Introduction: Tragedy’s Offspring

Inasmuch as revolution is the destruction of the old outdated order, of old family and social relations, it is also one of the causes of besprizornost’.

We are thrown out like puppies born blind.

Orphaned and abandoned children have been a source of misery from earliest times. They apparently accounted for most of the boy prostitutes in Augustan Rome and, a few centuries later, moved a church council of 442 in southern Gaul to declare: “Concerning abandoned children: there is general complaint that they are nowadays exposed more to dogs than to kindness.”^[1] In tsarist Russia, seventeenth-century sources described destitute youths roaming the streets, and the phenomenon survived every attempt at eradication thereafter. Long before the Russian Revolution, the term besprizornye had gained wide currency.^[2] What, then, distinguished vagrant juveniles of the nation’s first postrevolutionary decade? To some extent it was their privation, though taken individually the children’s experiences knew precedent enough in Russia. Much more shocking was their vast number. By 1922 the twentieth century’s relentless opening sequence of warfare, epidemics, and famine had left the new Bolshevik government at least seven million waifs. Even to observers well aware of social problems under the tsarist regime, homeless youths now inundated Russian cities to a degree unimaginable only ten years earlier.

To be sure, few imaginations accurately forecast horrors of unusual dimension. The exuberant demonstrations that attended the march of tsarist troops to the front, for instance, appear now as exultation around an unquenchable inferno. Those shouting for blood in August 1914 did not anticipate the scale of impending havoc that would extinguish some sixteen million lives within the nation’s borders by 1922.^[3] Yet this was the reckoning which commenced that summer—and hardly the Great War’s sole measure of grief. Along with its slaughter in the trenches, the conflict administered a variety of blows that severed contact between millions of children and their parents.^[4]

From the beginning, mobilization of adult males deprived numerous families of their primary breadwinners and compelled mothers to work outside the home. Sons and daughters sought subsistence in any way possible, with little or no supervision. Whatever their choice—begging, peddling, prostitution, or theft—they spent an ever larger portion of their time on the street, drifting out of shattered families that could no longer support them. Those who turned to relatives often discovered these havens to be just as precarious, for if wartime adversity overcame their adoptive guardians, the newcomers’ weak claim on household resources saw them first out the door. By summer’s end in 1917, a Provisional Government ministry noted the presence in Petrograd of “5,000 children without parents and absolutely homeless. According to the estimates of the city there are about 150,000 children who are partly destitute, their fathers being in the army and their mothers at work.”^[5]

One family shredded by the conflict included a boy named Aleksei, born in the city of Ekaterinburg. His father, who had worked as a cobbler in a factory before the war, perished in the fighting, leaving his mother, a washerwoman, to support five children. After making ends meet for a time through the sale of household property, she fell ill, suffered a mental breakdown, and was taken to a hospital. Testimony is silent on the children’s fate, but at some point they lost their dwelling, for on their mother’s discharge the family sought refuge in a crude dug-out shelter. Soon, another breakdown returned the woman to the hospital, and she appears no more in the account. After an unspecified interval, her sons and daughters were placed in children’s homes—from which Aleksei escaped repeatedly to spend ever longer periods stealing from traders in local markets.^[6]

Meanwhile, as the Russian army suffered one defeat after another, the combat moved eastward, pushing residents out of villages and towns in the western portion of the country. A stream of over three million refugees issued from four provinces in Belorussia alone by early 1917, as people left on orders from officials or fled independently.^[7] Those evacuated at the bidding of authorities were generally informed that they would be conveyed by train or other means to safe regions deep inside the country. Inevitably, youths lost contact with their parents during these wartime relocations. Mothers and fathers (and, of course, some juveniles as well) died of starvation or disease as periods of travel in packed train cars alternated with endless waiting at stations. Looking back a few years later to describe their abandonment, children sometimes recounted that while they were off searching for food during such stops, the trains—with their parents aboard—were ordered to depart. Here and there, local officials sorted minors from adults, sending them to different, often remote, destinations. Inadequate coordination and record keeping commonly accompanied the shunting of citizens from place to place and made it difficult to reunite families later on. The government, in short, handled millions of refugees with the same lumbering confusion that it displayed in conducting other aspects of the war.^[8]

Many evacuees washed up as far east as the Urals, particularly the area around Cheliabinsk. Children whose parents had perished or disappeared en route could rarely hope for anything more than refuge in squalid orphanages or temporary shelters. As the months dragged by, they were joined by others whose parents had died after reaching evacuation regions—often carried away by outbreaks of cholera and typhus that also claimed many juveniles. The brief autobiography of an orphan, identified only by the surname Korneliuk, reports that World War I forced his family to flee their village. With hardship and illness ever at hand, he and his parents covered thousands of miles (presumably part of an evacuation managed by the government) to reach a village in Cheliabinsk province, where he worked five years as a hired laborer for a prosperous peasant. After the war, his family joined others in the province petitioning to return to their native region, now part of Poland. When the passage of time brought no response, they journeyed to Cheliabinsk to take up the matter with authorities there. The city thronged with refugees, many of whom clogged a barracks previously stocked with Austrian prisoners of war. In this setting the boy survived a bout with typhus but discovered upon recovery that his parents had died. Some time thereafter, his name appeared on a list of orphans collected in the barracks and transported westward back across the country to the town of Velikii Ustiug, where he worked on a state farm. Six months later, local officials dispatched him to Poland, a trek destined to lead instead to a children’s home in Moscow.^[9]

Juveniles routinely fended for themselves after overcrowded shelters denied them entry. Others vanished from official sight in the shuffle from one institution to another or fled facilities whose conditions seemed more wretched than life on the street. Even families that survived intact the long journey to the Urals or one of the cities in the middle Volga region did not always withstand the trials that lay ahead. After a lifetime of misery compressed into less than a decade, they faced in 1921 a famine that desolated the territory to which manmade ruin had flung them.^[10] This sequence of events forms the heart of an autobiographical sketch left by an orphan from the city of Grodno. His family numbered among the millions pouring from western districts to the interior during World War I, in this case again to a village in Cheliabinsk province. Here the boy quit school and found work with local peasants in order to help support the family, his father having died in 1914. For six years they managed in this fashion, until famine arrived to eliminate the village’s food and drive them in desperation to Cheliabinsk. Five people in a starving multitude, they were swept into a cold, typhus-ridden barracks that soon claimed the boy’s mother and a sister. Three days later his other sister died, leaving him alone with an ailing brother. “There were many like us.”^[11]

But before the scourge of famine descended on the country, civil war between the Bolsheviks and diverse adversaries beset a society already bled pale by World War I. From 1918 through 1920 families continued to disintegrate under the assault of combat, flight, hunger, and disease, casting adrift still more children. Every contested province revealed them in abundance. As the fighting approached its last summer in southern Russia, for example, American Red Cross personnel in the vicinity told of “1,000,000 Russian children separated from their parents and needing food and clothing.”^[12]

With warfare spread across much of the country, refugees streamed in huge numbers and in all directions. A Red Cross document titled “The Agony of Western Siberia” portrayed scenes by no means unique to the Siberian front: “The whole of the towns in this region are over-crowded in an incredible manner, and the congestion is indescribable. To quote one example, in Omsk where the population prior to the war was about 180,000 souls, it is estimated that there are at the present time 700,000 herded in and around this town.”^[13] City after city near the ever-shifting front lines teemed with people on the run. By 1920, over three hundred thousand refugees jammed the Crimean city of Sevastopol’, normally home to only seventy-five thousand. In the Northern Caucasus sector, as Bolshevik troops approached Rostov-on-the-Don during the winter of 1919–1920, “trains went out with refugees clinging all night to the platforms, bumpers and huddling on the roof. This is not unusual inthe summer,” commented a Red Cross official, but it was then “bitter winter weather.” No doubt many of these people made for the neighboring Kuban’ region—where they joined five hundred thousand to one million other uprooted adults and children.^[14] With even less guidance than that provided by the tsarist government for evacuations during World War I, the Civil War’s refugees plodded blindly into chaos and death that stripped innumerable children from their parents.^[15]

As casualties from battles, reprisals, and executions grew, so did the number of households deprived of their principal source of economic support. Most of those killed in military operations were men, of course, and the tragedy of newly widowed mothers unable to support their offspring remained the fecund source of homeless youths that it had become after 1914. Furthermore, the collapse of government authority in numerous areas left armed bands to roam the countryside, seizing whatever they could, killing whomever they pleased, and strewing additional orphans in their wake.^[16] Such was the experience of the Aleichenko family in the village of Fliugovka, Voronezh province. A few months after the father departed for the trenches of the First World War, notification arrived that he had sacrificed his life “for the faith, tsar, and fatherland.” Then, after a yearlong illness, the mother died, leaving five children with their grandfather, Anton. One of the five, a boy named Vasilii, recalled that in 1919 or 1920 groups of armed men began to raid their village. As the peasants scrambled to bury their grain and conceal their livestock, Anton sought to hide his only horse. In the process, the animal kicked him in the chest, a fatal blow that deprived the children of their guardian. Vasilii’s older brother took the youngest of the three boys to live in the Northern Caucasus region with distant relatives and managed to find refuge for his two sisters with compassionate neighbors. Then he and Vasilii set out for the Northern Caucasus, hoping to survive in any manner possible. Along the way they were separated, not destined to meet again until 1964, and Vasilii began a vagrant life that would take him throughout the Crimea, Northern Caucasus, and beyond. Eventually he entered an orphanage, from which his path led to school, the communist youth organization, factory work, action in World War II, and service in the Cheliabinsk police force.^[17]

Behind the Civil War’s violence trailed a retinue of hunger and disease, tearing untold thousands of youths from their guardians. Years of fighting had bequeathed the population severe shortages of food and other essentials, thereby inviting epidemics and starvation for lengthy stays. Perhaps typhus or cholera arrived to gut a child’s village, or a father journeyed off in search of food and never returned. Entire families left home, fleeing privation or soldiers, only to be decimated by disease along the rails, roads, or waterways.^[18] In Omsk, for instance, the American Red Cross opened an orphanage for children whose parents had succumbed to typhus and other maladies—often spread by soldiers, as described in the following report:

[In the rail yards across the Irtysh River from Omsk] the congestion of trains of soldiers coming from the West ahead of the advancing Bolsheviks soon led to a frightful situation. Hundreds upon hundreds of patients in the height of typhus fever arrived from the West and many of them wandered delirious in and out among the other trains and among the refugee families, spreading the disease. Lacking water, lacking food, lacking fuel, lacking every facility for decent living, the railway yards at Kolumzino became a [sic] inferno of suffering.^[19]

Hunger, too, pried children from households that could no longer sustain them, including a boy named Andrei growing up in the industrialized core of the Donets basin. One day in 1917, after news of the tsar’s fall reached the area, unrest broke out at an iron mill. Policemen responded, and the ensuing battle claimed among its casualties a worker from Orlov province—Andrei’s father. His mother had died years before, so the children were sent back to their home region to live with an uncle. Here they managed to get by until hunger overcame the area in 1919, prompting the beleaguered uncle to evict one of the boys, Andrei, to forage on his own. “I cried, not knowing what to do, and set off with no idea of a destination. I got on a train and left without knowing where I was going. I wanted to eat, but I was afraid to beg and afraid to steal . . .”^[20]

While Andrei groped for survival among the homeless, conditions also deteriorated in Petrograd, Moscow, and other large cities. Desperate officials even evacuated children to colonies in Ufa province, the Caucasus, Ukraine, and Crimea, where they hoped for more abundant food and fuel. Some evacuees subsequently lost contact with their parents when the ebb and flow of fighting cut off regions temporarily from Soviet Russia, as the American Red Cross observed: “Poltava was the centre of a district selected by the Bolsheviki where the children from the northern cities were to be sent, consequently, with their [the Bolsheviks’] forced evacuation, some 8000 children were left to be taken care of by the new [White] government. Conditions in this respect were very bad and unless some outside assistance is given this winter much suffering will result.”^[21] Colonies left in such straits frequently crumbled, and their inhabitants dispersed to fend for themselves.^[22]

Thus it was that by 1920, as combat finally diminished, local officials noted an alarming number of orphans and abandoned children, growing ever more primitive and dissolute as they swelled the contingent of delinquents, prostitutes, and hawkers clinging to life on the street.^[23] More would soon join them.

Within a matter of months, in the second half of 1921, the bony hand of famine strangled countless villages in the nation’s heartland. The territory devastated most completely stretched along the Volga basin all the way from the Chuvash Autonomous Region and the Tatar Republic through Simbirsk, Samara, Saratov, and Tsaritsyn provinces down to Astrakhan’ at the river’s mouth. It extended as far north as Viatka province, as far east as Cheliabinsk and the Bashkir and Kirghiz republics, including Orenburg, Ufa, and Perm’ provinces, and west as far as southern Ukraine. The long period of war had removed hundreds of thousands of peasants from the soil and cut sharply into the number of draft animals available, reducing acreage under cultivation. Also, the Bolsheviks’ policy of grain requisitioning (not to mention similar measures taken by their opponents), while possibly necessary for victory in the Civil War, diminished the peasantry’s grain reserves and rendered them more vulnerable to unfavorable conditions that might subsequently arise.^[24] And arise they did, for a severe drought blighted the crops of the Volga basin by the summer of 1921, inaugurating a catastrophe destined to claim at least five million lives.^[25]

For nearly two years, chilling accounts surfaced from the famine region, describing a population driven to ever more wretched extremes by hunger. Investigators found village after village where people had abandoned hope in exchange for numbing apathy. They lay in their huts with changeless, blank expressions—after having dug their own graves on occasion—and waited quietly to die.^[26] Others committed the most brazen thefts from homes, mills, storehouses, and similar facilities thought to contain food. Newspaper articles and telegrams from local officials reported a huge increase in such offenses, though in some localities they were so common that no one bothered to count them or even view them as crimes.^[27] As starvation and disease spread in the second half of 1921, millions resolved to flee their villages. Many thronged to provincial capitals or more distant sites rumored to be better supplied, including Central Asia, Siberia, and Ukraine. Some wandered aimlessly down the roads, passing forlorn figures trudging just as blindly in the opposite direction. For a long time thereafter, human remains dotted these routes, marking the end of refugees’ ordeals.^[28]

In Orenburg, a former waif recalled, hunger reduced his family to such misery that he and his father boarded a train for Tashkent, said to harbor substantial grain stores. Day by day, the journey took one frightening turn after another. First, illness overcame his father. Then, at a station, other passengers ordered the boy to take a bucket and steal some oil for the stove in the crowded car. They promised to throw him and his father out if he failed, but the terrified boy managed to pilfer the oil and preserve his place among the travelers. On another occasion he narrowly escaped a fire that destroyed much of the car. Later, when he and his father were searching for tea in a station, the train departed, stranding them until accommodations turned up in a freight car. Eventually his father died, leaving the boy to push on alone to Tashkent and then Samarkand before returning to Orenburg. He supported himself along the way by selling his clothing and begging, with adversity continuing to overshadow good fortune.^[29]

As food supplies disappeared from the Volga provinces, ravenous inhabitants turned for sustenance to leaves, bark, acorns, roots, weeds, grass, chaff, straw, and sunflower stalks. Peasants hunted dogs, cats, mice, rats, and crows until none remained in their villages. A delegation from Samara reported that “people deranged from hunger are wandering about like packs of wolves, tearing apart the burrows of rodents, digging up the carcasses of diseased cattle, and grinding their half-decayed bones into flour.” Others vainly sought nourishment in carrion, manure, leather, and clay.^[30] Numerous dispatches told of suicides and of parents resolved to end the anguish of their emaciated offspring by suffocating the children or throwing them into wells and rivers.^[31]

Even this did not mark the limit of ghastliness inflicted by the famine. When references to cannibalism first reached Moscow and Petrograd, they seemed wild exaggerations, inconceivable in twentieth-century Europe. But with each passing month, cases multiplied, reaching into the thousands by 1922. In the town of Nikopol’, two American relief workers sought confirmation from local officials: “Comrade Titov, the ruler of the town, verified these reports and even showed us official photographs of two children picking the meat from the head of their dead mother; and another where the members of the family, father, mother and several children, were satisfying their insane appetite on the cooked remains of one of the members of the family.”^[32] The practice occurred frequently enough in some districts that local inhabitants ceased to regard it as remarkable. Here and there people plundered graves and morgues in search of corpses, and human flesh even appeared for sale.^[33]

The famine’s wrath added legions of abandoned juveniles to the millions already at large. Clad in filthy, lice-infested rags and staggering from exhaustion and hunger, they began to appear on the streets of Moscow by late summer of 1921. From Kazan’ came word that every ship and train arriving in the city brought waifs from the surrounding area. With the onset of cold weather and the ever-worsening supply of food in their home districts, they flooded numerous cities, both in and out of the famine region. Reports described “whole armies of children—grimy, starving vagrants”—who jammed train stations, docks, and bazaars.^[34] Armand Hammer, traveling on business in 1921, was shocked by the spectacle surrounding his train at the station in Ekaterinburg:

Children with their limbs shrivelled to the size of sticks and their bellies horribly bloated by eating grass and herbs, which they were unable to digest, clustered ’round our windows begging piteously for bread—for life itself—in a dreadful ceaseless whine. We could not help them. Here and there it was possible to give one youngster a meal, but if we had distributed every scrap of food on our train, it would have been as nothing to feed this multitude.^[35]

A telegraph from Simbirsk province sketched some victims as “little wild animals” living in the woods and fields, where they fed on roots and avoided adults. As late as the end of 1923, well after the drought had passed, approximately 70 percent of the youths still roaming Moscow were originally from the Volga famine territory.^[36]

Simply put, the famine played a greater role in depriving children of their homes than did any other single cause. Proof abounded in city streets and welfare institutions, overrun with juveniles in 1921–1922.^[37] While it is impossible to be certain how many boys and girls lost parents during the famine, the total certainly reached into the millions.^[38] By May 1922, each day saw three to four hundred newly forsaken children accumulate in most principal municipalities of the middle-Volga basin. Cities located at rail hubs in the famine region found themselves overwhelmed with as many as 50,000 young refugees—36,000 in Simbirsk, 50,000 to 60,000 in Ufa, 48,000 in Cheliabinsk, and 55,000 in Orenburg.^[39] As early as the autumn of 1921 a Soviet journalist discovered “many children around the Ufa train station. Their bodies are filthy; their faces deathly pale, skin and bones. In the rain and slush they sit and silently watch passersby and travelers. The fortunate among them receive alms on rare occasions. On every street, wherever one turns, there are children starving, homeless, and even dying in the dirt and dampness.”^[40] In Ufa province, the number of besprizornye grew from 100,000 in June 1921 to 280,000 just four months later. Figures from the Kirghiz Republic jumped from 129,000 in December 1921 to 408,000 the following March, while the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate reported a total of nearly 800,000 waifs in the Tatar Republic well before the end of 1921.^[41] Clearly, the tragedy’s scope had reached catastrophic proportions.

The famine severed children from parents in a variety of ways. Juveniles typically received priority over adults where relief supplies existed, and in such cases—as in families where parents ate less in order to continue feeding their offspring—children could elude death more successfully than did their elders.^[42] Others lost parents during flight from famine areas or on long expeditions by the family (or some of its members) in search of food. Numerous variations on this theme occurred as hunger and disease took their toll. Parents also disappeared during chaotic layovers at train stations, as in the evacuations forced earlier by World War I. “There were sad scenes,” a traveler observed, “when the trains came into stations. People rushed to the doors of the third-class carriages. Every place was soon taken, every space filled, corridors packed, the platform full. Children were separated from their parents, never to see them again.” After languishing several days, refugees could be herded unexpectedly onto a departing train and torn from relatives who happened to be off foraging for food or otherwise temporarily engaged away from the station. Parents or children who fell ill, as many did, might be taken from trains to hospitals or barred from continuing with the other passengers. Adults thus stripped of dependents often learned upon recovering that their progeny’s trail had grown cold in the streets or the maze of overcrowded relief institutions.^[43]

One boy recalled that World War I forced the evacuation of his family to a village in Kazan’ province, where they lived tolerably well until the famine arrived in 1921. As hunger and death closed in, they headed for Kazan’, some eighty miles away, hoping to secure passage to their native Grodnensk province. But the appalling conditions around Kazan’ crushed the health and morale of the boy’s parents. Bloated from hunger, they lay inert, four or five miles outside the city. After supporting the family for a time through begging and stealing, the boy could no longer endure his parents’ hopeless condition. Bidding them and his elder sister farewell, he departed for Kazan’ with his two younger sisters, Vavara (age eight) and Anna (ten). Hardly had they begun when Vavara sobbed that she could go no further. Drivers of passing carts ignored their pleas for a ride, so they supported Vavara by the arms and even dragged her along the ground for much of the way. It was a cold Christmas Day. On they walked, crying and hitting Vavara in the back with their fists because she was not bearing her weight. People coming from the city shed tears when they encountered the trio, and two travelers gave them a little bread. At last they reached Kazan’ and found a children’s home willing to admit them. Relief appeared at hand, until Vavara contracted typhus and died. The journey of her brother and sister had only begun.^[44]

Sources commonly include accounts of children jettisoned by parents. With hunger paramount, any number of motives—a sense of helplessness to ease a child’s torment or, alternatively, a desire to shed a burden and save oneself—prompted adults to abandon youths. As noted earlier, such feelings provoked some parents to kill offspring, but much more frequently they elected to part company with their children and entrust the outcome to providence.^[45] In some cases, parents simply thrust them out of the home to wander hungry, swollen, and undressed through the village, filling the road with their sobbing. Others decided to take youths to neighboring settlements and forsake them there (or leave them at home and ply the roads themselves). So many peasants chose to desert children at urban bazaars that market days doubled or tripled the flow of minors to relief institutions in some cities.^[46] From Rostov-on-the-Don, a journalist reported that parents regularly stranded dependents in the large square outside a train station, telling them to wait there just a minute until they returned from some minor undertaking. As time passed and the adults did not reappear, children around the square began to wail helplessly. Rarely did anyone respond to their grief, merely a drop in a sea of misery.^[47]

Adults also discarded children after joining the throngs of refugees. Sometimes this had been the parents’ intent from the moment they left home, though often the decision was reached only after considerable travail in an increasingly bleak odyssey. In Samara, a young peasant girl sat in a temporary facility for homeless children and asked all who passed if they had seen her mother. Earlier, as the famine drove her parents toward this provincial capital on the Volga, she and her mother lost contact with her father. One day, after further wandering, her mother set the child outside a house, telling her to wait until she returned with an egg. There the little girl remained, all through the night. When she was found the next morning and taken away, she protested desperately that she had to wait there for her mother.^[48]

Other parents, drained by the famine to the point where they could no longer support their young, brought them to the nearest orphanage or government agency that administered these institutions. If told by officials that no resources or space remained in a facility, they frequently deposited offspring in the hallways and stairwells of the building or on the street outside. In Samara, the local head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) discovered some children dumped at the door of his apartment.^[49] Here and there, adults no longer able to care for dependents would engage an unusual type of unscrupulous entrepreneur who made the rounds of famine-stricken villages, collecting payments from peasants in return for promises to place their children in urban institutions. Having assembled a batch of perhaps twenty to thirty youths, he or she herded them off to town and then disappeared after disposing of the group in the street.^[50]

The millions of abandoned juveniles scattered across the country by war and famine diminished in following years to the range of several hundred thousand halfway through the decade. Such a sharp drop inspired the view that remaining waifs were merely a fading inheritance from the old “capitalist” order and the calamities of 1914–1922—a comforting suggestion that time would soon eliminate the problem altogether. But the assumption withered under scrutiny in studies at a variety of children’s institutions, where investigations revealed that many residents—sometimes 50 percent or more—had first landed on the street in the years after the famine.^[51] “I myself wrote previously that besprizornost’ is the legacy of war and devastation,” admitted Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin’s widow and a figure active in Narkompros from its foundation. “But, having observed besprizornye, I see that we must cease such talk. We must state that the roots of besprizornost’ are not only in the past but in the present.”^[52] In short, a variety of factors continued to generate homeless youths throughout the 1920s—not in the vast quantities of 1921–1922, but enough to prevent the government from realizing its goal of clearing them from the streets.^[53]

The countryside, home to some three-quarters of the population, long supplied reinforcements. Partial crop failures that plagued one region or another did not have to approach the nightmare of 1921–1922 to foster additional street urchins. Through much of the decade, in other words, an experienced urban eye had no difficulty spotting quaintly clad peasant children gazing around in bewilderment at train stations or walking nearby with the hesitant gait of newcomers. Though they soon sank into the unsavory world around them, new arrivals from the villages followed fast on their heels.^[54] Even a good harvest failed to halt the flow of rural youths to cities, for most villages contained landless or at least impoverished families, often headed by widows. Sooner or later, the absence of adequate support or employment pushed many children of such households, along with village orphans, to seek life’s necessities in cities or towns. These themes echo throughout the sources, time and again accounting for the departure from a village of juveniles who could not be fed or employed.^[55]

In some cases, youths worked in the countryside for several months each year, from spring until the autumn harvest brought the agricultural season to an end. With the onset of winter, the village could no longer support them, and they decided—or were ordered by parents and relatives—to migrate to cities in hopes of eking out a living. While they generally intended to return to their villages in the spring or at least at the end of summer for the harvest, some found life in the city’s stations and marketplaces more appealing than the rural alternative. Wedded to the bustle of urban thoroughfares, they did not set out for the countryside when the sun had melted the snow and warmed the fields.^[56]

Abandoned youths emerged as well from urban homes whose adults lacked the means to raise offspring, a predicament that gripped with special tenacity families headed by single parents, usually widowed or divorced women.^[57] Heavy male casualties from World War I and the Civil War created many such households, and new developments in the 1920s added more. The Family Codes of 1918 and 1926, for example, made divorce much easier to obtain than before the Revolution, contributing to a dramatic increase in the number of marriages dissolved. The Soviet divorce rate climbed to almost three times that of Germany and twenty-six times that of England and Wales. As one might expect, urban areas far outstripped the countryside in this regard, with Moscow leading the way at a pace of almost one divorce for every two marriage “ceremonies” in 1926. The new laws—intended to promote equality between the sexes—had the effect of encouraging men to leave their spouses (at a time when the numerical imbalance between the sexes due to war losses increased the “competition” among women for those men who remained). The difficulty women met in vying with men for jobs outside the home meant that a woman abandoned by her spouse could face an extended period of poverty—especially if she had dependents. Soviet law provided for the payment of alimony in such cases, but in amounts insufficient for adequate support and, in any event, frequently not delivered by ex-husbands.^[58] Mothers deserted in this fashion (or by men they had not married) often could not sustain their sons and daughters. Whether a child’s route to the street thereafter proved direct or passed through intermediate stops in relatives’ homes, the broken families of the 1920s represented a fertile seedbed for waifs.^[59]

Along with families headed by single parents, numerous other domestic arrangements funneled children—through poverty, abuse, or neglect—into the ranks of the besprizornye. Much as in other eras and countries, harsh treatment at home, especially when combined with penury, could accelerate a child’s exit. Blows from a drunken father, for example, presented the street in a different light—that of refuge—to the victim of the thrashing. In addition, adults reduced to rage by drink or by dependents’ demands on scant family resources might lash out and banish youths without waiting for them to run away. A child’s failure to perform a chore properly could also spark parental fury and lead to expulsion, as could exasperation at offspring continually under foot in a crowded hovel.^[60]

Juveniles ignored (rather than ejected) by parents were likewise free to occupy themselves in nearby lanes and market squares, where they might encounter street children and learn the ways of a new world.^[61] Meager supervision often stemmed directly from poverty, which inclined adults to send children out to beg, steal, or engage in petty hawking to help support the family. Thus deployed, they absorbed the street’s mores along with techniques for scratching a living from a difficult environment. This knowledge, accompanied by dire poverty at home, prodded them to loosen family bonds and spend more time in the company of other roving juveniles.^[62] A group based on Khar’kov’s Sumskaia Street contained several members whose passage to vagrancy included a stretch of work as bootblacks. One boy, who had lost his father years before, experienced a childhood of relentless but scarcely unusual privation. Eventually, he and his mother moved in with his married sister, a sickly, impoverished woman burdened with a large family. Both newcomers were regarded by the others as parasites, which goes far to explain the youth’s appearance with polish and rag on the sidewalk and his preference for life there with footloose friends.^[63]

Neglect also occurred as a by-product of parental employment outside the home. The absence of a comprehensive system of day care institutions compelled adults lacking assistance from their own parents or other stand-ins to lock offspring in rooms each day or, more likely, abandon them to the street’s tutelage. Left to forage like stray animals, some youngsters soon passed their time with full-fledged waifs and took up petty thievery. In households with just one parent, the odds in favor of this outcome climbed even higher, for only the most fortunate individual could support a family and supervise it at the same time.^[64]

Two other factors deserve mention as well. First, the unemployment rate among teenagers remained high after the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. NEP itself bore some responsibility for the problem, because it required numerous state organizations to operate profitably. This new discipline stirred such enterprises to cut expenses by dismissing staff—with women and adolescents representing a disproportionate number of the layoffs. In many types of production, labor laws stipulated that juveniles work fewer hours per day than adults, with lower output norms but at the same wage scale as their older coworkers. Moreover, the preceding years’ turmoil deprived youths of adequate schooling and labor training, and thus of qualifications needed to compete for jobs.^[65] Under these conditions, supervisors had little incentive to hire minors as long as capable adults remained available—as they did in considerable number until the industrialization drive at decade’s end. In the meantime, teenagers forced to support themselves found the labor market a difficult nut to crack, closing for many a gateway that might have saved them from indigence.^[66]

While unemployment blocked an escape route for the homeless, the ineffective work of welfare institutions returned juveniles to the street. Countless thousands over the years fled the abysmal conditions in orphanages and headed for their former stamping grounds. Even among those who remained, many did not receive adequate training to secure steady work upon discharge into a glutted labor market and thus replenished the ranks of abandoned youths after failing to find employment.^[67] In addition, local officials struggled throughout the decade to reduce the strain on their budgets caused by orphanages—sometimes disbanding institutions altogether, even in defiance of orders from Moscow to maintain the existing network. Residents discharged early for budgetary reasons often landed on the street, either directly or after transfer to the families of relatives or strangers who could not support them and did not relish the financial burden any more than did local officials.^[68]

The homeless wave crested during the famine of 1921–1922, with estimates ranging typically from four to seven and a half million orphaned and forsaken youths.^[69] Lists compiled around the country commonly identified 75 to over 90 percent as Great Russians, reflecting both their numerical predominance in the nation and the famine’s devastation of several Great Russian provinces. The catastrophe, of course, spared no one in its path and thus accounted as well for sizable pockets of Chuvash and Tatar waifs, both in their home territories along the Volga and as refugees elsewhere. Many young Ukrainians also appeared in the totals, after famine in the south followed years of warfare in much of the republic. Other street children sprang from smaller ethnic groups—Jews, Volga Germans, Poles, Bashkirs, Armenians, Georgians, and Moldavians, to name a few—typically emanating from regions scourged by violence, disease, and hunger.^[70]

While the quantity of street children clearly declined in the years following the famine, sources continued to offer widely varying assessments of their number in any given year. Estimates for 1923 generally fell between one and four million, though a few ranged even higher, or as low as 800,000.^[71] In 1924, figures from local offices of Narkompros prompted tabulations for the Russian Republic that ran from 125,000 to 300,000 youths. But totals of this order could not have convinced the author of an article in Komsomol’skaia pravda, who warned that “before us stands the fact of the insignificant reduction in the number of besprizornye in 1924 compared to 1922 and 1923.” Earlier, in the spring of 1924, an article in Izvestiia placed the total at “over one million.”^[72] Estimates for 1925, 1926, and 1927 covered a span from the neighborhood of 300,000 to less than 100,000.^[73] Even as late as 1930, when most sources trumpeted the virtual elimination of the problem, an article in a provincial journal maintained that 200,000 abandoned children continued to inhabit the Russian Republic alone.^[74]

It bears stressing that accurate data eluded officials throughout the decade, a fact acknowledged by nearly everyone from Anatolii Lunacharskii, head of Narkompros, to provincial investigators.^[75] The youths’ very nature—streetwise and wary of outsiders—rendered futile all attempts to count them precisely. Furthermore, local officials worked with differing understandings of the term besprizornye and diverse methods for determining their number. The results proved difficult to compare with one another and unreliable in combination as a national total.^[76] More often than not, the numbers relayed from the provinces to Moscow were far too low. In fact, the slippery street children left some investigators able to count nothing more than those already in institutions.^[77] Even special efforts to tally homeless juveniles during the national census of 1926 produced results widely judged as well below the actual total. Substantial numbers evaded the census takers with ease, on occasion greeting them with a hail of stones before fleeing.^[78]

Statistical difficulties, however, cannot obscure the massive nature of the problem, evident to anyone touring Russian streets, markets, and train stations in the 1920s. Nor can there be any doubt that a majority of these youths issued from nearly a decade of calamities—wars, epidemics, and famine—that had battered the land since 1914. Thereafter, while the number of victims dropped sharply, other types of misfortune replenished their ranks at a rate exceeding the government’s ability to respond as rural poverty, unemployment, and numerous single-parent families stubbornly continued to restock the streets. To be sure, the adversity faced in mid-decade paled before that of preceding years and therefore offered hope of satisfactory control before long. But that day arrived much later than anyone could have imagined at the time, for new upheavals—collectivization, dekulakization, the famine of 1933, and World War II—cast fresh waves of homeless children adrift in a country that had already seen far too many.

Notes