Part 2

4. Children of the State

Children in orphanages are state children.
Their father is the state and their mother is the whole of
worker-peasant society.

Prison, prison! What a word,
Shameful, frightful to the ear.
But for me it’s all familiar,
I have long since lost my fear.

In the heady days of revolutionary triumph, the new Bolshevik government sought to take upon itself the task of feeding, clothing, and even raising a large share of the country’s children. Decrees instructed central and local agencies in 1918 and 1919 to arrange the distribution of food to juveniles—free of charge—from schools, special dining halls, and other outlets.^[1] As late as July 1921 the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) noted that while the rest of the population was expected to provide for itself, the state would continue to assume responsibility for supplying food to minors.^[2] More ambitious still, Narkompros and other government agencies anticipated the development of a network of children’s homes that would be capable before long of raising the nation’s offspring.^[3] Enthusiasts viewed the institutions as far better equipped than the “bourgeois” family to fashion youths into productive, devoted members of a communist society. What task could be more important, they asked, than replacing the traditional family environment—often steeped in ignorance, coarseness, and hostility toward the Bolsheviks—with homes administered by the government itself?^[4] “The faculty of educating children is far more rarely encountered than the faculty of begetting them,” observed The ABC of Communism. “Of one hundred mothers, we shall perhaps find one or two who are competent educators. The future belongs to social education.”^[5]

Ambitious in the best of times, these plans were deflated by the dire reality of the Soviet regime’s early years. As millions of waifs overwhelmed government institutions and budgets, Bolshevik hopes of rearing most other youths appeared practical only to unflinching visionaries. Children’s homes may have been intended originally for all juveniles, but they soon acquired a reputation as refuges for the multitude of young vagabonds bred by war and famine. Even this restricted clientele proved so vast that most facilities could long do little more than struggle to prevent their charges from dying or running away. The goal of a socialist upbringing retreated to await more auspicious days.^[6]

As commissariats of the Soviet government took shape following the Revolution, rivalry soon developed among three of them—Narkompros, the Commissariat of Health, and the Commissariat of Social Security—over responsibility for child welfare. Each pressed claims to administer a variety of institutions entrusted with aiding abandoned juveniles.^[7] At first, early in 1918, decrees specified that care of homeless youths (including the operation of children’s homes) belonged in the Commissariat of Social Security’s hands.^[8] But Narkompros, undaunted, continued to lobby Sovnarkom for a greater share of responsibility in this area and gradually prevailed. As early as June 1918, Sovnarkom ordered the transfer to Narkompros of institutions for delinquents, and the following month Narkompros sent circulars to provincial agencies, instructing them to turn over Juvenile Affairs Commissions (which handled the cases of delinquents) to Narkompros offices on the scene. Unimpressed by these instructions, some local branches of the Commissariat of Social Security refused to relinquish control, and the matter lay unresolved for months. As a result, from province to province, one found commissions run by each of the two commissariats and even, in a few instances, by the Commissariat of Health.^[9] Finally, in February 1919, Sovnarkom ordered the Commissariat of Social Security to transfer its remaining children’s institutions to Narkompros by year’s end, thereby terminating the former’s brief tenure in the vanguard of the campaign to rescue street urchins.^[10]

Narkompros also bickered with the Commissariat of Health, for each claimed a larger role in the care of indigent children than the other deemed appropriate.^[11] Champions of Narkompros naturally stressed the importance of providing a proper education and general upbringing, while health officials emphasized the need for medical care. Beset by these competing appeals, Sovnarkom issued a series of decrees beginning in the autumn of 1919, spelling out the domain of each agency. In general, the Commissariat of Health retained control of children’s clinics, sanatoriums, and similar institutions where medical treatment and physical therapy represented the principal activity, while pedagogic facilities remained under the administration of Narkompros. According to a decree issued by Sovnarkom in September 1921, doctors chosen and paid by the Commissariat of Health would provide medical treatment for youths in Narkompros’s establishments. At the same time, local Narkompros branches received the right to nominate candidates for these positions and to dismiss individual physicians.^[12] Jurisdictional rivalries flared now and then during the remainder of the decade, but they were not so severe as to prevent the two agencies from reaching an accommodation. Health officials operated homes for juveniles up to age three (as well as medical facilities for older youths), and Narkompros administered institutions for residents three years of age and older.^[13]

Thus Narkompros emerged with primary responsibility for the rehabilitation of street children. By the beginning of 1923, after a series of internal reorganizations, the agency had evolved the following departments and subsections to undertake the mission: At the highest level, in Moscow, the commissariat’s branches (covering such bailiwicks as publishing, the fine arts, censorship, propaganda, higher education, and vocational training) included one titled Main Administration of Social Upbringing and Polytechnic Education of Children (Glavsotsvos). Glavsotsvos in turn contained a number of subsections with responsibilities that included preschool and primary school education, teacher training, and experimental educational institutions. The subsection of central importance in the attempt to reclaim abandoned youths bore the name Social and Legal Protection of Minors (SPON).^[14]

SPON’s four subdivisions focused their attention respectively on (1) the struggle against juvenile homelessness and delinquency; (2) the establishment of guardianships for youths; (3) the rearing of “defective” children (which included delinquents); and (4) the provision of legal assistance and information of benefit to juveniles (such as locating lost dependents and reuniting them with relatives). SPON thus administered most of Narkompros’s orphanages, supervised its Juvenile Affairs Commissions, and dispatched social workers to approach young inhabitants of the street.^[15] Throughout the Russian Republic, each province maintained its own Narkompros office (GubONO), generally organized to resemble the basic blueprint of Narkompros in Moscow. Among the branches of a GubONO, therefore, one customarily found a Gubsotsvos (the provincial equivalent of Glavsotsvos) with its own SPON subsection shouldering assignments similar to those of SPON in Moscow. Even smaller administrative units, such as districts (uezdy) and cities, sometimes opened their own Narkompros offices, which commonly retained a structure close to that described above.^[16] In Moscow, the thousands of tattered youths thronging the capital by 1922 prompted formation of an Extraordinary Commission in the Struggle with Juvenile Besprizornost’ and Juvenile Crime (the Children’s Extraordinary Commission, for short)—a division of the Moscow City Narkompros organization (MONO). Thereafter the Children’s Extraordinary Commission sought out Moscow’s homeless, handled cases of juvenile delinquents, and administered welfare institutions until it was combined at the beginning of 1925 with another unit of MONO to produce a new division bearing the SPON title.^[17]

In January 1919, amid the commissariats’ wrangling, Sovnarkom decreed the formation of a Council for the Defense of Children. Headed by a representative from Narkompros and including members from the commissariats of labor, food, social security, and health, the council received instructions to coordinate the work of individual government agencies to improve the supply of food and other essentials to juveniles.^[18] However, as it lacked the leverage to command respect from even the commissariats represented in its own offices, the council made little headway promoting bureaucratic cooperation and played an insignificant role in providing relief to destitute youths.^[19] Before long, it gave way to a more imposing interagency body, a commission driven initially by the zeal and clout of the secret police.

To some, the name Feliks Dzerzhinskii, head of the Cheka (secret police), suggested dry-eyed ruthlessness—an image that Dzerzhinskii himself scarcely shunned. But when conversation turned to the plight of waifs, his expressions of dismay at their misery struck more than one interlocutor.^[20] In just such a conversation he told Anatolii Lunacharskii, head of Narkompros:

In this matter we must rush directly to help, as if we saw children drowning. Narkompros alone has not the strength to cope. It needs the broad help of all Soviet society. A broad commission under VTsIK [the All-Russian Central Executive Committee]—of course with the closest participation of Narkompros—must be created, including within it all institutions and organizations which may be useful. I have already said something of this to a few people. I would like to stand at the head of that commission, and I want to include the Cheka apparatus directly in the work.^[21]

Pursuing this goal, Dzerzhinskii took the lead in establishing, on February 10, 1921, a Commission for the Improvement of Children’s Life attached to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.^[22] Apart from Dzerzhinskii as chairman, the commission included six other representatives, one each from the Cheka, Narkompros, the commissariats of health and food, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, and the Central Trade Union Council. In some respects their duties differed little from those of the earlier Council for the Defense of Children. They were to facilitate the flow of supplies to agencies responsible for juveniles’ welfare and oversee implementation of decrees (as well as suggest new legislation) to protect minors. But the Children’s Commission, more than the council, focused its energy and resources on the problem of homelessness, underscoring the government’s growing concern with this phenomenon. The order creating the council in January 1919 had called for aid to needy youths in general, without referring specifically to those abandoned. Two years later, in February 1921, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee directed the newborn Children’s Commission to assist “first of all” agencies caring for boys and girls of the street.

The same decree of February 10 instructed province and district executive committees to designate officials for children’s commissions at these levels in the Russian Republic, and similar organizational structures took shape in other republics. In Ukraine, for example, the equivalent of the Children’s Commission bore the title Central Commission for the Assistance of Children and was attached to the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee.^[23] The primary role of the commission in the Russian Republic, and of analogous bodies elsewhere, was to assist other government agencies, most notably Narkompros, rather than operate their own orphanages and schools. Nevertheless, Lunacharskii and his lieutenants at Narkompros displayed little enthusiasm for the commission and proposed the creation of interagency bodies featuring a more prominent role for Narkompros and none for the Cheka.^[24] But the commission weathered these early challenges (it survived for nearly two decades), and other agencies eventually accepted it as a partner in their labors.

Meanwhile, the number of homeless juveniles steadily increased. As the government struggled to assign general responsibility on this front to such bodies as Narkompros and the Children’s Commission, the question remained: how should they go about aiding millions of beggars and thieves? Everyone desired that prerevolutionary shelters be replaced, but many social workers and educators had no idea—others a bewildering variety of utopian theories—how to organize and operate new institutions.^[25] Ilya Ehrenburg described the chaos that reigned among facilities for “morally defective” youths in Kiev during the months of Bolshevik control in 1919. Though he possessed no experience or even any connection with such work—and thus much to his surprise—he received an assignment to help rehabilitate children.

We spent a long time working out a project for an “experimental pilot colony” where juvenile law-breakers would be educated in a spirit of “creative work” and “all-round development.” It was a great time for projects. In every institution in Kiev, it seemed, grey-haired eccentrics and young enthusiasts were drafting projects for a heavenly life on earth. We discussed the effect of excessively bright colours on excessively nervous children and wondered whether choral declamation influenced the collective consciousness and whether eurhythmics could be helpful in the suppression of juvenile prostitution.

The discrepancy between our discussions and reality was staggering. I began investigating reform schools, orphanages and dosshouses where the besprizornye (lost children) were to be found. The reports I drafted spoke not of eurhythmics but of bread and cloth. The boys ran away to join various “Fathers”; the girls solicited prisoners of war returning from Germany.^[26]

The approach developed at Narkompros by the early 1920s called for three stages of institutions: one to remove a child from the street and tend to his or her immediate needs; a second to observe and evaluate the youth; and a third to achieve rehabilitation. Closest to the street in this system were the receivers (priemniki), facilities generally administered by SPON personnel and often located near markets, train stations, and other settings frequented by the homeless.^[27] Narkompros planned for receivers in all cities and towns down to the district level and intended that they admit waifs twenty-four hours a day for emergency shelter, care, and questioning.^[28] In addition to youths who arrived on their own, receivers were to accept children dispatched by social workers, the police, and private citizens. This included juveniles apprehended for begging, prostitution, street trade, and thefts, as well as those who appeared to have lost contact with their parents only temporarily. In the case of delinquents, Narkompros hoped that receivers would provide a less pernicious environment than police-station cells and issued instructions in 1920 that staff members greet all entrants with warm attention.^[29]

Upon arrival, a youth was to be questioned (in an effort to establish identity, recent activities, place of residence, reason for entering the facility, and so on), then taken to receive a bath, haircut, medical exam, and disinfected clothes, followed by isolation for those with infectious diseases. Narkompros intended that children remain in receivers no more than two or three days and therefore did not foresee extensive pedagogic activity at this stage—nothing more than exercise, crafts, singing, readings by the staff, domestic chores, and attempts to nurture better personal hygiene.^[30] The plan stipulated that inhabitants be sorted and housed separately according to age, sex, and other characteristics to prevent contact between a practiced young criminal, for instance, and a lad new to the street.^[31] Finally, after a few days of observation, a child faced discharge to a destination deemed appropriate by the staff. This might be to parents or relatives if they could be located, to a Juvenile Affairs Commission in most cases involving crimes, to a children’s home to begin rehabilitation, to a hospital, or to an intermediary institution for additional observation.^[32]

The last option routed a child to an “observation-distribution point.” Here ensued an extended period of examination designed to establish the subject’s mental and physical condition—and thus the type of institution likely to provide suitable upbringing. Narkompros considered observation-distribution points particularly appropriate for difficult or troubled youths and intended that information assembled at this stage be passed on to assist Juvenile Affairs Commissions in deciding the means of rehabilitation for delinquents.^[33] According to a circular prepared by a division of SPON in Moscow, the normal length of stay in an observation-distribution point was to range from one to three months, though it could reach “six months or more” if necessary. Under these conditions, regular school classes still made little sense, but SPON recommended that some form of rudimentary instruction take place—making a start toward literacy, for example—in addition to the sorts of activities suggested for a receiver.^[34] Given the resources and staff required to maintain observation-distribution points, Narkompros must have expected them only in large cities, a pattern of concentration that soon developed in any case.^[35] As the years passed, so few such facilities appeared that the vast majority of Narkompros’s wards never entered their doors, moving instead from receivers (or the street) directly to institutions of rehabilitation.

Lunacharskii’s commissariat intended the children’s home (detskii dom, often shortened to detdom, pl. detdoma) to be the most common site of extended rehabilitation. A model charter for detdoma sent by Narkompros in 1921 to its provincial branches presumed an extensive array of these institutions—some for preschool candidates, some for older youths, some for delinquents, some for the physically handicapped, and so on.^[36] Narkompros emphasized repeatedly that the network’s success hinged on detdoma admitting only children who had already undergone preliminary sorting in a receiver and, ideally, an observation-distribution point. In addition, detdoma were to conduct periodic evaluations of their residents’ mental and physical health so that those with problems rendering them unsuitable for a particular detdom could be identified and sent to a more appropriate institution or to an observation-distribution point for further appraisal.^[37]

As spelled out in the charter, a model detdom maintained the following facilities: ample sleeping quarters, kitchen, dining room, laundry, bath, storerooms, quarantine, separate rooms for the staff, rooms for special projects, and a few workshops for activities such as carpentry, leather work, and sewing. Narkompros also desired the children to receive a standard education, either inside the detdom or at a nearby public school. To supplement traditional classroom instruction and fill free time productively, detdoma received strong encouragement to organize clubs and circles. Suggested activities included drama, music, handicrafts, sports, animal and plant raising, investigations of nature in the surrounding area, and studies of local folklore.^[38] In addition, every detdom was to have at its disposal sufficient land for a kitchen garden and, if possible, a larger field to provide food and labor training for the inhabitants. An order from Narkompros and the Commissariat of Land in December 1923 specified that a detdom receive approximately one-quarter of an acre per child.^[39] Finally, institutions were urged to implement a program of “self-service” or “self-government” (samoobsluzhivanie or samoupravlenie), which, broadly speaking, meant that youths assumed responsibility for daily chores and some administrative decisions.^[40] Such measures, designed to imbue residents with a sense of control over their lives and an instinct for collective responsibility, were destined to receive considerable attention in years to come.

While the government anticipated that most homeless children would follow the path just described, from receiver to detdom, it made additional provisions for youths charged with crimes. Shortly after the Revolution, in January 1918, Sovnarkom and the Commissariat of Justice directed that juvenile delinquents not appear before courts or receive prison sentences. Instead, the decree ordered the formation of Juvenile Affairs Commissions to handle cases of all offenders less than seventeen years of age.^[41] Originally placed under the Commissariat of Social Security, but transferred to Narkompros in 1920, each commission comprised three members from local offices of Narkompros and the commissariats of health and justice, with the first serving as head.^[42] Soviet authors proclaimed at the time (some noting the contrast with the treatment of delinquents in tsarist Russia and Western countries) that youths would now be rehabilitated, not punished.^[43] At the beginning of the 1920s, plans called for commissions in virtually every city down to the level of district towns, a network as dense as that envisioned for receivers. Indeed, Narkompros intended the closest cooperation between commissions and receivers, with the latter (or observation-distribution points, where these existed) holding delinquents temporarily and providing commissions with information on their mental and physical condition.^[44]

Commissions were instructed to conclude cases by selecting one of numerous options, among them a simple conversation or reprimand, the dispatch of children to parents or relatives (if these could be located and appeared capable of providing a satisfactory upbringing), or placement in a job, school, detdom, or medical facility. By 1920, however, instructions recognized that such measures might not be appropriate for inveterate young criminals (who were proliferating along with homeless adolescents in general) and therefore granted commissions the choice of passing particularly difficult offenders on to the courts.^[45] In March, Sovnarkom increased by one year the maximum age of juveniles whose cases were to be handled by commissions—but at the same time allowed these bodies to transfer intractable youths at least fourteen years old to the courts. Because such decisions required the establishment of a child’s age, often difficult under the circumstances, additional directives advised commissions to rely, if necessary, on estimates derived from medical examinations. The Commissariat of Justice received orders to hold teenage defendants apart from adult criminals in all stages of the judicial process and place those sentenced by the courts in special reformatories.^[46]

When commissions (as opposed to the courts) channeled delinquents into institutions, the destination was generally a facility operated by Narkompros. Here and there around the country, officials inaugurated establishments bearing a variety of names—detdoma, colonies, communes, institutes—intended exclusively for a “difficult” or “morally defective” clientele. Narkompros issued detailed instructions for the proper operation of these institutions, accompanied by articles in its journals stressing the wisdom (and economy) of reclaiming youths before crime became their adult profession.^[47] According to reports and resolutions at the First All-Russian Congress of Participants in the Struggle with Juvenile Defectiveness, Besprizornost’, and Crime (held in the summer of 1920 in Moscow) and instructions issued later by Narkompros, facilities for difficult children were to resemble regular detdoma in many respects. Officials stressed, for example, that an institution contain residents of the same sex, age, and level of development (or degradation). Also, activities in schools, clubs, and workshops had to fill the inhabitants’ lives, eliminating unsupervised idleness. In particular, guidelines emphasized labor training, whether on the land or in workshops, as essential in nurturing desirable work habits and good character—besides preparing trainees to help build a new society.^[48]

At the same time, Narkompros’s resolutions and instructions indicated a number of ways in which institutions for delinquents should differ from ordinary detdoma. Discipline, for instance, had to be stricter, though never vindictive. If a violation of the rules seemed to warrant sanction stiffer than a reprimand, additional punishments could include extra chores, temporary deprivation of recreation and other pleasures, or even isolation in a separate room (under staff supervision). Corporal punishment was not permitted.^[49] Narkompros also advised that facilities for difficult children operate on the principle of “closed doors” (zakrytyedveri), meaning that instruction take place on the premises and youths not be permitted to leave the grounds on their own.^[50] Institutions themselves belonged mainly in the countryside, far removed from temptations afforded by train stations, markets, and other bustling urban sites.^[51]

Commissariats other than Narkompros (and the Commissariat of Health) also administered facilities for delinquents—in particular, for teenagers whose cases Juvenile Affairs Commissions had transferred to the courts. Once before a court, a youthful offender faced sentence to a labor home (trudovoi dom) run by the Commissariat of Justice until 1922, and through the rest of the decade by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs.^[52] Activities favored here resembled those expected in Narkompros’s detdoma for difficult children—school, workshops, agriculture, sports, even a form of “self-government”—but with still more emphasis on rehabilitation through labor.^[53] Guidelines for operating labor homes appeared in the Russian Republic’s Correctional Labor Code rather than Narkompros’s publications. Also, while labor homes shared many of the pedagogic methods of detdoma, they were to employ stricter discipline together with window bars and guards to restrain their charges.^[54] As in other “institutions for the deprivation of freedom,” those assigned to labor homes served sentences, which a court could extend to an inmate’s twentieth birthday.^[55]

This, in broad strokes, completed the array of facilities intended at the beginning of the 1920s for most abandoned and other abused or delinquent children. To guide them into such institutions, Narkompros set about deploying a corps of social workers. In September 1921, Sovnarkom ordered the formation of a Children’s Social Inspection, under the administration of Narkompros, to spearhead the battle against juvenile homelessness, delinquency, begging, prostitution, and speculation (a term often applied to street trade). The inspectors were intended to replace the police in most dealings with minors, and their duties included patrolling markets, stations, and other locations that attracted waifs. They could call on the police for assistance but did not carry weapons or wear uniforms themselves. Narkompros hoped they would manage to establish contact with youths, draw them out of places exercising an unhealthy influence, and direct those lacking homes to receivers.^[56]

The doorstep of a receiver or Juvenile Affairs Commission did not mark the end of the Social Inspection’s beat. Sovnarkom noted in its September decree that inspectors’ duties included supervising youths admitted to receivers (or observation-distribution points) and assisting in their examination. Both receivers and commissions, as interested parties, held the right to submit candidates for positions in the Social Inspection.^[57] Commissions themselves were to rely first on another set of social workers, known as investigators-upbringers (obsledovateli-vospitateli), for the following assistance: (1) investigation of offenders (their backgrounds, personalities, and crimes) scheduled to appear before commissions; (2) presentation of this information in commission hearings; and (3) implementation of decisions reached by commissions (supervising guardianship arrangements, for example, or escorting youths to institutions). The general similarity between the duties of the Children’s Social Inspection and investigators-upbringers allowed commissions to call on the former for assistance in the absence of the latter.^[58]

This was the plan. Almost at once, however, the problem’s breadth overwhelmed officials and the institutions just described. Even during the period from 1918 to early 1921—before the Volga famine confronted the state with additional millions of starving refugees—youths roamed the country in numbers far exceeding the government’s capacity to respond. At this time, investigations of children’s institutions around the country revealed that shortages of food, clothing, buildings, equipment, and staff not only complicated the opening of new facilities but prevented many already in existence from meeting their charges’ most basic material needs (to say nothing of education and rehabilitation). Nearly the entire population, after all, suffered privation during the gaunt years of War Communism, and detdoma bore no immunity to these hardships.^[59] Conditions in some institutions appeared as deplorable as life on the street and left officials uncertain whether to continue packing urchins inside.^[60] Despite instructions from Moscow that no effort be spared to supply orphanages (and, at a minimum, to distribute food to hungry youths left outside), stern commands could not alter the stark reality of pervasive shortage.^[61]

Throughout the Civil War, the army naturally consumed a sizable portion of the government’s meager resources, including materials previously earmarked for children’s institutions. In many regions military authorities commandeered buildings in use or intended as juvenile facilities—and sometimes proved reluctant to surrender the structures to Narkompros or the Commissariat of Health after hostilities had ceased.^[62] Government agencies besides the army, facing the same shortage of serviceable buildings, appropriated detdoma while shrugging away protests from provincial children’s commissions and Narkompros. Ironically, given Dzerzhinskii’s leading role in the Children’s Commission, a report from Irkutsk told of the local Cheka requisitioning such an institution during the Civil War and refusing to relinquish it after the Bolsheviks’ triumph. These difficulties left Narkompros (and the Commissariat of Social Security earlier) to enlist many substandard structures in the expanding network of detdoma.^[63]

The torrent of waifs loosed by the Volga famine thus descended upon a makeshift network of receivers and detdoma already swollen with victims of previous catastrophes. From the summer of 1921 well into 1922, Narkompros offices across broad stretches of the starving heartland found themselves besieged daily by dozens and even hundreds of juveniles clamoring for admission to detdoma. Some beleaguered officials could scarcely stir in their own buildings, so clogged were the halls with children who had often been waiting weeks for assignment to the orphanages. Parents, too, joined this throng and thrust forth offspring they could no longer feed. Desperate appeals from provincial agencies to Moscow grew routine—and could not be satisfied, as the calamity’s scope dwarfed resources at hand.^[64]

Throughout the famine territory, and in many nearby provinces, children swamped detdoma even after officials had scrambled to open additional institutions in every conceivable structure. For each building pressed into service, thousands of homeless youths remained on the street. A Narkompros office in Simbirsk province accepted only candidates facing imminent death, so overcrowded were the facilities.^[65] To ease institutions’ congestion, Narkompros branches around the country ordered the discharge of low-priority inhabitants whose parents or relatives could be located.^[66] Many residents shown the door had been placed in detdoma by parents pleading inadequate family resources or (less often) a desire that their sons and daughters receive a collectivist upbringing. Some were progeny of the institutions’ own staffs. In a number of regions, local officials transferred adolescents from detdoma into the care of peasant families. By no means all peasants selected had volunteered—with the predictable result that “their” new children often fared poorly and soon fled to the street.^[67] Narkompros hoped, of course, that these measures would free more places in detdoma for the genuinely homeless, which they did. But those inside the walls of institutions still represented a small fraction of the crowds on their own.

The introduction of the New Economic Policy during 1921 presented administrators of children’s institutions with another set of problems. NEP forced many state enterprises and provincial government agencies to assume greater responsibility for their own finances. Unable to rely any longer on Moscow for more than a fraction of their budgets, and finding other government bodies in similar straits now unwilling to supply necessities free of charge, local Narkompros officials moved to close some detdoma in order to reduce expenses. By 1922–1923 they had done so in substantial numbers.^[68] The children involved were squeezed into other detdoma, placed in families of the surrounding population, or left to fend for themselves. Whatever the economic advantages of NEP’s “market discipline,” they were difficult to ascertain at once from the vantage point of orphanages.

A decade later, looking back over her years of work with abandoned youths, Asya Kalinina recalled that in 1922 the task appeared nearly hopeless. She and her colleagues feared then that juvenile homelessness and delinquency, which were assuming ever more dire proportions, might eventually corrode the foundation of the Soviet state.^[69] The briefest tour of famine provinces erased any thought that the boarding institutions of Narkompros and other agencies might perform as planned. How could anyone press ambitious programs for rehabilitation and upbringing on facilities buried in wraithlike children? Yet something had to be done.

As early as the summer of 1921, the number of people threatened with starvation had reached a scale sufficient to trigger planning for a variety of emergency measures, none more dramatic than mass evacuations of juveniles from afflicted provinces. The Children’s Commission, Narkompros, and other bodies formed special divisions for the project, with Narkompros’s Evacuation Bureau (whose members included representatives from several agencies) most directly involved in its implementation.^[70] Officials in comparatively prosperous regions received telegrams instructing them to inform Moscow how many Volga youths they could accept, while evacuation procedures were devised to guide authorities in the famine zone. The ambitious plan for September–October 1921 called for removing approximately 40,000 boys and girls.^[71] Not surprisingly, as soon as the policy of evacuation appeared on the government’s list of options, officials in ravaged districts showered Moscow with communications emphasizing the distress in their areas and pleading that thousands of juveniles be transported to other parts of the country. Well before year’s end the number claimed to require evacuation approached 175,000—exceeding by nearly 100,000 the total that other sections of the country agreed to support.^[72] Authorities in some stricken cities abandoned all restraint and placed candidates—in a few cases, the entire populations of detdoma—on trains headed out of the region, without waiting for Moscow’s permission.^[73]

Altogether, from June 1921 to September 1922, the government evacuated approximately 150,000 children. A majority appear to have been orphans or otherwise homeless, though information is far from complete. Nearly all came from seven provinces (Samara, Saratov, Simbirsk, Ural, Ufa, Cheliabinsk, and Tsaritsyn), three Autonomous Republics (Tatar, Kirghiz, and Bashkir), and several smaller Autonomous Regions (those of the Volga Germans and Chuvash among them). Saratov and Samara provinces alone each supplied over 25,000, and the Kirghiz Republic over 20,000, in scarcely more than one year.^[74] Destinations lay in every direction from the Volga basin and included Siberia (notably Omsk and Semipalatinsk), Central Asia (Samarkand, Bukhara, and Tashkent), the Transcaucasian republics, Ukraine (mainly the provinces of Podol’sk, Kiev, Poltava, Volynsk, and Chernigov), and Petrograd. Many other cities (and their surrounding districts) also received contingents numbering in the thousands, including Vitebsk, Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk, Gomel’, Kursk, Nizhnii Novgorod, Orel, Tula, Iaroslavl’, and Tver’.^[75] Published plans did not designate an especially large share for Moscow, possibly because young refugees arriving on their own had already inundated the city. Finally, in the fall of 1921, the Children’s Commission even approved projects for evacuating juveniles to Czechoslovakia, Germany, and England. The documents do not indicate whether any ever set out for Germany and England, but agreement was reached with Czechoslovakia on the evacuation of 600 children, at least 486 of whom arrived.^[76]

While several thousand youths made their journeys by boat, commonly sailing up the Volga to Nizhnii Novgorod, well over 90 percent traveled by train.^[77] Special “sanitary trains” (sanpoezda) often carried from 400 to 600 children, and one hauled 983.^[78] Juveniles selected for these trips were to receive haircuts, baths, and disinfected clothes, along with a clean bill of health. Indeed, no one qualified for evacuation from a detdom if cases of any severely contagious disease had been detected at the facility during the previous two weeks. Those living outside institutions faced a two-week quarantine before departure.^[79] As it turned out, in areas where the starving population lived far from rail lines, youths did not always assemble at stations in accordance with Moscow’s timetable. Authorities in Saratov, for example, received instructions initially to load each arriving train only with residents of one district or another. When the intended passengers did not materialize in Saratov on time, trains had to wait, thus disrupting the evacuation schedule. Before long, new orders permitted officials to fill trains with any candidates available.^[80]

Conditions on board varied considerably. Some trains were clean and warm, with ample food, medical attention, and dedicated personnel.^[81] Others left a different impression. Trains deployed to pick up children were supposed to contain supplies of food, clean clothing, and bedding, but many clattered into town empty and filthy. A telegram from the Samara Children’s Commission to Moscow complained on one occasion that officials had to strip clothing from juveniles left behind in order to outfit those departing. In Saratov, a local journal revealed that train crews stole shoes and clothing sent for evacuees and sold the items in bazaars. Once a trip had begun, shortages of food sometimes prompted the young passengers to slip out at stops to forage for provisions. Delays at stations could stretch on for days—as when depot authorities unhitched the trains’ engines for other tasks or refused to provide fuel and similarly vital supplies. Meanwhile, poor sanitation produced illness and death. In fact, officials among the Volga Germans, after evacuating a few trainloads of the region’s offspring, resolved to send out no more. Such wretched conditions obtained aboard the trains, they concluded, that youths possessed a better chance of surviving in the famine region itself.^[82]

The most vociferous complaints sounded outside the famine territory—from authorities who received the deliveries. Time and again they bombarded the Children’s Commission and Narkompros in Moscow with indignant reports of trains unloading boys and girls clad only in undershirts or similarly inadequate apparel. According to a Narkompros official in Poltava, “all of the children who arrived were, without exception, absolutely naked and barefoot.” The Ukrainian Central Commission of Aid to the Starving protested repeatedly to the Russian Republic’s Narkompros that youths evacuated from the Volga provinces to Ukraine had not been given adequate clothing for their journey. This violated Moscow’s own instructions on evacuation, the Ukrainians reminded Narkompros, adding that they could not themselves supply all the arrivals with clothes.^[83] Worse still, dispatches from many cities described disease as commonplace among evacuees, an indication of disregard in the famine zone for the two-week quarantine rule. Of the 578 juveniles delivered by a single “sanitary train” to Vladimir, “over 100” had to spend the first few weeks in hospitals with cases of typhus, measles, and smallpox. Narkompros’s office in Novgorod reported in December 1921 to the Evacuation Bureau in Moscow that “many” on the most recent train from the Volga were sick—and a “few” dead. A health official in Novgorod telegraphed to Moscow that trains from famine provinces had saturated local hospitals with typhus cases, exhausting resources available to treat them and threatening the entire region with infection.^[84]

Instructions from Moscow specified that children evacuated from famine districts be housed, upon reaching their destinations, in special facilities (such as a converted receiver, detdom, or clinic) for a two-week period of medical examination and quarantine. Youths routed to Smolensk province, for example, traveled initially to the town of Roslavl’, where they stayed in a set of old barracks for medical processing. Only then were they deemed fit for transfer to more permanent accommodations.^[85] More often than not around the country this meant detdoma—supported in part by trade unions, factories, military units, institutes, newspapers, cooperatives, and the Cheka. Even the involvement of these organizations did not provide sufficient resources to sustain all famine refugees, however, and officials turned to placing some children in local peasant families.^[86]

Regions struggling to absorb evacuees found the task complicated by still more boys and girls, at least 100,000 strong, arriving from the famine zone on their own.^[87] In December 1921 and January 1922, for instance, the Kuban–Black Sea province received 200 youths in “organized fashion” from famine districts and another 3,400 whose travel arrangements appeared in no government plans. Thousands of miles to the east, in Siberia’s Eniseisk province, 967 children arrived through official channels between March and November 1922, while 280 made the journey themselves.^[88] Some authorities in the Northern Caucasus and Georgia, areas that attracted many refugees, attempted to seal their borders by stationing detachments there to repulse anyone traveling without “legitimate” purpose.^[89] Though the success of these measures is questionable, their extraordinary nature testifies to the difficulties that those fleeing the famine caused administrators of territories they entered.

The seemingly endless stream of refugees, “organized” and otherwise, combined with the central government’s inability to provide anything approaching the resources necessary to support them, soon moved provincial officials to appeal that Moscow route no more shipments their way. On occasion these entreaties included threats to turn any future trains around and send them, still loaded, out of the region. A few district authorities eventually did refuse to unload evacuation trains and dispatched them down the line to other towns—which in turn sometimes passed them on further.^[90] While open defiance did not constitute the norm, the provinces made no secret of their impatience for permission to reevacuate those who bulged their detdoma and exhausted their resources. By the middle of 1922, with a better harvest anticipated in the Volga basin, Moscow heeded such complaints and began the process of sending refugees home.^[91]

According to guidelines developed in the capital, officials were authorized to reevacuate minors only after obtaining written confirmation of parents’ consent and only if the children received shoes, clothing, food, and train tickets.^[92] It often proved next to impossible, however, to locate mothers and fathers hundreds of miles away and document their agreement for the return of offspring. During the famine, parents themselves traveled far and wide as refugees, and many had left this world altogether. In response, local authorities began sending juveniles back to home regions—or any other available province—without authorization from Moscow and without observing the guidelines they received. Eager to reduce the financial strain imposed on them by thousands of evacuees, they shipped them home, observed a Narkompros report, “allegedly to their parents, who almost never, incidentally, turn out to be alive.” Approximately 25 percent of the youths reevacuated to the Tatar and Bashkir republics fit this description, and close to 30 percent of those transported “home” to Saratov and Samara provinces found neither parents nor relatives on their arrival. They either crowded into receivers and detdoma just as overtaxed as those they had departed or hunted for shelter in alleys and train stations.^[93]

Among the children reevacuated into a void were the boy and his sister, Anna, who had dragged their younger sister, Vavara, along the road to Kazan’ on Christmas Day of 1921. After Vavara succumbed to typhus, the children’s parents and elder sister arrived in Kazan’ and found room in other shelters; thus family members were reunited in the same city if not the same building. But as each week of famine left the region ever more desperate, officials decided to evacuate the two youngest children (and many others) by rail to Ukraine. At the end of a month’s journey, the special train reached Vinnitsa, where local authorities, already swamped with starving youths, turned it away. The train itself became something of a besprizornyi, rumbling down the tracks to the town of Mogilev-Podol’skii on the Romanian border. Here the passengers’ fortunes improved. They landed in a children’s home that provided not only ample food but also schooling and other activities. Several months later, after the famine had abated, the youths were reevacuated to Kazan’. Anna and her brother discovered no trace of their parents and could do nothing but enter a foul shelter for indigents. The conditions soon prompted them to leave Kazan’, bound initially for their native Grodnensk province (by then part of Poland), but destined instead for separate children’s homes in Moscow.^[94]

For years the government struggled to reassemble such families. Even before the famine scattered its victims across the country, parents and relatives approached officials regularly for help in determining the whereabouts of progeny lost during World War I and the Civil War. Toward the end of 1921, Narkompros organized a Central Children’s Address Bureau to collect information on institutionalized juveniles for use in responding to these inquiries—which multiplied in the aftermath of the Volga basin evacuation.^[95] The Address Bureau did manage to locate some youths sought by relatives (582 in 1923/24), but the numbers never exceeded a small fraction of those who had disappeared.^[96] Such modest results prompted Narkompros and the Children’s Commission to approach local officials and the public more directly by publishing lists of vanished offspring. These rosters appeared now and then in various periodicals by the middle of the decade and commonly included the names and ages of dozens or even a few hundred youths missing from one region or another. On occasion, the inventories produced responses that reunited families, but not at a rate sufficient to trim the homeless population perceptibly. The lists that Narkompros placed in its weekly bulletin, for example, succeeded in uncovering only four lost children.^[97]

Why were tens of thousands of sons and daughters, even those transported from famine districts by the government itself, so difficult to find as conditions slowly improved after 1922? No doubt many parents whose children had embarked on “sanitary trains” shared this perplexity. Much of the frustration stemmed from the evacuation’s chaotic nature. Four copies of a form (containing such information as the child’s name, location of original family home, and addresses of the dispatching and receiving institutions) were to be prepared for each boy or girl shipped out of the famine zone. But all too often the records were transcribed inaccurately, lost, or not compiled in the first place. Haste and sloppiness in these desperate times corrupted data to the point where someone searching for, say, Anastasiia Shcherbakova, and finding on the list an Anastasiia Shcherbaniuk, had grounds to wonder whether the two names identified the same girl. More likely, the object of an inquiry failed to appear in government registers at all. According to an article published in 1928, the list of evacuated minors composed by the middle of the decade contained only about thirty thousand names. Even when records were filed properly, subsequent undocumented transfers of juveniles to peasant families or from one institution to another rendered the original paperwork obsolete—as did the flight of youths from foster homes and detdoma.^[98] Many children obscured their tracks by entering relief facilities under fictitious names. Wily vagrants, with no desire for a trip home, proffered aliases with polished ease. Others, especially the very young, who could not remember their identities, received names (and even nationalities) arbitrarily from officials. Revolutionary heroes numbered among the sources of inspiration for these choices—leaving some orphanages stocked with such ersatz celebrities as Klara Tsetkin, Inessa Armand, Mikhail Kalinin, and Sof’ia Perovskaia.^[99]

As early as 1921, an occasional voice questioned the mass evacuations then in progress, arguing that the exercises wasted government relief funds and even harmed some of the children involved. A teacher traveling in 1921 with a train transporting youths from Saratov to Vitebsk contended that this method rescued only an insignificant percentage of those starving, far fewer than could be saved by allocating equivalent resources to the blighted provinces themselves.^[100] If such objections did not sway Narkompros initially, problems beleaguering the evacuation and reevacuation campaigns convinced the government by 1923 to abandon these large-scale endeavors. In 1924, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee ordered a halt to mass transfers of children. Individuals might still be reevacuated, if parents or relatives awaited them and possessed means to provide proper care. Otherwise, juveniles qualified for transfer only by consent of the Narkompros office in the province of their destination. When partial crop failure returned to several Volga provinces in 1924, Narkompros rejected another round of mass evacuations and concentrated instead on directing aid to the stricken districts.^[101]

Whatever the wisdom of evacuation in 1921–1922, the policy sprang from the sound conclusion that receivers, detdoma, and clinics in the region could not begin to cope with the prostrate multitudes. This same realization prompted the opening of food distribution points in the famine zone, as a socialist upbringing for residents of detdoma yielded to efforts aimed at keeping the starving alive wherever they huddled. To this end, the government established cafeterias and dispatched trains to traverse the famine provinces distributing meals and medical care.^[102] The public, too, was pressed to donate funds for the emergency. Newspapers carried frequent articles on contributions (doubtless not always as voluntary as described) by soldiers, sailors, workers, and private entrepreneurs to bolster detdoma and provide assistance to other young famine victims.^[103] At its peak, aid from individuals, factories, trade unions, military units, and other organizations appears to have maintained at least two hundred thousand juveniles, with trade unions responsible for over half the total.^[104]

The government even opened afflicted areas to foreign relief groups.^[105] By July 1922, according to Soviet figures for the Volga basin and Crimea (but not Ukraine), foreign organizations were feeding nearly 3.6 million children, with the American Relief Administration (ARA) responsible for slightly over 80 percent of the total. An American account credits the ARA in July with supplying daily nourishment to 3.6 million minors and 5.4 million adults, totals that peaked the following month at 4.2 and 6.3 million respectively. Meanwhile the state distributed food to approximately 1.3 million boys and girls (30,000 by means of the special trains), bringing the number of youths receiving at least occasional meals from these sources close to 5 million.^[106] Yet despite this valiant undertaking, millions more went unfed.

The gap between these figures and the enthusiasm fostered by the Revolution for child-rearing projects could not have been greater. As Narkompros put the finishing touches on plans for a network of institutions intended to fashion waifs into a new socialist generation, the famine shifted official priorities to stark survival. Here, obscured by the overwhelming tragedy of the spectacle, resided a forlorn irony. In 1920, as it wrenched primary responsibility from the Commissariat of Social Security for the care of destitute juveniles, Narkompros justified its action by claiming preeminent expertise in educating and rehabilitating youths, as opposed merely to providing for their material well-being. But when Lunacharskii’s commissariat finally turned to the mission it had won, officials found themselves facing conditions that rendered education and rehabilitation all but impossible. The new generation, its members dying by the million, had to be saved before it could be trained.

Notes

5. Primeval Chaos

A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not take the greatest care possible of the children—the future race for whose benefit the revolution has been made.

At the time the tragic problem of these children seemed unsolvable.

While the famine scuttled any thought that Narkompros’s receivers and detdoma could operate as planned, it did not eliminate these institutions. Quite the contrary. In 1921–1922 they multiplied as rapidly as the most ardent partisan of “social education” could have dreamed three years earlier. But the reason for the increase—the soaring number of waifs—did not coincide at all with the expectations of euphoric revolutionaries in 1917–1918. As the crisis deepened, officials in Narkompros and other agencies asked ever more urgently how the network of children’s institutions could absorb the deluge of abandoned girls and boys. They wondered, too, about the effort to decriminalize juvenile delinquency when young thieves appeared at every turn. Such concerns prompted, or stemmed from, another question: What was actually happening inside facilities for homeless youths during these difficult years? The answer would help shape renewed efforts to salvage a socialist generation from the street, once the famine had run its course.

Nowhere did children’s institutions proliferate more rapidly than in the nation’s capital. As early as June 1921, Narkompros acknowledged the need to enlarge Moscow’s network of receivers in order to absorb urchins, who seemed more numerous each day. Plans called for several additional receivers (and observation-distribution points, sometimes combined with receivers), whose intended capacities ranged as high as one thousand.^[1] The space would not go unused. From November 15 to December 15, with refugees pouring into Moscow from the famine zone, the Pokrovskii receiver alone admitted 3,925 youths. Slightly under 1,000 had been evacuated by the state, while the remaining 3,000 had fled starvation on their own. During the course of 1922, the city’s receivers processed approximately 1,000 juveniles per month, only 4 percent of whom were native Muscovites.^[2]

In the country as a whole, the number of receivers increased steadily during the famine period, reaching 237 (along with 160 observation-distribution points) in the Russian Republic by the summer of 1922.^[3] Unfortunately, this represented only a fraction of the quantity required to accommodate the homeless millions, and remained more than 300 below Narkompros’s original goal of one receiver per district. Local officials, lacking resources to open hundreds of additional facilities, packed existing receivers five and even ten times over intended capacity.^[4] A doctor in Simferopol’ characterized the city’s receivers as “dumps” into which boys and girls were crammed without attention or even count, and whose exhausted staffs simply “threw up their hands before the ceaseless influx.” In one large room, roughly two hundred children covered plank beds, the floor, window sills, and a piano. Circumstances numbed them to the point where they matter-of-factly utilized as tables the bodies of others who had already died. “Corpses served as pillows for those who, tomorrow, might expect the same fate.” Every evening, personnel counted the inhabitants and then placed an order for the next day’s food. By morning, the census was usually obsolete: residents had died, run away, or, conversely, arrived during the night. Furthermore, a constantly changing number materialized from the bazaars each day at mealtime—and disappeared again after eating.^[5] American relief officials inspecting receivers in Samara described the conditions as “heartbreaking”: “The first place we visited was a ‘receiving home.’ Before the war this building was erected as an orphanage for fifty children; today [September 1921] it holds more than six hundred. They lie in the yard, on the floor, on wooden benches, one on top of another, sick and well together, covered with dirty, lousy rags. For this large number of children there are only ten small soup dishes and fifty wooden spoons.”^[6]

During the famine, youths often arrived at receivers and observation-distribution points in deplorable condition: grotesquely swollen stomachs bulged from shriveled physiques covered with excrement, dirt, and lice. Now at death’s portal, many expired shortly after entering crowded rooms and sinking into vacant spaces on the floor. Figures do not exist to reveal the toll in institutions at this time, but reports from individual facilities underscore the obvious. Children succumbed in droves. At a receiver in Orenburg, 118 (from a total of 935) perished in just two days. Institutions in Groznyi and Vladikavkaz recorded mortality rates as high as 30 percent in the period November 1921–early January 1922, while in Simferopol’ thirty inhabitants died every day in one receiver during the emergency’s peak. Given the shortage of buildings and the vast quantity of victims, those with infectious diseases could not be isolated from the rest. Bodies weakened by the famine offered little resistance to myriad ailments, which thus spread rapidly in crowded rooms. Staff members themselves sometimes contracted the maladies, a risk that prompted a few to sever all contact with their charges and even flee the institutions.^[7]

As the famine waned in 1922–1923, receivers’ primary clientele changed gradually from emaciated, desperate refugees to juveniles adept at fending for themselves. These vagrants, cast loose by the famine or earlier misfortune, drifted in and out of institutions or tried to avoid them. With time, they mastered the skills necessary to survive indefinitely on the street and absorbed its manners and recreations. Thus endowed, they presented different problems to receivers than did famine victims listing on grave’s edge. Of course, some abandoned adolescents in 1923 could not yet be classified as veterans of markets and train stations, while numerous children at large during the famine had already been hardened by years in such haunts. But after 1922, as fewer new urchins appeared, inveterate waifs accounted for an increasing portion of the remaining pool of homeless children.

These pupils of the underworld complicated greatly the work of receivers, sometimes disrupting them to such an extent that institutions assumed the air of criminals’ dens. Even when a staff managed to maintain control—by driving out, transferring, or domesticating troublemakers—the process rarely proved smooth or rapid.^[8] In overcrowded buildings, practiced young thieves could not be separated from weak or green occupants (often dubbed ogol’tsy, meaning stripped or naked ones), thereby enabling the former to prey on the latter. In receivers where seasoned youths held sway, they greeted newly arrived ogol’tsy with beatings, just as they had on the street, and commonly seized clothing, blankets, and meals from those unable to resist. At Moscow’s large Pokrovskii receiver, a staff member noticed the leader of a gang brazenly consuming several servings of food while a newcomer in poor health sat quietly in the corner with only a meager portion of thin soup. She demanded that the leader share his repast with the silent diner—and received an indignant refusal. Her order struck the gang member as an affront to the institution’s protocol; the idea that he be placed on the same footing as the sickly figure in the corner seemed absurd. Thus he continued his meal, rebuffing the woman with icy rudeness. Flinty aristocrats of this sort reigned throughout the Pokrovskii receiver early in the decade, reserving the best places to sleep, buying and selling others’ belongings, “hiring” lads to perform chores, and collecting “tribute” from weaker neighbors. One boy extracted protection payments from a group of Tatar children who feared abuse at the hands of their Russian counterparts. In some receivers, toughs exercised more control over other residents than did the institutions’ staffs.^[9]

Juveniles despoiled not only each other but the receivers themselves. Food, sheets, blankets, clothing, even furniture disappeared with daily regularity at some institutions, often to be resold in nearby streets and markets. Thieves also slipped out to steal from the surrounding population, in one case filling an entire neighborhood with fear of the adjoining receiver.^[10] In such conditions, the relations between adult personnel and their charges bore little resemblance to those desired by Narkompros. It took a patient, optimistic staff member not to regard experienced waifs as irretrievable hooligans, and many adolescents in turn expressed sullen mistrust toward their “upbringers.” Most often, the suspicious, restless, and unhappy (including those abused by other youths) ran away before they could be sent on to an observation-distribution point or detdom. Some remained less than a day, long enough only to secure a set of new clothes or a meal.^[11]

Narkompros had anticipated that receivers would hold children for no more than a few days of preliminary observation and processing before distributing them to Juvenile Affairs Commissions, detdoma, or other destinations. But the homeless tide that flooded receivers also engulfed detdoma, colonies, and clinics, leaving few openings to which receivers could discharge their multitudes. As a result, receivers found themselves obliged to keep youths for months rather than days, which greatly exacerbated overcrowding and related problems.^[12] It also meant—for something had to be done with wards remaining indefinitely—that receivers came to assume responsibilities originally intended for detdoma, including the provision of classroom education and labor training.^[13] In most cases the transformation took place by force of necessity and without prearrangement, as staffs contended with a situation thrust on them by reality rather than decree.^[14] The outcome varied greatly. Despite setbacks and disappointments, some receivers managed to break (or at least loosen) the street’s hold on their residents, even arrivals wedded to a vagabond life.^[15] More often, however, sources early in the decade portrayed facilities plagued by the aforementioned deficiencies—hardly grounds for astonishment, given the magnitude of the problem facing an inexperienced government armed with modest resources.

While the process often required several months, receivers did eventually discharge children who had not already left on their own. The intended destinations included relatives’ homes, hospitals, clinics, and observation-distribution points, but the route traveled far more frequently, especially by the genuinely homeless, led to detdoma.^[16] In broad terms, the designation detdom referred to a facility housing children during the extended period of education and labor training considered essential for a productive life. Institutions of this sort received a wide assortment of other names in various localities—including colony or labor colony, labor institute, school-commune, and home-commune, to list a few—with a document sometimes employing first one label and then another (and perhaps a third) in reference to a single detdom. Some authors observed clear distinctions when using these terms, but many others interchanged them freely. As a general rule, establishments sporting “colony” in their titles were located in the countryside and occupied youths primarily with agricultural pursuits. They, along with facilities whose titles included “labor,” were typically intended for the rehabilitation of “difficult” or “morally defective” juveniles. But institutions so named did not all share these characteristics, and they did not monopolize them.^[17]

As local authorities scrambled to acquire buildings for expanding the network of detdoma, they faced the same difficulties that beset them in securing premises for receivers. With resources insufficient to construct hundreds of new facilities, they pressed the widest variety of existing structures into service, including municipal buildings and establishments used prior to the Revolution as shelters for orphans and delinquents.^[18] Officials also sought the rights to houses, dachas, and estates confiscated from the prerevolutionary elite. In this event, if someone of Dzerzhinskii’s stature intervened, splendid mansions opened their doors to the homeless. More often, though, the modest clout mustered by provincial offices of Narkompros (and the Commissariat of Social Security before it) yielded estates and residences in extreme disrepair. A detdom in Zvenigorod district, for example, appeared at first glance to be a superb facility. Standing in a large park on a bank high above the Moscow River, the manor, formerly property of the wealthy Morozov family, boasted thirty-six rooms, a marble stairway, central heating, running water, and electricity. But closer examination revealed that the local population had carried off everything movable and smashed most of what remained, including the heating, electrical, and water systems. Similarly, when a “labor school-commune” was established on a former noble’s estate near Simbirsk, children and staff had to enter the building with shovels to clear it of filth deposited during the previous few years by hundreds of deserters.^[19] Churches and especially monasteries also took on new roles as detdoma. Some had lain abandoned for months or years after 1917; others sheltered monks or nuns throughout the revolutionary period, until they were evicted to make room for waifs. A few continued ecclesiastical activities, at least for a time, even after the youths arrived.^[20]

The legions of juveniles who disrupted receivers moved on to burden detdoma with many of the same predicaments—most obviously overcrowding. Even before the famine, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate discovered that detdoma in numerous provinces bulged with as many as several times their intended volume of inhabitants. So, too, did shelters in sectors outside Bolshevik control during the Civil War, as American Red Cross representatives noted in Ukraine. There a local official told them of “54 orphanages in the country controlled by Petliura with 30,000 children inmates [an average of 556 youths per orphanage!].”^[21] By autumn of 1921, the squalor described in these accounts paled against the horror reported routinely from the Volga basin, southern Ukraine, and nearby regions inundated with famine refugees. Skeletal forms packed every square foot of detdoma, while hundreds more waited outside many facilities, begging for admission and perishing in untold numbers.^[22] Altogether, the detdoma of Ufa province took in 60 to 100 youths every day as early as June 1921. By December the total reached 150 per day—and exploded to 500 two months later. As a result, the province’s detdoma staggered under a load estimated at 500 percent of their planned capacity at the beginning of 1922, with an additional 50,000 candidates left in the street.^[23] One of Samara’s detdoma struck a visiting journalist as nothing so much as “a ‘pound’ for homeless dogs”:

They picked up the wretched children, lost or abandoned by their parents, by hundreds off the streets, and parked them in these “homes.” At the place I visited an attempt had been made to segregate those who were obviously sick or dying from their “healthier” fellows. The latter sat listlessly, 300 or 400 of them in a dusty court-yard, too weak and lost and sad to move or care. Most of them were past hunger; one child of seven with fingers no thicker than matches refused the chocolate and biscuits I offered him and just turned his head away without a sound. The inside of the house was dreadful, children in all stages of a dozen different diseases huddled together anyhow in the most noxious atmosphere I have ever known. A matron and three girls were “in charge” of this pest-house. There was nothing they could do, they said wearily; they had no food or money or soap or medicine. There were 400 children or thereabouts, they didn’t know exactly, in the home already, and a hundred or more brought in daily and about the same number died; there was nothing they could do.^[24]

All across the famine zone, as homeless children proliferated at a much faster rate than did institutions to house them, the populations of existing detdoma mounted (table 1). Many local authorities could have written the lines sent to the Children’s Commission in Moscow by a Narkompros official in Baku: “I declare without exaggeration that we have, not children’s homes, but children’s cemeteries and cesspools in the literal sense of the words.”^[25] Later, when the famine subsided, it left behind institutions in such dismal condition that one author wondered pointedly whether boys and girls already in detdoma might require aid just as urgently as those still on their own.^[26]

1. Increase in the Number of Detdoma and Their Inhabitants, 1921

	January 1, 1921		December 31, 1921
Detdoma	Children	Detdoma	Children
source: TsGA RSFSR, f. 1575, o. 6, ed. khr. 4, l. 25.
Volga Germans	12	|428	33	3,300
Simbirsk province	65	3,530	117	11,719
Stavropol’ province	40	2,279	125	12,490
Tambov province	113	7,834	134	13,372
Tatar Republic	110	5,670	232	17,971
Ufa province	103	4,976	239	23,985
Cheliabinsk province	90	6,103	222	22,200
Tsaritsyn province	51	2,374	159[a]	14,721[a]
Samara province	294	18,000	407[b]	44,660[b]
Astrakhan’ province	67[c]	2,964[c]	92	5,509
Viatka province	89[c]	3,347[c]	109	10,934
Perm’ province	165[c]	7,703[c]	203	12,214
Saratov province	145[c]	—	180	18,000
Chuvash region	12[c]	489[c]	40[d]	4,500[d]

March 28, 1922August 1, 1921July 1, 1921February 1, 1922

Inevitably, severe food shortages accompanied overcrowding. Malnutrition and outright starvation occurred most routinely during the famine, of course, but the lack of sufficient provisions crippled institutions throughout these early years—reflecting the privation faced by much of society. Time and again, as the number of waifs increased in a province and local officials opened additional detdoma, they received ever more irregular and inadequate deliveries of food. Appeals to superiors rarely availed, because the same misfortunes that spawned a surge of homeless juveniles often reduced a region’s food supplies.^[27] As rations dwindled in detdoma, some children not yet incapacitated by starvation launched forays to steal from nearby markets or peasants. Even before the famine, girls at an institution in Petrograd engaged in prostitution to acquire food, and desperate authorities in Beloozero (Cherepovetsk province) sought permission to release detdom residents to forage for themselves. By the end of 1921, ravenous staff members joined youths at some institutions on expeditions to beg for sustenance.^[28]

In these grim years, detdoma lacked not only food but adequate supplies of nearly everything else as well—furniture, clothing, utensils, tools, books, and agricultural implements. Reports streamed in to provincial capitals and to Moscow, describing children who lapped soup out of cupped hands (in the absence of bowls), occupied themselves with disturbing activities learned on the street (as insufficient books, equipment, and staff thwarted more wholesome projects), and, in general, languished in buildings devoid of the most basic conveniences.^[29] Administrators of many detdoma, left to shift for themselves, received no supplies for weeks and even months. Anton Makarenko explained in 1922 that when he needed kerosene to light the buildings of his colony, the local Narkompros office instructed him to catch dogs and melt down their fat.^[30]

Most detdoma, overcrowded as they were, could not maintain ample sleeping facilities. Three or four youths often shared each bed, and many simply huddled on the bare floor, covering themselves with anything at hand, including old curtains and rugs. An institution in Viatka, with no blankets at all, issued sacks to sleep in.^[31] Similarly meager supplies of shoes and clothing did not stretch to outfit the ragged and half-naked millions. Reports told of numerous institutions providing footwear for as few as a quarter of their inhabitants, and even these shoes were not always serviceable. The entire populations of some detdoma faced winter barefoot or with only a few pairs of boots and shoes to share. This, combined with a dearth of warm clothing, commonly required detdoma to keep their charges indoors all winter, which in turn prevented the children from attending school if the detdom did not operate one of its own.^[32] Even inside, the bite of winter left its mark. Crumbling walls, broken windows, and lack of heating fuel permitted icy winds to roam buildings as master, lowering interior temperatures to the neighborhood of zero degrees Celsius. From the Kuban’ came word of frostbite acquired indoors and floors coated with ice after a washing; in Tashkent, desks were smashed and burned as fuel; and in Iaroslavl’, children slept embracing each other tightly for warmth. A report to Dzerzhinskii described certain detdoma in Simbirsk, Saratov, Penza, Vladimir, and other provinces as completely unheated—so vulnerable to the cold, in fact, that snow drifts developed now and then inside rooms.^[33]

Shortages of food, clothing, heat, and space contributed to levels of hygiene and illness in detdoma that shocked investigators. Early in 1923, a health commission portrayed a detdom in Samarkand as “an utter cemetery of decaying, live children,” and this spectacle was not restricted to Central Asia. In Samara province, health officials were brought before a revolutionary tribunal “because of the horrible, unsanitary condition of children in institutions.” Many detdoma had no lavatories at all, so that boys and girls relieved themselves in yards, hallways, and even their own beds. Existing latrines often overflowed with filth, through which barefoot youths walked routinely. In some overburdened facilities, juveniles caked with grime and parasites received baths only at intervals of several weeks.^[34] Their crowded buildings also lacked space to isolate the ailing from the relatively healthy, which further hastened the march of infections. Rare indeed was the institution at this time whose inhabitants did not suffer from a wide variety of maladies, and in some facilities nearly everyone (even the staff) was stricken. In Kazan’, for instance, fully 85 percent of the residents in one detdom had malaria early in 1921. Throughout the country, common ailments included skin and eye infections, fungi, parasites (often lice), typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis, malaria, and scurvy. Nor were venereal diseases strangers to institutions, especially those for delinquents. Among 290 at a home for the “morally defective” in Ekaterinodar toward the end of 1920, 60 had contracted syphilis.^[35]

In light of the preceding, there can be no doubt that many thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) died in detdoma during the period 1918–1923. While precise information for the country as a whole has not been published, and may well have escaped compilation in these turbulent years, a few detdoma reported during the famine that half or even three-fourths of their occupants had perished. “At one children’s home that I visited,” wrote a traveler in Buzuluk, “of 141 boys and girls received in the course of the previous week, 76 had died. This was by no means an exception.” More often, however, dispatches told only of “high” or “very high” mortality, leaving details to the imagination.^[36]

Along with illness and death, thefts appeared among the consequences of shortages rife in detdoma, for hunger stimulated much the same desperation within institutions as it did on the street. Underworld veterans, of course, might plunder any detdom, well supplied or not, to support habits acquired while at large or merely for the adventure. But insufficient food in a facility prompted others to join them in pilfering anything at hand—sheets, blankets, shoes, clothing, tools, utensils—and spirit the items away to the nearest market for sale. Such transactions deprived detdoma of essential supplies, to be replaced with great difficulty if at all. Some residents, rather than (or along with) stealing from detdoma, took to raiding other targets in their neighborhoods, such as peasants’ storerooms and passing travelers.^[37] As Makarenko put it, recalling the early years of his colony:

In full accordance with the theories of historical materialism, it was the economic base of peasant life which interested the boys first and foremost, and to which, in the period under consideration, they came the closest. Without entering very deeply into a discussion of the various superstructures, my charges made straight for larder and cellar, disposing, to the best of their ability, of the riches contained therein.^[38]

Finally, youths not disabled by hunger or disease frequently responded to woeful conditions in detdoma by fleeing. Though they abandoned institutions for other reasons as well—a city’s lights and excitement, perhaps, or to escape beatings and gambling debts—it appears reasonable to suppose that lamentable facilities prompted most flights in these initial years. In any case, children slipped away and returned to the street in countless thousands, often absconding with clothing and other property to sell for food and entertainment.^[39]

Facing so many obstacles, it must have been a rare staff member who did not succumb at least occasionally to bottomless despair.^[40] Aside from the formidable difficulties just described, gangs, gambling, drinking, brawling, anti-Semitism, rapes, vandalism, insolence, and occasional attacks on adult personnel plagued many detdoma that housed streetwise youths.^[41] Little wonder these institutions often failed to attract and retain qualified educators. Those not intimidated at the outset by the prospect of working with troubled adolescents often left their positions before long, fed up with the grueling work and monthly pay (when it materialized at all) lower even than that of teachers in schools for “normal” pupils.^[42] Congresses of concerned officials and investigations of detdoma identified a crying need for more trained staff, especially in the growing number of institutions for “difficult” residents. Detdoma did attract people of generous spirit, prepared to shoulder considerable sacrifice to assist abandoned juveniles. But the institutions also served as refuges for those who could not find or hold jobs elsewhere and who viewed their positions as little more than nests in which to live off supplies intended first of all for the children.^[43]

Despite the abundant and often overwhelming hardships faced by detdoma during the Revolution’s first half-decade, their portrait should not be painted solely in black. Studies did find most institutions in miserable condition, but a minority received favorable reports. Comparatively clean and adequately equipped, they left an encouraging impression, even if they also displayed room for further improvement. Where their histories are known, one finds almost invariably that they faced the same problems besetting detdoma in general—dilapidated facilities, few supplies, and unruly inhabitants. But eventually, sometimes not until the passage of several trying months or even a few years, signs of progress began to reward the efforts of a dedicated staff. Workshops, schools, clubs, kitchen gardens, and livestock came to occupy the children’s energies, while flight and theft faded to occasional nuisances. Thus nurtured, most youths in these establishments gave reason to believe that they had broken, or were breaking, their bonds with the street and might well join society before long as productive, well-adjusted citizens.^[44]

A detdom for difficult juveniles in Moscow provided a vivid illustration of this transformation. Prior to the arrival in December 1920 of new teachers and administrators, the youths did whatever they pleased, completely intimidating the staff. Some disappeared for hours each day, taking food and clothing along to sell in the Sukharevskii Market. Others remained in the detdom and engaged in such “manual labor exercises” as destroying furniture to make sleds and slamming a piano with wet towels to frighten a teacher when she tried to “meddle” in their lives. Many were extremely volatile, quickly vexed by the slightest obstacle, and prone to fly into rages and fights on trivial grounds. They shouted from morning to night, even while conducting mundane conversations. In short, numerous obstacles greeted the new staff’s effort to bring rudimentary decorum to classes, meetings, and meals. Activities requiring collective discipline and the observance of rules, such as team sports or simple theatrical productions, were completely beyond the residents at first. When rehearsing a play, for instance, some actors saw no need to wait for others to finish speeches before sounding forth with their own. Informed of the coherence yielded by the delivery of lines in proper order, they stormed from the room. Though the new group of educators had resolved initially to abjure compulsion, they soon concluded that basic rules of behavior would have to be introduced, beginning in the dining room. Here children leaped up from the table throughout the meal, screamed whenever they pleased, made obscene gestures, and ate out of their hands. It was therefore announced that no one who arrived late, left the table early, or ate sloppily would receive any more food that meal. This tactic soon diminished chaos in the dining room, though shouting was not overcome for several months.

As time passed, the staff’s devotion to the detdom won the youths’ trust. Thefts and destruction of property shrank to trivial proportions. Abusive and hysterical inhabitants, though still capable of rough moments, grew more stable and dependable. Eventually the group even received invitations to attend festivities in other institutions, something their reputation for wildness had earlier precluded. To be sure, the success did not extend to all children, a handful of whom remained immune to the adults’ efforts and finally ran away or were conveyed to relatives or other facilities. But isolated setbacks notwithstanding, the detdom made striking progress from year to year—organizing clubs, excursions, and schooling, for example—and by 1923 bore few traces of its former seedy character.^[45]

A perusal of such histories indicates that detdoma required nothing so much as an energetic, dedicated staff. Without instructors and administrators devoted to weaning juveniles from the street, even a well-equipped facility could achieve little. It should also be noted that the Moscow detdom featured here contained six teachers and only 25 to 38 children. Had the staff been swamped by 100–150 boys and girls, a common occurrence in this period, the institution’s accomplishments would have remained modest. The most saintly corps of educators could not absorb an unlimited number of starving or unrepentant youths and expect, with completely inadequate supplies and facilities, to reshape their lives. In any case, ardent, skilled personnel did not represent the norm in detdoma. Thus, despite individual successes, these institutions taken collectively made little progress toward the goal of rehabilitating waifs in the first five years of Soviet power.

As described in the preceding chapter, Narkompros (and the Commissariat of Social Security from 1918 to 1920) intended to rely on hundreds of Juvenile Affairs Commissions to replace the courts in deciding proper treatment for young lawbreakers. No longer regarded as criminals, the children were to be spared traditional trials and incarceration. Although the plan envisioned a network of commissions reaching nearly every municipality down to the district level, implementation proceeded slowly. By March 1920, when Narkompros assumed responsibility for the commissions, only about 50 had been established, nearly all confined to the largest cities. As the ranks of homeless youths (and thus juvenile thieves) continued to increase, so too did the number of commissions. In the Russian Republic the total reached 190 by May 1921, 209 by September 1922, and 236 by December. Thereafter the figures leveled off at 273 in 1923 and 275 in 1924—in other words, roughly paralleling the opening of new receivers and still approximately three hundred short of the goal.^[46]

The number of children processed by a commission in any given area depended on numerous factors, including the board’s efficiency and the region’s share of offenders. In Petrograd, ravaged during the War Communism years but far removed from the subsequent Volga famine, the caseload of the city’s commission rose steadily from 5,888 in 1918 to 8,404 in 1919 and peaked at 9,106 in 1920. As local conditions improved, volume dropped to 7,902 in 1921 and then plunged to 4,520 the following year. Moscow’s commissions, by contrast, were busiest during the famine year of 1921, handling by one account 14,307 youths (down to 7,121 in 1922).^[47] Figures available for the Russian Republic as a whole must be regarded merely as rough estimates, given the incomplete compilation and reporting of information from the provinces. According to one source, commissions decided the cases of 54,424 juveniles in 1921, while a second author estimated that the actual total approached 85,000. A work published later in the decade listed the number who appeared before commissions as 50,580 in 1922, 43,484 in 1923, and 48,945 in 1924.^[48]

The volume of children passing through commissions was affected not only by the country’s supply of delinquents and commissions at any particular time, but also by periodic changes in the law. The decree of January 1918 had stipulated that commissions decide the cases of all minors (defined then as anyone under seventeen), stressing that adolescents no longer be sent before courts or to prisons. But the relentless increase in delinquency that accompanied the epidemic of homelessness during the next few years overwhelmed commissions and convinced the government to enact stricter measures. Thus Sovnarkom’s decree of March 1920, while increasing by one year the maximum age of youths sent before commissions, permitted the transfer of those fourteen through seventeen to the courts if commissions considered inadequate the “medical-pedagogic” measures at their disposal.^[49] Similar concern over a country saturated with young bandits colored the Russian Republic’s new Criminal Code, issued in June 1922, which reduced from eighteen to sixteen the minimum age at which an offender’s case went directly to a court. Only for those fourteen and fifteen years old did commissions retain authority to decide whether they or the courts should determine treatment.^[50]

In the summer of 1922, the expansive scale and brazenness of juvenile crime prompted a series of interagency meetings to consider transferring from Narkompros to the Commissariat of Justice all responsibility for rehabilitating delinquents. Although Narkompros managed in the end to retain its Juvenile Affairs Commissions, an amendment to the Criminal Code approved by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in October 1922 further reduced their competence. More specifically, the new wording granted courts the sole authority to decide in each instance whether they or commissions would hear cases of children fourteen and fifteen years old. These provisions of the Criminal Code and the October amendment, rather than a significant abatement of crime, appear to account for most of the sharp drop in the number of youths coming before commissions in 1922. More now traveled straight to the courts.^[51]

Meanwhile, Narkompros petitioned the All-Russian Central Executive Committee to repeal the October amendment. Among the agency’s arguments numbered a reminder that the courts possessed only a handful of juvenile institutions (administered at the time by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs) to which they could sentence the tens of thousands of adolescents now destined by the Criminal Code to appear before them. Either an expensive network of detention facilities would have to be constructed—a most unlikely development—or courts would sentence minors to confinement in regular prisons cheek by jowl with adult criminals. Habits and skills acquired here would likely remain beyond the ken of rehabilitation programs. Appeals along these lines may well have struck home, for in July 1923 Narkompros’s commissions regained the responsibility stripped from them by the previous year’s amendment to the Criminal Code.^[52]

By no means every local commission, court, and police force followed nimbly, or at all, the series of legal changes sketched above. Even when agencies learned of the latest guidelines and attempted to implement them, they often lacked instructions or resources adequate to insure uniform application from one district to the next. More than a few officials regarded vagrant adolescents as hopeless criminals, “morally defective” and impossible to salvage, who deserved the same treatment as adult thieves. Authorities who shared this view sometimes refused to recognize the competence of Juvenile Affairs Commissions and locked up underage offenders in prisons and labor camps. In contrast, others flooded commissions with delinquents at the first opportunity, apparently seeking to shift the burden of feeding and supervising them onto different shoulders.^[53] A minority of commissions behaved much like courts themselves and referred to their decisions—including fines, forced labor, and imprisonment—as “sentences.” To mark major holidays, a few granted early release through amnesties similar to those accorded adult criminals. This, Narkompros superiors complained, made no sense if one supposed that the children had been placed in settings designed to provide a healthy upbringing.^[54]

Once a boy (rarely a girl) appeared before a commission, its members were to discuss his background and the case’s particulars in order to select a suitable course of rehabilitation. As shown in table 2, the action taken was often nothing more than a conversation, reprimand, or the youth’s placement with relatives. Unregenerate offenders (including most veteran street children) found themselves routed to institutions or transferred to the courts.^[55] The data for 1922 reveal that courts received nearly a fifth of all cases, reflecting (temporarily) the terms of the new Criminal Code and its October amendment.

The three members (representatives from Narkompros and the commissariats of health and justice) who made up a Juvenile Affairs Commission could not themselves assemble pertinent information on all cases and supervise the implementation of decisions reached in their hearings. For support, they were expected to rely on social workers, as explained in the previous chapter. Many Narkompros offices, however, especially at the district level, lacked funds to provide such personnel, thereby reducing the number of cases commissions could handle and the effectiveness of their rulings. In these straits, commission members relied on their own efforts or cast about for assistance from the Children’s Social Inspection, the police, and recruits from the ranks of schoolteachers, Komsomol members, and officials in local soviets. Most people thus enlisted had to perform their new tasks on top of prior obligations and without extra pay—not a recipe for swift, enthusiastic work.^[56] Apart from this, commissions here and there were crippled by the frequent turnover and poor quality of their own members. Some provincial offices of the three commissariats ranked work with juvenile delinquents low among their responsibilities and shunted less able employees to commissions. These factors, and severe budget cutbacks brought by the New Economic Policy to Narkompros branches, idled local commissions on occasion for weeks and even months.^[57]

Nevertheless, many commissions, especially those in large cities, met regularly—roughly twice a week on average for the country as a whole and nearly every day in Moscow—hearing hundreds or thousands of cases in a year.^[58] But even the most efficient, well-staffed commission sometimes found its work frustrated by the inadequate number of institutions to which offenders could be sent for rehabilitation. In fact, “inadequate” appeared too generous a characterization in numerous regions, where no detdoma at all existed for the “morally defective.”^[59] As a result, commission members frequently found themselves forced to adopt measures they regarded as inappropriate for the individual before them. If a child required placement in an institution, and no facility contained an opening, what could they do? This quandary goes far in explaining the large percentage of youths dismissed with merely a reprimand or channeled to relatives or home provinces. Some commissions also turned to the opposite extreme among their options and disposed of cases by shunting them to the courts.^[60] Juveniles so transferred, in other words, included not only those deemed incorrigible but candidates considered suitable for Narkompros’s custody, if only the appropriate institutions were available.

After reaching the courts, adolescents sentenced to “deprivation of freedom” were generally expected to spend this period in labor homes (trudovye doma) intended exclusively for minors and administered by the commissariats of justice (until 1922) and internal affairs (through the remainder of the decade).^[61] There appear to have been three labor homes functioning in or near Moscow, Petrograd, and Saratov in 1921, joined by a fourth in Irkutsk the following year. The intended total capacity of these facilities—531 youths—far exceeded the number actually housed, 310, owing to shortages of equipment and supplies. By 1923, published lists included three more locations, adding the cities of Khar’kov, Kiev, and Kazan’ to the four earlier sites. Thereafter the number of institutions continued to grow slowly, reaching ten by 1926–1927, with a joint capacity of 1,883.^[62] This handful of structures could not begin to accommodate the thousands of delinquents nurtured by the country’s misfortunes, and courts found no alternative but to send young offenders to prison. In 1922, approximately three-quarters of all children deprived of freedom landed in regular penal facilities rather than in labor homes. Even Juvenile Affairs Commissions occasionally consigned teenagers to prisons, despite legal prohibitions.^[63]

Youths sentenced to prison were to remain isolated from adult inmates in order to avoid the grownups’ unsavory influence. In theory, sections of prisons shielded by this quarantine might then function much like labor homes. But the reality of prison life subverted partitions in most facilities, and children mingled with other convicts.^[64] Whatever else a boy acquired in this environment, it was not rehabilitation. Viewed by older prisoners as a golets, plashketa, shket, or margaritka—all underworld terms denoting an uninitiated and vulnerable individual, ripe for plucking—he likely suffered numerous rapes in their domain.^[65] He also learned from a ready corps of instructors the criminal world’s thieving techniques, language, and diversions. While he may have entered prison relatively unscarred, forced by hunger to take up petty thievery, he walked out of the institution in all probability a more formidable practitioner of the craft that had led originally to his confinement.^[66] Thereafter, especially if he lacked relatives able and willing to support him, the imperatives of survival pulled him back among the besprizornye. He returned to them, however, with a new store of knowledge (and possibly venereal disease) to pass on to those less experienced, whom he beheld in much the same light as adult convicts had appraised him in prison. Regardless of his transgressions prior to incarceration, a more hardened criminal now faced society, as chronicled by street children in song.

	My first term in prison didn’t last long:
	Nothing but a third of a year.
	And when I came out to freedom,
	There was no one I did fear.[67]

No impression emerges more starkly from a survey of the state’s early efforts to cope with abandoned youths than a picture of agencies con fronting a task far beyond their means. The plans begun in 1918 for rehabilitating the country’s already considerable population of homeless juveniles were shattered and swept away by the torrent of waifs, which rose relentlessly each year. As the number of children’s institutions swelled in response, conditions inside them deteriorated to a level that one journal labeled “primeval chaos.”^[68] Sources routinely described re ceivers and detdoma in which education and training had given way entirely to, at best, temporary survival.^[69] When the crisis receded, Nar kompros found itself presiding over a network of mostly squalid facili ties where few activities seemed both so urgent and unpromising as re habilitation. Scrutinizing this landscape at the beginning of 1923, an author in one of the agency’s journals wondered if any solution existed to the problem and worried that a bleak future on the edge of society awaited Narkompros’s wards.^[70] In the months to come, the quest for remedies stoked a debate on how best to proceed—from which there soon arose a call for sweeping reform of detdoma, based in turn on a reassessment of the besprizornye themselves.

Notes

The Street World

Responses to the Problem

Institutions

6. Florists and Professors

There must not be deprived and homeless children in the republic. Let there be young and happy citizens.

If you read sometime about the condition of our “pedagogic institutions” for besprizornye, your hair would stand on end.

By 1923 the famine had subsided, and emergency assistance agencies set about winding down their operations. Leaders in Moscow, and no doubt much of the remaining population, expressed relief that the worst of the horror had passed. But the problem of abandoned juveniles remained stubbornly at hand, both in the streets and in the teeming detdoma. Lunacharskii and other Narkompros officials called urgently in 1923–1924 for a drive to rescue homeless youths and joined the authors of numerous books, articles, and hortatory slogans in prophesying calamity if the effort failed. The most ominous danger appeared to loom in the guise of a thief, as observers pondered the prospect of desperate adolescents acquiring instincts and skills that would steer them by the million to lifelong crime. Campaigns to focus public attention on their plight included such slogans as: “Besprizornost’ in childhood means criminals as adults” and “Besprizornost’ begets crime.” “If we do not build schools and shelters for them,” one author concluded, “we will be forced to build prisons for them later.” Even the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, scarcely an avatar of decorum, worried that street children represented a “limitless source of hooligans.”^[1] Aside from tomorrow’s criminals, young vagabonds were often portrayed as a potentially malignant cancer within the new generation expected to shape a better society. Those pursuing the medical analogy most literally claimed that waifs’ unsanitary, itinerant existence rendered them prime transmitters of infectious diseases. Others, fearing contamination on a different plane, warned that the youths’ adventuresome life could entice unsupervised, “normal” boys and girls. “Struggling with besprizornost’,” proclaimed a slogan, “we save our own children.”^[2]

As speeches, slogans, and publications paraded the dire consequences of juvenile homelessness through Narkompros and before the public, many people both in and out of government recognized that the past five years of struggle on this front had not yielded heartening results. Something clearly had to be done, given the peril associated with failure, but what? Erect more detdoma? The cold reality of budgetary restrictions paralyzed such plans. In any case a chorus of voices, centered in Narkompros and broadcast most powerfully through the agency’s publications, rose by 1924 to question even the existing array of institutions. It was not an issue of numbers—though more buildings, of course, would be better than fewer. Reformers demanded instead a fresh look at the operation of facilities, based in turn on a rejection of common assumptions about street children.^[3]

In particular, they showered criticism on the concept of “moral defectiveness” (moral’no-defektivnost’)—the view that long-term vagrancy and delinquency resulted primarily from a child’s own psychological defects rather than from outside influences.^[4] The issue represented part of a larger debate that continued to ricochet through much of the 1920s among Soviet criminologists, legal theorists, and others. Controversies flared over such topics as the causes of crime and the character of offenders—questions that often boiled down to disputes over human nature. Regarding the roots of criminal behavior, for example, one school blamed genetic disorders or other innate personal qualities rather than external circumstances. Opponents insisted that deviance arose not from congenital flaws but from unfavorable living conditions. Improve a person’s surroundings, they advised, and antisocial traits would no longer appear indelible.^[5]

Among those concerned with the treatment of juveniles, the second, or “environmental,” outlook rose to prominence. Enthusiastic applause punctuated a debate at the First Moscow Conference on the Struggle with Besprizornost’ in March 1924, when a participant remarked that anyone who clung to the doctrine of “moral defectiveness” suffered from “scholarly defectiveness.”^[6] After spirited discussion, the conference rejected the theory of “moral defectiveness,” though this hardly ended dispute. The theory’s defenders, dubbed the “Leningrad professors” because several scholars among them were based in Leningrad, crossed swords repeatedly at conferences and in print with reformers known as “Moscow florists” (from the slogan “Children are the flowers of life.”). While “florists” gained the upper hand in the controversy—especially in central organs of Narkompros, its principal publications, and numerous provincial branches—the notion that many homeless juveniles were “morally defective” proved impossible to eradicate among teachers, scholars, and the general population.^[7]

The “florists” tried, however. Time and again in the middle years of the decade they contended that grievous social and economic forces accounted for nearly all instances of children wandering at large and committing crimes. An inclination to shift blame to the youths struck them as typical of bourgeois scholarship and capitalist society, which, in their opinion, demonstrated no interest in assisting the downtrodden. The admittedly antisocial demeanor of numerous urchins sprang not from inherently twisted personalities, they asserted, but from the harsh setting into which they had been swept by currents beyond their control. Inveterate psychopaths stemmed no more frequently from the street than from the “normal” population, proclaimed a resolution adopted by the Moscow conference.^[8] The very phrase “juvenile crime” was an oxymoron. Hardship might impel its young victims to violate the law, but this did not make them criminals. “There are no child criminals,” announced a slogan prepared for public display; “there are sick and neglected children.”^[9]

Many authors went further, insisting that while street life encouraged various undesirable habits, it also nurtured virtues. As noted in chapter 3, these alleged boons included boldness, resourcefulness, perceptiveness, a collectivist spirit developed from living in groups, and even a dislike for prosperous, bourgeois elements of society. Institutional personnel who counted their charges as “morally defective” thus remained oblivious to the potential supposedly acquired in the austere arena outside. Instead, a critic fumed, they behaved as if confronting incorrigible criminals or the mentally ill, thereby rendering ineffective a “whole mass of institutions for besprizornye” prior to 1924. The staff of a properly run detdom, the argument concluded, employed an understanding of waifs’ true nature to strip away their coarse veneer and cultivate the worthy qualities sprouted in hothouse fashion by their previous struggle for survival.^[10] Viewed in this light, homeless youths shed the label of “lost children,” immune to rehabilitation. “We regard the besprizornyi as a child of the Revolution,” a Komsomol delegate informed the Moscow conference. “If he is approached correctly, he can become an active builder of a socialist state.”^[11]

Despite such revelations, reformers complained, many detdoma continued to treat residents as embittered, irredeemable spirits beyond the reach of pedagogy—in short, as “morally defective” inmates. Resolutions repudiating the theory of “moral defectiveness” meant little if they failed to stir these institutions—which were said in some cases to resemble prisons “still awaiting their own October Revolution.”^[12] Partisans of change (sounding much like today’s critics of juvenile penal colonies in Russia) attacked the common practice of isolating youths from the community, the policy of “closed doors.” They argued that high walls and barred windows, adopted under the assumption that those inside were “morally defective,” ostracized the inhabitants and hindered their reintegration into society. Reformers also judged disciplinary measures employed in numerous detdoma as excessively harsh and likely to drive children further from rehabilitation. Common punishments—especially in the provinces but also encountered in Moscow and Leningrad—included deprivation of food or recreation, isolation in a separate room for as long as a few days, removal of an offender’s clothes, icy showers, extra work assignments, and beatings. Consensus regarding appropriate means of discipline never emerged—as was evident at a conference of personnel from institutions for difficult juveniles, held in November 1925—and even reformers did not always agree where, short of corporal punishment, to draw the line.^[13] But they did concur that severe methods yielded little but disappointment. Despite the bars, locks, and guards at institutions for hardened delinquents, thousands fled every year. Even those who remained, critics emphasized, often emerged alienated, untrained for available jobs, and destined once again for the criminal world.^[14]

What, then, was to be done? Mass homelessness had transformed the nature of detdoma. The primary role first envisioned for these facilities following the Revolution—that of providing an upbringing for any and all children of working parents—now appeared a dream for the remote future. In the meantime, the structures bulged with indigent and sometimes hostile youths, many unintimidated by compulsion and rigid discipline.^[15] Facing this reality, Narkompros reformers issued detailed instructions, both from Moscow and in provincial journals, on the proper operation of institutions engaged first and foremost in the rehabilitation of abandoned, difficult, but not “morally defective” juveniles.^[16]

First of all, official documents and individual authors urged that detdoma encourage healthy contact between their wards and the society they were to enter upon discharge. Adolescents had to learn how to participate productively and eagerly in life, reformers declared, not glimpse it sullenly from behind bars. An institution secured only pedagogic bankruptcy by relying on “closed doors” to retain occupants.^[17] Narkompros instructed local officials to open these doors by removing schools from inside detdoma and sending youths to attend regular schools side by side with other pupils. Where possible, children were also to visit nearby workshops, factories, and state farms for at least a portion of their labor training. If such options did not exist, thereby requiring detdoma to maintain their own schools and workshops, contact could still be established with society by opening these facilities to boys and girls from the neighborhood.^[18]

At the same time, Narkompros called with greater insistence for many other activities to supplement classroom instruction, both inside and beyond the walls of detdoma. These pursuits included circles and clubs (science, reading, drawing, drama, music, hobbies, and the like), involvement with communist youth groups, and extended summertime excursions to camps at natural attractions. The endeavors were said to provide fresh opportunities for social and political education, as well as promote the policy of “open doors.” They would also spice the routine of institutional life, dissuading the restless from escape.^[19] Toward the objective of maintaining detdoma without bars and locks, many Narkompros documents in the middle of the decade stressed more vigorously than before that residents be made to feel a part of their institutions through participation in “self-government.” This usually meant at a minimum the organization of groups to assume responsibility for daily chores, while more ambitious efforts centered on meetings (run, at least nominally, by the children themselves) to discuss house operations, emergencies, and disciplinary matters. Reformers regarded condemnation of offenders by their own “collective” as preferable to punishment imposed by the staff. A firm adult hand might be necessary temporarily, when most inhabitants had just arrived from the street, but discipline maintained by youths themselves represented the goal as “collectives” matured.^[20]

Of all the improvements desired for detdoma, none received as much emphasis as expanded labor training in workshops and fields. Workshops in particular were often depicted as the heart and soul of detdoma, the feature that most distinguished them from prerevolutionary shelters and flophouses. Reformers claimed that the shops nurtured a healthy labor psychology—namely, good work habits and a respect for manual labor—essential in preparing adolescents to join the proletariat. Facilities that produced goods for sale in local markets also helped cement relations with the surrounding community while securing additional income for detdoma. Finally, by providing skills (metalworking, leatherworking, carpentry, and so on) with which juveniles could later support themselves as adults, workshops offered homeless children a clear hope for the future and an incentive to remain in detdoma.^[21]

Official zeal for workshops rose in part from the reforms favored by many Bolsheviks and their supporters for schools in general. In the early postrevolutionary years, Narkompros insisted that arid, bookish rigidity—seen as characteristic of tsarist schools—give way to a curriculum featuring “socially productive labor.” The nation’s students would then accrue essential academic skills, including the three R’s, while engaged in diverse projects that took them outside the classroom. Even theoretical fields were thought more accessible to pupils steeped in practical work than to those who remained all day behind desks. As youths progressed through their school years, they would receive broad polytechnic training to ready them for flexible and productive lives in a modern industrial society whose features could not yet be fully divined. Moreover, asserted the ABC of Communism, they would learn “to look upon labour, not as a disagreeable necessity or as a punishment, but as a natural and spontaneous expression of faculty. Labour should be a need, like the desire for food and drink; this need must be instilled and developed in the communist school.”^[22] “Indeed,” explained a treatise titled The Unified Labor School, “the wise and experienced teacher cannot help but notice that for these three questions: how to form the child’s will, how to mold character, how to develop a spirit of solidarity, the answer is one magic word—labor.”^[23] Such exertion, in other words, did far more than train hands; it shaped the identity of a socialist citizenry.

If so, the argument for labor training applied with special urgency to street children. The point had been made before, but reformers turned spotlights on it in the middle of the decade. Who stood more in need of labor’s civilizing touch, they asked, than the besprizornye? Unfortunately, the difficult years just past had prevented most detdoma from acquiring equipment and instructors to establish proper workshops. The desperate quest for food, clothing, and medical care exhausted resources and rendered labor training a secondary concern. In the aftermath, as the flood of orphans slowly ebbed, this shortcoming proved difficult to overcome. Investigators surveying detdoma found the room for improvement of labor instruction to be far more substantial than resources necessary for progress. Where shops existed at all, they often lacked equipment and staffs to do anything but occupy children with the most primitive handicrafts—skills unlikely to provide passage from the street.^[24]

The gap between goals and reality vexed reformers wherever they turned. Some detdoma appeared to be operating properly, either in response to instructions from Moscow or on the basis of methods developed independently, but more establishments persisted with minimal labor training, harsh punishments, and “closed doors.”^[25] When a facility with “open doors” encountered difficulty managing its charges, the setback emboldened skeptics to proclaim reform “reckless and harmful sentimentalism.” At conferences and in the field, voices could still be heard insisting on stricter discipline. “ ‘Open doors,’ ” a critic asserted in 1926, “in no way give an institution any sort of special significance regarding upbringing. They lead only to corruption in every sense, if they are adopted in institutions containing youths with antisocial tendencies.”^[26] Thus in the middle of the decade, though instructions for change crowded conferences and publications, the desired improvements remained far less evident in detdoma. “Florists” found their tussle with “professors” a mere skirmish compared to the challenges beyond.

Even the most optimistic reformer likely recognized that central and local budgets would not soon relinquish funds to support accommodations for all abandoned juveniles. This reality spurred various Narkompros bodies, notably the State Scientific Council, to advocate “halfway” institutions designed to provide something short of full-time room, board, and instruction.^[27] In 1923–1924 night shelters (nochlezhki, not to be confused with flophouses of the same name that required payment and catered mainly to adults) were established for street children in many cities, especially as the approaching winter drove larger numbers to seek asylum from the elements. If detdoma could not absorb all candidates, in other words, some could turn to night shelters for temporary sanctuary from the worst rigors of their environment.^[28]

The shelters were envisioned not only as a less expensive alternative to other institutions, but as a means of enticing the obstinate and wary to take a first small step off the street. They could come every night, if they wished, or only intermittently. At any rate, they were not to be rounded up and brought against their will. If they violated a facility’s rules, they might be denied the evening meal and expelled, but they would not be hauled to institutions for delinquents. To a degree, shelters resembled receivers in that they were designed to receive youths directly from a brutalizing world, introduce them to rudimentary education, and eventually send them (voluntarily, in the case of shelters) to permanent institutions for rehabilitation.^[29] Before long, some shelters began to operate daytime divisions, hoping thereby to wean children entirely from the street by offering them each morning an alternative to train stations and markets. Activities—drama clubs, reading circles, literacy training, and simple workshops—remained voluntary, though house rules required typically that one participate for a stipulated number of hours in order to receive lunch. Where these daytime operations emerged, they further enhanced the similarity between shelters and receivers, sometimes to the point where significant differences vanished altogether.^[30]

As expected, a large share of those who frequented shelters came from the street’s hard core. They had escaped repeatedly from other institutions and were long accustomed to life in seamy quarters of town. According to a study of two hundred juveniles who passed through a certain Moscow shelter in 1924–1925, approximately 40 percent had already roamed the land for over three years.^[31] When they entered shelters, they brought their mores with them and frustrated the facilities’ work. Investigators discovered ragged, lice-covered urchins of all ages crowded together in filthy rooms, obscured by clouds of their own cigarette smoke. Many departed periodically to engage in thievery and other exploits unscheduled by Narkompros. Veterans commonly entered in groups—the same gangs in which they lived outside—and their leaders sometimes sabotaged the plans of an institution’s staff. Even in the absence of gangs, experienced youths routinely beat the new or feeble and seized their clothing. In some facilities, gambling and cocaine enjoyed much wider appeal than workshops and clubs. The Moscow study found approximately one-third of the sample to be long-term cocaine users, and other accounts confirm that such children saw no reason to abandon the practice in shelters.^[32]

Thus, numerous shelters resembled an extension of the street more than a stepping-stone away from it. Not all youths disrupted regimens, but even the docile could prove difficult to work with because of their physical and emotional debilitation. An observer described children in a Moscow shelter as emaciated wraiths, with sunken eyes encased in enormous black circles, gazing about with “a sort of senile expression.” Shriveled black rootlets protruded from the gums of those who had already lost their teeth.^[33] While some shelters managed eventually to steer 40–50 percent of their visitors to other institutions, the nature of the juveniles they courted made this an achievement that few facilities could surpass.^[34] Vagrant life did not surrender readily its favorite apprentices.

Night shelters were the most ambitious “halfway” institutions of the period, but they shared some of the street’s brood with others, notably daytime playgrounds set up in parks, squares, and vacant lots during the year’s warm months. Much like shelters, playgrounds were intended to attract homeless and other unsupervised youths voluntarily, by offering a meal, games, excursions, and crafts. The staff hoped to gain newcomers’ confidence, erode their bond with the street, and eventually convince them to enter institutions or at least to spend the night in shelters.^[35] Confronting an often troublesome clientele, shelters and playgrounds deserve credit for guiding any children (certainly several thousand over the years) out of slums and down the road to a productive life. But it must be stressed that these facilities never multiplied to admit (let alone win over) more than a small percentage of abandoned juveniles. They remained modest projects to retrieve some of the neglected and alienated who had not settled in Narkompros’s much larger network of detdoma.

By 1923–1924 it was clear that the solution to the problem of street children lay in something more than scooping them up for delivery to receivers and detdoma. Thousands had already traveled this route repeatedly, each time running away to their familiar haunts. Such discouraging results encouraged experiment with alternative approaches, and none more fully embodied the reformers’ spirit than the labor commune (trudovaia kommuna).^[36] Here was an institution organized in the belief that even the most belligerent adolescent could be rehabilitated—indeed, an institution intended especially for teenage delinquents, many of whom had prowled the streets for years. While some might regard prison as the only place for these ruffians, communes faced them having disavowed traditional measures of control, including “closed doors” and harsh punishments. Instead, supporters predicted, youths and staff would work together as comrades.^[37]

The most striking difference between detdom and commune, a feature heralded tirelessly by the latter’s champions, was the principle of voluntary entry and departure. Children were to join only if they so desired, and they could leave if disenchantment overcame them subsequently.^[38] Ideally, they would emulate a group that formed the initial nucleus of the Rosa Luxemburg Labor Commune, established on the outskirts of Moscow in 1924. Late one night in February, a social worker (accompanied by a policeman) descended into a tunnel leading under the Alexander Station. Among the adult criminals and tramps ensconced in the basement, she found a group of nine boys, some of whom had been living on the premises for years. Several had passed more than once through Juvenile Affairs Commissions and on to detdoma—from which they always fled back to the station. Calming them with assurances that they did not face another roundup that night, the social worker described a labor commune and asked them merely to think about the opportunities available there. On subsequent visits in weeks thereafter, she continued the discussion with this group, suggesting that they consider such an undertaking. Eventually, after their leader and a few other lads inspected a proposed site, the group agreed to embark on the venture.^[39]

In addition to voluntary entry and departure, labor communes were expected to devote particular emphasis to practices promoted by reformers for detdoma, most notably “self-government” and labor training. As indicated previously, “self-government” (and “self-service”) meant that children were to assume responsibility for daily chores and participate in the commune’s general assembly to run the institution. Treated as full-fledged partners and sustained by a sense of control over their lives, they would bear no resemblance to the bitter, unruly inmates of other facilities.^[40] Nor would they lounge about the grounds, as the name labor commune suggests. Even more than in detdoma, instruction in workshops or in nearby factories and state farms represented the key to rehabilitation. Benefits thought to derive from labor in any institution—access to a profession, self-respect, and a sense of solidarity with other workers—seemed to be urgent requirements for commune members. Their difficult nature and the fact that, as teenagers, they would soon be discharged to support themselves made training for workbench and field the first priority.^[41]

Communes appeared here and there in 1923 and then mushroomed to such a degree that, by the end of the following year, they had lost the quality of puzzling curiosities.^[42] Some were established on the initiative of social workers and local officials before Narkompros could issue guidelines, which did not circulate in comprehensive form until 1925.^[43] Viewed in a broader context, the institutions were a comparatively late, government-inspired manifestation of communal living endeavors that had flourished spontaneously among diverse segments of the population ever since the Revolution. In October’s glow and the ensuing adversity of War Communism, groups of students and workers had rushed to pool resources and live in what they took to be the new socialist manner. Communes also sprouted (or were rejuvenated) among people less drawn to socialism—peasants and religious sectarians, for example—who shared nonpersonal property and organized collective living arrangements. Even in the case of sectarians, the Bolsheviks displayed remarkable sympathy for their efforts during the 1920s, often finding in them aspects of a communist lifestyle.^[44] Still more attractive, then, seemed the prospect of Narkompros’s communes, for they would lack religious or superstitious blemishes associated with communities conceived by sectarians and peasants.

While Narkompros administered the majority of labor communes for besprizornye, other agencies, most notably the secret police (OGPU), operated similar facilities of their own. The first OGPU commune (as distinct from the agency’s earlier institutions for homeless children) appeared near Moscow in 1924. Dzerzhinskii and some of his colleagues hoped to demonstrate that a suitable atmosphere could salvage even the most unrepentant delinquents—though others in police circles harbored less fervor for the enterprise and referred to the project as their chief’s “baby farm.” At any rate, more OGPU communes soon followed, and by 1928 the total stood at thirty-five. Best known in the long run was the Dzerzhinskii Labor Commune, established near Khar’kov in 1927 and directed for several years thereafter by Anton Makarenko. In theory, the communes of Narkompros and the OGPU shared basic principles—voluntary entry, “self-government,” and extensive labor training—though stricter discipline was generally expected on the part of the OGPU. Its facilities sought the most difficult youths, often recruited from jails. The Rosa Luxemburg Labor Commune, for example, after several months in Narkompros’s hands, passed into the OGPU’s domain late in 1924 and began to receive juveniles from Moscow’s Butyrskaia Prison.^[45]

Some communes, of both Narkompros and the OGPU, reportedly enjoyed considerable success. They implemented “self-government,” involved members in labor training, and gradually broke the binding spell of life on the street. A number of institutions appear to have retained nearly all their recruits, including those who had previously fled countless detdoma.^[46] But even descriptions of the most successful communes usually shrank from suggesting that rehabilitation proceeded smoothly. Thefts, gambling, drinking, cocaine use, and fights proved difficult to eradicate and flared up from time to time, especially when a large new contingent arrived from the street or prison. “Self-government” might degenerate into a charade or collapse entirely, and gang leaders could disrupt an institution by continuing to demand the deference and tribute they had customarily enjoyed.^[47] Youths in communes located near markets and train stations succumbed on occasion to the lure of these locations and disappeared. Even an article endorsing labor communes as the most suitable place for difficult juveniles acknowledged that, despite the success of a few institutions in retaining their populations, the overall percentage of residents who abandoned communes was “very large.”^[48] Though information is sketchy, certain ventures clearly failed altogether, torn by mass brawls requiring police intervention or simply disintegrating until adolescents roamed without any supervision.^[49]

No less a trademark of communes than the policy of voluntary entry faded rapidly. At a meeting in May 1925 of a subsection of Narkompros’s State Scientific Council, a participant remarked: “Labor communes, as a mass institution, have not proven themselves because life has forced the violation of their basic principle—voluntary entry. Now [juveniles] are dispatched to labor communes by force.” Instructions sent in October of the same year to provincial Narkompros offices praised the rule of voluntary entry, but then explained that the principle did not mean a youth could be delivered to an institution only if he consented. That would be “too facile and narrow” an interpretation, noted the order, because adolescents often had no desire to enter facilities. The document urged tenacious exertion to secure a child’s approval, but the clear implication remained that absence of assent need not thwart the routing of new members to communes.^[50]

Numerous resolutions and instructions generated by various Narkompros bodies in 1924–1925 favored the reorganization of all detdoma (or all institutions for difficult youths) as labor communes.^[51] Articles on communes that appeared in Narkompros publications focused almost invariably on the most successful, and the positive impression left by these descriptions encouraged, sometimes explicitly, the transformation of detdoma along similar lines. But no such mass reorganization occurred, and it seems plausible to conclude that most, less publicized, communes experienced enough difficulties to eliminate their appeal as models. Had they consistently delivered superior results, nothing would have prevented the recasting of detdoma in their image. Whatever the accuracy of this speculation, labor communes never flirted with ubiquity. A work published in 1926 calculated that they housed less than 4 percent of all institutionalized street children, and this share scarcely soared as the decade waned. For better or for worse, the vast majority of these wards (roughly 90 percent, according to the account just mentioned) resided, as before, in detdoma.^[52]

As Narkompros struggled to reform its children’s institutions, many social workers, journalists, and government officials, while praising these efforts, concluded that the task of recovering abandoned boys and girls exceeded the state’s capabilities. With the homeless continuing to deplete resources applied by Narkompros and other agencies, publications and official resolutions called more frequently for society as a whole to lend a hand.^[53] Apart from individual citizens, the public (obshchestvennost’) targeted in these appeals included semiofficial bodies such as trade unions and communist youth groups (the Komsomol and Pioneers), individual factories, institutes, military units, and societies of volunteers devoted to saving destitute juveniles. During the famine, many such people and organizations had strained to provide whatever they could to rescue victims of the catastrophe, but by 1923 the sense of emergency had passed. In addition, the New Economic Policy, by requiring state agencies to support themselves with less subsidization from Moscow, helped dry up contributions from factories and other enterprises.^[54] Finally, as some observers alleged, a considerable portion of society may have grown accustomed to young ragamuffins in the streets and accepted the phenomenon with less distress or even contemplation than had been the case a year or two previously. Those who found their attention drawn to the scruffy figures were more likely than during the famine to regard them as scoundrels, whose plight merited no sympathy.^[55]

Hence, in the middle of the decade, Narkompros and the Children’s Commission redoubled their push to secure assistance from individuals and groups. Books appeared describing the bleak street world, and rebukes stung organizations for their passivity in aiding the homeless.^[56] Many newspapers carried fund-raising displays listing recent donors (individuals, Party cells, work units, editorial boards, and so on), followed by names of others who were challenged to respond. In Izvestiia, for instance, under the title “Help the Besprizornyi,” a group of authors called on such colleagues as Alexei Tolstoi, Boris Pil’niak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Andrei Belyi, and Osip Mandel’shtam to join them in contributing. Some papers ran these appeals with near daily frequency for months. During the first half of 1926, most issues of Pravda contained a section urging readers to donate funds for a labor commune, and by late July, when Pravda described the commune’s opening, gifts totaled nearly 140,000 rubles. From time to time, following the death of well-known personages, the paper listed those who forwent customary wreaths and chose instead to commemorate the deceased by giving money to care for waifs.^[57]

The government also encouraged special “weeks” (or, less often, other periods), with the goal of focusing public attention on abandoned children’s misfortune. These undertakings—with such titles as “Week of the Besprizornyi,” “Fortnight of the Besprizornyi and Ill Child,” and “Week of Aid to Besprizornye”—were usually local operations centered in a single city and sometimes projected through the province, though drives occasionally encompassed an entire republic.^[58] Bodies in and out of government might share responsibility for implementing a “week”; as a result, the exact array of sponsors varied considerably from place to place. “Society” most often contributed such partners as trade unions, teachers, the Women’s Section of the Party, the Komsomol, and volunteer groups formed to aid minors. Less frequently, military units and even boys and girls from detdoma participated.^[59]

Because promoters of a “week” could choose any number of activities, their plans differed markedly from one region to the next. But even with all the local variations, fund-raising remained a common attribute. Money was solicited from enterprises and collected through the sale of flowers, handicrafts (some made by youths in detdoma), special stamps, postcards, pins, emblems, and other petty objects. Slogans usually appeared in public places, rousing the population to make donations. Auctions and lotteries also generated funds, as did special shows featuring plays, movies, music, and other productions for which admission could be charged. Aside from gathering revenue, “weeks” often sought to familiarize society with the misery of street life and explain the problem’s importance by means of public lectures, exhibitions, pamphlets, and newspaper articles. Here the aim might extend to recruiting citizens for voluntary organizations in which they could assist state officials. “Only with participation of the entire population,” proclaimed a slogan, “can victory be achieved on the long and difficult front of besprizornost’.” In some cases a “week” included inspections of local detdoma and even expeditions to round up homeless juveniles and convey them to institutions.^[60]

It is difficult to gauge popular reaction to these appeals. Reports from numerous regions told of workers and officials donating small portions of their pay (either as a single gift or in regular installments over many months) and volunteering to prepare clothing for children in local receivers and detdoma. Some organizations, especially Pioneer and Komsomol units, staged shows and contributed extra days of work on weekends to raise money for the cause.^[61] Occasionally, a factory, trade union, or military unit gave considerable sums to a nearby institution and even assumed formal responsibility for its material support. Such accords often called as well for the sponsoring organization to carry out periodic inspections of the facility and assist Narkompros with labor training and general upbringing.^[62] As improbable a benefactor as the state film agency auditioned some three hundred juveniles fresh from the street and selected twenty for instruction. After a difficult start, during which several trainees fled or displayed little enduring talent, those who persevered set to work producing a children’s film.^[63]

The labor and resources supplied through these channels by a small minority of citizens spoke well of their devotion to a worthy cause and helped save youths from prolonged vagrancy. At the same time, critics asserted that the public’s interest wandered fast on the conclusion of officially orchestrated exhortation. All fell quiet, and the problem remained much as before.^[64] A few children’s institutions did benefit greatly from local donations, but the overwhelming majority of facilities remained primarily dependent on funds and materiel provided (or not provided) by central and local government bodies.

Apart from money and supplies, Narkompros lacked sufficient personnel, especially social workers out in the street. Most cities, including Moscow, found their branches of the Children’s Social Inspection grossly understaffed and unable to work effectively with hundreds or thousands of youths peering from the urban landscape’s nooks and crannies. In response, communities around the country recruited groups of “volunteers” (druzhinniki-dobrovol’tsy), often from the Komsomol in general and universities in particular, along with participants from trade unions, the Women’s Section of the Party, and other organizations. Large numbers were marshaled in this fashion, especially during academic vacations and for special exercises of short duration. Approximately one thousand “volunteers” worked with besprizornye in Moscow’s streets in 1925, “over eight hundred” in Leningrad the following year, and in 1924 roughly three hundred young people helped conduct a census of homeless children in Saratov.^[65]

“Volunteers” assumed, with varying degrees of training and supervision, duties that took them deep into a city’s shadows. They helped tally the local street population, usually by groping through shabby sections of town at night when the search’s objects were most likely to be in their “dwellings.” More routinely, they patrolled markets, stations, and other prime locations, searching for lairs and keeping an eye peeled for new arrivals. Many received instructions to establish contact with veterans of this terrain, win their trust, and coax them into permanent institutions or temporary accommodations such as night shelters.^[66] The work naturally entailed certain dangers, for juvenile delinquents, not to mention the adult criminals among whom they commonly lived, rarely summoned enthusiasm at the approach of social workers and census takers. Most often, youths simply vanished into the urban labyrinth they knew so well. But on several reported occasions, similar no doubt to many that went unrecorded, they greeted visitors with barrages of stones.^[67]

Citizens also participated in dramatic mass roundups of homeless children conducted repeatedly in cities across the country. On the given day, scores, hundreds, and even thousands of “volunteers” were divided into small groups and assigned to search various districts known to harbor concentrations of their quarry. After receiving instructions, brigades set out—usually at night—to comb train stations, ruined buildings, flop houses, taverns, apartment entryways, dumps, and other promising habitats. In a few instances, boys recently removed from the street helped guide search parties to abodes of cohorts still at large.^[68] The objects of a roundup often displayed no inclination to exchange their domiciles for an institution. Many had already fled more than one detdom and quickly disappeared into the night as brigades approached. If cornered, they responded with searing obscenities and even violence. The following taunts, dispensed by a youth netted one night, ranked as a comparatively mild expression of defiance.

—“What is your name?” [asked a social worker].

—“Ivan, or maybe Aleksei.”

—“And your last name?”

—“I have forty. I’ll say them all if you like. Choose one.”

—“How old are you?”

—“One thousand! And then some.”

—“Where were you born?”

—“In Peter [i.e., St. Petersburg]. In the Winter Palace.”

—“Who were your parents?”

—“Nikolai Romanov. But perhaps someone helped him. I don’t remember exactly.”^[69]

In turn, most brigades devoted little attention to securing the consent of those corralled. Briefings might discourage the use of force, but headlong chases after elusive urchins tended to drain pursuers’ patience. Only the most pacific men and women confined themselves to persuasion when steering a struggling, abusive lad to an institution. More likely he was marched off under guard—with hands bound, according to a report from Saratov—and the frequent participation of policemen further insured a tone remote from the reformers’ spirit.^[70] Where possible, children apprehended in the sweeps were taken to receivers for processing and then dispatched to permanent institutions. But the numbers amassed in a single night, sometimes reaching into the hundreds, often far exceeded the capacities of local primary facilities. In this event, the night’s catch waited in any quarters available, including police stations, until they could be moved to more appropriate buildings.^[71]

One of the most common vehicles by which citizens joined the effort to aid abandoned minors was the “Friend of Children” Society (Obshchestvo “Drug detei” or ODD). Formed on the initiative of the Children’s Commission in Moscow and Khar’kov at the end of 1923, ODD soon grew into a nationwide network of cells, with an official membership of one million by October 1926.^[72] Many cells functioned inside trade unions, Komsomol groups, Women’s Sections of the Party, military units, and other organizations, though ODD branches also existed outside the framework of such bodies and recruited participants from society at large. With resources obtained from initiation fees, yearly dues, donations, and public fund-raising drives, cells engaged in a wide range of activities.^[73] They furnished “volunteers,” helped conduct “weeks” and similar campaigns, contributed money and supplies to detdoma, and assisted state agencies in the operation of receivers, shelters, playgrounds, workshops, and cafeterias. They also sought to place youths with guardians or, following their discharge from institutions, in jobs and decent living quarters. In addition, ODD provided aid to poor families and worked to improve the methods with which parents raised their offspring—thereby seeking to prevent children from reaching the street at all.^[74]

Of course, few ODD cells managed all these endeavors. Many did little more than collect dues for occasional contributions to the cause, and in some units even fund-raising fell by the wayside. Reports often noted cells that formed and then lay dormant for want of local initiative or encouragement from above. The only sign of their members appeared on rolls of names initially filed.^[75] In Moscow, Leningrad, Khar’kov, and a number of other cities, ODD did emerge as a mass organization, visibly engaged in the struggle to end juvenile homelessness. But in other regions—especially the countryside, where ODD was expected to help stem the flow of peasant youths to the cities—cells remained few and far between.^[76]

In its review of the well-known motion picture Road to Life (which portrayed a group of delinquents led to better ways in a labor commune), ODD’s Moscow journal complained in 1931 that no hint of the organization’s work appeared on the screen. An individual member of ODD did materialize briefly in the film, but in a decidedly unflattering role of “a petty bourgeois beating a besprizornyi.” More serious, resolutions issued by various bodies early in the 1930s repeatedly characterized ODD’s work as inadequate. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee went so far as to claim in 1934 that ODD had not fulfilled the mission entrusted to it and “does not play any sort of discernible role in work with children.”^[77] Such an assessment is too harsh, at least when characterizing ODD during the 1920s. Certainly it had problems, and the organization never lived up to the expectations that accompanied its inception. But in many cities, and even in some smaller towns, ODD cells received frequent mention as participants in charitable projects. Judging from the evidence at hand, ODD assisted thousands of youths in one way or another over the years, either helping to remove them from the street or reducing the likelihood that they would find their way there. The fact that these efforts overall generated only modest progress toward the goal of eliminating homelessness demonstrated not only ODD’s shortcomings but also the imposing scope of the task.

No more direct means existed for citizens to help juveniles and reduce demand on Narkompros than to open the doors of their homes. During the years of war and famine, a multitude of young refugees—one hundred thousand according to one estimate—were placed with private citizens. Though host families came mainly from the peasantry, the nation’s titular head, Mikhail Kalinin, and his wife also adopted two orphans found wandering the parched roads. Officials generally resorted to these arrangements as emergency measures, particularly when boys and girls were evacuated into districts in quantities that engulfed local institutions.^[78] While results in some instances appear satisfactory, most evidence conveys a discouraging impression. Families commonly accepted wards under pressure from authorities, and this compulsion did not presage a hearty welcome for the household’s newcomers, even assuming they possessed no diseases or troublesome individual qualities. At any rate, peasants living near the subsistence level found an extra mouth a considerable burden, as an American Red Cross agent discovered near Arkhangel’sk: “I enquired of [a local official] how the refugees [adults as well as children] were received by the families where they were quartered and from his reply I gathered that in the majority of cases they were not very welcome.” Children regarded by their hosts in this light often lived miserably—exhausted by work, begrudged food and clothing, and made to feel every inch an affliction. Some families refused to feed their new lodgers or sought to return them to local Narkompros offices, unless the youths took matters into their own hands first and ran away. An investigator concluded that the hardships confronted by famine refugees after assignment to private homes soon drove “a huge percentage” to the street.^[79]

Placement of the homeless in foster families grew far less common in 1923–1924 compared to the preceding years.^[80] The famine had abated, and there seemed little reason to pursue a policy widely judged to be disappointing. Like evacuation, mass foster care appeared a crisis tactic whose time had passed. Within a year, however, Narkompros resolved to revive the practice in modified form, not as an emergency measure but for the long term. The decision represented yet another thrust at problems associated with detdoma. First, observed numerous journalists, officials, and Narkompros orders, the nation’s overcrowded network of institutions could not possibly absorb all those still on their own. Second, not a flicker of hope existed that additional funds would be forthcoming to construct enough new facilities. Diverting children to families of peasants and artisans would diminish the financial burden on Narkompros. Properly screened, some might pass directly from the street to private households, bypassing detdoma altogether. In addition, many adolescents already living in institutions could be discharged to families, thereby freeing places in detdoma for younger candidates. It was far more cost effective, proponents of foster care maintained, to offer financial incentives to peasant families than to pay for upbringing in institutions. Furthermore, they claimed, juveniles would more likely acquire labor skills in properly selected households than in underequipped and poorly organized detdoma. These arguments were bolstered in 1925 by a study conducted in Samara province, indicating that youths placed previously in peasant families had flourished more than their counterparts in detdoma.^[81]

To be sure, notes of anxiety also registered in meetings and publications. Foster care, after all, signaled a retreat from the goal of collective, institutional upbringing and promised to expose some children to religion and other influences scarcely compatible with Narkompros’s curriculum.^[82] But the arguments for relieving pressure on detdoma outweighed these objections, and decrees soon began to include foster care (patronirovanie) routinely in the list of options for authorities confronted with homeless juveniles. Some local officials, eager to reduce the strain detdoma placed on their budgets, discharged youths into families in 1924–1925 even before receiving guidelines from Moscow.^[83]

When such instructions did appear in 1925–1926, they reflected an awareness of the sorry results obtained four years earlier. No family, they stressed, should be compelled to accept new members. Local Narkompros personnel were encouraged to promote foster care among the surrounding population, but the peasants themselves had to desire the arrangement and take the initiative in communicating their decision to officials.^[84] Few could be expected to do so without enticements, of course, and the government offered several. Families accepting children were to receive an extra strip of land (freed of the agricultural tax for three years), a cash payment, and additional privileges regarding local taxes and fees to be worked out by officials on the scene.^[85] Should a household rise to these offers, Narkompros staff in the area had instructions to initiate an investigation of the family to insure that it could provide a suitable environment. This meant that a representative of the Children’s Social Inspection—or, in the unit’s absence, nearly anyone else available, including a recruit from the Komsomol or ODD—had to ascertain that the prospective hosts exhibited no such disqualifying brands as infectious diseases, poverty, alcoholism, or criminal proclivities. Similarly, Narkompros reminded its provincial offices that a successful program required careful selection of youths. Those with illnesses, a disinclination for agricultural work, or objectionable habits acquired in the underworld did not make promising candidates.^[86]

After screening of this sort had produced an acceptable match, representatives from the family and Narkompros drew up an agreement. It listed the promised remuneration and detailed the household’s obligation to provide agricultural training and raise the child as one of its own for a certain number of years.^[87] Every six months thereafter, the Children’s Social Inspection or one of the substitutes just mentioned was to visit the dwelling and verify the terms’ fulfillment. In some provinces, officials chose to appoint separate legal guardians as well.^[88] When a boy came of age and left his foster family, the strip of land contributed previously by the state became his. In addition, the peasant household was to provide him with agricultural implements and other supplies as specified in the agreement. If both parties wished, he could continue to live with the family, which then retained the extra land. Should he run away or otherwise depart prematurely, the field reverted to the state.^[89]

Narkompros also sought to transfer youths from detdoma to live with artisans. The rationale was much the same as when peasant families represented the intended hosts, and agreements likewise offered incentives (monetary rather than land) to participating artisan households and larger groups (arteli) of craftsmen. In addition to any initial outlays negotiated, Narkompros agreed to pay for the support of apprentices during the first year of instruction. The hosts in turn were to set aside funds each month to help establish their charges in arteli or as independent handicraftsmen upon completion of training.^[90]

The total number of children transferred to peasants and, less often, artisans appears to have ranged between fifteen and twenty thousand by 1925–1926, including a few thousand placed during the famine and still living with families. According to a Narkompros report, peasant households concluded agreements in 1926 to receive approximately 4,400 inhabitants of detdoma in the Russian Republic, and the following year they took in an additional 7,500.^[91] In certain provinces (most notably Samara), as many as several thousand juveniles lived in foster homes, while in other regions the policy failed to take root.^[92] Overall, the practice gradually developed beyond a negligible scale but did not yield the volume of transfers desired by Narkompros. Even the optimistic figure of twenty thousand equaled less than 10 percent of those in the country’s detdoma.^[93]

What accounted for the population’s lukewarm response? The difficulties varied from place to place, but generally included some combination of the following. Numerous local officials remained unfamiliar with foster-care legislation or did not bother to publicize the new terms and incentives. Perhaps in some cases they recoiled from the program’s extra administrative work. More often, they lacked or refused to commit money and land called for in the decrees. Here and there, as before, they forced children on families—with predictably discouraging results, Narkompros pointed out to its provincial offices. Reports also told of peasants failing to receive payments after accepting new “sons” or “daughters,” which cooled a village’s interest in further participation.^[94] Even where incentives were distributed punctually, peasants did not always evince enthusiasm for the program. Some refused candidates younger than fourteen or so, deeming the pact worthless if it did not provide a capable worker. Others wanted nothing to do with any child from a detdom—an institution, they felt, whose walls sheltered only miscreants.^[95]

Testimony varied considerably regarding the fate of those placed in families. Many cities, including Moscow, registered encouraging results, and a number of sources asserted that a scant tenth of the country’s foster-care arrangements collapsed. Samara province boasted a failure rate of only 2 percent.^[96] But other investigations and Narkompros documents created a different impression, sometimes of the same region praised elsewhere. In an account published in 1927, for example, Irkutsk appeared on a list of cities where no more than 6 percent of host families returned to Narkompros the boys and girls they had received—in contrast to another journal’s report that out of four hundred juveniles sent in 1927 from detdoma to families in the Irkutsk region, “about two hundred” had run away. Both figures may be accurate, but each casts the policy in a decidedly different light. Where children remained with their hosts, fragmentary evidence suggests that sooner or later they may not have received what Narkompros considered adequate food, clothing, labor training, or opportunities to attend school. Some peasants even took in youths for work during the agricultural season and then drove them out at the onset of winter.^[97] Much of the difficulty in appraising mass foster care derived from Narkompros’s inability to supervise those it transferred to peasant villages. The agency’s staff did not approach the size necessary to bring most of the countryside into view, and many youths thus disappeared over the bureaucratic horizon when they entered new families. Some local officials, having signed an agreement with a peasant or artisan, regarded the matter as closed and severed all contact with the household. There were offices that failed even to compile a list of families receiving children. Such practices left Narkompros personnel in Moscow squinting through fog in their efforts to evaluate the program.^[98]

At the end of the decade, as the Party prepared to launch its twin campaigns of collectivization and dekulakization, journal articles and Narkompros orders hearkened to the new winds blowing from the Kremlin and questioned the practice of distributing youths to individual peasant families. Warnings focused in particular on the pernicious influences allegedly awaiting boys and girls sent to prosperous kulak households—a peril best avoided in the healthy setting of collective farms expected soon to blanket the countryside.^[99] Some authors dismissed the topic by contending that the surge to socialism would eliminate vagrancy and with it the need for any policy of foster care. As it turned out, devastation loosed on the peasants by collectivization, dekulakization, and the famine of 1933 sired new millions of street children and insured that decrees would continue to promote foster care in that turbulent era. Later still, the sea of homeless juveniles produced by the Second World War forced Soviet officials to resort as never before to foster care and such kindred measures as adoption. According to incomplete data, the end of hostilities saw some 350,000 orphans placed in families that had managed to survive the savage conflict intact.^[100]

The stubborn problem of abandoned youths prompted a variety of remedies in the mid-1920s. Some were new, at least as measures vigorously promoted by the central government, while others bore a strong resemblance to previous policies. As an assortment, they represented a combination of what might be called revolutionary idealism and strategic concession—in the latter instance paralleling the concurrent New Economic Policy. Foster care, for example, did not inspire passionate endorsement as a means to implement October’s dreams. Just as the New Economic Policy signaled a retreat from socialism by calling on private entrepreneurs to help revitalize the economy, the enlistment of private families to raise homeless children marked an about-face from the goal of socialist upbringing in state institutions. Foster care, in short, stemmed from the painful recognition that resources for detdoma were inadequate. Much the same could be said of night shelters, at least to the degree that they were promoted as an inexpensive stopgap source of minimal care. Even the call for society’s assistance—whether as volunteers in the street or contributors of funds—usually appeared in official documents accompanied by an explanation that the government alone had been unable to muster sufficient resources for the task. Phrased in this way, suggesting that Narkompros and other agencies would have preferred to accomplish the undertaking on their own, participation of civilian volunteers could be seen as a bow to necessity rather than a long-desired stride toward a Bolshevik vision. At the same time, however, conviction characteristic of the revolutionary dawn found voice in the arguments of “florists” and glistened in the promotion of labor communes by directives, resolutions, and other publications. Here the dominant tone remained faith in government institutions to produce a new socialist generation, even from the most unpromising raw materials.

As the Soviet Union entered the second half of the 1920s, then, it did so having deployed a wide range of measures to eliminate the spectacle of youths roaming the streets. Difficulties remained, of course, along with differences of opinion on how best to proceed. But the nation had safely weathered the storms that attended its inception and no longer faced anything like the catastrophes that poured millions of waifs across the land five years earlier. Time at last appeared an ally in the drive to reclaim the “Revolution’s children,” and those involved in the effort did not consider it audacious to anticipate success by the end of the decade.

Notes

7. Progress and Frustration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

8. Conclusion: On the Road to Life?

Ten years ago, every traveler in Russia came back with stories of the hordes of wild children who roamed the countryside and infested the city streets. . . . After methods of repression had failed, they gathered these children together in collective homes; they taught them cooperation, useful work, healthful recreation. Against great odds they succeeded. There are today no wild children in Russia.

If there were old people…who could not adjust to Soviet society, there were young ones, too, who could not—or would not. My roommate, Nichan, had adjusted brilliantly after his years of wandering, and had become an inspiring and useful citizen under state guidance, helping others along the path of progress. But many young vagabonds had refused to accept—or accepted only temporarily—the aid of institutions established for them. These determined little hooligans were making a last stand for freedom.

Toward the end of the 1920s, as the Party set a new course for socialism, comprehensive planning took the helm amid feverish acclaim. Zeal for blueprints and guidelines, most prominent in fanfare surrounding the First Five-Year Plan, spread beyond the economy to many other undertakings, including the campaign to eliminate homelessness. Narkompros tacked to the changing winds as early as 1927, when the preface to one of its publications announced that “the struggle with juvenile besprizornost’, like all other areas of Soviet construction, is taking on a planned, systematic character.”^[1] In November of the same year, a report to the All-Russian Conference of Detdom Personnel urged that uncoordinated bursts of activity, which had failed to clear the streets, give way to a deliberate approach. Improvised emergency measures may have been unavoidable when desperate millions inundated the country, observed the report, but current conditions dictated a meticulous, studied solution. This was not an instruction to be ignored. Only a few months before, the government had unveiled a Three-Year Plan to rescue abandoned children, and the conference dutifully urged that local officials compose similar documents tailored to their own regions.^[2]

The Three-Year Plan was approved by the Council of People’s Commissars and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on June 20, 1927. It followed a draft prepared by the State Planning Commission, based on an estimate that in 1925 the Russian Republic contained 125,000 homeless juveniles requiring “full maintenance.” Of this total, the planners calculated that 20,000 would enter institutions by the end of 1925, leaving 105,000 in need of accommodations. Places were to be created for nearly two thirds by discharging 68,000 inhabitants from detdoma and other facilities over three years (23,000 in 1926/27, 22,000 in 1927/28, and 23,000 in 1928/29). Concurrently, the plan expected construction of new institutions and expansion of existing establishments to accept the remaining 37,000. As before, Narkompros figured prominently. Fully 34,000 of the 37,000 youths were earmarked for its facilities, with only 2,000 intended for the Commissariat of Internal Affairs’s labor homes and 1,000 for the Commissariat of Health’s sickbeds. At the same time, the decree ordered provincial officials to draft local plans following the guidelines sketched above, thus forbidding further reductions in the budgets and capacities of detdoma during the three-year interval.^[3]

The decree of June 20 also called for a concerted effort to remove juvenile stowaways from the nation’s railways, a goal promoted again five months later by Lunacharskii at the All-Russian Conference of Detdom Personnel.^[4] While the passage of time had reduced the number of youths plying the rails, many who persisted (some 24,000, according to an estimate in 1926) now boasted years of experience on the road. In contrast to refugees from war and famine, they were skilled in the tricks of survival and familiar with the criminal subculture at stations. More comfortable in this footloose world than in children’s institutions, they (along with a smaller number who traveled aboard ships on inland waterways) presented facilities with a severe challenge. Regulations and discipline struck them as chafing impositions, and they kept an eye open for opportunities to flee. It came as no surprise that a majority plucked from the rails late in the decade had already compiled records of escape from detdoma.^[5]

Waifs on the railways confronted other government agencies and citizens with vexations, too, notably damage to train cars and equipment, frequent safety hazards, and thousands of thefts each year.^[6] In 1926, well before the Three-Year Plan, the Council of People’s Commissars ordered the Commissariat of Transportation to invigorate its heretofore ineffectual efforts to remove young vagrants from trains and ships. The resulting strategy required the deployment of thirty stationary receivers along routes heavily traveled by juveniles and the dispatch of sixty special train cars intended to range over principal lines, stopping at stations to collect children for preliminary processing (haircuts, disinfection, meals, questioning, and so forth). After no more than three days, youths were to be transferred from the cars to the commissariat’s stationary receivers for up to sixty days of further study and rudimentary education similar to that in ordinary receivers.^[7] Thereafter, most were expected to enter Narkompros’s domain, following the well-worn path to detdoma, with a much smaller number placed directly into production work or institutions operated by other agencies. Those discovered to have parents or relatives were to be sent home.^[8]

The Commissariat of Transportation’s train cars and receivers removed thousands of urchins (at least temporarily) from the rails. But the procedure also encountered predictable difficulties, including the same shortages of resources and trained staff so evident in Narkompros’s institutions. At the station of Armavir in the Northern Caucasus, for instance, a fire hose served to douse youths in the absence of disinfection equipment, and children had to prepare their own meals while living in a derelict freight car.^[9] In addition, provincial Narkompros branches did not fling open the doors of their detdoma to candidates from the Commissariat of Transportation’s receivers. Balking at the prospect of still more mouths to feed and bodies to clothe, they delayed or refused outright to accept juveniles gathered from the railroads by transport authorities. The string of reprimands and orders on this score, issued from Moscow into the 1930s, could not erase the defiance of officials determined to conserve their means.^[10]

Fragmentary data (and the Three-Year Plan’s renewed attention to the problem) suggest that the number of receivers and roving train cars never reached the totals anticipated in 1926.^[11] It appears that in most regions the strategy had shifted by 1930 to one of maintaining fixed receivers at stations—often in cars on sidings—rather than moving them up and down the tracks. Some mobile receivers continued to operate, but preference grew for establishing cordons at important junctions to apprehend extra passengers as they arrived. Frequently, the stations chosen bespoke not only a desire to collar stowaways and deposit them in receivers, but also a hope to block their perennial migrations to major cities, first and foremost Moscow. To assist employees of Narkompros and the Commissariat of Transportation, members of “society” (representatives from the Komsomol, ODD, trade unions, schools, and so on) were urged to form brigades to search trains at local depots. The tiny Tikhonova-Pustyn’ station, on the Moscow-Kiev-Voronezh line, fielded an effective inspection unit consisting of one person, a former waif, familiar with all the crevices on trains. Within two weeks he apprehended fifteen youths and sent them to a receiver in Kaluga.^[12] Around the country, such efforts helped reduce markedly the number of homeless children riding the rails by the end of the 1920s. Optimism seemed in order—just before the next decade’s upheavals in the countryside left thousands more clinging to trains in search of sustenance.

The decree of June 20, in approving the Three-Year Plan, pointed to other sore spots as well, among them an insufficient effort to pre vent impoverished, abused, or neglected juveniles from landing on the street in the first place. Reiterating the complaint, a resolution of the All-Russian Conference of Detdom Personnel observed that three years earlier, another congress on homelessness had appealed for more attention to this very issue—with little discernible improvement. As a result of the problem’s tenacity, concluded the resolution, even if all needy youths entered institutions immediately, new contingents would likely materialize to void the accomplishment.^[13] This was an important point. How could the Three-Year Plan, whose arithmetic did not allow for newly abandoned offspring, retain any chance of success if the street acquired more boys and girls on the heels of those wedged into detdoma? Quite apart from the plan, anyone could understand that the declining number of homeless children in the second half of the decade presaged the blight’s complete eradication only if reservoirs of potential replacements were drained.

Thus, while resolutions and directives prior to 1927 mentioned prevention now and then, agencies promoted this goal more frequently in the period 1927–1929.^[14] Attention centered on youths thought most vulnerable, especially those whose parents or guardians left them unsupervised for extended intervals. Whatever the reason for neglect—parental disinterest, jobs far from home, or poverty (forcing dependents out to beg, trade, or steal)—it led to unattended children roaming their neighborhoods. These juveniles prompted observers and government decrees to demand action, including (1) material assistance to impoverished families and single mothers, (2) out-of-school activities to occupy the idle (similar to clubs, circles, and workshops desired in detdoma), and (3) employment for adolescents. Occasionally, appeals also sounded for criminal charges against comparatively prosperous parents who left offspring to grow up on their own.^[15] Responses of this sort, implemented broadly, would doubtless have depleted the street’s reserve army. But the massive industrialization and collectivization drives begun in 1929 eclipsed such modest programs. Industrialization did provide jobs for teenagers who might otherwise have floundered, but the concomitant traumas of collectivization and dekulakization churned a new homeless wave across the country.

Meanwhile, by no means all “new” waifs were new. Thousands on the street arrived there from detdoma. Some had run away; others had been discharged with minimal training and then failed to catch on in work or school. As the years passed and this “recycling” pattern developed, substandard conditions in detdoma gained wider recognition as a cause of “secondhand” homelessness. Here lay another reason for reform. During the years 1928 to 1930 numerous decrees from the Council of People’s Commissars, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and the Children’s Commission demanded the facilities’ improvement.^[16] Most of these commands, especially by 1930, did not restrict their attention to remedies indistinguishable from previous years’ legislation. Breaking new ground, and also promoting certain old ideas much more insistently, they called for reorganization of institutions to bring them in line with the dramatic economic policies launched by Stalin and his supporters.

Few corners of the Soviet Union remained untouched by the industrialization and collectivization campaigns of this era, and juvenile facilities, the forges of a new generation, received their marching orders promptly. A conference on neglected and homeless minors, for example, declared it essential in 1930 “to restructure fundamentally the whole system of children’s institutions to prepare cadres for industry and agriculture.” Shortly afterward, a circular issued by a number of government agencies, including Narkompros, warned: “Against the background of rapidly growing industry and the socialist reconstruction of the countryside, and with the consequent huge demand for workers, it is especially intolerable that children’s institutions contain adolescents who are not receiving sufficient training and who are not finding a use for their strengths and skills in a single branch of construction.”^[17] The new priorities even affected documents retroactively. As late as April 1928, the Council of People’s Commissars had instructed Narkompros and the Commissariat of Health to prepare residents of their establishments for handicrafts as well as factory work in order to expand the youths’ opportunities for employment. But almost as soon as these instructions appeared, the government’s burgeoning appetite for industrial labor rendered them obsolete—and a collection of documents published in 1932 displayed the decree minus its offending advocacy of handicrafts.^[18]

Numerous resolutions and directives sought to incorporate detdoma and similar facilities more fully into the transformation of Soviet life by “attaching” them to nearby factories. This could take the form of an arrangement where teenagers worked by day as apprentices in a plant and, after discharge from their detdom, found employment and housing at the enterprise in which they had trained. In November 1929, the Council of People’s Commissars ordered Narkompros and the Supreme Council of the National Economy to establish “apprentice brigades” of detdom occupants to undergo instruction in factories. After their training (for which the local Narkompros office and factory shared expenses), each youth, the decree insisted, had to receive permanent employment commensurate with his qualifications. Less ambitious variants of “attachment” included a factory’s agreement to supply the workshops of a detdom with tools, raw materials, and instructors. But whatever the details, they pointed to the same end: more adolescents with skills readily harnessed by industry.^[19]

At rural institutions, the onslaught of forced collectivization generated official demands for change along analogous lines. Many of the decrees and circulars that promoted industrial “attachment” stipulated likewise that agricultural detdoma, colonies, and communes be “attached” to state or collective farms. Some urged the transformation of facilities into collective-farm training schools or pressed for their merger with nearby farms already in existence.^[20] The policy of foster care also felt the new winds. Without ceasing immediately to place children in peasant families, Narkompros began to recommend that institutions transfer residents to collective farms instead. The general terms resembled those announced a few years earlier for private families and artisans: the child had to agree to the move, and the collective farm received a strip of land and various payments. In return, Narkompros expected, youths would be raised in a communal atmosphere more conducive to socialism. Just as decrees lauded factory apprenticeship as a means to marshal foot soldiers for the industrial front, a Narkompros order proclaimed that training in collective farms promised to “make former besprizornye into future fighters for economic and cultural revolution in the countryside.”^[21]

Many other features of the “Stalin Revolution” crowded directives on detdoma. The period’s militant language muscled forward in some publications to attribute deficiencies in work with street children to the now ubiquitous bogies of “opportunism” and “wrecking.” Official documents and journal articles recommended to detdoma such favorites of the season as “friendly socialist competition” and “shock brigades” of ardent workers. Grounds for “socialist competition” between institutions or inside individual facilities included the performance of workshops, the level of Pioneer/Komsomol activity, the organization of “self-government,” and attendance at school. Some contests covered extensive territory—Siberia or even the entire Russian Republic—with victorious detdoma qualifying for prizes that could reach thousands of rubles.^[22]

Labor training in factories, work on collective farms, “socialist competition,” and shock brigades: these were among the endeavors desired by the government for detdoma—and much of the rest of society for that matter—in 1930. But staging competitions between facilities and organizing youths into “shock units” to perform their customary work could not alone erase the chronic problems of detdoma. If anything, resources for institutions grew scarcer by the early 1930s as the government channeled investment into industrialization with growing determination. Reports from around the country still found children’s establishments dilapidated, overcrowded, poorly supplied, and hobbled by inhabitants of inappropriate age or disposition. Complaints over freezing indoor temperatures, filthy bathrooms, snow eaten in the absence of water, and schools unattended for lack of warm attire dotted newspapers and journals.^[23] So, too, did allegations of wretched sanitation—“beneath all criticism,” according to one article—and diseases that appeared more frequently than doctors.^[24]

The shortcomings helped keep universal labor training far beyond Narkompros’s reach. Though some facilities were indeed “attached” to factories or collective farms and provided vocational preparation to most of their charges, others could do so for only the oldest. In many regions, fewer than half and sometimes none of an institution’s residents received labor instruction of any sort. Here and there youths loitered unattended, broke windows in nearby buildings, and threw rocks at passersby.^[25] Fighting, gambling, narcotics, and sexual abuse endured at some addresses in both Moscow and the provinces.^[26] These conditions and the street’s lure continued to pull thousands of juveniles from facilities as escapees rather than as new workers striding forth to the factory bench.^[27]

It would be incorrect, of course, to suggest that few if any institutions yielded impressive results as the decade waned. Some did, and a larger number managed to propel children into worthy occupations at least occasionally.^[28] Say what one might of discipline or sanitation, the most compelling measure of a facility remained its ability to place “graduates” in productive careers. Substantial numbers participated in the test each year, as the Russian Republic’s detdoma discharged twenty to thirty thousand youths annually in the second half of the decade.^[29] A majority headed for one of four destinations: (1) relatives or parents whom authorities had located; (2) other families (generally peasants) on a foster care basis; (3) production jobs in factories, agriculture, and handicrafts; or (4) schools and apprenticeship programs.^[30] In 1927, for example, inhabitants of institutions for “normal” children in urban areas of the Russian Republic departed as follows:^[31]

• 25 percent to parents or relatives
•   7 percent to factories
• 5 percent to agricultural work
• 2 percent to handicraft occupations
• 7 percent to foster families
• 10 percent to schools and apprenticeship training
• 26 percent to other children’s institutions
• 11 percent to other or unknown destinations
• 6 percent ran away
• 1 percent died

Parents, relatives (the latter more frequently than the former), and other households (through foster care or adoption) received the largest number of juveniles from detdoma during the middle of the decade. In 1926, over half those released were so earmarked.^[32] As the decade drew to a close, this proportion diminished, in part because institutions contained fewer youths whose parents or relatives could be identified; most had already been removed by local officials shepherding their budgets. At the same time, new opportunities and decrees spawned by industrialization and collectivization encouraged authorities to send adolescents in other directions. Above all, this meant to factories, for the surge of industrial activity prompted by the First Five-Year Plan transformed a labor glut into a shortage.^[33] Youths soon crowded the path to “production” as detdoma received insistent orders to turn out workers for the country’s new projects. In 1928/29, for instance, 40 percent of those discharged from a large sample of detdoma headed for industrial work, while only 24 percent set out for relatives and peasants’ families.^[34]

The government had long tried to place more of its wards in industry. Early in the decade, factories and plants received instructions to reserve quotas of jobs—between 3 and 20 percent, depending on the branch of production—for minors. Youths who qualified need not have come from children’s facilities, but in 1923 the All-Russian Central Executive Committee stipulated that 25 percent of the places reserved for juveniles through labor exchanges go to candidates from detdoma. In subsequent years provincial officials in many regions set aside even more, as much as 30–50 percent of the juvenile quota, for residents of institutions.^[35] Still, the implementation of these orders remained spotty for some time. Factory administrators resented requirements that adolescents work reduced hours while receiving full pay, and trade union members tried on occasion to reserve jobs for their own offspring.^[36] Only the First Five-Year Plan’s boundless demand for labor overcame such obstacles by multiplying opportunities in the industrial sector for recruits from detdoma.

Much the same could be said about schools. Officials had sought from the beginning to reserve places in technical schools for former street children, and incomplete data suggest that increasing numbers left detdoma for additional education over the years.^[37] Whatever progress may have been made in the mid-1920s, however, was dwarfed at the end of the decade as industrial acceleration brought with it a much greater demand for technical training. New institutions to provide this education opened their doors across the land, creating room for a larger contingent of pupils from detdoma. They (and other recruits) often entered programs that maintained a direct relationship with production, notably factory-apprenticeship schools. Here basic industrial training accompanied postprimary education, with students frequently supported at the host factory’s expense. By 1930, detdoma hoped to discharge most occupants along paths of this sort, anticipating no doubt that the climate of full employment and abundant educational opportunity would ease the youths’ transition into society’s mainstream.^[38]

What happened when an adolescent walked out the door of a detdom for the last time? Did a life of independent respectability commence, or were impediments forthcoming that few could surmount? While no statistics or even reasonably precise estimates indicate the number who turned their fortunes around, the undertaking clearly represented a steep climb for many. In the case of juveniles sent from detdoma to relatives (and, less often, to foster families), Narkompros and the Children’s Commission complained throughout the decade that local officials, keen to reduce demands on their budgets, proceeded without assurances that the households could support new members. As a result, boys and girls risked landing in families that did not want them or could not feed them, with the street a likely refuge.^[39]

The scarcity of effective labor training in detdoma also impeded juveniles’ reentry into society. Accounts from around the country described institutions clogged with residents in their late teens and early twenties, still without skills needed for employment. An author from Saratov expressed amazement in 1930 that the city’s nine detdoma contained 208 adolescents between sixteen and eighteen years of age whose lack of training prevented them from securing jobs even as the country’s demand for labor soared.^[40] Just as often, local officials simply discharged youths, including those with little vocational instruction, rather than house them year after year. “Unloading” children seemed the quickest way to alleviate overcrowding, reduce expenses, and dispose of troublemakers—enough to preserve the practice despite official condemnations. But in time, numerous teenagers released with slim employment prospects rejoined the homeless and later appeared again in detdoma.^[41]

When youths left an institution for work or school, the first days and weeks were generally difficult. They entered an unfamiliar environment, perhaps without a job or stipend in hand, and encountered neighbors who viewed them askance. To reduce the jolt of the transition and help anchor juveniles in their new lives, Narkompros ordered on several occasions that detdoma give clothing and food (or money) to those setting out into the world. Some institutions apparently did. But the chronic poverty of many others left them unable to provision departing wards.^[42] Of course, support could take forms beyond bread and shoes. As early as 1921 Narkompros directed facilities to preserve contact for two years with former occupants in order to encourage the youths with demonstrations that others shared an interest in their well-being. Correspondence, visits, or gifts could assure adolescents that they had not been abandoned once again. The effort might make the difference, Narkompros felt, in convincing some to persevere in the face of difficulties confronted while adjusting to a new life. Toward this end, a children’s institution in Moscow province organized a society of “graduates,” now working in factories and schools, to help those who came after them to navigate securely. Publications of the period reveal a few similar undertakings; but much more frequently, into the 1930s, they criticized detdoma for treating residents’ farewells as deliverance from an onerous obligation best terminated with all speed.^[43]

Out in the provinces, officials continued to send children on journeys to cities armed only with one-way tickets and instructions to seek employment or admission to schools. A Narkompros circular complained in 1928 that local authorities began shipping adolescents from detdoma to Moscow shortly before each school term—transferring their responsibilities to the capital, in other words, and hoping for the best. Without money for food and lodging, and with no advance application to the schools and factories approached, these ill-fated quests generally foundered before long. Youths had to beg or steal to survive, and all too often the street reclaimed them for its own. In short, warned the Children’s Commission three years later, launching teenagers to cities under these conditions bordered on a criminal act, for which prosecution was now contemplated.^[44]

Even those who stayed in detdoma until a school or enterprise accepted them did not always enjoy smooth sailing. Prospective students bound for educational institutions might receive their stipends only after classes began—or not until the start of a new budget year—and hence be stranded financially for weeks. To make ends meet, some turned to selling their clothes and sleeping in train stations or night shelters, establishments whose atmosphere contributed little to academic success.^[45] Housing represented a particularly intractable problem. Millions of citizens suffered from a shortage of accommodations that aggravated the plight of youths discharged from detdoma. Factories and schools, if they provided housing at all, often placed these children in ramshackle dormitories worse than their previous abodes. A correspondent in Tula described one such building itself as a besprizornyi, while a report from Vladimir told of juveniles leaving primitive barracks assigned them by a factory and returning ragged and hungry to their detdoma.^[46] At the end of the decade, Narkompros went so far as to seek control over the apartments of parents who had died and left offspring to state care. Living space previously occupied by those now entering children’s facilities should be reserved, the agency argued, for others leaving.^[47] Unacceptable to brawnier government bodies, the unorthodox proposition succeeded mainly in demonstrating Narkompros’s difficulty in competing for scarce resources.

A long series of resolutions and decrees stipulated that adolescents from detdoma receive preference in the allotment of housing and jobs—often at the high level of priority extended to workers and demobilized soldiers. While this seemed encouraging, many of the same sources complained that the orders were widely ignored.^[48] Part of the problem stemmed from the deficit of housing and (until the end of the decade) jobs, for laws alone could not erase the nation’s shortages. But there was more to it than that. Beyond economic and bureaucratic difficulties lurked the widespread view of waifs as thieves, prostitutes, and drug addicts. “Who,” asked a Siberian author, “does not speak often with annoyance, indignation, and contempt of these youths, feared by people in the bazaar, station, wharf, train, bus, and at home?!” A woman in Moscow overheard someone encourage bystanders to douse a pair with kerosene and set them on fire. In one of Leningrad’s schools, a large majority of pupils, questioned on the sources of hooliganism, included street children in their lists. Around the country, many observers commented on the bitter remarks uttered by citizens who spotted urchins: “Beasts!” “Damned bandits!” “They should be destroyed!” These and similar convictions filled the air. Even the chairman of the Baku Children’s Commission, as previously noted, characterized them as robbers, hooligans, and murderers, impossible to mold into human beings—an opinion shared by the head of a receiver in Moscow. She called her charges “bandits” and told them: “You will never become human beings; every one of you will end up in the Solovki [labor camp].”^[49]

The unsavory reputation of homeless adolescents rubbed off on detdoma. Facilities that overcame initial hostility from the surrounding population and established better relations with their neighbors appear to have been the exception.^[50] Most evidence suggests that people viewed detdoma at best as barracks where children languished in idle poverty and, at worst, as lairs of unspeakable debauchery. Some citizens feared or loathed residents of detdoma to the point where they refused to walk nearby.^[51] As shown in preceding chapters, many institutions merited unflattering reputations, and there were indeed buildings best given a wide berth. Youths of the Lenin detdom in Tambov, when not engaged in such activities as burglarizing nearby apartments, amused themselves by pelting passersby with rocks. Occupants of a receiver in Saratov poured tubs of water from an upstairs window on pedestrians and showered them with stale bread, melons, and stones.^[52]

In turn, the unpalatable image of detdoma haunted those who passed through them. According to a report from the Urals, for example, a group of peasants working the land noticed a fire in their village and rushed back to help extinguish it. Upon learning that the conflagration raged only at the local children’s institution, however, they returned without further ado to the fields. Long after discharge from their facilities, wards of detdoma remained soiled in the public mind—for girls in particular, a possible hindrance to marriage.^[53] To this day, negative opinions of detdoma and their charges persist, as a recent letter to Pravda made clear. The anonymous author, who had adopted youths from a detdom, implored readers not to spread word of boys and girls with this background, for those so informed tended to regard the youngsters as misfits. “People,” she appealed, “have pity on me and my children. Why can’t you be quiet after discovering that a neighbor has children from a detdom?”^[54]

Thus, when former denizens of the street left institutions to enroll in schools and factories, they often encountered suspicion and even hostility from supervisors, teachers, workers, and students. Some enterprises and schools wanted nothing to do with detdom veterans, considering them poorly trained, wanton at heart, and likely to corrupt others. “It is important to bear in mind,” Narkompros reminded its provincial offices, “the widespread (even if to a considerable extent preconceived) opinion of economic organs and enterprises that those raised in detdoma are unreliable and poorly suited for systematic work.” In short order, complaints from schools, dormitories, and factories piled up at the youths’ doorstep, alleging thefts, hooliganism, laziness, and absenteeism. Even if a former inhabitant of a detdom did not deserve to be viewed in this light, at some point after leaving the institution he or she probably was. Hounded, branded as “detdomers” (detdomovtsy), and assigned to the least desirable living quarters and jobs, many faced greater initial trials in schools and plants than the “normal” juveniles who entered with them.^[55] As if their past had not been difficult enough, it clung to them as a notorious stain, throwing up one more obstacle to overcome.

Narkompros’s concern led it to conduct surveys here and there to ascertain how youths fared after growing up largely in government hands. An investigation in 1929 of detdom “graduates” in approximately twenty factory-apprenticeship and other technical schools in the Moscow area determined that half the sample had lived in detdoma for seven to ten years, very much Lunacharskii’s “state children.” As the author of an article on the survey put it, “we are completely responsible for them.” If so, the study’s results represented grounds for neither euphoria nor despair—about the best Narkompros could reasonably expect. Only half the respondents felt that they had received adequate training in detdoma, but three-fourths indicated satisfaction with work in their current institutions. The average success rate hovered unimpressively between 50 and 55 percent, though school administrators evaluated students from detdoma as “no worse than children from the general population.”^[56] If this last assessment (which ran contrary to the impression of other officials just cited) were true throughout the country, Narkompros would deserve credit for a remarkable salvage operation.

Certainly, the sources do not lack for portraits of individuals who made a successful start in work or school after leaving institutions. Some returned to visit their detdoma and communes; others sent photographs and letters—all of which must have heartened staff members. When Anton Makarenko died, former inhabitants of his colony and commune came from around the country to pay their respects, no longer as delinquents but as engineers, journalists, students, and army officers. Veterans of the street also pursued careers as musicians, actors, teachers, economists, doctors, artists, athletes, skilled workers, and activists in the trade unions, Komsomol, and Party.^[57] A few became well known in their fields within the Soviet Union, as the journalist Mikhail Leshchinskii discovered. In 1955 he met Anna Kurskaia, widow of the country’s first procurator general and a participant in the effort to assist homeless youths thirty years before. Sometime after their introduction, she communicated to Leshchinskii her curiosity about the fate of these children, adding that too much time had likely passed now to pursue the matter successfully. Leshchinskii took up the challenge by writing a newspaper article that soon called forth responses from a number of former urchins. He then tried to contact them and eventually produced a book depicting the lives of several, including a major general in the Red Army and a conductor with the rank of People’s Artist of the USSR.^[58]

And yet, in the laborious process of tracking down a handful, Leshchinskii uncovered no records to show what became of the vast majority. Reports and resolutions at conferences occasionally tossed off such figures as “many tens of thousands” of former waifs engaged in “socialist construction,” and one article in 1930 mentioned, without reference to a source, “hundreds of thousands” helping to build socialism after time in detdoma.^[59] But even assuming these totals to be accurate, they leave millions from the 1920s unaccounted for. Many perished, especially at the beginning of the period, but how many? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? A multitude doubtless slipped back into the criminal world as adults (including some who later attracted attention in the dock at murder trials) or continued to drift elsewhere on the fringe of society. In all these areas, estimates differ little from guesses.^[60] There appears no reason to question that “hundreds of thousands” from detdoma found themselves shoulder to shoulder with most of the population, straining to fulfill the First Five-Year Plan’s goals. A substantial number, together with a boy mentioned in Leshchinskii’s book, must have added their names later to the country’s long list of casualties from the Second World War.^[61] According to scattered claims, youths also gained employment in the secret police, thereby exchanging the roles of defendant and inmate for those of guard, interrogator, and executioner. Hardened by their experiences in the street and alienated from the surrounding community, they purportedly carried out the security force’s chilling commands without hesitation. Similar charges have recently described Romania’s orphanages as recruiting grounds for the dreaded Securitate. The Soviet police had indeed long run some juvenile institutions, providing ample opportunity to enlist residents; but the meager evidence available cannot suggest the extent of such levies.^[62]

In any case, scathing criticism of detdoma at decade’s end (and earlier) from educators, observers, and official bodies accentuates a judgment that teenagers routinely emerged from the institutions unqualified for respectable careers. Looking back in 1930, Krupskaia concluded that most detdoma “have not provided any sort of vocational training,” and therefore “the detdom has not prepared [children] for life.” From Siberia an author argued that “our detdoma have failed their exam,” turning out “useless” adolescents, whom another pen labeled “junk.” “In the final analysis,” concluded an article in one of Narkompros’s journals, “no type of educational facility has received so much criticism and, perhaps, contained so many shortcomings as the detdom.”^[63] Surely, if even a half or two thirds of the juveniles who departed institutions did so prepared for productive work, reproach would not have flared so vehemently. No doubt the demand for labor created by the First Five-Year Plan absorbed thousands of these ill-trained youths. But it strains credulity, as it did in 1930, to conclude that nearly all overcame in this way their schooling in the street and their years in dismal detdoma.

Criticism of detdoma helped spark a debate in Narkompros and its publications over the institutions’ future. The journal Detskii dom carried articles in 1929 arguing a variety of positions on such questions as: Should the facilities be restricted to street children—and thus gradually disappear along with homelessness—or should an ever larger number of places be made available to youths from viable families? At a conference in June a Narkompros report urged discussion of the institutions’ role in the new society then under construction, in light of the great disparity between the work of existing detdoma and the function originally envisioned for them.^[64] Immediately following the Revolution, many in the Party had viewed detdoma as sites for raising children of the population in general—a means to provide them with a socialist outlook rarely cultivated in traditional families. Instead, as the years passed, homeless juveniles saturated the structures and precluded institutional nurturing for most other boys and girls. Not only that, severe overcrowding prompted the transfer of some out of detdoma and into peasant families—opposite to the direction desired in 1918. Among the issues debated in 1929, then, stood the question of whether the institutions’ initial mission could, or should, be restored.

One side in the dispute echoed sentiments of 1918, demanding that detdoma be multiplied, not closed, after the elimination of homelessness. The need to provide institutions for the working population’s sons and daughters mounted without pause, enthusiasts maintained, as the nation accelerated its economic development. On a practical plane, sweeping industrialization employed additional millions of parents, requiring mass child care as never before. If nothing else, in other words, detdoma could help working families fulfill the Five-Year Plan. To the ideologically minded, though, there was something else, aimed not at supporting families but at supplanting them. The country’s quickening pace increased the urgency of instilling socialist principles in youths soon to reach adulthood in a society fundamentally different from that of their parents. Detdoma, not the family hearth, advocates emphasized, could provide this upbringing.^[65]

A more powerful battery of voices opposed proliferation of the facilities. Some stressed the expense and ineffectiveness of detdoma and called for their elimination. Others combined financial arguments with observations on the population’s low “cultural” level to reject as premature the transfer of numerous offspring from families to institutions. Few people were ready for such a step, the authors contended, even if the state could afford it. Moderates favored the preservation of detdoma at roughly current number—and as institutions devoted primarily to the destitute.^[66] This was the road followed by the government as it entered the 1930s. Detdoma and similar institutions did not face oblivion, but they remained by and large the preserve of abandoned children and other unfortunates. A swift expansion of the network to accommodate the general population’s progeny, while not rejected once and for all, became a goal too remote for serious consideration.

There was no going back to 1918. Ten years after the Revolution, in his greeting to the All-Russian Conference of Detdom Personnel, Lunacharskii characterized as “utopian” the initial hope of some comrades that families would rapidly yield juveniles’ upbringing to the state.^[67] In one respect, of course, this anticipation was anything but quixotic, for civil war and famine, as if granting the wish in ghastly fashion, soon shattered millions of households. But the aftermath bore slim resemblance to Bolshevik reverie. Instead, the government found itself swamped by a multitude of youths it could not properly raise and who obliterated the original mission of detdoma. Not even the hypothetical absence of catastrophes in 1918–1922 restores plausibility to the Party’s original expectations, for without the privation of these years it seems unlikely that many families would have desired to hand over their children to institutions. As it turned out, whatever the popular view of detdoma in 1918, virtually no enthusiasm flickered for them among citizens a decade later, because the facilities had become widely stigmatized as shelters for society’s dregs.^[68] Only the desperate and the ideologically zealous could want to place dependents in settings now more commonly regarded as dens of sloth and depravity.

In 1925 Viktor Shul’gin, director of what came to be known later as the Marx-Engels Institute of Pedagogy, asserted that street children, by their very nature, lived in constant struggle with bourgeois notions of property and order. “The besprizornye are objectively interested in the destruction of bourgeois society,” he concluded, “and they are destroying, undermining it.”^[69] Other Soviet commentators chose a different emphasis, regarding the poison of homelessness as toxic for socialism too. They might view capitalism as the problem’s cause, and they all presumed a socialist government more inclined to assist the needy. But few considered their socialist aspirations unmenaced by the presence of abandoned juveniles. On the eighth anniversary of the October Revolution, President Mikhail Kalinin warned: “Both the government and our society must, with all their energy, set to saving the besprizornye. The situation here threatens grave dangers for the future if we are not able to eradicate promptly in youths the bad habits that a vagrant life imparts to them.”^[70]

Throughout the second half of the decade, officials and other authors repeated arguments offered in previous years regarding the danger at hand. Boys who are petty thieves today, ran a common refrain, will tomorrow be adults able to subsist only through crime. Even those who did not become full-time criminals would hardly emerge from the street’s forge as champions of the new society that Bolshevik leaders prophesied. Concern also persisted throughout the 1920s that waifs would infect others with their language, behavior, and values. Viewed in this light, they not only sapped government resources in the short run, but threatened to corrupt a portion of the next generation—themselves and those susceptible to their influence—on whom the Party counted to remake the nation. Visible to all, their presence daily spotlighted serious problems still to be overcome before one could hail the victory of socialism.^[71] Stanislav Kosior, a secretary of the Party Central Committee, took to the pages of both Pravda and Izvestiia to caution in 1928 that “juvenile besprizornost’ remains a great evil in the country. Although its dimensions have diminished significantly, thousands of socially neglected children and adolescents on the streets of our cities stand in sharp contrast to the growing economic prosperity of the country and its rising cultural level.”^[72]

Kosior sought not to paint a picture of unrelieved pessimism. He combined the concern quoted above with an assessment that the government could eliminate the problem nearly completely “during the next year or two.” Numerous officials, resolutions, and individual authors gave further voice to this confidence, maintaining that prosperity and enlightenment brought by “socialist construction” would soon expunge homelessness.^[73] By 1930–1931, if decrees and other exhortations served as a guide, the blight faced welcome extinction. During the “third, decisive year of the Five-Year Plan,” when so many corners were to be turned, the end of juvenile destitution ostensibly waited around one of them. “In 1931,” trumpeted a slogan in one of Narkompros’s journals, “not a single besprizornyi in the Soviet Union!”^[74]

That year witnessed the release of the early Soviet sound film Road to Life, which portrayed the lives and eventual rehabilitation of several delinquents from the street. A Soviet reviewer welcomed the film, but with the words “better late than never” to underscore an observation that its subject had ceased to plague the country. Hence, the article concluded, “this film has become today a historical document that illuminates a stage through which we have now passed.” The American educator John Dewey, who appears onscreen to introduce the feature, apparently reached much the same conclusion, for he assured audiences that “wild children” no longer inhabited the Soviet Union.^[75] Many other enthusiastic pens joined in celebrating the accomplishment (variously claimed to be total or virtual), including that of Nikolai Semashko, chairman of the Children’s Commission: “At last in 1931 Soviet society could state with pride that besprizornost’ in the Russian Republic was liquidated in the main. Socialist construction was enriched with yet another historic achievement: the end of this sad inheritance from the years of famine, war, and ruin.”^[76]

The Three-Year Plan approved in 1927 bred similarly buoyant predictions of triumph. Amid the optimism, however, thoughtful observers regarded as unlikely the satisfaction of requirements essential to the plan’s fulfillment.^[77] For the project to succeed, local officials would have to obey instructions to replace adolescents discharged from detdoma with similar numbers of incoming residents, while providing additional beds for still more. At the same time, no new homeless urchins could surface. As it happened, these conditions were not met—and thus neither were the plan’s goals for 1928/29, its final year.^[78] Far fewer youths traversed cities and rails in 1929 than in 1921, but claims of the problem’s demise rang false. Pravda, for example, reported in 1928 the absence of abandoned children in seventeen major regions, including the Northern Caucasus. This territory, long a gathering place for vagrants, could not possibly have been emptied so soon—a point supported by a recent Soviet account that included the Northern Caucasus in a list of areas (along with Moscow and Leningrad) on whose streets juveniles still lived in 1929.^[79]

Nevertheless, had the corps of forsaken youths continued to thin during the early 1930s as it had in the late 1920s, the problem would have shrunk rapidly to negligible proportions—in line with announcements of the tragedy’s elimination that resounded in 1930–1931. Perhaps some readers were puzzled, then, by a handful of articles and other sources that mentioned considerable numbers of street children shortly after the decade’s turn. Most likely, few noticed these hints of trouble, for the documents remained widely scattered and sometimes unpublished.^[80] In the new political climate, the government would no longer concede a swell of homeless youths, let alone permit detailed studies routinely conducted a few years before. With the country now allegedly speeding to socialism, there could not be another tide of abandoned juveniles. Then, too, the problem’s origins differed in each era. A majority of the 1920s’ orphans owed their distress to war, famine, and associated epidemics—none of which could be blamed primarily on the Soviet government. But how could a new army of the uprooted be explained in the first half of the 1930s without reference to collectivization, dekulakization, and the famine of 1933? Faced with this question, the Party chose not to acknowledge such traumatic consequences of its actions—and in the case of the famine denied the event itself. In contrast, when Hitler’s invasion filled the country yet again with roving children, they were recognized openly and presented as products of fascist brutality.^[81]

By shunning in the 1930s an honest assessment of juvenile destitution’s scale, the government broke with the previous decade’s practice. It did so as well by adopting a harsher view of young deviants, formerly declared victims of their environment. If a community on the verge of socialism could not generate mass homelessness and vice, how could it be faulted for those hooligans who endured to blemish an otherwise dazzling vista? Responsibility shifted to the culprits themselves, who were now regarded as criminals rather than victims of their surroundings. This reappraisal of juvenile delinquency corresponded to a change in Soviet criminology as a whole. Thereafter, as one scholar observed, “Soviet criminal law has stressed condemnation and disapproval of the crime and the criminal. Earlier jurists have been reprimanded for failing to understand the educative value of punishment.”^[82] As the sterner disposition gained prominence in the 1930s, police and courts pushed aside Narkompros’s social workers and stepped forward to confront offenders. Streets were cleared more aggressively, and journals ceased promoting rehabilitation through “voluntary entry” and “open doors.”A defector from the secret police even claimed that Stalin ordered the execution of waifs caught stealing or found infected with venereal diseases.^[83]

While no confirmation of the executions has appeared, laws on delinquency did grow far more severe by the middle of the decade. A decree of April 7, 1935, specified that children as young as twelve, charged with such crimes as theft, rape, assault, and murder, bypass Narkompros’s Juvenile Affairs Commissions for trial in regular courts as adults. The commissions, now roundly criticized for coddling offenders, were abolished a few months later.^[84] Following the April 7 decree, a wave of arrests swept up teenagers between the ages of twelve and fifteen, mainly for petty theft. Once in official hands, they landed ever more frequently in labor colonies—not facilities of the sort run by Narkompros in the 1920s, but penal institutions administered by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. In 1934 approximately 17 percent of minors charged with hooliganism entered these colonies; three years later the figure reached 65 percent.^[85]

Meanwhile, juvenile homelessness soared. As a benchmark, consider a report from the Children’s Commission listing a sum of seven to eight thousand stowaways plucked from the nation’s rails and waterways in 1928/29. This total was dwarfed not only by those of a few years before, but also by quantities suggested in fragmentary data for 1930–1933. A single train-car receiver in Rostov-on-the-Don, for example, processed fully 600 to 800 youths per month in 1930/31. Over a six-month period beginning in March 1930, the receiver at Moscow’s Kazan’ Station took in 7,000 children. During a similar stretch, over 26,000 boys and girls packed train-car receivers throughout the Soviet Union. From April 1930 to April 1931, nearly 8,000 were gathered from the network of railroads and waterways around Leningrad, while an ODD document reported that the organization’s members participated in removing 21,985 from seven railroad lines in 1933.^[86] There is no reason to suppose that the tens of thousands of itinerant adolescents discovered on railways in the early 1930s had been there earlier, awaiting detection by more vigilant officials. The facts point instead to another cycle of refugees searching desperately, as in 1921–1922, for necessities of life no longer available in their villages.

If official sources shrouded the new eruption of indigence—and especially its link to government policies in the countryside—others reported the calamity without hesitation. Foreign residents and Soviet citizens who later departed for the West described crowds of hungry peasant children in the streets and around railway stations. No sooner had the nation weathered the previous decade’s flood, an American journalist observed, than “new thousands of boys and girls, mere infants some of them seemed, roamed through the land. They were the children of kulak parents who had died or who preferred to leave their children to shift for themselves rather than to drag them into exile.”^[87] An anonymous contact of the émigré newspaper Sotsialisticheskii vestnik depicted youths abandoned during the famine of 1933 as sick, swollen beggars, nothing like the adroit, devious figures who had earlier shaped the popular image of besprizornye. Though the government systematically drove the newcomers out of Moscow, noted another article in the paper, they continued to arrive at a rate sufficient to fill cellars and other refuges in the capital.^[88]

Some decrees and other official documents in the 1930s conceded a small number of street children, generated by such problems as lack of supervision, poorly functioning detdoma and schools, inadequate work by local officials and “society,” and crumbling traditional families. Most often, the sources claimed that escapees from detdoma—that is, restless souls orphaned by difficult conditions no longer prevalent—made up the main contingent.^[89] All these factors did yield homeless juveniles, but the total could not have compared with the number deprived of parental care by collectivization, dekulakization, and the famine of 1933.^[90] On this point, Soviet documents and articles of the time remained largely silent. Brief references to “unorganized influxes” of people from rural areas and beleaguered kulak families expelling adolescent laborers only obscured the scope and nature of events that left untold millions desperate and alone once again.^[91]

Throughout the 1920s, Soviet authors and officials responded indignantly to Western and émigré claims that the ragged children crowding the nation’s streets stemmed chiefly from the Revolution and subsequent canons of the new order. They also scoffed at various foreign statements on the problem’s extent and rejected allegations that the government treated urchins brutally.^[92] In so doing, fervent or unscrupulous partisans strayed far from the facts, especially on the number of homeless, and ignored evidence published widely within their own borders. Rebuking a German newspaper in 1929, for instance, an ODD journal contended ludicrously that the country had never been overrun by millions or even hundreds of thousands of waifs. Soviet embarrassment over youths still on the street ten years after the Revolution also inspired such window dressing as mass roundups to cleanse Moscow temporarily before foreign guests arrived to attend decennial festivities.^[93] In some cases, however, Western criticism swept too broadly, as in charges that an iron fist formed the essence of government policy in the 1920s. While local officials abused orphans here and there, the dismissal and occasional prosecution of personnel for such offenses better reflected the sentiments of Lunacharskii. Indeed, the treatment of delinquents desired by Narkompros surpassed the West in leniency. If actual conditions and achievements in Soviet children’s facilities ranked below those of other European countries—which might be difficult to prove—one could not fairly attribute the Soviet showing to heartless motives in the capital or most institutions.

Finally, it is misleading to seize on the millions of abandoned children from the early 1920s and identify them as progeny of the Revolution and “communist” policies that followed. Though most (but by no means all) had lost their homes after 1917, primary blame does not lie necessarily with the Soviet government. The Bolsheviks deserve only half the onus for the Civil War, still less for the famine of 1921–1922. Nor does the imagination suggest an alternative government capable of eliminating the crush of rural overpopulation and poverty that continued to drive youths in smaller numbers to cities later in the decade. This is not to judge Lenin and his colleagues free of all responsibility. Besides the cruelty of the Civil War (alien to none of the major participants), measures adopted by the Party after the famine—certain aspects of the New Economic Policy and family law, for instance—contributed to the suffering. But the number flung inadvertently onto the streets by these decrees represented a small fraction of the amount deposited there earlier.

If nothing else we should avoid the mistake, made by some observers in the 1920s, of attributing all troubling phenomena in a state to the agenda of a new government one may find disturbing. In countries of very different political stripe today, combat and hunger have left myriad orphans living much like the besprizornye seventy years ago, and caution of new sorrow should current adversity escalate among the independent remnants of the Soviet Union. Beyond locales ravaged by war and famine, many other nations report flocks of boys and girls fending for themselves, as populations stream from impoverished villages to the shantytowns of Manila, Bombay, Nairobi, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and other bulging cities. Childhope, an organization partially funded by UNICEF, has estimated that approximately one hundred million homeless youths now inhabit the planet.^[94] By no means all are confined to war-torn, parched territories and the slums of developing lands. Governments of the United States, Great Britain, and other Western countries—far more experienced, wealthy, and secure than Third World states or the Soviet regime in 1921—have presided over expanding populations of street children in recent years. Estimates of the runaway, “throwaway,” and otherwise abandoned adolescents living in New York City reach twenty thousand or higher, and the nation’s total ranges over one million by some reckonings. “The growing phenomenon of homeless children is nothing short of a national disgrace,” the American National Academy of Sciences concluded, “that must be treated with the urgency such a situation demands.”^[95]

Had this been foreseen by those most eager in the 1920s to associate homeless juveniles with Bolshevik rule, they might have hesitated with their charges. In any case, numerous Soviet officials, educators, and journalists deserve credit for publicizing the problem and struggling to overcome it. The concern they displayed for children’s welfare rings true. But just as it served no useful purpose to link the youths’ plight to a “communist” government, Soviet commentators did not further the campaign to save them by portraying their misfortune as an inheritance from “capitalist” society. Shul’gin, for example, dismissed contention that the root of the matter lay in war and famine. These afflictions sprung from the bourgeoisie’s rule, he maintained, adding that, come war or peace, castoffs always thronged capitalism’s harsh landscape. While many of Shul’gin’s compatriots did not insist as narrowly on “capitalist” responsibility, their statements approached unanimity in asserting that social and economic development in the Soviet Union would purge conditions that drove human beings to the street.^[96] In such accomplishments lay the appeal of socialism. How ironically tragic, then, that the very “socialist construction” billed as the means to overcome juvenile homelessness produced instead another wave in the 1930s. Here were orphans for whom the Soviet leadership bore full responsibility—and whom it refused even to acknowledge.

Notes