Preface

This is our own Russia tramping along the road, our own Russia, as young and orphaned as these abandoned children, as visionary and embittered, without a corner of her own, with never a caress, with no one to look after her. Our own Russia—that strange child who has already experienced everything.

No spectacle in Soviet cities more troubled Russian and foreign observers during the first postrevolutionary decade than the millions of orphaned and abandoned children known as besprizornye.^[1] Whether portrayed as pitiable victims of war and famine or as devious wolf-children preying on the surrounding population to support cocaine and gambling habits, they haunted the works of journalists, travelers, and Party members alike. “Every visitor sees it first,” noted an American correspondent, “and is so shocked by the sight that the most widely known Russian youth are the…homeless children flapping along the main streets of cities and the main routes of travel like ragged flocks of animated scarecrows.”^[2] Averell Harriman recalled them as “a particular tragedy of the time…, begging or stealing and living as wild animals unconnected with the normal community life.”^[3] The very fact that no one could remain indifferent to their travail made them tempting ammunition in the ideological charges and countercharges exchanged in these years. On one side of the battle lines, critics of the Bolsheviks featured the children as “proof” that the new regime had failed even to care for its own young. In reply, Soviet officials pointed to the problem’s origin in disasters largely beyond their control and insisted that the Party had assigned far higher priority to rehabilitating homeless juveniles than “bourgeois” governments allocated to the care of their own downtrodden.

In other ways as well, these children meant different things to different people. Government officials, for instance, set out to rescue them with widely varying understandings of who belonged in the category of besprizornye.^[4] Translated literally, the singular besprizornyi means “unattended” or “neglected,” though “homeless” or “waif” would be closer to the meaning intended by most Russians.^[5] While everyone agreed that the label fit children orphaned or jettisoned by their parents and left to the streets, numerous educators, scholars, and social workers applied the word to a broader range of candidates. Their capacious definitions often encompassed minors still living with parents or relatives but not receiving a proper upbringing. Any number of factors—parental destitution, neglect, cruelty, or debauchery—could deprive offspring of a healthy adult influence and place them, advocates maintained, in the category of besprizornye. According to the principal Soviet encyclopedia of the time, “One must not restrict the term besprizornye to children who have lost their parents (or guardians) and homes. If parents (or guardians) deprive children of food, treat them crudely, steer them to crime, or set a harmful personal example—children of such parents are also besprizornye.”^[6]

We will focus primarily on youths who spent all, or at least most, of their time in the street. Our gaze thus takes in juveniles who drifted out of families, as well as the more obvious millions orphaned, discarded, or otherwise separated involuntarily from parents. Those who remained at home will not be included, regardless of the abuse or neglect they may have experienced there. Soviet administrators responsible for raising indigent children inclined toward a similar sense of their mission’s scope, for even the narrowest definition of the besprizornye yielded more candidates than state institutions could absorb. The time when other youths, living with parents in unsatisfactory settings, could be lodged in children’s homes together with the nation’s orphans—a goal often avowed immediately following the Revolution—quickly receded far over the horizon.

Thus defined, the besprizornye represented first and foremost a stubborn challenge remaining to confront the Bolsheviks after their victory in the Civil War. The dismaying presence of countless young beggars and thieves underscored how deeply war and famine plague a society long after guns fall silent and crops return to fields. Even a wealthier and more experienced government than the one newly ensconced in Moscow would have been hard pressed to overcome rapidly the adversity bequeathed by nearly a decade of catastrophes. Later in the 1920s, though the street children’s ranks diminished considerably, factors such as rural poverty and the unraveling of traditional families spawned additional urchins at a rate that frustrated the government’s attempts to rid the country of their misfortune. As a result, in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s estimation, any description of Soviet urban life in this period remains incomplete without attention to abandoned juveniles, so common were they in train stations, markets, and other public places.^[7]

Meanwhile, the government’s desire to create a new socialist generation touched homeless boys and girls in a manner that revealed the new regime’s hopes and fears. As banners unfurled to proclaim children “the flowers of the future,” ubiquitous besprizornye prompted many to worry that weeds choked the country’s flower beds, portending numerous thistles among the roses. Others, more optimistic, saw an opportunity to employ various theories of education and upbringing that competed for acceptance in the years following the Revolution. In their view, the Commissariat of Enlightenment’s long-term boarding institutions possessed a seemingly unsurpassed opportunity to orchestrate the training of adolescent bodies and minds. What better facility, visionaries asserted, than a children’s home in which to nurture the country’s flowers—and the ragged crowds in the street insured that institutions would not lack seedlings to cultivate.

Despite their significance as a massive social problem and the many parallels between their predicament and that of the world’s growing number of homeless juveniles today, the Soviet Union’s abandoned children have eluded thorough investigation in Western scholarship. They find spotlights in only a few recent articles and figure peripherally in a handful of other works on education, the family, and crime.^[8] Though useful, these studies’ nature limits them to an overview—mainly of policies adopted to cope with the affliction—with little on the lives of the youths themselves. A lengthier treatment of the subject did appear in English translation some sixty years ago, but it consisted primarily of quotations from several Soviet newspapers, a minuscule sampling of the sources available.^[9] The only extensive English-language work on the topic to surface in the decades since is a dissertation unnourished by published and archival materials accessible exclusively in the former Soviet Union.^[10] Beyond this, one must look principally to memoirs and travel accounts if Western volumes mark a search’s limits.

Meanwhile, a much larger body of sources evolved in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. Scholars, social workers, educators, and journalists published books, articles, collections of laws, and statistical information on the plight of waifs and the measures taken to save them.^[11] National and provincial branches of the Commissariat of Enlightenment issued many of these works (and generated numerous internal documents that archives have recently been willing to provide), though other government agencies, notably the Commissariat of Health, contributed as well. So, too, did citizens’ “volunteer” organizations, especially the “Friend of Children” Society (Obshchestvo “Drug detei” or ODD). ODD cells in several cities published periodicals (sometimes with the participation of government agencies) that carried reports from around the country. Two of these journals, composed in Moscow and Khar’kov and both titled Drug detei, are particularly rewarding vehicles for an often unflinching look at the street habitat of abandoned children. Similarly forthright reports appeared in newspapers—national papers with their far-flung staffs and local gazettes concentrating on a single city or region—as correspondents explored derelict buildings, train station basements, and other entrances to a harsher world. The dispatches carried by their papers displayed a frankness unmatched in the Soviet press until the ascendance of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Once the 1920s gave way to decades of more regimented tone, Soviet scholars added comparatively little to these earlier publications. Prolonged interest in tragedies that accompanied the nation’s infancy seemed out of place, indeed undesirable, on a stage featuring triumphant remembrances of the Revolution and pageants of “socialist construction.” The most helpful exceptions have been scattered regional studies of the besprizornye, a few essays on juvenile delinquency, and biographical material on such personages as Feliks Dzerzhinskii and Anton Makarenko who strove to rehabilitate difficult youths. As with Western historians, the emphasis here rests invariably on official responses to the problem (rather than on the children’s street experiences), though Soviet authors naturally view the policies more favorably.

Taken as a whole, the array of Western and Soviet sources now available suggests two broad avenues of investigation: the children themselves and the government’s reaction to their presence. Following an introductory chapter on the origins of the youths’ distress, the remainder of the work adopts this dual approach. Chapters 1–3 examine the lives of juveniles on the street and provide a glimpse into corners of the urban underworld. Principal topics include the forms of shelter sought by waifs, the measures they adopted to secure sustenance, and their mores, amusements, and views of the surrounding society. Illegal activities and the ties many children acquired with adult criminals appear throughout.

This survey of the street then yields in chapters 4–7 to an analysis of the government’s response. How serious a problem, for example, did authorities regard the tattered figures of tender years? Did confidence prevail that the besprizornye could be recast as builders of socialism? In what ways did official assumptions and remedies change during the period under consideration? Looking beyond policy to its implementation, how were children actually captured or otherwise channeled into orphanages? What was the nature of these facilities, and did they succeed in clearing the streets? Finally, what happened to adolescents after their discharge from institutions? Did their paths lead back into the mainstream of Soviet society, or did other fates await them?

Many people have assisted me generously during various stages of this project, and I am pleased to acknowledge my debt to them. Samuel Baron read a draft of the entire manuscript, while Richard Stites and Lynne Viola each scrutinized portions. Their comments both encouraged me to continue with the endeavor and suggested numerous improvements. In addition, I would like to thank Bill Creech and Dane Hartgrove at the National Archives for steering me reliably to documents of the American Red Cross, Wendy Goldman for alerting me to certain archival fondy prior to my departure for the Soviet Union, and Don Raleigh for kindly sharing materials he acquired while conducting his own research in Saratov. Professor V. M. Selunskaia of Moscow State University was most congenial and accommodating during my stay there in 1987–88 as a participant on the US-USSR Long-term Exchange of Advanced Researchers administered by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). Needless to say, I am grateful to IREX for supporting this year of research in the Soviet Union. Numerous Soviet archivists and librarians aided me as well, but the staff at the Central State Archive of Literature and Art (TsGALI) deserve special mention for their willing help in obtaining copies of several archival photographs. They made work in TsGALI more rewarding than I could ever have anticipated. Closer to home, at the University of California Press, Sheila Levine’s sure-footed combination of encouragement and advice served the project well. She, with able assistance from Monica McCormick, Dore Brown, and Anne Canright, brought the book into this world with a deftness that required no recourse to the profession’s equivalent of forceps or general anesthesia. Finally, excerpts from earlier versions of some chapters have appeared as the core of articles in Slavic Review, Russian Review, and Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. I thank the editors of these journals for allowing me to draw on that material here.