the street as Bogomaz (icon dauber). In addition to physical features, children’s special skills or experiences provided inspiration for names. The moniker Sevastopol’skii (from the Crimean city Sevastopol’), for example, referred to a youth who had traveled extensively in the southern part of the country, while the leader of a gang in Odessa received the name Simuliator because of his ability to assume a variety of roles in order to escape capture.^[74] Diminutive forms of girls’ names, applied to boys, also enjoyed circulation, as did names of animals such as Medvezhenok (bear cub), Lebed’ (swan), and Krysa (rat). In at least a few instances, girls’ nicknames stuck to boys who worked as prostitutes.^[75]

With the passage of months, a group’s Krysa or Kosoi would fall into the hands of the police or depart for other reasons. The band’s core of veterans therefore took in new boys now and then, typically from among recent arrivals at a station, market, or other location that served as the gang’s base. An initiate often underwent a trying, sometimes brutal, probationary period of beatings and orders to perform difficult tasks. If he proved himself by enduring these tests, which could last for weeks, the group accepted him as a reliable member. Those who ran away to escape the torment were dismissed by the others as sniveling babies or worse.^[76]

According to some observers in the 1920s, many gangs divided stolen goods among all members equally or, failing that, in proportion to their involvement in the theft.^[77] No doubt something of the sort occurred here and there, though the true extent of the practice remains difficult to determine. One sometimes senses in these accounts an author’s eagerness to emphasize the cooperative nature of street children, even to the point of suggesting that they harbored embryonic collectivist qualities that educators could cultivate to transform them into builders of a communist society. Other reports, while noting that youths on occasion displayed considerable unity inside their groups, stressed as well that dominant members often tormented the rank and file. This abuse—which included beatings, appropriation of the most desirable portions of food, and sexual exploitation of other boys or girls in the gang—stood in vivid contrast to any custom of communal disposition of spoils.^[78]

However sharply the conduct of groups might differ in some respects, certain rules of behavior and discipline gained wide currency, especially among adolescents experienced on the street. Loyalty to comrades, for example, was embedded deeply enough to prevent many, when questioned by police or social workers, from informing on the gang. “Betrayal” represented a sin of such proportions that young boys raped by older residents of the Moscow Labor Home complained to the staff only with great reluctance, fearing the merciless retribution likely to follow. Also, while respecting those of their world most adept at deceiving outsiders, vagrant children typically regarded cheating at cards or other games played among themselves—not to mention failing to pay debts incurred—as a grave transgression. Offenders risked savage reprisals, usually in the form of beatings, though the authors of one study witnessed instances of gang rape of group members considered guilty of such offenses. In a few reported cases the exaction of vengeance resulted in the victim’s death.^[79]

A youth who fled his group after violating one of its rules might well find that word of his act followed in short order. Gangs sometimes maintained connections with groups in other markets and train stations—even other cities—and could pass information along regarding the misdeeds of former members. In one such case, a boy who had fled from Tula to Moscow was eventually tracked down and dragged out of an institution. Only the staff’s intervention saved him.^[80] In a few instances, children arriving at shelters requested permission for a brief visit to the street in order to “earn” some money with which to settle their obligations before entering the institution. Among other things, they apparently felt that a safe return to the street in the future hinged on paying their debts.^[81]

Most groups featured a leader (sometimes more than one), known in the youths’ slang as a vozhak, glot, or glavar’. In some cases, leaders reportedly attained their preeminence by exercising such qualities as resourcefulness, intelligence, and strength of will, but this seems to have been the exception. Usually the oldest and strongest members (who might also possess the traits just mentioned) employed their physical attributes to intimidate others in the gang and thereby assume the dominant position.^[82] A leader made the group’s important decisions, enforced discipline as he saw fit, and in some cases demanded payment of tribute (cigarettes, perhaps, or something similarly desirable) from other members. While he might experience a challenge periodically, observers were more often struck by the unhesitating obedience his commands received.^[83] Some groups depended so entirely on a leader’s initiative that they crumbled when arrest or other misfortune removed him from the scene. Cohesiveness returned only with the emergence of a new vozhak from the ranks or the arrival of a strong figure from outside. The most submissive and dependent members followed their leaders with blind determination, whether to commit a risky crime or to enter an orphanage.^[84]

One day, a man looking over the waifs gathered in the reception room of Narkompros’s Moscow branch found his eye drawn to an older lad who sat smoking cigarettes and spitting frequently on the floor. There could be no mistake; it was Chainik. As the boy haughtily surveyed the room’s other ragged children, the adult recalled their previous encounter in Moscow’s Alexander Station. Like other large railway terminals, the station sat above a basement labyrinth of tunnels and steam pipes that sheltered many homeless youths from winter’s frost. When Narkompros officials learned of this lair, they organized a foray to collect its urchins and place them in institutions. The man in the reception room had been among those in the search party that descended with quivering nerves into the station’s basement. Aided by a single lantern, they groped down a long passage, clambering over pipes and turning several corners. With each step, oxygen seemed to grow scarcer, until one of the group lost consciousness. After carrying her from the basement, the others retraced their steps and arrived at an oval aperture in the wall—the mouth of a steam-pipe conduit so narrow that it could be negotiated only by crawling. A few minutes of this squirming sapped two members’ resolve, leaving the party’s leader to continue down the channel alone, his lantern now extinguished. The others backed out of the duct and crouched at its entrance, where they could hear muffled cries of besprizornye awakened in their chambers. The expedition had penetrated Chainik’s winter home, and before long he stood among a score of cohorts herded out of the basement and assembled in the station for processing.

Years before, as it happened, his mother had brought the seven-year-old boy to this same hall with the apparent intention of deserting him. She placed her son on a bench and then lingered to watch from a distance, perhaps reluctant to take the final parting step. In any case, as evening approached, she told him that she would go out for a minute to buy a roll in the bazaar—and disappeared. That night, when the station closed, someone noticed the boy asleep under the bench with a raw carrot protruding from his mouth like a pacifier. He stuck to the premises for weeks, living on handouts from passengers, until he overcame his shyness and adjusted to the city’s bustle. His nickname derived from the ploy of carrying a teakettle (chainik) to impersonate passengers, who often took pots and kettles into stations to obtain hot water. Under this cover he ran less risk of challenge while stealing baggage for his group to sell in the Sukharevskii Market. Come spring he migrated to the Crimea and did not return to Moscow until autumn, when stinging temperatures drove him into the caverns underneath “his” station.^[85]

Chainik’s experience illustrates the challenge faced by all children thrust out on their own, for even the most Spartan set of requirements included shelter from winter and other perils. The very young, weak, or ailing—those most handicapped on the street—could often hope for nothing beyond garbage piles, ditches, and the like. Unless admitted to institutions, few survived long. Others, more experienced or fortunate, managed to sniff out and cling to niches in structures that afforded securer refuge. But sanctuary lay not only in the basement of a train station or an abandoned building; it also resided in numbers. Like an irresistible force, the advantage of teamwork in activities essential for survival drew many into groups. With life a matter of competition reduced to its most unvarnished form, those who could not defend their dens soon lost them. Under these stark rules, gangs wielded the upper hand. This applied not only to the apportionment of shelter, but to all other matters of importance in an environment that prompted more than one observer to recall the name of Charles Darwin.

Notes

2. Beggars, Peddlers, and Prostitutes

What the besprizornis live on I do not know.

Besprizornost’, often appearing in the most twisted, horrifying forms—such as juvenile crime and prostitution—threatens the young generation with the most severe and alarming consequences.

Whereas the need for shelter waxed and waned with the seasons, other difficulties confronted waifs throughout the year. Disease, harassment, and drug addiction numbered among the predicaments that tormented many, but a far more widespread challenge lay in the unremitting urgency of procuring food. Death in short order faced those unable to wrest provisions from the street. No abandoned child, from the greenest beggar to the sliest gang member, was immune, and some spent nearly every waking hour in search of bread. Techniques ranged from the passive to the criminally aggressive, with the choice influenced by a multitude of factors including age, health, gender, location, level of desperation, and degree of experience with street life. As among wild animals—with whom they frequently found themselves compared—the strongest and cleverest extracted the most food and clung to life with the securest grip.

Youths neither strong nor clever could often do no more than pick through garbage piles. Here they encountered minimal competition for their wretched bits of “food” and ran little risk of punishment from policemen or other citizens. Because this activity required no special skills or experience, it attracted children only recently thrown onto the street and those otherwise desperate and helpless. During the famine, when an observer recorded the following scene in a town along the Volga, similar cases appeared numberless:

Three men were sitting on the top of a low shed eating water-melon. The side of the shed was filthy with dirt and excrement. As they ate their slices of melon they threw the rind into the dirt, and, unseen by them, a little boy would come and pick it out and chew it ravenously. Not far away were women selling rolls of bread and large but unpleasant-looking sausages; the hungry child looked at them, and they at him, but at such a time nobody can help anybody else. Besides, such sights as these are commonplaces all through the vast famine area.^[1]

Discarded scraps—whether fish heads and peelings thrown in the dirt of market squares or the daily trash generated by apartment dwellers— enticed juveniles in later years as well.^[2] Some tried to intercept unwanted food even before it reached the refuse heap. A man who pushed away his plate at a restaurant in Kherson was startled by the events his action triggered:

No sooner had I shoved the plate aside than a boy of about seven, attired in nondescript rags, rushed in like a fury, grabbed a piece of meat from my plate and as quickly rushed out again. The whole scene transpired in the twinkle of an eye. It gave me the creeps. But there was still more to come. A minute later, a tiny tot crept in, almost naked, except for a skimpy dirty shirt which he lifted and cupped apronwise. Suddenly he seized a piece of meat and threw it in his shirt, where it found congenial company among bones, bread crusts, and other refuse.^[3]

In Saratov, youths known as tarelochniki (from tarelka, plate) lingered around cafeterias and snack bars, waiting for patrons to finish their meals. As soon as a diner departed, they scurried to the table and devoured anything left on the plate. Every cafeteria in town had a contingent of tarelochniki, most of whom remained throughout the day.^[4]

In a manner of speaking, begging represented a step up from the practice of rummaging through garbage, because it required a youth to make an impression on another citizen. The rewards, too, while often modest compared to those of other activities undertaken by homeless adolescents, generally exceeded anything available in piles of trash—especially for skilled practitioners. According to a number of accounts, juvenile begging did not assume mass proportions in most of the country immediately following the Revolution. Its scale doubtless increased during the Civil War, but not until the famine of 1921–1922 did young beggars inundate cities and towns across much of the nation.^[5] A report from Saratov province told of tattered, starving boys and girls roaming the bazaars and streets in the summer of 1921, beseeching passersby, “Uncle, give a bit of bread.” Others could manage nothing more than to approach silently, with outstretched hands and tear-stained faces.^[6] Rail passengers at major stations in famine districts and neighboring regions described a continuous wail produced by multitudes—often hundreds or even thousands—of children’s voices clamoring for food from travelers. Variously described as flocks of sparrows and ravenous locusts, they swarmed instantly over any scraps of food or garbage thrown to them from the cars, fighting for every crumb. The scene recurred at station after station, testifying graphically to the scale of destitution produced by the famine.^[7]

For years thereafter juvenile beggars remained a common sight.^[8] Indeed, most studies concluded that a majority of abandoned children took up begging during a portion of their time on the street. A survey of 1,183 youths passing through one institution found that 952 had previously solicited alms.^[9] While a child newly arrived among the homeless rarely shunned thievery if a safe opportunity presented itself, most novices did not possess the experience or resolve to plunge immediately into such a career. Instead they commonly clung at first to begging. Only when steeled by the street and schooled in crime did they graduate to bolder illegal pursuits.^[10] Youths with physical or mental disabilities found few alternatives to begging. Their infirmities rendered them unlikely even to contemplate an active life of robbery, let alone pursue it successfully. Tests of physical adroitness administered in a children’s institution during the second half of the decade revealed that those who had supported themselves only with begging scored considerably lower than their counterparts who had left begging for crime.^[11]

Young beggars naturally assembled in public locations crowded with citizens carrying money or provisions. Thus, train stations and markets, favorite sites for other reasons as well, lured many bent on panhandling. So, too, did stores, nightclubs, cinemas, and theaters, around whose doors children congregated to implore patrons for a few coins or a piece of bread. Some did not wait for people to venture forth to these establishments, choosing instead to make the rounds of apartments to beg from the occupants. Churches and cemeteries also drew them, especially on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays—when youths could hope for larger, more philanthropic crowds.^[12] Competition for favorable locations flared frequently, with those who had established their positions resisting newcomers vigorously. One lad, who sang for money on a train each day, was expected by other beggars not to continue past a certain station. Eventually he pushed beyond this limit—and fell victim to knives, according to the boy who soon replaced him.^[13]

Children often haunted entrances to restaurants, cafeterias, snack bars, taverns, and the like—in many cases entering the premises to seek money or a portion of the repast directly from diners.^[14] They were not always greeted warmly, as Ilya Ehrenburg noticed in the refreshment room of the train station in Gomel’: “Here, too, wandered homeless children in the hope of scraps. A passenger handed one girl his plate with some bits of meat and gravy: ‘Here, gobble it up!’ A waiter (or as they used to say then a ‘serving citizen’) ran up, tore the plate out of the child’s hands and threw the pieces of meat and potatoes all over the rags she was wearing. I was revolted, but nobody backed me up. The little girl cried and ate hastily.”^[15] Another observer described mentally deficient juveniles begging in taverns whose coarse clientele made them the butt of crude jokes and abuse. Before receiving food or money, they might be required to clown, recite obscene verses, or down considerable amounts of liquor. Some youths recognized the tone of these establishments and developed their own acts of ribald tomfoolery to perform in return for sustenance.^[16] Indeed, alert minds soon learned that success hinged on adjusting an approach to suit the nature of one’s prospective benefactor. According to several children, the following “rules” had guided them in begging from patrons in dining facilities:

1. Never approach a diner who has just sat down to the table, because his hunger leaves him disinclined to give anything. Wait for a break in the meal, such as between the first and second courses. Do not wait to approach him after the second course, because he will likely be hurrying and therefore unreceptive to appeals.
2. Do not approach a diner from behind and surprise him with a request. The reflex response of a person startled in this way will probably be a refusal, and then he will not want to appear to change his mind.
3. Try to determine in advance what sort of person the diner is. Do this by noticing how he is dressed, what type of luggage he has, what brand of cigarette he is smoking, and so on. Then one can adopt the physical carriage and deportment most likely to appeal to the patron.
4. Beg in a cheerful manner (veselo) from a fat person—unless he appears short-winded, because then he will be cross. With a thin person, adopt a sad, whining voice.
5. If the diner is sitting with a woman and does not talk with her during the meal, beg from him, because the woman is his wife and probably will not give anything. If he speaks and jokes with the woman during the meal, beg from her—and the man will more quickly give something.
6. If there is a group of people at the table, approach the person who first places his order with the waiter. He will be the one who pays for the meal, which means that he has money.^[17]

Youths appealed for charity with a wide variety of techniques, ranging from the passive to the energetic and deceitful. Some did nothing more than sit or stand in place for hours on end, often mute, with upturned palms and vacant expressions. A girl begging in the Sukharevskii Market stood barefoot, clad in a torn dress and jacket, silently watching the traders. Her swollen face, its dull eyes encased in dark circles, appeared set in a listless expression, divorced from nearby arguments and the market's other pungent qualities. Finally, she approached a row of booths and rooted herself before them without a word, never diverting her worn gaze from the broiling sausages. Sedentary methods of this sort, involving little effort to seize the attention of prospective donors, were adopted most often by the frightened and inexperienced, along with those in poor physical and mental health or otherwise reduced to apathy. A doctor in the Crimea during the famine noted that hunger had so weakened some children that they lay crying softly on the sidewalks of busy streets, no longer able to make any overt effort to beg.^[18]

Bolder urchins selected individual pedestrians and scampered along with them, appealing relentlessly for a few kopecks. Pravda reported from Odessa that “on warm days, no one on the boulevards can avoid them. Their badgering is tenacious, and the pedestrian simply cannot drive them off.” Others performed little services—such as brushing the snow or dust off people or opening a shop door for customers—as part of their appeal for alms.^[19] Some fabricated stories to exploit their conclusion that adults would respond more sympathetically to the temporary distress of “ordinary” children than to requests from waifs. Tales included variations on a claim that the juvenile, arriving in the city to visit relatives, had been unable to find them. Now, with his money and documents allegedly lost or stolen, he begged for funds to purchase a train ticket home. In addition to the pitch itself, youths employed “props” (such as a knapsack) to bolster their credibility. Several roamed the bazaars of Rostov-on-the-Don in 1922 carrying coffin lids, pleading for money to bury their parents, said to be just deceased. Children also claimed, with tears in their eyes, that they had lost coins given them by parents to buy food for the family. How could they return home, they lamented, without recovering the sum in question? Whatever the entreaty, polished supplicants adjusted the contents, delivery, and form of address—from the familiar bratishka (roughly, pal, buddy, or brother) to the deferential gospodin (mister or sir)—to suit the targets of their appeals.^[20]

Rather than concoct stories, others feigned illness or injury to win sympathy. This tactic commonly involved simulating blindness, convulsive fits, or the loss of a limb (by doubling it up under clothing). One cold winter day, a fourteen-year-old boy noticed that he received more money when he shivered visibly, and thereafter he resolved to quiver whatever the temperature. When spring finally arrived, he found that this trembling, initially a ploy, had become involuntary. Some children even equipped themselves with festering sores. Dirty needles stuck under the skin, for example, and left there for a few days, produced wounds to help stir the hearts of potential benefactors.^[21]

The most conspicuous young beggars relied on songs to elicit contributions. “On any day in Moscow you can hear and see some besprizorni ‘perform,’ ” a visitor to the capital wrote in 1926, and the experiences of many citizens prompted similar observations. Trams, for instance, stopped at certain points along their routes for five or ten minutes, presenting children opportunities to climb aboard and sing to people awaiting the vehicles’ departure. A passenger recalled one such youth, about seven years old, clad in shredded garments revealing much of his body, which was blue from the cold. When the conductor ordered him out, he jumped to the sidewalk, pulled out a cigarette, and hurled abuse at his evictor—then slipped onto the next tram approaching the stop.^[22] Juveniles (including Chainik) also dodged conductors to ply their songs on the railways. Some worked the same suburban lines so frequently that commuters gave them nicknames, as in the case of a lad dubbed Solovei (nightingale). While his voice bore no resemblance to a songbird’s, the sole selection in his repertoire lamented that after his death, no one save a nightingale would visit his grave. He introduced some new material at the beginning of the year but soon returned to his lachrymose standby, explaining that the mournful song drew more money. Another boy regaled passengers on local trains with a few short tunes and then always ended his performance with the appeal: “Help a future Shaliapin!” After making his rounds among the audience, during which he collected as much as thirty kopecks on a good day, he proceeded to the next car for another performance.^[23]

In addition to targeting mass transportation, street children aimed their songs at citizens in other busy public sites.^[24] The lyrics (sung for entertainment or solace, as well as to solicit donations) most often featured some aspect of a vagrant, thieving life. Frequently, as in the nightingale lament, the singer described an adolescent at turns neglected and abused—ultimately dying anonymously and unnoticed in a cold land. Konstantin Paustovsky heard the following verse from a homeless boy in 1924.

	Forgotten, neglected
	In my youthful state
	I was born an orphan
	And misery’s my fate.[25]

Some songs focused on the transformation of an artless pup into a petty thief and ultimately a hardened criminal.^[26] In one, the protagonist reproached citizens who had refused to offer him any assistance and thereby turned him to crime. “Because of you, I suffer. Because of you, I will find my grave.”^[27] In other selections, lyrics featured portrayals of life in prison—including debilitating idleness, abuses, and even death—or descriptions of Dickensian children’s institutions.^[28] While most songs presented a rough-edged world, a number praised at the same time the vagabond “freedom” of life on the street.^[29] Some even adopted a saucy air, such as a tune in which a thief secured his freedom by bribing a policeman; thus enriched, the officer proceeded to the Khitrovskii Market and purchased cocaine.^[30] Finally, man songs depicted romances—affairs generally doomed to misfortune as one partner forsook the other or was caught committing a crime. In a composition set to the melody of a well-known lullaby, a mother sings her baby to sleep with the prediction that he will grow up to become a pickpocket and abandon her for a hussy. With this lass, and cocaine in his pocket, the prophesy continued, he would spend his evenings on the town. In the end, while stealing for his lover, capture by the authorities awaited him.^[31]

Along with singing, youths staged other performances in public locations—simple acrobatics, dancing, or juggling, for example—as part of their appeal to passing citizens.^[32] Reports from a number of cities described groups that roamed thoroughfares, markets, and apartment courtyards accompanying their songs with primitive instruments fashioned from pans, plates, and the like.^[33] Vasilii Aleichenko, the orphan whose grandfather died trying to conceal a horse during the Civil War, joined forces on the road with a boy skilled at mimicking the sounds of machinery and animals. Once the pair learned to evade policemen, they found that spectators would reward them for these imitations.^[34] Others practiced more unusual forms of begging. Passengers on board a ship in Sevastopol’ harbor noticed several waifs who had undressed and swum out to the ship as it prepared to depart for Yalta. Treading water, the boys called to people on deck to throw them kopecks—which some travelers did to amuse themselves, watching the swimmers dive far to the bottom in search of the coins.^[35] A handful of children earned money from onlookers by humiliating themselves in grotesque fashion. In Omsk, a boy who lived at the train station clowned oafishly for money and let people do anything they pleased to him in return for a kopeck. For five kopecks he smeared his face with his own excrement. At the Nikolaev Station in Moscow, a child covered himself with oil from a steam engine and then rolled in the dirt to win a few kopecks from petty traders nearby.^[36] More coercive juveniles, claiming to have syphilis or other venereal diseases with which to afflict hesitant donors, transformed the art of pleading into extortion. They threatened to bite or spit on passersby, hoping that purses would open to ward off the alleged risk of infection.^[37]

Finally, some homeless youths begged together with one or more adults. According to numerous accounts, the latter took all the money earned by children, generally in return for providing food and a corner in which to sleep. In some cases adults sent juveniles out to beg alone, while in others they worked as a team. A grownup might pretend to be blind or crippled, for instance, hoping that the child’s presence would enhance the pathos of his spectacle and melt the indifference of passersby. Adult beggars who did not shrink from thefts to augment their income introduced their assistants to a darker side of street life and another means of support. Other youths participated in the acts of older street performers (musicians, conjurers, or acrobats), sometimes running away eventually to continue routines on their own.^[38]

The question remains, how did juveniles fare when they approached the surrounding population for assistance? There seems little doubt that a majority of citizens regarded abandoned children as nuisances, quite possibly thieves, and rebuffed their appeals for alms.^[39] But the plight of the homeless did move some people to offer them money, food, cigarettes, and other items without hesitation. In response, books, articles, letters to editors, and slogans of official campaigns implored the Soviet population throughout the 1920s not to contribute anything to young mendicants. Such gifts, some contended, contributed to the ruin of children in the grip of vodka and cocaine by encouraging them to continue begging rather than enter institutions. Those wishing to assist were advised to donate money or time to the various organizations formed to rescue youths from the street.^[40]

While such recommendations may well have diminished the contributions citizens made to beggars, the flow certainly did not dwindle to the point where it no longer behooved hungry urchins to pursue charity. Handouts supported many indefinitely. Langston Hughes learned of an old woman who had placed bread on her windowsill each day all winter for a group of boys living in a nearby train station. When the warm weather of spring finally summoned them to the rails for another season of travel, they presented her in parting with an attractive handbag stolen from a foreigner at the station. Most full-time beggars, of course, could not hope for a constant source of generosity and depended on passing, anonymous benefactors for a few coins and morsels. A day’s take rarely exceeded one ruble. Two boys interviewed in 1925 received a total of 1.05 rubles (30 kopecks and 75 kopecks, respectively), which they spent as follows: 14 kopecks for two hundred grams of sausage, 28 kopecks for two rolls, 16 kopecks for two hundred grams of sugar, and 7 kopecks for candy. The youth who had brought in the larger amount claimed 40 kopecks to attend the movies. This budget, similar to those of other juveniles in the same study, indicates that beggars could survive on the street for well under 30 rubles per month. A handful of the most talented or fortunate exceeded this sum three or four times over, prompting a few to reject any thought of learning a craft in an institution. Begging, they felt, promised a better income.^[41]

Children also sought money from the surrounding population by offering something in return—that is, through trade. To be sure, the boundary between begging and trade was indistinct on occasion, as when youths played primitive instruments or opened doors for shoppers. In some cases, too, when the items offered for sale by a peddler were particularly meager, trade could serve as a mask or a means for begging. But such qualifications aside, numerous observers remarked in the 1920s on the clusters of waifs roaming markets and other crowded locations, trying to interest people in their modest inventories. Even before the 1920s, during the War Communism years when the state attempted to ban private trade, youths were much in evidence on the streets carrying small quantities of food and other goods for sale. The elimination of large private enterprises and the inability of the state to supply more than a trickle of consumer products compelled the population to rely heavily on petty, itinerant traders. Some in the corps of vendors were dispatched by parents to help support families during these years of privation, while others sprang from the burgeoning ranks of homeless children and traded anything they could steal or otherwise acquire. With no adequate alternative to small-scale private trade, officials in many cities watched the proceedings through their fingers and cracked down only intermittently—even then rarely focusing their energies effectively on juveniles.^[42]

The legalization of private trade by the New Economic Policy in 1921 nudged authorities in most regions to adopt a still more indulgent attitude toward young street entrepreneurs. While the law required that traders possess licenses and stipulated that only people at least sixteen years of age could obtain them, these provisions were frequently ignored. Numerous unlicensed juveniles worked the streets and markets openly, often without any interference from the police. Even if apprehended, youths generally faced nothing more than a reprimand, after which they could return to hawking their wares.^[43] Eventually, the government’s diminished opposition to private trade amounted to a mixed blessing for small-scale peddlers, because the New Economic Policy also spawned larger shops and stalls that presented stiff competition to petty vendors. But the millions of abandoned children created at the same time by the famine insured that ragged young hawkers would remain a common sight in cities for years to come.^[44]

Waifs often worked in groups when conducting trade. A need to defend themselves from plunder by gangs, and to assemble enough eyes to watch in all directions for the approach of the occasional zealous policeman, frequently inspired this clustering.^[45] Early-warning functions aside, some groups operated much like guilds. They attempted to restrict competition by driving away others displaying similar wares in what they regarded as their own territory.^[46] At the very least they sought to prevent outsiders from offering merchandise at lower prices. Studies of street children reported a few groups that regulated their own activities to an even greater degree. The leader of several boys selling candies in the Sukharevskii Market made the rounds of the members periodically to collect their take and later divided the receipts among them. A second group of young candy peddlers in the market pooled and redistributed their receipts with those of a youth who shined shoes and two who sold kvass.^[47]

The means employed to acquire merchandise varied as widely as the goods themselves. Some children stole the items they sold, or hawked commodities purloined by others. One boy described how he pilfered apples, marketed them, and used the money to purchase cigarettes, which he resold.^[48] Youths occasionally captured animals—pigeons, for example—intending to sell them to consumers. Some hunted rats to eat the flesh and peddle the skins. A group of about thirty homeless people (adults and children) living in an abandoned building in Leningrad specialized in trapping cats, skinning them, and dying the pelts to resemble other furs more desired in the markets.^[49] Another illegal, but rarely prevented method of obtaining goods involved waiting in lines at movie theaters to buy tickets for resale later at higher prices.^[50]

Juvenile traders secured some products from state agencies unable to market all of their stock through the rudimentary and ponderous official distribution network. Thus tobacco trusts recruited children to sell a portion of the trusts’ merchandise in the streets.^[51] But no other state-supplied commodity attracted as many young hawkers as did newspapers. According to an extensive study conducted over a period of months, Moscow contained several hundred such peddlers (less than 500 in the winter and about 750 in the summer) in 1926/27, and their counterparts were visible (and audible) at major intersections, stations, and tram stops in other cities as well.^[52] Responding to the question of why a large number of juveniles engaged in selling newspapers, the study stressed the activity’s accessibility. It required neither registration with the labor exchange nor special training. Anyone with the small sum necessary to purchase a few papers could join the others waiting at distribution locations. Also, while the earnings were not lavish, most youths could count on garnering from one to one and a half rubles per day— enough to survive on the street.^[53]

As described in the study, morning newspapers (Rabochaia gazeta, Rabochaia moskva, Pravda, and Izvestiia) were distributed to vendors (adults as well as children) at many points around Moscow between 5:30 and 7:00 A.M. Some hawkers lined up earlier, seeking to be among the first to reach the public with their papers and thereby sell them more rapidly. Out on the street, the work still included an element of competition. Who would infiltrate most successfully such places as tram cars and dining halls, where the sale of newspapers was forbidden but lucrative? Who could yell most convincingly and loudly the sensational news supposedly—but not always in fact—contained in the papers? A majority of vendors sold all their morning papers by 10:00 or 11:00 and returned to distribution points by 1:00 P.M. to await the evening paper, Vecherniaia moskva—handed out between 2:00 and 2:30, if it appeared on time. Roughly five hours later, most youths had exhausted their second stock and their bodies.^[54]

Rather than ply stolen wares or merchandise purchased from state agencies, some street children sold products easily procured at no charge, notably water. During the summer months in many cities, youths traversed market squares carrying large containers from which they dispensed drinks. After obtaining water from a variety of sources close to the market, including faucets in public lavatories, they often tried to enhance the liquid’s appeal by coloring it with powders or other fluids. One child, under observation for a few hours in the Sukharevskii Market, changed the tint of his water three times before arriving at a hue that tempted customers. This study found that, unlike juveniles purveying other goods, those selling water generally did so on their own rather than in groups. As a result, prices varied considerably around the market, ranging from two kopecks per glass to two glasses for one kopeck. The lack of organization may have been due to the temporary, seasonal nature of this trade and to the likelihood that those selling such commodities as water had just begun their trading careers.^[55]

The inventory hawked by unsupervised children also featured other types of food (including fruit, seeds, rolls, and fish), flowers (often near the entrances to theaters), programs (near theaters, race tracks, and the like), and cheap haberdashery. A newspaper article describing the situation in Leningrad near the middle of the decade reported numerous abandoned boys and girls on the street selling homemade cigarettes, chocolate, matches, seeds, rotten apples, and “in general anything that comes to hand.” Young bootblacks, too, graced the sidewalks, with little more than a box, a rag, and a tin or two of polish. Some youths changed lines of trade repeatedly, peddling whatever seemed profitable and in reach.^[56] A few in Odessa worked as guides, though not to sights customarily visited by city tours. They led sailors from foreign ships to the city’s prostitutes. Because they navigated this terrain on a daily basis, they knew “where is better and where is worse,” as Pravda put it, and could make expert recommendations.^[57] In the absence of merchandise and special knowledge, adolescents sometimes sold raw labor—hauling loads at train stations and markets or holding places for people waiting in long lines. According to a report in the middle of the decade, such unskilled work typically netted a child no more than forty to seventy kopecks per day. Nevertheless, youths continued to seek out this employment, a fact that testified to both the difficult conditions on the street and the steady appearance, year after year, of new, inexperienced waifs.^[58]

Thousands of children, unable to support themselves through other means, turned sooner or later to prostitution. “Who among the inhabitants of Moscow,” an author inquired, “is not familiar with the figures of rouged and curled adolescents, flooding every evening the sidewalks of the Tverskaia [Moscow’s main street]? Who has not seen the disheveled, ragged inhabitants of the Smolenskii, Trubnyi, and other markets? They are all a juvenile ‘commodity,’ awaiting its consumer.”^[59] While very little statistical information exists concerning prostitution, especially during the chaotic years immediately following the Revolution, a wide variety of sources stressed the direct link between homelessness and the multitude of juvenile prostitutes in evidence by the beginning of the 1920s.^[60] As abandoned children proliferated during the years of War Communism—that is, even before the famine of 1921–1922—several studies and reports warned of an enormous increase in the number of young prostitutes. “The results of my investigation are horrifying,” a professor informed his colleagues. “They show that child prostitution, which formerly was only an isolated phenomenon, is now very widespread.” According to one estimate, the number of juveniles engaged in prostitution had increased twentyfold since 1917. Whatever the precision of this figure, it would not have astounded a woman who operated a brothel near Moscow’s Khitrovskii Market. She disclosed that the problem of finding enough young girls, previously a difficult task, no longer plagued her establishment.^[61]

Not until the famine triggered a new deluge of castaways, however, did the tide of juvenile prostitutes reach its crest—a “catastrophic” increase, according to the editor of a recent Soviet work.^[62] Relief officials and others noted that among the millions of destitute youths, many clung to life, at least for a time, by selling their bodies for as little as a piece of bread.^[63] By the middle of the decade the number had decreased, but the variety of forces that continued to generate street children insured that young prostitutes would remain visible and very much a cause of concern.^[64]

A considerable proportion of homeless girls supported themselves, at least in part, through prostitution—in contrast to boys long at large, most of whom depended primarily on theft. At the beginning of life on their own, some girls (probably most) tried to acquire sustenance through begging or petty trade. If these endeavors proved fruitless—and often after being raped by denizens of the underworld or even passersby—they undertook prostitution. Reports also told of juveniles, trading without licenses, who obtained the forbearance of policemen in return for sexual favors and eventually dropped their original enterprises to sell themselves.^[65] Though prostitutes’ income was far from steady, a number divulged earnings as high as three to five rubles in a single day. This amounted to more than they could realize through the other dismal alternatives available to them and thus was incentive enough to begin.^[66]

While there can be no precise estimate of the percentage of all abandoned girls who tried to survive by marketing their bodies, local investigations suggested a high figure—quite possibly a sizable majority, at least among those who had been homeless for more than a few months. In 1920, for instance, a survey of 5,300 street girls up to the age of fifteen found that 88 percent had engaged in prostitution. Among a smaller assortment of children (mostly boys) removed from the Northern Caucasus railroad at the end of the decade, everyone of the girls had worked as a prostitute.^[67] Though nearly all young prostitutes were girls, a few investigators also discovered boys who were similarly experienced. The latter, according to an article describing the situation in Khar’kov in the middle of the decade, tended to be very young—often no more than seven to nine years of age—and frequently turned to prostitution after first finding shelter with adult males. Their number increased in the winter, as harsh conditions made survival by other means more difficult.^[68]

The boys’ tender age did not distinguish them greatly from their much more abundant female counterparts. In fact, nothing struck observers more sharply than the girls’ youth. By their middle teens, many ranked as veterans, and reports of prostitutes no more than eight to ten years of age appear in numerous sources.^[69] When asked how old girls had to be in order to work for her, the proprietress of the previously mentioned Moscow brothel replied: “It doesn’t matter. We take whoever comes along. The younger the better.” Her visitor noticed a prostitute there who appeared to be eight or nine years old.^[70] The engagement of a young girl in such activity (and much the same could be said to a lesser degree of street life in general) often produced a child bearing vividly incongruous personality traits—cynical, sexually experienced, and accustomed to alcohol and cocaine on the one hand, but eager to play with dolls and listen to stories on the other.^[71]

A city’s juvenile prostitutes worked in a variety of districts and facilities—some, as just indicated, in brothels. Girls alone and without shelter quickly caught the attention of “aunties” (teten’ki) or pimps (koty), who lured them to prostitution in return for a corner in a room.^[72] In 1920 a girl named L, who could not have been much older than ten, ran away from a children’s shelter. She had lost her mother shortly after birth and did not know her father, so she joined some other youths climbing aboard a train bound for Moscow. Along the way she was separated from her companions and found herself groping alone in one of Moscow’s stations. Suddenly, it seemed, fortune smiled on her, for a woman approached, offering food and clothing if L would come to her apartment. Off they went, but their destination proved to be a tearoom near the station where L was sold (prodana) to a “well-dressed man.” He proceeded to intoxicate his new acquisition and then led her to his apartment. L regained consciousness the next day in a hospital. Upon discharge from the facility two weeks later, she was evidently left to her own devices, for she made her way back to the man and lived with him for a few weeks. When, at the end of this period, he announced plans to leave Moscow for his native Khar’kov, he bought her some dresses and shoes and returned her to the street.^[73]

Most juvenile streetwalkers, however, did not reside in brothels or settings similar to that of L. They sought customers on their own, frequently in large urban markets (the Smolenskii, Trubnyi, Tsvetnoi, Khitrovskii, and Sukharevskii in Moscow, for example, and the Nevskii, Ligovka, and Aleksandrovskii in Leningrad).^[74] Among the waifs in Moscow lived an eight-year-old girl whose parents had divorced in 1918. Her father moved into another household, and her mother was imprisoned for concealing stolen property, leaving the girl and her brother alone on the street. They soon made their way to the Khitrovskii Market, which became their new home and school. Here the girl not only took up prostitution but also discovered a rich underworld lexicon, the art of stealing, and cocaine. The children returned to their mother after her release from prison, and a social worker managed to interest the girl for a time in literacy. She gave up cocaine but not prostitution.^[75]

Train stations, too, supported contingents of young prostitutes, who utilized lavatories, dark corners in the terminals, empty train cars, outbuildings, and secluded spots around the rail yards to conduct their business. Clients included passengers, depot employees, and members of train crews.^[76] While markets and stations may have been their points of greatest concentration, homeless children also worked as prostitutes in other sites, including abandoned buildings, vacant lots, taverns, restaurants, squares, public baths (such as the Sandunovskie and Samotechnye in Moscow), movie theaters, parks, and other outdoor locations, especially in the summer. A teenager apprehended in a public bathroom at Moscow’s Strastnaia Square indicated that her sexual activities with customers—as many as five or six in an evening—took place in their apartments or the entryways of buildings.^[77]

This general habitat, combined with the nature of the youths’ work, insured close contact between them and the criminal underworld. Much of their sexual activity transpired with the unsavory individuals who frequented the same parts of town as they, and girls sometimes moved in with petty thieves while continuing to work as prostitutes.^[78] Little wonder, then, that many in this position—with criminals as customers, lovers, and acquaintances—soon began to combine prostitution with thievery. Some even worked to funnel victims to adult thieves by luring unsuspecting clients to dens where bandits could later prey on them.^[79]

Children long exposed to these influences naturally developed personalities lacking common ground with societal norms. An eleven-year-old girl in Khar’kov, for example, already a prostitute for three years, considered the street her home and resisted all efforts to dislodge her. When placed in a family, she ran away. She smoked, used cocaine, and decorated her body with tattoos in the style of the underworld. After falling under a tram—which tore the skin from one side of her face and head, leaving her terribly disfigured—she was taken to a hospital. There she lay, swearing wildly, demanding to be released to the street.^[80] In children’s institutions, former prostitutes were among the most difficult cases. Many flew into fits of rage or tears at the slightest provocation, while others appeared completely indifferent to everything around them.^[81] Well after leaving the street for an institution or a job, their experiences as prostitutes continued to torment some in their dreams, prompting them to wake up screaming in the night.^[82]

Thus, numerous youths adrift on the street relied on begging, petty trade, or prostitution to maintain an often precarious existence. Of the three endeavors, begging attracted the most practitioners, especially during years of widespread misfortune, when destitution left countless juveniles too broken to do more than appeal with extended hand. Later in the decade, the “advantages” of begging remained compelling. It demanded no experience or inventory and could be practiced almost anywhere. Indignant rejection—not beatings or arrest—represented the most disagreeable outcome normally endured. For these reasons, homeless children tended to try begging first. Later, if alms grew scarce, or when experience revealed more lucrative options, their energies might shift elsewhere. In the case of girls, a deeply worn path led abruptly to prostitution. But the large majority (roughly two-thirds to three-fourths) of street children were boys, and when they looked beyond begging or trading, it was rarely to prostitution.^[83] Instead, they turned to stealing, the activity most indelibly associated with besprizornye in the popular mind.

Notes

3. From You I Can Expect No Pity

To those who are used to angels’ twitter,
I say: ponder the words of besprizornye bitter.

We’re against you, and you’re against us!

“Rarely does one encounter two phenomena so closely linked, one proceeding so directly from the other,” asserted a provincial author, “as the phenomena of ‘juvenile besprizornost’ ’ and ‘juvenile crime.’ ” Certainly no one should have been surprised that the creation of millions of homeless youths led year by year to extensive juvenile delinquency. “Besprizornost’,” the saying went, “is the mother of crime.”^[1] Reports from around the country—especially at the beginning of the 1920s, but also later in some cities—spotlighted waifs, far too numerous for institutions to absorb, as the source of sharp local surges in thefts by minors.^[2] A number of authors observed that abandoned children did not merely expand the ranks of young offenders; they represented the large majority in the first half of the decade, with the most incorrigible hoodlums the most likely to have spent time on the street.^[3]

As more youths found themselves deprived or neglected during the course of World War I, juvenile crime assumed ever larger proportions in Russia—and hardship associated with the Civil War and War Communism only furthered the trend. According to one source, while the number of residents five to eighteen years of age in St. Petersburg/Petrograd plunged from 400,000 in 1910 to 175,000 in 1920, property offenses committed by minors more than tripled in the city during the same interval.^[4] By all accounts, though, the volume of juvenile crime grew most rapidly—and reached its peak—during the period 1921–1922, when the famine created additional millions of bereft children.^[5] In the Russian Republic (excluding Moscow, Petrograd, and certain other regions), during a six-month period in 1921, the number of youths appearing before Juvenile Affairs Commissions (boards that determined what to do with most delinquents) soared 161 percent compared to a similar period the previous year. In Krasnodar, Moscow, and Rostov-on-the-Don, the volume of cases handled by commissions in 1921 swelled by 27 percent in the first two cities and by 143 percent in Rostov.^[6] Juvenile crime may well have increased not only in absolute terms but also more rapidly than adult crime. Minors arrested by the Russian Republic’s police in the first quarter of 1920 reportedly amounted to 6 percent of all people apprehended; a year later the total jumped to 8 percent, and by the first quarter of 1922 it stood at 10 percent. The juvenile share of arrests in Moscow approached 20 percent in 1920, 15 percent in 1921, and 13 percent in 1922. By contrast, national figures for the period 1911–1913 ranged between 3 and 5 percent.^[7]

One sign of homeless children’s central role in the juvenile crime wave lay in statistics showing a much higher percentage of orphans among delinquents by 1921–1922 than before 1914. According to an estimate for Moscow, only 3.5 percent of the delinquents surveyed in 1909 were orphans, compared to 28.8 percent in 1921. In St. Petersburg/Petrograd the figure sprang from 5.7 percent in 1914–1916 to 31 percent in 1920.^[8] Thereafter, cities that attracted large numbers of waifs, such as Moscow and Rostov-on-the-Don, maintained an extremely high percentage of orphans among their underage offenders. According to data for 1925, approximately 22 percent of the youths appearing before Juvenile Affairs Commissions in the Russian Republic (excluding Moscow) were orphans, while for Moscow the number doubled to 44 percent—and reached 59 percent in Rostov.^[9] Most studies of young lawbreakers in various regions throughout the 1920s revealed that approximately 60–70 percent lacked one or both parents, with the highest percentages generally found among recidivists.^[10]

Statistics naturally present certain problems of interpretation. The growing volume of cases heard by Juvenile Affairs Commissions, for example, followed in part from an increase in the number and efficiency of the commissions themselves. Moreover, the actual dimensions of juvenile crime in famine regions exceeded official figures by a large margin. “In the atmosphere of ‘famine life,’ ” one author observed, “they [juvenile crimes] became so commonplace that it was not worth reporting them or even reacting to them.”^[11] Data showing a significant decrease in the number of adolescents appearing before commissions in 1922 also create confusion. This drop appears to result largely from a change made to the Criminal Code in June 1922, which sent the cases of most youths sixteen to eighteen years of age directly to the courts, rather than to commissions.^[12] Statistics aside, however, no one would dispute that juvenile crime reached unprecedented levels during the famine and that homeless children accounted for the lion’s share.

After an improved harvest in 1922, the volume of juvenile offenses moderated by 1923–1924.^[13] But hunger continued to prompt remaining and newly spawned waifs, still far more numerous than in the prewar era, to seize the necessities of life in any way possible. Clearly, the pressing requirement of food (and, to a lesser extent, clothing) underlay most thefts. Autobiographical sketches of street children describe the turn to these crimes prosaically, as a natural feature of their world, requiring no special explanation or justification. Many undertook their first robberies with nerves tingling and even trembling with fright, but before long the forays became routine.^[14] This said, and without refuting the statement that most stole to satisfy basic needs, other motives appeared from time to time. Thefts provided the funds to acquire narcotics, stylish clothes, movie tickets, and similar items well outside the category of necessities. They also served as a form of amusement or adventure—and as a means of proving one’s reliability and prowess to the rest of a gang.^[15]

Many youths did not plunge into crime immediately after landing on the street. Any number of factors contributed to the hesitation, including a lingering inhibition carried over from the society a child had departed, fear of capture and beatings, sufficient earnings produced by begging or petty trade, and lack of experience in the realm of illegal undertakings. On this issue, a study conducted over the period 1925–1928 of more than a thousand “difficult” children concluded that those who had engaged in begging only briefly before moving on to stealing came much more often from urban families than from the peasantry. By the same token, youths who had clung to begging longer revealed a greater tendency to have arrived from the countryside. Other things being equal, the author concluded, a peasant lad’s inexperience with city life made him less likely than a homeless boy of urban background to embrace thievery rapidly.^[16]

Some indigent juveniles, of course, never became criminals, certainly not habitual bandits. But in general, the longer a child remained adrift, the more likely he was to join the corps of petty thieves. Probably a large majority of boys on their own for at least several months supported themselves to a significant extent by stealing.^[17] Aside from level of desperation and tenure on the street, several additional considerations encouraged or retarded the turn to crime. Older children, for example, those at least fourteen years of age, generally took up stealing with less hesitation. Doubtless their greater speed and strength emboldened them, as did, perhaps, the reported adverse relationship between one’s age and begging receipts. Conversely, according to the study just mentioned, youths hampered by physical or mental deficiencies remained beggars longer than their healthier comrades. Finally, whatever a waif’s personal qualities, the sooner he joined a gang, the shorter his path to crime under the tutelage and prodding of the group’s veterans.^[18]

The immediate circumstances that convinced a child to exchange other means of support for thefts varied considerably. Perhaps a beggar or vendor saw his customary flow of coins dry up for a few days or simply tired of the work’s monotony. Maybe he stumbled upon an unexpected opportunity to steal with impunity—goods left temporarily unguarded outside a store or restaurant, for example. Having profited from the chance to acquire far more than he could hope to earn begging or trading, he kept an eye peeled for new openings. In some cases, gambling debts or an introduction to narcotics prompted robberies. So too might a desire for other “luxuries,” such as the better food and clothing enjoyed by experienced thieves.^[19] In any event, when a boy replaced (or supplemented) begging or peddling with stealing, the thefts often bore a relationship to his previous occupation. A former beggar on trains, for instance, might specialize in burglarizing railroad cars and their passengers. Children who made the rounds begging in apartments began sometimes to enter antechambers, communal kitchens, and other rooms surreptitiously, no longer intent on soliciting. Similarly, those accustomed to begging or trading amid crowds in streets and markets recognized opportunities to raid vendors and snatch purses.^[20]

Indeed, few inhabitants of Soviet cities in the 1920s had not heard startled cries to seize small ragged figures darting off with handbags or parcels.^[21] Before long, the image of a waif probably coincided in most minds with that of a petty thief. Unfair though it may have been to regard all street children in this light, persons in crowded public places were well advised to guard their bundles and pockets, especially in the decade’s early years. “More and more often,” an author from Kazan’ observed at this time, “one hears complaints from citizens about the extraordinary boldness and brazenness of juvenile delinquents” working the streets, stations, wharves, and markets of large cities. According to a report from the famine-stricken Crimea, attacks by bands of hungry youths grew so frequent that many women ceased venturing to bazaars without escorts.^[22]

Groups as large as ten to thirty children swooped in lightning fashion on individuals, knocking them down and making off with their purses, bags, or packages. While gangs generally preferred to ambush women and the elderly, even healthy men, stunned by the suddenness of an assault and swarmed over as if by a school of piranhas, found themselves stripped of belongings on occasion. A doctor, strolling through a bazaar in Simferopol’ with another man of substantial height and strength, described the following scene. His friend paused to purchase some bread, while the doctor went on ahead to a cigarette vendor. As he paid for the cigarettes, he noticed a group of children dash by and, a second later, heard a cry.

My companion was literally enveloped by a pile of boys: some hung on his arms; others clambered up his legs, trying to reach a parcel that he held high above him in his hand. The bread had already vanished; they seized it first of all. One lad managed to grab the parcel, which turned out to be a box of cigarette wrappers, and tore it open. The wrappers fell out, but the boys did not pay any further attention to them and dashed off. All of this happened so quickly that I did not have time to run to my companion’s assistance.

As a result of such attacks, officials increased patrols in the bazaars—to which some youths responded by carrying tobacco to throw in the eyes of resolute policemen.^[23] Other reports described boys who waited for passengers to pull out money to pay cab drivers and then made a grab for the funds before dashing off. Even toward the end of the 1920s, back pages of newspapers contained reports of street children surrounding a pedestrian, seizing her purse, handbag, or other possessions, and then scattering. Their familiarity with the neighborhood’s escape routes and hiding places made them difficult to apprehend. If people nearby caught one or more of the culprits, the latter had often managed already to relay the stolen goods to others in the group.^[24]

Rather than rush at their targets or overwhelm them with sheer numbers, many children preferred to steal more discreetly from passing citizens. Hence the legions of young pickpockets in the nation’s cities.^[25] These thieves naturally selected such locations as squares, bazaars, and train stations, where the press of bodies facilitated their probes. One observer watched for an hour as a boy took advantage of the crowds struggling to board trams at a stop near the Sukharevskii Market. Carefully gauging a group’s flow, he reached into pockets just as people grabbed for the rail at the tram’s entrance—and rarely emerged empty-handed. Far to the south, on the busy thoroughfares of Sevastopol’, a visitor noticed many filthy, half-naked street children, their long hair bleached by the sun, worming in and out of the sidewalk traffic. Few paid them attention until a man grabbed at his pocket and turned to pursue one of the boys. Like a rabbit reaching a thicket, the lad darted into the crowd, leaving the victim to gesture in resignation and continue on his way.^[26] Other youths exploited opportunities presented not by the jostling of torsos but by temporary distractions. Street singers, jugglers, contraptions set up in market squares to test one’s strength—anything would do that drew the curious and diverted their attention momentarily from belongings. In the case of inebriated citizens sprawled unconscious outdoors, adroit fingers required no artifice at all to relieve the dormant revelers of boots and other possessions.^[27]

Witnesses noted that some juveniles maneuvered in teams to concoct distractions for their prey. Two children in a market, for example, approached a woman from different directions. One occupied her vigilance by creating the impression that he sought an opening to snatch her basket, while his companion moved in from the side and put his hand in her pocket under the cover of a little board he held.^[28] At a train station, another pair employed a strategy in which one diverted a woman by begging persistently, even tugging her sleeve, despite her threats to call for the police. Meanwhile the other slipped in unnoticed and deftly removed parcels from her basket.^[29] A group of four prowling the Sukharevskii Market concerted their efforts somewhat differently. The lead youth scrutinized a line of shoppers until a promising target caught his eye. He then wormed his way into the densest portion of the line, seeking to position himself to explore the quarry’s pockets. Following this move, his three comrades pushed vigorously into the line behind him, trying to magnify the jostling and thus avail the group’s undertaking. On this occasion, however, their efforts bore no fruit, as the intended victim turned quickly and left.^[30]

After committing thefts of one sort or another, the perpetrators did not always make good their escape. Victims or others nearby managed now and then to seize some of the culprits, and youths so detained did not expect or generally receive mercy. Before ceding a boy to the police, those robbed—and even groups of onlookers—often expressed their exasperation by administering beatings that could leave arms, legs, ribs, jaws, or skulls broken. A survey of the Moscow Labor Home’s residents reported that 85 percent had received drubbings from citizens who apprehended them.^[31] Aleksei P——iaev, the boy whose father’s death in World War I and mother’s mental breakdown lay behind his arrival on the street, carried scars on his head from such batterings. “When you are caught stealing,” he confided, “it is good if they send you straight to the police station. Many people, when they catch you, begin beating you so hard that you go away scarcely alive.”^[32] Even so, hungry juveniles resigned themselves to the blows, a routine feature of their struggle for survival that could not be avoided. A scene in a market square brought this point home to an observer, who marveled at a ravenous lad devouring bread during the course of a thrashing:

I myself saw a boy of about 10–12 years of age reach out, while being beaten with a cane, for a piece of bread already covered with grime and voraciously cram it into his mouth. Blows rained on his back, but the boy, on hands and knees, continued hurriedly to bite off piece after piece so as not to lose the bread. This was near the bread row at the bazaar. Adults—women—gathered around and shouted: “That’s what the scoundrel deserves; beat him some more! We get no peace from these lice.”^[33]

Bantam thieves focused as much attention on street hawkers and market vendors as on pedestrians and shoppers. Most days, a line of petty traders (adults and children) stretched along Moscow’s Strastnoi Boulevard near the statue of Pushkin, where they sold cigarettes, apples, rolls, and the like. From time to time one of their number, sighting a gang bearing down on them at full speed, let out a warning cry, prompting the vendors to gather up their baskets or trays and scamper off in all directions. Encumbered with their wares, they did not always manage to escape. The New York Times correspondent in Moscow was struck by the raids’ explosive nature. “Suddenly there materializes beside you a group of children, seven, ten, and twelve years old. . . . They shuffle together, taking counsel, then swift as swallows make one after another a leap for the counter, grabbing anything, running like the wind.” Such attacks—everyday occurrences early in the 1920s—remained common throughout the decade. Nowhere could waifs expect to find food so accessibly displayed day after day as on street traders’ stands and in the market stalls of any large city.^[34]

Inexperienced juveniles, reduced by their circumstances to desperation, sometimes stalked vendors alone. But traders faced a more serious threat from thieves who struck in groups—occasionally numbering as many as thirty to forty youths—intent on overwhelming an entrepreneur and stripping her (less often his) stand of its goods.^[35] A long-term study of street children in Khar’kov yielded an unusually detailed description of such a raid on a woman selling cigarettes. The group’s leader deployed members with instructions to play one of four roles. Some were to distract the woman by asking about the prices she charged, while others, apparently as another diversion, pretended to look for lost coins nearby. Taking advantage of the opportunity thus created, the remaining participants were either to snatch cigarettes from her stand or seize bags hanging underneath. Once set in motion, however, the plan immediately ran into difficulty. The woman paid no attention to the youths pretending to look for coins and stared instead at the “assault troops” fidgeting nearby. Rather than abort the venture, the group’s leader took matters into his own hands by suddenly shoving the woman into her stand. During the resulting turmoil, those assigned to the task rushed in and grabbed cigarettes and bags.^[36]

Whatever the target, this organized approach typified a large number of thefts carried out by experienced children. One or more often stood watch to warn of approaching danger, especially if the crime involved surreptitious entry of an apartment, warehouse, or other facility. Depending on the undertaking’s nature, a decoy might also be stationed to distract the attention of a policeman, passersby, or owner of the item to be stolen—perhaps by feigning a fit or in the manner just described. Apart from those who actually seized the goods, others frequently positioned themselves in preparation to receive the loot and relay it instantly to a safe hiding place, especially if the group anticipated that the crime would be detected immediately.^[37] These support roles commonly fell to younger or less experienced participants, including a boy who had fled a children’s home in Khar’kov and traveled to Moscow. Youths with whom he became acquainted in a train station introduced him to the Khitrovskii market, where he received lessons in stealing from apartments. As a first step, his friends left him just outside the targeted building, poised to dash away with the stolen goods. Despite the operation’s success (celebrated with a drinking binge), teamwork did not strike him as essential, for he soon attempted a robbery on his own—resulting in a six-month prison sentence. As he headed back to the market following his confinement, he noticed an open door and crept in to steal whatever lay at hand. Once again, prison rather than riches ensued.^[38]

As this impulsive attempt indicated, not all raids germinated from careful planning. Sometimes a group simply rushed down the street—“like a pack of young wolves,” according to an observer in Moscow—with one member or another snatching on the run any exposed item that caught his eye in the booths or stands they passed.^[39] On occasion, children undertook these dashes as much for the adventure as for the spoils. In Khar’kov one day, the same leader who planned the attack on the cigarette vendor proposed two options for his followers to consider while loitering outside a movie theater: sneak into the theater or launch a thieving spree. Opting for the latter, the group set out immediately in unorganized fashion down the street, accompanied by a few school children caught up in the excitement of the impending escapade. Descending on the first cigarette trader to appear in their path, they seized some of his cigarettes and his cash box. The money fell out onto the ground, but the band did not break stride to gather it up and sped on, as if to outrun the vendor’s cries. Reaching the end of the street, they grabbed more cigarettes from another tray (at which point the police managed to apprehend two of the youngest, most passive participants) and rounded the corner. This new tack soon brought them upon snack bars, which surrendered a few bottles of mineral water to the passing raiders. As they approached a pharmacy, one of the boldest darted in and, a moment later, leaped out carrying a vessel extracted from a tank of boiling water. The group then made for the sanctuary afforded by back lanes, where they consumed the mineral water before returning to their home street.^[40]

Rather than harry vendors and pedestrians, some children preferred to steal from apartments. To this end they devised a variety of techniques for entering rooms, ranging from picking locks and crawling through windows to masquerading as laundresses or delivery boys.^[41] The strategies often entailed considerable risk, as suggested in the youths’ songs:

	Stealing, too, I learned the practice,
	And to vodka my love did give.
	Among apartments I took up prowling,
	And to prison I went to live.[42]

One night, just such a figure wriggled through an apartment window intending to open the doors for his confederates after the tenants had left in the morning. He wormed into a cupboard to hide until daybreak and soon fell asleep. The scheme collapsed when a resident surprised the unfamiliar lodger and shook him awake in a manner that betrayed no admiration for his dexterity.^[43]

D. Sergeev, who lived in the Gor’ky colony administered for years by Anton Makarenko, described a similarly bold robbery he had earlier attempted. Under night’s cover, he and some friends escaped from achildren’s home and hopped aboard a train that reached Taganrog the next morning. After carousing much of the day in this southern city, just down the line from Rostov-on-the-Don, they decided to break into a dwelling. When darkness fell, the group set to work on the chosen structure and silently removed a window pane. Sergeev climbed inside, threw some linen out to the others, and turned to a dresser in search of money. As he probed for the key, it fell to the floor with a clatter that sent him scrambling for cover behind the piece of furniture. Almost at once a woman appeared with a light and walked around the room, while Sergeev crouched motionless, afraid to breathe. Then she approached another bed to wake a man who arose and noticed the broken window. Alarmed by the discovery, he came over to inspect the dresser, where his startled gaze fell on the intruder. Sergeev made a dash for the window, but the man seized his legs and beat the boy severely before turning him over to the police.^[44]

Warier urchins stole from apartments by reaching inside the outer door for galoshes or a coat. Only as their experience and nerve developed did they penetrate further in search of more valuable items—forays that often took place under the cover of begging. A boy who found the door to an apartment or communal kitchen open, and with no sign of people within, would slip inside. If the occupants or someone in the hall noticed him, he began begging for food or money as if that had been his intent all along.^[45] Aleksei P——iaev stumbled upon this tactic by chance, after escaping from a children’s home. His travels took him through Viatka and Vologda to Moscow’s Iaroslavl’ Station, where hunger or some other motive drove him to beg at a nearby block of apartments. Inside the building, an unattended pair of boots changed his plans. With footwear in hand, he sped away and later resold his plunder in the Sukharevskii Market. Here he chanced upon a boy he had met in Vologda, and the two decided to join forces stealing from apartments in the guise of beggars. For a time, they mainly pilfered Primus stoves—so many, in fact, that Aleksei could not pass the market without middlemen shouting to inquire if he had more stoves to sell.

Before long the boys began to seize anything of value that opportunity presented. Nor did they confine themselves to rooms with doors ajar. Aleksei later offered the following tip on breaking windows to a staff member of a children’s colony: “You smear honey on the glass and break it with a rag. All the splinters will stick to the rag without making any noise.” During the pair’s last successful robbery, in a building near the Arbat, they entered a corridor lined with several locked doors. Scarcely discouraged, the “beggars” broke into four apartments using a piece of iron and a skeleton key without attracting other residents’ attention. Their exploits yielded two large sacks of loot, including men’s suits and a fur coat, which they sold in the Novo-Spasskii Market for more than enough money to outfit themselves with boots, leather jackets, and other clothes well beyond the reach of most street children.^[46]

Thefts from individuals and apartments, while accounting for the majority of robberies committed by homeless juveniles, did not exhaust the list of their targets. They pillaged storage facilities, workshops, and stores—sometimes smashing the glass to reach goods in window displays—and preyed on deliverymen’s vehicles and the carts of peasants bringing food to markets.^[47] Some who obtained work carrying loads at wharves, markets, and similar locations took advantage of opportunities to divert goods to destinations unintended by their employers.^[48] On the railways, precocious thieves stole baggage so frequently that travelers were well advised to close carriage windows as stations neared, however hot the weather. “One day this past summer,” a foreigner recounted, “as the train slowed up for a station, one of my friends saw a ragged little arm insinuate itself into the compartment through the window and gracefully appropriate his valise; four besprizorni fled with the booty, thumbing their noses at the despoiled.”^[49] During the unloading of fruit and vegetables, youths became a common sight in rail yards, maneuvering for opportunities to slink under cars and snatch produce. One boy even bored holes in cars and then filled up bags with the grain that poured out.^[50]

These illegal activities, not to mention the street setting that encompassed every aspect of waifs’ lives, insured contact between them and the underworld of adults. Locations in which children sought refuge often sheltered older vagabonds and criminals as well, thereby serving as schools for newcomers in the occupations and diversions of the street.^[51] Little wonder, then, that numerous groups quickly developed ties with grownups and conducted thefts under their direction.^[52] Many sources told of adolescents living in thieves’ dens, sometimes as camp followers, but frequently as active participants in the bands’ activities.^[53] From a youth’s point of view, membership in an adult gang offered multiple advantages—not the least of which were food, shelter, and protection from threats that menaced one alone on the street.^[54] He in turn performed a variety of tasks to earn his keep. Even a relatively inexperienced boy could soon be trained to stand watch at a lair or during robberies, and children were likewise deployed to observe buildings—in order to determine the residents’ daily schedules, for example—or gather other information.^[55] The underworld also utilized juveniles to spirit away stolen goods and serve as couriers if messages or parcels had to be delivered around town. Purveyors of bootleg liquor and cocaine sometimes marketed their products through street urchins, who might also be instructed to take orders for new deliveries.^[56] Finally, echoing Bill Sikes’s manipulation of Oliver Twist, thieves on occasion dispatched diminutive accomplices through narrow apertures or up drainpipes toward destinations inaccessible to larger bodies.^[57] Lacking Charles Dickens to rescue them, youths who fell in with this company stood the greatest chance of entering adulthood as proficient and habitual criminals.

That prospect appealed to a boy named Alexander as he served a sentence in the Moscow Labor Home. A few years earlier, after the death of his widowed mother, his older brothers had placed him in school, where nothing engaged his interest. Deserting the classroom to romp with street children, he began to commit petty thefts and eventually gravitated into the orbit of an adult criminal. This man, an Estonian who had fled his native land, fed and clothed Alexander and trained him as an assistant. Over a span of two years they succeeded in several large thefts and lived comfortably on the proceeds. But one day Alexander decided his schooling was complete and undertook a robbery alone, without his mentor’s knowledge. Capture and imprisonment were the result, and Alexander expressed regret in the Moscow Labor Home over venturing forth without the master’s guidance. He continued to idealize the Estonian as an “invincible thief” and dreamed of achieving similar standing. The opportunity may have arisen, for the Estonian promised to take him in again upon his release.^[58]

Abandoned children vexed many people around them even when not stealing. To the fastidious eye, their mere appearance represented an affront and caused numerous pens to shudder when describing lice-ridden creatures encountered about town. Caked with grime and clad in filthy garments, their sooty feet often bare or wrapped in newspaper, they inspired revulsion as often as pity. Some wore shoes and clothing of outlandish size, stolen from adults or retrieved from garbage, as a traveler noticed in Batum. There, a boy begging in the train station flopped about inside pants so big that he could pull them over his head. The man who noticed Chainik in Narkompros’s waiting room described the other youths present as “clad just in underwear, blackened by dirt, with rags hanging down to the knees; or barefoot, with the remains of a coat over an otherwise bare body. Some wore sacks in place of outer clothes, with immense galoshes on their feet.”^[59] A sympathetic Konstantin Paustovsky came upon a group in similarly mangy dress:

These jackets obtained from some grown-up man or woman were long, reaching below the knee, with dangling sleeves. Time, dust and dirt had given them a uniformly mouse-grey colour and made them shine as if covered with oil. In the torn and battered pockets of these jackets the besprizorniki kept all their belongings—bits of broken combs, knives, cigarettes, crusts of bread, matches, greasy cards, and bits of dirty bandages. They did not even have shirts, however old or decayed, under their jackets—just their frozen, dirty, greenish-yellow bodies, covered with bleeding streaks which they got from scratching.^[60]

Youths in need of warm clothing donned whatever came to hand, turning themselves into strange spectacles, as when boys sported both men’s and women’s apparel. Pravda described a girl in Moscow wearing meager tatters through which appeared her naked body, bluish from the cold—by itself, scarcely an exceptional sight among the homeless. But on her feet glistened new, fur-trimmed overshoes, evidently stolen. The juxtaposition of these foppish boots with the rest of her attire jarred the eye.^[61]

Such children stood out everywhere—splashing in mud puddles, loitering in public areas, riding on the bumpers of trams, and dashing through crowds, lacing the air with vulgar observations.^[62] Their recreation filled many with the aversion registered by a woman watching a group playing cards on the sidewalk: “Dirty, infested rags hung in shreds over them, and it was difficult to say which looked dirtier and more revolting, the rags or the bare parts of the body that could be seen through the rags.” Before long a stray cat walked by. “Immediately a boy jumped up, threw his cap over its head and began to choke it. A minute later he removed the cap and started on a run, pulling the wretched animal by the tail amid a chorus of screams and oaths.”^[63]

While some citizens might dismiss these antics as mild annoyances at worst, other pastimes of vagrant youths displayed more destructiveness, frequently taking the form of vandalism. “Besprizornye,” one official emphasized, “are the breeding grounds of hooliganism.”^[64] At railroad terminals, on occasion, they broke windows in cars and buildings, showered station personnel and passengers with rocks, and threw objects under passing trains. From the provinces came word that street children in the town of Podol’sk broke windows in the women’s section of the bathhouse on Fridays and Saturdays, its period of operation.^[65] Spiteful waifs also molested pedestrians—tripping passersby, setting dogs on them, staining their coats with various substances, and cutting off women’s braids. In at least a few instances, they abducted other youths and stripped them of their clothing.^[66]

Among the more private indulgences of homeless juveniles, none surpassed the allure of gambling. Cards apparently captured the largest number of enthusiasts across the country, but many other vehicles for betting, such as guessing which side of a thrown coin would land up, enjoyed popularity as well. Aside from children only recently orphaned, most youths whose lives centered on the street—from newspaper vendors and other petty traders to thieves—were well acquainted with games of chance. In the absence of commercially produced playing cards, they manufactured their own by such methods as laminating a few sheets of paper together with glue made from bread, cutting out blank rectangles from this stock, and adding the appropriate designs and numbers.^[67] Some groups even made gambling their full-time occupation and supported themselves for the most part with their win nings. Roaming a city’s seedy districts, they stirred up games with other lads, whom their expertise and trickery often relieved of coins and possessions.^[68]

Passionate gamblers added their clothing to the stakes frequently enough that the appearance of a half-naked child amid a group of urchins could well testify to the youth’s recent setback at cards.^[69] Rather than play for cash or goods—or lacking such items—some elected to gamble for the right to inflict blows of one sort or another on the loser. At the train station in Omsk, a boy nicknamed Baldy (Lysyi) preferred to gamble na volosianku: that is, the winner gained the right to yank out a tuft of hair from the head of the loser. His half-bald head, covered with bloody wounds, suggested that good fortune had not been his steadfast companion.^[70] Card players at the Moscow Labor Home, after losing everything else, occasionally stayed in the game by agreeing to undergo sodomy if their reversals continued. One who lost “himself” in this fashion avoided the penalty by slashing his body with glass splinters to secure admission to a hospital.^[71]

In games demanding the wager of money or goods, youths without either might gamble on credit. They promised to cover any losses with future income generated by begging, trading, or stealing—in some cases an amount requiring several days’ work. Such debts inspired a verse heard among juvenile newspaper vendors in Moscow: “For aces and jacks, I traded all summer” (Za tuza i za valeta, torgoval ia tselo leto).^[72] On occasion, a boy gambled away to others in his group a promise of everything that he could beg or steal the next day (or several days), rather than a fixed amount of money or food.^[73] Those who ran up debts far larger than they could ever hope to pay might be required to perform services desired by creditors. In Odessa, a group of children prowling the streets came upon a cluster of youths singing in public for money. As it happened, one of the performers was deeply in debt to the leader of the first band, a boy named Kolia. Recognizing the debtor, Kolia instructed him to sing for his group, forgiving anywhere from fifty kopecks to one ruble of the debt for each song. Even as his voice grew hoarse, the child acknowledged his obligation and sang on endlessly as ordered.^[74]

Though hardly as popular as gambling, motion pictures also occupied the time of juveniles on their own. Large cities contained numerous movie houses by the 1920s, and these enticed homeless youths along with the rest of the population. To be sure, part of the cinema’s appeal had little to do with the films themselves. The bright lights, nearby vendors of cigarettes and candy, and (in some cases) prostitutes lured street children whose intentions did not include an evening inside the theater. Even those actually seeking to enter the buildings often viewed the facilities as more than purveyors of gripping tales. Cinemas offered shelter from the cold and a dark hall in which other viewers, absorbed in the screen’s story, did not always pay sufficient attention to their pockets and handbags.^[75]

That said, numerous abandoned youths did enjoy the movies. According to reports from several cities, they—like many others then and now—preferred fast-paced adventure films with vivid plots, bold stunts, and exotic settings. Their favorites included several American productions, such as The Mark of Zorro, as well as various Soviet sagas of action and peril, among them The Battleship Potemkin. When asked in an anonymous survey which actor they would most like to emulate, thirty of thirty-three named Americans, with Douglas Fairbanks alone garnering eighteen votes.^[76]

Homeless children seeking to enter cinemas generally faced obstacles. Certain theaters did not admit them—even those with tickets in hand—because of their soiled appearance and no doubt their reputation as thieves. Even at less immaculate movie houses, many waifs did not possess sufficient money for tickets and therefore developed a number of techniques for entering free of charge. Some slipped in past the door attendant by taking advantage of distractions. A few stole tickets purchased by others. On occasion, crowds of juveniles overwhelmed ticket takers and burst into theaters. At least one group pooled their coins to buy a single ticket, enabling a member to enter the building. Once inside, he waited for the lights to dim and then admitted his comrades through a back door. In some neighborhoods, gangs defended “their” cinemas from other groups based along nearby thoroughfares, insisting that only they had the right to sneak into the building in question.^[77]

Among the other diversions pursued by street children, tobacco figured prominently. More than one investigator concluded that “almost all” homeless youths smoked, and this assessment struck close to the mark, at least in the case of those long at large.^[78] Reports from numerous children’s institutions listed anywhere from 50 to 100 percent of the residents as smokers—some of whom had consumed twenty-five to thirty cigarettes per day on the street when only six years old. Efforts to eradicate the practice encountered tenacious resistance and prompted one boy to shout defiantly: “Down with Soviet power, not cigarettes!”^[79] Alcoholic beverages, too, attracted besprizornye (though not in numbers to match tobacco’s devotees).^[80] Despite restrictions on the sale of liquor, juveniles had little difficulty locating willing vendors. Some acquired enough money to purchase comparatively palatable spirits and cigarettes, but most consumed tobacco and alcohol of a sort unlikely to tempt connoisseurs. Unless they could steal alternatives, they made do with makhorka (coarse, acrid tobacco), discarded cigarette butts, home-brewed drinks, or even substitutes such as varnish.^[81]

Investigators who scarcely regarded it a revelation to find urchins familiar with tobacco and alcohol were struck by the number using cocaine, for only a decade earlier few adolescents knew of the drug. The first half of the 1920s witnessed a dramatic change, owing both to the larger supply of cocaine in general and the newly deserted multitudes living in close proximity to dealers and consumers of narcotics.^[82] Thus, forms listing information to be gathered by Juvenile Affairs Commissions incorporated a question on cocaine, and many sources mentioned street children who had acquired the substance.^[83] Some youths tried other narcotics as well, notably opium, morphine, and hashish (especially in Central Asia). But none approached cocaine’s popularity, probably in large part because of its wider availability and ease of use, with no special facilities or equipment required.^[84]

For obvious reasons, precise information is unavailable regarding the number of juveniles introduced to narcotics. In the realm of estimates, a publication of the Commissariat of Health in 1923 mentioned young cocaine users as totaling “in the thousands,” and other sources surmised that 10 to 15 percent of homeless children in large cities consumed drugs (which included heavy drinking).^[85] Among institutions, those stocked with the street’s veterans naturally recorded the highest percentages of these narkomany. A group of doctors investigating three of Moscow’s labor communes in 1924 established that every one of the residents in a compound for the most “difficult” had used cocaine, while no one in the other two facilities gave indication of this experience. The previous year, an examination of juvenile delinquents in the Moscow Labor Home found 28 percent to have taken cocaine (some starting as early as seven to ten years of age), and results from another study published in 1926 put the figure at 85–90 percent.^[86] A boy’s physical appearance alone might advertise his drug habit to investigators. As previously noted, waifs sometimes bestowed telling names on heavy users of cocaine and alcohol—youths whose wasted, shriveled cast stood out even in their rough surroundings.^[87]

Such was the drug’s effect on Grigorii Valentinov. He had parted with his parents in Samara during the famine and traveled to Moscow, where officials placed him in a shelter. After learning from some of the other children how to steal, he escaped.

I began to hang around train stations and markets, looking with dark thieving eyes for something to swipe. When evening comes there is nowhere to sleep. You have to sleep somewhere on the street, on the cold dirty grit. In the morning you get up filthy and go about business. Sometimes, when you are unable to steal anything, you go around hungry, mean, and depressed.

In this way I lived two years—in cold and hunger. One day I went to see some of the guys at the train station. They were snorting some sort of white powder. I asked with surprise what this was. They answered: “This is marafet,” that is, cocaine. They gave me some to take, and I became like a madman, unable to say a word.

From that time on, I began to take cocaine. Whatever I stole went to get cocaine. I took cocaine for two and a half years and became thin and pale, hardly able to walk. Eventually I landed in a clinic and began to recover.^[88]

Cocaine and other narcotics were most readily available in the nation’s principal metropolises, but lesser cities also included drugs among their underworlds’ distractions. A study in 1925 of the links between cocaine and crime ascertained that a “significant number” of the criminals under consideration had first encountered cocaine in the provinces.^[89] Whether in the capitals or far removed, street children were often introduced to cocaine by older thieves and prostitutes. Some hoodlums drew juveniles to their gangs and kept them loyal by periodically supplying the boys with drugs. On occasion, criminals gave doses of cocaine to youths in order to render them less reluctant to perform such harrowing tasks as climbing a drainpipe to enter a second-floor window.^[90] Whoever first acquainted them with narcotics, though, most underage users had to obtain the drugs themselves. As with addicts of other ages and countries, the habit’s expense inspired thefts.^[91]

Cocaine could be purchased in a variety of urban quarters. Large outdoor markets and the lanes around them often proved abundant sources, as did certain bars, cafes, flophouses, restaurants, and theaters. Derelict buildings and labyrinthine alleys of rundown neighborhoods also provided suitable cover for transactions and soon acquired a corresponding reputation. Among the purveyors, newspaper accounts listed several dens operated by Chinese and Koreans, who sold morphine, opium, and cocaine.^[92] Those at home on the street knew of convenient buildings where they could buy cocaine and stay to consume it. A proprietor generally did not charge for use of the room—in which dozens of youths sometimes gathered—making his money instead by selling the drug. In Moscow, a group of formerly homeless boys showed authorities a lair where children (and others) could exchange stolen goods for cocaine. The author of another account visited an urban wasteland of debris, pits, and ramshackle structures, not far from the Sukharevskii Market, where he watched youths and prostitutes purchase cocaine openly. An even brisker trade transpired there at night, he was told, but it would be dangerous to return then for a look.^[93]

In addition to tobacco, alcohol, and cocaine, the street introduced many of its inhabitants to sexual activity without delay. A study in 1925 of ninety-four former waifs in Odessa determined that 40 percent had begun their sex lives by the age of fourteen. Sources are filled with accounts of sexually active children only ten or twelve years old, and some began even earlier. Investigation at an institute for girls (many of them former prostitutes) revealed that 3 percent first had intercourse by the age of seven.^[94] One way or another, abandoned juveniles commonly learned sexual practices from the adults who shared their seedy domain. In this respect, as with underworld jargon and criminal skills, thieves and prostitutes served as tutors readily emulated.^[95] Of course, the first sexual encounters of many youths, especially girls, were entirely involuntary, the product of rape. Those newly on their own fell to the mercy of experienced street children, adult thieves, railway workers, and others, with rape time and again a result.^[96] According to a report presented at a conference on juvenile problems in the summer of 1920, one reason for the extensive sexual experience among a sample of institutionalized girls lay in the long period of warfare the country had just endured. World War I and the Civil War spread large numbers of soldiers as well as refugees throughout the country, and sexual contact between the troops and homeless girls (either as prostitutes or rape victims) was apparently substantial.^[97]

As in attempts to gauge drug use, confidence shuns efforts to estimate the number of sexually active juveniles. No doubt initiation was routine among those long on the street—not just prostitutes, but others who engaged in sex with fellow orphans, adult prostitutes, and thieves. A report that lists fully three-fourths of the Moscow Labor Home’s delinquents as experienced in this regard provides some idea of the practice’s extent among boys accustomed to the underworld. Sexual relations frequently appear to have been casual and fleeting, though a few accounts describe instances of a girl and boy living together, or sometimes one girl and several boys, imitating arrangements chosen by adult thieves and drifters.^[98] A handful of observers noted boys who engaged in sex among themselves—by means of rape, for example, or prostitution within institutions.^[99]

Before long, some sexually active youths contracted venereal diseases, usually syphilis or gonorrhea.^[100] Investigations of children in Khar’kov, Odessa, and Tashkent found that from 4 to 12 percent of the sample (some straight from the street, others by then in institutions) had at least one such disease. These figures may apply accurately to the country as a whole, but the small number (several hundred) involved in the studies renders such a conclusion difficult to embrace with confidence. If this extrapolation proved reasonably accurate, however, it would challenge the conclusion, shared widely in the general population, that waifs as a group were saturated with sexually transmitted diseases.^[101] Among street girls alone, the percentage almost certainly was higher. While here, too, fragmentary data do not permit precise calculations, the numerous girls who worked as prostitutes or suffered rapes doubtless resulted in a larger portion—30 percent of a thousand girls in one study—contracting venereal diseases.^[102] In any case, it seems safe to accept the conclusion of a medical journal in Khar’kov that homeless youths accounted for the lion’s share of juveniles who acquired syphilis through sexual contact. As another author put it in 1921, the surge in the number of boys and girls treated for venereal diseases stemmed directly from the high tide of besprizornye.^[103]

Life as described in the preceding pages naturally left a deep imprint on those who experienced it. Few could endure this existence for long without developing characteristics regarded as undesirable by much of society. To be sure, a big difference existed between a starving village youth, newly arrived in a strange city, and an adolescent tempered by years in the street. The huge contingent of homeless children produced by war and famine struck observers most often as exhausted and helpless, not wicked and perverted. As the years passed, many died, returned to relatives, or entered state institutions. But others remained at large and learned to cope in ways that inclined few to view them as pitiable victims. Similar differences existed among juveniles who replenished their ranks in the middle and later years of the decade. A boy long accustomed to train stations and markets as a result of parental neglect joined the homeless with an outlook far different from that of a child thrown suddenly into the same milieu by unanticipated adversity. Whatever their route to the street, though, the longer they remained there, the more vividly they displayed qualities considered twisted and threatening by society beyond the underworld.^[104]

Some authors argued that the rigors of independent life nurtured certain positive attributes rarely exhibited so prominently by “normal” children. Boys and girls struggling to survive, in other words, allegedly developed impressive resourcefulness, adaptability, boldness, and similar qualities.^[105] No doubt something of the sort did occur, at least among youths not reduced by their plight to illness or apathy. Occasionally, though, the claims went further, suggesting against most evidence that a Spartan life in groups on the street rendered juveniles collectivists at heart, hostile to “bourgeois materialism.” Forced by their harsh environment to work together, the argument went, they developed an unspoiled, cooperative outlook, which social workers were urged to utilize in reclaiming them as part of a new generation of communists.^[106]

For the most part, however, observers acknowledged the obvious: homelessness yielded bitter fruit. Time and again, studies revealed a wide range of personality problems among waifs, ranging from abysmal hygiene habits to severe psychopathic disorders. Reports frequently described veterans among them as emotionally volatile, vengeful, unreliable, disinclined to work, and devoted to any number of underworld vices.^[107] Whatever qualms a Bolshevik might harbor regarding traditional schools, only the most naive could fail to prefer their work over lessons taught in the alleys outside. Anyone who argued that vagrancy helped groom countrymen for socialism betrayed either a fanciful view of street life or an alarming image of the Party’s goal.

Little effort is required to imagine that forsaken youths, miserable in their wretched habitat, clamored for escape into relief institutions. Many certainly did, sometimes besieging government buildings in large numbers to press their desire.^[108] Investigators often discovered groups in whose midst appeared individuals pleading desperately for admittance to already overcrowded facilities.^[109] Nevertheless, such scenes should not obscure the fact that numerous juveniles adjusted to the street in one way or another and displayed no desire to change their way of life. Greater success in begging, crime, or prostitution—not entrance to a school or boarding institution—occupied their concern. A teenage girl, working as a prostitute since the age of thirteen, stated bluntly: “When I have money, I like to take a little cocaine and smoke a bit. I like this life and will never change it.” A twelve-year-old boy, living on his own, declared: “It’s better to live free like this. I eat what I please and don’t starve. It’s cold here, yes, but I like it better than in an orphanage. I can go wherever I please.”^[110] Children rounded up and placed in institutions fled by the thousand and returned to the markets and rails. Many repeated this cycle for years, driven in part by the facilities’ deplorable conditions, but just as powerfully by a desire, as they often put it, “to be free.”^[111]

Out on the street, they typically regarded the society beyond their world with emotions that ran from wariness to loathing. Probably a majority of the population viewed them with much the same feelings—as thieves and degenerates. This produced a chasm between the two camps that appeared in the youths’ songs:

	Spit at me and throw your stones,
	It’s nothing new, I will endure.
	From you I can expect no pity,
	There’s none to help me, I am sure.

Or

	Other kids are treated fondly,
	And from time to time caressed.
	But for me the handling’s cruel,
	I to none at all am blessed.[112]

This animosity flared into view one summer’s day on a Black Sea beach, where several waifs startled a group of sunbathers. Cursing all the while, the children plunged into the waves and then dashed around the beach, splashing water to and fro. People nearby fired verbal abuse and threats at the swirling figures and ordered them to leave. Not the least intimi dated, the newcomers mocked and swore at the bathers, who soon de parted themselves. A witness who recorded the incident recalled most vividly the hatred and contempt that burned in the juveniles’ eyes.^[113]

Nor was this an isolated incident. Time and again, in their actions, interviews, and reminiscences, homeless youths expressed aversion for a surrounding citizenry that represented to them only potential victims or persecutors.^[114] At a station near the Black Sea, a young passenger leaned out of his train car and spat in the face of an adolescent vagabond below. The latter riveted his gaze on the window from which the offense had come and picked up a rock. But at that moment a whistle sounded, and the train lumbered into motion. He slipped back into his spot under the carriage, still clutching the stone and muttering that he would yet pay back the little burzhui. At another station, near Saratov, a peasant recounted to a traveling companion how street children had robbed him on several occasions. Warming to the topic, he promised a thrashing to the next one he caught and punctuated the vow with a menacing gesture out the window to a group of his antagonists standing near the train. They responded with their own threats, assuring him in turn that they would find an opportunity to carry them out.^[115]

Youths such as these did not view stealing as a transgression. Questioned on the point, they responded along the following lines: “Some people have things. We don’t. So why shouldn’t we steal from them?” and “Since I don’t have it, why shouldn’t I take it?” Some did not hesitate to blame their deeds on the callousness of society, in the process abandoning pity for any but themselves. “And now my soul is hardened,” proclaimed one of their songs—a reproach to those whose refusals of assistance had steered many to crime.^[116] An investigator in Saratov described the alienation in stark terms:

People fear the besprizornyi, shun him, sometimes avoid him. And he, this juvenile delinquent, learns early to pay back this cold society in the same coin. Feelings of sympathy for people are removed from him; people become hateful to him. It is a pleasure for him to cause them any sort of unpleasantness. Thus, crime in his eyes amounts to a violation of the laws only of these well fed, clothed, and complacent people—not something to trouble his conscience. Anything may be done when it comes to these alien, hostile people.^[117]

Little wonder, then, that many considered waifs depraved and malignant to an extent that precluded any prospect of rehabilitation. An investigator in Omsk, distressed by the conditions in which children were living in the city’s train station, approached a police official to see if something could be done. The policeman revealed no enthusiasm for the topic and cut short the conversation with an emphatic assessment: “Here’s how it is, comrade. Officially, I have nothing to say to you. Unofficially, my opinion is this: the sooner all your besprizorniki die, the better. I have to deal with them daily, and I tell you sincerely that they are a hopeless bunch, soon to be bandits. And we have enough bandits without them. Is that clear?”^[118] Even the chairman of the Baku Juvenile Affairs Commission—whose organization was entrusted with the very task of placing delinquents on the road to recovery—once remarked: “When all is said and done, you will not make a human being out of a besprizornyi. They are all toughs, thieves, hooligans, and murderers.”^[119] The youths themselves sometimes expressed doubt that they would ever be able to change their ways, even if they so desired. “A thief I have been, and a thief I will remain,” declared one on his dispatch to an institution. Said another to a social worker: “I will put it to you this way, sister. Half of us are such that nothing will work with us now.”^[120] In the face of such pessimistic assessments, the young Soviet government set out not merely to save the besprizornye, but to transform them into builders of a new, communist society.

Notes