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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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