Soviet Street Children and the Second World War: Welfare and Social Control under Stalin 9781474213424, 9781474296199, 9781474213431

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Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War Welfare and Social Control under Stalin

Olga Kucherenko

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YOR K • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Olga Kucherenko, 2016 Olga Kucherenko has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-1342-4 PB: 978-1-3500-5811-8 ePDF: 978-1-4742-1343-1 ePub: 978-1-4742-1344-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kucherenko, Olga, author. Title: Soviet street children and the Second World War : welfare and social control under Stalin / Olga Kucherenko. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015043330 | ISBN 9781474213424 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474213448 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Child welfare–Soviet Union. | World War, 1939-1945– Children–Soviet Union. | Juvenile delinquency–Soviet Union. | Social control–Soviet Union. | Soviet Union--Social policy. | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union. | HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century. | HISTORY / Social History. Classification: LCC HV782.A6 K798 2016 | DDC 362.740947/09044 – dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043330 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Terms and Transliteration Abbreviations and Archive References Introduction

vii viii ix x

1

Part One Bezottsovshchina

11

1

Rolling Stones

13

2

The Crime Wave

25

3

The Great Migration

37

4

Efforts to Help

51

5

Coda

59

Part Two Step-Motherland

63

6

Empty Promises

65

7

Forced Displacement

75

8

Making Labourers into Criminals

97

9

Law and Order Soviet Style

109

10 Coda

117

Part Three In Beria’s Care

123

11 State House

125

12 Maloletka

135

13 Challenges to Authority

143

14 Educating through Labour

153

15 Coda

167

vi Conclusion Glossary Appendix Notes Select Bibliography Index

Contents 173 177 183 187 235 240

Acknowledgements I am indebted to many friends and colleagues who helped bring this book to fruition. No words can convey my gratitude to the Fellowship of St John’s College that inspired and supported my research, both intellectually and financially. Becoming part of this vibrant and engaging community was a major milestone in my academic career and a personal triumph. Returning to Cambridge as a Research Fellow offered an opportunity to meet new people, exchange ideas and form long-lasting friendships. I am honoured to count Ksenia Afonina and Tanya Zaharchenko, both wonderful companions and brilliant thinkers, among my closest friends. Research in the former Soviet archives would have been a much more gruelling task without the assistance of the archival staff. Be it in Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev, Odessa or Stanford, I was fortunate to encounter enthusiastic and generous individuals, whose readiness to help was truly appreciated. For their perceptive and encouraging comments, I am grateful to Julie deGraff enried, Mark Edele, David Marples, Nick Baron and Karl Qualls, who despite their very busy schedules carefully read the entire manuscript and helped me refine some of the arguments. Thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers for their vote of confidence, as well as judicious and insightful feedback. Amanda George not only restored my errant definite and indefinite articles (that bane of the Slavs) to their rightful places but also served as my first non-academic reader, whose perspective proved invaluable. Needless to say, all errors of fact, judgement or syntax are entirely my own. I am grateful to everyone at Bloomsbury who contributed to the editing and production of this book. I also thank the editors of The Russian Review and Australian Journal of Politics and History for permission to reprint parts of my earlier papers ‘State v. Danila Kuz’mich: Soviet Desertion Laws and Industrial Child Labor during World War II’ and ‘Without a Family: Public Order, Social Welfare and Street Children in the Wartime Soviet Union’. Finally, I bow my head to my parents, Natalia and Vitaliy, for ensuring that their daughter never lacked in affection and care. They unquestioningly accepted the eccentricities of the two ‘archival rats’ in the family, and together with my mother-inlaw, Irina Emel’ianova, took turns to look after their grandson for prolonged periods of time while his parents whizzed around the world attending conferences and searching for new discoveries in dusty archives. My husband, Andrei Kozovoi, deserves a special thank you for being such a splendid and loving partner in crime and father, especially now that we have a new addition to the family. Our children, Arthur and Adèle, are a true blessing! I dedicate this book to them.

List of Illustrations 1

Registration at the Kiev DPR, 1944.

14

2

Children collecting weapons.

34

3

Evacuation of children from Leningrad, June–July 1941.

40

4

Child refugees.

42

5

Cadets of Nakhimov Naval College in Leningrad.

56

6

Cadets of a Suvorov college.

57

7

Polish orphans awaiting evacuation together with the Anders’ Army.

80

8

Makeshift dwellings of Lithuanian exiles.

86

9

A child deportee marking wood in 1955.

93

10

Model students of FZO no.7, Leningrad, 1945.

101

11

A model DPR in Kiev.

127

12

A stark contrast between two different juvenile reformatories.

137

13

A lesson at a model DPR in Kiev.

156

14

A workshop at a model DPR in Kiev.

159

Terms and Transliteration Throughout the text I use a modified Library of Congress transliteration system. The Russian endings ий and ый appear as ii and yi, and most diacritics are omitted, except the Russian ‘soft’ (’) and ‘hard’ (”) signs. Personal names and toponyms appear in their non-Anglicized Russian form, except when such names are commonly used in their familiar English version, for instance Krupskaya and Gorky. Toponyms, such as Kiev and Kharkov, as well as those that have since been changed, such as Stalingrad (Volgograd) and Gorky (Nizhnii Novgorod), are mentioned as they were known at the time. All translations are mine, except where indicated otherwise. To simplify matters, I use the word ‘police’ instead of the Soviet term ‘militsiia’. To minimize repetition, the official designation for the Soviet government agency concerned with ensuring administrative legality, the Procuracy, and its employees, procurators, appear interchangeably with the names that are more familiar to Western readers, Prosecutor’s Office and prosecutors.

Abbreviations and Archive References AChMP DAOO GARF GARF (Hoover)

LGGRTC Memorial MUZR RGANI RGASPI RGASPI M TsDKFFA TsGAIPD SPb TsGAKFFD SPb TsGAMLI KP NSh PP SIu SP SZ SZd

Archive of the Black Sea Port Authority (Odessa, Ukraine). State Archive of Odessa Oblast’ (Odessa, Ukraine). State Archive of the Russian Federation (Moscow, Russia). Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford: Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet State, Microfilm Collection (Stanford, CA, USA). The Museum of Genocide Victims (Vilnius, Lithuania). Archive of the International Historical, Educational, Human Rights and Charitable Society ‘Memorial’ (Moscow, Russia). Museum of Young Defenders of the Motherland (Kursk, Russia). Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (Moscow, Russia). Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (Moscow, Russia). f.k.a. TsKhDMO Centre for the Preservation of the Documents of Youth Organizations (Moscow, Russia). Central State Archive of Film, Photo and Phono Documentation (Kiev, Ukraine). Central State Archive of Historical and Political Documentation of St Petersburg (St Petersburg, Russia). Central State Archive of Film, Photo and Phono Documentation of St Petersburg (St Petersburg, Russia). Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Arts (Kiev, Ukraine). Komsomol’skaia Pravda Nachal’naia Shkola Pionerskaia Pravda Sovetskaia Iustitsiia Sovetskaia Pedagogika Sotsialisticheskaia Zakonnost’ Sovetskoe Zdravookhranenie

In the endnotes, names of archives are abbreviated, and the traditional f. for fond or collection number, op. for opis’ or inventory number, d. for delo or file number, and l. for list or folio number are substituted with forward slashes (e.g. GARF 1/1/1/1).

Introduction

In a 2011 interview, Sergei Volkov, the author of the popular and deeply disturbing Russian novel Children of the Emptiness, compared the abysmal situation with child homelessness in modern Russia and the Soviet Union. Careful not to idealize the latter, the writer nevertheless lamented the ‘unmatched social security’ offered by the Soviet state to disenfranchised children. To substantiate his claim, Volkov invoked some of the best examples of Soviet propaganda film: A Road to Life (1931), Flags on Towers (1958) and The Republic of SHKID (1966).1 All three celebrated the events of the 1920s – when the country was swamped with waves of abandoned and destitute youthful victims of war and famine – and the efforts undertaken by the state to eliminate child homelessness (besprizornost’). Volkov did not, however, mention another tumultuous decade in Soviet history that had also witnessed more than a million children being swallowed up by the street. And this ignorance has less to do with the writer’s forgetfulness than with the Soviet state’s deliberate policy of excision. To be sure, the 1940s were associated in Soviet collective consciousness with a savage war, grand strategic operations, unparalleled suffering and even child displacement, but a carefully constructed metanarrative of the Second World War failed to mention the extent and some of the reasons of this social ill. The regime worked hard to represent itself as the bastion of social fairness and the champion of all children during this period. In the words of one prominent Soviet jurist echoed by many others: ‘from the beginning of the war [the state] carried out a planned and well thought-out programme to prevent neglect, homelessness and delinquency’, thereby ‘sharply reducing the scale and acuteness of this frightening calamity, caused by the war’.2 Consequently, not only was the regime hailed for the arduous task of keeping the number of destitute and deviant children under control, but the responsibility for producing them was firmly planted on the shoulders of the German fascist invaders, who maliciously wrecked the happy childhoods of so many little citizens of the Soviet Union. To sustain the fighting spirit and to boost the regime’s legitimacy in the eyes of its subjects, the story of exceptional state care in wartime was disseminated far and wide. Even the Soviet Union’s allies received assurances that ‘despite all our war-time difficulties, the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government have not for a moment forgotten the children’.3 Whether the allies fell for the carefully constructed myth is a matter of debate, but some indeed assumed that the Soviet Union was spared a rise in juvenile delinquency, and claimed that despite its shortcomings ‘the Soviet child-care programme [was] the most comprehensive of any country in the world’.4 Considering how readily people from different walks of life within the country believed in their state’s energetic actions

2

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

to keep children off the streets, even if their everyday experience contradicted such convictions, the propaganda campaign worked on the domestic audience. In their letters to the authorities written shortly after the war’s end, ordinary citizens insisted that all homeless children and war orphans had been quickly absorbed by state welfare institutions or adopted.5 Similarly, juvenile delinquents, in the view of two Ukrainian cinematographers, had not been allowed to remain ‘on the bottom’, where a capitalist system would have surely left them, but had been picked up and re-educated in labour colonies to return to the bosom of a socialist society as ‘proper citizens’ (polnotsennye grazhdane) and ‘active participants in the building of our magnificent future’. So confident were the directors in the state’s ability to find keys to the ‘broken souls of these little people, to restore their innocence and to instil in them high moral qualities and love towards labour’ that they proposed to make a film about it in 1946.6 Seven years later their colleague from the literary community simply stated through her protagonist that ‘during the unprecedentedly difficult years of the Great Patriotic War in our USSR there were absolutely no neglected children. That is the miracle that Soviet power enacted!’7 A similar line was repeated incessantly in specialized literature on social welfare during the Second World War. Elevating ideals into fact, the author of one treatise, published in 1969 at the height of Soviet war myth-making, boasted that while in the occupied countries of Europe children endured great hardship, in the Soviet Union ‘there was no mass homelessness’; ‘from the very first days of the war local authorities with the help of public organizations accounted for all children left without parental supervision’; ‘all children’s institutions were evacuated to safety in an exceptionally short period of time’ and ‘received provisions from a centralized distribution system’ on top of what they gathered from their ‘vast’ subsistence plots; children’s commissions responsible for dealing with homeless (besprizornye) and unsupervised (beznadzornye) youngsters worked tirelessly to place ‘all apprehended vagrants in children’s homes immediately’, while every large town and train station boasted a receiving centre supervised by the education authorities, and from 1943 by the police. All this, the author triumphantly concluded, served as an ‘eloquent confirmation that in our socialist country state care for a person has always been and is a priority’.8 Social welfare in wartime thus continued to serve as a legitimizing factor in the regime’s marketing campaign designed to prove the superiority of socialism over capitalism. So persuasive was the one-sided self-congratulatory story presented by Soviet historiography that many of today’s social workers and historians repeat it without much critical assessment, despite the revisionist trend in late and post-Soviet historical literature. Once again faced with a rapidly growing number of ‘socially orphaned’ and homeless children, the Russian specialists look to the Soviet past to find examples where marginalized youth were dealt with successfully. Instead of making a complex analysis of the wartime crime and vagrancy prevention programme, they tend to examine state legislation exclusively, which extended sympathy and a helping hand to all youngsters, be they conscripted child workers, displaced children, juvenile delinquents or war orphans.9 The difficulties in implementing state programmes are acknowledged but mostly blamed on wartime exigencies. Very few studies mention, and even then only fleetingly, other factors

Introduction

3

that played a role in marginalizing youngsters, generating a great number of orphans, vagrants and delinquents during this period.10 This book challenges the idealized assertions made by Soviet opinion-makers and historians, consolidated in the aforementioned 1969 essay and frequently repeated in more recent studies. It exposes a huge discrepancy between what the legislator envisioned and how it translated into reality. Given the enormity of the upheaval faced by the Soviet state and the strain it found itself under, its child protection programme was extensive but not as successful and effective as Soviet and modern accounts make it out to be. Though on paper the government was committed to the resocialization of street children, this was in practice a low priority for the state, which was busy fighting a war and maintaining order on the home front. Its interventionist policies were more about exercising control over the population than protecting children from wartime hardships. The state was less concerned with the prevention of child vagrancy and deviance than with combating their negative consequences. Crucially, the Stalinist state created conditions that exacerbated the situation. As such, it was to a degree responsible for marginalizing youngsters through the poor administration of criminal justice, consistently punitive legislation, deportations and ineffective management of resources. Assuming, for the purposes of this discussion, that ‘the state’ is a hierarchical network of individuals with administrative and policy-making duties, as opposed to an abstract structure, the responsibility for generating homeless juveniles and deviants lay with central government and its local representatives. While many choices were forced upon them by the emergency of war, certain actions reflected political objectives that unnecessarily subjected a great number of people and their children to abuse. The gross violation of their rights was avoidable. Many home front children suffered great hardship during this period for reasons that only indirectly had anything to do with the emergency situation. It is true that the rapid rise in juvenile delinquency and vagrancy was inevitable in wartime, as the experience of other belligerents shows, but the presence of so many street children in the Soviet Union was an indictment of the way the state understood its priorities, where political and ideological considerations weighed more heavily than humanitarian concerns. The book, therefore, shows how state policies transformed an existing problem into a nationwide crisis, how the Stalinist method of rule extended hardship to children on the home front and prevented the government from responding effectively to the emergency. The Soviet state’s role in ‘constructing asocial identity’ and its contradictory policies, which aimed at preserving social stability but simultaneously marginalized a great many people, have attracted the attention of a number of historians both in Russia and the West.11 Some of them concentrated their analysis on the youngest members of society, although their focus was predominantly on the children of those whom the regime considered its enemies.12 Homeless and delinquent children and their relationship with the state became the subject matter of several important studies, but their focus is either on pre-war or post-war years.13 More general works on Stalinist policing practices and the legal system, although providing an invaluable detailed account of debates underpinning juvenile legislation, also stop short of wartime.14

4

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

Scholars generally left the period of hostilities unexplored, and when they did turn their attention to it, their objective was either to give a broad analysis of children’s wartime experiences or to write the latter into a general history of Russian/Soviet childhood.15 Although it does not reflect in great detail on the plight of street children and the state’s role in the reinforcement of their ranks, Julie deGraffenried’s seminal study is of particular importance because it pinpoints the crucial shift of priorities in governmental policy towards children, which other scholars tend to overlook. As the state needed everyone to contribute to the war effort, its attitudes and expectations towards children changed from protectionist to openly exploitative. Children were now expected to sacrifice their innocence, even well-being, for the ‘happy childhood’ they would return to once victory had been secured. Following this general line of thought, the current volume also considers the war years as a separate and consequential episode in the history of Soviet child policies. This was a period when the romanticized concept of childhood, on which the Soviet state partially based its legitimacy, was dramatically redefined, stressing the punitive disciplinary model. Although outwardly the regime was still operating in the ‘happy childhood’ mode, inwardly it continued in earnest the disciplinarian trend that had started in the mid-1930s – following the more liberal approach of the 1920s – and which would be abandoned again after Stalin’s physical and ideological demise. In this respect, the war years were indeed an interruption in the longue durée of the ‘sentimentalization’ of childhood in the Soviet Union, which would leave deep scars.16 As Soviet society marched into the maelstrom of the Second World War, it witnessed the nearly complete erasure of boundaries between social welfare and repressive policies. In more than one way, the widely touted welfare state became a ‘warfare’ one, whose great social promises were more rhetorical than real, rarely receiving sufficient funding or making it to the top of the state’s priority list.17 All children were affected, but those who did not fit the accepted model of behaviour were at the centre of the new punitive approach. The tremendous social and economic chaos of this period produced mass displacement and rapidly rising rates of juvenile criminality. While some youngsters were indeed maladjusted, the overwhelming majority were victims of circumstance, who crossed the boundary of legality in order to survive. As such, they became a numerous and important, if distinct, group within the broader cohort of Soviet youngsters. A social anomaly, they were certainly not representative of the entire child population, but, as the most prolific student of marginalized groups in the post-war Soviet Union, Elena Zubkova, notes, ‘nothing can be so revealing about the “norm” as a deviation from it’.18 Looking at street children – in the broadest definition of the term, which encompasses homeless, unsupervised (or neglected) and delinquent youth not all of whom were easily distinguished – offers an opportunity to examine the relationship between the state and its youngest subjects, as well as between theory and practice of the wartime prevention programme. The state and its spokespersons claimed to have taken the well-being of all children seriously, giving them the love and protection of a family that many permanently or temporarily lost. When the parents could no longer perform their child-rearing functions, the state offered its services as a surrogate parent, thereby laying a particularly robust foundation of the post-war myth of

Introduction

5

exceptional state care. There is thus an opportunity to test the state’s declarations by examining its attitudes towards the most vulnerable group of children. Looking beyond policy to its implementation, this study evaluates the effectiveness of the legislation as well as the success of programmes of removing children from the streets and resocializing them in state care institutions; it also investigates the impact of the war years on juvenile justice and reveals many continuities with the 1930s procedures and standards. In the final analysis, not only did the Soviet state fail to live up to the image of an ‘extended family’ that it had taken upon itself, but it also enacted some of the most abusive policies concerning minors in its history. In the sphere of child welfare the Stalinist state resembled a ‘limping Behemoth’ (to use Mark Edele’s metaphor), much less capable of nurturing than coercion and persecution.19 That said, it would be hasty to claim that repression was an end in itself. In her insightful analysis of the state’s treatment of street children in the immediate postwar years, Juliane Fürst argues that compulsion and exclusion of such children was a state policy throughout the war years and especially after its end. The image-sensitive regime viewed street children as a particularly ugly stain on its record. Initially treated with sympathy, such youngsters were progressively elbowed out from the socialist project, having been, in Fürst’s words, ‘branded and forgotten’ so as not to spoil a more heroic and sanitized picture of Soviet childhood in wartime. They were given to the repressive organs and locked up from view in receiver-distribution centres (DPRs) and reformatories, where their numbers grew markedly by the war’s end.20 Custodial sanctions indeed prevailed in judicial practice during this period, even when there was a possibility to return a misbehaving child to his or her family, which might lead to the conclusion that the Stalinist state attempted to solve juvenile homelessness and delinquency through social exclusion. This argument is generally correct but needs a more nuanced substantiation. The current study reveals that although the regime did turn to repression and exclusion to combat deviance, it did so by force of habit as an expedient solution. The nature of these measures can be understood in the context of Soviet totalitarianism, where the desire for comprehensive control clashed with the inability to exert it, thus provoking drastic measures. The weaker the state felt its grip on society, the harsher were the punishments and the heavier was its dependence on repressive organs. The state’s inability to care for the growing numbers of street children ultimately led to the toughening of law and the strengthening of coercive methods. The year 1943 witnessed the climax of governmental activity regarding misbehaving children. By this time the regime had gained more confidence in the positive outcome of its struggle with Germany and needed to reassess control over society with a view to post-war reconstruction. It finally acknowledged the growing problem of child homelessness and lawlessness on the home front, turning to more repressive means of dealing with youthful indiscipline and indolence. The network of DPRs and juvenile reformatories expanded and a greater number of youngsters found themselves under the authority of the social control agencies. Nevertheless, as Rosaria Franco rightly states, ‘penal institutions were only one of the options of care’ for street children and ‘even at the height of the totalitarian state, never became

6

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

the prevailing one’.21 Efforts were also made to return children to the classroom, to reassert the influence of the youth league in order to organize and control their afterschool pursuits,22 and to increase the number of children’s residential institutions with the addition of new trade schools and junior cadet colleges. Together with children’s homes (detdoma), the new educational establishments, as part of the state-wide anti-homelessness campaign, would have to accommodate the ever growing number of children whose parents had perished at the front or succumbed to the effects of a bad harvest, disease and general exhaustion from prolonged starvation coupled with hard work, all of which made themselves manifest by 1943.23 Over the next two years, the liberation of new territories, as well as state actions against people whom it perceived as being disloyal, also produced new claimants to the welfare funds. Thus, the increase in the population of DPRs and juvenile reformatories in the last two years of the war, to which Fürst refers, was indeed the result of more repressive methods employed by the state desperately trying to avert chaos. Yet it can also be attributed to better operational work on the part of the law enforcement agencies, as well as the inability of the overtaxed residential welfare system to absorb all the street children quickly enough.24 The idea of reintegrating these youngsters into mainstream society through education and labour training was never abandoned, although it rarely materialized, because the conditions and the rough treatment in these alternative institutions of socialization were rarely conducive to successful rehabilitation. Rather, in its dealings with street children the state used a combination of correctional and rehabilitative models, viewing such youngsters both as a public nuisance, who moreover threatened the regime’s reputation, and as damaged victims in need of help. This does not mean that the state’s relationship with street children was a benevolent and nurturing one, although some of its representatives persistently advocated just this kind of approach. The central government did not seem to have any qualms about the potential for creating new waifs and orphans when it enacted its repressive campaigns against entire national groups or those accused of treason, even though it knew very well how this would affect the children involved, having had vast previous experience with such operations. Furthermore, while the leadership might not have considered the offspring of persons accused of collaboration with the enemy as being criminal themselves, it neither showed much concern for their wellbeing, contrary to what Catriona Kelly suggests,25 when it interned them together with their relatives in prisons or sent them off to exile in remote regions of the country, where the utter lack of provision increased their chances of turning to life on the streets or illegal activities in order to survive. Conversely, there is a danger in over-emphasizing the government’s more sinister motives when concentrating exclusively on state repression, as several students of the Soviet penal system do. Although they convincingly argue that the war years became the apogee of repression against children, evidence does not bear out their assertions that the state deliberately targeted children and their mothers in order to enlarge its rapidly haemorrhaging involuntary labour force or that the state’s relationship with street children and delinquents was based solely on ‘arbitrariness, illegality and brutality’, or that the general camp system was governed not by the logic of production

Introduction

7

or re-education but by the logic of torture. The risk here is to confuse the traditional disrespect for human life, economic hardships, constantly breaking down supply system and unscrupulous, sometimes openly sadistic, individuals in powerful positions with the calculated actions of higher authorities.26 With its decrees and instruction letters central government tried to correct the wrongs, advocating a more humane approach towards disadvantaged youths, including those in custody, but it was generally unable to enforce its own orders successfully. Much depended on the people who came into direct contact with street children. So the centre tolerated abuse, and in certain cases implicitly encouraged it through indolence and myopic policies, but this was most certainly not its objective. The fact that hardship was extended to a great many children was more an act of oversight than commission, and there were examples when the state did try to deliver on its promises and alleviate privation. These efforts are the focus of Part One, which considers both the advantages and disadvantages of the state programmes to remove children from the streets and resocialize them in state care institutions. It investigates the genesis of child homelessness and delinquency on the Soviet home front, the way the war affected family dynamics, the means with which children coped with hardships, as well as how law enforcement and welfare agencies responded to the crisis of mass displacement.27 Although homelessness and delinquency were not synonymous in the eyes of the Soviet authorities, the latter definitely saw greater risks of children falling into misbehaviour and committing crime when they found themselves permanently or temporarily on the streets. So the two problems were addressed simultaneously, betraying the consistency of perceptions over time and geographic space, be it in the deep rear or areas close to the front.28 Unable to meet the current burden of welfare and carry out effective social work among children, many of whom quickly found employment for their idle hands, driving up crime rates throughout the country, the government turned to volunteers for support. The war period saw increasing community participation in child protection programmes, as well as crime control, and the expansion of the movement into all social strata, something that would become a truly massive drive in later years. With its gaze turned to the front line, the leadership delegated the responsibility for dealing with disadvantaged children to the local authorities and made it clear that the latter should not expect the centre’s assistance, whether organizational or material. Hidebound in corruption and idleness, local bureaucrats often refused to prioritize disadvantaged youngsters, while their superiors engaged in bitter jurisdictional warfare, blaming one another for failures. In fact, it seems that in many cases it was compassion and a desire to help, not resources, that were in short supply. Yet mismanagement of funds and bureaucratic indifference were just two among many causes of state-induced child displacement and victimization. The government’s narrow-minded policies of repression, resettlement and deportation of entire ethnic groups also played a significant role in driving children to a wretched life on the streets. Judging by the available information, the leadership did not seek the complete extermination of these ethnic groups,29 but the state’s discriminatory neglect and lack of basic organization resulted in the abuse and physical destruction of many people, leaving their children parentless, destitute and ultimately more likely

8

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

to commit crimes. Joining them in their plight were many youthful workers who were conscripted into the labour force under threat of criminal prosecution but were left with little provision or protection far away from their homes and social support networks. The contribution of underage workers and apprentices to the criminal statistics was significant, and neither state nor general public took to them kindly. Though many of the committed offences would have been considered criminal by any society of the time, disproportionately severe punishments and wide deployment of discretionary justice made the Soviet case peculiar. The state clamped down on the slightest signs of deviant behaviour in the juvenile population, broadening the list of punishable offences, encouraging extrajudicial punishment and routinizing custodial sentences. There was also a very high incidence of wrongful convictions. Miscarriages of justice could naturally be blamed on the underfunded and underqualified law enforcement agencies that proved largely inadequate for the task of maintaining public order in wartime. Nevertheless, a strong prosecutorial bias also indicates that these were not merely individual ‘mistakes’ and ‘abuses’, but a systemic trend, a certain method of rule, wherein the political expedience of maintaining public order took precedence over legality. Those professionals who advocated a more humane treatment and believed in rehabilitation outside custodial settings did not meet an understanding audience in the government. Instead, unwilling to attribute the shortcomings to its own actions and policies, the leadership insisted on solving the problems that arose with the excessive use of repression, which had engendered those problems in the first place. Therefore, while Part One explores the role played by the state welfare system in curbing child displacement and crime, Part Two concentrates on state actions as their accelerator, pushing a great number of youngsters to the margins of society. Evidence presented here reflects more negatively on the Soviet state’s track record during the war, and supports the argument advanced by Aleksandr Yakovlev and Ann Livschiz about the ‘duality’ of Soviet childhood,30 whereby some children were allowed to retain their innocence, while others were rudely thrust into the world of adults on account of their belonging to a ‘suspect nationality’, committing a transgression or becoming part of the ‘indentured’ workforce. Chronologically, this part begins at the start of the Second World War, twenty-two months before the Soviet Union’s clash with Nazi Germany and her allies. Although the Soviet state was not yet at war (but already throwing its weight about along its western borders), it was actively preparing for the inevitable collision, setting up draconian labour regulations, as well as arresting and deporting potential enemies from among its own ethnic minorities and newly acquired populations.31 Moving away from the discussion about the legislation and repressive policies that adversely affected home front children, Part Three concentrates on the experiences of those youngsters who found themselves in the clutches of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), either for committing crimes, including political ones, or because they were deemed vagrant. Juveniles became a comparatively small but easily recognizable part of the Gulag inmate population. Nevertheless, they are hardly ever mentioned in the scholarly literature on the Soviet penal system, and when historians afford them a short remark, there is a strong tendency to lump them together and

Introduction

9

represent them either as hapless victims of political purges or beastly good-fornothing brutes. Such a simplistic approach distorts the social face of this segment of the Gulag population. Similarly unhelpful is the classification of all NKVD institutions for juveniles as ‘children’s camps’, which frequently appears in historical works. There existed two types of reformatories for minors within the wartime Gulag – labour colonies (TKs) and labour educational colonies (TVKs) – where the overwhelming majority of youngsters were interned. Despite the generally abject living conditions therein, it would be misleading to equate juvenile correctional institutions with the loaded term ‘camp’, not only because of the milder regime compared to that of adult camps, but also because officials viewed juvenile colonies as places of childhood, where youngsters were to be socialized, educated and trained to become productive members of society. Whether the colonies succeeded in this task is a different matter, but when it came to thousands of juveniles who wound up in labour camps for adults, little attempt was made to educate them. Much depended on the administration of a given camp, but, normally, increased rations and lower production norms were the only entitlements that youngsters could expect. Part Three, therefore, enhances our perception of the juvenile contingent as it follows their trek across the wartime penal system from the day of their apprehension to release. The focus here is on the youngsters’ everyday existence in correctional institutions, the state’s attempts to resocialize them and the brutalizing conditions of internment that gave rise to a robust juvenile delinquent subculture which governed the youngsters’ lives and determined their relationship with the authorities, fellow inmates and wider society. Interwoven throughout are the overarching themes of the state’s role in the marginalization of children and the disparity between the theory and practice of its childhood policies. Focusing on juvenile reformatories, the discussion also breaches a wider debate on the economic rationale of the Gulag, and the relationship between the requirements of the penitentiary machine and increased repression in wartime. In addition, all three parts evaluate the power dynamics between central and local authorities. There is evidence of disorder, incompetence, conflicting interests, unresponsiveness and insubordination at all levels of the bureaucratic structure, which at once illustrates the inconsistency of state policies in the sphere of child welfare and betrays the dysfunctional nature of Stalinist governance.32 Judging by the available archival material, the centre, local governing bodies and welfare agencies often advanced very different opinions about the nature of deficiencies and failures in child protection programme. It was the task of state inspectors to uncover problem areas and alert their superiors, which explains a strong bias towards the negative evaluation of local developments, although positive assessments were also fairly common. Provincial bureaucrats often had a different take on their efforts, employed various techniques to conceal shortcomings or made the best out of the bad situation by asking for more resources. At the same time, although the centre blamed their regional colleagues for inadequacies, the true champions of children’s rights often came from the ranks of local officials. To balance the often-prejudiced representation, this book takes advantage of a number of regional studies to reveal the local perspective.

10

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

Therefore, focusing on the war years proves a fruitful exercise, allowing one to delve into this hitherto little explored subject, as well as offering greater insight into the interaction of Soviet society with the state in times of emergency. Moreover, considering the Soviet propensity to boast about achievements in the sphere of child welfare, drawing comparisons with their American and European contemporaries, this study places the Soviet experience within the broader geographic context. The study makes use of a number of published works that present a rich and nuanced picture of social change exacted by the war, but the results of historical research in the former Soviet archives, both national and regional, form the book’s core. Most of the documents are ‘state-produced’, generated by the government, police, the Procuracy, as well as the youth league and education departments. To present a more objective picture of the events, an array of secondary material, such as memoirs, contemporary periodicals and published testimonials seek points of convergence between official records and witness accounts. Although the sources in this study do not come directly from children themselves, being either the processed memories of adults expressed through memoirs or interviews, or professional assessments and bureaucratic reports detailing the children’s contacts with the system, the documents still give voice to their subjects, vividly conveying their childhood experiences and everyday struggles. As such, the book combines the ‘top-down’ political and legal approach with grassroots social history, exploring the impact of war on children’s lives, their behaviour and legal status, as well as their experiences within the penal system. My understanding of the term ‘child’ is guided by Soviet legislation, which considered any person under the age of eighteen to be a ‘child’ or a ‘minor’; a similar definition is adopted in current international law. For the purposes of the present discussion, I limit the age group to adolescents aged ten to sixteen, since they constituted the core of the homeless cohort of youngsters and the inmate population of juvenile correctional institutions. Theirs was not an enviable lot. First marginalized by the system that had loudly proclaimed its devotion to every child but fell short of its promises, they were later pushed to the margins of an academic debate. It is time to afford them more than just a fleeting mention.

Part One

Bezottsovshchina

1

Rolling Stones

War, with its attendant massive population shifts, destruction of infrastructure, loss of life and widespread chaos, caused an alarming rise in child neglect, vagrancy and delinquency. From mid-1941 to late 1945 the officially recorded number of homeless and neglected children passed the million mark; however, these figures are not comprehensive and are thus deceptive (see Table A.1). Before 1943 there existed no central coordination or integrated collection of statistical data, and even afterwards in many places the registration of street children was unsystematic and incomplete. Officials usually recorded only those youngsters who had been processed through receiver-distribution centres (DPRs). Many more had been apprehended by the police, Komsomol activists or concerned citizens and returned to their relatives or directly placed in a job or a state boarding institution, bypassing the DPRs. For instance, in the course of the last two years of the war, the police of Smolensk oblast independently arranged placement for the entire contingent of their 1,726 charges.1 Moreover, not all children managed to obtain a referral to the receivers, owing to the shortage of places therein, and had to be turned back to the streets, as was the case in Tashkent, where the number of homeless and neglected youngsters was so overwhelming that 4,750 of them, collected from the streets during the course of January and February 1944, had to be let go, many without registration or assistance.2 While some children managed to move through the system several times, changing their surnames and biographies, orphans often remained unaccounted for, especially in the recently liberated regions. Moreover, instructed to detain only those below fourteen years of age, the police normally left older adolescents on the streets, thereby overlooking ‘the most persistent cadres of vagabonds’.3 Officials also resorted to conscious falsification of statistical data, when they strove either to create an illusion of a favourable situation, thus underreporting, or to show off their efforts in clearing cities of juvenile delinquents. Several times a month, district police officers would enlist the help of house attendants and members of the public to carry out major sweeps of places known to attract large numbers of children. The problem with such campaign-style operations was that all too often totally innocent youngsters found themselves caught up in such clearing operations. Observers complained that up to 95 per cent of children were mistakenly apprehended and recorded as neglected while attending cinemas, zoos and marketplaces, or travelling to the countryside to visit relatives, to procure food or

14

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

to go on vacation.4 If delivered to a receiver, such teenagers were eventually released and normally did not make the DPR statistics. Another contributory factor to the desultory record-keeping was the relatively limited network of DPRs, which meant that the majority of waifs and neglected youngsters ended up in so-called children’s rooms (detskie komnaty militsii), organized under the aegis of police precincts and vested with the responsibility of controlling juvenile delinquency, as well as serving as temporary shelters for street children. The registration process was just as flawed in these places, however. The sheer number of youngsters collected in a single day, in addition to those who arrived of their own accord, and the incompetence of the responsible police officers inevitably led to a careless registration process. Regardless of the nature and extent of the violation, the children would be put on record, even when there was no reasonable cause to do so.5 This not only wasted the officer’s time, while the rest of the detainees waited for hours to be registered, but could potentially do great damage to some children, should they find themselves standing trial for a first-time offence, when the number of previous apprehensions (privody) could affect the court’s ruling. No wonder, then, that some youngsters attempted to cover their tracks by burning registers, thereby interfering with already skewed statistics.6 While interned, the youngsters were usually forced to hang around in exceptionally hazardous environments, sometimes for up to a week instead of the prescribed six hours.7 Approximately half of all the children’s rooms throughout the country were deemed satisfactory for work and temporary accommodation. Many did not have appropriate quarters, being located in cowsheds, storehouses, former shower-rooms, with leaky plumbing, and even in private flats. Almost everywhere,

Figure 1 Registration at the Kiev DPR, 1944 (courtesy TsDKFFA).

Rolling Stones

15

including Moscow, inspectors found ragged, lice-infested, homeless children eating and sleeping on dirty floors and sharing their space with rodents.8 In one town, not far away from the Kazakh border, boys and girls were herded into an unheated room, after their warm clothes had been taken away from them, lest their owners decide to escape. There was no bedding. The sewerage system did not function, so the children had to relieve themselves next to where they slept. Lack of running water, soap and towels further compromised their personal hygiene. A thousand miles to the south, in Samarkand, bars on the windows sent the wrong message to the inhabitants of the children’s rooms; as did the close proximity of newly arrived boarders to adult criminals and feral waifs in many other places.9 The rapid expansion of the network of children’s rooms (with 1,058 founded throughout the country by 1944) contributed to the poor conditions evident therein. Swarms of street children appeared on the doorstep of the police, especially along the major transportation routes. To illustrate, almost two thousand youngsters, 91 per cent of whom were homeless, went through the children’s room at the train station in Gorky in the first quarter of 1944 alone. So overwhelmed were the police officers that they refused to admit the children and simply left them camping outside. In Sverdlovsk, waifs spent weeks loitering at the train station, being ignored by the police. Four hundred and fifty of them were picked up and immediately released in the span of just one month in 1944. Two transient fourteen-year-olds later complained to a state inspector that they had approached the station police on many occasions regarding employment, but were instead advised to leave Sverdlovsk and go elsewhere.10 Not many children’s rooms could boast qualified and conscientious delinquency specialists. Normally, the people who were appointed to work with hungry, restless and often traumatized children had neither the appropriate skills nor a special knack for the job, having transferred, sometimes reluctantly, from propaganda or combat training sections. Besides, the officers were often pulled from their duties to do other work, leaving the children’s rooms understaffed. Less experienced inspectors exhibited ‘excessive adherence to prescribed forms’, so much so that an encounter with the police ‘at times not only fail[ed] to correct behaviour, but dr[ove] the child to commit further offences’.11 Faced with such conditions and maltreatment, many strays preferred not to linger. In the last three months of 1943 alone, one children’s room in Bukhara lost 484 youngsters, or 80 per cent of the entire intake in that quarter.12 The reason why the situation was allowed to deteriorate to such an extent was a nominal interest on the part of the authorities in the affairs of the rooms. Until 1944 they were neither centrally coordinated nor had any legal status. Even the Main Police Directorate possessed no data on the number of children’s rooms under their command, or in which localities they were situated. Since the facilities existed purely on the initiative of local police officers or Komsomol members, they were not always successful in securing satisfactory quarters or provisions. In Saratov, official neglect forced the inspector of one children’s room, which occupied a section of a communal flat, to steal firewood from the neighbours to keep the children warm. A caved-in ceiling that no one troubled to repair became the reason for moving the other room in the city to a janitor’s flat.13

16

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

Therefore these establishments had to rely almost entirely on the generosity of concerned citizens and organizations. Where they managed to find energetic mentors and resourceful volunteers, the rooms’ work became a model for others to emulate. Two such establishments reportedly existed in Barnaul and Kuibyshev. Both had separate quarters, consisting of several clean rooms and were overseen by experienced inspectors with pedagogic training. Thanks to the active assistance of their patrons, the rooms were able to offer a large number of children hot meals several times a day, and to carry out health checks and sanitary treatment of the newcomers, even holding educational discussions.14 On the whole, however, the under-qualified, overloaded and understaffed police had great difficulty in coping with the massive dislocation and social disorder of wartime. By 1943 they felt they could no longer control the situation, let alone systematically compile accurate statistics.15 Local and anecdotal evidence suggests that the official data did not reflect the real situation, and that the problem with street children was much more dire. The summer months were especially busy periods, when scores of youngsters would take to the roads in search of food, relatives or adventure.16 While some adolescents chose to live rough, the great majority ended up on the streets as a result of war, poverty and social disintegration. Wartime family break-up, as parents joined the army or the overstrained workforce, and an attendant decrease in parental supervision, was believed to be the cause of children’s marginalization. This conviction was widespread throughout the Western world as well. Greatly increased juvenile delinquency rates in the USA, Great Britain and Vichy France were blamed on parental neglect and broken families. In America, working mothers became the scapegoats in the public outcry about child neglect, which was reported to be ‘verging on a national scandal’, while the army held off conscripting family men until 1943. In Britain, the absence of fathers on military service and the attendant lack of parental discipline prompted some civil servants to propose that schools should employ more male teachers in order to reduce delinquent behaviour among boys.17 Echoing their colleagues in other countries, Soviet observers also suggested a correlation between adolescent delinquency and paternal absence (bezottsovshchina). They were governed by traditional patriarchal views on parenting that prioritized paternal over maternal authority and looked to fathers (men in general) as the main role models and discipline enforcers, especially for boys.18 Local crime reports seemed to support this assessment, claiming that fatherless children committed the majority of offences.19 Since boys far outnumbered girls among street children and offenders, it was the former’s behaviour that raised most concern.20 Disproportionately high death rates among males, compared to females, whether from wounds or hunger,21 contributed to the rapid feminization of home life and the workplace. In such circumstances, boys’ socialization became problematic; some might have begun experiencing anxiety about their identity. With their fathers or other male relatives not around to set an example, elevate their self-esteem and teach them self-restraint, the boys were encouraged to seek male company outside the home. In their compulsive pursuit of masculinity, some decided to join the army, while others showed off their

Rolling Stones

17

toughness by breaking rules and adopting street ‘gang’ culture. Those who preferred to go to the front sometimes turned to crime in order to carry out their gallant mission. Adolescents participating in combat had been a widespread phenomenon ever since the war began. As it progressed and the Red Army moved westwards, the number of hopefuls only increased.22 Masses of children poured into the less devastated or more prosperous regions looking for food, war trophies or glory; sometimes all three at once. Their eagerness brought local children’s facilities to bursting point.23 For instance, in 1944, the Lithuanian authorities complained that the vast majority of 280 children who had escaped en route to the local DPR did so in order to go further west. A year later, the Byelorussian DPR reported 6,348 natives of other regions attempting to catch up with the front. The Valga train station in Estonia received on average seventy unsupervised youngsters a day.24 In their desire to head off to war, children often behaved recklessly, with serious consequences. Thus, an ill-conceived decision by two twelve-year-olds from Ryazan to steal prop bayonets from the House of the Red Army, so that they could go to the front fully armed, almost cost the boys their freedom, had it not been for the interference of the Procuracy of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), which commuted their one-year sentence in a children’s labour colony.25 Three teenagers from Stalinabad were sent to court for stealing a stamp, which they had used to forge high-school diplomas, possibly in order to enlist, while five others committed petty theft and sold the plunder to buy provisions for their westward journey. They also planned two burglaries but were pre-empted and returned to their parents.26 The Battle of Stalingrad attracted a number of adolescents wishing to see the ‘hero-city’ and partake in the action. They ran away from home but, if not ‘adopted’ by army units, had a very good chance of becoming vagrants.27 Therefore, the absence of a father in itself certainly did not produce juvenile delinquency but considerably increased the risk thereof. Full-time employment or physical debilitation prevented mothers from functioning as buffers for their offspring’s antisocial activities. With external restraining factors relaxed, and the children’s self-control not yet fully developed, being further reduced by the constant struggle for survival, it was not long before frustration and prolonged psychological stress began manifesting themselves in aggressive behaviour. Other important variables were the rearrangement of family roles, when children had to shoulder the burden of providing, as well as the social and economic deprivation suffered by the truncated families. A Soviet lawyer working with juveniles was on the right track when she suggested that difficult economic circumstances and ‘the acute lack of proper upbringing lay at the root of antisocial conduct’.28 In her view, and that of others, the risk of children falling into delinquent habits could only be mitigated by access to education and extracurricular activities that would offer responsible and constructive adult supervision. There was even a suggestion that lessons in criminal law should be introduced in higher grades so that adolescents could make rational evaluations of their actions.29 Political and party leaders urged schools to do a better job of offering moral education to their pupils and providing a healthy environment for effective adolescent

18

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

socialization, but pedagogues found themselves hard pressed to perform this task. During the war, the school network shrunk considerably. Many school buildings were either destroyed or requisitioned for use as military hospitals, storage facilities, even as prisons.30 The remaining schools moved into unsuitable quarters, sometimes private flats, and carried out lessons in multiple shifts or by correspondence. Education facilities close to the front were often shut down completely or operated in a much-diminished capacity.31 Poor heating, inadequate lighting and overcrowding often resulted in unsanitary conditions and the spread of disease.32 The unavailability of buildings and inadequate settings contributed to high dropout rates, as did the shortage of qualified teachers.33 Conscription, hunger and demoralization depleted their ranks, with towns bearing the brunt. Being at the bottom of the rationing pyramid, teachers received from 100 to 400 grams of bread per day, if at all, which was less than half of what their working pupils usually earned. With their wages often in arrears, many resorted to begging, their productivity and enthusiasm suffering as a result.34 People with no adequate training or experience often substituted for professional teachers.35 The number of pupils also dropped, especially among seniors who either volunteered for the front or entered the workforce, unable to sustain themselves on a dependant’s ration (see Table A.2).36 Quitting school without a valid reason was also very common.37 Many children failed to attend classes because of hunger or a lack of clothing. In the 1942/3 academic year, up to 45 per cent of all shirkers in the RSFSR stayed at home because they did not have anything to wear. A year later, another million pupils in the republic left schools as a result of material deprivation; a similar situation was observed in Kazakhstan.38 To stem the outflow of pupils in their jurisdiction, the Leningrad authorities issued a decree in 1942 abolishing school fees in the upper grades, which had been introduced two years before.39 In some institutions across the country attendance dropped to 50 per cent, while in others headmasters did not even know the exact number of their students.40 The ‘harmful practice’ of ‘trying’ truants or subjecting underachievers to humiliating punishments, such as placing an offender in solitary confinement during recess or parading him around school without a belt and headgear and under guard, also pushed some youngsters further away from their studies; as did frequent and illegal mobilizations for agricultural work.41 The teenagers lapsed into beznadzornost’ and misbehaviour, while their overworked and undernourished teachers rarely concerned themselves with the students’ whereabouts until the latter ran into trouble with the law.42 This is what happened to a fifteen-year-old boy from Kirov whose mother died and his father was too busy at work. He had dropped out of school, but his teachers noticed his absence only when the boy was apprehended at a local market on suspicion of theft.43 The wartime school was thus in no position to provide a normal upbringing and engage children in useful activities during after-school hours. The constant struggle for survival and multiple-shift schooling prevented teachers from devoting sufficient attention to their pupils; a totally inadequate infrastructure left the majority of the youngsters with nowhere to go and nothing to do after school.44 The situation was less critical in the countryside, because children kept themselves busy with farm work. Young city dwellers, however, had a relatively free reign regarding their after-school

Rolling Stones

19

pursuits, but there was nowhere for them to go.45 Whereas in January 1941 the Soviet Union could boast three thousand out-of-school facilities, three years later only eight hundred remained. The budget for children’s summer camps declined from 270 million rubles in 1940 to 40 million rubles by 1942.46 One observer complained that only 8 per cent of the entire student population was involved in extracurricular activities in Moscow, the city that had far better opportunities than anywhere else in the country.47 Even then, youngsters with behavioural problems, who urgently needed to be diverted from the temptations of the street, usually had no access to the much-reduced network of clubs and youth centres, since the latter required referrals from teachers.48 The youth league, and specifically its Young Pioneers branch, which worked closely with schools, assisting in the organization and coordination of adolescents’ extracurricular activities, was also going through its ‘near-death experience’, as Julie deGraffenried put it. Poor administration and a dearth of experienced leaders meant that many Pioneer detachments existed on paper only, and those that did operate consistently failed to engage their members in interesting work.49 Boys seemed to remain particularly unimpressed. It was reported in 1942 that Pioneer detachments in Moscow had very few boys, who instead preferred to ‘team up, travel outside of the city, play war games [or] make their way to Red Army units and eagerly run errands for them’. Disturbingly, some managed to do the same for the other side.50 The authorities’ deep concern over the increasing number of schoolchildren loitering around with nothing to do and little supervision was fully justified, especially when reports started coming in about a large percentage of pupils being detained for beznadzornost’ and committing crimes (including peddling): in 1942 across the country, 25 per cent of 286,467 misbehaving minors were still in school; in 1943, they constituted 72 per cent in Altai Krai, 18.5 per cent in Stavropol Krai and 19.1 per cent in Tashkent; 50 per cent in Khabarovsk Krai and 44 per cent in Moscow in 1944, with the percentage rising to 53 per cent in the capital by the third quarter of 1945.51 Many of them quickly learned the mores of the street and eventually abandoned education, and their homes, altogether. Those living on the edge of economic self-subsistence were particularly prone to leaving. Never prosperous in peacetime, Soviet society was plunged into extreme poverty during the war. Given disintegrated families and a nearly collapsed economy, the official claim that only ‘a certain part of the population’ suffered material hardship sounded optimistic at best.52 In fact, the party functionaries seriously underestimated the gravity of the situation experienced by the overwhelming majority of Soviet people. It is true that there were enormous variations in Soviet children’s life circumstances, depending on their parents’ position in society – children from privileged groups, such as political and intellectual elites, did not suffer as much, being protected by their family connections. But such children were not numerous compared to the overwhelming majority who were forced to endure extreme deprivation, especially in the areas that had recently witnessed heavy fighting. In the nearly pulverized Stalingrad, families made homes out of discarded lorries or downed German transport aircraft.53 In Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of youngsters plucked off the streets had been driven away from home (or state boarding institutions) by abject penury. Yet even in the areas untouched

20

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

by combat, the statistics were not encouraging either: the railway network running through Chkalovsk oblast yielded 3,029 unsupervised youngsters in 1944. Three hundred and seventy-six of them were former orphanage wards; nearly twice as many had broken ties with their parents. A similar dynamic was observed in Chita oblast over the next year.54 These were usually children from urban environments, where family bonds were weaker, the enticements of the street more alluring and the shortages generally more severe than in the countryside. If the data for the third quarter of 1941 (when the situation was dire at the front but not yet as desperate as in later years on the home front) is anything to go by, out of 26,236 detained homeless youngsters during that period, 17,237 were town dwellers, compared to 5,958 peasants; 29 per cent turned out to be war orphans, 17 per cent left home because of material hardship, 18.5 per cent received no parental supervision and 5.4 per cent had been poorly treated by their parents or guardians.55 Children did not always leave home willingly. To illustrate, three youngsters – twelve, six and three years of age – were deserted by alcoholic guardians, who neglected their charges, the youngest of whom was their own child. The children had been forced to the streets, first to beg and then to steal. Eventually, the couple decided to relocate, leaving the children behind.56 Changes in parents’ marital status also became a reason for abandonment. At the end of the war the police picked up a sickly sevenyear-old boy at a train station near Stalingrad. Abandoned by his mother, the child was trying to get to Ukraine in the hope of finding his father, who had been replaced by another man while he was fighting at the front. A teenager from Tula ended up on the streets and in detention for stealing after his mother had thrown him out of the house. Having remarried, the woman began to abuse the boy regularly and to deprive him of food. Initially, he tried to find shelter with his friends and sustained himself through begging, but eventually turned to crime. Another boy from Stalingrad oblast organized a gang of thieves after his father had moved away to live with a new family. With no means to support himself, the boy first operated on his own but then managed to persuade several more minors into criminal activities. Reportedly, the father not only encouraged his son’s thieving, but also forced him into it, seizing the loot to support his alcohol addiction.57 There were, of course, children whose love of adventure took them far away from home. They saw the wartime situation, with its massive displacement, as an opportunity to explore their vast country or, as one official dubbed it, ‘aimlessly to travel around’.58 To this end, they used the general chaos to move about relatively unobstructed. The People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) complained that ticket collectors exhibited too much leniency towards unaccompanied children aboard their trains and did not report them to the police.59 To avoid overzealous railway employees, children would simply stow away on rooftops or hide between cars. A Polish teenager, who had travelled with Soviet waifs to Central Asia, remembered how they ‘jumped from one wagon to the next in search of their pals, or just to pass the time. They did this without a hint of worry about being discovered; they did it as though the train belonged to them’.60 As attested by another contemporary, such equilibristics were a quickly learned habit: ‘There isn’t much to hold on to on a slopey roof of a passenger car, except an airing pipe or, as a last resort,

Rolling Stones

21

a barely there roof edge ... Already on the second day, you begin to feel quite at ease; you move while the train is in motion and in no time start jumping from one car to the next, looking at the rails flitting past down below ... the only discomfort we felt was when it rained and when it got cold at night.’61 Central Asia was a popular destination, perhaps because of the milder climate and the grossly overestimated abundance of food, but all major transportation hubs drew large numbers of migrating youngsters, especially during the warmer months.62 Thus, according to incomplete records, 4,700 teenagers traversed Moscow in May and June 1942. Its position at the railway junction between Moscow and Central Asia and heavy river traffic made the newly formed Ulyanovsk oblast in the Middle Volga Region a major attraction for the swarms of young drifters. Similarly, Archangelsk and Molotovsk were exposed during the navigation period from midMay to mid-October.63 Train stations, docks and markets were the favourite places for urchins to congregate. Here they hoped to earn a few coins or morsels of food through begging and busking or, if bold enough, by stealing. In 1943 a Komsomol worker described typical scenes at a station in Central Asia: ‘A train pulls in. Clutching their pitiful bundles, boys and girls jump off sidesteps and rooftops. They look awful: barefoot, undressed, black with dirt’; ‘If one were to walk across town early in the morning, one can see boys and girls wrapped in rags sleeping by staircases, in parks and public gardens.’ The official, however, reserved her indignation for adult onlookers and passengers, who, instead of alerting the authorities, ‘gather around such a lad or lassie, talk and laugh with them. Sometimes, the youngsters try to earn some food money by entertaining the public with songs and dances. The grown-ups watch the performance with pleasure’ or ‘pass by with an air of complete indifference’; ‘One can often see a child standing in the street with an outstretched hand. Passers-by would drop onto a small palm a dime, a ruble, a piece of bread, and, confident that that they have done a good deed, move on’; ‘When the train starts, everyone takes their seats, but the homeless children are forced again to look for a place on the train to continue their wandering.’64 With the onset of cold weather, the drifters would either migrate further south or allow themselves to be picked up by the police, settling for the winter in prisons, receivers, trade schools or children’s homes.65 Their ruffled, pitiful state made youngsters in one run-down orphanage recoil in horror: ‘On one occasion three boys and a girl were brought in. They were so ragged, dirty and lice-infested that it was painful to watch. Naturally, they were quickly scrubbed up and changed into clean clothes. When their old rags were thrown onto the snow, it turned black with lice.’66 Once the weather permitted and they felt strong enough to resume their travels, many former waifs would again take to the road. As a result, some travelled so extensively and weaved elaborate lies about themselves so skilfully that they would forget in what part of the country they had been born.67 Finding themselves adrift and leading an impoverished life, street children quickly realized that banding together with others increased their chances of survival. They supported one another with the day’s takings, acquired either through begging, peddling or petty theft, and protected the weaker members of the group who could

22

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

not look after themselves. Wandering about marketplaces in Alma-Ata in the hope of finding something to eat, a seventeen-year-old survivor of the Leningrad blockade made friends with a group of local waifs, who squatted in a ramshackle clay hut belonging to one of their number, Tolik, and his five-year-old sister. Tolik ran the household and looked after the girl. The children’s father had been killed at the front; their mother was probably dead as well. The rest of the boys had no parents either. They slept together in the hut and disappeared in the morning to return at dusk, tired but laden with provisions, which they shared with the rest of the gang. ‘It would be an overstatement to call our hut a thieves’ den,’ insists the Leningrader. ‘We simply tried to survive as best we could in this human anthill unsettled by war. I promptly and easily fell into the role of an emaciated evacuee, innocent but rather shabby looking. My task was to illicit pity from market-women, to divert their attention [from the stalls]. This wasn’t difficult, for all of them were somehow touched by war, had children or may have already received notifications of their demise at the front.’ The police eventually discovered their hideout, seizing most of the children apart from the Leningrader and his friend Vas’ka. The boys reunited at a train station and, having teamed up with two more drifters, resolved to go to Ukraine to join the Red Army. They made it to Novosibirsk, where one of them was caught thieving. The remaining three stole aboard a coal wagon, travelling to Petropavlovsk (Kazakhstan), where they decided to spend the winter at a trade school.68 Two other boys chose a more honest way to make a living. They met on the road at the very end of the war. One of them, Eduard Kochergin, the son of political convicts, had recently escaped a detdom in Omsk and was making his way to Leningrad in the hope of finding his mother there. Early on, the boy had discovered a talent for drawing and earned his subsistence by making wire profiles of the country’s leaders. Eduard’s companion was a partially blind beggar Mit’ka, who had lost most of his eyesight as a result of a wound sustained during evacuation. The boy’s face was badly mutilated and missing one eye, but he was an excellent singer. Having spent some time on the streets, Mit’ka learnt many popular songs. Their double act was for Mit’ka to sing about Stalin while Eduard bent the leaders’ wire profiles for sale.69 Joined together by necessity and a shared experience of street life, loss or separation, youngsters would develop a strong sense of collective identity. As attested by a memoirist who had spent some time in the company of waifs, he ‘could not help thinking, that although there was no honour amongst the besprizornye, there was great loyalty’.70 In some gangs this was achieved through brute authority and coercion, just as in the one run by an eighteen-year-old in Dzhambul. The leader’s preferred method of dealing with recalcitrant or ineffective gang members was murder, which eventually proved to be the thug’s undoing, when the authorities began investigating a string of violent crimes perpetrated against young boys.71 Other groups were based on deep friendships, which resembled tight kinship. Mutual care for one another within these substitute families acted as emotional buffers against the stigmatization that the youngsters often faced from the wider community. When Kochergin’s mate fell gravely ill during one of their winter stopovers at a children’s home, and had to be taken to the hospital, Eduard was crushed by grief. Nurses had difficulty pulling him away from Mit’ka. Even many years later the pain of

Rolling Stones

23

separation is still evident in his recollections: ‘In desperation I pounced at the nurses and began kicking them. I don’t remember how they managed to pull me together, but I refused to eat anything for several days afterwards.’72 The boy’s bitterness turned to hostility towards the outside world; his lonesomeness sharpened his senses: ‘At that time I was gradually transforming into a wild animal recently out of the cage. I could feel danger, woke up at every suspicious rustle or sound. I could smell out human dwellings, even humans themselves. Wicked people had a peculiar smell – they stunk. In one word, I turned into a lump of senses (chuvstvilishche).’73 Kochergin was wise to maintain his guard. Lonely children were at risk from violence or exploitation within the criminal underworld. Some crooks were prepared to go to great lengths to force a child to do their bidding. Professional beggars sought out unaccompanied children hampered with physical deformities or, if none were evident, would allegedly maim the youngsters with the purpose of parading them about in public to elicit sympathy from onlookers. Kochergin recalls that Mit’ka was afraid of falling into their hands, having been pressed into working for a group of such mendicants in Omsk. They drank away his takings and badly mistreated him. The little invalid was fortunate to escape in one piece after he overheard his companions plotting to chop his hand off to make the boy look even more pitiable. On several occasions Eduard had to protect his feeble friend from the unwanted attention of this ‘deprived human rot’. Once he used a bottle disguised as a grenade to chase away two women dressed as nuns, who had tried to pull Mit’ka away, as they threatened a protesting Eduard with a stiletto; the second time he stunned a greedy old beggar with his slingshot.74 While most of the besprizornye were not habitual bandits, but perpetrated their acts out of desperation, for some their time on the streets would become the beginning of a criminal career, usually under the tutelage of older thieves.75 Kochergin, for instance, met such a gang of grown-up railway burglars on his solitary way to Leningrad. They did not necessarily force him into their trade – theirs was more like an alliance of expediency – and one can even detect a hint of admiration towards the new acquaintances in Kochergin’s recollections. He saw them as true professionals, who could have made excellent careers as circus acrobats and equilibrists. Their skill did not come easily and required ‘extensive training and enormous concentration’, which Eduard would have to embrace wholeheartedly if he wanted to stay away from prison. The thieves coached the boy relentlessly. ‘Evidently, we chanced upon each other during their down time,’ recounts the memoirist: They drilled me for 8–10 hours a day ... Early in the mornings, besides the usual sprints, sit-ups and press-ups, they also made me curl into a foetal position, until I could do it in a second. Then two of them would grab my hands and legs and hurl me down a hillock as if an imaginary side slope. Diving through the air, I had to assume the embryo position and, upon hitting the ground, gently roll down like a ball. They taught me how to coil into a spring, and, forcefully pushing away from a doorstep as if from a train sidestep, leap forward, bundling up in mid-air. They would pack me into an enormous padded coat, cast a malakhai hat over my head and thrash me with their fists, forcing me to ward off their blows. The

24

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War faster I did so, the happier they were. They were trying to get an instantaneous, or, better yet, an advanced reaction from me. Eventually, after extensive bruising, I would fly into a fit before the beatings commenced ... They taught me to fight at close quarters, that is to use defence techniques concurrently knocking out the assailant ... This was an ancient thieves’ trick – a simultaneous elbow blow to a heart and a knuckle rap on a temple ... They also taught me the uses of a Finnish belt knife ... how to trip a man deftly and insidiously ... and much more. Likewise I learnt the secret of efficient packing.76

As well as gruelling training, Kochergin’s new trade required cold calculation, ingenuity and vigilance. It was important to know train schedules and the geographical peculiarities of the rail routes, to note passengers’ behaviour and to learn the habits of ticket inspectors. To avoid detection, one had to be able to walk over the rooftops of moving carriages, sometimes carrying heavy suitcases.77 The boy managed to extricate himself from the gang in time, although he admits to having used some of the thieving skills later in order to help his struggling mother, with whom he eventually reunited shortly after the war’s end.78 Therefore, whether under adult guidance or acting of their own volition, minors were becoming a real threat for the passengers of the vast home front railway system. In the first quarter of 1942 alone, across sixteen oblasts of the RSFSR, the underage were responsible for 6,500 crimes (5,193 of which were thefts, 137 robberies and 19 homicides).79 Curiously, however, it was not besprizorniki who committed most of the offences, either on transportation routes or in general.

2

The Crime Wave

Throughout the war years, the levels of juvenile delinquency rose steadily by more than 50 per cent annually. Overall, children committed 25,139 crimes in 1941, half a year later 23,242 minors appeared in court, and by 1944 their numbers had doubled, with 52,897 convicted in the nine months of that year. Across the country, minors constituted up to 10 per cent of those sentenced for criminal offences. In some regions, especially at the beginning of the war, their numbers approached 85 per cent, although accurate figures are hard to come by.1 In the period from 1941 to 1945, 168,084 underage convictions were recorded, a tally including older criminals lowering their age to escape harsher sentences, while excluding some other offences, such as labour law infringements.2 Heavily represented in the criminal statistics were theft and public order violations, while convictions for offences against persons remained relatively low. According to the available data, in 1944, 81.4 per cent of all inmates of juvenile labour colonies found themselves in custody for theft, 3.2 per cent for armed robbery, 1.8 per cent for murder and assault, 0.5 per cent for especially dangerous crimes and 11 per cent for other offences. A year later, an amnesty reduced the number of juveniles in labour reformatories by half.3 Thefts still constituted 73 per cent of all the offences, but the percentage of more violent crimes rose slightly – 4.6 per cent for armed robbery, 2.9 per cent for murder and assault and 2.7 per cent for especially dangerous crimes – which was perhaps partially due to the increase in violent crimes by the end of the war and in part because thefts usually entailed much shorter sentences, leading to a quicker release of petty offenders (see Table A.3).4 The overwhelming majority of perpetrators were boys in the twelve to sixteen age group, one or both of whose parents survived.5 Whereas two decades before, besprizorniki had represented the large majority of juvenile delinquents, now it was unsupervised working-class children who drove the criminal rates up. In fact, according to official reports, the neglected youngsters were responsible for up to 90 per cent of all juvenile offences.6 Their behaviour was not only age-related (for theft is usually a young person’s pursuit) but was also a reflection of the acute deprivation and vulnerability in which many adolescents had found themselves since the war had begun. Adults played not the least part in drawing children into illegal activities,7 and those frequently mentioned in official reports as ‘instigators’ quite often turned out to be none other than the youngsters’ own relatives.8 For many families, usually consisting of

26

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

a single adult and a number of young children, the eldest would become the principal source of economic support. Those who failed to find employment were sent to scavenge, beg or trade. The parents hoped that their children would not be prosecuted owing to their minority age. Yet, especially after 1943, this hope could prove to be false. With the establishment of a new breed of reformatories, labour educational colonies, the law enforcement agencies were given a free hand to incarcerate adolescents as young as eleven for begging, although not all police officers or judges strictly followed the letter of the law.9 The proliferation of begging was the result of the general impoverishment of the population and the disruption of social order brought about by wartime circumstances. Focusing all its attention on the military, central government largely left the civilian population to its own devices. Many consumer goods, already in short supply before the war, disappeared completely, but most devastating was the ‘near-cataclysmic fall in nutrition’ that the majority of people on the home front were now facing.10 Wartime destruction, loss of a large proportion of the food production base and food reserves, an inadequate transportation network, misdistribution of resources, poor harvests and the continued drain on manpower all fatefully contributed to mass starvation, particularly in the first two years of the war.11 In fact, one historian argues that during the war as many people might have died from hunger and hunger-induced diseases as in combat-related action. Starvation was as universal and extensive in the Soviet rear as it was in the occupied territories.12 The terrible fate of the inhabitants of Leningrad is well known, but circumstances were at times almost as bleak in some other regions of the Soviet Union. The corpses of hunger victims lying in the streets reportedly became a familiar sight in Moscow; cases of murder, cannibalism and suicide caused by intense undernourishment also occurred in areas far away from the front line.13 Official rations could not sustain the biological needs of the overworked population, nor were they intended to. In the majority of cases, food allowances offered less than a third of the required calories and protein. But even this minimum was not always available, and sometimes people did not receive their rations for months at a time.14 Bread was the only guaranteed product; its quality, however, was not assured.15 A contemporary, whose adolescence coincided with the war years, remembers bread as ‘damp and heavy, and half of it was bran’. He also maintains that, although his family received ration cards for cereal, butter and meat, the ‘reality was different’, for these goods were not always available in stores, and when they were, the family’s cards could only buy them ‘something two or three times a week’.16 Ration cards, explains another respondent, were issued on a monthly basis and could only be redeemed at a specific store, which would usually attract large crowds of people attempting to buy whatever was available. Often there was very little on offer, and if one was unable to redeem his bread entitlement on a given day, the card would expire, and a new one would have to be used the next day. The loss of ration cards could turn into ‘a tragedy’ for the entire family, since lost cards could not be restored.17 Since the centralized distribution system had largely stopped functioning by the spring of 1942, the localities had to procure their own resources, which meant that

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27

ration allowances depended on local food availability and the resourcefulness of those in charge of its procurement. Large industrial centres would usually receive more complete supplies, but factory managers still needed to supplement the missing goods by cultivating land or buying produce on the market.18 Private individuals could rarely afford astronomical market prices, and with the state providing only the most essential items (and even then not regularly and sufficiently), people had to find ways to feed themselves. Given that parents were busy at work, it fell to their children to secure resources. Since begging required no special skill and could be performed anywhere, the children would try this approach first. This is what partially blind ten-year-old Tolia Mitin resorted to after he had been expelled from school for underachievement because of his disability. The boy’s father was at the front and his mother was poor and burdened with three more children.19 Tolia was not unique; a large number of his counterparts throughout the country would engage in ‘systematic begging’ because of food shortages. In some regions, the absolute majority of detained children sought alms on the streets.20 Some felt proud that they could contribute to the family’s income, as did one girl, whose ailing mother was felling trees while her three children tried to make ends meet. The girl was the youngest, and it was up to her to walk around villages in winter to scrounge for food. ‘Sometimes I would return from such a trip,’ she recalls, ‘my nose, ears and cheeks sparkling white [from frost]. But then I would feed everyone. I really wanted to study, but nothing could be done about it.’21 The authorities were not impressed by these children’s pursuits, and not only because it kept them away from school and threatened to undermine public order – youngsters begging in the streets endangered the positive image that the regime was building for its childhood policies, both domestically and abroad. Nowhere was this anxiety felt as strongly as in towns where child beggars came into direct contact with foreigners. Arkhangelsk, Murmansk and Molotovsk (present-day Severodvinsk) were among such places. As the main ports receiving Arctic convoys they became the ‘centre point for inter-allied relations’.22 With the arrival of the convoys, the town authorities registered a large number of local youngsters beseeching foreign sailors. They would panhandle sweets and cigarettes from the seamen, attempt to enter into commercial dealings with them, or, worse, cheat them of their possessions. Some sailors found such solicitations bothersome and complained to their respective consulates, while others tried to help the children by feeding or temporarily ‘adopting’ them.23 The officials conceded that the youngsters’ behaviour was governed by material need, but insisted that a true Soviet child should know better and learn how to uphold his/her honour and country’s reputation. Equally, the officials extended their irritation to those foreigners who amused themselves by throwing candy at children and taking pictures of them scurrying around. By doing so, the officials insisted, the sailors were taking advantage of the material hardships of the local community to prey on its weakest members.24 Since they could do nothing about the seamen, the police cracked down on the youthful street traders and beggars. In May 1943, forty-three underage inhabitants of Arkhangelsk were charged

28

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

with panhandling and fourteen with ‘speculation’; for goods obtained in this way usually ended up on the black market.25 Street trade by children was as widespread as begging throughout the country and worried the authorities no less.26 All too often youngsters ended up in criminal courts for speculation, in the majority of cases with no probable cause (there were, however, instances where adults hired random children to sell illegally obtained rationed food in order to deflect attention away from their own activities27). According to Soviet law, speculation – or selling rationed articles for profit – was illegal and entailed harsh punishments; yet the ordinary trade or barter of personal belongings was widely tolerated and recognized as a source of sustenance under circumstances of extreme disruption of supply and production.28 Public safety and judicial personnel, however, did not always make a clear distinction between speculation and petty trade, and had to be reminded by the Russian Prosecutor General in March 1942 that it was equally unacceptable to prosecute ‘honest labourers’ trading their belongings as it was to show excessive lenience towards true spekulianty.29 Evidently, not all criminal justice workers heeded the demand, bringing criminal charges against a large number of minors for street trade, as happened in Moscow in the fourth quarter of 1944.30 Around this time, the government was mulling over a decree that would prohibit the buying and selling of manufactured goods by children who were younger than fourteen.31 In the Bolshevik perception trading was a shameful activity, but, much to the officials’ chagrin, some parents not only urged their children to engage in it but actually took pride in their entrepreneurial skills, especially in the western border regions, where the population was yet to be thoroughly educated in communist ethics.32 By allowing or encouraging their children to participate in street trade or mendicancy, the parents themselves risked prosecution for aiding and abetting. Some officials demanded strict punishment for adult relatives who pressed juveniles into a criminal lifestyle, to which street trade was allegedly a stepping-stone.33 But there were those, among them the deputy prosecutor for juvenile affairs V. Tadevosian, who advocated caution, arguing that in the majority of cases parents were simply too busy to look after their offspring and, since there was no malicious intent on their part, should not be made criminally responsible.34 This was certainly the case for one woman whose twelve-year-old daughter took the initiative while her mother was at work. ‘The thought that I needed to help my mother somehow, that we were starving and mommy had become so skinny would not leave me alone,’ remembers the girl many years later: When there was not a crumb left to eat, I decided to sell our only blanket and to buy some bread. Children were not allowed to trade, so the police took me to the children’s room. I remained there while they notified mommy. She came after her shift and carried me home wrapped in the blanket, for I had cried my eyes out from shame and the fact that mommy was still hungry and we had not a single piece of bread at home.35

Limited demand for material goods in starving towns drove many teenagers to the countryside in the hope of exchanging their possessions for food. They became

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29

part of a robust self-provision drive, known as meshochnichestvo.36 Considering this trade of commodities to be a form of speculation, the Soviet authorities viewed it with suspicion and were thus dismayed to find that many so-called meshochniki (bag-people) were adolescents aged twelve to sixteen. In 1942, on the Moscow– Voronezh railway line alone, transport police disembarked 6,237 teenagers journeying in search of provision. Of 3,675 youngsters travelling by train in the second half of 1942 in Ryazan oblast, 3,508 were meshochniki.37 Across the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), one-third of all the minors detained on the railway in the first quarter of 1943 were children going to the countryside to barter or beg.38 Ironically, despite the urban belief about rural prosperity, the situation with food provision in the country was, with few exceptions, almost as dire as in the towns. Agriculture was hit hard by the war, crippled by the continued haemorrhage of the most productive manpower into the army and the urban workforce, insufficient mechanization, intensive exploitation of rapidly ageing equipment and increased production norms. Besides, unlike urban dwellers, farmers fell outside the rationing system and were expected to survive from their private allotments or payments in kind based on the number of trudodni (workdays) put in over a certain period of time. Most collective farms were stripped bare by compulsory deliveries to the state, so there was no surplus left to distribute among farmers in lieu of compensation (and those kolkhoz heads who did so unilaterally without authorization faced severe penalties39). The peasantry found themselves on the verge of starvation. A contemporary writes how her mother worked ‘from dusk till dawn’ earning trudodni, which bought them ‘almost nothing in the autumn’, because their kolkhoz had to give up all the grain to the state.40 In one region in north-western Russia peasants died of hunger, with sacks of grain, destined for the front, stored nearby.41 Increased workdays meant that peasants often had little time left to cultivate their private plots, and after a fivefold rise in agricultural taxes that squeezed additional produce from peasant households, many families were left with practically nothing to eat.42 ‘The dues were so high’, continues the memoirist, ‘that all the livestock was soon slaughtered. For the whole year women [in the village] handed over their own milk, meat, eggs and wool with no compensation, leaving only scrapes for themselves.’43 The prohibitive taxes drove one mother to steal state property, in the form of a handful of grain, to feed her starving children. ‘I remember the tax was so severe that a family would be left with slops, one could hardly survive on,’ explains her daughter. The meat tax alone could do anyone in! ... One night they came for our sheep. That’s all we had left. Mommy tried to protest, begged them to leave at least one sheep for the children. There were seven sheep and a couple of wee lambs. We were hiding on top of a stove and saw how they pushed mommy aside and took all our sheep; the lambs soon died. Later, they took a sewing machine in place of a tax. Mommy went to complain somewhere [and got] it back ... Our kolkhoz was big. All the fields were sown. Everything was guarded and everything was just carried away by rail. In order to make some money besides the [worthless] trudodni ... mommy hired herself out to load rail cars. You couldn’t buy anything

30

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War without the money! What was she to do? The war robbed her of her men – her husband and son! One day she hid some grain in her shoes to make pancakes for the children. She got convicted. That’s how I ended up in a Ryazan detdom where I could finally eat my fill!44

Another girl’s mother sold their last possessions at the market so that her children could eat something more than just boiled water for dinner and supper. They were so hungry that the youngest one nibbled off a corner of the whitewashed stove.45 Several more contemporaries single out thoughts of food as the most vivid sensation of their wartime childhood in the countryside. ‘Clearly, as if it happened yesterday, my memory retains this feeling of hunger and horrifying, penetrating cold,’ writes one.46 Another recounts how starving people in her kolkhoz were prepared to eat carrion to quell the feeling: ‘My most dreadful memory about war is hunger ... A horse fell sick and died in our kolkhoz. Several women got together, dug it up in the middle of the night and shared it equally as neighbours. My [older] sister went too, brought us a piece ... We ate it, though we were afraid that we’d die.’ 47 Even evacuated children sometimes helped their more destitute village neighbours by passing them scraps of food from their institutions. ‘We were properly fed,’ claims a contemporary who evacuated from Moscow with a kindergarten. ‘We’d hide extras in our pockets ... and laid them on the ground by the fence. We were always awaited on the other side ... Local children were starving; they ate orache. So many years have passed, but I cry every time I remember those little beggar hands protruding from under the fence.’48 For one town girl her trek eastwards was an eye-opening experience that shattered her illusions about the prosperity of her country and the care the state offered to all children, when she saw hordes of hungry village youngsters clothed in rags running across fields to meet echelons of evacuees to ask them for some food.49 The Muscovites shared their bread with the destitute villagers, but such generosity was rare considering that the evacuees themselves normally survived on short commons. The shortage of food in kolkhozes and state farms compelled some parents to take children to the nearest town and abandon them there. Their desire to have fewer mouths to feed, and the hope (sometimes misguided) that the youngsters would be picked up and taken into state boarding institutions, only compounded the problem of child homelessness. The situation became critical in 1943, when poor harvests sent waves of peasant children into cities. Responding to the mass exodus, the authorities in Armenia endeavoured to set up more DPRs and detdoma in the rural area, just to keep the youngsters from escaping to towns.50 Those who did remain in the villages sought their own survival strategies, which ranged from the passive, such as begging expeditions to neighbouring settlements, to criminal (from the state’s point of view). Malnutrition drove these children to kolkhoz fields to pilfer crops or what was left of them after harvesting, which was a risky undertaking, because watchmen rarely took into consideration the children’s plight, themselves being under threat of criminal prosecution for any loss. ‘As soon as the snow would melt, we’d go in search of fodder, like animals,’ reminisces one such youngster from a village near Tambov:

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31

We’d eat sorrel, wild leek, wood garlic ... A real treat was press cake, be it from sunflower seeds, flax or hempseed. It beats me how our stomachs managed to digest it all. We were full of expectation when peas would ripen; then we’d tuck our skirts in and head for the fields ... We were terrified of the watchman, uncle Artem: he had such a whip! It didn’t matter that his own kids were with us; all would get flogged!51

Another girl describes the whipping she received from an overzealous watchman, whose horse seemed to show more humanity than her mount: ‘I couldn’t run and didn’t this time either. A dark-faced rider came down upon me swiftly with his knout. This happened on the edge of the field. All I did was to gather a few spikelets in the hem of my skirt! He flayed me with his whip, but his horse wouldn’t tread on me; she just whirled around.’52 Town children also tried to find sustenance wherever they could, including sifting through refuse pits and stealing. Even though, unlike peasants, youthful urbanites were included in the rationing scheme, their food allowances frequently fell short of the officially set minimum, if issued at all.53 The children of railway workers, for instance, received no rations and survived on what their working parents brought home. Special canteens, established at major stations, serviced only one-tenth of all employees’ children.54 Adolescents were particularly hard hit, being most vulnerable to starvation. Officially, their rations did not differ much from those received by younger children (except in Leningrad), although upon reaching the age of twelve, they graduated into the ‘dependant’ category together with the elderly and unemployed. Nevertheless, their rapidly growing bodies still required a higher calorie intake than younger children and the elderly.55 By far the most numerous type of crime committed by Soviet minors was food theft, and judging by contemporary accounts, almost every child committed petty theft at any given moment during this time.56 ‘As early as April we began raiding neighbours’ vegetable plots,’ remembers an evacuee to Kazakhstan. ‘I devoured everything I could find. Depending on the season, it could be onions, turnips, garlic, carrots – anything that I could dig out discreetly ... All the leftovers from the previous year’s crop at the neighbours’ gardens were dug up and eaten. I did the best I could and ate anything I could procure and digest.’57 A girl, evacuated from Moscow together with the children of medical workers, tells how the borderers having perfected their crop-stealing technique on kolkhoz fields a year before, continued thieving even from their own newly secured allotment. Although the children had not thought it a crime at the time, it still constituted an indictable offence, and there were cases of teenagers receiving harsh punishments.58 Two such boys were lucky to have state prosecutors intercede on their behalf after they had been sentenced for an attempted theft of several onions and 500 grams of vegetable oil. A girl who stole some porridge for her four-year-old sister was less fortunate.59 Although there were a number of juveniles who committed theft for profit and whose parents helped them to peddle the loot on the black market,60 the majority of the perpetrators were ‘accidental’ offenders, who acted out of desperation, which was, of course, of little comfort to the victims of their crimes, themselves struggling

32

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

to survive. This was particularly true in the blockaded Leningrad, where a theft of ration cards or a loaf of bread could condemn an entire family to death. Theft of food in large and small amounts was widespread in the cut-off city and the oblast. Many of the petty offenders were starving teenagers below the age of sixteen, who received the lowest rations as ‘dependants’ (a mere 125 grams of bread a day), were usually refused employment and, if orphaned but older than fourteen, a place at a detdom. If they had nothing to sell or barter, they were doomed to die a slow and painful death.61 Some of them had been turned out by their own parents, who felt they could not share the meagre provisions with their brood.62 From July 1941 to February 1943, city police apprehended 5,480 neglected children, 1,726 of whom had been abandoned by their parents.63 Caught in circumstances of exceptional deprivation, the children relied on the charity of others, but, not finding much, soon turned to thieving and robbery. Notwithstanding the gravity of the offence, being caught stealing could mean the death squad or, at the very least, a violent thrashing by a crowd, but neither threat seemed to deter desperate youngsters. As well as young child beggars, survivors of the blockade often remember gaunt peckish adolescents snatching bread from shops and unsuspecting customers. If carried out in a confined space, such as a bakery, the act would inevitably lead to a beating by queuing people, so vicious that the victims of a theft sometimes pleaded on behalf of those who had just left their families without provision.64 Crazed by hunger, the youngsters would take the punishment stoically. Survivors remember that the children ‘didn’t even attempt to run away, thinking only of eating as much as they could, before [the crowd] would take [the bread] away. They lifted their collars beforehand, expecting to be beaten, lay on top of the bread and ate, ate, ate’; ‘Exhausted people kicked him, but he just lay on the snow face down and chewed, chewed, chewed’; ‘We are sobbing, the entire queue turn on the lad ... batter him, but he just continues to gnaw on the bread mindless of the beating’; ‘He did not even attempt to run away. He knelt beside the wall ... hunched his head into his shoulders, the loaf wedged between his knees. He is being kicked but doesn’t feel it – he is just eating.’65 The feeling of guilt and pain would come later. A memoirist depicts a dramatic scene that unfolded after a twelve-year-old snatched a loaf of bread off the counter: ‘The girl gripped the bread, swallowing pieces without chewing, as she ran. People tore off her headscarf and viciously thrashed her ... The girl paid no attention either to the battering or the gathering crowd. Like a tiny bundle she collapsed on the wet pavement and began to weep disconsolately.’66 In a similar situation, a boy did manage to run away. His victim enlisted the help of a policeman and tore after him, but then she saw where the boy had hidden and how he wept as he devoured her bread. The woman felt sorry for the thief and pushed him inside a doorway to conceal him from the policeman. As she did so, the boy bit her. The policeman left, and the boy returned what remained of the bread to the crying woman.67 Snatching food or swiping ration cards occurred regularly in other parts of the country as well. A group of juveniles sneaked into a rations bureau in Gorky and stole a thousand cards, some of which they gave to their parents, peddling the rest.68 Three thirteen-year-olds, who had recently managed to cross the front line from the occupied territory, robbed a girl in the street. When arrested and questioned, it transpired that one of them was an orphan and another had lost his father to a German firing squad,

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33

but still had a brother in the army. All three appeared sickly and desperately hungry, which was the reason why they had pinched the bread in the first place. At the end of their interrogation, all three began sobbing and begged for forgiveness. It is unknown whether they were able to move the investigator with their pleas, but in the case of a fifteen-year-old from Blagoveshchensk (Amur oblast), who was tried for swiping bread cards in two stores, the judge remained indifferent to the defendant’s difficult material situation and the fact that the boy had never before done anything reprehensible.69 Thieving youngsters were becoming a real nuisance, especially to those who tried to earn an honest living. One boy had a close encounter with a gang of thugs who attempted to relieve him of his bread bonus, for which the boy had worked extra time and on which his entire family depended. ‘They were going to do a fat job on me,’ reflects the memoirist. Someone was pulling my hat off, someone was ripping open my peacoat, someone was already searching the pockets. My ration cards were in the overalls under the coat – it wasn’t difficult to find them ... So I thought to myself, you won’t get me that easily. I turned around and hit someone over the face, but was brought down ... They probably wouldn’t have killed me but would certainly have knocked me senseless. Street toughs are a dangerous breed.

Help came from the most unexpected quarter. As the boy prepared to be savagely beaten, a local hooligan leader, for whom the victim had done favours on many occasions before, called off the brawl. With the words ‘he is a working lad, doesn’t steal and never will’, the chief ordered his minions never to touch the boy again. ‘That was the order of the day then,’ concludes the correspondent. ‘Some people worked, and some filched!’70 Delinquent activities held a certain appeal for many youngsters, even those who would never otherwise have exhibited any antisocial tendencies. The general decline in morale, the constant struggle for survival and inadequate familial environment, engendered aggressive behaviour and contempt for authority. As attested by a war child, who at the age of eleven evacuated with his summer camp from Byelorussia to Saratov oblast, the children at his boarding school alleviated constant hunger by going to the local market and stealing from stalls: ‘Thieving at the bazar was not considered shameful, just the opposite, it was heroism! We did not care what to nick, as long as it was edible.’71 Another contemporary confirms this assertion by saying that stealing ‘was the only way to survive ... It was perfectly respectable ... After all, the government owned everything on our behalf ’.72 Having acquired a taste for derring-do, some eventually developed an acute sense of their own importance, with scant regard for the people around them. They drank alcohol, terrorized classmates and passers-by, abused animals and deliberately destroyed property for no apparent reason other than bravado and self-gratification. The famous children’s writer Kornei Chukovskii, who based his comments on a tenmonth shift with the children’s evacuation commission in Tashkent, described such youngsters as ‘ “small Hitlers” who wanted to be evil for the sake of evil’.73 In many regions, public order violations, such as mischief, riding on tram buffers, swearing, destructive behaviour and badgering, became a real epidemic and constituted a large percentage of all offences.74

34

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

As the war progressed, crimes committed by minors became more violent. Adolescents were responsible for a quarter of all robberies and banditry in the country.75 Although convictions for offences against the person were comparatively infrequent, the availability of firearms, the low value placed on human life and the scarcity of material goods led to a market increase in homicides. In May 1944 three boys from Kirov oblast turned a robbery into a battle scene when they opened fire at the windows of a private house, throwing in two grenades for good measure, which, luckily, did not explode because they still had their safety catch on. The owner managed to escape, while the fifteen-year-old robbers climbed in through the windows and made away with 40,000 rubles worth of personal belongings. Their victory did not last long, though, for the police quickly tracked them down.76 Sometimes children committed murder for tiny rewards, as did two evacuated girls, aged twelve and thirteen, who killed a four-year-old in order to sell her clothes on the black market.77 But in many cases, the horrendous crime was a result of mere childish play: one woman was accidentally killed and another wounded after two teenagers fired aimlessly in the street; two boys were shot by their friends from supposedly unloaded rifles while playing ‘catch the Fritzes’.78 Manslaughter was especially endemic in the regions that had witnessed recent heavy fighting, where local authorities involved adolescents in clearing up battlefields. In Leningrad oblast, such activities became even more enticing after monetary rewards were promised for abandoned weapons and bullet casings.79 The arms and explosives would then be stored in unguarded quarters attracting both the ‘criminal element’ and children, whose limited knowledge of weaponry often led to fatal accidents.80

Figure 2 Children collecting weapons (courtesy of Getty Images).

The Crime Wave

35

The liberation of the western Soviet Union also introduced a new kind of juvenile offender. Suspected of collaborating with the enemy intelligence forces, most of these youngsters had the charges against them dropped for lack of proof, but the authorities still preferred to keep them imprisoned and under strict observation.81 Life for such teenagers was most likely very hard; their long years of incarceration were filled with distrust, hostility and abuse. One such boy ended up in a juvenile colony near Tomsk. He had reportedly given away a Soviet pillbox to the enemy for a chocolate bar and, as a result, received twenty-five years of deprivation of freedom. His companion in misfortune was a member of the German Youth Organization from Königsberg, accused of diversionist activities. Both were ‘mercilessly beaten’ by their patriotic fellow inmates.82 Collaboration was a serious offence, but youngsters could face long-term imprisonment even for copying German leaflets, as did one thirteenyear-old, who reportedly wrote down a ditty calling on the inhabitants of his town to surrender.83 Throughout the war juvenile crime rates were rising but not uniformly – the regions most affected lay along the major evacuation routes, something that other belligerents experienced as well. Areas with defence industries attracted masses of workers and their families, where they encountered crowded living quarters, shortage of childcare facilities, ethnic strife, as well as rapid decline in nutritional standards.84 All this was felt with greater intensity by the poverty-stricken, exhausted and often neglected Soviet evacuees.

3

The Great Migration

The movement of millions of people across the country threw the home front into chaos. The populations of receiving cities swelled rapidly, doubling in size by the second year of the war.1 Yet most urban areas, not to mention rural localities, where two-thirds of all evacuees were settled, had very little in the way of infrastructure to accommodate the newcomers. Evacuation exacerbated notoriously bad housing conditions in the provinces. The arriving evacuees were accommodated wherever space could be found – hastily erected barracks, damp basements, schools, dug-outs and production shops – but quite often simply remained at evacuation posts or on board trains and barges that brought them to their new places of work, if any could be spared.2 The living conditions of thousands of those who arrived in an ‘unorganized’ fashion, including many peasants who were omitted from the official evacuation plan, turned out to be even more rudimentary. Finding nowhere to go, these people camped out along railway tracks, in parks, squares and on pavements. The ‘enormous “gypsy” encampments’, assembled from blankets and sheets, lacked even the most basic sanitation facilities, quickly turning the surrounding areas into an impassable, foul-smelling swamp of human waste and a breeding ground for rats and flies, the harbingers of disease.3 Since the refugees lacked the appropriate documentation, finding a job, lodgings and food became problematic. Compounding the difficulty was the Soviet system of propiska (residence permit). Without such a permit one could not receive work and ration cards, but in order to get one, it was necessary first to obtain a job and a place to live. The central leadership did not ease the situation when it prohibited the registration of ‘refugees and evacuees from the frontline regions who arrive in an unorganized manner’ in a number of designated cities. Besides Muscovites and Leningraders, as well as the families of party leaders and military officers, who were allowed to settle there provided they had found lodgings, the rest were to be removed to the countryside.4 Urbanites, in particular, found such arrangements unacceptable, possessing neither agricultural skills nor any knowledge of husbandry, on which their livelihood now depended. For this reason, there was a great deal of resentment towards the newcomers on the part of their rural hosts, who associated the former with the regime and its policy of collectivization, and thought of the outsiders as inept and lazy.5 In a number of regions they were badly mistreated by farmers, who deliberately housed them in unsuitable quarters while demanding exorbitant rents; village councils

38

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

refused them vegetable allotments and charged them twice for supplied provisions, if they delivered them at all, rather than diverting them to other needs; daily bread rations varied from 100 to 900 grams ‘depending on the attitude towards evacuees’. Betraying their social envy, kolkhoz managers told the wives of frontline soldiers and officers: ‘Why have you come here, no one invited you’; ‘You used to have your nails polished and painted, [and] now dig dung.’6 Ethnic differences, progressively soaring food prices and worsening epidemiologic conditions, which were blamed on the new arrivals, further tested the natives’ tolerance. Hostility towards the evacuees spilt into conflicts, some of which turned lethal, as happened near Ufa in 1942, where local youngsters killed an underage evacuee of Jewish origin. Six hundred kilometres to the north-west, in a Mari village, natives tormented a Russian boy to death.7 Unsurprisingly, evacuees crept back into towns, where they hoped to find better living conditions but where they also spent months trying to ‘legalize’ themselves. To make sure they stayed where the state wanted them, the authorities confined evacuees to the regions of their resettlement and carried out frequent document checks, evicting those who had managed to fall through the cracks. This forced many people and their children to lead a nomadic life, frequently moving from one place to another in the fear of police raids.8 In the meantime, many were reduced to begging or trading. Their desire to avoid the police as well as their involvement in market activities encouraged the authorities’ attitude towards them as ‘speculators, shady people and spies’.9 If anything, however, the semi-marginal existence many evacuees and refugees were forced to lead in their new places of settlement betrayed the government’s own organizational shortcomings. Even those who did arrive in an organized manner could not always register and receive supplies or ration cards on time. Local governments in evacuation areas had little idea exactly how many newcomers there were. Trainloads of evacuees often arrived unexpectedly, catching the authorities unawares and before they received any funds or distribution orders from the Commissariat of Trade, resulting in widespread bureaucratic chaos, when some people got their allowances, while others were refused them for no apparent reason.10 Representing at least a third of the entire migrant population, the children of evacuees suffered most, for even if their parents were able to secure jobs, either in towns or the countryside, youngsters did not automatically receive rations and often had to look for sustenance independently. Eager to keep children in schools, the central government made provision to distribute clothes among the needy, but logistical difficulties, shortages and rampant corruption left many with nothing to wear except their own tattered, dirty garments.11 Poor personal hygiene, coupled with overcrowding, inadequate sanitation facilities and chronic malnutrition were all conducive to the proliferation of louse-borne diseases, such as typhus and relapsing fever. Together with tuberculosis, yet another illness associated with poverty, these maladies spread like wildfire across the home front regions, killing young and old and leaving a throng of orphans in their wake. By 1943 the situation had become critical, yet the public health infrastructure, crippled by the shortage of trained staff, medicine and equipment, failed to keep pace with the demand.12 Severe strains placed on local health, educational and welfare facilities meant that children found themselves completely neglected both by their busy or incapacitated

The Great Migration

39

parents and state institutions. Uprooted and thrust into a strange and often hostile world, with their parents struggling to find proper housing, food and clothing, these children could either rely on state assistance, which was slow in coming, or take matters of survival into their own hands. Many left home in the hope of making it on their own, living off their wits and dexterity, but exacerbating the progressively deteriorating criminal situation.13 Consequently, levels of child vagrancy and delinquency skyrocketed in the regions where large factories had been evacuated, especially in Gorky, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Molotovsk, Novosibirsk, Kirov and Moscow oblasts, the Tatar Autonomous Republic, as well as Central Asia and Transcaucasia.14 Whereas previously the majority of homeless children had arrived in these areas from elsewhere, after 1943 up to 80 per cent came from within, driven to the streets by material need. For example, by the third year of the war their number had grown fivefold in Kazakhstan, and sevenfold in Kirov oblast in the first quarter of 1943 alone. In the following two years, the Tajik authorities registered a massive increase in the number of neglected and homeless children who came from the republican hinterland and whose physical state suggested extreme deprivation.15 On the streets they met other victims of the poorly handled evacuation, who lost their relatives during frenzied layovers, became orphaned by bombings and epidemics, or were intentionally abandoned by their carers. Despite later self-congratulatory claims, the authorities exhibited complete unpreparedness in the face of unprecedented population displacement.16 Evacuation plans had indeed been drawn up over the two interwar decades, which included provisions for refugees as well as the evacuation of children and the non-working population, but the government scrapped these arrangements on the very eve of the war, considering them defeatist, on a par with preparations for partisan warfare and the organization of food dumps. The unfavourable course of events at the front during the summer of 1941 swung the Soviet mobilization machine into action, although the fate of the civilian population was taken into account only insofar as it served the purposes of industrial and military deployment.17 Children could become a potential hindrance to their mothers’ full employment as well as a cause for workers’ discontent should they stay behind in case of industrial evacuation. A show of concern for their offspring in dangerous times was also hoped to keep spirits up among fathers at the front. So, while some factories and organizations allowed the removal of employees together with their family members, others decided to evacuate children on their own, while the parents stayed put. In the latter case evacuation measures were only partially successful. Where trade unions mounted relocation independently, organizing temporary boarding schools and transporting them away from the big cities, the efforts were somewhat thwarted by logistical deficiencies: groups were ‘unacceptably’ large, comprising children of all ages, from two to eighteen, and supervised by people with no pedagogic or medical experience, who were reportedly unable to maintain adequate sanitation standards.18 The situation was not much different, and at times even worse, when local governmental agencies acted as initiators of the mass evacuation of children, as events in Moscow and Leningrad revealed.

40

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

In late June to early July 1941, parents in the two capitals were given several hours to pack and take their children to schools to be carried away to safety. Many adults were at work when the orders arrived, so the youngsters showed up poorly clothed, with few provisions and little money. In some cases their unpreparedness was because of their parents’ belief in the triumphant propaganda of the late 1930s about a quick and victorious war. One evacuee from Moscow claims that ‘everyone believed that the hostilities would be over by autumn; that’s why I wasn’t given any warm clothes and furnished only with a bare minimum of food and money’.19 In Leningrad, children sometimes departed with summer camps and kindergartens without their parents’ knowledge. This caused great distress to workers

Figure 3 Evacuation of children from Leningrad, June–July 1941 (courtesy of TsGAKFFD SPb).

The Great Migration

41

at one factory, who begged their managers for permission to go home, lest their children should be shipped to unknown destinations. Indeed this happened on several occasions, with parents later receiving contradictory information as to their children’s whereabouts.20 Such poor coordination was the result of hastily drafted evacuation plans. Purportedly, it took the Moscow soviet one night to formulate their provisions, which, unsurprisingly, had little to do with reality and did a great deal of damage to the children involved. Accidents, illness, thirst and hunger were their daily companions because of erratic catering, an absence of medical staff and a shortage of responsible carers.21 A large number of child evacuees found themselves in the line of the German advance and at risk from bombing raids on transportation routes. As attested by a victim of such aerial attacks, at first her companions thought that the enemy aircraft were dropping balls, which the children attempted to catch. Their excitement quickly soured into nightmarish panic amid explosions, screams and destroyed buildings. The children were hastily gathered and led through the night across a forest and the river to the nearest train station, only to be strafed again there. Most of them managed to break through, but at a terrible cost – the last two carriages never made it to safety.22 Another boarder from Leningrad describes similar scenes of destruction and death, when older children would grab the younger ones and carry them away from the carnage: ‘When we returned we witnessed such horrors ... a severed leg here, a hand there. So many were killed. We cried, tried to pull free. No one wanted to board the train again, out of fear.’23 Upon hearing the news, parents and local authorities rushed to retrieve the children, presenting a serious problem for the higher-ups, who thought that panicking mothers and lower level officials were disrupting the course of evacuation and muddling things up even more. They tried to prevent such rescue missions by issuing two decrees prohibiting the return of children (one on 6 August in Leningrad and the other on 21 September in Moscow) and forbidding enterprise directors from giving employees time off to fetch them home.24 Those who disobeyed and managed to reunite with their offspring brought back stories of the appalling conditions that the remaining youngsters were in, informing other parents’ defiance of governmental orders to evacuate their children. Consequently, roughly half of almost 600,000 underage evacuees sent out from the capitals in the summer of 1941 had returned by the beginning of September.25 The rest either continued their long journey rearwards, with enemy planes in hot pursuit, or were overrun by the fast-moving frontline. Such was the fate of an orphanage from Leningrad. Their train strafed by a German bomber, the children scattered in fear. The staff moved on with the entire inventory but without the children. The latter, 394 in total, were collected by a Red Army straggler, who brought them to a village behind enemy lines, where they survived as best they could with the help of the locals and the soldier’s resourcefulness when it came to saving lives of Jewish youngsters and the children of Red Army officers. After the liberation, their saviour received twenty years’ hard labour for collaboration.26 The evacuation of children did not go smoothly in other areas either. Only 38 per cent of the entire contingent of children’s institutions were able to evacuate

42

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

from the Kuban region. Given the shortage of transportation, as well as the fear of air raids on railway lines, most children were evacuated on foot, covering hundreds of kilometres before reaching the rear. Allegedly, thousands of schoolchildren from Kiev also had to march without provisions or the chance to say farewell to their parents. Hungry and exhausted, many of them expired en route, while hundreds of others had to walk across a minefield in the Pechersk district in order to break through the German encirclement.27 Inevitably many children fell behind or went missing amid the chaos, as did their counterparts who went east, accompanied by relatives. Travellers spent days, even weeks, at stations and quaysides waiting for transportation or, if already on board, for an itinerary and free passage. In the meantime, they or their children would go foraging for food and water. It was easy to go astray in the hustle and bustle of overcrowded stations, some of which saw tens of thousands of passengers a day; or to miss one’s train, which, in the passengers’ absence, would acquire extra cars and become overgrown with new commuters, who would settle on roofs, squeeze in the doorways and between carriages, and hang onto step railings. Besides, trains were often moved to a different track to let military or freight echelons pass. One child evacuee nearly lost his mother this way: she had gone to fetch some food and could not find her way back in the darkness. Several fellow passengers thought they heard her voice in the distance and began calling out to her, guiding the woman towards the train.28 Children’s absentmindedness and carelessness could sometimes cause them to miss their ride. A girl from Byelorussia suffered a great shock when she returned from a meadow with a bouquet of flowers to find her train departing. She silently ran after the train, while her mother prepared to jump out and her younger sister

Figure 4 Child refugees (source: Karavaev, Medal’ za Boi, Medal’ za Trud).

The Great Migration

43

wailed in distress. A soldier pushed the woman away from the door, hopped off the moving train and hurled the girl inside the carriage. After this, the mother never let the children out even during air raids, tucking them under mattresses.29 Another boy almost missed his train when he went on his usual reconnaissance mission during one of many long stops. Caught up in play, he did not hear a whistle, and only looked up when the train was already picking up speed. Adult passengers leapt on the step, but the boy was too short to reach for them. He eventually got hold of one of them on the last car and kept running, rapidly losing strength and all hope of reuniting with his mother, when someone grabbed his hand and pulled him inside.30 ‘One had to keep one’s ears constantly attuned to the first sounds of the train stirring,’ elucidates a released Polish deportee, who travelled together with his parents across the wartime Soviet Union. ‘Missing one’s wagon was not a disaster; friendly hands would help the straggler into another, but missing the train often was ... [C]hances of catching up with the train, or otherwise re-joining [one’s] family at a later date were slim. The country was vast and none of us had a forward address.’31 The number of children who reached rear cities without supervision was staggering. Twelve and a half thousand of them arrived in Uzbekistan alone between November 1941 and mid-March 1942. In Kazakhstan, evacuation was responsible for 33 per cent of all homeless children in 1943. Twenty-five per cent of receiverdistribution centre (DPR) inmates in Bashkir ASSR in 1944 were those who had lost contact with relatives while heading east.32 They travelled alone or in groups with other children, selling their belongings along the way in order to survive. One woman in Tashkent, requesting registration of her two children, explained how they had been lost en route and arrived barefoot and hungry, having sold everything in transit.33 As the Polish deportee suggested, children did not always know where to look for their parents, because train itineraries changed frequently, as did the evacuees’ settlement plans. A Moscow resident appealed to Uzbek authorities to help reunite his family, who had been separated at departure. He and his wife arrived in Omsk, with one daughter in Tashkent and the other one missing. To deal with the large number of wandering child evacuees, Uzbek officials even established a specially designated centre that would register them and inform parents of their whereabouts. However, as many as half of these youngsters would never see their parents again, having been orphaned during a long and gruelling journey.34 The conditions in which most passengers travelled were often described as ‘inhuman’.35 Given the shortage of passenger carriages, people occupied boxcars, without windows, heating and even bunks. Especially at the very beginning of the war, many workers and their families were transported on flatcars together with machinery. In June 1941 the head of the Evacuation Council and Commissar of Transportation, Lazar Kaganovich, ordered his subordinates to ‘speed up the loading’ because of the destruction of railway infrastructure by enemy aircraft. Putting people on open flat wagons ‘compactly’ together with industrial equipment would reduce the number of passenger cars needed and save time. People travelled in this fashion at least until November 1941 (and some, allegedly, much later), when the Commissariat was able to procure ‘passenger’ cars and gave orders to equip them with braziers and make sure workers journeyed with ‘maximum comfort’.36 An eyewitness recalls how he was

44

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

evacuated together with his parents’ plant in the dead of winter on open flat decks. At one of the stations they levelled with a train carrying Siberian soldiers to the front. People on iced-up flatcars watched enviously the ‘blessed warmth streaming from the funnels’ of the ‘real teplushki (heated goods cars)’. When the soldiers realized who was stirring under the snow on the opposite track, they reportedly demanded to exchange places with frozen women and children, who were able to continue their journey east in relative comfort.37 Massively overcrowded trains and barges, and appalling insanitariness exacerbated by cold and hunger, presented a perfect environment for the rapid spread of viral and louse-borne diseases, as well as gastrointestinal disorders, among the transient population. Epidemics became one of the major causes of parental loss. A Leningrad evacuee recalls how people would slumber ‘like sardines on wooden bunks and straw, falling asleep with the living and waking up with the dead’.38 A mere suspicion of a serious malady could end with a sickly person immediately being removed from the carriage at the request of other passengers, while his or her children would either have to continue travelling solo or disembark in an unfamiliar place and try to survive as best they could while the parent recuperated. One boy was fortunate to escape this fate, after his mother, having weakened considerably from starvation, developed stomach problems. Suspecting her of having typhus, other passengers ganged up on her. Only the common sense and kindness of a few other fellow travellers prevented her removal from the train.39 Having lost their relatives in transit, children could find it difficult to obtain the paperwork either to reunite with their families, find employment (and receive ration cards) or to secure shelter at a state institution, owing to stringent bureaucratic practices. Without the necessary identification papers and referrals from regional departments of education, orphanage administrators refused to enrol such children. Although the headmaster of one children’s home in Tomsk oblast did allow two girls from Estonia to live on the premises, he was unable to register them formally, which presumably meant that the girls, whose mother had been killed during evacuation and father fought at the front, did not receive their food and clothing allowances officially and were fed and equipped from detdom funds.40 Yet the latter could be stretched only so far. Very few children’s homes had the means to provide a relatively comfortable existence for their charges. If the testimonies of former residents and staff, substantiated by a multitude of official reports, are to be believed, the conditions in most (although not all) state boarding institutions could be described as primitive at best, marred by cold, constant hunger, deprivation, disease and sometimes deliberate neglect and abuse, which in extreme cases provoked revolts.41 It is true that both types of source betray a certain degree of bias, since it was the negative experience that was usually etched in people’s memory and attracted the attention of officials reporting on children’s institutions. Nevertheless, a high incidence of window dressing (pokazukha) on the part of orphanage administrators and their local government patrons also suggests that the situation was indeed critical and rarely matched the idealized picture presented in the Soviet press as well as in some

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45

self-congratulatory statements by local bureaucrats. A modern author of a collection of testimonies was surprised to read a 1941 report of the Kirov regional department of education, which stated that children under its jurisdiction received their food allowances ‘without delay’ and were well provided for, which markedly contrasted with what his respondents had to say on the matter (not to mention Komsomol dispatches from the region42). One of them insists that all the objects of comfort and proper clothing, brought out and distributed among children for the benefit of the inspecting group, would disappear soon after the inspectors left.43 Others are similarly expressive about the hunger and cold they endured owing to acute shortages and pilfering, both by staff and fellow residents.44 All too often orphanages became dumping grounds for undereducated or incompetent employees,45 whose tactic of dealing with hungry and distressed children, some of whom indeed exhibited serious behavioural problems, involved severe punishments, including depriving them of food, stripping them naked and locking them in unheated holding cells.46 Such were the penalties meted out against two boys for picking up a cast-off onion and eating several raw potatoes while working in a kolkhoz field. Predictably, cruel treatment provoked resentment among boarders. One report plainly stated that children in orphanages ‘trudge about dirty, ragged, lice-ridden and bitter against their caregivers’,47 although, as one historian warns, not all state boarding institutions were ‘dysfunctional units’, just as not all of them could be described as the large harmonious families that featured in Soviet propaganda.48 While close bonds developed among adults and children in some places, in others ‘caregivers perceived their charges as bandits and rogues’, and not always entirely without reason.49 Because of the problems of supply, children spent a great deal of time and energy looking for provisions to supplement their diets, usually by illegal means. They stole from school canteens, leaving the administration to find extra food in order to feed everyone; they picked pockets and robbed their more privileged schoolmates who had parents, living up to the unsavoury reputation that residents of children’s homes usually enjoyed; they sought alms in the streets and sifted through refuse, which the authorities found distasteful, as such behaviour not only left the youngsters no time for studies but also threatened the reputation of the regime clearly unable to provide for the downtrodden; they stole from kolkhozes and from one another in the hope of trading the plunder for food at local markets; they established strict hierarchies and bullied other children, forcing them to give up their food rations for protection.50 In the words of a former orphanage resident, such juvenile thugs liked to be called ‘masters’. He demands what he wants from you. If your master was a smoker, then you had to go around the town ... and gather cigarette butts, so that he would have something to smoke. When the staff caught wind of this, then it was like in a prison, in a camp, or someplace else – an attendant would stand at the door, in the doorways, and search us, when you left the dining hall ... so that nobody took any bread out. So then you had to come up with a way to get it out, because if you didn’t bring

46

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War the bread, then they would send you to the village to steal something or beat you up, really beat you up badly. And you couldn’t tell the staff, that was called being a snitch ... Then in 1943 the new director somehow figured out how to get rid of these older boys, and there was no more of that.51

Progressively worsening behaviour was something that educators noted, especially among evacuated children. The director of the State Hermitage Museum’s children’s home from Leningrad was shocked at how quickly she ‘lost control over some of the boys in the group, who formed a gang and began stealing food, lying and swearing’. These previously well-mannered boys from good families began to remind her of the waifs portrayed in Soviet films.52 Evacuated boarding schools and detdoma usually encountered severe hardship in their new localities, lacking the required connections and depending entirely on the charity of local officials and enterprise managers. Many lost much of their property in the hasty retreat and desperately needed any assistance they could get with acquiring new equipment, inhabitable buildings and provisions. For instance, 78 of 122 children’s homes arrived in Chelyabinsk oblast in 1942 without furniture, bedding, crockery, shoes or clothing.53 While in some places the children received a warm welcome, were resettled and provided for,54 in others they were completely neglected, sometimes living at train stations for several weeks before attracting the attention of local officials, but even then to little effect. Thus, one bureaucrat in Novgorod oblast greeted a children’s home from Leningrad with the words: ‘Let them settle however and wherever they want.’55 A November 1941 report informing the Council of People’s Commissars (SNK) about the smoothly proceeding placement of children’s homes in the rear was completely out of touch with what was happening on the ground. A 1942 observation, stating that ‘circumstances in which evacuated children find themselves presently remain difficult’, was closer to the mark.56 Most evacuated children’s institutions were housed in impoverished rural areas. Often one establishment occupied several buildings situated kilometres apart.57 Whatever housing they had was not set up for winter, lacked kitchens, baths, laundry rooms, sick bays, furniture and fuel.58 Unable to endure the squalor of his existence in a village of Saratov oblast, a boy wrote in desperation to his mother: ‘Mommy, if possible, I beg of you to fetch me back to Moscow. If I tell you the truth, you’d be horrified. We’re all crawling with lice, everyone is thieving.’59 Negative socialization partially caused by failures in welfare provision informed children’s disruptive behaviour. State inspectors noted with dismay that there were many cases of hooliganism, stealing and insubordination at evacuated juvenile institutions.60 Beset by shortages and notoriously bad management, they were losing their wards in droves. Some reported 30 per cent of their inmates being on the run at any given time.61 When caught, 75 per cent of the children complained about malnourishment, cold and cruelty at their former institutions, which had prompted them to escape.62 A steady trickle turned into a flood of spontaneous re-evacuation when the Red Army began liberating western regions of the Soviet Union. From early 1944 onwards,

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47

authorities in a number of regions noted a substantial increase in the apprehended vagrants of children travelling to their places of origin or searching for their relatives in the liberated territories.63 In the last months of the war, Moscow DPR, for instance, registered up to eighty children a day, most of whom were re-evacuating on their own initiative. The communiqués are usually silent on the average age of these children and their social background, although one report from Yaroslavl oblast states that the majority of them were ten to fifteen years old, coming mostly from urban areas and workers’ settlements.64 Fearful about the spread of epidemic diseases and conscious of potential threats to public order presented by masses of unsupervised children, the authorities attempted to contain the inflow of restless youngsters into major cities. As part of the general strategy to control civilian movement, to conserve the workforce in the rear, to alleviate the pressure on limited housing stock in war-damaged cities and to ensure the preservation of public order, the authorities put in place a number of preventive measures. One could not return without a special summons from city soviets and a compulsory health check, all this being conditional on first obtaining work and accommodation in the place of return. Defiance of the legal restrictions on movement led to the exclusion of the offender from the rationing scheme and denial of propiska. Therefore, re-evacuation and social support depended on one’s status, manner of arrival, ability to work and age. The infirm, the elderly and children had no chance of legally returning, at least while the Soviet Union was still at war. Parents were prohibited from collecting and bringing back their offspring without special authorization. It became exceedingly difficult to obtain such permission for an orphaned relative or a grandchild. As a way around the ban, factory collectives ‘adopted’ the children of dead colleagues, organized children’s homes or tried to find lodgings for such youngsters, guaranteeing their provision from factory funds.65 Yet, more often, relatives simply ignored the prohibitions. They paid bribes and smuggled their children back into cities. One woman reportedly paid 5,000 rubles for the ticket controller to look the other way while she sneaked her two children from Mogilev (Byelorussia) into Leningrad, although they still needed to get off the train several times before they reached the city. Another woman hid her daughter behind rags and boxes on a top shelf of their train compartment. The girl was allowed to leave her hiding place only at night. When their train approached Moscow, she had to jump off and walk home.66 Youngsters were even less mindful of the law. Since not all juvenile boarding institutions were allowed to return until the end of the war, or took too long to organize re-evacuation, the children dealt with the problem on their own. Some youthful evacuees had already started sneaking back into Leningrad as early as summer 1943, even before the siege was lifted.67 The authorities feared, with good reason, that if the children failed to find their relatives in the liberated regions, they would become homeless and eventually turn to crime to sustain themselves. So it was decided not to send them to their former regions of residence without first establishing contact with their relatives.68 Typically, however, chaos prevailed in the official procedures: oblast educational departments had neither concrete information on how many youngsters were to be dispatched and where, nor were there enough adults to accompany the

48

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

children on their journey. The latter preferred not to wait for the governmental agencies to become better organized, thereby turning the official fears about rising vagrancy and crime rates into reality.69 As an illustration of a general trend, one orphanage resident evacuated to the Urals in 1941 took to the road two years later in the hope of finding his relative in Serpukhov (Moscow oblast). Having failed to locate her, the boy eventually turned to stealing. The judge overturned his case and referred the boy to a labour educational colony.70 By flocking into the recently liberated territories, the youngsters exacerbated the already dire situation there. They joined tens of thousands of local orphans awaiting urgent assistance, but the state was unable to accommodate everyone. In January 1944, in Smolensk oblast alone, more than 17,000 children were registered as orphans, 3,000 of them being effectively homeless. Their number grew to 5,000 by the year’s end. Yet even many of those considered to be provided for received help only nominally. In the meantime, the children turned to stealing when begging and busking did not yield results. Juvenile crime rates soared in Stalingrad oblast in 1944, ‘reaching the highest levels ever’.71 Things were no better in Ukraine, where, according to some incomplete data, during the first quarter of 1944 the authorities reported 67,000 orphans, one-sixth of whom were homeless. At the end of the year, there were already 125,000 of them, with 21,000 registered as displaced.72 Some waifs preferred not to hang around in devastated, poverty-stricken regions and moved further west, to the Baltics, where it was rumoured that jobs were available and there were better pickings to be had from begging and stealing, as well as to Moldavia via southern Ukraine, where a milder climate promised better provisions.73 The problem with western republics was that from 1944 onwards, they began receiving a large number of people from across the border, as part of the Soviet–Polish population exchange agreement, according to which some 532,000 ethnic Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Lithuanians settled in the three republics and elsewhere from 1944 to 1947.74 Because the resettlement was executed with little regard for the wellbeing and property of the ‘expatriates’, the latter quickly began to lay claim to the scant resources available in the receiving regions. Being voluntary and fairly civilized at first, the resettlement became much more brutal in later years. Polish authorities applied a variety of coercive measures to pressure families to relocate to the Soviet Union. The Soviets complained that ethnic Ukrainians had to leave their homes under threat from Polish officials and military personnel, some of whom did not shy away from murder and robbery (although others attempted to dissuade the Ukrainians from leaving, which the Soviets also found unacceptable). Conversely, the Ukrainian nationalist insurgents operating on Polish territory, not wishing to lose their popular base, threatened the relocating farmers with retribution. To drive their message home, they attacked the emigrants, as well as Polish police units guarding them, and wrecked the transportation infrastructure, rendering relocation a dangerous and costly undertaking.75 Once the people crossed the Soviet border, they rarely encountered a warm reception, especially if moving into ethnically heterogeneous and war-damaged areas, such as the south-west and east of the Ukrainian Republic or the Russian

The Great Migration

49

Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Reports from Odessa oblast, for example, mentioned widespread instances of careless treatment of the resettled by local authorities, themselves hard pressed to provide for the indigenous population.76 The general disposition of the latter towards the linguistically and culturally different newcomers was also overwhelmingly negative, sometimes spilling over into open confrontations, especially among children.77 Yet when the resettled families attempted to leave their assigned regions or re-emigrate, having received neither proper housing nor basic provision, nor the promised compensation for their abandoned homesteads in Poland, they could not do so, being threatened with arrest.78 In the meantime, shortages of clothing and footwear kept many children of resettlers from attending schools, and epidemics carried away their parents; but local administrators, as a rule, failed to monitor the situation, and the much-needed state assistance in most cases never reached the destitute and the orphaned.79 A similar fate awaited the children of repatriates (who had been carried off as slave labourers to Germany and Poland), returning to the Soviet Union at the end of the war. Despite government orders, provisions were not made for the repatriates’ reception; centrally allocated funds, however meagre, in many cases failed to reach the intended addressee because of machinations by local administrators.80 At the same time, town councils and regional executive committees did not always receive information about the number of contingents arriving at their localities, making it difficult for the authorities to prepare adequately.81 The economic situation, as well as public order concerns, often demanded a planned settlement of the newcomers, but many of them wanted to return to their previous places of residence. Hard pressed for an additional labour force, local officials felt reluctant to allow this. The situation was made even more complicated by the fact that in many instances the repatriates’ homes had already been taken up or used for public needs. Without a permanent residence, the repatriates could not get employment, passports and ration cards, so they were forced to live in run-down reception centres, where disease and hunger ran rampant, especially among children, because no one bothered to organize their provision.82 Owing to the lack of housing in their assigned places of work, women repatriates from Odessa oblast were strongly encouraged to place their children in orphanages,83 although the Odessa reception centre did make efforts to find suitable accommodation and job placements for the parentless children repatriates arriving on its doorstep.84 It was clear, then, that the Stalinist government was generally failing in its role as caregiver for the nation’s children in wartime. To make up for the deficiency in welfare provision, it tapped into a vast resource at its disposal – public activism.

4

Efforts to Help

The central government and many of its local representatives made genuine efforts to prevent social displacement and to bring wayward children under control. Having recovered somewhat from the initial shock of the invasion, the leadership began issuing proposals and making statements that called for the protection of children’s welfare and immediate assistance to displaced youngsters, especially in the regions liberated in the course of the Soviet winter strategic offensive operations in 1941. Hailed as ‘the matter of utmost state importance’, the first decree ‘On the assistance to unaccompanied children’ appeared on 23 January 1942 and was followed by a myriad of orders, instruction letters, decisions and plans emanating from the centre, as well as the local authorities and agencies responsible for child welfare and public order. They instructed their subordinates to identify all the children left temporarily or permanently without parents, to improve the work of existing children’s boarding institutions and to allocate funds for the creation of new ones, to promote the fostering and adoption programme, to offer employment assistance to those who were over fourteen years old, to broaden cultural work among children and to implement stricter policies against neglectful parents. Komsomol activists were to work with the families of front line soldiers, ascertain their material situation and help the most destitute with clothing, footwear and additional meals.1 To make the latter an official policy, the Council of People’s Commissars (SNK) decided at the end of 1942 to open a number of special canteens and cafeterias throughout the country for enfeebled children, who would be referred there by their doctors and placed on a high calorie diet over the course of two months.2 However, owing to limited funds, the canteens were not wide-ranging and were quite discriminatory in their work, accommodating only 300,000 children and restricting their services to those who had not yet reached the age of thirteen.3 Older children, who were at much greater risk of turning to crime and who were already liable to criminal prosecution because of their age, fell outside the remit of the scheme. When officials (such as the one in Leningrad oblast) raised the question of extending cafeteria services to adolescents, their inquiries remained unanswered.4 In the meantime, the only additional meal the teenagers could count on was a 50 gram piece of bread and a cup of unsweetened tea distributed in their school cafeterias.5 This short ration might have kept some pupils in schools, but if the authorities wanted to stem the massive outflow of teenagers, they had to come up with more drastic measures. In July 1941 the central government had already waived school

52

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

fees for soldiers’ children, and a year later included other categories of pupils, such as servicemen’s siblings (provided their parents were disabled), in the exemption programme. Over the next two years the government also requested the return of all school buildings that had been converted to other uses unless they were occupied by hospitals and evacuated enterprises. Building superintendents were to report all children of school age leaving or moving into their apartment blocks, while teachers and youth leaders had to keep track of their charges’ whereabouts, learn their family situation, pick them up from home and escort them to school if necessary; pupils were also called upon to do the same with their truant classmates.6 To drive the message home, parents became administratively responsible for ensuring that their children attended lessons.7 To improve school attendance rates, which were hampered by the lack of clothing and footwear, the Consumers Union proposed to introduce children’s clothing coupons and distribute them through city schools; in its turn, the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) called for the organization of workshops where pupils could mend or sew their own apparel.8 It is unclear what came of these proposals, but the overall measures were evidently only partially successful, since the dropout rates remained fairly high in the second wartime academic year, especially among adolescents, while the problem with the return of school buildings did not disappear until after the end of the war.9 So the campaign to support schools continued. The Komsomol contributed by instituting 45,000 scholarships for soldiers’ children in 1944. Each amounting to 100 rubles and conditional upon academic achievement and material need, the stipends covered school breakfasts and the purchase of clothing. The lion’s share of the scholarships went to Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), where Moscow and the oblast received the largest amount of funds.10 To keep urban schoolchildren away from the streets and out of trouble, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) suggested engaging them in socially useful or cooperative work for several hours a day, making sure they were fed and remunerated for their efforts.11 Yet even the older cohort of youngsters faced difficulties finding employment. In many localities genuine efforts were made to assist them with job placements or trade school enrolment, but, despite strict instructions from above, enterprise managers and school administrators were disinclined to employ youthful workers, especially if the latter lacked the necessary documentation and lodgings of their own.12 The youngsters themselves were not always overly enthusiastic. For example, one district soviet in Gorky identified eighty-five teenagers without any occupation. When the authorities tried to find jobs for them, all but three ignored the summons. In many other cases, the youngsters simply fled when suitable work and living conditions were not created for them in their new places of employment.13 The presence of these children on the streets put extra pressure on the understaffed law enforcement agencies. Observers disagreed on police performance when it came to combating juvenile crime and preventing vagrancy. While some noted that the police were doing a much better job with the former but overlooking the latter, others insisted that even the ‘struggle against criminal elements among children and

Efforts to Help

53

adolescents [was] carried out at pre-war rates, which [were] incomparable with the current situation’. Despite the fact that the network of receiver-distribution centres (DPRs) and children’s rooms grew considerably during the war years, the general consensus among specialists was that most state efforts to clear the streets of homeless and delinquent children ran aground.14 Even the long-awaited Department for Combating Child Homelessness and Neglect (OBDBB) – established in June 1943 within the NKVD and vested with the responsibility of supervising the work of juvenile reformatories, DPRs and police activities in the sphere of child displacement and social deviancy – failed to improve the situation. The successful functioning of the department depended on smooth coordination between various government authorities as well as a cohesive internal structure. In the event, the skeletal staff, the lack of a clear division of responsibilities, as well as the unresponsiveness of some of the welfare agencies, led to the dispersion of skilled cadres and squandering of financial resources. A month after the newly organized OBDBB had begun its activities, one of its officers, Major Sokolov, suggested to the Deputy Commissar of Internal Affairs that he put an end to this multi-agency approach and gave a more detailed explanation of the decree of 15 June 1943. In the officer’s view, this would ‘streamline and combine’ the activities of various agencies and ‘introduce clarity and accountability’ to the organization of work with street children. Sokolov emphasized that within the NKVD alone there were many sections that carried out such work, and although formally they fell under the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, they fully depended on local executive committees and party organizations. There was a clear need to allow the OBDBB to coordinate all the other agencies. In his next report to Beria in September, the officer reiterated the need to afford the department greater authority and wider responsibilities, including the supply of children’s institutions and crime investigation.15 Evidently, Sokolov’s request was not fully satisfied, for a year later a member of the Moscow Bar Association, Dora Gorvits, complained to Vyacheslav Molotov that there was still ‘no regulatory system that would connect various organizations caring for children and adolescents, and those responsible for prophylactics of child neglect’. The lawyer argued that ‘the absence of premeditated, balanced and unified methods in prevention of child criminality inevitably [led] to the devaluation of positive results in this sphere’.16 The advocates of children’s interests, therefore, acted without coordination and, instead of assisting, often hindered one another’s work. Unable to solve the problem on their own, social control institutions made the prevention of juvenile crime and homelessness a matter of public responsibility. From the beginning of the war, a state-wide press campaign was launched to promote the idea that looking after children was a task for everyone.17 The involvement of ordinary citizens in policing the streets was maximized. Public volunteers joined state representatives in what very much resembled the 1930s campaigns of combing public places for unaccompanied children, guarding railway stations and quaysides and preventing youngsters from buying tickets without a reasonable excuse, or stopping waifs trickling into towns. They also conducted preventive work in their neighbourhoods, established additional children’s rooms

54

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

at police stations, identified orphans, delivered youngsters from DPRs to their parents and organized after-school activities.18 Because a large number of children were detected near cinemas, busking or selling tickets and cigarettes for profit at all sorts of times, including during school hours and late in the evening, the authorities in some localities entrusted the police and public volunteers with the task of patrolling cinemas and theatres, especially at weekends and during holidays. For their part, the officials instituted curfew hours, prohibited the individual attendance of spectacles by children younger than fourteen or sixteen, and outlawed the sale of alcohol and tobacco to minors, as well as buying goods from them. They also proposed to extend the network of children’s theatres and cinemas throughout the country and make attendance therein free of charge, to stop some youngsters begging or committing petty theft in order to buy tickets. Children were warned against the negative effects of cinemagoing on their academic performance, and the most persistent were ridiculed in the press.19 While in some places state inspectors complained that the police did not involve obshchestvennost’ (the general public) in their work, in others, as in Moscow, Sverdlovsk, Kuibyshev, Gorky, Ulyanovsk, Stalingrad and Kaluga oblasts, volunteers even outnumbered the combined forces of police officers, teachers and youth leaders, acting in their professional capacity.20 Thus, in 1944, 1,326 concerned citizens of Kaluga oblast joined forces with 506 Komsomolites and 138 pedagogues in crime and vagrancy control activities; their numbers doubled in the following year. Over the same two-year period, some 3,542 volunteers and 2,000 public activists from Stalingrad assisted 1,153 youth leaders, 458 teachers and 155 members of the Police Assistance Brigades in clearing the city of youngsters engaged in street trade and committing public order violations.21 This was in line with a tradition instituted two years previously. On the eve of the Battle of Stalingrad, Komsomolites and volunteers had collected hundreds of children from the rubble after heavy bombing raids on the city and brought them to safety over the Volga.22 In Leningrad such efforts to locate and protect orphaned and unaccompanied children were already in full swing after the starvation winter of 1941–2 left approximately 80,000 children alone in dark and freezing flats with no one to look after them.23 It was local executive committees and the youth league that initially put out the call to organize regular trawls of apartments, but after a one-time show of effort by government officials, the matter was delegated to lower ranked Komsomolites, members of sanitary brigades, teachers, building superintendents, doctors, enterprise employees, female activists, schoolchildren and neighbours.24 In the years of 1944 and 1945 approximately 44,000 volunteers conducted roughly 7,000 ‘clearing’ raids throughout the country.25 The state also took advantage of the informal arrangements already being provided by local communities. Though the nationalized welfare system left little room for individual initiative, many trade unions, public organizations, kolkhozes and even the armed forces had begun carrying out social work among children. Without waiting for a governmental directive, members of the youth league and public-spirited citizens organized special fundraising campaigns, collected clothes, footwear and books, took mentorship over children’s boarding institutions and cultivated land for them. The national press widely publicized their work, attracting further volunteers.26 Started

Efforts to Help

55

on the initiative of a Red Army officer and taken up by the Komsomol, the Children’s Aid Foundation collected 47 million rubles by mid-1944; an additional 222 million rubles were donated by trade unions.27 The Foundation sponsored children’s canteens, financed scholarships for disadvantaged pupils and subsidized special summer camps and sanatoria for the ailing children of front line soldiers.28 From 1943 to 1945, a total of 7.5 million youngsters received the opportunity to spend some time at these summer camps, most of which were located on the dacha territories of various factories and commissariats. For instance, in 1943 Moscow enterprises expended more than 20 million rubles on the organization and upkeep of these establishments, excluding the funds provided by parents.29 Private individuals adopted and fostered children, or attempted to find their relatives, because the state address bureaux could not manage on their own, as a result of the shortage of staff and paper, as well as irregular record-keeping by all the involved parties. Despite their energetic work, bureaux employees and volunteers achieved extremely modest results in reuniting children with their families, inviting an avalanche of criticism from parents as well as state inspectors.30 The foster care scheme also did not prove as effective and popular as had been hoped by the government, which wished to cut the cost of maintaining orphans at state institutions. Although during the war an estimated 400,000 to 600,000 children found homes through adoption, guardianship and foster care, the success of these programmes was limited, despite what was officially claimed.31 Instead, many factories organized so-called initsiativnye detdoma and boarding schools on their grounds for the children of deceased or incapacitated employees.32 The provision of supplies and care was usually better at such institutions because of direct financing and increased accountability. Also generally better was the situation at junior cadet schools, perhaps the most successful wartime socialization project, initiated by the Commissariats of Defence (NKO) and the Navy (NKVMF) for orphans, street children and underprivileged boys. The armed forces had already been participating in social care, albeit on an ad hoc basis, not only donating money, but also taking in wards, mentoring children’s institutions or distributing food among children from the areas where military units were stationed.33 From 1942 onwards, their involvement in the state child protection programme became much more systematic and official, with the organization of several types of military educational establishment for adolescent boys, from the age of ten to sixteen. In addition to ‘special’ secondary military schools which had been in existence from the late 1930s, and short naval courses, both commissariats boasted eight naval cadet schools, seventeen Suvorov colleges and three Nakhimov naval colleges by the end of 1944. All of these junior cadet schools were more than just classrooms full of boys receiving paramilitary instruction. Besides training future cadres for the armed forces, they carried out social work among at-risk youth by awarding tuition exemptions and free accommodation to the needy and orphaned, keeping them off the streets and facilitating their social adaptation through education and inclusion.34 For those children who had endured starvation, experienced the brutalities of occupation or the front line, who had roamed the vast expanses of the Soviet Union, being chased by the police and despised by the public, these schools were salvation. With their strict

56

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

discipline and relatively better provision, the schools offered greater protection from the physical abuse and hunger so widespread in juvenile reformatories and detdoma. While daily bread rations at the children’s residential institutions rarely reached more than 400 grams, junior cadets received 800 grams of bread per day, with the Russian Narkompros petitioning on their behalf when the Commissariat of Trade attempted to cut down the allowance to 600 grams in 1943.35 Significantly, the schools also allowed their students to avoid the stigma usually attached to the charges of orphanages and reformatories, rendering it very difficult for the youngsters to integrate into society.36 The negative stereotypes usually did not extend to junior cadets, although, depending on their past history, they could face discrimination at first. Thus, when Odessa DPR began referring former waifs to the local naval cadet school, port authorities in charge of the institution had to be strongly persuaded by the General Prosecutor’s Office to accept the boys who had successfully passed their entrance exams and had already been enrolled on the orders from the NKVMF.37 As if to prove the port authorities wrong, most of these youngsters worked extra hard and were among the best students at the school.38 At the same time, the establishment and operation of junior cadet schools exposed certain, perhaps inevitable, shortcomings. Since one of the reasons for the schools’ existence was the preparation for a future military career, the social care arrangements did not extend to girls, although, admittedly, they were generally less at risk than boys of falling into delinquent habits. Second, the popularity of the schools as elite institutions attracted many youngsters throughout the country, including those at the front. They would undertake long journeys, travelling thousands of kilometres,

Figure 5 Cadets of Nakhimov Naval College in Leningrad (courtesy of TsGAKFFD SPb).

Efforts to Help

57

usually on their own, to try their luck at passing the entrance exams. Many were barred from enrolling by age restrictions, shortage of available places or poor academic performance. Having failed the entrance exams, not all children had enough money or the heart to return home, so they ended up leading a homeless existence. Living rough was what one army ward did after he had been discharged from his division in Poland and sent to the rear to study at a Suvorov college. Before departure he received a reference from his divisional commander, a change of linen, food allowance and 17 rubles. He travelled by freight train to six cities, but all the colleges he applied to were full. En route he made friends with two other hopefuls, another ‘son of the regiment’ and a former Byelorussian partisan, both of whom also failed in their mission. Eventually all three ended up in an orphanage near Moscow.39 The sudden disappearance of another boy after he had been rejected by a ‘special’ naval school in Batumi (Georgia) prompted his mother to write to the head of the juvenile section at the General Prosecutor’s Office, who, in turn, contacted his colleague in Batumi requesting an investigation into the boy’s whereabouts.40 Despite these shortcomings, as well as certain material difficulties and initial struggles with discipline, junior cadet schools presented an excellent example of the army’s prophylactic work with socially vulnerable youngsters. The regime capitalized on this success in promoting its paternalistic image, even though central government’s role was limited to passing the necessary legislation. Both the initiative of organizing the schools and the supervision of their everyday functioning belonged to people working at the respective commissariats, without whose patronage the schools would most likely have led the poverty-stricken existence of the majority of other children’s residential institutions. Unlike the latter, the schools did not have to rely on the

Figure 6 Cadets of a Suvorov college (courtesy of MUZR).

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Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

benevolence of their volunteer or semi-volunteer patrons, but received such assistance directly from the commissariats’ subordinate organizations by administrative order. In fact, the success of the junior cadet corps first and foremost depended on the relatively limited number of schools, the rudimentary selection procedures that screened off the most obvious miscreants, better resources at the disposal of the responsible commissariats and, not least, the enterprise of people working at these educational institutions. This corroborates the inference of one student of Soviet wartime childhood that ‘the state was getting the benefit of the “protection” rhetoric without having done much to deserve it’.41

5

Coda

The war threw a great number of children to the margins of society. Widespread impoverishment, displacement, parental death, diminished adult supervision, radical alteration of gender roles and erosion of age boundaries were a direct consequence of the war and contributory factors to the growth of criminal tendencies and vagrancy among minors. Just as in the 1920s, street children once again became a sign of the times. Assisting them was a genuine policy objective of the state. Having assumed the fatherly role of provider, the Party and the government hastened to establish a legal basis for the child protection programme throughout the country and assured the orphaned and the families of servicemen that they were now the responsibility of the large and caring ‘Soviet family’.1 ‘Our sacred duty is to care for children!’ proclaimed a lead in a newspaper article published by Komsomol’skaia Pravda shortly after the announcement of the decree ‘On the assistance to unaccompanied children’. ‘There will not be the downtrodden among us. No matter how difficult it is for the Motherland, the people, the Party and the government will take care of their young citizens. Our country’s first thought is about children. Not a single child will be left on the streets. There will not be vagrants. The Motherland will find them a home and heal their spiritual wounds.’2 The widely touted aspirations, however, were not always supported either by material resources or meaningful actions. Neither the state’s rationing scheme nor its evacuation planning betrayed much concern over the fate of the non-working civilian population, and local realities were rarely reflected in the central plans. The possession of ration cards was no guarantee against hunger, for Soviet wartime food distribution depended on one’s contribution to the war production (or social status) and for some categories of consumers, such as non-working adolescents, was only notional, even if they did manage to redeem their ration cards. During the war, the Soviets liked to boast about high bread rations in the USSR compared to the countries of occupied Europe. Their claims were highly exaggerated, because, at least until 1942, juveniles in continental Europe (including Poland) were entitled to four times more bread per day than their Soviet counterparts, and usually more than younger children, although, as in the Soviet Union, the actual supplies were not always available and malnourishment, even outright starvation, was rampant, especially by the close of war.3 Not getting enough food, the adolescents throughout Europe, except in Germany, would have to starve, beg or steal in order to obtain the calories required by their growing bodies. In Belgium the authorities sounded the alarm

60

Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

about children going from farm to farm begging for food ‘for days on end’, usually with the full consent of their parents. In famished Greece, abandoned youngsters and child refugees searched among refuse or ‘fought dogs for something edible’. In Poland children were often left to fend for themselves after their parents had been deported as forced labourers to the Reich.4 Hungry adolescents in the Soviet Union also drove up the crime wave that hit evacuation destinations particularly hard. Indisputably, industrial evacuation was an incredible feat and helped to save lives, but it also exposed the leadership’s unpreparedness and lack of foresight and planning. Where the welfare of the civilian population was concerned, this lumbering confusion often negated any good that came of the efforts. It has even been claimed that the government, suspicious of its Western allies, was indirectly responsible for high casualty rates from communicable diseases, such as typhoid fever, by refusing to cooperate with British and American medical researchers.5 The Soviets were not the only ones who botched their evacuation efforts, especially where children were concerned. In Britain, many youngsters were also sent into known danger areas and had to be re-evacuated several times. Little was done by way of checking the suitability of the receiving hosts, which on many occasions resulted in neglect, abuse and exploitation; but the victims’ complaints rarely reached their parents, because their letters were censored. Just as in the Soviet Union, the evacuation of British children was less about saving lives by moving them from dangerous areas but about meeting essential wartime demands. Officials considered liberating mothers for war production and sustaining military morale to be of greater importance than the safety of children.6 In the case of the Soviet Union, widespread institutional backwardness, especially outside the capital, further contributed to the inadequacy of welfare provision. The weakness of the social care and law enforcement agencies was reflected in their frequent resort to repressive measures as a substitute for social control. The tactic was also born of an acute anxiety about the reputation of the Soviet state that permeated all levels of the governmental structure. Mendacity and vagabondage among children struck a serious blow to the prestige of the country, especially the widely trumpeted image of the regime making great strides in the sphere of child welfare, despite wartime privations. The presence of waifs, beggars and youthful pedlars in the streets was incompatible with the way of life in a socialist country; their very existence discredited the socialist order and would continue to concern governmental agencies as well as members of the general public, for years to come.7 For hardships did not cease with the war’s end; nor did juvenile homelessness and delinquency show marked signs of abetting for at least another two years. Even though, compared to 1944, the authorities registered a decline in criminal activities and vagabondage among children, the number of arrests appeared to have risen in 1945, which was attributed to greater efficiency and better record-keeping on the part of the police and public volunteers. Conviction rates also went up, but this dynamic was not reflected in the labour colonies’ statistics, which might indicate the judges’ greater recourse to suspending sentences, better prosecutorial supervision, but also a slower transfer of detainees from prisons to juvenile reformatories.8 In July 1945 an amnesty was announced, which caused the dwindling number of inmates both in colonies and

Coda

61

prisons; however, it also received blame for a worsening criminal situation in some regions in the second half of the year.9 A year after the war’s end, a new calamity struck. Local droughts and the resulting food shortages of 1945 were followed by a wholesale failure of the grain harvest in the autumn of 1946, leading to a food crisis, which affected most of the country, but especially Moldavia and southern Ukraine, claiming between one and two million lives in the course of almost two years. The regime, however, did little to protect the already careworn population from the effects of famine, but chose instead to maintain its grain reserves by reducing consumption even further and intensifying grain requisitioning.10 To that effect, it refused to extend rationing to collective farmers, took away workers’ supplemental meals and removed ration entitlements from the workers’ adult dependents, the disabled and the elderly. Workers’ children had their rations reduced and those living beyond the city limits saw them removed completely. By the beginning of 1947 one quarter of the country’s population stopped receiving bread allowances. Among them were many orphanage employees, whose predicament compelled them to seek jobs elsewhere.11 Understaffed and swamped by the waves of destitute children, many of whom had to be turned away owing to the shortage of places, detdoma could ill afford to keep those who still had surviving parents (as had been the practice before) and demanded that the latter remove their offspring, no matter what their material situation was, to make room for new orphans. The parents tried to sustain their children as best they could, a task that compelled many to turn to illegal means to make ends meet and risk facing exceedingly long sentences under the newly promulgated anti-theft laws of 1947. The laws immediately began to affect child welfare provision – over the next two years the number of orphanage residents, whose mothers were incarcerated in accordance with the new law, more than doubled (owing to the shortage of places in orphanages, children younger than four went into detention together with their mothers).12 Abandonment of children by their relatives once again became a widespread phenomenon, and a large number of them poured into cities and industrial centres, clogging the railway system and overpowering the shorthanded law enforcement.13 According to official records, almost as many children went through receiverdistribution centres (DPRs) in 1946 (319,146) as in 1944 (341,133), the most ‘fecund’ year of the war in that respect. Yet 1947 broke the record, with nearly half a million youngsters finding refuge in the DPRs (494,104). As famine gradually loosened its stranglehold on the population, and the standards of living began to rise slowly, child vagrancy and crime rates dwindled accordingly across the country, albeit unevenly.14 From 1948 to 1952, the number of street children recorded by DPRs decreased from 299,178 to 145,500, while crimes committed by minors went down by 23.2 per cent.15 In the fight against child displacement and delinquency, the state capitalized on its wartime experience of actively involving members of the general public in social welfare and crime control.16 As time went by, obshchestvennost’ (the general public) began to play a truly significant role in the process, taking on the responsibility of maintaining public order.17 An important feature of social welfare and delinquency prevention in the 1950s to early 1960s was that it was voluntary, normally unpaid and performed largely by non-professionals. This was just as it had been during the war,

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when, for instance, the Commission to Aid Evacuated Children in Tashkent had been presented as ‘a government body run by republican officials’, but in reality consisted of ‘a group of volunteers receiving little to no financial assistance from the state’.18 The war years also witnessed the revival of individual charitable giving, which had previously been curbed by the Soviet authorities. Just as with public activism, the latter now attempted to give philanthropy an organizational form, bringing it under their full control and showing it off as one of their own inventions, despite its often spontaneous nature.19 Without having to allocate funds to problem areas and for the training of social workers, the state could both keep public order and take credit for providing a service to society. The regime made it appear that the humanitarianism of individual donors and volunteers were the qualities instilled in them by the Soviet state, which vested them with this responsibility through its decrees, supervised and guided them in their compassion.20 The discrepancy between expectations laid out in the official edicts and realities, however, was evident. Even education and after-school activities, as a proclaimed remedy against vice and mendacity among children, did not take precedence in state financing, despite the propagandistic rhetoric. The figures showed an abrupt fall in funding at the beginning of the war, climbing slowly over the four years and eventually surpassing the pre-war totals.21 Nevertheless, as one scholar points out, what was ‘planned’ and ‘allocated’ did not equate to what was ‘actually spent’, neither during nor after the war. There was, thus, insufficient material backing for the loud proclamations about the importance of reducing dropout rates among schoolchildren,22 while rampant corruption and mismanagement, born of systemic deficiencies, siphoned the already inadequate resources away from children’s institutions. Certainly, without the institutional support from the state amid the prevailing scarcity, chaos and exertion of resources, the child protection programme would most likely have not functioned at all. Yet the Soviet state, busy blaming wartime conditions for all the shortcomings, never addressed its systemic defects, all the while creating additional difficulties for itself, and great hardships for its subjects, by subordinating their well-being to its political and economic priorities.

Part Two

Step-Motherland

6

Empty Promises

The incessant promotion of the state’s ‘fatherly care’ and ‘motherly tenderness’ for children in the wartime mass media and legislation generally encountered serious difficulties at the stage of implementation.1 With much of the country’s resources devoted to the war effort, the central government and the Party relied on their local representatives to manage the supply of the civilian population and to combat the problem of abandoned children and juvenile delinquency. The responsible parties, however, did not always possess the required resources, material or human. Many attempted to shift responsibility to other agencies, leaving those who desperately required assistance in a precarious situation. Corruption, bureaucratic formalism, lack of initiative, incompetence and outright indifference to the plight of the needy became characteristic features of the administration and provision of goods at a local level during this period. Evacuees and the families of Red Army servicemen on active duty (frontoviki) especially felt the consequences of the bureaucratic foot-dragging and red tape, since everything from residence and work permits to ration cards and soldiers’ allowances was in the hands of state officials. The predicament of these vulnerable social categories and the ‘criminal idleness’ of many local party and government agents did not escape the state inspectors’ notice. Their reports stated that despite being entitled to benefits, the wives and children of servicemen had great difficulty obtaining them.2 By 1 January 1942, the state was reportedly 8.2 billion rubles in arrears on allowance payments.3 When the women complained, their petitions rarely received immediate consideration; nor did the husbands succeed in attracting official attention to their families’ difficult material situations.4 Instead, as one executive complained, ‘party bureaucrats gave soldiers’ families “empty promises” ’.5 Such worthless assurances about ‘care for the families of servicemen’ transmitted over the radio and in the press compelled one anxious woman write to her husband: ‘I listen and tears begin to flow: where this care is and for which families I don’t know’.6 In the meantime, the children of those who defended the country (and the regime) at the front were deprived of the basic necessities and could not attend schools because of a lack of clothing and emaciation. One boy reported to his father at the front that he ‘would gladly give up five years of his life for a cup of milk’.7 Inspectors warned that such indifference and idleness on the part of local administrators significantly contributed to the growth of child neglect, delinquency and homelessness as a result of the youngsters running away from home or being

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thrown out by their desperate mothers.8 The last year of the war yielded an especially large number of soldiers’ children escaping the precariousness of their hungry existence. Thus, 1943–4 figures showed that the majority of waifs in Khabarovsk Krai and Amur oblast were the children whose fathers served at the front. During the first quarter of 1945, 53 per cent of youngsters passing through receiver-distribution centres (DPRs) of Ivanovo oblast were such runaways. This represented a 22 per cent increase compared to the last quarter of the previous year.9 For allowing their children to wander unsupervised, mothers faced a fine, which could create a serious dent in the family’s already meagre budget, and many decided not to pay up at all. For instance, in 1945, 1,273 parents from Chelyabinsk were fined for neglecting their children, though the state managed to collect only half of the total sum of 79,100 rubles. Public authorities in other towns of the oblast seemed to be more efficient at recovering penalties from 1,140 truant parents.10 Unable to feed and control their offspring on their own, many mothers turned to state welfare institutions. They petitioned (usually unsuccessfully) local governments to place their children temporarily into boarding homes, enrolled them into junior cadet schools or entrusted them to army units. Some even asked for a referral to juvenile reformatories.11 In several particularly disturbing cases, despairing mothers committed suicide; some had killed their children first. Before she took her own life, one officer’s wife wrote that her husband had ‘abandoned’ her and their children in order to fight for the country, but the latter refused assistance to his family.12 Evacuated wives of front line soldiers and officers complained about the callousness and hostility of the local powers that be, whose attitudes and actions sometimes bordered on abuse.13 ‘I hope the end is near, I don’t want to live any more,’ despaired an evacuee from Leningrad as she described the bureaucratic snafus. ‘We, the evacuees, don’t get any rations; we are treated worse than dogs. They deprived us of the last crust of bread, even though we are the family of a frontovik. It is impossible to get to the bottom of it all – oblast executives refer us to the district, the district send us to the village soviet, and no one wants to talk to you here. So we go begging from table to table.’14 Such attitudes were widespread. Many, though not all, state representatives used their access to power for personal gain. The war, with its chronic shortage of all consumption goods, created new opportunities for enrichment, and the bureaucrats seized them. In addition to their legal privileges and higher ration norms, they employed illicit means to increase their consumption, setting up an elaborate and well-organized system of redistribution of rationed goods, which was especially visible and predatory in rural areas. State functionaries, enterprise directors and their retainers managed to eat at the expense of the rest, and while in some areas this was perceived as an abuse of power, in others it was embedded in the official rationing scheme.15 Nowhere was such official misconduct more sinister and deadly than in the famished Leningrad, where ‘the system of privilege’ was an open secret and where supplies were distributed according to an individual’s ‘value’. Scientists, engineers and highly qualified workers could count on higher rations, although, as one Russian historian has succinctly put it, ‘the specialists’ value was relative and “situational”.

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The value of state and party elites was absolute.’ On top of their elevated rations, the functionaries also received extra allowances in special closed canteens, as well as ‘protection’ supplies from their clients among factory managers and port authorities. Using their weight to confiscate commodities for themselves and their associates, the higher party and NKVD echelons suffered considerably fewer deaths compared to the rest of the city and oblast population, despite being in the same rationing category as other public sector employees.16 In the words of a diarist, the inequality even within this group was literally ‘etched on people’s faces’, when comparing the ‘hideous brown mask of a state employee suffering from dystrophy ... and a blooming appearance of some big cheese’.17 As in Leningrad and the oblast, bureaucrats in other localities used public funds and their access to stocks to arrange receptions, banquets and council meetings, and later wrote off their expenses as money spent on public projects or issued to families of frontoviki.18 When people tried to complain, it was exceedingly difficult to break through the barrier constructed by corrupt officials. Thus, after their children’s rations had been suspended in 1943, workers evacuated from Moscow and Kherson to Tatar ASSR wrote repeatedly to the authorities in Kazan, only to see inspecting committees come and go, loaded with food bribes but resolving nothing. When the workers tried to appeal directly to Moscow, their letters reportedly ended up on the desk of the enterprise director. Only when a lower manager personally delivered the letter, things changed, the guilty were dispatched to the front in lieu of a lengthy prison term, and the children began receiving their rations as well as additional meals at the factory canteen.19 In 1944 a specialist journal for jurists publicly condemned the self-serving behaviour of the ‘bigwigs’ (bol’shoe nachal’stvo). After the necessary preamble, describing the state’s comprehensive care for the families of servicemen, the author of the article proceeded to claim that there were still cases when wives and children of soldiers were illegally evicted from their homes, which resulted in the loss of ration cards. Their supplications circulated around prosecutor offices for prolonged periods of time with no effect, all the while high-ranking ‘conmen’ (aferisty) embezzled relief funds. The article reminded its readers how strategically important it was to show the ‘valiant warriors’ at the front that their families were afforded protection and support.20 Whereas the relatives of Red Army soldiers could at least attempt to use their special status to demand justice or benefits, orphans and homeless children had only one patron, the state, whose representatives often did not shrink from taking advantage of their charges. Goods and produce reserved for orphanages and DPRs too often ended up in the hands of senior party bosses, and through them on the black market. In one case, officials redistributed clothing donations from the USA among their friends and relatives, swapping old garments for the new ones to cover their tracks.21 Orphanage property was also not safe from encroachments by state organizations.22 Thus, one of the best children’s homes in Gorky oblast fell victim to the greed of the local head of labour camps administration who arbitrarily seized the orphans’ flourishing subsistence plots for his agency’s needs.23 A similar fate befell a boarding school for Polish orphans near Sverdlovsk. Having received 20 hectares of woodland and meadows, the detdom had

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to make do with what was left after various state agencies unilaterally made use of the scattered parcels of land and even leased them to private individuals.24 Yet, more than half of children’s boarding institutions did not have subsistence allotments and relied entirely on the highly inefficient centralized distribution system. Unless they had a powerful sponsor, this put them completely at the mercy of negligent bureaucrats and trade organizations, whose actions revealed that children’s needs came last on their list of priorities. While the central authorities earmarked certain goods and foodstuffs for children’s residential institutions, it was up to local trade organizations to distribute these resources. They did so only partially, on the leftover principle and with considerable delays, often substituting one food with another of inferior quality, as happened in Omsk, where up to 90 per cent of the meat allocated for children’s institutions turned out to be various substitutes.25 In 1942 only 39 per cent of supplies reached their intended recipients throughout the country; in several regions the percentage was even lower. For the duration of the war, not a single bedsheet or jacket made it to the children’s homes of Krasnoyarsk Krai. During the first three months of 1942, orphans from Chelyabinsk oblast received nothing but cereal and bread. Four hundred kilograms of butter, 200 kilograms of meat and 5,000 eggs had simply melted away.26 Similar misappropriations took place in other detdoma and receivers, where boarders were literally starving to death.27 In one orphanage, for instance, cabbage soup for lunch was the only proper meal of the day, with breakfast and supper consisting solely of tea.28 Hunger drove boarders to eat stray dogs, steal fodder from draught animals, drink contaminated water and consume various plants, sometimes with serious consequences for their health – fatalities and poisoning as a result of such a diet were not uncommon.29 Thus, three residents of the Ezhovskii children’s home in Kirov oblast suffered from temporary loss of speech, after they had eaten toxic henbane.30 Having found themselves outside the local system of patronage, evacuated children’s institutions usually suffered the hardest; their administrators felt that the children were being deliberately cheated out of their allocated supplies.31 This was not an empty claim, for state inspectors uncovered numerous cases of local executives giving direct orders to divert parts of the allocated supplies to the commercial network,32 to which the orphanage administrators would now have to turn in order to feed their charges. However, notoriously inadequate state financing, coming out of local budgets, meant that residential institutions were not only unable to afford to buy food on the market but also would accumulate huge debts, which prevented them from settling accounts with trade organizations. Headmasters and staff had to borrow money ‘from whoever would give it to them’, and, in some instances, even sell their personal belongings to raise funds.33 In their dispatch from Siberia carers of an evacuated Leningrad children’s home complained to their city soviet that they had to exchange all their possessions to support the children and themselves. ‘This whole time we have not received any sugar, soap, or butter apart from May’, they reported in late 1944. ‘We feel as though we have been somehow rejected, although we are looking after the children of frontline soldiers.’34

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Such a dreadful state of affairs was not only the result of poor financing and concealment by trade organizations and manufacturers – even greater pilfering occurred within children’s institutions. There was little control over resource management and food distribution therein, which allowed many administrators to cut children’s rations in order to use surplus produce for personal gain. More often, however, it appears that headmasters resorted to such measures in order to feed the staff.35 Teachers and mentors made very little money, and in a number of places they did not receive any food from their employer. At the same time, they rarely managed to obtain goods with their ration cards, and since the majority of orphanages and boarding schools were situated in remote rural areas, their access to markets and stores was limited.36 The country’s leadership was aware of the difficulties that orphanage personnel and their children faced with regard to food provision, but the decree of 1943 on the improvement of living conditions of orphanage employees merely suggested that money for cafeteria food should be subtracted from the teachers’ salaries, which were often in arrears. In actuality, it remained unclear whether they could partake of the food supplied to orphanages and whether this was reflected in the central allocation of foodstuffs.37 To make matters worse, the central government was slow to introduce universal norms relating to the amount of each food item to be supplied to an individual child, thereby indirectly encouraging regional leadership and stores to set deliberately low rates.38 In March 1942 the Russian Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) wrote a protest letter to the Council of People’s Commissars (SNK) disagreeing with the current rations, which were so low ‘on a number of basic products (such as meat, fat, sugar, bread and milk) that they not only fail[ed] to offer proper nourishment, but also cause[d] concern for the preservation of children’s health’. The commissar was particularly alarmed about the situation in rural children’s institutions, for which the Commissariat of Trade made no provision, besides the delivery of tea and sugar.39 Worryingly, the unified rations for state boarding institutions introduced in September 1943 did not eliminate arbitrariness in the distribution of central funds.40 Despite the numerous cases of orphanage staff pilfering food and other supplies, sometimes the provision and well-being of wards depended solely on the resourcefulness and doggedness of their administrators. The headmistress of a boarding school, which evacuated from Moscow to Chelyabinsk oblast, recalls how she ran several kilometres every morning to the nearest town in order to ‘wangle’ (vybivat’) food supplies for her charges. She admits that the food procurement used up all her energy. Her colleague from Leningrad also felt like giving up and lying in the snow as she dragged herself through ice sludge for 7 kilometres to ask for seeds for her boarding school. The tenacity of another woman landed her in detention on suspicion of speculation, when she personally attempted to buy produce at the market to replenish unissued quotas for her kindergarten.41 Many directors found it difficult to cut through the bureaucratic juggernaut and unresponsiveness. While officials worked hard to create the appearance of active involvement in children’s welfare, orphanage directors were losing faith that their pleas would ever be heard. They wrote letters full of desperation to

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higher authorities in an attempt to force trade organizations and stores to release goods, only to receive a reply that ‘there [were] more important concerns’, that the officials could not inconvenience their superiors with such ‘trivial’ matters and that the question of supplying children’s institutions was not their responsibility.42 One orphanage administrator in Leningrad was flabbergasted when her pleas for some furniture from the available stocks were repelled by the head of a district executive committee, declaring that the ‘district soviet [was] not a cash-cow’.43 This occurred just as senior governmental representatives in Leningrad and other regions were accusing headmasters of children’s institutions of not being assertive enough.44 Frustrated with two months of unsuccessful petitioning, the headmaster of an orphanage for Spanish children evacuated from Odessa to Kuban’ begged for the transfer of his institution to another region, where ‘it would be possible to create normal living conditions for the children’.45 Even when local executives operated conscientiously and made an effort to help, they often met with indifference from trade organizations. A production of 1,000 pairs of size 42/43 shoes for children by Arkhangelsk cooperative societies represented nothing less than a mockery of the administrative order. Even the Commissariat of Light Industry refused to make any promises regarding the supply of all needy children with footwear and clothing, since the required equipment and materials were reportedly ‘lost’ and the army had to take priority.46 Often trade organizations simply did not have the resources allocated for children’s homes because the supplying enterprises did not deliver their produce in time, owing to a lack of transportation or bureaucratic confusion. City and regional food authorities did not know where and to whom the goods should go. While various organizations fought fiercely for every delivery, local executives were locked in incessant disputes about who was responsible for supplying the orphans.47 In the meantime, conditions in many state boarding institutions for children were little better, and sometimes worse, than those on the streets. One thirteen-year-old apprentice preferred living in a pottery workshop and sleeping on the floor without any bedding to a life in the orphanage from which he had escaped three months earlier.48 In their secret reports Komsomol inspectors drew a direct connection between the authorities’ dismissive attitude to the needs of disadvantaged children and the swelling ranks of vagrants. As has previously been mentioned, a great number of those living rough were discovered to be running away from hunger and unbearable living conditions at their institutions. Only in 1942, authorities apprehended almost nineteen thousand former orphanage residents living rough. A year later, in Uzbekistan alone children’s receivers processed 4,318 waifs, 3,104 of whom were orphanage fugitives. Together with Moscow oblast, the Central Asian republic were the record setters when it came to creating conditions for secondary besprizornost’, with a considerable part of almost 14,000 former orphanage residents picked up in the first half of 1944, coming from these regions.49 Almost 55,000, or 8.6 per cent, of the entire intake of DPRs in 1944 and the first half of 1945 came from children’s boarding institutions.50 Alarmingly, no one was usually looking for them.51 This was not surprising, considering that there were instances when children ended up on the streets because the adults in charge of their welfare did not know

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what to do with them, as was the case with eight girls, aged eight to twelve, from an orphanage in Azerbaijan. Having referred them to a sanatorium to recover their health, the orphanage failed to claim the girls back when their sojourn was over. Instead of sending the children straight to the orphanage, the director of the resort entrusted them to a cook, who deserted the girls at the earliest opportunity. Similarly, a Narkompros employee brought four children to Kirovabad in order to enrol them into an orphanage, whose director refused them under the pretext that there were no available places. The employee then simply left the orphans on the street, where the police later found them.52 Cities became a common dumping ground for orphans from rural areas. Being unable to feed and house them, kolkhoz chiefs would arrange for the orphaned children to be transported to the nearest town and abandoned there.53 The state’s efforts to provide for destitute children and prevent their displacement were further compromised by welfare workers’ complete lack of concern about the youngsters’ fate after they had left their institutions. The law stipulated that those over the age of fourteen were to be found employment or sent to a trade school. In the majority of cases, however, orphanage graduates found themselves in such dire circumstances that many were forced to resort to begging or stealing in order to survive. The situation varied in different regions, but it did not seem to depend particularly on the geographic remoteness of these localities from the front line. Whether they lived in the recently liberated Ukraine or Kazakhstan, which was relatively unaffected by fighting, their predicament was not dissimilar. Both in the countryside and in industrial regions they usually found little assistance or guidance and were simply exploited on a par with adult workers, all the while lacking proper housing, clothing and food supplies.54 The inability of employers to provide for the basic needs of their teenage workers was the most cited reason why many orphanage wards and former waifs were refused jobs and thus left to fend for themselves. As noted in NKVD reports, despite a labour shortage, many industrial establishments and kolkhozes ‘literally resisted children’s employment’, because they lacked the facilities to house them and could not guarantee their feeding and schooling.55 Besides the objective difficulties brought about by wartime shortages and population displacement, there were obstacles of a different nature. While the central authorities did not necessarily equate homelessness with delinquency, in the popular imagination all displaced children, including orphanage wards, enjoyed a bad reputation as potential criminals. Considered to be poorly trained, lazy and disruptive, they often encountered suspicion and even hostility from their supervisors and fellow workers, who wanted nothing to do with them, especially if the youngsters had spent a considerable amount of time on the streets or in reformatories.56 This was probably the reason why two former waifs failed to obtain employment in Kuibyshev. One of them, a sixteen-year-old refugee from Smolensk oblast, knocked hopelessly on the doors of a number of local officials in order to gain a referral to a factory. The other boy visited the local police precinct five times asking for work placement until the commanding officer assaulted him.57 Managers’ anxieties were not always ungrounded. In 1945 the General Procuracy received information that the DPRs in Kharkov oblast carried out insufficient

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screening of their charges before referring them to factories and kolkhozes. Some of these youngsters had been living rough for some time and even managed to travel extensively around the country, begging and committing petty crime. Sometimes such youngsters left their employers, taking what valuables they could carry, and even killing the farmers who had given them shelter.58 Undoubtedly, there were plenty of sociopaths among homeless children, but society’s indignation and contempt for them as a group made some youngsters respond with apprehension and antagonism. Hungry, tired and desperate, they tried to improve their lot but found little sympathy with the people responsible for their reintegration. Their appeals to children’s commissions, established in the winter of 1942 to deal with child displacement, generally remained unanswered, because in the majority of towns, including Moscow, the commissions existed in name only. Where they did function, their activity, as a rule, was limited to several meetings, culminating in the formulation of action plans, but no implementation of the decisions.59 To compensate for the prolonged periods of inactivity local party representatives in conjunction with the police carried out occasional large-scale sweeps.60 The latter usually resulted in the apprehension of a great number of unsupervised and displaced children, many of whom were later released back onto the streets because of the shortage of places in children’s homes and receivers.61 The ‘occasional stop-and-go’ (kampaneiskii) approach received condemnation from the deputy prosecutor for juvenile affairs, V. Tadevosian, who urged his colleagues in regional procuracies to monitor closely the work of the commissions.62 However, even after inspections effected the reorganization of many such boards, they continued to do nothing.63 In order to create an impression of success and order, some officials deliberately lied in their reports, but more commonly they simply reverted to the old ways of dealing with the problem of child homelessness by abandoning all attempt to control it and instructing apprehended juveniles to leave their territories.64 One functionary openly suggested that the waifs ‘go elsewhere, for we cannot do anything about them here’; another insisted that it was not his ‘job to attend to besprizorniki – let the Komsomol take care of them’; still others issued them with certificates of homelessness and sent them to other regions, in order to avoid negative statistics in their territory.65 As soon as the youngsters left, new waifs took their places in sewers, deserted shops and empty train carriages. Sometimes they would install themselves next door to municipal and party offices, their presence there serving as a testament to official idleness and indifference.66 Meanwhile, various responsible commissariats and state agencies blamed one another for the failures in preventing and combating child displacement and delinquency. The NKVD and the Komsomol in particular criticized local executives and those higher up within the commissariats, pointing out that shortcomings could be overcome with a proper application of effort, for, as they claimed, resources were indeed available in many places or could be supplemented from the Children’s Aid Foundation or shipped from the central reserve funds.67 For instance, in October 1944 Moscow sent a large shipment of additional food supplies for detdoma and boarding schools in Molotovsk oblast.68 However, the reserve funds, set up specifically for children’s needs, in many instances were either not claimed at all or

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could not be obtained promptly because of red tape, thus considerably limiting the success of the relief programme.69 Likewise, foster care stipends did not always reach their addressees, thereby discrediting yet another of the government’s initiatives. Narkompros officials expressed deep concern that the compensation and bread allowances were inadequate even when paid out, which resulted in the neglect, complete abandonment and even death of foster children.70 An increase in recompense from 30 to 50 rubles per month in 1942 did not change the situation considerably, because many youngsters ended up in peasant families, whom the state did not compensate at all. On the other hand, foster care benefits engendered serious abuse of the programme. Reports mention neglectful foster parents who had been attracted by the presents, additional bread rations and canteen tickets that accompanied the responsibility of looking after a child. Many peasants particularly hoped to get free farm hands and then exploited their charges.71 Moreover, even though there were many people who genuinely desired to give a new home and tender care to displaced children, the overwhelming majority wanted to adopt or foster toddlers and not teenagers, who represented the most vulnerable and problematic contingent for public order.72 The two commissariats that received the most criticism for shortcomings in the effectiveness of the foster care programme were those of Enlightenment and Health. They stood accused of poor maintenance of files, delays in handling complaints and insufficient screening of prospective foster families. Work with such families was usually entrusted to ‘incompetent’ people who ‘answered to no authority’ and thus allowed ‘gross violations of law’.73 Reportedly, the education and health sections in Stalingrad and Gorky oblasts had no idea how to draw up a guardianship contract correctly, failed to keep any record of such cases and monitored neither children’s health nor living standards.74 Insignificant support funds for foster children in Briansk, Orel and Omsk oblasts placed them in danger of being returned to the state, or worse, dying of neglect. Some youngsters eventually exchanged their new homes for life on the streets.75 The government laid the blame for these deficiencies at the door of local bureaucrats, insisting that they were not implementing central directives and were allowing the situation to deteriorate. Local officials, in turn, held orphanage staff and volunteers responsible for the squandering of resources and the abuse of children’s rights. The people responsible for child welfare regarded both the central and local governments’ lack of concern devastating. Moscow issued general commands, while commissariats, enterprises and trade organizations received real freedom for autonomous action when it came to the supply and redistribution of goods. Local officials could be heartless, but circumstances were sometimes outside their control. Not only did the centre sometimes distribute resources that did not actually exist, but its ill-conceived policies in the sphere of child welfare and the ineffective management of prevention programmes also created conditions for juveniles’ return to the streets. It was policy miscalculations that forced collective farmers to abandon orphaned children in towns, because throughout the war they received nothing from the state for children’s maintenance, including foster care benefits. Some kolkhozes made

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efforts to open special rooms for the destitute, but without state assistance amid acute rural poverty the rooms could not function properly and soon discontinued their activities.76 Children from single-parent families also suffered the consequences of the 8 July 1944 decree on increased subsidies to mothers. Despite its promising title, the decree relieved absent fathers of financial responsibility, but the stipulated monthly compensation of just 5 rubles fell considerably short of a child’s needs, giving a powerful impetus for many youngsters to leave their poverty-stricken homes. There was much talk about stricter control over the work of the children’s commission and distribution of reserved goods, but in reality assistance and change were very slow in coming. In mid-1944 the Russian SNK learned that children’s boarding institutions were still undersupplied and that special inspecting groups were needed to ensure that trade organizations adhered to regulations.77 Summing up the work with displaced children at the close of 1945, a delegation of prosecutors from different regions of the country had to admit that ‘important decrees on the assistance to unattended, homeless and delinquent children in a number of oblasts were not put into effect’. Furthermore, judicial organs tolerated the poor state of affairs, having replaced some neglectful officials with others, no less idle.78 The centre did make a show of punishing or reprimanding its local representatives for malpractice, but ‘protectionism’ and clientelism within party ranks meant that the majority of negligence cases went unnoticed or unpunished. Thus, mismanagement was made possible as much by the organizational weakness, short-sightedness and unresponsiveness coming from the centre as by bureaucratic bungling, inertia and corruption at a local level.

7

Forced Displacement

In addition to a lack of basic organization and systemic corruption, the Soviet government administered several powerful blows against selected groups of people, which seriously undermined the efforts to combat child displacement. These policies were not directly aimed at children, but the consequences turned out to be devastating for a great number of them. Wishing to preserve public order in the rear, to enhance the fighting spirit at the front and to increase the production capacity of certain industrial sectors, the regime launched large-scale, coercive and, for many people, lethal resettlements of those whom it considered social outcasts, collaborators, real or potential political opponents and ‘suspect nationalities’. In addition, entire communities were relocated against their will to regions in need of the labour force. The rationale for the deportations and resettlements varied but their execution was similar in the majority of cases, resembling the tragic events of peasant deportations of the early 1930s.1 Just as before, the government drew on the principle of collective responsibility, deporting entire families to regions with harsh climates and scarce resources, thereby putting many children at risk of being left homeless and parentless. Besides causing great physical suffering, the resettlements also had a long-term psychological impact. For some children their treatment at the hands of Soviet officials became confirmation of the worst stereotypes harboured by their parents; the injustice visited upon them by their own government compelled others to lose forever any illusions about the widely publicized state care for all children. The first to feel the crushing weight of the Soviet repressive apparatus were residents of the territories acquired in the wake of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation. As the Second World War was beginning to gather momentum in Western Europe, the Soviet government made arrangements to reinforce its newly extended borders and to Sovietize the adjoining lands. This included removing the potential fifth column. In a series of deportations, the Soviets expunged the families of landed gentry, colonists (osadniki), servicemen, well-off farmers, artisans, small traders, state functionaries and anti-Soviet nationalist activists from Eastern Poland and later the Baltic states, Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina.2 Polish and Romanian refugees fleeing the Nazi advance, as well as those who wished to leave the Soviet side but had been refused admission by the Germans, also joined their countrymen in exile. In the meantime, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) was busy cleansing north-western cities and border regions of ‘socially dangerous elements’

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from among Soviet subjects. ‘Citizens of alien nationalities’ (inonatsional’nosti or inopoddannye), among them Russian Finns, Swedes, Greeks and ethnic Germans, also found themselves on the rosters.3 In the course of seventeen months, from February 1940 to June 1941, nearly half a million people from the westernmost border regions were banished into the Soviet hinterland, predominantly to the Far North, Siberia and Kazakhstan.4 Approximately one quarter of these exiles were children below the age of sixteen.5 Once earmarked for deportation, there was little that families could do to evade banishment, since children faced exile on their own, even if one or both parents were missing on the day. At the same time, some youngsters remained behind, because authorities forgot to put them on the list; they had to ask soldiers to be allowed to depart together with their relatives.6 By the same token, families went into exile, and to their deaths, as a result of a bureaucratic mistake. Upon his release from detention in July 1941, a Lithuanian man discovered that his wife and children had been deported to Yakutia because of a surname mix-up. He desperately tried to retract the order but his efforts came to nothing, for all of his family members, apart from a sixteen-year-old daughter, would starve to death by 1943.7 As with the kulaks before them, deportees were quickly rounded up, usually in the middle of the night, given a few hours, or even minutes, to pack their belongings and then driven or marched off to train stations to await departure. If their friends or neighbours attempted to pass them food, they were chased away by guards. The disorientation and anxiety of meeting armed soldiers with eviction orders soon gave way to the misery and acute discomfort of accommodation on board trains. Crammed into dim, airless cattle wagons that allowed just half the official space allocation per person, deportees endured further humiliation in circumstances of ‘enforced intimacy’, performing vital functions such as sleeping, eating and relieving themselves in the company of perfect strangers. As a Polish deportee remarked, ‘pigs [were] transported in better conditions’.8 Most journeys lasted from two to four weeks, during which food and drink were given sporadically, in inadequate quantities and sometimes being of questionable quality.9 ‘The conditions were terrible,’ remembers Andris Alks, who was fourteen at the time of his exile from Latvia. ‘They only gave us one bucket of water a day. We made do with what we’d brought along.’10 Polish children also reported being fed very rarely on board their trains. Lack of water caused dehydration and forced people to neglect their hygiene. Rapidly breeding lice brought with them disease, which many deportees, especially the youngest and the oldest, were unable to resist. Having been rudely turned out of their homes with little food or appropriate clothing for the season and no medical assistance, except what they could find among their fellow deportees, stronger individuals eventually yielded to ailments as well. It was not always possible to offload the bodies of those who died en route, so the corpses would travel together with everyone else until the train stopped to take on water and coal for the locomotive. After seeing their dead or sick parents off the trains, some children had to continue the journey alone.11 Since the overwhelming majority of exiles were destined for rural areas, they would have to wait for prolonged periods of time after disembarking to be transported

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to their settlements. That route could also take hours or days, during which the youngsters risked losing other members of their families and friends. Travelling to Siberia first by train and then by barge down the Ob River, Andris witnessed many children expiring in hot weather; their bodies were then unceremoniously tossed overboard.12 Finally arriving at their destinations, the exiles quickly realized that their tribulations were far from over. Owing to the poor registration and assembly procedures, as well as the widespread practice of arresting men prior to their families’ eviction, or separating them in transit, members of one family could end up in different regions.13 This only added to the agony of uncertainty and made hard, poverty-stricken life in exile even more desperate. Unaccustomed to severe climatic conditions and often encountering hostility from local residents, the deportees also had to deal with housing that was completely unsuitable for living. Hastily refurbished barns, stockyards and peasant banyas, which lacked windows, heating stoves, basic sanitation facilities and sometimes even ceilings, were jam-packed with people, two to three families to a room, presenting ideal conditions for epidemics. Sickness combined with malnutrition claimed more lives, but medical care was rarely available. Women with large families, in particular, struggled to survive amid such extreme deprivation. Rent prices for decent housing were usually beyond their means, while few people agreed to accommodate young children. A shortage of childcare facilities meant that women could not work and thus were unable to sustain themselves and their offspring. Begging became the only means of survival for sickly Anna Motyl’. Unable to find lodging for her thirteen children, one of whom was still an infant, the woman ended up on the streets, with no food or clothing, living off whatever her children brought from their foraging missions. Other mothers found themselves in similar circumstances.14 They bartered their last possessions to obtain food and warm garments. Daina Shmuldere-Gerkis’s mother managed to keep her offspring alive by selling or exchanging items she had brought with her from Latvia. The food she was able to buy in this way had to last for a long time, so the woman ordered her children to sleep in every morning so that they did not ask to eat: ‘When we woke up, she grated three potatoes, suffused them with boiled water and watched that we drank this slowly. We bought dried potato peels from which we made flapjacks and fried them on the sizzling hot surface of the stove. If we could get fish scales, we made some jelly-stock. It seemed liked a royal meal, provided we had managed to obtain some salt and garlic.’ With the start of the war, the deportees saw their measly bread rations being progressively cut, until they stopped receiving them completely. To earn some food Daina hired herself out to delouse other people’s hair. Despite this, she failed to save her mother, who eventually died of starvation, like many others in their settlement.15 Performing odd jobs or taking up full employment was a way for adolescents to contribute to their families’ paltry budgets, especially if adults could not find employment because of the lack of required skills. Many deportees from the Baltics, Eastern Poland and the Leningrad Military District were people of learned professions, unaccustomed to manual work, which made them prone to accidents and negatively affected their productivity. Weakened by hunger and lacking proper

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attire, they also endured workplace discrimination, even outright exploitation, being required to work twice as hard as locals, while receiving twice as little or nothing at all.16 Despite labour laws regulating minors’ working hours and the type of work they were allowed to perform, teenagers as young as thirteen worked in kolkhozes, salt factories, brickworks and stone quarries, where they were often involved in hard physical labour for long hours on a par with adults.17 Deported to Siberia at the age of fourteen, Dalia Grinkevičiūtė described in her memoir how she fainted while carrying heavy sacks of flour, only to be ridiculed by her brigade leader that local twelve-year-olds could do a better job.18 The daily task of the ‘children’s brigade’ in another Lithuanian settlement was to fill 500 bags with salt. It was hard work, and in the words of a thirteen-year-old member of the brigade, they ‘could not make it; there would be only about 200 at the end of the day. Then all of us who were still able to hold a spade would be sent to dig salt.’ As punishment for unfulfilled quotas, the youngsters received lower bread rations.19 If parents or older siblings lost their jobs, became sick or died, children first tried to beg for food, which did not guarantee their survival, as in the case of an eightyear-old Lithuanian. After her entire family succumbed to hunger, the girl wandered around the special settlement (spetsposelok) on Trofimovsk Island in the Laptev Sea, asking neighbours to take her in and promising not to eat much. Several days later, however, the child was found lifeless in her bed. The neighbours themselves were starving; their orphaned children were huddled in a separate barracks to die slowly of neglect. They would scrape snow off the icy windows to eat or venture out of the barracks to rummage through garbage near the supervisors’ homes, risking frostbite. This kind of existence eventually drove two Finnish twelve- and thirteen-year-old residents of the barracks to suicide. Other exiled children did not wait for starvation to consume them and turned instead to stealing food or anything that could be stolen, from wooden planks and aluminium plates to raw dough and frozen fish.20 In search of sustenance, many youngsters essentially led a homeless existence, their scavenging missions taking them far from home. Overstrained mothers were unable to supervise them and very soon began noticing the effects of neglect on their offspring, who, in the women’s own words, ‘no longer resembled children’; ‘they get wild and will grow into regular savages and brigands’.21 Therefore, resettlement was far from the well-organized process envisioned by the authorities. Not only did it have catastrophic consequences for the people involved, but it also turned out to be counterproductive as far as public order was concerned. The attitudes of the deportees to their new circumstances were understandably extremely negative; however, their anti-Soviet utterings could cost them their freedom and make orphans of their children. This is what happened to Andris’s mother, who having been separated from her husband at departure and left with four children to support, began sending proclamations to other Latvians in Siberia, urging them to stay strong and hope for American help. After their mother’s arrest, the children remained alone, weathering out the war years as best they could with neither adult help nor protection.22

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The German invasion of the Soviet Union made life in exile even harder, but, ironically, it also gave hope to some deportees to escape the misery of their settlements. Following the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with the Polish government in exile, on 17 August the Soviets announced an ‘amnesty’ for all Polish citizens interned within the Gulag, and the formation in Central Asia of a Polish armed force under the command of General Władysław Anders. Local authorities were required to furnish released Poles with the appropriate papers, assist them with gaining employment and accommodation (above all women with children), provide them with clothing and organize their transportation to any region of their choice, with the exception of restricted areas.23 For some, the ‘amnesty’ came as a mixed blessing, however: motherless children were abandoned by their fathers leaving for the army; women with infants did not dare to relocate, fearing the long journey ahead of them; unwilling to leave their ailing spouses behind, some parents sent older children on the trip to Central Asia by themselves.24 Since no one knew exactly where the army was being formed, the children, like thousands of their countrymen, tramped around the country, covering hundreds of kilometres in search of recruitment centres. Polish government officials complained that people were ‘forced to wander aimlessly’, camping at railway stations and suffering acute malnutrition, while local authorities did nothing to provide them with travelling subsidies, subsistence allowances and employment.25 In the meantime, death rates were snowballing among the migrating Poles, already weakened from months of hard labour in harsh environments. One boy described his family’s trip south as being ‘awful. People died of hunger in the train cars and their corpses were thrown out the window along the way ... The train would grind the bodies apart on the tracks.’26 During long stopovers, children went to station towns foraging for food, but since no one knew how long the train or boat would wait, there was a good chance that the youngsters would be left behind when their transportation departed unexpectedly. Finding themselves on the streets, the adolescents tried to contact Polish relief workers, who sent numerous petitions to the Soviet leadership, proposing the evacuation of orphans and foundlings to Iran together with the Anders’ Army. Yet the Soviets were reluctant to let the orphans go, claiming that ‘the welfare of the children is assured by the Soviet authorities’. The Poles suspected that in reality their Soviet partners feared the world would discover the sorry state of affairs in state-run residential institutions.27 While waiting to be sent over the border together with the army, a Polish girl stayed with her mother at a children’s home in Uzbekistan. She was shocked to see how run down the place was, where disease, shortage of potable water and malnourishment claimed children’s lives with frightening regularity. The remaining inhabitants of the orphanage finally evacuated in mid-1942, together with almost 20,000 other Polish orphans (against the planned 50,000).28 Among them were children who had taken the initiative to find the army and struck out on their own, eloping from their institutions (thereby risking a stint in a labour educational colony for absconding). Hearing about the ‘amnesty’, Polish

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Figure 7 Polish orphans awaiting evacuation together with the Anders’ Army (courtesy of Getty Images).

orphans wrote dispatches or sent delegates from among themselves to plead on their behalf, either with Polish social workers, who tracked down amnestied deportees and facilitated their linking up with the Anders’ Army, or directly with military units to accept them in the ranks. One such boy was Janusz, who had been evacuated with his summer camp to Udmurtiia soon after the Axis invaded. When his classmates heard of the formation of the Anders’ Army, they petitioned local authorities to let them go, but were refused, because the bureaucrats considered them Soviet citizens.

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The children then chose Janusz to go to Kuibyshev in Novosibirsk oblast to look for the Polish welfare service.29 Those Poles who did not manage to join the army and evacuate were given the opportunity to relocate to regions with better climates (first in 1942 and then in 1944), but the arrangement for their comfortable relocation once more faltered against bureaucratic bungling and inertia made worse by wartime stringencies. Despite clear orders to ensure regular supply of fuel, food and warm clothing, especially for women with children, carriages were again not fit for the transportation of humans, so the resettlers had to relive the traumatic experience of deportation in windowless animal trucks with neither bedding nor toilet facilities. As testified by one deportee, there was so little space in her carriage that people had to sleep in turns. Their journey took three weeks. During that time they received very little food, mostly salty soup made from dried fish, and no water.30 Travelling under adverse conditions inevitably led to fatalities. Thus, during the resettlement from Omsk to Kirovograd oblast, three persons died en route and twenty-four fell behind; twelve children became parentless as a result and had to be taken off the train.31 Just as the Poles were making their way south, another series of forced exoduses were afoot. From August 1941 to March 1942, the entire Russian German population throughout the country (including the blockaded Leningrad, from which Finns and other ‘anti-Soviet element’ were also expelled) was uprooted and moved to take up the Poles’ place in the Far North, Siberia and Central Asia. Over the following two years, several other national groups from Crimea and the North Caucasus as well as diaspora populations from the Black Sea coast and Turkic communities from Georgia also went into involuntary exile. The main cause of deportations was alleged treason, although in the majority of cases these charges were trumped up, based on inflated reports and false allegations. Limited military and economic collaboration indeed occurred among the Crimean national minorities and Kalmyks (just as in other occupied territories of the Soviet Union), and a fairly strong resistance movement was mounted by the indigenous Muslim populations of the North Caucasus, which the Abwehr exploited to their own advantage.32 It is also true that the Russian German population harboured a few Nazi sympathizers, which was certainly not a peculiar characteristic of this particular ethnicity and was mainly the result of the Bolsheviks’ performance in the 1930s.33 Faced with a real or imagined threat to internal security, the Soviet leadership decided to deal with the problem in one sweeping action that was intended simultaneously to preclude the possibility of collaboration with the enemy, to end permanently the resistance by destroying the cultural milieu of the recalcitrant nations and to provide workers to labour-starved industries. Therefore, whereas in the case of ethnic Germans, Finns, Italians, Greeks and the Turkic peoples of Georgia the deportation was pre-emptive, for the peoples of the North Caucasus and the Crimean Tatars it was both punitive and prophylactic. The NKVD endeavoured to remove or otherwise dispose of, sometimes in the cruellest of ways,34 every single person belonging to these nationalities, including orphanage residents and those living outside the areas mainly inhabited by these ethnic

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groups. Men received their discharge orders from the armed forces, their bewilderment and sense of betrayal hardly surprising. Those who were not demobilized immediately joined their relatives in exile after the war. Such a large-scale relocation during a tumultuous time inevitably led to errors. Individuals of non-targeted nationalities also found themselves on board trains and boats, either because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time or because they physically resembled people of the ‘enemy’ nationality and lacked the necessary documentation to prove otherwise.35 Their decision to register as Tatars might have saved Crimean Gypsies from persecution under the German occupation but proved fateful after the return of Soviet power to the region. Around six thousand of them were banished to Uzbekistan together with the people of their adopted nationality. They tried to protest their deportation on these grounds, not realizing that some of their brethren, for instance, from the Volga German Autonomous Republic and Georgia, met a similar fate.36 Altogether, wartime deportations affected sixty-one nationalities and more than two million people, half of whom were children of sixteen years and younger.37 Their national territories were divided between the adjacent districts, homes taken over by new settlers from other parts of the country, including resettled Poles,38 toponyms changed and cultural heritage destroyed so as to erase any memory of the deported. The available documentary evidence suggests that the journey into the Soviet hinterland was less messy and lethal for the Russian Germans than for the other deportees, although this might have been at least partially owing to sloppy recordkeeping.39 As before, the specific instructions regarding the transportation of, and provision for, the deportees en route were not universally adhered to. Some railway officials made efforts to supply the deportees with hot meals along the way,40 while others did not even provide hot water. A December 1941 report from Pavlodar oblast mentioned that Russian Germans were in transit for two to three months, during which time they did not wash and ate so little that their bellies swelled from hunger.41 Germans from the Caucasus remember being put on boats to sail across the Caspian Sea to their new places of settlement. Instead of several days, their journey lasted for months, as they were dragged back and forth, rapidly succumbing to mass starvation. One woman lost both of her sons to hunger during such a voyage. Their bodies were tossed overboard, even though the elder, who was seven at the time, had begged her not to allow that, promising to take care of her when he grew up.42 Having heard of the privations encountered by the fellow Germans, one woman decided to send her children to live with their paternal grandparents in exile, without waiting for deportation orders, which was a risky undertaking in itself, since the youngsters could have got lost on the way.43 Those deportees who travelled in summertime reportedly fared better than those exiled in winter, although the incidence of disease and mortality was still very high.44 Families of servicemen in general received more lenient treatment; sometimes guards even helped them pack, which would later prove the difference between life and death. Servicemen still on front line duty could petition to release their relatives from exile or improve their circumstances. Such requests were occasionally satisfied, although the families were not allowed to return to their former places of residence.45 The most privileged treatment was afforded to party activists and NKVD employees, as well as

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spiritual leaders who had agreed to cooperate. They had more time to prepare, could bring extra luggage with them, travelled in unguarded carriages and even chose their places of settlement.46 For the rest of the deportees, no matter how testing their journey had been, the real hardships began upon arrival. In a horrific repeat of the previous deportations, the government was once again unable to provide adequate housing, employment and a steady supply of food, even though the deported communities were entitled to compensation for their abandoned livestock and grain.47 As before, central plans to settle the exiles in a quick and efficient manner collapsed under the weight of sheer unpreparedness and competing priorities at the local level. Wartime shortages, bad harvests and the inherent impoverishment of the localities taking on the deportees certainly hindered the resettlement process. First, the special settlers, as they were now called, had to face the local populations, who suddenly found themselves living side by side and competing for scarce resources with those whom their government considered enemies. Existing prejudice and stereotypes about strangers received further encouragement from state propaganda, which whipped up hysteria about the deportees’ alleged crimes. V. Kruglov, who was fourteen at the time and living in Tashkent oblast, describes how his outraged townsmen prepared to meet the first echelon with exiles from Crimea: ‘At the train station, in the food queues, in the streets, at factories and in schools there was much talk: “The Crimean Tatars are coming, those damned quislings, we’ll welcome them right and proper. We’ll show them what happens to traitors to the Motherland and murderers.” In short, everyone did his best to get ready. Some armed themselves with rifles, others with axes, clubs and metal rods. And, we, the lads, stockpiled rocks.’ However, when the much-awaited train pulled in and the locals prepared to storm the carriages, they were taken aback by what they witnessed: It’s impossible to describe what came before us. I can’t forget it to this day! Those eyes, those faces, those living corpses, staring at us ... We felt deeply ashamed of ourselves. People peeked inside the wagons, searching for ‘traitors’. They were looking for men, but there weren’t any. Among these living corpses, there was not a single man of draft age, only graybeards, women and children. We began moving sideways away from the train, hiding the ‘weapons’ behind our backs and throwing them over a concrete wall. Having disarmed in this way, we returned to the carriages. For us, the home front folk, who had never seen war up close, this was a truly dreadful spectacle ... People lay on the floor, barely moving. Propping themselves up, they asked for water ... I can’t remember how long our befuddlement lasted, but suddenly a common gasp escaped the bellicose onlookers. People on the platform began to bustle around. Several ran someplace, others struck up conversations: ‘Where are you from? Who did this to you and why? Where are your menfolk?’ ... Being hungry themselves, people shared their bread and water.48

Such compassion was not an individual occurrence. In some other kolkhozes the arriving special settlers received grain, fuel and horses at the bidding of public assemblies.49

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The deportees’ ethnicity and religion could fatefully affect their relationship with the natives, who were more eager to apply generalizations to certain ethnic groups while gradually accepting others. Polish and ethnic German exiles were eventually recognized as ‘hardworking’, ‘cultured’ and ‘honest’ people, whereas Gypsies and Chechens rarely managed to shake off the stigma of being ‘backward’, ‘wild’, ‘lazy’ and ‘criminal’. They often became the victims of racist taunts and physical assaults.50 Virulent prejudice was especially peculiar to local children, who waged wars of their own against ‘fascists’ and ‘traitors’. Even some teachers failed to rise above their biases, rendering the already difficult adjustment to new schools, with unfamiliar cultural and linguistic environments, an even more painful process.51 The central authorities’ opposition to the deportees being taught in their native languages, the abject poverty suffered by the special settlers who could not always afford clothing and footwear for their offspring, as well as some parents’ fervent resistance to their children attending Soviet schools, negatively affected enrolment and contributed to child neglect.52 The aloofness of the exiles, whether intentional or not, could hardly endear them to the natives, who readily believed the wildest rumours spread about the newcomers. For instance, the Kalmyks’ reputation of being savage cannibals preceded them on their journey across Siberia. On several occasions the locals’ gullibility turned fatal for the Kalmyks, when their barracks were boarded up at night and set on fire. In other villages old people guarded their houses with firearms and axes for the first few months after the arrival of the exiles. Even those who had been banished there before the Kalmyks believed the stories. One deportee recalled his bewilderment at the behaviour of a Russian German girl at his school, who would give him a wide berth whenever she saw him. Later, she admitted that she had been afraid of being eaten. Some parents were so anxious that they would not at first let their children attend school together with Kalmyk youngsters.53 The extreme need spurred some deportees to crime, which, naturally, did nothing for the establishment of cordial relationships with the locals. Unable to find jobs because of their language impairment or discrimination on the part of employers, Kalmyk herdsmen used their skill with animals to steal kolkhoz livestock for food. Since only one person would normally be arrested for the crime, the weakest or the oldest members of the exiled community, who did not hope to survive, would take the blame, making sure their children or grandchildren would be looked after in their absence.54 Sometimes it was the children themselves who provided for their families through stealing. A group of Kalmyk boys exiled to Novosibirsk oblast chose a rather dangerous way to earn a living by climbing onto moving freight trains that were carrying coal. ‘We were lucky if it was just an open flatcar,’ remembers one of the accomplices. ‘A wagon was worse – too high. You either fling large chunks overboard or collect coal into sacks and toss those out. Then you assemble and hide [the plunder], and later take it to those who need it. We knew who was safe. They paid us money, sometimes gave us food. That’s how we made a shift.’ Child deportees from state boarding institutions were not much better off where food was concerned, spending most of the time searching for it. As one later recalled, hunger was the most vivid memory of the first winter in exile:

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I don’t know what the rationale behind our rations was. They were just too scant. Occasionally we managed to acquire some dog food. Not far away from our boarding school, there lived a Tatar musher. We noticed that after his expeditions he fed his dogs really well with big chunks of fish. Having figured out his schedule, we would hide in the evenings near his house. As soon as he doled out the food and left, we would jump out of our hiding place, drive away the dogs with sticks and having taken a part of their meal would quickly return to school ... The fatty fish was very nutritious, shame we had to steal it.55

Conflicts between special settlers and the natives also arose over accommodation. The newcomers were usually squeezed into the houses of the villagers, without the latter’s consent, or billeted in barns and outbuildings hastily adopted for human habitation. Some special settlers had to construct their own makeshift shelters from whatever material they found at hand. After spending eighteen days on the road, a tattered group of Crimean Tatars found themselves in a mountainous area of Uzbekistan to discover nothing there but bare dirt and rock. The Tatars dug out ‘something resembling trenches’, where they lived until eventually the kolkhoz administration supplied each ‘household’ with five wooded slabs that served as rooftops. A bunch of reeds offered protection from the elements for another family of fellow sufferers who had been settled in a roofless shack on the steppe. With their father gone, the children were terrified of the jackals that came sniffing around at night.56 One village in Siberia sprouted a shantytown, which quickly acquired the nickname ‘Kalmyk ASSR’. It consisted of damp dugouts, each housing several families who would stay there for many years to come.57 This kind of subterranean communal existence had already been the reality for a number of Russian German families in another Siberian village. With their mothers unable to work owing to the lack of clothing and getting nothing but 200 grams of bread per day as a result, the children took turns to wrap themselves in whatever rags they could salvage and went begging for food.58 In some other places the sick and the healthy were forced to live side by side in overcrowded dugouts or barracks, where even finding a place to sleep or eat became a challenge.59 Seeing that even their established workers had to endure squalid and crammed living conditions, many enterprises simply refused to accept newcomers or did not bother to meet their needs, claiming that this was the responsibility of those who sent them there in the first place.60 The NKVD became convinced that in the majority of cases, local administrators deliberately created difficulties for special settlers.61 Much of what the centre promised never materialized, either because the responsible commissariats failed to supply the goods or because local officials misappropriated the funds for personal enrichment or for local projects.62 Moreover, not only did the district leadership often know of these abuses, they sometimes participated in the embezzlement of funds and material earmarked for exiles. With their salaries and rations frequently in arrears, state-supplied warm clothing never reaching, or quickly disappearing from, depots, and the allotted grain going straight back to central coffers to fulfil state quotas, special settlers suffered serious privation.63 Approximately one quarter of them died in the first three years of exile,

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Figure 8 Makeshift dwellings of Lithuanian exiles. Some deportees continued to live in such conditions well into the 1950s. (Courtesy of LGGRTC.)

leaving a string of orphans behind, whom the state now had to take care of, but in many instances did so only nominally.64 According to official records, from March 1944 to January 1946 the Department of Special Settlements identified and put up 2,941 homeless children.65 The majority

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of them were taken in by relatives; the rest went to detdoma or, more likely, ended up under the patronage of collective farms, which usually meant being left to their own devices, with very little sustenance and, often, no shelter. Many memoirists talk about being completely abandoned after the death of their parents. Acute hunger drove a teenage deportee of Greek descent to the neighbouring miners’ barracks, where the child ‘would stand with tears in my eyes and an outstretched hand asking for a piece of bread’ for the youngster’s sick mother. The woman died in 1943, but the child stayed in their cold and damp hut for the remainder of the war. To earn a living, the youthful deportee babysat other people’s children and ran errands for neighbours. Only with the arrival of a new commandant was the teenager sent to a receiver-distribution centre (DPR) and then to an orphanage.66 This story rang true with another orphan from Kalmykiia, who describes how he and his siblings were reduced to begging and performing various chores for other people, some of whom did not take kindly to the ragamuffins. Their coexistence with the locals ended tragically when a group of boys set a pack of dogs on one of the orphans, resulting in the girl’s death.67 NKVD inspectors uncovered other cases of the ‘heartless and disdainful attitude of the kolkhoz leadership’ towards their wards. For instance, at the ‘2-aia Piatiletka’ collective farm the young orphans of the Chechen Khairbekov family, aged five to eight, were ‘literally thrown to the arbitrariness of fate’. Not receiving any assistance from their appointed benefactor, they would search through dry cattle dung for undigested wheat to eat.68 In early 1945, 116 identified homeless child deportees in Mariiskaiia ASSR received no rations except for 200 grams of bread a day. The NKVD insisted that the children should be transferred to orphanages, but the shortage of places therein and the idleness of local administrators meant that the process took too long. To illustrate, 114 children who had lost their parents on the way to Sverdlovsk oblast from Crimea were still waiting for a placement half a year after their arrival.69 In the late summer of 1945, the head of the Kazakh evacuation department implored the Council of People’s Commissars (SNK) to save 300 homeless child deportees from the North Caucasus in Kokchetavsk oblast. He pointed out that regional party, executive and educational committees completely ignored the children, who were at risk of not making it through the coming autumn chills. The SNK ordered that their Kazakh colleagues place the youngsters in existing boarding institutions and, if required, organize new ones.70 Nevertheless, such concern for the deportees was not something that the central leadership exhibited readily or regularly. Requests for funding to provide food and shelter to special settlers in Kirgizia and Kazakhstan were flatly rejected on several occasions.71 In the meantime, hunger and parental incapacitation drove the children of deportees to the streets. Between 30 and 40 per cent of all the youngsters processed through the Kazakh DPR system in the two final years of the war were the children of special settlers. DPR administrators particularly noted their undernourished state. The majority of them suffered from dystrophy, chronic vitamin deficiency and mycosis. There were also among them those youngsters who deliberately left their homes in order to escape the stigma of a special settler.72 The unlucky ones ended up in children’s colonies, either for wandering, begging or committing more serious crimes. In 1944, at the end of the deportation of the Chechen and Ingush peoples, 1,268 children of those nationalities had been institutionalized in Kazakh juvenile reformatories.73

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Even those children who were taken in by their relatives did not always turn out better than their unaccompanied counterparts. One seven-year-old Kalmyk boy had been visiting his uncle when the deportation orders arrived. He went into exile together with his cousins. On the train, the uncle robbed the boy of felt boots for his daughter’s benefit. Hungry, frostbitten and forgotten by everyone, the boy made it to Tyumen. During disembarkation ‘people trampled all over him and insulted him, while all he did was whimper pitifully’. Another girl, whose mother died en route, ended up with a distant relative, who exploited her for very little food and often knocked her around. Unable to endure such torments, the girl escaped. She lived in the woods, running out to the roadside in the hope of earning a few morsels from passers-by. With the onset of cold weather, she drifted towards villages, but avoided people, who were unsettled by her grimy, sickly appearance. One day, jeering village youths set the girl racing along the main street, but two Kalmyk women managed to rescue her, gave her a good scrubbing and dressed her in old but clean rags. In return for their kind treatment, the girl babysat the women’s young children, until her brother returned from the front and took her in.74 Parents did not have to be dead or driven to total debility for the children to find themselves entirely on their own. Mass mobilization of men aged fifteen to fifty-five and women aged sixteen to forty-five into the so-called ‘Labour Army’ led to the further breakdown of family structures in the deported communities, and the rapid growth of child homelessness in the regions affected by the draft.75 Formed into labour columns, the conscripts were dispatched to remote areas, far away from their families’ places of settlement. Pregnant women and those with children younger than three usually received temporary exemptions from mobilization; those who had older children, however, were to entrust them to relatives or kolkhozes before departure. Left to fend for themselves, the youngsters suffered great hardship. For instance, having been ‘orphaned’ by the state when it conscripted both their parents into the ‘Labour Army’, the three children of the Russian German Ebergard family attempted to obtain admission to a detdom but were unsuccessful. As a result, two younger children died of malnutrition and neglect.76 In Sverdlovsk oblast approximately 53,000 women were drafted, leaving behind 6,436 children, 45 per cent of whom became orphans and were transferred into state care.77 Witnessing such suffering, some NKVD officers carefully suggested that the mothers should be reunited with their offspring.78 The traumatic experience did little for the morale of the conscripts, who had already heard of the murderous conditions in labour battalions.79 Since the death rates among labour army members (trudarmeitsy) were exceptionally high, there was a good chance that the children would never see their parents again.80 One child deportee of German descent, whose mother was mobilized as soon as her two-yearold expired from hunger, recounts a heartbreaking scene of women in his village being taken away from their children: ‘I can still hear [their] frightful wailing, as they were dispatched. The women writhed in hysterics, jumped off the horse carts and ran to their children. Eventually they were tied up to the carts. All around, other villagers stood, seeing them off and calming them down.’ The five-year-old never saw

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his mother again. He first lived at an orphanage, then with his maternal aunt, until the woman was mobilized into agriculture and the child found himself completely alone once more. When he turned ten in 1948, he managed to rejoin his father, who had been assigned to a labour battalion in Perm Krai. On his journey, the boy met many youngsters like him, who also wandered across the regions of deportation in search of relatives.81 By then, the NKVD had been dealing with itinerant special settlers for some time. Throughout the war, they tried to reunite thousands of families separated during the initial stages of deportation, but the process was too slow as a result of the absence of a general cataloguing system, the scattered nature of special settlements and the unauthorized absence of deportees who had gone looking for their families without permission.82 Trudarmeitsy were not the only victims of the Soviet state’s thoughtless consumption of human resources. In its attempt to settle and develop remote regions of the country, the government uprooted entire collective farms. This was done without consideration for the people’s wishes, interests or professional skills, and instead was presented as a voluntary relocation initiated by the patriotic farmers themselves. In reality, the latter viewed their forced displacement as deportation that resulted in the utter degradation of their communities. During their resettlement from 1942 to 1945, more than five thousand Yakut cattle breeders from the Churapchinsky district in the south were moved to the mouth of the Lena River in the north. With their menfolk serving at the front, the majority of resettlers were women and children, who would have to man the nascent fishing industry.83 Not only were they unaccustomed to the much harsher climate and completely untrained for the job, they also could not take their domestic animals with them, apart from the cattle that pulled the carts. As a consequence of the shortage of mechanized transportation, the first wave of resettlers had to march long distances to the shores of the Lena River to be taken downstream. Burdened with luggage, sick relatives and small children, not every family made it to the barges in one piece. The boats did not arrive in time, so the farmers had to linger for weeks in open-air camps in cold, damp weather. Their food provision quickly running out, they began slaughtering the livestock that had brought them there, despite warnings of a cattle epidemic. As witnessed by a seven-year-old who was resettled with his mother and older sister, some people did not survive the wait; many more died on the boats, but the biggest tragedy struck when the resettlers came ashore: It was October already when we finally anchored, so winter was closing in. We were unloaded onto the bare banks of the Lena, just before Cape Bykov on the Laptev Sea ... There was no shelter! Nobody was expecting us; we didn’t even have fishnets. After a long journey, the weakest, the old and the very young, perished. So our housewarming started with a funeral. Whoever still had strength, began building lodgings. Lucky, people had packed saws and axes ... Each yurta had four families in it ... Winter frosts came. People began dying from hunger. The entire fish yield had to go to the state. If you didn’t fulfil your quota, you didn’t get any flour ... Eventually only very few could work; they had exceedingly high norms.

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Soviet Street Children and the Second World War People were just lying around; they couldn’t move from hunger. Everything that was made of leather was eaten ... Hunger is a test enough, wherever one lives, but freezing ocean winds or prolonged blizzards make it much worse.

The boy’s mother and sister died within hours of each other. Because of severe emaciation, the child was fostered out to a hunter and his elderly mother, together with two more Yakut orphans. Having spent a winter ‘fattening up’, the children were later dispatched back to Churapcha, which now had three orphanages. Allegedly, almost half of his neighbours did not make it through the first winter in the north.84 Throughout the war, but especially as the Red Army pushed the Wehrmacht forces back, the exiled and mobilized contingents were regularly replenished with fresh labourers from among the families of so-called deserters, collaborators and nationalist guerrillas. Desertion was a loose concept in the wartime Soviet Union. It covered a range of offences from unauthorized absence from the defence industry to cowardice on the battlefield, to capture by enemy forces, to being missing in action. As of June 1941, the immediate ‘adult family members’ of deserting officers and those convicted of treason were subject to arrest and exile to remote regions of the country for a period of up to five years, unless they had other close relatives who continued to serve valiantly in the armed forces. As the Red Army bled white in the first two years of the war, the state targeted the families of ‘deserters’, arresting some and depriving others of state allowances, which in times of acute scarcity could mean serious consequences for family members.85 To avoid being stigmatized and left without rations, some preferred not to volunteer any information about their missing sons and husbands. Equally, many disgraced servicemen agreed to serve in penal battalions in order to ensure their families would continue to receive ration cards and stipends, albeit much reduced.86 Not all the relatives of ‘defecting’ servicemen were punished. First, generally only officer families were slated for deportation. Second, almost six million Soviet soldiers found themselves in German captivity during the war; tracking their whereabouts in the majority of cases was logistically impossible. Third, senior officers did not always know the names of the men under their command, since they had gone into battle before being placed on the muster roll. Fourth, the swift advance of the enemy also meant that many relatives had by then found themselves in occupied territories and could not so easily be extracted. Finally, state decrees and individual declarations by front commanders (such as the ones by Georgiy Zhukov and the head of the political administration of the Baltic Fleet, threatening family members of ‘deserters’ with execution) were issued to re-instil discipline and to ensure steadfastness of the troops rather than as purely repressive measures. As one recent study shows, they served as an effective deterrent for the servicemen contemplating a defection, but were later retracted as illegal.87 Similarly, even though the Stalinist regime treated anyone who had been in the occupied territories as potential enemy agents, the majority of those sentenced for treason were military collaborators, petty traders or non-party functionaries. Protectionism within the party ranks and the shortage of qualified personnel to replace higher ranking employees ensured that party members were treated

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less harshly, at least until the dust of war had settled.88 Nevertheless, according to the incomplete statistics, in the two year period from 1944 to 1945, 8,974 family members of those sentenced for treason were exiled to the Soviet hinterland. The first to suffer prosecution were officer families, because their situation appeared more or less straightforward to the investigating organs. Even then, the initial lack of guidelines regarding who should be prosecuted and what punishment to impose created confusion and allowed for arbitrary interpretation of the decrees, especially at an initial stage. Sloppy evidence collection and procedural violations meant that people could be sent into exile on the basis of a document that had no judicial power.89 Already in early 1942, telegrams from local officers began arriving at the central authorities, seeking advice on what to do with the family members of those who had left with the retreating enemy or had been sentenced to death. The reply arrived swiftly: ‘indiscriminate accusation’ of collaboration should not be allowed; the relatives of those who had left or worked for the occupying civilian authorities were simply to be placed under surveillance, if the accused could prove their connection to the Soviet resistance or had worked in their professional capacity as doctors or teachers. On the other hand, the families of those who had received death penalties and against whom there was clear evidence of collaborating activity were to be banished, unless the sentences were commuted or delivered in absentia (this latter stipulation was a reversal of the original order).90 While the investigation and the court proceedings lasted, the wives of collaborators would normally be detained as well, their children, presumably, staying with relations or on their own.91 Although the decrees only mentioned the adult relatives of ‘traitors’, collective family guilt extended to their children as well. When a parent was convicted, the youngsters either went into exile with everybody else or remained behind, deprived of parental supervision.92 The children clearly chose the former (or were spoken for by their elders), because on 27 July 1942 the NKVD released a special directive issuing a detailed procedure relating to the transportation of exiles. Once the NKVD special section allowed youngsters to depart with their families, the guards received instructions to keep the underage with adult relatives at all times and to prevent their contact with common convicts. Before departure and during transportation, the children could be detained along with their kin in jails or transit points.93 A large number of civilian collaborators came from the national minorities populating the Black Sea coast, such as Armenians, Greeks and Bulgarians. Accused of engaging in light industry and trade in support of the local Nazi economy, they were, however, deported as a group on the basis of a government directive, not a court decision.94 Another cohort that suffered collective blame for their ethnicity were the Volksdeutsche, who had enjoyed preferential treatment during the occupation but for various reasons failed to evacuate together with the retreating Germans. As soon as the liberation of Ukraine commenced in December 1943, Beria sought Stalin’s advice regarding what to do about the ‘traitors’. He proposed to refer active collaborators to military tribunals and to dispatch the rest to the Altai Krai. Characteristically, Stalin ordered them all to be sent to labour camps, so from 1944 to 1945, 2,990 Ukrainian Volksdeutsche went to Siberia.95 It is unknown how many minors were among them, but the Soviet leadership appeared eager to erase any

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trace of the German presence in the liberated regions, even when this was done to the detriment of the state child welfare programme. From 1942 onwards the NKVD was preoccupied with the fate of children fathered by German servicemen and civil administrators. Three years later, possibly influenced by similar persecution campaigns in the liberated Europe, the Deputy Commissar of External Affairs, Ivan Maisky, claimed that there were thousands of such ‘little Germans’, and that they should be separated from their mothers for their own benefit. In his April 1945 letter to Stalin and several other senior officials, the deputy commissar mused that if the children stayed with their families, they would be tarnished for life, society would never accept them and that there was a good chance of them eventually growing up into criminals. Hence, he proposed to institutionalize such children and change their names so that even orphanage personnel would not know their origin. In Maisky’s view, this would be the proper punishment for the promiscuous mothers (the question of consent was never raised) and would save the ‘little Germans’ from themselves. A group of deputies of the Supreme Soviet ardently supported the initiative. It is unknown whether the leadership ever followed up on the proposal, but several historians claim that some women were indeed persecuted, and the children sometimes murdered; some changed their identities and moved away in the hope of starting with a clean slate elsewhere, while others gave up their children voluntarily.96 If this was indeed the case, an additional number of youngsters who did not have an immediate need for state care ended up in already overcrowded detdoma, placing an even greater strain on overstretched resources. Yet the state continued to supply potential claimants to public funds. As part of its plan to ensure order in the rear of the advancing Red Army and to re-establish Soviet power in the westernmost regions, acquired as a result of the European campaigns of 1939–40, the regime launched a series of ‘clean-up’ operations against anti-Soviet insurgents and their civilian sympathizers. The threat to the Soviet regime was very real in these regions, and therefore hostage taking would become a central strategy for the pacification of the borderlands, preventing attacks on Soviet administrators, teachers and doctors as well as communication lines. Active insurgents who refused to give themselves up would be hunted down and executed, while their family members, as well as those villagers that gave them shelter and provision, would be banished to the Union’s eastern provinces, with all their property, except for the bare minimum, confiscated.97 In the context of vicious inter-ethnic strife, and mounting casualties among the civilian population, particularly in Western Ukraine, retribution for the guerrillas’ victims was used as justification for exile. Moreover, in order to pave the way for a swift collectivization of the regions, the state exiled the potential opposition, especially wealthy farmers and high-ranking civil servants, whose deportations in the Baltics, for instance, far exceeded the deportation of the insurgents’ relatives.98 In preparation for the banishment, the authorities made sure to retain at least some pretence of legality; they even gave the guerrillas a chance to surrender in order to avoid repressions against their families.99 Nevertheless, instances of abuse and improper collection of evidence, either as a result of carelessness or in pursuit of quota fulfilment, were also common. Whereas in the case of collaborators and traitors it was only their close relatives who suffered repression, anti-Soviet insurgents sometimes saw their entire clans uprooted, including non-blood relations

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or those who had no connection to the resistance movement. Similarly, unlike the traitors’ families, the relatives of insurgents received little protection from their kin serving in the Red Army. Indeed, there were many war invalids and decorated veterans among those departing for Siberia, until the NKVD issued an instruction in the summer of 1944 putting a stop to this practice.100 When it came to the underage children of insurgents and sympathizers, unlike their counterparts whose parents were accused of treason, the youngsters did not need to obtain a special permission to follow their parents into exile, since they were included in the eviction lists from the start. As with all the other deportations, the exiles’ trek eastwards quickly deteriorated into a nightmare, which the NKVD attempted to rectify but with little success.101 Given the special settlers’ experience of exile, it is doubtful this group fared any differently. They faced similar problems with adaptation, had to perform hard labour, in which adolescents were also involved, and to endure acute poverty. If anything, official directives advocated harsher treatment of settlers from the western borderlands than for ethnic communities from the Soviet hinterland.102

Figure 9 A child deportee marking wood in 1955 (courtesy of LGGRTC).

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Senior officers and politicians again saw the problem with their provincial cadres and enterprise administrators, who failed to create ‘normal living conditions’ for the exiles and resettlers under their command. However, the administrators were themselves struggling to meet exceedingly ambitious production plans and could not always provide for the newcomers amid severe shortages and frequent disruption of supplies. Moreover, there was little coordination between the actual enterprises and the commissariats that distributed the ‘special’ and mobilized contingents. Some factories, for instance, were desperate for workers; others did not know what to do with new arrivals, especially since the majority of them were helpless women and children who were useless from the production point of view. Enterprise directors responded to this with exasperation: ‘Give us real workers, not some dead souls.’103 There was also significant opposition from local managers and party bosses to the mobilization into the ‘Labour Army’. They reasoned that by plucking specialists from their work places, the government hurt local production, especially considering that the conscripts were sometimes not even needed where they were sent.104 Therefore, the consumerist attitude to the workforce, either free or ‘unfree’, was characteristic of all the Stalinist government echelons; above all, the central leadership, who had ordered the forced migrations in the first place. Not only did the country’s leaders become used to solving economic and political problems by coercive means, but they also knew from rich experience of previous campaigns that ‘they certainly would be unable to enforce their directives regarding the settlement of deportees during the war if they could not do so even in peacetime’.105 Even setting aside the morality of collective punishment, the responsibility lay with the people who deported millions to regions manifestly known to be lacking sufficient food supplies, shelter and other necessities. This does not mean that all receiving enterprises and localities lacked resources. Memoirists speak of food supplies rotting away in storehouses, while forced migrants were starving. Official reports yield plenty of examples where provisions miraculously appeared and were promptly distributed among the needy after local administrators and regional executives received a dressing down from their superiors.106 By neglecting their involuntary workforce, they broke the unspoken rule – squeeze the exiles, provide only the bare minimum to survive, but if anything goes wrong, you will take the blame:107 the rule that conveniently absolved the higher-ups from any responsibility. Instead of putting in place a strict system of checks to ensure provisions reached their intended recipients, the senior leadership preferred to refuse any appeals for help from their regional colleagues, suspecting them of dishonesty. Thus, in February 1945 the deputy NKVD chief, Vasylii Chernyshov, wrote on the margins of a report from Kazakhstan that the situation in the republic was still ‘unfavourable’ owing to the ‘anti-state practice of asking for charity (podachki) from the state, when in reality it is all used to secure more resources, while denying them to special settlers’. Chernyshov proposed to prosecute violations.108 Yet, even then, the practice of mutual cover-up and backscratching that permeated the system ensured that, in many cases, the punishments would not be severe enough to serve as a deterrent, thereby allowing multiple acts of injustice, discrimination and repression.109

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In the case of the deportees, the abuse was also made possible by the government’s relentless campaign to represent them all as enemies. Instead of differentiating between the innocent and the guilty, especially in such a sensitive period as wartime, the central leadership chose to stigmatize every single representative of the exiled ethnic groups, making it more difficult for them to assimilate and much easier for local authorities to abuse them with impunity. The children of forced migrants became the unintended victims of social and ethnic profiling. Their appearance on the street created serious problems for the system that had put them there in the first place, the system that proved unfailingly inattentive to the consequences of its own actions.

8

Making Labourers into Criminals

Another government programme that marginalized adolescents, consigning them to the category of ‘indentured’ workforce (to use Donald Filtzer’s term), was compulsory labour mobilization and the criminalization of labour violations. The regime’s main method of optimizing the productive capacity of the population was the attachment of workers to their enterprises, a policy that became even more urgent during wartime. After a series of measures that had failed to keep workers in place, the government issued an edict on 26 June 1940 that criminalized absenteeism and unauthorized changing of jobs. Three months later, the State Labour Reserve was established to replace young workers drafted into the army under the Law on Universal Conscription and to supply the most unpopular industries, such as construction, mining and metallurgy, with qualified specialists.1 Adolescents aged fourteen to seventeen became the primary targets of these policies. They were channelled into factories, railway depots, quaysides and mines through a network of so-called labour reserve trade schools. Alongside the industrial training schools (FZOs), which conscripted predominantly rural teenagers aged sixteen to seventeen and offered a six-month course in ‘mass professions’, there existed a number of more privileged vocational training (RU) and railway colleges for fourteen- to fifteen-year-olds. They offered a two-year period of instruction and higher educational standards. Although the state claimed to have taken full responsibility for the upkeep and protection of the rights of working juveniles, the schools, especially FZOs, became legendary for their appalling conditions almost immediately. By the time they were launched in October, neither the Commissariat of Trade nor the enterprises mentoring the schools were ready to supply trainees with food, housing or training equipment. In addition, the sending parties (such as kolkhozes and detdoma) failed to provide the conscripts with warm clothing. Consequently, the trainees could not attend classes or practical courses on the factory floor. In some places it seemed that such mistreatment of students was deliberate: canteens were situated miles away from workshops, where the amount and quality of food were lower than the centrally established norm; overstocked depots refused to give up warm clothes, even though in some places the temperature in dormitories plummeted to 8°C; students’ stipends were allocated arbitrarily and usually did not even meet the minimum necessary for survival.2 Moreover, students were not always trained for the professions they had been recruited to study. Thus, an FZO in Leningrad oblast made its pupils do anything but learn a new trade. Their curriculum included unloading freight trains

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and burning wood. At the same time, the supervising construction company allocated the most difficult jobs to them, which deviated from the curriculum and was not written into the contract. The boys did not receive appropriate equipment, nor was their work remunerated. As a result, the school did not have sufficient funds to pay stipends or to carry out repairs to its dilapidated buildings. Poverty and injustice led to problems with discipline and truancy. Because of poor instruction, a group of pupils at another school in the oblast found themselves on the verge of revolt. They spoke openly about running away and wrote protest letters to the administration of labour reserves in Moscow.3 Shortages and neglect were particularly endemic in newly organized trade schools, but abuse suffered by trainees and young workers had been widespread in established enterprises and institutions even before the Labour Reserves came into existence, especially in the mining industry. The labour regulations prohibited the employment of minors below the age of sixteen, set the working day at four hours, made overtime and night work illegal for those aged under eighteen, and provided for compulsory annual medical examinations.4 Even so, throughout the 1930s, inexperienced and often physically unfit teenage apprentices were regularly engaged in heavy underground work, stayed in the mines for longer than seven hours, did not receive their wages on time and worked night shifts, which sometimes led to serious accidents. Forcing adolescents to work double shifts or at weekends as punishment for truancy reportedly became the norm in some areas; as did the failure of management to provide trainees with equipment, work clothes and bedding.5 When they carried out inspections in November–December 1940, government officials uncovered an ‘anti-state tendency’ among trade schools that recruited children younger than the legally stipulated ages of fourteen for RUs and sixteen for FZOs. Once enrolled, the teenagers were neither consulted about their professional ambitions nor tested for their physical ability to perform certain tasks. Moreover, the generally low quality of training hampered their academic growth and moral development, made worse by unruly high school rejects recruited en masse after the promulgation of the law on labour reserves and the simultaneous introduction of fees in upper grades.6 Schools were therefore plagued by a high student turnover, especially in the FZOs, where abysmal living conditions, coupled with a six-month crash course in professions they did not want to learn, failed to impress new recruits. For instance, by mid-June 1941, Leningrad oblast was able to recruit 5,681 youngsters, only 1,025 of whom enrolled voluntarily.7 The number of runaways in some schools constituted a large percentage of total admissions. Even where a school’s material base was satisfactory, students fled in search of better pay or a better job, having been persuaded by friends who had already managed to settle elsewhere.8 As the press gang conscription intensified, student turnover in trade schools reached threatening proportions. To stave off the haemorrhage of the student body, the government issued another edict on 28 December 1940, subjecting the undisciplined apprentices to one year’s imprisonment in labour colonies for minors. Their counterparts, employed in industry, had already experienced the full weight of judicial action since the 26 June 1940 edict, which accounted for more

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than two-thirds of all criminal convictions in 1940.9 Now thousands of trade school students were also caught in this prosecution mayhem. According to a secret report forwarded to the General Prosecutor, V.M. Bochkov, on 8 May 1941, 4,206 trainees appeared in court within four months of the enactment of the December edict; 3,028 teenagers were prosecuted for ‘desertion’ and 1,178 for ‘systematic breach of discipline’. Additionally, state prosecutors investigated a further 350 indictments, though they had already dismissed 415 cases. The report also mentioned a disturbing tendency among judges to deliver the highest penalty allowed by law. Thus, of 2,131 convicted minors, 1,407 were sent to labour colonies for more than six months.10 As a certain reduction in labour law infractions became evident in the first months of 1941, it seemed that the government could congratulate itself on the effect of the new legislation, but more careful observers spoke of the possibility of ‘artificial lowering of the number of violations and the creation of an imaginary picture of wellbeing’. Some headmasters reportedly engaged in ‘number-hunting’ (pogonia za tsiframi) as they deliberately failed to notify local prosecutors about desertions, while others allowed careless record-keeping.11 There were also those who, not wishing to pursue legal action against teenage truants, simply concealed the real state of affairs. Instead of reporting them, the directors ‘scar[ed] [the apprentices] with prosecutors’ and carried out explanatory discussions with the pupils, including those who had already fled, by way of writing letters or sending their plenipotentiaries to persuade the runaways to return. Such tactics achieved mixed results: a few ‘deserters’ indeed came back; others preferred a short spell in jail to years of privation and job dissatisfaction.12 The invasion prompted a toughening of legislation. On 22 June 1941, the government declared an emergency labour draft. Four days later it abolished holidays, increased the number of working days and introduced compulsory overtime for up to three hours a day for adults and two for adolescents. From 26 December 1941 all employees in the defence and supply industries were effectively mobilized and treated as conscripted soldiers. Leaving without permission made one answerable to a military tribunal and liable to imprisonment for five to eight years. Soon afterward, most industrial enterprises became part of the defence sector.13 Since teenagers constituted a substantial proportion of the working population, the new edicts concerned them as well, but the government was also quick to apply further coercive levers specifically to adolescent apprentices, including those who volunteered to work. From 1 August 1942 labour trainees aged sixteen and younger could be sentenced to one year of imprisonment for an unauthorized absence and discipline violations. Since teenagers now fell within the purview of three edicts, the General Prosecutor attempted to clarify the resulting legal confusion by making trade school students and factory apprentices who were under sixteen years old liable for ‘desertion’ according to the edict of 28 December 1940, while the over sixteens, including those who entered into an employment contract for a vacation period, faced military tribunals as adults under the edict of 26 December 1941.14 But judges still applied the edicts arbitrarily. As a result, relative to their percentage of the industrial workforce, workers below the age of eighteen constituted a disproportionately large share of labour ‘deserters’.15 In many areas

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they also constituted the bulk of the ‘criminal contingent’. For instance, in 1943, of 2,413 minors accused of various crimes in Sverdlovsk, 1,926 (79.8 per cent) were ukazniki (sentenced under the edict) who had run away from their trade schools. In the third quarter of 1944, 35.2 per cent of juvenile crimes reported in Stalingrad were violations of labour laws; in the fourth quarter they already constituted 51 per cent. During the same two-year period, officials from Moscow and Orel oblasts also reported a large proportion of ukazniki among youthful criminals.16 Though the majority of escapees were never caught, courts convicted 50,179 teenagers during the war for leaving their schools without authorization. Many more were among 7.7 million adults accused of absenteeism and unauthorized jobchanging at different enterprises throughout the country.17 Some of these truants were renegades who had no intention of learning a profession, preferring a seedy life on the streets instead. They would sign up for courses under fictitious names and then depart at the onset of warm weather, often taking along their uniforms, as well as other students’ belongings. These ‘corrupted individuals’ reportedly ‘turned their time in the labour reserves into a “business” of sorts’.18 Still, many more students and apprentices left their institutions and factories in an attempt to escape an oppressive, crime-plagued and abusive environment. They either had nothing to sell in the first place or traded their meagre possessions in order to obtain food and clothing.19 For child workers now found themselves in an even more precarious position than before the invasion, since they were expected to perform on a par with adults, even in heavy industry, but still received dependants’ rations.20 To be sure, the central government established a set of regulations for minors concerning food supply and labour protection, but as it preoccupied itself with fighting a war, it withdrew its support almost entirely, transferring this responsibility to local authorities, who frequently disregarded the rules. Since most employers required skilled workers, the network of trade schools and on-the-job vocational training expanded; the mobilization campaign intensified, but some regions under-conscripted. Their party leaders sent desperate dispatches to Moscow, asking for an adjustment of mobilization plans. Thus, the deputy head of the Primorsky regional soviet complained that if the plan were to be fulfilled, he would need to mobilize every single high school pupil.21 The Secretary of Sverdlovsk city committee reported in May 1942 that the oblast could conscript only 5,000 adolescents of both sexes, and that additional numbers would either have to be enlisted elsewhere or from a younger contingent of local thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds.22 The whole enterprise was therefore open to abuse. The authorities resorted to violence and illegal mobilization of those who were too young, illiterate or sick, or who had physical or mental disabilities. Kolkhozes, already stripped of working hands, issued fictitious documents to homeless and displaced children in order to protect their own youth and thereby limit their losses.23 In some areas, parents, protesting against their offspring entering trade schools, faced criminal charges for aiding and abetting, while the teenagers received sentences for avoiding mobilization.24 Fear of repression against her blind mother forced one fourteenyear-old girl to submit to conscription orders (which were clearly illegal because of her age):25

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Figure 10 Model students of FZO no.7, Leningrad, 1945 (courtesy of TsGAKFFD SPb).

If a person didn’t show up, their father or mother, whoever was at home, was taken to a prison and held there until their daughter put in an appearance. They forced you, as though it was a military draft. I wanted to hide, lived at my aunt’s for a week. Mother came one day, crying ... I had nothing to wear, and Kirov was ten kilometres away. Halfway there my shoes fell apart. I tied them together with a piece of rope and walked on ... it was autumn and very muddy. And if you don’t go, they will take you to court. Some lads ran away and received six-month sentences. They enrolled me in a FZO, found me new shoes size 40 (for a girl of fourteen).26

Another witness remembers how conscripted teenagers in his village attempted to hide from the ‘buyers’, or trade school envoys, and local party and police representatives, but were easily extricated from their hiding places in the attics and cellars, and taken to towns to be enrolled in trade schools.27 The prospective students and parents had a great deal to be worried about, for poor conditions in trade schools, already evident in peacetime, were exacerbated as state financial support dried up. Reports, including those published in specialist periodicals, told the same tale of privation, shortages and abuse of child workers. Inspectors and Komsomol activists raised concerns about unwashed, poorly clothed and malnourished students leading a dull life in dirty, cramped and unheated dormitories that lacked even the most basic equipment.28 Where there was no sustainable source of firewood, pupils utilized their bed planks. Lacking footwear, they could not reach school canteens, where the quality of food and service was so low that it attracted the attention of prosecutors.29

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Despite state regulations aimed at protecting students’ diets, many schools arbitrarily cut food provisions in half, while some headmasters and foremen took away teenagers’ ration cards as punishment for indiscipline or refusal to attend sport clubs.30 Doctors sounded the alarm over the prevalence of liquid foods on the trade school menu. In Archangelsk, one school canteen served exclusively rye flour stew three times a day; another offered a limited selection of soups made out of either green salad or pickled mushrooms. Reportedly for the ‘convenience’ of personnel in two other cafeterias, students were given both their lunch and supper at once.31 This, however, could also be because of the lack of staff, space or cutlery. Thus, an FZO in Chitinsk had only eight plates and no cutlery for 284 students, who were forced to eat in several shifts and, consequently, spent two to three hours taking a meal. To add insult to injury, it was not uncommon for canteens to serve spoilt food.32 In Krasnoyarsk, teenagers had to queue up for hours, enduring ‘the utmost rudeness’ of staff, only to discover cockroaches in their meals. Unsurprisingly, one tenth of the school’s new intake in 1943 was on the run within less than three weeks of their admission.33 Finding maggots in her borsch as well as being forced to perform menial work instead of attending classes also broke the will of one girl from Chernogorsk – she ‘deserted’, was caught and ended up in court. Another girl only found relief from inhumane treatment by committing suicide.34 Exceptionally poor provision of trade school students increased the number of unsupervised youngsters on the streets. Almost four thousand apprentices took to the road in eight regions of the Russian Federation in the first two months of 1943 alone. The situation deteriorated the following year, with 5,484 students leaving in the first quarter. Some schools lost from 30 to 90 per cent of their recruits. From January to February 1944, receiver-distribution centres (DPRs) registered 15,349 former trade school students among their contingents.35 Those who did not find the courage to leave, stole food or other students’ possessions in order to sell them, and if caught were either charged with theft or punished by their own classmates.36 Trade school students generally enjoyed a reputation as ‘dangerous and incorrigible hooligans and thieves’, and some indeed lived up to this image.37 Statistics showed that since the beginning of the war, the crime rate had increased dramatically among FZO and RU pupils. The former were particularly notorious, sometimes organizing themselves into gangs of robbers, rapists and callous murderers.38 In 1944 FZO students and factory apprentices came second after rural and unemployed adolescents among the accused minors in Smolensk oblast. A year later, they were competing for first place with the unemployed.39 Headmasters usually blamed former besprizorniki, or delinquents recently released from labour colonies, for demoralizing and corrupting other pupils. Whereas before the war, those who had been tried for criminal or administrative offences were not legally allowed to enter trade schools, in wartime it became widespread practice to enlist former offenders as part of an anti-homelessness campaign.40 The initiative belonged to the Deputy Commissar of Internal Affairs, Victor Abakumov, who in May 1941 suggested that orphans, state wards and ‘the best part’ of the contingent released from juvenile reformatories be given priority in trade school admissions.41 Following the edicts of 29 September 1942, 26 June 1943 and 13 September 1943,

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inmates of juvenile labour colonies were repeatedly released en masse and enrolled into FZOs.42 The majority of them were youngsters who genuinely wanted to work, but some were also openly violent and criminal. Understandably, the headmasters felt reluctant to admit such recruits, so they ‘created artificial difficulties’ for all former delinquents, usually working in cahoots with local party bosses. The headmaster of an FZO in Stalingrad failed to ally himself with city officials and was fired after refusing to admit three fourteen-year-olds on the grounds that ‘he already had enough thieves’ at his institution.43 It was probably the administrators’ protests that led to the creation of a special regime FZO in Tomsk in May 1943, specifically for waifs and former juvenile offenders.44 That said, it was not always the trade school students who had run-ins with the law. There were cases when the school management attempted to shift the blame for their own wrongdoing onto the pupils. Although the prosecutor filed lawsuits against many administrators who ‘had acquired prosperity at the school’s expense’, this was of little comfort to disheartened students, who felt abandoned and exploited.45 ‘I walk three kilometres to the factory,’ complained one trainee, ‘work for six hours, but attend no classes. The job is messy and dangerous. Many girls had their fingers torn off because we work the machines and it is very cold on top of everything else ... they don’t give us any [warm] clothing.’ Another student protested against working outside in temperatures of –40°C and not being fed properly. ‘Everyone has lost weight, looks shrivelled, [is] unable to walk.’46 In Leningrad, embezzlement of funds by school administrators and very low rations caused exceptionally high mortality rates among the student population, who, in order to survive, were forced to steal, rob and engage in ‘corpse eating’. Some, like 270 students from the city’s twelve trade schools, even tried to defect to the enemy;47 at least that is how the NKVD interpreted the actions of the youngsters who most likely attempted to break out of the starving city in order to reach their families in the occupied territories. The students from trade schools were not the only ones who suffered. The experience was typical for thousands of factory apprentices as well. The majority of enterprises failed to create satisfactory working and living conditions for adolescents, including trade school graduates. Inspectors noted that factory managers approached their responsibilities at best as mere tokens, while foremen and trade union representatives did not distinguish teenagers from other adult workers and left them to their own devices. As examples, the inspectors cited cases of unheated, insectinfested, flooded barracks with leaking ceilings and broken lavatories.48 The living conditions in dormitories were so bad, especially in winter, that teenage workers preferred to remain on the shop floor after an eleven-hour workday. They ‘loitered (slonialis’ po uglam), did not wash, and then took up their places by the machines again’.49 ‘I received 700 grams of black bread and a balanda a day,’ remembers a former FZO graduate assigned to a factory in the Urals, from which he eventually deserted: It was a watery vegetable soup. One had to be lucky to find anything of substance therein. Very quickly I turned into a dokhodiaga (a very thin, sickly person). It was terribly cold. How could one sleep in a collective habitation without any heating? When I got up in the morning, the water was frozen in my mess-tin. I

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was fifteen and needed rest. So I tried to sleep in the foundry. They had a drying room where I could sleep despite terrible noise ... Personal hygiene was in a catastrophic state. The younger ones attempted to run away. But they were often caught and brought back.50

Leading a similar existence landed one teenager, Gurov, in the courtroom for supposedly being forty minutes late for work. In reality, the boy lived and slept in the production shop because of a lack of clothing. On the day of the alleged offence he was taken ill with a high temperature but remained on site. The court acquitted Gurov and obliged the factory management to supply him with clothing and lodging.51 Not everyone was fortunate enough to have authorities intercede on their behalf. In most cases, no one made an effort to inquire about the fate of the recruits until they found them in the hands of the police.52 Having gone through the humiliation of knocking about in search of a job, another boy, whose father had died at the front and mother in the bombing of Stalingrad, ended up living under his lathe with no bedding and warm meals. Eventually, he escaped, was put on a wanted list and, when caught, sentenced under the 26 December 1941 edict.53 A group of twelve trade school graduates sent to Chimkent ended up living in a park and pickpocketing for survival, because local labour reserve administrators had dragged their feet finding them employment. As a result, the teenagers were expelled from their dormitories and deprived of ration cards. Fourteen other war orphans were more fortunate, receiving two rooms from a brick works in Voronezh. However, their living conditions were so poor that the youngsters began stealing and four of them subsequently ‘deserted’, fearing prosecution. One factory in Chkalov lost ninety-eight out of a hundred FZO graduates within a year; all of them ran away because of hunger.54 The situation was not much different in other places. As a result of what in official parlance was called ‘shortcomings in political education and certain difficulties in production and living conditions’, fourteen factories in Kirov lost 2,350 teenage workers over the first six months of 1944. During the second half of the year, 21 per cent of all apprentices were on the run across the country, although the outflow stalled somewhat in 1945.55 Reports are also full of evidence of conflict and child labour abuse. Among the justifications for their actions, ‘deserters’ often named rudeness and cruelty of their foremen and teachers.56 A member of the Moscow Bar Association, Dora Gorvits, directly blamed callous and abusive foremen, as well as negligent factory managers, for the high rates of labour indiscipline among child workers. ‘If they are interested in their work,’ she stated blatantly, ‘if they handle their job well, if they receive proper assistance from foremen, as a rule, they do not leave without permission.’57 In the event, it seemed that no one wished to accept responsibility for the poor state of affairs. Health inspectors and Komsomol leaders complained about dismissive factory managers and nepotistic labour reserve administrators who consistently failed to utilize the available resources to assist teenage employees. Managers and shop floor masters, in turn, shifted the blame onto local party bosses for neglecting apprentices’ needs. The bosses responded by passing the buck back

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to the foremen, teachers and Komsomol leaders, calling for a ‘resolute refinement of educational standards [and] the improvement of the [educators’] political and professional training’.58 And yet, when it came to child exploitation, the responsibility clearly lay with enterprise managers, which higher authorities tolerated. According to government decrees of 14 June 1942, 9 March 1944 and 15 July 1944, adolescents below the age of sixteen could work for a maximum of only six hours a day, were exempt from night work and were guaranteed a weekly day off as well as a yearly twelve-day leave. In reality, there was usually no difference in labour routine for children and adult workers, except that the former received much lower pay. Working from eight to twelve hours per day, sometimes at night, on hazardous jobs with no prospect of a day off was reportedly the norm at industrial enterprises in Tula and Kirov.59 ‘On my first day,’ remembers a former child labourer, I spent twelve hours on the shop floor. I was told straight away that being late was not allowed ... And I worked for twelve hours [a day] until the very end of the war! No holidays. During the entire war, I only had two days off. Two free days in three and a half years. Once a month they rescheduled our shifts. Then we had to work eighteen hours straight.60

Another apprentice was marginally luckier, having to work only twelve hours a day and enjoying one day off a week: Work was really hard ... We had to lift 75-kilo bundles of copper wire. I would get so tired that I would fall asleep at the bench. Our forewoman yelled at me, ‘Get up, your mother!’ I would wake up and resume work ... I was quite short, only 162 cm. A walking skeleton ... How much strength could 700 grams of bread soaked in water give me? The female workshop manager used to say, ‘And they call him a man.’61

Extreme fatigue from overwork combined with undernourishment not only damaged the youngsters’ health but could also be fatal, as it was for twelve FZO graduates employed at a factory in Moscow. The boys were accommodated in a large room of a factory barracks. Owing to the lack of beds, they slept on mattresses on the floor. After a long workday they fell into a deep slumber, never to wake again, for during the night they were allegedly attacked by a swarm of hungry rats and died of sustained injuries. A small child living in the same barracks went in a similar way, despite various precautions employed by other residents.62 Managers justified long working days as being ‘in the interest of production efficiency’ in light of the manpower shortage. Some even considered it a matter of pride. A high-profile American tourist visited an aviation plant, where he encountered ‘boys no more than ten years old, all dressed in blue blouses and looking like apprentice students’. He later recalled that ‘the officials of the factory pulled no punches in admitting that the children work, in many of the shops, the full 66-hour week worked by adults. Many of the boys were doing skilled jobs on lathes, and seemed to be doing them extremely well.’63

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This almost idyllic picture of self-sacrifice and professionalism might have been an exception to the rule or simply boasting on the part of the factory bosses. Evidence shows that working children’s needs were rarely considered. In mid-1944 an increasing number of homeless and delinquent children prompted the authorities in Tula, Leningrad and Kirov oblasts to carry out a comprehensive assessment of industrial enterprises in these regions. The inspection revealed an ‘unacceptably heartless attitude towards adolescents’. Far from performing skilled work, a great many of them did random jobs unrelated to their qualification or professional aspirations. At recruitment, managers did not take into account the physical capabilities of their youthful employees. To top it all, the youngsters worked in dim-lit shops on lathes that were not equipped with foot stands to accommodate the children’s height. An inspector at a metal plant reduced one boy to tears when he noted that the lathe the youth claimed to be his was, in fact, someone else’s, because it was clearly too high for him. The boy’s story turned out to be typical of the time: with his father at the front and his mother dead, he desperately needed a job but received little sympathy either from the foreman or the shop manager. His counterparts throughout the area shared dormitories with adults; they did not wash, lacking an extra set of clean undergarments to change into, and slept in their dirty work clothes, because their employers did not receive provision funds from the central government. The administration of one factory in Leningrad oblast appealed repeatedly to their commissariat and trade union on behalf of teenage workers, but to no avail; local trade organizations also proved unresponsive. In Vologda oblast some teenagers worked barefoot and without protective gloves in hot shops, which led to mass cases of burns. Despite clear instructions from the Council of People’s Commissars (SNK) that adolescents should receive three meals a day, the majority did not even make enough money to pay a canteen bill. Their rations would typically last them for eighteen to twenty days, so the youngsters spent most of their free time peddling stolen equipment and produce, immediately attracting the attention of the law enforcement.64 Forty-six per cent of all apprehended juvenile criminals in Moscow in the fourth quarter of 1943 were child workers; in Bashkir ASSR and Ivanovo oblast they made up 50 to 55 per cent of delinquents respectively. Other regions reported analogous statistics.65 One former child labourer recounts how she and her friends suffered from stomach aches, furunculosis and muscle cramps as a result of malnutrition. To supplement their diet and to quell the constant feeling of hunger, the girls mixed paraffin and bitumen to make a kind of ‘chewing gum’ to help them through a twelve-hour workday.66 Alarmed by the situation, specialists pointed to a significant distinction between adults and children with regard to physiological and cerebral capacities. In the doctors’ view, this underdevelopment, coupled with chronic malnutrition and a widespread violation of safety regulations, rendered child labourers prone to work-related injuries and serious diseases, such as tuberculosis and dystrophy. Meanwhile, quality medical care was rarely available, and inexperienced doctors in local polyclinics generally treated trade school patients as an ‘incidental extra workload’.67 Industrial enterprises rarely had their own doctors, let alone paediatricians. This was so in the case of factories and cooperatives in Tula, which employed 4,102 adolescents, many

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of whom were ill and physically weak. Only two factories thought of establishing small rest homes for their teenage employees.68 In the meantime, unable to provide normal living and working conditions for the existing apprentices, and perhaps unwilling to take responsibility for potential ‘desertions’, factory managers and trade school headmasters refused to accept new recruits if they did not have the proper clothing or lodging of their own.69 Some of those who had already been employed, for example child workers at the Dzhambul tannery in Kazakhstan, would be dismissed at the onset of cold weather. At another enterprise, the foreman turned away fourteen-year-old apprentices every time they showed up at work barefoot. All their pleas to the factory administration to supply them with footwear remained unanswered, but when the boys failed to report to the factory, they were arrested and convicted for ‘desertion’.70 Occasionally, trainees asked if they could go home and fetch their own clothes. While some managers were resigned to the fact and gave permission, thereby breaking the law, others refused and filed charges against the teenagers, who went anyway.71 The grounds for prosecution were often trivial. For instance, two teenagers, having repeatedly asked to be allowed to look after their ailing relatives, were arrested for disregarding their superiors’ orders. One of them, Valia Red’kina, defied the headmaster’s refusal to allow her to tend to her bedridden mother and sister. The women died, and Valia was arrested on the day of their funeral to spend three months in jail. A brother of two frontoviks, Vania Boriskin, was sentenced under the edict of 26 June 1940 for skipping work in order to take his seriously ill mother to the hospital. This was done despite the fact that Vania was now solely responsible for his three younger siblings.72 In other instances, children left because they were unhappy with their jobs (especially girls in construction or boys in professions that they considered too ‘feminine’), untrained for them, used as menial workers, or simply because they felt homesick, having been recruited from faraway regions as well as nearby kolkhozes.73 Thus, Volodia Sizov’s 10-kilometre walk home translated into a year at a juvenile reformatory.74 Mothers often encouraged their children to come home to help or replace their relatives conscripted into the army.75 Parents wrote letters to school headmasters and factory managers pleading for their offspring’s transfer closer to home. One father bluntly stated that he was ‘resolved to be with [his] son and no repression would stop [him]’.76 Since the overwhelming majority of truants never faced trial owing to general confusion, a lack of manpower and, not least, a highly effective practice of protection and collusion on the part of family members and local officials, the runaways in any case believed they would not be prosecuted.77 So did the schoolchildren who entered into labour contracts with enterprises and left once the school year started, only to find themselves facing a military tribunal. This resulted in a tough correspondence between the Commissariat of Enlightenment and the General Prosecutor’s Office, and a subsequent explanatory letter from the prosecutor for juvenile affairs to his colleagues in the provinces, ordering the release of those who had breached their contracts to continue general education.78 Observers considered it preposterous that a sixth grader should be criminally charged and imprisoned for four months for attending school instead of going to shovel snow, when her factory (which she joined

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out of patriotism) stopped production because of the lack of resources. Absence of shoes and bitter frosts prevented another volunteer from going to work for a month and a half. The district court sentenced the girl to three months in jail, having requested her immediate isolation. A similar offence landed a sixteenyear-old boy behind bars.79 Such administration of criminal justice frustrated many law practitioners. In December 1942 the head of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sharply criticized the tribunals for ‘an enormous number’ of youthful workers under eighteen being convicted under the edicts, and called on his colleagues to pay ‘especially steadfast attention’ to this alarming dynamic.80 Several months later a jail inspector in Moscow expressed concern that ‘the majority of minors’ whose cases he had examined ‘are unable critically and consciously to grasp the meaning of the edict and the consequences of its violation. The explanations they give are very childish – “I didn’t like the job”, “I overslept”, “foreman swore at me” – and demonstrate an immature state of mind [and] lack of clear criminal intent.’81 Gorvits went further maintaining that ‘oftentimes it’s not the worst, socially unstable teenagers that find themselves in the dock, but well-organized and hard-working children’.82 Many prosecutors simply refused to take on ‘desertion’ cases; as did some factory and school directors who, instead of sending cases to court, attempted to persuade the runaways to come back, staged open show trials to deter potential truants or brought charges only against the most malicious offenders.83 In the words of one headmaster, ‘no one would authorize the trial of seventy people at once, and it would be silly; we should bring the runaways back in an organized fashion and make them study’.84 Such leniency could cost the administrators their jobs or even freedom. The authorities attempted to make examples of the factory managers who protected absentees and deserters, by giving them long sentences.85 A trade school instructor was fortunate to have his case acquitted, having suggested to his students that he would also run from such a life, thereby allegedly instigating a mass escape.86 Some managers noted that when normal living and working conditions were created, ‘deserters’ gladly came back, although their repentance did not make them immune from punishment.87 Many wanted to return but could not, either because they lacked special entry passes into certain oblasts or were afraid of prosecution; although it became easier to return after December 1944, when the regime, unable to deal with a staggering number of ‘desertions’, finally acknowledged the ineffectiveness of its search efforts and announced an amnesty to those who went into hiding, as long as they came back to their enterprises.88 Nevertheless, while the war raged, the government did not ease its coercive judicial practices, provoking critical response from an increasing number of lawyers.

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Already inadequate before the war, the quality of juvenile justice further deteriorated after the invasion. As was admitted at the 1945 All-Union conference of prosecutors for juvenile affairs, the ‘heartless attitude towards minors in industry’ extended into law enforcement activities.1 The work of the judiciary system betrayed investigative sloppiness, deliberate simplification of legal procedures and, most evidently, inconsistency, being either too lenient or too abusive. The police either released apprehended children without any inquiry into their activities and circumstances, or overzealously pursued them, arresting some on dubious charges and subjecting them to no less questionable investigation.2 Consistent with the Soviet law of the time, a youngster detained for committing a crime became subject to a preliminary examination by an impartial people’s investigator (sledovatel’), who was also a procuracy employee. The investigator collected information and testimonies, on the basis of which the case was either dismissed or referred to court. During this preliminary inquiry the police were not supposed to have access to the suspect.3 The ability of the procuracy to respond to the demands of specially trained investigators was, however, reduced by the draft of able-bodied males into the Red Army. Over the course of the war, the RSFSR Prosecutor’s Office alone saw 82 per cent of all its sledovateli depart to the front.4 The shortage of qualified, specially trained investigators meant that the pre-trial inquiry was usually carried out by ‘illiterate’ or ‘semi-literate’ police officers.5 By the end of the war, on average, no more than 43 per cent of all juvenile cases were conducted and completed by special investigators (see Table A.4). Yet, even when the latter were available, they either fell short of the required level of qualification and experience, particularly when it came to investigating especially dangerous crimes, or considered juvenile cases a ‘superfluous workload’.6 In the meantime, many, though not all, police officers substituting for sledovateli had a very limited understanding of child psychology, approached their responsibilities superficially and often used similar methods of interrogation as with adults, including the application of physical force.7 This means of obtaining confessions or new evidence triggered an inquiry into the case of Lionia Gerasimov, whose sickly appearance caught the eye of an inspecting officer. A good student and son of a front line soldier, the fifteen-year-old was arrested together with other teenagers for housebreaking. Records revealed that the boy lived with his older sister,

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earning sustenance by babysitting her children. The officer noted that during their conversation, Lionia looked lethargic, pale, ‘even ghastly blue’, and cried constantly. When asked about his health, the boy explained that during an interrogation, sledovatel’ had beat him with a metal rod and punched him in the stomach.8 The widespread tendency of ‘obtaining confession by any means’ provoked the rightful indignation of the deputy prosecutor for juvenile affairs, Tadevosian, but violence against underage suspects was just one of many procedural violations committed by interrogators.9 The improper collection of evidence or lack thereof also resulted in judges regularly throwing out juvenile cases or sending them back for further inquiry. In the first half of 1943, when the siege of Leningrad was partially lifted, only three out of thirty-nine cases heard in the unoccupied oblast were preceded by an investigation, and the majority of these cases did not involve defence attorneys.10 This could be blamed on the starvation that had wiped out a great number of civil servants in the area, necessitating severe simplifications in the judicial practice, but the situation in Moscow, for example, although difficult was not as dire. In the first quarter of 1945 alone, Moscow courts quashed 4.5 per cent of all lawsuits in the course of preliminary trial, 3.5 per cent ended in acquittals and 4 per cent were stopped at the stage of investigation or returned.11 Countrywide, for the first five months of the same year, the Supreme Court sent 33 per cent of all appealed sentences back for more accurate investigation.12 Often interrogators failed to obtain official documents confirming the suspect’s age that would determine his or her eligibility for criminal prosecution. As a result of this practice, one girl stood trial on the basis of her older sister’s birth certificate.13 Little effort was made to compile teenagers’ psychological portrait based on the testimonies of parents, teachers and neighbours; neither did interrogators identify the causes of crime, nor explore the suspect’s living conditions and family situation.14 Instead, individual files contained curious descriptions of adolescents as being ‘single, not a party member, a person without definite occupation, not a propertyowner, not subject to army draft, not connected to the White Army, not previously disenfranchised, etc.’15 Tadevosian criticized such a formal superimposition of judicial procedures relating to adults onto juveniles. In 1944 he published an instruction manual for judges and procuracy employees where he opined that the correct understanding of the law’s objective, compliance with the given instruction and the basic rules of investigation of juvenile cases would reduce the incidence of error and render the investigation a more speedy and efficient process.16 As matters stood, however, youngsters could spend up to seven months in remand cells, instead of the legally permitted three to ten days. Sometimes, in flagrant violation of the existing law, the measure of restriction was applied even before the institution of a criminal case.17 There were also instances when adolescents, having already spent prolonged periods of time in confinement, saw their cases revoked or received suspended sentences.18 A fourteen-year-old girl from Yaroslavl had to be rescued by Department for Combatting Child Homelessness and Neglect (OBDBB) inspectors, after being accused of labour ‘desertion’ and spending thirty-nine days in prison without ever meeting her investigator. In the meantime, her disabled mother and younger siblings had to survive without their principal

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breadwinner. An apprentice carpenter from Kostroma was arrested for swearing at adults and breaking a door and a chair. The boy’s prison governor had to remind the district prosecutor, who had given the arrest order, about the teenager’s prolonged incarceration without indictment. Finally, a month later, the prosecutor decided not to refer the case to court but instead to transfer the boy to a juvenile colony. The governor, however, never received the prosecutor’s ordinance; he telephoned the officer only to learn that the document had been ‘lost somewhere’.19 Judges themselves often allowed gross mistakes in court proceedings, which violated the principles of a fair trial and led to sentences being reviewed or overturned on appeal. The conscription of the top specialists into the armed forces, the closure of research centres studying child psychiatry and criminology, as well as the elimination of the juvenile department at the Institute of Law of the Soviet Academy of Science led to increasing amateurism in juvenile justice.20 Procedural ignorance was especially pronounced in cases of labour violations. Many judges were so confused about whom should be prosecuted, according to which decree and what penalties to dispense, that Tadevosian felt it important to explain the law yet again. He particularly stressed that since August 1942 no child below the age of sixteen could be held criminally responsible for evading agricultural labour conscription; nor did the 26 December 1941 edict extend to minors in this age group, who worked in industry. Instead, they were liable to prosecution exclusively under the 28 December 1940 edict and had the right to a full investigation of their cases, unlike older youths and adults.21 There was no coincidence in Tadevosian’s mentioning the pre-trial inquiry, to which he dedicated an entire section of the manual. Despite several previous instructions from the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Commissariat of Justice and the General Prosecutor’s Office, many judges continued to disregard the formal criteria of criminal liability and heard cases of labour violations, petty theft and hooliganism brought against under-sixteen-year-olds without considering their age or requiring an investigation.22 Consequently, court hearings for minors differed little from cases of general jurisdiction.23 Judges neglected evidence, disregarded defendants’ testimonies and mitigating circumstances, confused the defendants’ personal names, age and gender, as well as the dates on which the transgression had supposedly taken place.24 In April 1945, a fifteen-year-old received six months of correctional labour under the edict of 26 June 1940. The judge ignored both the defendant’s age and the fact that on the day when the boy failed to report for work, the spring flooding of the River Oka had rendered all crossings nugatory. Even falling unconscious in the street and being hospitalized for six months did not protect another boy from a suspended sentence for labour ‘desertion’.25 The backlog created by an increasing number of ‘desertion’ lawsuits meant that the cases were rushed through the courts, lasting for five minutes in the case of a boy who received one year in a labour colony.26 Some judges did not even require the presence of litigating parties, sentencing defendants in absentia or denying them legal representation.27 In one instance, a judge refused to hear out the defence on the basis that he knew the case well, and sentenced a teenager to a year in a labour colony for planning a burglary.28 Instead

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of engaging attorneys to represent two groups of youths, who received two- to fiveyear sentences, a people’s court of Vysokovskii district in Kalinin oblast relied on the services of district education department employees, who met the accused for the first time in the courtroom. It is, of course, possible that no attorneys were available in the area at the time, in which case the judge could, in accordance with the Code of Criminal Procedure, turn to plenipotentiaries of state institutions, trade unions, public organizations and even the defendants’ parents. Nevertheless, the inspecting prosecutor disagreed with the court’s actions, emphasizing that out of 487 examined cases, 412 were confirmed on appeal, yet four had to be amended and seventy-one acquitted, mainly because the juveniles were refused the right to a defence.29 Campaigning for defendants’ rights to an attorney, Gorvits criticized judges’ propensity to award parents the role of mute observers at trial. She saw them not only as witnesses but also as their children’s lawful representatives.30 Likewise, she maintained that the passive behaviour of the accused, encouraged by many courts, not only ‘perverted the essence of the proceedings’, but also ‘distorted the judicial perspective’, since ‘a minor can only explain certain circumstances of the case if his attention is turned to the significance of the facts and circumstances, which he himself can not always appreciate’. As an example, Gorvits cited the case of a thirteenyear-old boy, who, having been accused of robbery, was not allowed to cross-examine the ‘talkative plaintiff ’ in order to clarify what had prompted him to pull the woman’s hat off. Concerned with the requalification of the charge, the boy’s attorney did not make matters any clearer; and nor did the judge. Meanwhile, it transpired that in order to prevent the defendant from entering a movie theatre without a ticket, the plaintiff, who worked as a ticket collector, had pulled the boy’s cap off, only to be promptly relieved of her own headgear. When threatened with prosecution, the boy repeatedly asked the controller to take her hat back, but the woman remained adamant. Consequently, the judge requalified the charge as hooliganism, but the boy still received a custodial sentence of several months.31 Gorvits represented the lobby of legal practitioners who pointed to fundamental differences between adult and juvenile suspects. They stressed the latters’ underdeveloped character and willpower, as well as their greater propensity to spontaneity, imitation and impressionability. In their criticism the advocates echoed contemporary child psychologists, whose work with war-traumatized adolescents showed that not only was the youngsters’ rational functioning naturally less advanced than in adults, but that they also were ‘less stable under war conditions’ (especially those who had lived under the occupation), exhibiting ‘reactive states’ which could manifest in temporary nervous exhaustion, impaired academic performance, withdrawal, greater suggestibility, loss of self-control, selfishness and ‘marked antisocial tendencies’.32 Many, it was claimed, were unable to grasp the meaning and consequences of their actions. Hence, judges and investigators had to be especially sensitive to defendants’ individual idiosyncrasies and to consider them as seriously as family/life circumstances.33 In the critics’ view, the poor quality of judicial work was partially responsible for the rapidly swelling ranks of juvenile delinquents. Already in 1942, a representative of the Main Police Department suggested that official ‘practices sometimes contributed

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to’ child criminality. Two years later Gorvits reiterated this claim in her letter to Molotov. ‘As matters stand now’, she insisted, ‘there is a danger of an increase in juvenile delinquency ... Poor quality of judicial work leads to errors that are disastrous for a child’s development.’34 This appeal to Molotov was a strategic move to attract the attention of the highest executive officer, who, besides being Stalin’s deputy on the Council of People’s Commissars (SNK) and the State Defence Committee, also oversaw scientific research in the country. Gorvits might have hoped that Molotov would take a special interest in her appeal. She argued that because of the absence of specialist literature and research centres studying juvenile delinquency, there was a severe shortage of qualified judges to preside over juvenile courts that became operational in 1943. She complained that many judges exhibited neither much interest in children nor expert knowledge of their profession.35 In 1945 the lawyer received an opportunity to address the judges directly on the pages of Sotsialisticheskaia Zakonnost’, imploring them to ‘work on themselves’. ‘It is not enough to love and to take an interest in the growing generation’, she advised. ‘One should possess a pedagogic flair, tirelessly broaden one’s knowledge in different scientific areas, [such as] psychology, physiology, juvenile psychiatry; to be aware of literary tastes of pubescent youngsters, their attitudes to visual entertainment, among many other things ... Judges should exhibit creativity, flexibility, initiative.’36 It is unknown whether Molotov ever replied to Gorvits or made any efforts to improve the work of special juvenile courts, but reports suggest that there was still a long way to go to achieve the levels of professionalism envisioned by the critics, especially in recently liberated regions, where the wholesale destruction of property and shortage of resources, including human, created additional difficulties. Thus, a juvenile court in Kiev, organized fourteen months after the Red Army had driven German forces out in late December 1943, was housed in a former kitchen, with its old stove still intact. The chamber was small and dimly lit. There were no separate areas for witnesses and the accused. The latter were brought directly into the courtroom to await their hearing and often changed their initial statements, having ‘learned the tricks’ (prokhodiat shkolu) of those who came before them while they waited. Since the collegium did not have regular assessors, the judge had to borrow them from other courts, which inevitably led to delays; nor did the state appoint defence attorneys. The functioning of the Kiev juvenile court was typical of many other tribunals, where judicial investigations were carried out without indepth analysis of children’s personalities, lifestyle and the circumstances in which they lived.37 In any case, the network of juvenile courts was still inadequate, being confined to large urban centres. So the majority of the accused came before adult courts, where adult criminal procedures operated, including an over-reliance on imprisonment. Despite repeated requests from the SNK and the General Prosecutor not to detain first-time petty offenders for the trial period, unless they had nowhere else to go, and to use custody as a measure of restraint only in exceptional cases, judges chose the deprivation of freedom more often than suspended sentences, even when the youngsters had parents and a permanent residence.38 The proportion of

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custodial sentences varied by region, perhaps reflecting the level of professionalism among judges: in the first quarter of 1945 people’s courts in Moscow and the oblast sent 42 per cent of juvenile defendants to jail; for the same period, the Tatar ASSR reported up to 86 per cent of all cases involving adolescents ending in incarceration.39 Throughout the war, officials from a number of government agencies sounded the alarm about judges eschewing the practice of conditional sentencing, even with first-time offenders or children under the age of criminal liability.40 High levels of incarceration were especially evident among labour ‘deserters’. From 1941 to 1945, 38,258 trade school students were imprisoned, while only 11,921 got away with ‘corrective labour’ or a conditional discharge. Early in 1945, 65 per cent of all the accused went behind bars and only 25 per cent received suspended sentences.41 Some observers suggested that the high rates of conviction were the result of the judges’ complete disregard for the principle of proportionality. As evidence, they regularly cited cases of children being interned for offences not serious enough to warrant arrest and court proceedings, such as the sentencing of a boy who shot at pigeons to three years for firearm possession (the rifle had in fact been given to the boy by his teacher for safe keeping when the latter went to the front), or making a group of teenagers criminally responsible for taking several children’s books from an unlocked room in their school.42 In yet another case, the court did not heed the advice of a procuracy inspector and, instead of reprimanding four otherwise well-behaved teenagers (three of whom were girls) for tearing a hat off one passer-by and attempting to do the same with another, convicted them of non-violent robbery, which was punishable by one year of confinement.43 Critics also condemned judges for not making concessions that criminal behaviour might have been temporary or situational. In the September letter to Beria, Major Sokolov reminded his superior that a great number of thefts were committed by hungry children, whose rations were on ‘the border of physical minimum for a growing and developing body’.44 It was hunger that drove one orphan, Aliosha Zhukov, to sneak into a plant bakery and to take some bread-crust from a garbage pit. As he attempted to leave, he was apprehended and wrongly accused of stealing half a kilo of bread. While in prison the boy went on hunger strikes protesting his arrest.45 Stealing five cans of tinned meat from a meat-packing factory earned another sixteen-year-old a year in detention, despite the fact that both his parents were invalids. In yet another case, a judge deemed that one-and-a-half years in custody was a reasonable punishment for an attempted theft of several onions from a kolkhoz. On appeal, both cases were proclaimed not serious enough to warrant such harsh punishments, but the harm had been done.46 Groundless arrests and wrongful convictions continued to occur with worrying regularity, even after the General Prosecutor issued a repeat order in June 1943 not to prosecute adolescents for minor transgressions.47 Inspections of custodial institutions revealed multiple cases of children being sentenced for minor thefts of food from private plots and kolkhozes. In the wake of the order, twelve out of forty-five detained teenagers in Moscow oblast saw their charges cleared, while it was decided not to

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continue criminal prosecution against nineteen others and instead refer them to labour educational colonies (TVKs). In 1944, the Belorechensk juvenile reformatory in Krasnodar Krai contained eighty adolescents sentenced for trivial transgressions.48 The fact that many first-time offenders were often subjected to a similar measure of restraint as recidivists became another matter of concern.49 Even adults who pressured children into blatantly criminal activities sometimes received milder sentences than the minors (although, according to the 7 April 1935 law, they could be imprisoned for up to five years for abetting).50 State inspectors found the judges’ leniency scandalous when a fourteen-year-old, whose mother had gone missing during a scavenging mission, was incited by neighbours to commit a theft and, despite being a first-time offender, spent a year in a juvenile colony, whereas the instigators received suspended sentences. On another occasion a boy’s mother escaped with only a year of ‘corrective labour’ at her workplace for instructing her son to assist adult thieves, which cost the teenager his freedom.51 Conversely, the inconsistency in judicial work was reflected in the mild treatment of two thirteen-year-olds who were arrested for burglary, which they committed together with several adults. The latter were prosecuted, but not the boys who, reportedly, continued in their criminal ways.52 Neither did an eleven- and twelveyear-old suffer any consequences for having been detained on multiple occasions for the theft of ration cards, pickpocketing, hooliganism and begging. Considering their refusal to attend school and their parents’ inability to control them, they should have been placed in a TVK, but instead remained at large.53 Many judicial errors could have been averted had public prosecutors supervised on a regular basis the legality of both the investigation process and the basis for prosecution, as required by law. With several notable exceptions, this was not done, but not always because of a lack of initiative on the part of the responsible specialists.54 In December 1943, two weeks after the Commissar of Justice demanded the compulsory participation of prosecutors in all pre-trial proceedings, the prosecutor for juvenile affairs of Ivanovo oblast, Eidelman, wrote to Tadevosian, complaining about elements of his workload that had nothing to do with the job description. His every call to the regional representatives of the youth league or the educational board needed to be cleared with the head of the investigation department. Encountering nothing but irritation and a lack of understanding from his superior, the prosecutor began to visit courtrooms, trade schools and juvenile reformatories less and less frequently. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that no one was interested in ‘the work that [he] love[d] with all [his] heart and have been doing for seven years, the work to which [he] dedicated all [his] strength and health’. This dismissive attitude caused him to feel ‘morally and physically defeated’.55 Eidelman was not the only one who felt like a second-rate employee – his colleagues throughout the country noted that their work was neither taken seriously nor rewarded accordingly. Consequently, few volunteered to serve in this capacity.56 Notwithstanding the General Prosecutor’s efforts to enhance the activities of juvenile groups, the shortage of personnel was still a problem in mid-1945. To be sure, the Procuracy did manage to procure a number of experienced prosecutors for several, though not all, regional offices, but there was still

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a strong tendency to load them with work unrelated to their duties. This resulted in dissatisfaction, high turnover rates and progressive ineptitude of the new personnel, who received little guidance and did not have access to specialist literature to help them enhance their professional competence.57 Therefore, Gorvits’s concerns were very real indeed. Nevertheless, as she and her colleagues pushed for better treatment of juvenile delinquents and suggested non-judicial means of dealing with younger adolescents, not everyone was prepared to listen. The government and the public were generally in agreement on the matter of repression of juvenile misbehaviour. Faced with the precariousness of everyday life, the average citizen demanded coercive control of offenders, concentrating solely on the victim’s rights and ignoring high victimization rates among juveniles who found themselves in the hands of the criminal justice system. Answering to popular demand and its own repressive impulses, the government placed great faith in the deterrent powers of tough sentences,58 even though evidence provided by the critics suggested the opposite dynamics: not only did such ‘re-education strategy’ do psychological damage, stigmatizing the young person and making it more difficult for him or her to reintegrate into society, but there was also little evidence that harsh punishment acted as a deterrent, and only created future criminals. The great majority of those placed in reformatories presented no danger to society, especially considering the relatively high incidence of wrongful extra-judicial convictions and erroneous judicial sentencing that put innocent youngsters behind bars. The appalling conditions they often endured in places of incarceration and their contact with seasoned criminals either broke their will or instilled in them criminal habits. Yet, for the benefit of public order and its own reputation, the government was willing to keep the age of criminal responsibility low and incarceration rates high, which masked its own inability to help children in trouble.

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Coda

While national and local newspapers boasted about achievements in the prevention of child neglect, the state was busy creating new displaced minors and juvenile criminals through the instrumental use of repression and sheer carelessness. Indisputably, the war itself served as the main catalyst for the breakdown of social and economic structures, facilitating child abandonment and delinquency. However, outside forces alone could not be held responsible for the two phenomena, even though officials at all levels attempted to use war as a convenient scapegoat to deflect attention from their own mismanagement, incompetence and corruption. Political decisions also extended hardship to children on the home front and indirectly encouraged homelessness and criminal behaviour among them. Judging by the increasingly punitive attitudes towards juvenile delinquents, teenage workers and the deported communities, the regime clearly prioritized public order over children’s welfare. However, the leadership seemed oblivious to the fact that its draconian labour policies, excessively harsh juvenile justice administration and wasteful population transfers only destabilized the situation further, unnecessarily subjecting a great number of youngsters to abuse and neglect. As far as deportations are concerned, historians often make comparisons with other belligerents, rightly pointing out that even Western democracies resorted to brutal measures, excluding and mistreating certain ethnic groups in pursuit of security and national interests.1 For instance, exile or internment of ethnic Japanese, Inuit, Germans and Italians in the USA certainly was something that provoked anger. Completely innocent people, including orphans, disabled youngsters, children from mixed marriages as well as extradited foreign nationals (such as Japanese and Germans from Latin America), were branded potential traitors, removed from sensitive areas and put behind barbed wire in arid and desolate areas. Alien nationals, including their children, of hostile nations also became enemies of the USA, being liable to arrest and incarceration without the benefit of legal representation. Cruelties and anomalies abounded, while conditions in the internment camps were, in the words of one historian, ‘Spartan in the extreme’.2 However, similarities with the Soviet Union ended there. Having made provisions on paper, the US government actually followed them through, building barracks for living and schooling at relocation centres, supplying the internees with textbooks, recreation equipment, musical instruments and food, which was often

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in plentiful amounts, even compared to the rations received by camp employees. The exiles were not required to work but were given an opportunity if they wished to. In a way, the daily life of internees ‘seemed better than that of their caretakers’, provoking resentment among the latter. Not only could the exiles exercise their right to demand fair treatment, they also had a say what their children should learn at school and managed such educational establishments independently of the official inspector’s office.3 Therefore, even though the exiles’ freedom of movement was severely curtailed, a much greater planning and preparation seems to have gone into the process of providing for them, compared to the Soviet Union, where special settlers and forced migrants were generally left to their own devices to survive as best they could in harsh climates, all the while being brutally exploited. Such mistreatment was damaging both for the affected communities and the state itself. Several historians have convincingly argued that the wartime forced uprooting of people and the loss of pre-war networks of surveillance and control made it much more complicated for the regime to maintain order. It undermined the authority of the state, intensified resistance in some areas and engendered new inter-ethnic conflicts.4 Besides being a failure from the ideological and security points of view, involuntary resettlement was not always economically viable. It required substantial investment, which the state was unable to provide at the necessary level, especially in wartime. Consisting predominantly of women, children and the elderly, the ‘special contingents’ and mobilized labourers turned out to be of little value as a workforce. Severe material difficulties and deliberate wastage of skill diminished their productive capacity even further. While additional resources had to be poured into the regions of deportations, lands abandoned by the exiles frequently fell out of use, thereby preventing the state from taking full economic advantage of the forced migrations.5 Ultimately, the state satisfied its economic requirements through the massive wastage of life and health, while increasing the pressure on the child welfare system. Many regions were forced to establish new boarding institutions and juvenile reformatories to accommodate thousands of children who otherwise might not have had to rely on scarce public funds and would not have been introduced to the criminal milieu. In the sphere of juvenile justice, the broad application of criminal sanctions, the utter lack of proportionality between crime and punishment and the frequent disregard for mitigating circumstances led to the artificial manufacturing of deviants. While the Soviet Union’s allies, as well as some other Western European countries, continued to eschew incarceration in favour of family rehabilitation and non-custodial alternatives, advocating a more therapeutic approach to child offenders, Soviet legislators responded to the crisis of war with intense repression, placing greater emphasis on detention as a solution to deviance (partially because family rehabilitation in many cases was impossible, given the destruction of familial structures). There were no comparable observation centres and professional agencies running medico-psychiatric examinations in the Soviet Union during the war. The Soviet law enforcement agencies persisted with their encroachment on child-rearing institutions, as they had done ever since the mid-1930s,6 just as calls were heard across the Western world to transfer

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custodial institutions for juveniles under the jurisdiction of education authorities, so that there was no association with the penal system.7 Admittedly, compared to pre-war rates, incarceration of juveniles grew in other countries of Europe, but this was something that jurists, government representatives and interest groups fiercely criticized. In any case, in Britain, for example, custodial measures accounted for only about 10 per cent of all sentences, even though the age of criminal responsibility was even lower than in the Soviet Union.8 In its reliance on stricter treatment of juvenile deviance, higher incarceration rates, harsher prison life and a greater emphasis on prison labour, the Soviet Union exhibited more similarities with Nazi Germany and Japan than with its liberal allies. Whereas the latter had ended the era of ‘productive prison’ in 1944, the Soviet regime continued exploiting and starving its prison population, including minors, beyond the war years.9 Attitude to child labour in general was something that also put the Soviet Union apart from Britain and the USA. American children’s work in agriculture was condemned as ‘a return to child labour and pre-modern standards of childhood’, while Members of Parliament in the UK denounced the enlistment of children for farm work as ‘inappropriate child labour’.10 It was the British government and not individual judges, attorneys or foremen that attempted to reduce the number of young persons imprisoned for breaches of wartime employment laws, by asking courts to stop cases and allow the defendants a second chance.11 Teenage workers in the Soviet Union did not have such powerful champions. The government was well aware of their abuse and exploitation but chose not to acknowledge it publicly or to do anything comprehensive about it. Not only did officialdom use teenagers to overcome a serious labour deficit, it also aborted their general education, took them away from their parents without making the appropriate provisions, deprived them of any decisionmaking power and exploited them with assignments to unrewarding, dead end jobs. While in other countries the authorities felt anxious about youthful workers’ sudden financial independence, which was reportedly reflected in their lax behaviour, in the Soviet Union teenagers barely scraped a living, and some could not even afford to eat in factory canteens.12 Poorly paid and neglected, teenage workers had to take matters of survival into their own hands – they either engaged in illegal activities or abandoned their training, in both cases risking prosecution. To be sure, trade schools were not intended as places of exploitation, despite the forced nature of enrolment therein. Initially established to train skilled workers for labour-starved industries, they also served as a means of social control in wartime, providing a safe haven for teenagers from war-ravaged regions and resocializing waifs and young offenders. But systemic failures, which the government was quick to blame on lower level managers, judges, and the youth league, undermined the benefits that came from this programme. It was not enough simply to create more institutions; it was imperative to ensure production and education facilities were adequate, and the overall delivery of criminal justice improved. As matters stood, notoriously substandard living and working conditions endured by the teenage workers, abuses of the forced mobilization and legal injustices only antagonized the young workers and put them on a collision course with the law.13 Yet the Stalinist leadership never

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even entertained the notion of reforming ‘desertion’ legislation. The so-called ‘wartime edicts’ remained in force for a full decade after the war, although forced conscription ceased after martial law was lifted from the industrial sector in 1948. In 1949, 94 per cent of new recruits entered schools voluntarily. The young workers’ desperate conditions, however, endured throughout the restoration period, continuing well into the 1960s and contributing to a new crime wave.14 It took the government less time to register calls to reform the administration of criminal justice. As soon as the period of reconstruction was over, the prosecution levels for juveniles fell sharply.15 Later, de-Stalinization would speed up the decriminalization of juvenile delinquency, although the process would still prove to be chaotic and inconsistent. Throughout the post-war decade and beyond, the investigative organs and the judiciary continued to operate by inertia. In October 1953 Ivan Dolgikh, the head of the Gulag (recently transferred to the Commissariat of Justice), complained to Khrushchev that judges took their time to adjust to the new realities and kept ‘rubber-stamping sentences without considering the degree of danger represented by the perpetrator’. Consequently, the number of arrests was growing markedly, while even first-time offenders committing minor transgressions received exceedingly harsh punishments. Over the summer of 1953 the Gulag absorbed 4,252 minors, of whom 31 per cent were sentenced for up to three years, 23.6 per cent from three to five years and a staggering 46.8 per cent for up to ten years or more. The latter category included 403 youngsters condemned to fifteen years of detention; ninety-eight would serve up to twenty years and eleven an even longer period.16 Most disturbingly, the long sentences were awarded not just to murderers, rapists and robbers. Theft continued to be the most common offence committed by juveniles whose transgressions were punished in accordance with the exceptionally harsh anti-theft laws of 1947. Even though many judges attempted to find loopholes to minimize the impact of the decrees on teenagers, not all law enforcers joined the organizational resistance against Stalinist excesses in criminal policy.17 Thus, a theft of 23 rubles and a penknife cost one boy six years of his freedom; a fifteen-year-old orphan received ten years for stealing state property, in the form of a towel, a sheet and a mat, from a sanatorium. The girl’s plunder was valued at 100 rubles, but an attempted theft of just 1 ruble, which was returned to the victim immediately after the arrest, sent two sixteen-year-olds to the pen for six and seven years. A stolen bicycle and seven pigeons earned their new owners five and six years respectively. The author of the report was clearly frustrated at how frivolously some judges dispensed exceedingly harsh punishments. But it was not just the lower courts that earned his well-deserved scorn. The Supreme Court, together with the Prosecutor’s Office and the Ministry of Justice, received their fair share of criticism: the latter for failing to draw the judges’ attention to errors and shortcomings, and the former for not participating in the collegium of the Ministry of Justice. Like some of his colleagues, Dolgikh proposed to change the legislation in order ‘to protect children from being detained, eschewing this measure of last resort in favour of other means of effective upbringing’. The officer insisted that the only way to increase administrative

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responsibility in matters of juvenile delinquency was to transfer the investigation from the police to special procuracy investigators.18 Therefore, eight years after the war, proportionality, legal inquiry and custodial sentencing still remained unresolved issues that had plagued the judicial system for two decades since the 1930s. Consequently, the appalling quality of judicial practices cannot be blamed on war and post-war reconstruction. Serious miscarriages of justice had been widespread long before the invasion. In many localities judges and the investigative organs had not adhered to elementary standards of procedure: they had routinely failed to carry out preliminary investigations, to establish the age of offenders, to investigate their motives and living conditions, and to obtain testimonies from parents, teachers or medical examiners; cases had often been heard without defence counsels in an assembly line manner. Also extensive were unjust arrests, detention without a warrant, undue delays in considering juvenile cases, as well as excessive reliance on pre-trial detention and carceral punishment; all this despite the ruling of the USSR Supreme Court and Procuracy that mandated higher standards for juvenile cases than adult ones.19 All these issues would continue to trouble jurists during the post-war years as well. Both homegrown and foreign specialists noted the ‘informality and speed of Soviet court proceedings’ and condemned the judges who favoured the deprivation of freedom.20 Many courts, including those in well-provided cities such as Moscow, continued to disregard the rules of criminal procedure.21 In the overwhelming majority of cases, minors were held for long periods of time in pre-trial detention, prompting the head of the Juvenile Reformatories Section to remind his colleagues at the All-Union conference in 1957 that being held in the same cells as convicts had a ‘deleterious effect’ on minors on remand and those awaiting trial. The hardened criminals often subjected them to psychological and physical abuse, which later affected their behaviour in juvenile colonies.22 This was one of the reasons why some lawyers, seconded by Tadevosian, demanded (yet again) that the age of criminal responsibility be raised from twelve to fourteen for especially grave crimes, and to sixteen for all other transgressions. An assistant prosecutor from Leningrad carefully pointed out in 1957 that the 7 April 1935 law, which subjected minors as young as twelve to all measures of criminal punishment for intentionally committing serious crimes, was long outdated and that there was no longer any need to apply punitive measures to twelve- or thirteen-year-olds. However, some lawyers felt that even sixteen-year-olds were in need of protection from overly zealous investigatory and prosecution officers, whose only concern seemed to be to detain and convict misbehaving youngsters.23 In 1958 two jurists from Georgia criticized the police, judges and public prosecutors for their thoughtless persecution of minors, who ‘as a result of an incorrect assessment of their misconduct suffer grave trauma’.24 Despite all this mounting evidence, Tadevosian continued to boast about Soviet achievement in the fight against child homelessness and delinquency on the pages of Sotsialisticheskaia Zakonnost’, defending the leadership’s decision not to re-establish separate juvenile courts, which had been shut down in 1948. In his view, a socialist country had no need of such an institution, even after two of his colleagues wrote

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an article on the administration of juvenile justice in the countries of ‘popular democracy’, favourably comparing their practices with Soviet ones. The jurists bemoaned the fact that, unlike everywhere else in the socialist bloc, the majority of Soviet republican Criminal Procedure Codes had neither separate sections nor special articles concerning juveniles. Whereas in Bulgaria specially trained specialists performed investigations, in the Soviet Union this remained largely in the hands of the police. The law in Romania and Czechoslovakia ensured the right of the accused to a legal defence during pre-trial investigation, while Poland, Hungary, the GDR and Bulgaria allowed parents not only to defend their children in court but also to submit motions to obtain evidence, suggest appropriate corrective measures and file appeals. Even though the majority of the Soviet republican Criminal Procedure Codes stipulated a legal defence in court, in practice, this regulation was not adhered to;25 nor did the codes provide juvenile defendants with the right to a closed hearing. As a result, the youngsters on the stand either withdrew into themselves, refusing to testify, or put on a show of being old-hand felons, either of which could affect the judges’ decisions.26 Even though the regime, eager to show its more humane nature, greatly reduced the length of custodial sentences in the late 1950s, problems with the administration of criminal justice endured.27 Unsanctioned arrests, unlawful incarceration and sentencing based on insufficiently verified information or without consideration of circumstances and the offender’s personality, still occurred frequently in judiciary practice.28 Moreover, after only a very short intermission, the regime reverted to its old practices of pressuring justice officials to hunt down and incarcerate offenders in large numbers.29 This was especially true of juvenile delinquents, 60 to 70 per cent of whom were sentenced to a term in a labour colony compared to an adult rate of 40 to 50 per cent.30 Although courts now only dealt with older adolescents who committed more serious crimes, proponents of the hard line claimed that excessive lenience towards juvenile delinquency created a feeling of impunity and only encouraged deviant behaviour. In the view of the hardliners, juvenile delinquency, compared to diminishing adult crime rates, showed no sign of abetting.31 However, as one historian has suggested, this dynamic might have been, at least partially, a selfinflicted malaise caused by the overly eager regime that lashed out against all those who failed to fit in with its ideal of a disciplined and cultured society.32 This tendency had also been pronounced during the war, when public disorder was indeed a major and very real concern. During this time, the regime exhibited a paradoxical behaviour, when it simultaneously fought and produced negative experiences for many children; when child homelessness and delinquency were driven not just by war-induced social turmoil, economic dislocation and parental absence, but also by certain official policies. In other words, the state did not just react to the events but also initiated them, generating instability and uncertainty, all the while ignoring the consequences for the children involved and undermining its own preventive programmes. It now had to double its efforts to clear the streets of displaced and misbehaving youngsters, once again not always acting in the children’s best interests.

Part Three

In Beria’s Care

11

State House

To the consternation of the law enforcement agencies the number of offenders under the age of criminal liability also soared during the war years. Since, according to the law, such children could not be arrested and held responsible for their actions, police officers or prosecution investigators would sometimes release them back onto the streets. This was something Tadevosian warned against in his 1944 manual. Obviously, he argued, these children should not be set free without first establishing who had instigated them to commit a crime. He gave a characteristic example of what the best solution would be in such a case: when three boys, aged ten, eleven and fourteen were apprehended stealing a carton of tinned meat from a freight train, the investigating officer, unable to detain the two underage offenders, referred them to the local receiver-distribution centre (DPR). There they remained for five days, while the rest of their gang, including a 28-year-old ringleader, were exposed and arrested. Luckily for them, the two boys returned home with just a reprimand.1 Yet such a successful conclusion of an investigation was relatively uncommon. More often than not underage offenders were made to languish in DPRs for much longer periods of time, either because it took too long to establish the details of their transgression, or as a result of the delay in their transfer to reformatories. Thus, DPRs quickly became dumping grounds and permanent places of detention for suspected juvenile offenders. This fact could not but worry DPR directors, who vociferously complained about the corrupting influences such minors exerted on other children and the subsequent problems with discipline.2 Disruptive behaviour was something that made DPRs notorious. They housed all sorts of youngsters who had been picked up from the streets, brought in by the police or referred there by investigators. The receivers served as way stations redistributing their contingent back to parents, orphanages, trade schools or reformatories. The inmates’ ages ranged from three to sixteen, but in some cases even more mature waifs managed to dupe their way in.3 Even though children were normally accommodated within their own age groups, rarely were they distinguished according to the degree of their social neglect. The most depraved would quickly establish control over the inmate population, introducing strict hierarchies and certain practices previously acquired on the streets or in juvenile colonies. According to Eduard Kochergin, who in his six-year trek across the country managed to settle temporarily in several DPRs, eventually ending up in a juvenile colony, different age groups of inmates had their own collective nicknames: patsany

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(roughly thirteen to sixteen years old), shkety (eight to twelve years old), koziavy (six to eight years old) and kolupy (five and younger). Each boy would also go under a personal moniker, which was an indispensable attribute of the criminal subculture.4 Patsany appointed an avtoritet (figure of authority) in each subordinate group to maintain order and ensure the unquestioning implementation of their orders. DPR mores were usually less authoritarian and brutal than those established in juvenile reformatories, but one nevertheless had to be on guard and choose a strong patron – and ultimately one’s master – or learn a certain skill, such as storytelling, designing tattoos or drawing playing cards, which would make one valuable and thus immune to abuse.5 Naturally, to minimize the negative influence on other children, DPR directors often refused to accept juvenile offenders who were still under investigation or those requiring special treatment (osobyi rezhim).6 This tactic sometimes made it difficult for the less boisterous first-time offenders to find temporary shelter in DPRs instead of going directly to prison. Hoping to address the problem and simultaneously to relieve the DPR system of the extra load, the Prosecutor General issued an order on 22 June 1943, instructing his subordinates to make sure that minors committing firsttime misdemeanours or acts of petty hooliganism, but who had parents or guardians, would not be detained by the police in remand cells or deposited in DPRs.7 The order, however, did not make considerable improvements to the composition of the DPR contingent. On the contrary, the situation worsened when a joint directive of the Prosecutor General, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the Commissariat of Justice, signed a day earlier, reached DPR directors. According to this document, the DPRs would also serve as transit centres for youngsters referred to juvenile penitentiaries by the courts.8 The police, for their part, continued to pluck children off the streets and send them to receivers without any checks into their background. Meanwhile, some parents deliberately took their offspring to marketplaces to beg or trade, only to abandon them at the sight of a policeman. The DPRs were required by law to feed, clean and partially outfit these children and then deliver them back to their relatives.9 Such kindness was no mean feat when shortages abounded. Ever since their establishment in the mid-1930s, DPRs had been underfunded and undersupplied. They had completely depended on local budgets, which during the war made their plight even more desperate.10 The establishments fared differently depending on the availability of resources in a given area and the political will of local officials. For even when the latter had the means, DPRs were usually financed on the leftover principle, despite orders from above.11 As with other children’s institutions, the centre earmarked certain amounts of goods and foodstuffs to DPRs, but it was up to local executive boards and trade organizations to provide the requisite resources, and those were usually of inferior quality, if supplied at all.12 Consequently, many receivers were housed in dilapidated buildings and lacked everything from construction materials to bed linen. Even at the Central DPR in Moscow – where the situation in terms of supplies was supposedly better than anywhere else – things did not look encouraging.13 Located on the site of the Danilov Monastery, the DPR had gained notoriety in the late 1930s as a transit centre for

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child victims of Soviet political purges. During the war, scores of youngsters arriving in the capital from different regions of the country, in search of relatives, adventure, better provisions or easier prey, thronged the receiver. They filed into the overcrowded reception hall, where boys and girls of all ages and in various states of physical and emotional neglect sat on the dirty floor waiting for hours to be admitted. For many children, especially pre-teens, this would become their home for months to come; a home complete with a punishment cell and a canteen, which served food in thirteen shifts, because there were only fifty wooden bowls to go around 1,400 inmates (instead of 600 as was initially planned).14 As a result of the shortage of warm clothing, fuel and window glass, children almost everywhere endured cold, stuff y and dim environments. In several DPRs window openings had to be bricked up. The unavailability of furniture meant that inmates slept two or three to a bed or on the floor and ate standing up, often sharing kitchen utensils. Factor in the near absence of disinfection and isolation wards, shortage of clean clothes to change newcomers out of their filthy lice-infested rags, plus general overcrowding, and there was a perfect recipe for the spread of infectious disease, particularly putrid and relapsing fever.15 For instance, in December 1944 Molotovsk DPR registered fifty-three grievously ill inmates, seventeen of whom had already caught typhus in the receiver but had not been hospitalized for more than a week.16 The fact of the matter was that, in many cases, receivers could not cope effectively with outbreaks, because they had neither the required medicines nor the qualified medical personnel. Noticing that poorly inmates almost never returned alive from the infirmary, children of the DPR near Omsk dubbed their sick bay ‘the death chamber’

Figure 11 A model DPR in Kiev (courtesy TsDKFFA).

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(mralka or kaputka from the German word kaputt). There ruled an incompetent medical assistant who was powerless in the face of intestinal diseases, acquired by the youngsters as they devoured anything that could be eaten, including unwashed vegetables from agricultural allotments, intended to supplement the inmates’ diet.17 For, just as in children’s homes, near starvation was the everyday reality in many receivers, and by far the most widespread life-threatening illnesses were caused by malnutrition. According to one report, up to 80 per cent of all DPR deaths were the result of dystrophy and pellagra.18 Even though the food situation did not seem to be as dire as in some other places, especially by the end of the war, children in the receiver near Omsk would always ‘get up from the table half-starved’. Reportedly, their most cherished dreams were concerned with food, especially in winter and spring, when the inmates ‘could gobble anything that wasn’t nailed down’.19 Writing from another DPR in October 1943, a boy complained about the cold and hunger at his institution and threatened to ‘beat to death’ any ekspeditor (security escort) attempting to bring more children there.20 Overcrowding was a serious problem in many places, even though, according to official reports, the overall capacity of children’s receivers was greater than the number of youngsters passing through them. This was in fact the result of a backlog initially unforeseen by the planners, who had calculated the monthly capacity of DPRs as twice the number of actual places therein, because they were supposed to accommodate children for no longer than two weeks. In the overwhelming majority of cases, however, youngsters remained there from several months to several years, because the receivers would not transfer them quickly enough. The flow of children through receivers was recorded annually; and every year the number of those who presumably remained behind ranked in the thousands (see Table A.5). Legal requirements, designed to protect youngsters, also slowed the process considerably. Thus, children could only be returned to their former residences upon confirmation that their relatives still lived there, which also meant that they could not simply be offloaded to other receivers in the area.21 In order to hand the youngsters over to detdoma or trade schools, DPRs would need to receive ‘assignments’ from local education authorities, equip the children with footwear and clothing (which were in very short supply) or, if they had reached the age of fourteen, make sure the adolescents had the appropriate education, skills or local language proficiency to be able to study at a trade school or work at a factory.22 This was rarely done and, as a result, orphanages and schools sent poorly clothed, illiterate or unruly youngsters back to their DPRs, thereby initiating what one official dubbed a ‘veritable war’ between these institutions.23 In the meantime, as the number of children in many DPRs exceeded by two to three times the number of available places, many more youngsters, especially the older cohort, were turned back onto the streets, for already meagre resources could not be stretched even further.24 With up to 30,000 children being processed by the DPR system each month (against a pre-war average of 4,000), receivers were in desperate need of personnel.25 Nevertheless, given the squalid poverty, substandard pay and general rowdiness of inmates, it was difficult to find dedicated staff.26 As he stayed at several

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receivers on his way from Omsk to Leningrad, Kochergin remembers only one DPR director, a demobilized tank driver from Chelyabinsk, who was strict but fair and, importantly, sober, unlike the dregs of society appointed to look after war-damaged and traumatized children in other places. One such ‘educator’ from Molotov had acquired a reputation as a drunkard and a bully. Reportedly, his favourite preoccupation was to burst into children’s sleeping quarters in the middle of the night and force everyone to get on their knees, as he berated them with obscenities. Directly correlated with the amount of alcohol consumed, his eagerness would go into overdrive during state holidays. ‘He treated us like garbage,’ concludes Kochergin. ‘We resented it and gradually turned into embittered little beasts.’27 Obviously, it would be rash to idealize the youngsters in their care, but it was the personnel’s own behaviour that often provoked well-deserved counteraction. Another of Kochergin’s DPR headmasters, a haughty woman with ‘NKVD credentials’, whose name had long been forgotten by both the inmates and staff to be substituted by an appropriate nickname, the Toad, was dismayed at the swarms of cockroaches in her study. Little did she know that this was the result of an elaborate and reportedly ‘terribly dangerous partisan operation’. It involved a large number of children and was carried out on a regular basis during weekends or holidays, when the director was out and the warders were ‘on all fours’ from drinking. On the orders of patsany, younger children caught the insects, which they apparently did with great enthusiasm, considering it their contribution to the war effort, since this particular species of cockroaches was believed to have arrived from Prussia and was thus of German nationality. The patsany would then blow the ‘Prussians’ into the Toad’s office through the gap under the door. The younger ones did not always realize what the cockroaches were for, and some even thought the wicked bosses ate them with special gravy.28 Their brutal, wretched existence did not rob the youngsters of the desire to be children, to be mischievous, to play normal games and have proper toys. Since the latter were very hard to come by, the children made their own substitutes. On the way to a bathhouse or a vegetable plot they would pick up pieces of cardboard, bits of rope or wire, buttons and nails. ‘We collected everything we could, just in case,’ remembers Kochergin. ‘Then fashioned our “dream” out of all this random stuff and played with [it].’ The DIY sessions would usually take place after dark, when, undisturbed by adults, the children also manufactured ‘combat catapults with little bullets’, as well as things that might come in useful during an escape.29 For absconding was the children’s most common answer to abuse and neglect. Some receivers registered from a tenth to a quarter of their inmate population as being on the run at any given time, even during the colder months.30 There was a gaping discrepancy between the reported number of children leaving the DPR system each year and the total transferred elsewhere. Allowing for the inaccuracy of wartime record-keeping and fatalities, escapes might have at least partially accounted for the inconsistency (see Table A.5). Nevertheless, foot voting would be much more dangerous, should the youngsters have a run-in with the law – which was highly possible in their situation – and reach the appropriate age to be legally imprisoned. As they attempted to maintain order on the home front and clear the streets of deviant youths, law enforcement agencies were increasingly prepared to overlook

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the age requirement and send apprehended children directly to jails or other secure institutions. Exclusion and repression of the growing number of street children seemed to become a panacea, administered generously by the regime. The strategy, moreover, enjoyed overwhelming public support. Few raised objections about the way the police handled delinquents. Whereas the quintessential war orphan enjoyed a privileged position in the popular imagination, a real waif would elicit nothing more than indignation and contempt. It usually did not matter to the public what happened to such youngsters after they had been institutionalized, as long as society was spared the company of the troublesome ragamuffins and miscreants. So eager were some to put children behind bars for the slightest offence that the entire upbringing process would sometimes be compromised. Demanding harsher punishments, many teachers all but abandoned pedagogic methods with some of the more undisciplined pupils. When in 1943 the NKVD began institutionalizing youngsters for rowdy behaviour, the teachers saw a chance to offload their rambunctious students on the repressive organs. Thus, in the first half of 1945, 241 schoolchildren were sent to labour educational colonies (TVKs) at teachers’ requests in the Moscow oblast alone.31 During the course of the war, in fact, the number of teenagers referred to TVKs increased almost sixfold. Nearly half of them had parents or guardians but were considered neglected (see Table A.6).32 Such an approach betrayed a huge margin for legal error and thus invited a great deal of abuse. Even though during the war, the courts curbed somewhat the NKVD’s unlimited prosecution powers, the security organs continued to exercise the privilege freely when it came to moving displaced children inside its penal system, without being countermanded by other judicial agencies.33 Thus, to meet the quota, the police in Omsk sent detained children straight to the local TVK, rather than finding them jobs or returning them to their parents, as was legally required. A DPR director in Bashkir ASSR deliberately accused several of his charges of begging and transferred them directly to a TVK. A policeman from Ivanovo oblast delivered a completely innocent twelve-year-old pupil to the DPR in Ivanovo to be transferred to a TVK without notifying his mother or obtaining the necessary paperwork.34 Pursuant to the instruction of 21 June 1943, minors could only be referred to a labour educational colony on the basis of either a court ruling, a prosecutor’s warrant or a joint directive of the head of NKVD/regional NKVD and the prosecutor’s office (or the Commissariat of Enlightenment in the case of discipline violators at children’s institutions). Another decree, issued by the Commissariat of Justice in December of the same year, mandated that judges should announce their decision about referral to a TVK in the presence of the defendant, his or her parents and a representative of the local education department. Instead, sporadic checks uncovered numerous instances of teenagers being incarcerated without the agreement of all the involved agencies or in violation of legal procedures, whereby the head of the local Department for Combatting Child Homelessness and Neglect (OBDBB) would simply sign a list of juveniles, subject to institutionalization, rather than examining and approving each individual case.35 Though the overall number of minors dispatched to juvenile reformatories through the DPR system was lower than those reunited with their relatives, employed

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or transferred to other child welfare institutions, it was clear that in many instances the NKVD clung onto old habits in its administration of justice. Such arbitrariness on the part of the law enforcement agency attracted the attention of the Prosecutor’s Office. In their instructions senior procuracy officers reminded their colleagues that confinement in a TVK was a serious punishment that had to be ‘fully justified’ and not dispensed lightly, and only once all educational approaches had been exhausted.36 Tadevosian wrote in his publications that the law required either the judge’s or the procurator’s sanction to transfer petty felons, against whom it was unreasonable to bring criminal charges, to a labour educational colony.37 The jurist urged the police and investigators not to detain minors who had parents or guardians, even if they reached the age of criminal liability or committed more serious crimes, but rather to hand them over to their parents for the duration of the pre-trial inquiry. That is, of course, unless holding them on remand would make troublesome offenders reform and repent.38 Isolation in prisons, however, seemed to have become a more common approach to juvenile delinquents, even if detention rarely led to redemption. As a rule, underage detainees spent more than the prescribed thirty days awaiting transfer to the appropriate institution after their cases had been heard. There was a high incidence of adolescents lingering in prisons for up to eight months, having already received one-year sentences in juvenile colonies. Just as before the war, they frequently shared their crummy, insect-infested quarters with seasoned criminals, either juvenile or adult, although sometimes it was not altogether clear whose company was safer.39 A sixteen-year-old Polish refugee, awaiting trial for an attempted border crossing into Hungary in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Poland, was shocked by the rowdy behaviour of the juvenile detainees, trapped in an upper floor cell: ‘All day long they were screaming and swearing. They banged the floor with the bedsteads. They broke windows to make it easier to talk and yell to the juvenile delinquent girls who were in a cell next to theirs.’ When his fellow adult inmates asked why the boy could not be transferred to the juvenile ward and benefit from better nutrition, the prison warden looked up at the ceiling, just as the juveniles raised ‘a frightful din, shouting, swearing and banging the floor and the door’, and smiled, ‘They would kill him there. He is better off here.’40 The law required that detained juveniles enjoyed a ‘milder’ regime than adult convicts. They had to be lodged in ‘the best, light, dry and airy cells’, situated as far away from other convicts as possible. No more than ten juveniles could share the same cell, with no less than 2 square metres of living space per person. Recidivists and escapees from juvenile colonies needed to be kept separately from other detainees, and only those accused of counter-revolutionary activity could stay together with adult political prisoners. Prison chiefs were to appoint ‘politically literate’ and physically fit instructors to carry out a cultural programme among underage detainees, and it was imperative that children had access to books and games, such as chess and draughts, but they were to be strongly discouraged from playing cards.41 In reality, not all prison governors had the means or the will to allocate special cells, qualified educators and food stores to accommodate underage inmates. A secret

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inspection report on ‘the legality of pre-trial detention of juveniles’ by the Moscow branch of the NKVD’s Directorate of the Worker-Peasant Militia, dated 19 February 1941, revealed that although underage detainees (accused of labour desertion) were accommodated in a separate chamber, all thirteen of them occupied only 7.4 square metres of cell space, which made it impossible for some to lie down at night. They were not allowed to go outside, had to eat substandard food, and if they wanted to lodge a complaint about abusive warders or simply write letters home, they could not do so because of the shortage of paper.42 Inspected in June 1943, another jail in Arkhangelsk contained eighty-six minors aged eleven to fifteen: fifty-six of them were convicted and thirty were still on remand. They lived in five cells according to their criminal record. Although inspectors deemed the minors’ living conditions acceptable, they also noted problems with discipline and pointed to several serious shortcomings: the teenagers rarely went outside in the fresh air; they did not receive any clothing and their undergarments were not washed but just disinfected once a week. Bedding consisted of several mattresses and blankets, which was not enough for everyone. Owing to the erratic food supply, the inmates neither received their rations in full, nor were they allowed to read for fear that the books would be used to make playing cards. Similar problems plagued a jail in Gorky.43 The widespread violation of legal requirements had prompted NKVD bosses to organize an inspection of the confinement conditions of juveniles. This, in turn, initiated a flurry of activity on the part of various government agencies, including the Komsomol, in the summer of 1943. What they uncovered was far from reassuring, because two months later, the NKVD issued another directive that stipulated a monthly assessment of juveniles’ prison regimes.44 This, however, did not seem to change the situation. At least in some prisons, juveniles continued to complain about sharing cells with adults or recidivists, criticised substandard food and a lack of bedding, cutlery, cultural activities and physical exercise.45 Moreover, just as the proclaimed egalitarian principles generally did not apply to Soviet society at large, social inequality was particularly evident in places of confinement. Minors, whose affluent parents still enjoyed the regime’s favours, seemed to experience milder treatment than their less privileged counterparts. Although he was unlawfully denied contact with his mother during a five-month stint in jail on suspicion of conspiracy to overthrow the Stalinist government, the younger son of Anastas Mikoyan, a member of the State Defence Committee, nevertheless endured less cramped conditions and was generally treated with consideration by his gaolers. Sergo was thirteen when his schoolmate, the son of the People’s Commissar of the Aviation Industry, committed suicide having first shot his girlfriend. The megalomaniac boy’s diary, where he had laid out his ambitious plans to become one day the head of the Soviet state, was used as evidence against Sergo and his older brother. In the former’s words, Stalin had ‘demanded to punish the guilty, but gave no clear instructions. Obviously, the sledovatel’ realized that there had never been a conspiracy, but he still did not know what to do with me. So they just isolated me in prison and did not allow parcels and letters from home.’46

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Even though Sergo’s stretch in prison was too long to be legal, the Mikoyan boys never became part of the prison fraternity, having eventually been cleared of all charges and promptly exiled to Central Asia, where their mother soon joined them. For the unlucky ones, the entire process proved to be sluggish and obtuse, as in the case of a group of underage Romanians who had crossed the border into the Soviet Union in 1940 and were shunted from one prison to another for months afterwards. As remembered by the Polish teenager Aleksander Topolski, who shared a cell with them, no one knew what to do with these children, except keep them in jail where they quickly turned into ‘seasoned jailbirds’.47 Sometimes, prison administration simply forgot about their underage charges. A Polish girl claimed that she had had to remind the Kharkov prison governor of the decision to transfer her and her cellmates to the Starodub colony for juveniles: ‘One day during our exercise in the prison yard, we met the prison governor. I asked him what we were waiting for. “What a good thing you reminded me – I’d forgotten all about you” – he answered. The next day we were sent away.’48 Another fourteen-year-old, an orphan from a children’s home in Baku, was begging at the train station when a sympathetic man in uniform whisked him to the local NKVD interior prison. The boy spent more than a year in the prison basement ‘without seeing the light of day’. The confinement devastated his health. In April 1943, without a court hearing, he was charged with being a ‘socially dangerous element’ and sentenced to five years of hard labour as an adult. He then exchanged several transit prisons before being finally released seven months later, possibly because his sentence had been revoked after an inspection or because of his poor health.49 The transfer within the penal system would become yet another ordeal, mostly because of the system’s jumbled nature, exacerbated by the realities of war. Whereas some juvenile penitentiaries were underpopulated, others were bursting at the seams, which prompted the NKVD to organize new ones and urgently remove all sixteen-year-olds to adult colonies and camps in order to free up space.50 In the meantime, minors had to wait in jails or transit centres for a referral and itinerary, because transportation proved to be yet another controversial issue. In answer to the widespread practice, a 24 September 1943 NKVD instruction mandated that juveniles should not be transported in specially adapted railway carriages for prisoners (vagonzaki), but rather in more comfortable passenger cars accompanied by unarmed guards. The deputy Commissar of the Railway Communications seconded the instruction in February 1944.51 Yet, neither directive took effect, for in March 1945 the commander of the convoy troops reported the ‘growing incidence’ of minors spending a long while en route, because of the shortage of places on prison trains and the lack of organization exhibited by the receiving parties. There were many cases when parents were notified neither of their offspring’s departure nor about their new places of internment. Consequently, parents lost contact with their children, which complicated considerably the latter’s correction and later resocialization.52 To make matters worse, judging from the attendant directives, juveniles were not always properly attired for the journey or given food and hot water on time. It seemed

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that jail governors and DPR administrators were happy to wash their hands of sick and severely undernourished charges, sending them away without appropriate provisions.53 As a result, many newcomers arrived at their destinations severely emaciated, exhibiting signs of dystrophy and scurvy or infected with tuberculosis. These diseases testified to the youngsters’ previous conditions of detention as much as to the possible reasons that had driven them into crime in the first place.54 At their new places of internment minors were only marginally better off than in prisons. Despite official proclamations, juvenile correction facilities were usually the last places to offer rehabilitation, either physical or social.

12

Maloletka

Although in legal terms, juvenile penitentiaries were places of punishment, it was emphasized that their overarching goal was resocialization rather than repression.1 The reformatories, colloquially known under their generic name as maloletka (the underage), like those populating them, were vested with the mission of shaping good citizens out of flawed and discarded human material through labour training and strict discipline. The legislator envisaged that deviant youngsters would walk out of these secure institutions armed with the correct social values and trade skills that would enable them to rejoin the modernization project. Supposedly placed there for their own safety and welfare, juveniles would instead leave maloletka as physical cripples and, more often than not, as moral degenerates. For, especially during the war, juvenile colonies gained notoriety for their unacceptable conditions and oppressive regimes. So wretched was the state of the overwhelming majority of these institutions that on 23 April 1944 Beria demanded that the colonies be brought to ‘perfect order’.2 Almost a year later, however, the deputy chief of the Department for Combatting Child Homelessness and Neglect (OBDBB), Foma Leoniuk, publicly acknowledged that things had moved forward only slightly. He chose to concentrate on inmates’ sleeping quarters as a benchmark for ‘high culture’ in reformatories. Well aware of the legislation that prescribed the minimum norm of 2.5 square metres per person, Leoniuk announced to his colleagues that it had not been uncommon for inmates throughout the country to sleep on solid plank beds, widely used in the Soviet penal system, despite being outlawed in 1919 because of the health hazard they posed,3 in filthy, jam-packed quarters ‘without windows, windowpanes and doors’. In the deputy chief ’s opinion, the situation in terms of bunks had slowly improved by the beginning of 1945, but overall living conditions still left much to be desired.4 The Krasnoyarsk colony could have been among those slated by Leoniuk. Its dormitory consisted of one unheated room that was designed to accommodate a maximum of sixty youngsters, but in fact housed all 341 inmates, who slept on solid plank beds and made do without any bedding.5 In another reformatory, adolescents shared beds or slumbered on the floor fully clothed to avoid freezing.6 Leoniuk laid the blame for the shortages of sleeping equipment on the government, which had left it to colony chiefs to procure such stock wherever they could. Those colonies that were situated in the areas of mass deportations, for example, were able to

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secure surplus furniture that had been left behind by the deportees.7 But in the regions, recently liberated from the German occupation, the devastation was so profound that it was almost impossible to find intact buildings, let alone equipment for children’s institutions. In the majority of cases, scant resources were diverted to other needs.8 Even more so than with detdoma, the issue of supplying juvenile reformatories exposed serious friction between central power and its local representatives. Colonies required substantial investment, which the state was unable to provide at the necessary level. Instead, just like all the other children’s institutions, the government transferred the reformatories to the local budgets and expected them to become self-sufficient in due course. In the meantime, it sent down directives to regional authorities without consideration for local means and capabilities. The latter were usually unable, or more likely unwilling, to do anything to help the OBDBB in setting up and supporting juvenile colonies, considering the general attitude towards deviant youths. Complaints about neglectful local bosses, understated budget appropriations and incorrect financial planning abounded; as did reports about callous colony chiefs, who themselves embezzled funds or allowed the siphoning of materiel by members of staff.9 But it was the allocation of housing that most sharply delineated the fundamental gap between the rhetoric and reality of Soviet child protection policies. Several months after the OBDBB had been set up, the newly appointed deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (SNK), Alexei Kosygin, suggested to republican councils and regional executive committees that they earmark within five days adequate buildings and construction materials for the establishment of new children’s colonies throughout the country. In November 1943, however, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) informed Kosygin that in many places local authorities ignored the orders.10 Moreover, since the ownership of some enterprises and their material bases was not always clear, a great squabble ensued between various local agencies and the OBDBB for the most comfortable and wellequipped buildings, with the Department of Corrective Labour Colonies also laying claim to the properties.11 Reasons for these turf wars varied. Some agencies were governed by a purely selfish desire to retain the best buildings, as was the case with a colony in KabardinoBalkariia, which was prevented from establishing itself on the territory of a former orphanage with a well-developed infrastructure, because the local executive committee wanted the property for themselves. Instead, the reformatory was offered the dilapidated building of a starch factory but eventually settled for the facilities of a pumice pit. In lieu of adequate living conditions the regional committee, seconded by the SNK, offered inmates a typically Soviet proclamation that the youngsters would ‘participate in an important socially useful activity – mining pumicite’, thereby helping the country’s reconstruction. In practical terms, the authorities hoped to solve several problems with one action: ‘To lower the cost of the extracted pumice powder’ and to allow the colony to earn enough income by trading the surplus ‘on the side’, in order to ‘replenish the shortage of buildings’. Having limited their assistance to issuing the order, the authorities left the staff of the OBDBB to deal with problems on the ground independently.12

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On other occasions, the local authorities were reluctant to undermine industrial production in the area, so they attempted to strike deals with the NKVD that production would continue if juvenile colonies were to move in. Thus, the Commissariat of Paper Industry forced the Akhunsk labour colony to move out from the territory of a paper mill in Penza, despite the fact that half a million rubles had already been spent on renovations. After a month of heated correspondence, the regional committee finally agreed to cede the facilities of a machine parts factory to the colony but on the strict condition that mechanical assembly would continue without interruption. Before long, it became apparent that this type of work was too difficult for children, so the reformatory moved yet again to a colony formerly populated by adult invalids.13 By and large, the quality of buildings varied. Some institutions were organized literally in the middle of nowhere, for example the Kiotsk labour colony in Irkutsk oblast, which occupied several dilapidated peasant shacks with boarded-up windows and a wooden fence around the perimeter of the zona. Other reformatories were accommodated on the sites of lagpunkty (camp compounds), complete with large dormitories, workshops, medical stations and canteens.14

Figure 12 A stark contrast between two different juvenile reformatories (courtesy of GARF).

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In many instances local bureaucrats resorted to pencil-whip tactics in the allocation of buildings, when the latter looked good on paper but were actually unsuitable for human habitation. Thus, at the Mary labour colony in Turkmenistan inmates entered their narrow dim-lit dormitories through window openings, because there were no doorways.15 The mudbrick buildings of the Kurgan-Tubinsk labour educational colony in Tajikistan constantly threatened to collapse.16 Situated far away from the town and the railway, the L’govsk colony near Ryazan had neither running water nor electricity. The absence of a bathhouse and general unsanitary conditions contributed to the rapid spread of pediculosis. No provision was made for the mostly female warders, who were forced to lead a beggarly existence in the nearby village. Crushed and demoralized by difficult circumstances, the inmates and guards became trapped in a vicious cycle of neglect and mutual abuse.17 While it has quickly transpired that juvenile penitentiaries generally operated according to the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ principle, it would be wrong to assume that, having placed delinquents and homeless children under lock and key, the state completely turned its back on them. After all, the L’govsk colony was eventually shut and the children transferred to other NKVD institutions. It was concern for the well-being of the underage inmates at another colony in Ukhta (one of the fastest developing industrial centres of the Gulag system in the north-western autonomous republic of Komi) that led to its eventual closure in September 1945. The basis for the petition, submitted by the republican NKVD to their superiors at the Union level, was that the inmates, who came from different parts of the Soviet Union, were not used to harsh climatic conditions, their predicament being exacerbated by the ramshackle state of the buildings they occupied.18 Whether prompted by parents or conscientious inspectors, the NKVD shut down a number of newly opened colonies, because they either lacked the appropriate production facilities or were established in inhospitable climates.19 The General Procuracy also exhibited concern for the children’s welfare, at least outwardly. On 24 September 1944 it decreed a monthly inspection of juvenile colonies in addition to the review of the legality of confinement stipulated in the Prosecutor’s order of 24 January. Yet, for the most part, the two decrees remained on paper only. To be sure, regional prosecutors carried out sporadic checks, in the course of which a number of violations were uncovered and the guilty punished, but, for instance, in the first half of 1945, only 3–4 per cent of all children’s institutions under NKVD authority had undergone such inspections.20 The lack of qualified and dedicated personnel was exacerbated by the remoteness of juvenile colonies, which were frequently situated tens and even hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest town and train stations. In a country with vast distances but only a rudimentary transportation network, this had a crippling effect on the directorate of public prosecutors.21 Still, even when inspectors did manage to visit a colony and find it in good order, there was usually more, or rather less, to it than met the eye. For pokazukha and ochkovtiratel’stvo (eyewash) were something governors and staff frequently resorted to in order to avoid reprimand and a blemish on their service record. Juvenile justice workers, Komsomol inspectors and NKVD supervisors despaired that the concealment

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of serious problems became the norm in the majority of children’s institutions.22 Reports revealed the cavalier attitude of many reformatory administrators to the living conditions of their charges, which was usually limited to eliminating any visible signs of squalor and lice infestation.23 At a conference in November 1945, colony governors learned that it was often enough to visit a reformatory unexpectedly, especially at night, to witness the real state of things. What during the day looked like a tidy dormitory would turn into a shambolic dosshouse, with children sleeping fully clothed on dirty, threadbare mattresses full of bedbugs. Inmates would neatly fold the clean bed linen and towels issued to them on account of the inspection, and put them at the head of their beds so as not to crease or sully them. It is possible that some frugal children did so out of habit, having lived on the streets for long periods of time (and possibly thinking of a better use for them), but most likely this was done on the orders of the avaricious wardens, hoping to curry favour with state inspectors.24 One former inmate insisted that bed linen would be distributed before such a visit and promptly taken away the minute the assessors left the colony’s premises.25 Another recalled a similar trick being performed with new clothing and food at his model colony in Kiev in 1940. General cleanliness would suddenly be strictly enforced and when visitors came, the colonists had to put up a show of happy, athletic and well-fed youths: ‘Before every visit by a high-ranking Party official, food would become plentiful, and such luxuries as cookies, fruit, candy and cigarettes would appear in the prison store. Most of the time, though, we lived on thin cabbage soup, a few spoonfuls of kasha, sweetish ersatz tea and 650 grams of dark bread per day.’26 These last recollections came from the time just before the German invasion wreaked havoc on food supply and distribution in the Soviet Union. Greatly reduced agricultural output meant that many regions of the Soviet hinterland, especially the industrial district of the Urals, witnessed a complete breakdown in general nutrition. For the Gulag, starvation became an everyday reality, and despite supposedly receiving preferential treatment as far as the provision of food was concerned, juvenile colonies fared only slightly better than their adult counterparts. Already inadequately stocked and managed before the war, colony stores were now stripped to the bone. Without access to sufficient food, the physical fitness of the inmate population quickly deteriorated to the point of total debility. Neglect and maladies associated with nutritional deficiency led to soaring mortality rates.27 Governors made excuses and blamed conditions in jails and the food provision in transit for the acute malnutrition of their charges.28 One person who found such claims unconvincing was the head of the ninth OBDBB subdivision, Major Sokolov. In his 25 October 1944 memorandum to Leoniuk, Sokolov insisted that an autopsy performed on deceased inmates showed that the children had not been beyond recovery upon their arrival in colonies. They had even been put to work, and lasted from one to six months before expiring.29 And yet at least some of what the governors claimed was true. It took time for the adolescents completely to exhaust their bodily resources, and for some of them the process had more likely started while they were on the way to colonies from prisons or receiver-distribution centres (DPRs), if not earlier. Official reports stated that juveniles would often spend up to two months en route, stopping over in various secure institutions before arriving at their destinations. While

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on the go, their diet would almost entirely consist of salted fish, which did not require refrigeration and was thus considered suitable for long hauls. It was also low in calories and induced acute thirst when consumed. Water was not always on offer though, so dehydration and fatigue soon followed, accelerating the onset of severe inanition.30 Moreover, those arriving from warmer regions found it particularly difficult to adjust to the extreme climatic conditions of the Far North, especially in the absence of warm clothing. They burned off more energy trying to keep warm, while the meagre provisions available to them did not offer enough calories to restore normal body function and re-energise them. A report sent from the colony in Ukhta in January 1944 stated bluntly that, in addition to the lack of warm clothing, which the local combine had refused to supply, the amount of food allotted to inmates was ‘inadequate in the conditions of the Far North’. As a result, 265 inmates out of 312 had to be transferred to other colonies, situated in milder climates.31 It seemed the youngsters found a true champion in Major Sokolov, who kept on badgering his superiors with protest letters. In August and September 1943 he wrote to Leoniuk and Beria, respectively, about the high level of mortality due to starvation in DPRs, prisons and colonies for juveniles. He complained to Beria that his previous request to revise the officially set allowance of food had been swept under the carpet, and that children’s colonies were supplied on the residual principle, despite official claims to the contrary. In November the deputy Commissar of Internal Affairs, Chernyshov, received a report from Leoniuk proposing a change to the established rations.32 Perhaps in answer to these demands, the Commissariat sent a telegram in January 1944 restating that within the Gulag system priority in terms of food and fuel provision was to be given to juvenile institutions and that ‘under no circumstances should there be any disruptions’ as far as feeding of minors was concerned. NKVD chiefs were to supply children’s reformatories with fuel ‘at the expense of any resources of camps, colonies and other NKVD organizations’.33 Four months later, a committee of medics and nutritionists met to review the food quotas set by the NKVD order of 29 May 1943. Unsurprisingly, they discovered that ‘the prescribed rations fell significantly below the minimum sustenance level for the children of that age group’. Even if inmates received the full daily allowance, their dietary intake of protein still fell short by 40 per cent and the calorie content by up to 28 per cent of the recommended healthy diet; furthermore, the minors did not get enough fat, vitamins or calcium to give them energy and sustain their growing bodies. The committee concluded that ‘a prolonged use of the prescribed norms inevitably [led] to mass emaciation of children and a high incidence of [starvationrelated] diseases, such as alimentary dystrophy and pellagra’, which were reportedly the cause of 55 to 75 per cent of all deaths in juvenile penitentiaries. Moreover, the study revealed that all the arrangements to re-feed the weakened youngsters had a ‘temporary effect’, because ‘positive results would disappear as soon as children [were] transferred back to the general alimentation’.34 It was a rare colony that had enough provision to re-feed all the vulnerable inmates. Throughout 1943, OBDBB subdivisions regularly submitted requests for extra allotments to be used by special rehabilitation sections.35 These were set up in each colony to accommodate minors in need of reinforced diet and rest. Certainly, it

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remained wishful thinking on the part of those sending down regulations that poorly inmates should enjoy ‘high-quality, dietetic food’ and at least four to five hot meals a day, whereas their healthy counterparts would receive three hot meals, consisting of ‘tasty, nourishing and varied’ food.36 Indeed, in their memoirs, former inmates refer to debilitating hunger that forced some to eat stray animals, while others attempted to trade their possessions to augment their diet.37 If allowed outside, they would also barter stolen colony property at markets or engage in shoplifting. The problem of squandering and thieving became so acute that some colony directors were prepared to spend more resources on extra guards in order to prevent inmates from leaving the zona.38 This only aggravated the situation further, since juveniles were now compelled to trade among themselves or, more likely, to extort food from others. They would either require ‘payments’ for ‘protection’ or gamble someone’s ration or even life in card games. This was a very dangerous practice leading to emaciation among weaker inmates, parasitism by the stronger minority and sometimes the murder of those unable to pay.39 Even the subsequent, post-enquiry increase in rations did not seem to make dramatic changes in the inmates’ diet.40 From 1944 onwards, as the Red Army continued its liberating march across the European part of the Soviet Union, resources became more plentiful, even though severe supply disruptions remained commonplace. There were also specifically local factors at play, since the availability of resources was far from uniform throughout the country, not to mention the massive practical problems associated with transporting provisions to remote colonies, situated miles away from the nearest depots. The new quotas were based on the assumption that local trade organizations could supply colonies with all the food they were entitled to. Nevertheless, not all of them had the means to do so, and many refused to prioritize children’s institutions. Beria underlined this utter lack of concern in his report to Mikoyan, sent on 11 August 1944. Not only did the State Committee for Economic Planning (Gosplan) include juvenile penitentiaries and DPRs in the same line with adult organizations of the Gulag, but other commissariats ‘for the most part, supplied goods of inferior quality’, which had an adverse effect on the physical rehabilitation of juveniles. Beria requested that the funds for juvenile institutions henceforth be allocated as a separate category on the Gosplan balance sheet.41 To supplement their stores, most colonies received land allotments in 1944, which they could use to grow extra food without the latter being accounted for in centrally allocated budgets.42 Yet there were limitations to what colonists could get from their plots without much knowledge about agriculture and animal husbandry. At the end of the day, the initiative turned out to be a mixed blessing, because of serious problems with acquiring suitable land, transport, livestock, seeds, fodder and, above all, qualified specialists.43 At least from October 1944 onwards, children’s reformatories and DPRs began receiving the same amount of vegetables and potatoes as detdoma.44 Despite the official regulations regarding stricter control over the quality of the supplied provisions, deliveries of inferior substitutes continued.45 To make matters worse, some colony administrators attempted to ‘economize’ on their charges’ alimentation. Thus, in the course of seven months in 1945, inmates of the Birsk colony

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in Bashkir ASSR were conned out of almost 3,000 kilograms of meat, nearly 4,000 kilograms of fish and 700 kilograms of sugar. What did reach the inmates often went through a very questionable cooking process. One inspector summarized in 1945 that, with few exceptions, clean kitchens and canteens were a rarity. Preparation rooms were usually filthy with refuse, while food was stored in cupboards together with cooks’ personal belongings, kerosene, dirty clothing and footwear.46 In some colonies children drank water from cleaning buckets or ate snow.47 People higher up the NKVD command chain clearly realized the danger of polluted food, overcrowding and poor hygiene as ideal conditions for the spread of communicable diseases.48 Their orders required regular sanitization of inmates and decontamination of colony premises, which was not always adhered to, either by colony administrators or the inmates themselves.49 The mass incarceration of besprizorniki from 1943 onwards bore an additional risk of infections turning into a serious threat, because the youngsters were often admitted without any prior medical examination.50 Not all colonies could boast a quarantine room, and those that did usually accommodated healthy and unwell children together. Although an outbreak of epidemics was generally kept at bay, the situation in a number of colonies remained dire throughout the war.51 An official report for 1944–5 identified several hundred nidi of typhus within the system.52 Considering that by the end of 1945 there were 126 juvenile colonies of both types throughout the country, it is possible that a great majority of them had to deal with various strands of the disease. Quality medical care, however, was not available, as children’s colonies yet again found themselves at the very bottom of the pecking order when it came to supplying them with medicine, disinfectants, medical equipment and specialists.53 In March 1944 the OBDBB complained to the NKVD about the acute need of epidemiologists, particularly malariologists, since twenty colonies were situated in the affected areas. The existing staff of doctors proved unable to combat high disease and mortality rates among colony wards.54 Yet, there were few enthusiasts who wished to work in juvenile correctional institutions, and the Commissariat for Health needed every physician they could get to meet the general population’s health care demands. As a result, the severe shortage of qualified personnel, supplies and equipment often amounted to the medical abuse of inmates. In the words of a former juvenile political, Gelii Pavlov, ‘medics varied. There were those whom the colonists deservedly called “death’s helpers”.’ However, as the case of the head doctor at his colony proves, much depended on the resourcefulness and doggedness of the medical personnel. Despite her demeanour and delicate physique, Bertha Skoblo, the wife of a political convict from Leningrad, was very assertive in her dealings with the colony’s governor, finding resolute allies among other medics in her battle for the welfare of the inmates.55 When the latter themselves tried to change the situation, their attempts were met with varying degrees of success.

13

Challenges to Authority

There were several ways in which juveniles could express their displeasure at the conditions and regimes at their institutions. The most legitimate, but ultimately least effective, action was to write a complaint letter or to express their concerns verbally, either to colony governors or visiting state inspectors. Yet the same regulation that awarded the inmates this privilege also stated that letters should be sent in an approved manner, else the supplicant forfeit the right to correspondence for a month.1 Presumably, it was left to the colony’s authorities to determine the acceptable content and to set the rules for the procedure. As well as ensuring that their charges did not engage in illegal communication or kept illicit contacts with the outside world, colony administrators were anxious not to allow any compromising information to reach the wrong eyes and lead to negative consequences. They also attempted to pre-empt especially active parents from publicizing abuses by threatening to punish their children. One mother nevertheless succeeded in attracting official attention having been refused access to her son again after a very short visit to his colony, during which the boy had appeared ragged and unkempt. Letters from the boy apparently confirmed the woman’s suspicions and she began petitioning for his release. She wrote to the governor of her son’s reformatory but received a rather brusque response from one Volkova that her son would be prevented from receiving visitors for a month for writing ‘absurdities’. Upon learning about such injustice, the Department for Combating Child Homelessness and Neglect (OBDBB) proposed firing Volkova and ordered all colonies to organize visiting rooms, make them as accommodating as possible and allow only members of teaching staff, rather than warders, to oversee the meetings. Teachers and vospitateli (mentors) also received instructions to correspond with their charges’ parents and inform them of the children’s health and academic progress.2 It was unclear, however, how the mentors were supposed to manage this when they had on average thirty to fifty (and sometimes many more) children in their care.3 Occasionally, it was the mentors themselves who harshly punished their charges for speaking up. When one courageous boy decided to complain about the abuse and arbitrariness of a deprived vospitatel’ and his minions at the Zakovsk labour colony, he received a polite reply from the head of the inspecting committee that the mentor in question, Uncle Kolia, would see to the boy’s complaint. This Uncle Kolia did with fervour. In the words of an eyewitness, the minions ‘ “saw to” the boy

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throughout the night’. In the morning, Uncle Kolia innocently asked whether the boy still had complaints. Savagely beaten, the latter replied grimly that he was satisfied with everything.4 Thus, governors or mentors could simply block the possibility of an appeal to a superior agency or to the public. Rather than enduring abuse and humiliation, many children preferred to take their chances on the street or to seek refuge with relatives. As in other children’s boarding institutions, escapes became the most widespread form of protest in reformatories. Thus, in the course of 1944, the Astrakhan’ labour educational colony (TVK) saw its entire inmate contingent take to the road. From January to May 1945 the Zvenigorodsk TVK admitted thirty new inmates while losing forty-one within the same space of time. Other reformatories also reported an exodus of inmates in response to poor living conditions. According to one report, on average 47 per cent of the population of juvenile colonies were on the run at any given time, although official statistics do not corroborate this claim.5 Less heavily guarded, TVKs were more affected by breakouts than labour colonies, which employed armed guards and guard-dogs. The latter were often unleashed to hunt down runaways. It is difficult to establish whether the underage escapees received similarly brutal punishments as their adult counterparts, if caught, but the ‘mechanical imitation’ of the Gulag practice of using dogs, for instance, attracted bitter criticism from some of the more conscientious officers.6 In secure institutions, such as labour colonies, escapes usually followed mass riots, which became the most effective, albeit dangerous for all sides, means of informing the authorities about the urgency of the problem. Sporadic rioting in children’s colonies was not something new and had taken place on several occasions before.7 Wartime deprivations only added to the explosive combination of factors that made riots a fairly common phenomenon. These actions of mass resistance could be spontaneous or carefully planned. Both types usually had farreaching consequences, at least in the case of juvenile reformatories. Unlike adult camps, in which mass protest action did not reach its apogee until after the war, colonies for minors witnessed serious disorders with alarming regularity, even though large-scale disturbances had not yet begun to sweep the reformatories in a wave-like fashion, as they would later on under the influence of the adult resistance movement.8 A milder regime and better provision of children’s colonies were definitely a factor in the youngsters’ ability to stage revolts, even though the juvenile population was also considerably weakened by starvation. Youthful enthusiasm, maximalism and a strong sense of entitlement must also have contributed to the teenagers’ radicalization. Years of ideological priming about youth’s special position within Soviet society, evidenced by their more lenient treatment in colonies, only reinforced the youngsters’ belief in their self-importance, competence in attaining certain goals and a feeling of impunity. Until 1946 there was also little surveillance work carried out among juveniles in an attempt to neutralize troublemakers or prevent disorder, as was the case with adult convicts.9 At any rate, just as in labour camps for grown-ups, riots in juvenile institutions unsettled the status quo within the Gulag, slowly undermining its structures.10 Juveniles were, on the whole, able to achieve some tangible results, including further

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relaxation of the regime and the improvement of their lot. A good example was the Sarovsk labour colony in Mordoviia. It took an uprising for bureaucrats to take notice of the wretched conditions in which inmates had been forced to live for several months since the establishment of the colony in September 1943. Regular arson and the destruction of colony property were just a taste of things to come before the general outburst at the end of the year. On 6 December inmates spilled out into the nearby workers’ settlement, having driven away the warders and wounded the chief of the colony in the process. Their first destination was the factory outlet shop and a canteen, which they promptly ransacked before moving on to rob private flats and attack settlers. Order was fully restored four days later; several members of the colony staff, accused of stealing or gambling food, were sacked and put on trial. Naturally, the affair became a major focus of public attention. Alarmed by the behaviour of the juveniles, the Secretary of the Oblast Party Committee (Obkom) wrote to Beria imploring him to help the colony with foodstuffs and outerwear, and suggesting that it be moved elsewhere.11 The People’s Commissar ordered an inspection, which uncovered similar deficiencies to those in many other NKVD institutions for minors: embezzlement of food by staff; anaemia and emaciation of inmates, including seven deaths due to malnutrition; inoperable heating and sewage systems; dim, dirty and cold lodgings; poor personal hygiene, conducive to the spread of pediculosis and scabies; a lack of medical supplies; and rowdy behaviour on the part of a group of underage convicts, who terrorized other inmates and even killed one by pushing him out of the window. Inspectors returned in March and then in July 1944 and noted some major improvements, except in the quality and quantity of food. It was, however, hoped that the inmates’ diet would be augmented once the newly acquired plot began yielding crops. As to the relocation of the colony, the enthusiasm of the Obkom Secretary became clear when inspectors found out that the management of the local plant had an eye on the colony’s buildings. They were informed that, because of the shortage of suitable premises in the republic, the colony would remain where it was. The management retaliated by refusing to employ released inmates.12 Soviet authorities considered the instigation of disturbances within secure institutions a serious offence. In the 1930s, it had been equated with counterrevolutionary activity and banditry. According to the son of the purged military commander, Iona Iakir, the ringleaders of a riot in his colony in the late 1930s, had been charged under the notorious Article 58 (‘Counter-revolutionary activity’), but their cases were requalified as homicide when they committed several murders while in prison in protest at being tried for a political crime.13 And yet, both before and during the war, severe disruptions in juvenile penitentiaries were not manifestations of political protest (although one cannot rule out the presence of political sentiment among some rioters). Even the authorities, on the whole, understood them as having socio-psychological motives. Official reports do not mention anti-Soviet agitation among juveniles, but they are replete with descriptions of children making a show of their unbearable predicament. For instance, in January 1944, armed with bricks and sticks, protesters at the Omsk TVK barricaded themselves in their dormitory. As they hurled bricks out of broken windows at colony staff, the teenagers demonstratively took

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their shirts off to show them crawling with lice. Trapped in a frenzy of destruction, they set fire to straw-filled mattresses, which were undoubtedly also teeming with insects, throwing in their shoes and jerkins for good measure. Storming and looting of the canteen followed. Appeals by the head of the local OBDBB and a procuracy inspector had no effect, and the armed police as well as the fire department had to be called in. By the evening the inmates seemed to have lost their vigour. Four of their ringleaders escaped and the rest, freezing and covered in smoke, were assembled in the canteen, given as much food as they could eat and then taken to one of the remaining barracks. There, they spent another month without sufficient clothing and provision, until things began to improve. Significantly, the five remaining ringleaders suffered no repercussions. Rather than being punished, four of them received job placements and one was reunited with his mother. It seemed the authorities shared the inmates’ sentiments that the fight was just. This could explain why they decided not to punish but simply remove the troublemakers from the collective. Even the officials could see no accident in youngsters always targeting specific places, such as canteens and shops. In fact, the Omsk riot broke out as a reaction to the governor’s announcement that the wards would no longer receive second courses for lunch.14 There could be another explanation for such lenient treatment of the brawlers, namely the fear of a violent response on the part of other inmates. When in March 1944 the Yadrinsk regional NKVD office decided to cut down on inmates’ milk rations, the youngsters stormed the office, assaulted policemen and seized the milk. The authorities apprehended the ringleaders several days later, thereby provoking another attack by a much larger mob, armed with clubs and pinch bars. As they attempted to free their associates, the attackers vandalized the building and stole two revolvers. The rest of the inmates were contained within the colony zone, but they managed to pull one guard down from the watchtower and viciously beat him, before mobilized Komsomolites dispersed them. Thirteen instigators faced criminal charges for mass disorder and up to three years of deprivation of freedom on top of their previous sentences.15 The difference in the punishment received by the inmates of the TVK and labour colony (TK) for essentially similar actions (except, significantly, the theft of firearms) might also suggest that the authorities deemed the second group more socially dangerous and, considering their criminal track record, less deserving of sympathy.16 The problem with this punitive attitude was that, despite the law, the officials responsible for the assignment of places in colonies did not always refer minors to the correct reformatory. Because of the lingering confusion regarding the purpose of the two types of penitentiary, there were instances of convicted juveniles, even recidivists, being sent to labour educational colonies and former besprizorniki or first-time petty offenders, as well as the children of ‘enemies’ and deportees, ending up in secure institutions.17 Frequently, wishing to avoid a more severe punishment, older adolescents intentionally lowered their age during investigations. Judges rarely ordered medical examinations to ascertain the defendants’ real age and referred them straight to juvenile colonies.18 Inspectors sometimes came across young adults whose dossiers indicated that they were thirteen or fourteen years old. In one juvenile colony an inmate’s funeral was attended by his wife and two children.19 On the other hand,

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there were many instances when children as young as eight or nine wound up in labour colonies on the basis of an incorrect determination of age.20 This failure to segregate the different categories of minors contributed to the entrenchment of criminal subculture and the moral barbarization of many inmates, so poignantly described by Solzhenitsyn in his Archipelago Gulag. Officially dubbed as the vorovskoi element (criminal cohort), previously institutionalized juveniles transplanted criminal traditions, skills and habits into their new collectives, where the weak and the young became easy prey.21 The least disciplined inmates would quickly rally around such avtoritety to form secret criminal fraternities, called interchangeably blatnye, zhigany or urki, with their own code of behaviour (‘thief ’s law’), mirroring those of professional adult criminals, who, among other things, had a duty to recruit and disseminate the ‘thief ’s law’ among youngsters with potential.22 Comparing his wartime stints at various receiver-distribution centres (DPRs) and a juvenile colony in post-war Estonia, Kochergin notes a very strict pecking order among the underage blatnye and how it perfectly resembled the criminal hierarchy of a state prison, going downwards from a pakhan (kingpin) and vory v zakone (high status criminals professing the code), to suki (criminals who collaborated with administration), stooges, fraera (other convicts that could be taken advantage of) and petukhi (untouchables).23 Even if their numbers were small, blatnye would quickly usurp power and rule over all other inmates, because, in the words of another observer, ‘they were strong, loyal to each other and absolutely ruthless’. They would torture and degrade their fellow inmates in order to preserve their special status and standing in the informal hierarchy. In this struggle for primacy other people’s lives were of little importance to them and ‘tomorrow never mattered’.24 On the whole, blatnye proved resilient to the conditions of shortages, thanks to their organization and the brute force with which they extorted food and clothing from others, either for their own use or for peddling outside the reformatory. There were cases of inmates being forced to gamble away their monthly rations, and when they could not settle accounts, the debtors were pressured into committing murder or bodily injury.25 Such was the case of three inmates of the Kineshemsk labour colony, who, having lost more than a hundred months’ worth of rations in card games, paid their debts by axing the first boy that came their way. Several months prior to the incident, another ward of the same colony compelled his debtor into doing away with their brigade leader.26 To fashion playing cards, inmates would use any piece of paper they could lay their hands on, including books (which were also suitable source material for rolling cigarettes) and portraits of state leaders, despite the fact that destroying the latter could be misconstrued as an assault on the regime. Petr Iakir gave a detailed description of the card-manufacturing process in his prison cell: Everybody was involved in the work. Some made paste from bread: they crumbled some bread into a mug, mixed it up with water into a sort of modge. Two of them then held a tightly stretched handkerchief, while a third used a wooden spoon to press this modge through the material and on the other side of the handkerchief a milky-coloured paste was formed. Others were involved in cutting out stencils

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with a home-made knife, burning part of a rubber galosh and producing some magnificent soot, grinding up a piece of red crayon, pulling the book apart and tearing up each page into four equal-sized pieces. After that, they stuck all the pieces together in pairs and put them to dry ... [L]ads dexterously applied and printed in either black or red, the previously prepared stencils. The result was almost as good as real playing cards.27

Such misappropriation of paper compelled some administrators to ban books and board games for fear of them ending up as playing cards.28 Dull, uneventful lives bred other disturbing habits and practices. Self-mutilation out of boredom or to impress mates reportedly occurred,29 as did coercion of female attendants and teachers or fellow inmates into non-consensual sex. Boys were sometimes cajoled into sexual intercourse with promises of food or protection.30 In the words of a former political prisoner: ‘In the majority of cases the youngsters were not naturally homosexual, but were forced to become ones because of hunger and a desire to find a protector.’31 They would then be considered untouchables and became the objects of bullying and humiliation. Inmates also expressed their unspent sexual energy through active and public masturbation, which they allegedly performed with ‘amazing ingenuity’, either ‘individually, mutually or in groups’, and sometimes as a racing contest.32 When women came to colonies with theatre companies, the inmates would sit in the audience and comment loudly ‘on every aspect of the female anatomy – albeit covered – of the artistes and on what they would do to them and how, if given a chance. Such remarks were appreciated by the rest of the audience, who would reward the most inventive quips by a short round of applause’.33 Such objectification of women was not surprising, since criminals traditionally treat females with contempt (despite maintaining a strong cult of motherhood).34 This attitude could also be extended to underage female convicts, some of whom were as vicious and nefarious as their male counterparts. Their demeanour and mindset often shocked adults, including hardened criminals, and drove other girls who were forced to share captivity with them ‘to tears, nervous exhaustion and utter despair’.35 The ‘thief ’s law’ also prescribed an active commitment to escaping reformatories before the conclusion of one’s sentence. To achieve their goal, blatnye often staged riots and thought little of casualties among inmates, staff or civilians. Despite the fact that the guards were not allowed to use weapons, instances of gunshot wounds and killings of strikers, presumably in self-defence, were not uncommon. Riots moreover presented a perfect opportunity to get even with the opposition, usually in the form of suki, or letting off steam, which some governors chose to ignore. Topolski recalls a bloody battle between two factions of convicts that erupted one night at his juvenile labour colony. A quarrel that started in one of the cells just after the warders had left the building and shut the doors for the night quickly escalated into a skirmish. Inmates invaded corridors and staircases, reportedly hacking at each other with knives and metal rods. Topolski was among a group of terror-stricken foreigners, who barricaded themselves in their cell for fear of the warring cliques declaring ‘a truce and turning their unspent fury against [them]’. The morning brought in fully armed guards who restored

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order when the fight had already run its course. The leaders and their lieutenants were locked in ‘the transit cells at the main gate where they were held without food or water awaiting transport’ to Siberian labour camps.36 One of the most important rules of the blatnye was resistance to state authority and its representatives within the colony.37 Thanks to an extensive network of informers they would keep abreast of all the goings-on in the reformatory, dealt ruthlessly with stool pigeons and were often able to pre-empt administrative action against them – once again by inciting mass disturbances. At the Atliansk colony, for instance, a large group of inmates systematically violated discipline, bullied other children, behaved ostentatiously towards colony staff and even assaulted a warder and the cook. When the administration decided to transfer them to the penalty cell, the youngsters, armed with chairs and hatchets, put up resistance.38 Officials and colony governors were alarmed by the permeation of the laws of the underworld among juveniles. While some tried to isolate or transfer the malefactors elsewhere, others attempted to utilize their organizational skills and street experience in administrative roles. A high inmate–mentor ratio meant that youngsters needed to monitor themselves. An NKVD decree reaffirmed in July 1942 that the main educational method in juvenile labour colonies was self-government through various committees, ranging from health and safety, food and athletics to conflict resolution and entertainment ones.39 Harking back to the Anton Makarenko’s principles of self-government, collective decision-making and cooperation were based on the assumption of the primacy of group interests before an individual. Far from being a democratic process, though, collectivism in juvenile colonies stressed a strict chain of command, which often hinged on brute force and intimidation. Members of these committees were called ‘activists’, and whereas in some colonies their activity had a very positive effect on the organization of life and leisure, in others the responsibility for maintaining discipline was given to ‘bandits and hoodlums’, who subjected the rest of the children, as well as members of staff, to psychological and physical torture.40 Girls were at times as vicious as boys in their attitude towards other inmates, especially those whom they considered ‘traitors’, such as foreign nationals and the children of ‘enemies of the people’. Attributing such behaviour to the criminals’ fervent loyalty to the Soviet Union, a Polish inmate insisted that ‘perhaps they were not after all so very wicked; but when they found that we were at their mercy, they began to torment us in an absolutely sadistic way. They were a mob that could be worked on by any slogan flung at them.’41 All this was sometimes carried out with the acquiescence and even encouragement of colony administrators. By setting various cliques against each other or by using blatnye to generate fear and submission among the inmate population, the mentors sought to maintain order and to free themselves from the responsibility of carrying out educational work among juveniles. By driving a wedge in the inmate ranks, these tactics allowed colony authorities to manipulate, monitor and manoeuvre the situation relatively efficiently. Before long, however, it became evident that the divide and rule policy had serious drawbacks. First, juveniles were increasingly reluctant to cooperate with the administration, for fear of retribution from the adherents to the thief ’s law,

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especially if their sentence eventually took them to the adult camps. The promotion of the unofficial trusty system in children’s colonies thus contributed to what in the immediate post-war years became widely known as the ‘bitches’ war’ (such’ia voina) between those who took administrative responsibilities (suki or bitches) and the ‘honest thieves’, who remained true to their code of conduct.42 Second, the underprivileged inmate population began putting up collective resistance against the repressive regime, thereby challenging the authority of both the suki and the administration. Just as it proved to be an important social force in the struggle for control, so-called zemlaichestvo (clannishness) also served as a psychological, and sometimes physical, shield against abuse. Inmates would group together on the basis of either their ethnic origin or shared geographic and cultural background or a common article under which they were convicted. Foreigners and ‘politicals’, in particular, deemed it crucial to their survival to form such close-knit groups in order to prevent other inmates from either venting their frustrations on the ‘enemies’ and outsiders, or providing themselves with a more comfortable life at the latter’s expense.43 Others, such as ukazniki who came from the same region, also joined gangs and attempted to demand certain privileges from the colony administration, staging acts of defiance or organizing escapes when their requests were not met. Thus, zemliachestvo gave rise to independent and difficult-to-control formations. To nip the process in the bud the authorities decided to send juveniles to reformatories situated far away from their regions, which cut off the inmates’ ties and escape routes, but also created problems with morale that led to a deeper entrenchment of violence in colonies. Being hardly better off than the inmates in terms of their accommodation and access to provisions and entertainment (except, perhaps, alcohol), colony staff would usually retaliate with the viciousness of the blatnye themselves.44 Even though the beating of children in all Soviet educational institutions was strictly forbidden, the law did not seem to penetrate the walls of juvenile penitentiaries.45 Disregarding official threats of administrative action, colony staff throughout the country resorted to intimidations, offensive language, unlawful incarceration in solitary confinement and physical assault in their dealings with juveniles.46 The dearth of people with professional qualifications willing to endure the dehumanizing conditions of everyday life as a colony mentor or warder meant that the positions were often filled by random brutes, even former convicts, some of whom gained notoriety for their sadism. Topolski mentions one such ‘educator’, a top officer at the supposedly model Kiev labour colony, who dispatched a number of boys to the prison hospital with bruises and ruptured internal organs. Unsurprisingly, his actions gained him many enemies and nearly cost him his life, when a heavy iron ingot was dropped from the roof and ‘missed him by only a fraction of an inch’.47 On other occasions, however, Topolski felt that the victims almost deserved their fate. Beatings became the preferred method of taming blatnye for another of Topolski’s mentors, Uncle Misha. Whether to stop them from abusing fellow inmates or to teach them a lesson for stealing others’ rations, Uncle Misha ‘went after the urki with a fury’. He would enlist other warders or activists to assist him, disregarding the blatnye’s screams for mercy as they were being thrashed.48

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Beatings would usually culminate in long stretches in the penalty cells. Considered the harshest legally allowed punishment – after temporary deprivation of visiting and correspondence rights – solitary confinement was reportedly abused to such an extent as to lose any educational value.49 Moreover, coolers would rarely meet the prescribed standards of being at least 4 square metres in size, dry rooms with plenty of natural light.50 The Shadrinsk labour colony, for example, used a stuffy, windowless dugout in place of an isolation room, where inmates were moreover confined without the appropriate authorizations.51 Before the German occupation, the Starodub colony in the Orel oblast used punishment cells at a nearby prison. An inmate remembered her cooler as being ‘narrow and dark, and trickles of water seeped down the walls ... The whole cell was blocked with beds made of flat strips of steel sparsely crossed – there was not even room to get in and out. The mattresses were only given out at night. During the day we sat underneath the beds, which were fixed to the floor.’52 The long-term traumatic effects of such ‘educational’ methods on the physical health and moral state of still-developing adolescents did not go unnoticed by the critics of the Soviet penal system for juveniles. Major Sokolov was again among the few who sounded alarm bells over the abuse of minors, especially the younger cohort in juvenile penitentiaries. He argued that the imprisonment of twelve- and thirteenyear-olds was too harsh and brutalizing an experience that neither rehabilitated nor deterred young offenders. In 1943 he called the majority of children in colonies the ‘victims of war’, who had been ‘pressed into crime by want and childish recklessness’. ‘They are still just kids,’ he continued, ‘girls play with dolls for hours, boys frolic. Trial, prison, colony ... leave an indelible mark on them ... Confinement in prisons and colonies with older underage criminals has a very questionable effect on their re-education.’53 A year later, he informed Chernyshov that children had difficulty grasping some of the basic principles of institutional confinement, such as isolation from society, armed convoy and strict discipline. Sokolov suggested raising the age of criminal liability to ‘fourteen or even sixteen’.54 Other critics agreed, claiming that the majority of children in colonies were not criminal at heart, that they found their way into the penal system too easily and that many would have been much better off in children’s homes.55 Incarceration in labour educational colonies became a particularly controversial issue. Essentially in violation of both criminal and labour law, TVKs institutionalized and put to work youths younger than those liable for criminal action and labour mobilization. Besides, unlike TKs, which held children on the basis of a court decision (however flawed), TVKs became the instruments of extrajudicial punishment, and a very harsh one at that, considering that children had to remain in the colonies until they either acquired a professional qualification or reached the age of legal maturity.56 Gaining a specialization was not an easy undertaking at a place with virtually no equipment or proper instruction, and those children who had no relatives to return to after their release could serve up to six years, not necessarily for committing a crime but simply for fitting into the category of ‘socially harmful’, which, of course, depended entirely on the personal discretion of those who had sent them to TVKs in the first place. Sokolov pointed out that the use of indefinite confinement and disproportionate punishment made the children feel miserable, exasperated and

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hopeless. He proposed reorganizing juvenile colonies into open institutions designed exclusively for convicted juveniles, where the latter would enjoy better provisions and a wide range of career training options, such as nursing courses for girls.57 In short, critics urged their superiors to see juvenile delinquents first and foremost as children deserving of a normal childhood and a professional opportunity in life. In January 1946 the appeal finally received most enthusiastic support from the new head of the recently reorganized Ministry of Internal Affairs. In his keynote speech at the OBDBB conference Sergei Kruglov defined the ministry’s new objectives in its work with deviant youths: We should immediately and resolutely eliminate everything that resembles a prison regime, where kids are constantly confined to the so-called zone, a narrow barb-wired patch of land where a child can hardly move (negde razvernut’sia kak rebionku). Predictably this kind of regime provokes protest among kids. The children demand to be allowed to swim, farm their plots, play football, volleyball, skittles, go hiking in the summer, and in winter – to ski and skate ... They demand childish activities. Every colony should have those.

Kruglov dismissed as unprofessional claims that, if let out of the zone, the children would run away. He insisted that recreation was at the centre of the educational process and only aided the strengthening of discipline among juvenile delinquents, unless, of course, the youngsters proved to be difficult. In that case, the minister proposed isolating them in special maximum-security juvenile detention centres.58 In fact, failure to discipline children and to curb their vehemence was constantly blamed on poor cultural–educational work. Senior officers and state inspectors saw uprisings and escapes as a result of youngsters’ idleness and lack of education as much as their abominable living conditions. The leadership envisaged juvenile colonies as places of childhood, where youngsters would be socialized, educated and trained to become productive members of society. Those running the colonies, however, found themselves hard pressed to fulfil these objectives. Besides trying to maintain at least a semblance of childhood in juvenile reformatories, the essential element of which was education, governors also had to meet the production quotas coming from above. For being part of the Soviet forced labour detention system, juvenile colonies served a dual function: (re)educational and economic. While in the mind of the legislator, the second automatically derived from the first, some administrators saw them as two competing tasks.

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The 1935 Council of People’s Commissars (SNK) decree, which established labour colonies for convicted juveniles, defined them as educational institutions.1 In July 1942 a secret People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) order reaffirmed that the colonies were ‘concerned with cultural–political, intellectual and physical development of their charges’.2 The happy childhood myth, on which Stalinist child welfare policies rested, sat uneasily with the existence of fenced-off and guarded penal establishments for juveniles, so it was only natural that authorities should seek to dissimulate the unpleasant truth. They even refused to use the term ‘inmates’ when referring to the juvenile population of correctional institutions and instead employed a neutral word, vospitannik (ward, someone who is being reared). Critics carefully reminded their superiors that the conditions of confinement and armed security made for an unhealthy pedagogic environment, but the latter insisted that the entire judicial process was a ‘cultural activity’, while the placement of a child into a reformatory was one of the ‘levers of cultural development, the levers that help us move forward’.3 The idea was that by isolating deviant youths, the state both provided a protective service to its citizens and continued its modernizing mission of transforming society, disinfecting its body and engineering healthy socialist souls. Everyone would have to participate in the project, including those shunned by society, if they ever hoped to return to its bosom.4 Unlike that of adult prisoners, in the majority of cases the youngsters’ mindset was still seen as raw material that had not yet gone through the manufacturing process, so their re-education was not so much about ‘reforging’ as actual shaping. The industrial term, which Soviet authorities used to describe the process of turning criminals into honest citizens, was rarely applied to children, although since the foundation of juvenile colonies, Gulag bosses planned to capitalize on their ‘ample experience of “reforging” convicts ... to build up in every former lawbreaker an interest and love towards labour, a sense of responsibility not only for oneself but for the entire collective, a feeling of pride in one’s human dignity’.5 The NKVD claimed that their wards would receive the appropriate socialist upbringing and a professional qualification which, upon release, would allow them to seek employment and sever their ties with the criminal underworld. Labour lay at the heart of the rehabilitation programme. Besides, it also allowed at least partial

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self-sufficiency of the penal system. So all healthy inmates were required to work, especially at the time of severe manpower shortages. Indeed, juvenile colonies became an element of wartime economy and a source of revenue for the NKVD, producing millions of rubles worth of consumer goods and ammunition for the Red Army.6 Considering the state’s cynical attitude to convict labour and the fixation of many Gulag bureaucrats on production goals, it is all too easy to see an economic motive in the increased repression of youngsters during the war. Yet, just as the adult Gulag was not governed chiefly by economic concerns, penal institutions for juveniles were not established to work minors as hard as possible for material gain.7 Despite the involvement of children in production, which in some instances was illegal, the legislator did not necessarily see juvenile convicts as mere economic instruments. Unlike the adult Gulag, the question of profitability was almost never raised, except in the context of break-even performance. The leadership had initially placed much greater emphasis on the inmates’ education and continued to do so throughout the war.8 It was the children’s illiteracy that was believed to have made them susceptible to wrong influences and caused their transgression; it was their persistent ignorance that turned them into repeat offenders.9 Only education and ideological indoctrination carried out in the classroom and during extracurricular activities could break them free from criminal habits and convert them into loyal, selfless and steadfast citizens. The legislator never saw the young offenders as incorrigibles, despite a marked change in attitude towards them from the mid-1930s onwards. Believed to be innately innocent and malleable, they were expected to make a return to society and to work for the common good; and in order to achieve this goal they needed to be literate. Consequently, all the inmates who had not yet received a seven-year education were required to undergo classroom instruction according to the standard programmes of the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros).10 The latter had to provide the best teachers, especially for labour educational colonies, and stock reformatories with libraries and school supplies on a par with ordinary educational institutions. In their turn, colony administrators’ responsibility was to create the appropriate conditions for compulsory universal education, which was a guaranteed constitutional right of every Soviet citizen. Whereas in the adult Gulag access to education was not uniform, depending on many factors, in children’s colonies there was no differentiation – everyone had to attend school. The legislator devised that, divided into same-age groups, inmates would take lessons in Russian, a foreign language, arithmetic, physics, history, the Constitution and other subjects, on which they would take exams twice a year.11 It is, of course, a different matter that cruelty and notoriously inadequate conditions exposed the hypocrisy of such ‘educational institutions’. Closed doors and armed guards, the routine application of physical force and a frequent diversion of inmates to perform various chores instead of attending lessons did not enhance the pedagogic environment; nor did the acute shortage of textbooks and writing implements. In one colony children wrote their assignments on pieces of wood and then scrubbed them clean in order to reuse them the next day (a practice that was common to many ‘free’ educational institutions for children at the time).12 Even though there were success stories and the official attendance rates grew from

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76 per cent in the 1943/4 academic year to 90 per cent a year later, general education in colonies, on the whole, mirrored the school system only in principle.13 Solzhenitsyn rightfully called schooling in juvenile colonies a tufta (sham). Although the majority of inmates spent at least some time in the classroom, vastly different levels of academic performance, literacy and, indeed, Russian language proficiency meant that school instruction could not be effectively organized around the normal academic year and class system. High fluidity rates further disrupted schoolwork. On average around twenty-seven thousand adolescents went through the reformatories each year of the war. Some places witnessed a 100 per cent turnover.14 A difficult situation with buildings meant that not all colonies had specially equipped teaching space. A 1944 report revealed that out of ninety-one inspected reformatories only fifty-four could boast suitable premises; twenty-five offered lessons in makeshift classrooms; three had to utilize canteens, dormitories and other inappropriate quarters; three more managed to make arrangements with local schools and six did not engage their inmates in any kind of formal schooling.15 There was also a market shortage of professional, dedicated teachers, and no one, apparently, supervised the quality of instruction. The Procuracy accused both the NKVD and Narkompros of irresponsibility and utilitarian attitudes towards children in custody.16 Conflicts between these two agencies as to whose jurisdiction it was to educate underage inmates resulted in low accountability on both sides. In the meantime, many children themselves exhibited little desire to learn. In the words of Topolski, ‘the noble attempt to bring education to the criminal masses in our labour colony did not last long. Two months at most. It just petered out – to nobody’s regret.’17 There were also those inmates who did not wish to be educated for ideological reasons, as in the case of a group of Polish girls. Until the attitudes towards their home country changed in the summer of 1941, the girls felt constantly patronized and humiliated during their lessons, because they were prevented from speaking their language or thinking of Poland as an independent country with rich cultural and historical traditions. Various Sovietstyle entertainment activities also made the girls weary to such an extent that they asked to be transferred to an adult camp in order to escape the incessant antiPolish propaganda.18 Classrooms in both colonies and receiver-distribution centres (DPRs) often became the sites of wanton destruction of school property, brawls, verbal and physical abuse of teachers and the harassment of fellow inmates who seemed to be more committed to their education. Poor academic performance would frequently endanger noncompliant and aggressive behaviour on the part of the older inmates. Kochergin vividly portrays a typical lesson at Chelyabinsk DPR: Except for a couple of shkety, all primary school pupils were much too old ... Many sprouted the wisps of a moustache under their noses. These children of war were uncontrollable. If the hefty lads detested anything, they could hurl a log into a teacher ... When yet another instructor could no longer stand the ruckus and ran out the door, the classroom would plunge into complete disorder. The overgrown punches shot out of their desks, grabbed the little ones and tormented us ... They upturned desks, clubbing them with logs and drew a huge backside on the chalk

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board ... My hand-me-down textbooks were covered with obscene doodles and profanities, thanks to which I managed to learn four-letter words pretty early.19

Both Topolski and Kochergin praised some of the teachers for their dedication and professionalism. When educators managed to engage their pupils, discipline would strengthen and class attendance, as well as academic performance, would dramatically improve. Inspectors spoke of several thriving colonies, where even the most incorrigible inmates were involved in various club activities, amateur theatricals and schoolwork, despite the shortages of textbooks, paper and craft supplies. Things were reportedly going so well at the Akhunsk labour colony that, even with the reduced number of guards, there were no escapes.20 Besides organizing classes and club activities, the model colonies also invited famous people, military heroes and professional theatre companies to perform in front of inmates and teach them a lesson in patriotism. Variety shows, film and plays were reportedly very popular with juveniles, and not only because of their artistic and entertainment value – large social gatherings presented an excellent opportunity for gambling and other illicit dealings.21 Yet the vast majority of teachers and mentors did not exhibit the sensitivity and dedication expected of them by the legislator. Very few of them had advanced degrees and almost none received training in providing instruction at correctional facilities.22 Only one out of ten mentors at the colony in Ukhta could boast a secondary school degree; the rest only had elementary education.23 Nor did the NKVD reward the instructors for their efforts – their already meagre salaries were not always

Figure 13 A lesson at a model DPR in Kiev (courtesy TsDKFFA).

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guaranteed and living conditions were only marginally better than those of the inmates themselves.24 Some colony directors were so reluctant to commit the required resources for educational activities and so concerned with keeping their charges at bay that they, rather counterproductively, preferred to hire additional guards and firefighters at the expense of the medical and teaching staff.25 It was, therefore, no coincidence that volunteers were few (especially for the regions with harsh climates), so the governors resorted to employing former inmates and adult convicts as mentors, teachers and foremen.26 Since some juveniles had nowhere to go after the completion of their stints, they preferred to stay behind, which both kept them off the streets and freed the administration from the responsibility of seeking employment for their charges. Attendants at a Komsomol meeting in March 1945 observed that in many colonies mentors were not much older than the inmates themselves. Yet, what really troubled the youth workers was the presence of adults with a criminal record and those on a work release programme among the teaching and administrative staff.27 Naturally, both the NKVD and the Prosecutor’s Office were aware of the situation. It is highly unlikely that the appointment of a person twice convicted of hooliganism and abuse of office as the governor of the Omsk labour educational colony went unnoticed by the authorities; nor was it a secret to those higher up that the governor’s deputy and the steward were also former convicts, one a drug addict, the other a drunkard, who together with the cook stole colony provisions to produce mash. All this became general knowledge only after the riot of January 1944.28 Pavlov’s mentor at Zakovsk, Uncle Kolia, was a ssuchivshiisia vor (criminal turned bitch) with multiple convictions and a homosexual who was ‘unbelievably proud of his elegant military uniform and epaulets, awarded for his “war” against children (while his peers were dying at the front). This, however, did not make him less proud of his criminal past.’ He surrounded himself with a battalion of trusties, who made life at Zakovsk unbearable for the rest of the inmates. So unbearable in fact that another mentor, the kindly Tikhon Ignatov, accused the trusties of turning the colony into a Gestapo torture chamber.29 Driven to exasperation by the abusive environment, chronic malnutrition and dull life, juveniles either rose up in open rebellion or waged low-intensity warfare against the cruel, thieving staff. They were often incited to commit acts of violence, arson and murder by adult inmates. Although the law prohibited the accommodation of grown-up convicts within the juvenile colony zone, this clause was quietly overlooked, even in labour educational colonies (TVKs).30 In some places, adults occupied the same dormitories and shared beds with juveniles, which occasionally led to cohabitation, whether voluntary or not. At the Kineshmensk labour colony, 647 boys shared their living space with 527 adult prisoners, 314 of whom were women.31 Since most colonies were involved in production, they used convicted or raskonvoirovannye (on work release) adults to perform various heavy labour duties that were too difficult for underage inmates.32 The official statistics did not always record the presence of adults in juvenile correctional institutions, but at least for the last two years of the war the share of the adult population of children’s colonies remained on average 27 per cent, in addition to approximately 2.5 per cent of over-sixteen-year-olds who, for various reasons, had not been released or transferred to

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adult institutions.33 In some places the adult to child ratio was 1:1 and in several others it was heavily weighted towards grown-ups.34 In 1944, for instance, the Krasnoyarsk TVK had 529 adult inmates besides 121 boys.35 The authorities worried that adults convicted of murder, banditry and robbery had a pernicious influence on younger inmates, facilitating their full introduction into a criminal milieu and habits. Not only did these convicts eat at the expense of the underage inmates, but they also ran criminal rings that involved juveniles in illicit trade operations, encouraged card playing and betting with blood, and acted as agent provocateurs during riots, arsons and escapes.36 In order to minimize the incidence of pilfering of property, physical assault and sexual liaisons, it was decided to remove all serious criminals to adult camps by May 1945, to use only middle-aged female convicts in supporting roles and to encourage greater involvement of underage inmates in self-service.37 What really set the inspectors’ teeth on edge was the presence of ‘counterrevolutionaries’ among the teaching staff and industrial training instructors. In the eyes of the paranoid authorities these ‘politicals’ posed significant challenges to the children’s re-education. Tadevosian was among those who protested against their employment in such sensitive positions, denouncing it as a ‘big political mistake’.38 According to testimonies, however, the counter-revolutionaries were usually among the most inspirational and caring adults encountered by the juveniles. Pavlov mentions several of his teachers, ‘brilliant scientists’ exiled from different parts of the Soviet Union, who ‘despite being constantly bullied by suki, were able to captivate pupils with their subjects and to instil in them a more thorough knowledge than at any other “free” school’.39 A serious hindrance to education in juvenile reformatories was also the heavy involvement of inmates in production. In yet another feat of rhetorical duplicity, the legislator postulated that labour in colonies should be seen as merely industrial training. In practical terms, it was also used to keep the juveniles occupied, prepare them for life outside and compensate the state for their upkeep. Thus, whereas for grown-up convicts labour was ‘the means and the measure of reform’, for juveniles it also presented an opportunity to learn occupational skills.40 The problem with this strategy was that very few children’s colonies had the capacity to offer a professional qualification. Official emphasis on schooling inevitably led to a certain tension between the upper echelons of power, with their romantic perception of prison labour as education and the local administrators, who had to implement these fanciful notions amid severe shortages and lack of motivation on all sides. The fact that the colonies seemed to be excluded from the general plan (at least until 1944) but were still required to fulfil certain norms presented serious difficulties in the long run. There was a widespread scarcity of raw materials and equipment, which local trade organizations would have been required to supply if there had been a general plan.41 If the colonies ever received any machinery, it usually turned out to be of low quality, if not completely useless. Thus, in November 1943 the SNK suggested handing over to juvenile reformatories a number of metal-cutting machines that could not be used in industry because they either lacked parts or needed major repair.42 In the wake of the uprising at the Sarov colony, industrial training was

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Figure 14 A workshop at a model DPR in Kiev (courtesy TsDKFFA).

recognized as the best means to restore discipline, except the colony workshops were too small to accommodate all the inmates, electric equipment had to be replaced and raw materials procured. Meanwhile the local factory supplied only 50 per cent of the colony’s electricity needs.43 Therefore, those who set the production quotas rarely took into consideration the manufacturing capacity, production line (proizvodstvennyi profil’) and material base of a given reformatory; and many of them did not have such a base.44 As a result, the norms were fulfilled only by about 60 per cent, and where they were achieved, it was largely thanks to the efforts of adult inmates, who constituted more than 45 per cent of the entire workforce in children’s colonies.45 Not surprisingly, deficiencies resulted in delays, stoppages and lost opportunities to teach the children a vocation. In 1944, of 45,000 inmates only 26,000 were involved in production, and only 14,000 of them actually received professional qualifications (razriady).46 In the majority of cases, the inmates were not trained for any profession but used as cheap manual labourers at adjacent factories and quarries. Refusal to work, tardiness and shirking were the teenagers’ most common responses to being treated as second-rate workers who required constant supervision and vigilance.47 Some juveniles resorted to evasion tactics, whereby they hid their garb and walked around in their undergarments. Wardens would then dismiss them from the workforce as lacking footwear and clothing. Others tried to get out of work by injuring themselves. This was especially widespread among adherents to the ‘thief ’s law’. One such girl swallowed some glass and was taken away to the punishment cell, never to be seen again.48

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In some colonies and DPRs adult foremen mobilized juvenile activists to keep truants in line. At Zakovsk, high production output at the shoe factory or the local excavation site was secured by forcing under performers to run the gauntlet. In a reenactment of the old Russian military tradition, the victim ran through two rows of inmates who repeatedly kicked him. A foreman stood nearby and struck those who did not show sufficient rigour in torturing their mate. Another anti-pedagogical method was allegedly to squeeze boys into large bedside tables and hurl them out of the window. Pavlov recalls that ‘once our brigade leader lined us up, showed his impressive fist and announced: “Children, this is your educator!” This was a very accurate statement indeed.’49 To maximize the inmates’ productive capacity, some foremen arbitrarily reduced their rations. According to a girl confined in the Starodub colony for juveniles in the spring of 1941, for doing less than 75 per cent of the required quota, her fellow inmates were put on the ‘punishment pot’. Failure to increase the output would lead the offender to the punishment cells, with ‘time off to go to work’, for nothing could excuse the girls except a serious illness.50 The practice of using teenagers as drudges frequently bordered on outright exploitation, when they were forced to perform work that was too hard or too dangerous for them. Although children’s colonies typically manufactured consumer goods, such as furniture, crockery, clothing, hardware, toys and agricultural appliances, during the war they also produced ammunition and clothing for the army, felled trees and worked in construction and mining.51 Despite several NKVD circulars regulating their schedules, working juveniles of all ages spent from six to ten hours per day on the shop floor.52 As they worked several shifts, sometimes at night, in unhealthy conditions, with no regard for safety and insufficient nutrition, accidents became a common occurrence.53 Though he himself was spared dangerous work, thanks to his drawing skills, Topolski recalls other colony workshops, ‘all of them unhealthy’, where ‘no one lasted for long’, be it a foundry where boys had to carry heavy buckets of molten iron, enduring heat, fumes and terrible burns, or the painting department in which inmates needed to ‘wash from head to toe with turpentine’ after work.54 Working in a sewing factory with unfamiliar machinery for ten hours a day sometimes posed no less a risk for one’s life and limb than mining pumice or dressing lumber. Girls who worked there reportedly suffered from lead poisoning and inflamed lungs. Breathing in poisonous fumes and cotton dust caused haemorrhages and rendered them too weak to get up for work, even on pain of punishment.55 Both accounts recall work in juvenile colonies shortly before June 1941, but there is no reason to believe that the use of children in dangerous jobs, either in custody or in ‘free’ industry, ceased after the German invasion. On top of their workload, many children were also required to attend lessons, but they were usually too tired or too ill to do so.56 Night shift workers were the least willing to go to school in the morning. They hid and slept wherever they could, in washrooms and workshops, and even during classes, their general literacy suffering as a result.57 In order to increase productivity, governors were encouraged to pay bonuses to over performers and, like their adult counterparts, juveniles also got the chance of an early parole.58 In the majority of cases, bonuses came in the form of an additional meal ticket or a placement in the colony’s rehabilitation section, with enhanced

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nutrition.59 The resulting shortage of spaces in these sections often meant a death sentence for the severely emaciated, who were unable to perform even the most minimal types of work. Evidently, in the eyes of some particularly hard-headed administrators, responsible for meeting production norms, these juveniles were dead weight, since they contributed nothing to production and consumed scarce resources that could otherwise support those still working or on their best behaviour. Although this callous attitude gives credence to the claim that children in juvenile colonies were expendable, it was certainly not a deliberate state policy that some juvenile inmates should starve.60 In February 1945, Major Sokolov, sponsored by the deputy head of the Department for Combating Child Homelessness and Neglect (OBDBB), condemned this ‘perverse’ practice.61 Cases of exploitation of child labour and deficiencies in the educational process raised concerns and were not paraded as something to aspire to by the General Prosecutor’s Office and senior NKVD officers. At a March 1945 conference on the work in juvenile colonies the head of the juvenile section of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) Procuracy, Counsellor of Justice Faivishevskaia praised the youngsters’ ‘colossal’ contribution to the defence industry, but reiterated that it was more important for them to receive a profession ‘with which they could enter life’.62 Kruglov echoed the sentiment during the January 1946 conference, insisting that ‘education not production should dominate our work’ with juvenile delinquents. He demanded that every branch of the OBDBB apparatus subordinate its work to child-rearing and instruction: Our country will manage to supply itself without the help of children’s colonies ... After all, this is the department for the struggle against child homelessness, not a division of industrial colonies. We cannot measure the colonies’ performance with a ruble – our reformatories are educational not commercial institutions. We can, and should, expect self-sufficiency from colonies for adults, not for juveniles.63

Typically, the implementation of Kruglov’s revolutionary ideas ended with wellintentioned proclamations. Problems with educating inmates continued to plague the system for decades afterwards. In the meantime, thousands of minors bypassed altogether the Soviet penal system for juveniles and ended up in camps and colonies for adults, where they acquired no education or professional skills but simply worked alongside adults. A familiar sight in pre-war penal institutions for adults, juveniles continued arriving at adult camps and corrective labour colonies in earnest after the invasion.64 Many of them were released at the beginning of the war, but the number of inmates under the age of seventeen grew steadily, reaching nearly 27,000 (or more than 2 per cent of the entire inmate population) by July 1943.65 For the period of the hostilities, it was decided to refer sixteen-year-olds directly to correctional labour camps for adults as a ‘temporary measure’, but younger children also fell through the cracks.66 Joining them there were those who had attained legal maturity while serving time in children’s colonies. In both cases, the presence of minors in labour camps with their much stricter regimes and more punitive conditions infringed on their rights and violated

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justice, for the juveniles had to endure punishment essentially unsanctioned by the court. Moreover, the vast majority of them were prosecuted for labour law infractions, hardly a crime deserving such penalty and exposure to hardship.67 Aware of the problem, the head of the Gulag, Viktor Nasedkin, and Leoniuk made a show of requesting the immediate removal of twelve- to sixteen-year-olds to juvenile reformatories in September 1943, but the number of underage inmates in general camps and colonies only increased in 1944.68 There, the situation in terms of food provision was even worse than in juvenile reformatories, and despite a separate accommodation from adult inmates, the pressure exhorted by the latter in everyday interaction was crushing. The youngsters became easy prey for hardened criminals, who took advantage of their young age and inexperience, pimped them out to fellow inmates and free workers, instructed them in the tricks of the trade, took away their rations and forced them to gamble, commit crimes or take responsibility for the crimes of others. Observers were stunned at how quickly these children made the transition to being callous, cruel and licentious cynics, ready to do anything for the smallest of rewards.69 Nevertheless, it is inaccurate to think that their acts went unpunished, as Solzhenitsyn claims. Although guards were legally prevented from shooting them, which does not mean that ‘accidents’ did not happen,70 it is unlikely that in the camps offenders were spared the additional sentences, beatings, reduced rations or waterlogged coolers frequently resorted to in prisons, juvenile colonies and certain DPRs. Still, the juveniles’ reputation preceded them, and some young inmates preferred to sign up with adult brigades rather than end up with their age group, despite lower production norms and supposedly better nutrition. This was Topolski’s decision upon his arrival at a camp in the summer of 1941. ‘I preferred the company of grown men’, he explains, ‘and although there were plenty of hardened criminals among them, they were not as wild and noisy as the “glorious youth”.’71 Nevertheless, not all the maloletki were ‘garish, intolerable ... flock of malicious apes’, and not all adults shared the sentiment that ‘there was nothing human left in these children’.72 Perhaps because the youngsters in their care were not as wild and depraved as the ones encountered by other Gulag memoirists, two female ‘politicals’ rather spoke of their charges as hungry, scared children, most of whom were curious and caring, albeit afflicted by typical adolescent mood swings, mischievousness and identity issues. Olga Kuchumova’s encounter with juvenile delinquents, all of them ukazniki, took place at the end of the war. Forty of them were sent to Kuchumova’s section of a camp in Kazakhstan to help with agricultural work and digging, much to the chagrin of the head agronomist and the rest of the inmates, for the boys’ first deed was to consume anything edible, including toxic wheat, which made them violently sick. As their supervisor, Kuchumova worried that she would be held responsible, but the boys eventually recovered and, once they had gained more weight, not least owing to their supervisor’s ability to slip them ‘various treats’, in fact proved to be helpful and great company.73 Maria Sandratskaia, who had spent several years on the committee dealing with child homelessness and delinquency in 1920s Odessa, was sentenced to eight years of hard labour as the wife of a Trotskyite in 1937. During the war, she worked as a nurse

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in the camp infirmary and as a supervisor of 250 maloletki, aged twelve to eighteen. She tackled her duties with enthusiasm, devised a cultural–educational programme, acted as a kind of psychological counsellor and oversaw the youngsters’ daily activities. These included making sure that they ate their entire rations and did not try to smuggle them out in exchange for tobacco or give them to adult criminals. She deemed it challenging at first, as the suspicious youngsters attempted to provoke her by stealing her personal belongings and food. Soon, however, she ‘found a key to their hearts’, and all the stolen objects were surreptitiously returned to her. In Sandratskaia’s view the real enemy were adult criminals and the state that placed the underage among them. Doubtful about their successful re-education in the camp settings and deeply disturbed by several incidents involving her charges and an adult recidivist, she wrote protest letters to the General Prosecutor’s Office, Maxim Gorky and Nadezhda Krupskaya, unaware that the last two of her addressees were already dead.74 Sandratskaia was not sure what happened to her letters, but hers was not the only voice of compassion. Youth justice professionals warned that the kind of ‘education’ the juveniles were receiving in the camps and youth reformatories further entrenched their antisocial behaviour. Not only were the majority of them poorly adapted to normal working life, but they would also usually leave the penal facilities without the support that might enable them to join the workforce and sustain themselves through legal means. It was one of the responsibilities of children’s penal institutions to find employment and shelter for those youths who did not have a family to return to, as well as to follow up their progress.75 Several colonies went out of their way to facilitate their charges’ reintegration. They even secured places at art colleges, choirs and theatres for especially talented inmates, but, it seemed, the majority of colony governors adopted a very cynical view of the young people’s future.76 Speaking at a March 1945 Komsomol conference, one representative of the RSFSR Procuracy expressed his alarm at the indifference of those who were supposed to aid vulnerable youths in their transition from custody to society: I have seen people who have been released from labour colonies. The gates open up before them, [they] leave, to the right or to the left, and no one cares anymore about their existence. Four persons were released before my eyes. They spent two days at the train station. The governor had entrusted them to an ekspeditor and provided two days’ worth of bread for the journey. They had no money. I approached one girl sitting at the station. Her face seemed familiar and I asked, ‘Are you from the colony?’ ‘Yes, I am from the colony, I’ve been sitting here for three days already and can’t get on a train.’ And the ekspeditor, knowing that no train was coming anytime soon, went calmly home. There are no trains, and the girl has been sitting at the station for three days. No one is interested in how she eats, no one bothers to help her get out of there. I talked to a representative of the station police and he said, ‘It’s fine if she doesn’t get caught stealing here, and if she slips up, then she’ll go back to the colony. We don’t bother with them anymore. Let her get caught stealing, just as long as she clears out of here.’77

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All efforts at re-educating these juveniles, therefore, were often wasted upon their release from the colony. The authorities’ mechanical, even callous, approach to their duties could not but dampen former delinquents’ enthusiasm to change and become useful. Failure on the part of both the NKVD and Narkompros to establish timely plans for suitable accommodation and education, provision of funds or employment would inevitably lead to disillusionment and a return to offending.78 It was hardly surprising that Sasha Mavrin should have found himself in the dock again soon after his release from a colony. The boy was reconvicted for another year and a half for theft and illegal entry in the Siberian border city of Ulan-Ude. This would not have happened had he been issued an individual permit, rather than a shared one with another former inmate, a fact that considerably reduced the boy’s chances of obtaining employment and thus encouraged him to steal.79 Sasha was among many victims of Soviet wartime restrictions on movement, which had been designed to allow the state to regulate labour and to ensure the demographic stability in sensitive areas, including keeping those with a criminal record and antisocial tendencies away from large cities, seaside resorts and border areas.80 Already in 1942 two Komsomol officials complained to the First Secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee, Nikolai Mikhailov, that homeless adolescents aged fifteen and above found themselves in a very difficult position, especially those with prior convictions. They arrived at DPRs asking for lodging and work placement, only to be turned away. Subsequently, they were ‘chased from one region to another’, and as soon as they turned sixteen, the police would pick them up for violation of the passport regime. This is what happened to the orphan Iura Gerasimchuk, who having escaped the German-occupied Kursk region, visited several towns attempting to find work, but was arrested for moving around without a permit.81 Viktor Lebedev’s mother prompted an investigation by the Procuracy into the fate of her son, who at the age of fourteen had been convicted of theft and sentenced to two years in a labour camp in Kazakhstan. His mother claimed that, upon release, the boy had not been issued a permit that would have enabled him to rejoin his parents and instead had to live rough on the streets until he got caught stealing again. The Prosecutor’s records showed that Victor had indeed received a passport and the required permit, but on his way from the camp was arrested and sent to a labour colony in Petropavlovsk, from which he was discharged several months later as a result of poor health. He was now an invalid, and his whereabouts were unknown.82 Not only did the practice of sending juveniles to serve time far away from home create additional problems for resettlement after release, but their removal from home regions also on occasion severed positive ties with the family, thus intensifying their marginalization.83 The wider society also proved less then welcoming. The stigma of imprisonment and their usually ragged state meant that many enterprises were reluctant to employ former inmates.84 Factory managers did not wish to spend additional funds on their attire and accommodation. It was highly unlikely that a group of emaciated former inmates, who had arrived in Moscow from the Zakatal’sk colony without shoes and shirts, would be fit to work anywhere. One of them suffered from alimentary dystrophy, scabies and foot ulceration, and it looked as if the rest would

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soon follow him, having been on a scant diet of bread and fish throughout their long journey.85 The Komsomol officials felt befuddled as to why thousands of adolescents of employment age, passing through large cities every month, were not put to better use in industry.86 Their generally poor health and extreme poverty might have been one of the reasons why they were unable to secure jobs and eventually turned to crime to survive. A fourteen-year-old former besprizornik, Chistiakov, recently released after serving three years for theft, had the highest party organ of Kazakhstan interfere on his behalf, when in March 1943 he had been refused employment by both the Alma-Ata chief of the labour mobilization committee and the deputy head of labour reserves based on the fact that the boy lacked clothing, had a criminal record and was emaciated.87 Therefore, the penal system’s primary aim of reducing reoffending and encouraging social engagement through education and training was seriously compromised, not least because of its own actions.

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Evidenced by a large number of various official decrees and critical comments, sympathy for child victims of the war extended to juvenile deviants as well. Just like other boarding institutions for children of the time, receiver-distribution centres (DPRs) and juvenile colonies were envisioned as places where youngsters would be saved from the hardships of war and harmful influences of the street. Also not unlike other residential institutions, they were plagued by widespread administrative ineffectiveness, neglect of children’s welfare and wretched conditions. What distinguished the reformatories was the culture of illegality upon which they were built. Despite official claims, the expansion of the network of colonies during the war was to a great degree about maintaining public order and cleansing society in anticipation of the war’s end, which was often done in violation of legal justice. Extrajudicial sentencing, the severity of punishment – sometimes arbitrarily determined on the basis of an internal instruction rather than the law – and an inability to segregate the different categories of inmates, all point to a deliberate simplification of work with street children.1 In other words, as one Russian scholar has aptly put it: ‘It was much easier to dump the youngsters in colonies rather than to worry about their upbringing and education in non-custodial settings.’2 Indeed, by the end of the war the number of juveniles in labour colonies (TKs) had tripled, while the population of recently established labour educational colonies (TVKs) had grown sixfold (see Tables A.6 and A.7).3 Particularly when it comes to the latter, the increase was not merely a reflection of rising crime rates or more efficient police work – because many labour educational colony inmates did not actually commit any crime and thus posed no serious danger to society – but a greater reliance on detention as a means of correction. Officials emphasized that reformatories, especially labour educational ones, were not about punishment but rather welfare and training for a productive life. In reality, the colonies did more harm than good. They damaged the individual both psychologically and physically, as well as stigmatizing youngsters, thereby making it much more difficult for them to reintegrate into society. More often than not the brutalizing environment of the colonies and uncertain life prospects after release turned many youths into reoffending criminals, initiating their odyssey across the Soviet penal system. Critics realized the dangers of incarceration at such a tender age but proved unable to influence those in power.

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The refusal to raise the age of criminal responsibility and the reluctance to find non-custodial alternatives did not, however, mean that children’s colonies were the realization of the Bolshevik policy of weakening family ties, as one student of the Stalinist penal system claims. In the face of the wartime disintegration of family structures, the authorities saw institutionalization of neglected youngsters as a viable means of averting chaos. Similarly, to accuse Soviet power of ‘the determination to usher into Gulag institutions as many children as possible’ is to disregard the proportionately low number of underage inmates compared to the overall child population of the Soviet Union.4 Though the war years can on no account be considered a time of relaxation of repression, only approximately one in thirteen of all unaccompanied adolescents collected from the streets went to labour educational colonies; twice as many received job placements (see Table A.6). Incarcerated juveniles, moreover, were regularly released en masse and mobilized into the workforce. Such measures were implemented less from humanitarian concern than from a desire to increase productivity on the home front, to cut the cost of the juveniles’ upkeep and to ease overcrowding in correctional institutions. Undoubtedly, the state benefited from incarcerating minors and involving them in productive work, especially in time of emergency. The expansion of the network of colonies in 1943 might be seen as having an economic pretext, especially since it happened during the period of extreme manpower shortages and the maximum exploitation of the camp population. In 1944, for instance, juvenile delinquents produced millions of rubles worth of goods and ammunition, while the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) spent only one-sixth of that sum on their maintenance. Then again, the colonies ingested more than six million rubles over what had been initially budgeted.5 The organization and supply of new colonies amid wartime scarcity also involved great difficulties, and there was little guarantee that insolvent clients would not default on payments for the produced goods.6 With an additional expense for clothing allowance, security, supervision and medical care (however basic), the majority of the reformatories never became self-sufficient, as had been envisioned and, generally, turned out to be a resource drain rather than an asset. What is more, their contribution to the wartime economy was minimal compared to the overall output of the entire Soviet industry.7 Wartime production rates of consumer goods were actually lower than pre-war ones, even with a greater number of colonies.8 This was partially a result of the conversion of some reformatories to defence production, but mainly because of the lack of manufacturing facilities as well as low levels of productivity caused by hunger, malingering and shortages. Despite the fact that during the war the entire Gulag was geared to fulfilling production norms, so far there is no evidence indicating a direct connection between stricter laws against juvenile delinquency and the economic requirements of the system, as one historian claims.9 Confronted by criticism from all quarters, senior NKVD and Gulag officers urged their subordinates to view reformatories as children’s institutions, where labour was part of professional training. Keen to improve social adaptation of juvenile delinquents, the authorities paid greater attention to their education. Even at a time

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when the country’s resources were dangerously overstretched and not a single hand could be spared, inmates were required to attend lessons. Famous for its devotion to education, the regime hoped to use it to mould compliant patriotic citizens and to ensure that upon release the youngsters would slot into the right positions within the Soviet economy. Their education was not necessarily intended as an instrument of social mobility, unlike for the children on the outside, although if an inmate showed potential, there was the possibility of referral to one of the more privileged colonies established in November 1943 to train minors ‘with higher academic abilities’ for textile, metal and wood industries, in accordance with vocational training school programmes.10 When it came to the rest of the graduates of juvenile reformatories, the reality of these institutions, as a rule, contradicted the state’s rhetorical commitment to the constitutional right of every child to receive free education. Those running juvenile colonies were hard pressed to maintain a semblance of childhood in these institutions, simultaneously attempting to fulfil production plans and deal with acute shortages partially generated by the system itself. It would be incorrect to accuse Soviet authorities of complete indifference to the fate of underage inmates, though their assistance was rarely prompt or effectual. Like their colleagues in the wider Gulag (or wider society for that matter), colony administrators usually implemented only those instructions that suited their goals and seemed practical to them, despite warnings from above.11 Corruption and inefficiency at grassroots level were often met with the rigidity of the upper echelons of power, who did not seem to realize that whatever looked reasonable on paper lacked substance and was difficult to implement in reality, especially with little assistance coming from the centre. Simply making heads of the local Department for Combating Child Homelessness and Neglect sections personally responsible for procuring the best food and equipment for juvenile colonies was not going to help matters.12 The repeated orders to improve conditions in reformatories indicate that all the responsible officials along the power ladder were well aware of the problem, but to little effect. It was the inmates who found the most effective way of getting everyone’s attention and prompting change by turning official warnings into a serious threat to miscreant administrators. Nevertheless, disturbances in juvenile colonies were not always a mere demonstration against administrative abuse. Running parallel to the protest action, they were also a way for adolescents to parade their cohesiveness, to express selfassertiveness and to let off steam. Their repertoire of resistance tactics included skills transferred from the streets, as well as those acquired in detention. The resulting juvenile delinquent subculture, primarily founded on the concept of resistance to authority, was a product of the repressive penal practices that both gave rise to this power game and attempted to eradicate it. The institutionalization of an increasing number of youngsters also meant that the resilient criminal subculture was transmitted to new generations of inmates and then fairly quickly released into the outside world together with them. There, its game-like romantic qualities appealed to certain rebellious adolescents looking for recognition or attempting to raise their status. In a poverty-stricken, fatherless society, where the state posed as an oppressive authoritarian parent, the juvenile delinquent culture became a form of protest, a

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fashion statement, supplying potential recruits for the criminal underworld and, ultimately, future inmates for the penal system.13 Therefore, not only did the system on the whole fail to return its charges to society as socially useful, disciplined and productive individuals, but it also indirectly introduced the juvenile delinquent culture into wider society, thereby contributing to offending behaviour among minors. The decriminalization of juvenile delinquency was a slow process, starting with several partial amnesties in the immediate post-war decade that saw a gradual reduction in the number of juvenile penitentiaries and their population, but not before the famine of 1946–7 and the anti-theft law of 1947 caused a massive new surge in the annual intake of colonies and a temporary re-expansion of the network (see Table A.8).14 Despite the fact that the prosecution of juveniles was finally on the decline in the early 1950s, especially for theft and embezzlement, sentences were still much lengthier than those given out during the war, with a very large proportion of inmates serving ten years and longer. The balance shifted towards shorter sentences only after Stalin’s death (see Table A.9). Furthermore, the authorities were in no hurry to dismantle the network of colonies for juveniles, as one scholar seemingly implies.15 In an attempt to reform the entire penal system after Stalin’s death, juvenile penitentiaries and DPRs were briefly transferred to the Ministry of Justice, only to return under the auspices of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1954. Albeit with a few adjustments, their form and rationale did not change since the early 1940s.16 There was no shortage of wayward youngsters, who continued to commit crimes, run away from the abuse and squalor of children’s boarding institutions and leave their jobs.17 In October 1953 the Ministry of Justice was compelled to acknowledge that the number of children admitted by DPRs in that year was only marginally lower than in the previous one. In the eight years since the end of the war, a total of 2,065,087 children went through DPRs, with 840,116 of them orphaned. Slightly over one million received referrals to labour educational colonies.18 Critics continued to raise questions about the purpose and usefulness of the TVKs. In 1959, without first coordinating it with their Union superiors, the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) requested that the republican Council of Ministers hand over TVKs to the Ministry of Education. Despite objections from the latter, the petitioner maintained that the children in these colonies were mere ‘ozorniki’ (pranksters) with whom general schools did not wish to deal.19 Reminded by their superiors that the majority of TVK inmates were still non-convicted petty offenders, the Ukrainians would have to wait until 1964 when the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union decreed to reorganize TVKs into special industrial schools and vocational colleges and to remove them from under the jurisdiction of the MVD.20 As to the remaining labour colonies, things did not change much therein throughout the post-war decade. On the positive side, hunger was no longer an issue, and medical care slowly improved. There were still severe shortages of suitable buildings, however, and serious difficulties in the organization of schoolwork remained. In a number of colonies, ‘labour training’ masked the outright exploitation of child labour; in others, no training was on offer, prompting a number of decrees demanding a stop to both

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practices.21 Overcrowding, the persistent failure to segregate inmates on the basis of their social danger, and the continuous presence of older juveniles contributed to low discipline in some places, where rowdy inmates regularly clashed with poorly educated, underpaid and abusive staff.22 Youngsters with short convictions were still commonly sent far away from home to serve their time. They would spend months in jails and in transit, travelling from one camp or prison to another until their sentences ran out.23 All this was happening long after the state of emergency was over. The regime could no longer blame systemic dysfunctions on the hardships of war and strains of reconstruction.

Conclusion

Victory in the Second World War provided a rich story of patriotism and heroism for the triumphant Allies. Albeit economically and demographically crippled, the Soviet Union emerged out of the deadly battle that nearly destroyed it, as a superpower, commanding respect and fear from its neighbours, admirers and former friends. After the October Revolution, the war became a second founding myth for the regime eager to show off the achievements of the socialist system. To that end, the regime tweaked and embellished the country’s war record, creating a narrative which, in time, was adopted by the general population as the infallible truth and carried forward by the force of popular inertia. One of the most pervasive wartime tales was the unprecedented and unmatched care for children who allegedly remained at the top of the state’s priority list despite the trials and deprivations of total war. Yet, there was a deeper and darker layer to the heroic narrative. Undermining the carefully composed story were those whom, according to a proverb, a great war spawns together with the army of cripples and mourners – the ‘army of thieves’. Millions of children joined the ranks of this army of beggars and criminals, but were ousted from collective memory and replaced with courageous child soldiers and selfless youthful workers. The homeless and delinquent juveniles had already begun their trudge into obscurity during the war. It was decreed that all the records and statistical data (already hopelessly unreliable) pertaining to them should be kept secret;1 not a single newspaper article published during the war betrayed the real state of affairs on the home front, and when on the rare occasion they did discuss displacement and deviance, these social ills were promptly blamed on the corrupting influence of the German invader. As fathers, and sometimes mothers, were leaving for the front, national newspapers reassured them that their families would be taken care of in their absence. The editorials offered descriptions of clean and airy boarding institutions, patriotic citizens adopting orphans and smiling youngsters thanking the state for its familial care. The leadership needed the parents and older siblings at the front to concentrate on winning the war, while it made sure that public order was preserved in the rear at all costs. In doing so, the government resorted to well-tested repressive methods, exacerbating the already harsh conditions of the emergency situation. Consequently, the growing social problem of child homelessness and delinquency was both the result of circumstances outside the state’s control and its own actions. It was a combination of ideology, tradition and politics, warped by the exigencies of total warfare that had devastating consequences for Soviet society and many of its younger members.

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It is difficult to deny the Soviet state its genuine efforts to better the lives of children. It is also clear, however, that during the war, the romanticized conception of childhood was at least temporarily adjusted, as the state adopted a distinctly exploitationist attitude towards youngsters, employing punishment to ensure their obedience and full participation in the war effort. Its behaviour became increasingly contradictory – as it proclaimed the children’s well-being as the highest priority, the state forced scores of them onto the streets, clamping down on the slightest signs of deviance; and while it expected both humanitarian treatment and efficiency in the prevention and correction of juvenile delinquency, it failed to implement either in practice. What on paper looked like a positive undertaking, in reality remained a mere declaration of intention. The underlying causes of such a striking discrepancy lay not only in the obvious shortages of resources, but also in the so-called ‘human factor’. Mirroring the initial situation in the Red Army, the Soviet administrative structure was plagued by rigidity, lack of initiative and general disorder, which, in turn, engendered nepotism, corruption, incompetence and mismanagement. The mistreatment of displaced children was not a deliberate state policy; rather, the children often became unintended victims of narrow-minded, incompetent, corrupt and indifferent individuals in positions of power. Furthermore, senior bureaucrats refused to acknowledge the fact that their own requests were often contradictory and dismissive of the difficulties faced by those implementing them. The central government imposed requirements on lower level representatives without providing adequate funding yet expecting maximum results. With few exceptions, it turned a blind eye to much dysfunction and wrongdoing, generally limiting its participation to issuing orders but not following them through. Even more crippling for the child protection services than the inefficiency of the system and the strains of the war effort was the attitude of the Stalinist government to social welfare as a ‘soft-line’ concern.2 Bent on industrial growth and military build-up, and unwilling to recognize certain social problems, some of which it itself generated, the ‘warfare state’, pretending to be a welfare one, made a conscious choice to prioritize public order over child well-being, thereby allowing those implementing central orders to ignore them if the latter contradicted local agendas. Weakened by starvation and epidemics, the general population was forced to pay the price, especially adolescents, many of whom turned to crime to supplement their nutrition. Those who chose to work quickly found that, despite the law, employers showed little concern for their safety or welfare. Instead, the adolescents were made to feel the brunt of draconian labour legislation, which dispatched thousands of them to the penal system each year. This does not mean that there were no genuine criminals or violators of labour discipline among youngsters, but many more were victims of circumstance as well as a defective judicial process, which allowed for arbitrary application of over-broad, excessively severe and vague law, the oversimplification of the procedures and a high incidence of groundless prosecution and error. Disproportionally harsh punishments, higher incarceration rates and harsh prison life became the everyday reality for stray

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children, many of whom had ended up on the streets as a result of actions of the state or its agents. Yet the government did not heed the critics within the judicial and penal systems, who bemoaned the harshness of the legislation and insisted that greater reliance on detention only aggravated the situation, damaging young offenders both physically and psychologically. The leadership viewed law as a reaction to already existing conditions, not something that had created them. The critics were not so bold as to suggest openly that certain policies also victimized youngsters. Political decisions had never been officially linked to the growth of the displaced population during the modernization drive of the 1930s; neither was the government now prepared to admit that the increasing number of homeless children and the rise of juvenile crime could be the result of Soviet domestic policy. And yet, far from being a time of political relaxation, the war years witnessed serious abuses of state power in the form of repression, ethnic cleansing, resettlement campaigns and the maximum but often wasteful exploitation of human resources. This is not to say that the Soviet Union’s allies did not resort to cruelty in order to implement their vision of an orderly community, or in pursuit of security considerations. However, the extent of terror, the loss of life and the destructive impact on entire home front communities in the Soviet Union far exceeded anything seen elsewhere (with a notable exception of Germany’s and Japan’s treatment of their conquered populations). In this respect at least, the Soviet experience does not compare favourably with the treatment of displaced children by its allies and most of its European neighbours, which, unlike the Soviet Union, did not create conditions for children that edged them closer to life on the streets (post-war population resettlements in Eastern Europe did approach this, however). Although the law nominally protected the offspring of people whom the state suspected of disloyalty, having decided to send their adult family members into exile, the government endangered young deportees’ well-being, stigmatized them, allowed abuse of their rights and indirectly encouraged criminal behaviour among them. The repressive policies flew in the face of the regime when it was forced to spend its scarce resources on the care of thousands of orphans and waifs who chose to live rough in order to escape the stigma which the state had attached to them. The leadership tried a variety of tactics, including the controlled revival of philanthropy and a greater reliance on public activism in crime and homelessness prevention. While accepting formal responsibility for needy and neglected youngsters, the government delegated its paternalistic duties to society. Social work with children was fragmented and performed by a myriad of agencies, such as the organs of social control, the youth league, trade unions, teachers and volunteers. Community participation was crucial in ameliorating the desperate conditions many children found themselves in during this time. Professionals and other activists doggedly advocated the rights of these youngsters and for a change in their treatment. Despite their inability to rectify systemic deficiencies, it can be argued that social welfare, at least initially, was driven by community and mid-ranking officials rather than from above. Having failed in its assumed role as surrogate parent, however, the regime took credit for successes, apportioning blame for failures. Doing otherwise would have

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required acknowledging serious flaws in the existing system. Ideology and political expediency prevented those in power from admitting that although the cost of war to the Soviet Union was enormous, a substantial portion of that had to be attributed to their own doing. And nothing could threaten the legitimacy of the regime that engineered victory. The armies of thieves and cripples would have to make way for the armies of heroes and mourners.

Glossary Anti-theft laws of 4 June 1947 – the most notorious of Stalin’s anti-theft campaigns, the edicts were prompted by the wartime rise in the volume of theft cases, especially petty theft of public property, such as grain and other foodstuffs. The harvest failure and the resulting famine of 1946 led to a further increase in such crimes. On 4 June two decrees were issued, concerning personal and public property, with the minimum term for theft of personal property set at five years, and seven years for theft of state property, however small the amount. With the repeal of the death penalty, maximum sentences for theft of public property were raised to twenty-five years. Roughly two million people were incarcerated in accordance with the laws. besprizornik (besprizorniki or besprizornye, pl.) – a child who has no home and lives on the streets. During the war, besprizorniki were either orphans or abandoned children, as well as those who permanently or temporarily lost contact with their relatives. They engaged in criminal activities mainly to ensure their survival. besprizornost’ – the condition of being homeless, the last stage of physical and social displacement. Literally it means lack of adequate care or shelter and is normally associated with life on the streets and vagrancy. Until 1943 there existed no definitive line between besprizornost’ and beznadzornost’. beznadzornost’ – the condition of being neglected or lacking adult supervision. Together with besprizornost’, it was considered an ‘inevitable source of child criminality’ by Soviet authorities. beznadzornyi (beznadzornye, pl.) – an unsupervised or neglected child, who normally had a fixed abode but spent considerable amounts of time outside home and could easily adopt the street lifestyle and culture. In the wartime Soviet Union beznadzornye committed the largest number of crimes. bezottsovshchina – fatherlessness, believed at the time to be one of the primary causes of juvenile crime. In popular parlance it is still a derogatory term for a severely neglected child. detdom (short for detskii dom, detodoma, pl.) – a children’s home, equivalent to an orphanage, although not all boarders were orphans. Impoverished parents often placed their children in such boarding institutions, paying a monthly fee for the youngsters’ upkeep. detskie komnaty militsii – children’s rooms at police stations originated in 1942 to aid DPRs in collecting and placing homeless and unsupervised children. The rooms were

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supplied from local budgets and were intended to hold children for no longer than six hours, but detainees often stayed there for days. By 1944, there were 1,058 rooms throughout the country. DPR (detskii priemnik-raspredelitel’) – children’s receiver-distribution centre responsible for collecting homeless and unsupervised children off the streets and delivering them back to parents, orphanages, trade schools or reformatories. Organized in the 1920s, DPRs were transferred under the jurisdiction of the NKVD in 1935 and became part of the Gulag, although its head, Viktor Nasedkin, sought unsuccessfully to rid his establishment of the children’s receivers, claiming that they should be the responsibility of the Commissariat of Enlightenment. During the war, the number of DPRs increased from 156 in 1940 to 363 in January 1945, with 209 situated in the RSFSR. ekspeditor/evakuator – an employee of a DPR or a colony delivering a child to a reformatory or an orphanage, to relatives or other children’s institutions. The law stipulated that such guards should be unarmed and should use public transportation when accompanying minors. FZO (shkola fabrichno-zavodskogo obucheniia) – an industrial training school formerly known as FZU (fabrichno-zavodskoe uchilishche). Recruited predominantly rural teenagers aged sixteen to seventeen and offered a six-month course in mass professions, particularly for the mining, metallurgy, oil and construction industries. During the war, the schools operated on the basis of conscription. Gulag (Glavnoe Upravlenie Ispravitel’no-trudovykh Lagerei i Kolonii) – the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies was the government agency which administered the Soviet forced labour camp system from the 1930s to the 1950s. By 1940, the Gulag encompassed fifty-three camp complexes, containing within them thousands of smaller units, 425 colonies, forty-nine labour colonies for juveniles and ninety ‘infant homes’ for the young children of female convicts. Corrective labour camps usually contained prisoners with a sentence of more than three years, while corrective labour colonies housed those with sentences of one to three years. Here the term ‘Gulag’ is used broadly to mean the entire Soviet penal system. Juvenile court (juvenile chamber) – originating before the October Revolution, juvenile courts were abolished in 1918 and replaced by Commissions for Juvenile Affairs. The latter were composed of representatives of the Commissariats of Enlightenment, Social Welfare and Justice, and dealt with all cases involving minors under the age of eighteen. In 1919 and 1920 new stipulations allowed criminal cases involving minors from fourteen to eighteen to be brought before regular courts, but it was up to the Commission to decide whether a court trial was desirable. In the mid-1930s special juvenile chambers replaced the commissions but in 1938 they stopped operating, although, in some cities, special collegia for juvenile cases heard cases on appeal from the people’s courts. Juvenile courts reappeared in 1943, but because they existed in large cities only their scope was limited. They closed again in 1948.

Glossary

179

Komsomol – Communist Youth League. Komsomolites – rank and file of the youth league. ‘Labour Army’ (labour columns) – an informal name given to a collection of forced labour battalions dispatched by the NKVD to places in need of the workforce. One of the harshest institutions of penal servitude during the war, the ‘Labour Army’ was formally disbanded in 1946. In order to keep its recruits at their workplaces, the NKVD allowed them to reunite with their families (see trudarmeitsy). Law of 7 April 1935 – the law lowered the age of criminal liability to twelve, although each union republic could independently determine the age of legal maturity. Any child of that age and older intentionally committing larceny, mayhem, murder, attempted murder or causing bodily injury could be subjected to all measures of criminal punishment, including the death penalty, whose actual application is debated by scholars. Adults were also made criminally responsible for inciting minors into crimes, prostitution or begging. A second decree, issued seven weeks later, abolished the Commissions for Juveniles (see Juvenile court) and established a series of institutions to care for minors at different levels of need (see TK). A companion edict promulgated in the RSFSR disallowed sentencing discounts based on age. Stalin’s personal participation in the drafting of the April law ensured its more punitive nature. There were many cases of a broad interpretation of the law by the courts, which applied it to crimes other than those listed. Six years later, the ‘intention clause’ was eliminated and all minors from the age of twelve who committed the listed crimes, including causing a train derailment, became criminally accountable. The age of responsibility dropped to fourteen for all other crimes not covered in the 1935 and 1941 decrees. The law lost effect in 1959. Makarenko, Anton (1888–1939) – a Soviet educator and influential writer who worked with homeless and deviant children. He is best known for his method of upbringing in self-governing child collectives with a heavy emphasis on militarization and manual labour. He rejected the popular 1920s idea of deviant children being morally defective and stressed the importance of social environment and occupational activity as a means of rehabilitation. maloletka – derived from the Russian word maloletnii (underage). Denotes both a juvenile reformatory and minors detained in places of incarceration. Meshochnichestvo – a mass social movement of self-provision at the time of food crisis and near complete collapse of the state supply system. Originating during the economic dislocation of the First World War and the subsequent Russian Civil War, it was a form of trade, or exchange of commodities, between towns and the countryside. The Soviet regime perceived meshochnichestvo as profiteering (speculation) and thus an illegal activity. MVD – Ministry of Internal Affairs.

180

Glossary

Narkompros – the Commissariat of Enlightenment, renamed the Ministry of Education in 1946. NKVD – the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, renamed the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1946. OBDBB (Otdel po Bor’be s Detskoi Besprizornost’iu i Beznadzornostiu NKVD SSSR) – the Department for Combating Child Homelessness and Neglect within the NKVD (its republican, krai and oblast divisions). Established in June 1943. In addition to managing the work of juvenile reformatories and receiver-distribution centres, the department also supervised police activities in the sphere of child displacement and delinquency, as well as overseeing job placement of apprehended minors and released juvenile colony inmates. In December 1950 its name changed to the Department of Children’s Colonies. RSFSR – the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. RU (remeslennoe uchilishche) – a vocational training school. The schools recruited adolescents from the age of fourteen, and administered a two-year training programme. During the war, the schools operated on the basis of conscription. sledovatel’ (investigator) – a legally trained professional who performs a preliminary investigation of criminal cases and decides whether to initiate a formal criminal investigation. Sledovatel’ is subordinate to the Procuracy. SNK (Sovnarkom) – the Council of People’s Commissars, renamed Council of Ministers in 1946. ‘socially orphaned’ child – a child whose parents are alive but unwilling to look after him/her for various reasons, including alcoholism and drug addiction. special settlers (spetsposelentsy or spetspereselentsy) – persons involuntarily resettled in remote regions of the country, typically in accordance with a government directive and not a court decision. During the war, the state resettled people because of their nationality or social status. Families of nationalist insurgents and suspect collaborators were also forcibly relocated to such places of special exile (spetsposelki) at the end of the war and thereafter. The spetsposelki normally did not differ from ordinary rural settlements. Their inhabitants, however, suffered significant restrictions on freedom of movement and found themselves under strict and constant surveillance of the NKVD. spetsposelok (spetsposelki, pl.) or spetsposelenie – special settlement or village. State Labour Reserves – established on 2 October 1940 and dedicated to the training of skilled workers in various trade schools, such as FZO, RU and railway colleges. Upon graduation, pupils received an obligatory four-year assignment to an industrial enterprise. street child – a socially displaced or deviant individual under the age of eighteen. Such children are inadequately cared for by responsible adults; they normally live or spend

Glossary

181

a significant amount of time on the street, which becomes their source of livelihood and socialization. In the wartime Soviet Union street children, although not called such, were a volatile and heterogeneous community consisting of orphans, lost or abandoned children, juvenile delinquents, runaway apprentices and abused youngsters fleeing their parents or guardians. Such’ia voina (bitches’ war) – mass disturbances taking place in various labour camps from 1946 to 1956. The bloody conflict unravelled between two groups of convicts: those who cooperated with the law enforcement, including serving at the front, called ssuchivshiesia vory (thieves turned ‘bitch’), and the adherents of the ‘thief ’s law’ who rejected any collaboration with the camp authorities and the state in general. The camp administration tolerated, even encouraged, the clash, deliberately placing the two warring factions together and pitting them against one another. Similar unrest, albeit on a limited scale, also played out in juvenile reformatories. TK (trudovaia koloniia dlia nesovershennoletnikh) – labour colony for minors, established in 1935. Before then, there existed several types of custodial institutions for juveniles – some open, some closed – such as labour communes, compulsory education homes and work homes. Different commissariats managed their operation. In 1924, all these institutions were renamed ‘labour homes’, which from 1929 housed convicted minors between the ages of twelve and sixteen, as well as those in need of special education, such as homeless and severely neglected children aged fourteen to sixteen. The joint SNK/Party Central Committee decree of 31 May 1935 ‘On child homelessness and neglect’ established three types of juvenile institutions within the penal system overseen by the NKVD: remand homes, labour colonies and receiverdistribution centres (see DPR). From 1939 onwards, labour colonies were required by law to hold only convicted minors aged twelve to sixteen, but this stipulation was not always adhered to. The number of TKs decreased progressively from eighty-four in 1936 to forty-nine in June 1940, and to forty-seven by January 1945. TKs were classified according to the regimen established therein: minimum security colonies for firsttime offenders, ‘closed-type’ or ‘disciplinary’ colonies which housed recidivists, repeat absconders and malicious violators of discipline, as well as special maximum security juvenile detention colonies. In 1969, TKs were renamed educational labour colonies. trudarmeitsy – members of the ‘Labour Army’ forcibly conscripted to perform hard labour. Ethnic Germans constituted the core of the ‘Army’. As the war progressed, they were joined by other nationalities from countries fighting with the USSR, natives of Central Asia and the ‘punished’ peoples from the North Caucasus and Crimea. The state mobilized males aged fifteen to fifty-five and females aged sixteen to forty-five; however, children below the conscription age also occasionally found themselves in labour columns. To meet wartime needs, trudarmeitsy were dispatched to remote areas, usually far away from their families’ places of settlement. They were neither free citizens nor convicts. Formally, trudarmeitsy enjoyed protection of the law, and were entitled to remuneration for the work performed, but, in reality, they saw their civil rights routinely violated. Non-appearance, desertion, sabotage and

182

Glossary

refusal to work led to severe punishments, including death sentences. When it came to the preservation of trudarmeitsy’s rights and well-being, much depended on the enterprises that used their labour, but many lived and worked under the established camp regime, which led to very high mortality rates. Like ‘Labour Army’, the term trudarmeitsy was not used in official documents and is a popular name for those who manned work columns. trudodni – workdays. A means of accounting quality and quantity of labour performed by each collective farmer. The farmers did not receive salaries. All income after compulsory deliveries to the state went to collective farms, which distributed the income to each farmer on the basis of the workdays he or she had put in. Before the war, collective farmers were required to work at least sixty workdays a year, normally during sowing and harvesting. From April 1942 the minimum number of workdays per year increased to 100 days for adults (150 in cotton harvesting regions) and fifty for teenagers. Farmers were also regularly mobilized for various ‘temporary’ duties, which earned them additional trudodni. TVK (detskaia trudovaia vospitatel’naia koloniia) – children’s labour educational colony. Set up in June 1943 in accordance with the SNK decree ‘On strengthening the measures of combating child homelessness, neglect and hooliganism’ to prevent permanent social displacement of juveniles. TVKs revived the practice of institutionalizing minors for rowdy behaviour, vagrancy and persistent running away from children’s institutions. By January 1945, there were seventy-six TVKs throughout the country, with fifty-three located in the RSFSR. In 1964, following the persistent calls within the MVD to transfer TVKs under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, it was decided to reorganize them into special industrial schools and vocational colleges to be overseen by the education authorities. ukaznik – a person charged under one of the edicts stipulating harsh punishments for labour law infractions. Volksdeutsche – persons of German ethnicity, but not citizenship, living beyond the borders of the Reich and considered by the Nazis as being of superior blood and culture. Though subject to compulsory military conscription, they were a privileged group in the occupied territories and many directly or indirectly benefited from the Nazi policies of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Some, however, actively participated in the anti-Nazi resistance movement. Toward the end of the war and after, those Volksdeutsche who had failed to evacuate with the retreating Wehrmacht suffered prosecution and expulsion. Vorovskoi zakon (‘thief ’s law’) – a code of behaviour strictly adhered to by the criminal fraternity. There are two types of criminal ‘laws’: the highest caste of criminals follows the ‘thief ’s law’ (vorovskoi zakon), while the rest of the inmates are subjected to the ‘prison law’ (tiuremnyi zakon). There is a certain overlap between the two.

Appendix Table A.1 Children processed by DPRs 1941a

1942

1943

1944

1945

Total

Homeless children

b

11,665

84,882

166,193

230,520

204,111

697,371

Neglected children

8,806c

201,601

38,385

110,614

92,321

451,727

296,432

1,154,863

Total

d

286,483

26,236

a

e

204,578

341,134

b

c

Notes: Data is for the third quarter of 1941 only; the number of children sent to orphanages; the number of children returned to their parents; dtotals include 595 escapes and 21 deaths, the fate of the remaining 5,149 children is unclear; e a different source gives a higher number of 348,138 detained children, of whom 236,484 were homeless and 111,654 neglected (GARF 9412/1/39/1). Source: GARF 9412/1/1/79ob–8; RGASPI M1/7/69/37, 17/126/39/46.

Table A.2 Student fluidity across the Soviet Union, 1940–3 Grade/Academic year

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

1940/1 (per cent)

10

6

1941/2 (per cent)

20

14

7

9

19

17

16

34

19

13

17

21

35

33

32

39

32

29

1942/3 (per cent)

15

10

13

16

26

23

21

27

20

20

Notes: These figures are problematic, since according to a report, education officials in certain regions systematically understated their statistical data (RGASPI M1/7/70/52ob). High dropout rates among senior pupils during the 1940/1 academic year, besides other factors, were due to new legislation which introduced fees in higher grades. Source: RGASPI 17/126/7/82–3.

Table A.3 Types of crime committed by inmates of TKs, 1944–5 Type of crime Theft

1944

Per cent

1945

Per cent

19,479

81.4

8,213

73.1

Robbery

770

3.2

518

4.6

Homicide and bodily injury

438

1.8

325

2.9

Especially dangerous crimes

130

0.5

301

2.7

Desertion Other crimes Source: GARF 9412/1/38/1-2; 9412/1/57/5–5ob.

563

2.4

355

3.1

2,547

10.7

1,535

13.6

184

Appendix

Table A.4 Investigation of especially dangerous crimes committed by minors across the USSR in 1944 Homicide

Invest’r

Robbery

Hooliganism

Invest’r

Percentage of cases completed by investigators/all crimes

Police

Invest’r

Police

1Q1944

251

156

317

808

294

Police 541

36/41.8

2Q1944

291

228

387

737

277

516

39/39.4

3Q1944

351

475

310

790

211

435

33.8/41

4Q1944

210

238

312

706

245

659

32/45

1Q1945

97

30

217

495

236

351

40a/48

Note: aData is incomplete, refers only to those regions that were monitored by the General Procuracy. Source: GARF 8131/27/162/24оb.

Table A.5 Movement of children through DPRs, 1942–5 1942

1943

1944

1st half of 1945

1945

Arrived

130,296

204,578

341,133

140,561

296,432

Left

121,835

201,390

335,393

142,710

285,024

Returned to relatives

16,063

39,893

63,254

31,230

66,650

Referred to detdoma

75,629

81,419

112,641

48,992

94,223

–

26,542

50,431

15,006

27,988

Referred to trade schools Referred to TVKs Employed

–

4,624

25,113

9,661

23,066

13,718

37,009

48,708

22,361

49,706

–

7,973

25,387

–

23,391

Referred to other institutions

Note: There are slight discrepancies between the tables presented in the two sources. Source: GARF 9412/1/58/1–2; 9412/1/519/5.

Table A.6 Movement of minors through TVKs, 1943–5 (select data) 1943

1944

1945

–

3,295

18,957

4,129

33,144

28,154

Homeless

17,547

166,691

Neglected

15,595

11,463

At the start of the year Arrived

834

17,482

29,333

Returned to parents

Left in the course of the year

18

4,155

8,469

Employed

23

1,029

2,867

Transferred to investigative organs

24

488

417

Appendix

185

1943

1944

1945

Transferred to other TVK

30

2,652

4,579

Transferred to children’s homes

13

66

271

Transferred to trade schools

–

350

598

580

8,154

9,945

100

84

Ran away Died Other At the end of the year

146

461

2,078

3,295

18,957

17,778

Source: GARF 9412/1/17/1–1ob.

Table A.7 Movement of minors through TKs, 1943–5 (select data)

At the start of the year

1943

1944

1945

7,288

18,530

23,927

Arrived

34,355

33,225

25,012

Left in the course of the year

23,113

27,828

37,692

Returned to parents

9,025

13,058

28,615

Employed and enrolled in trade schools

3,061

1,455

2,055

352

885

788

59

857

372

2,315

888

1,594

Transferred to investigative organs Transferred to TVK Transferred to other TK Transferred to detdoma

–

21

45

Ran away

590

1,437

1,184

Died

858

306

103

Other

193

473

114

18,530

23,927

11,247

At the end of the year Criminal record: First conviction Two or more convictions

19,248

6,658

4,679

4,589

Source: GARF 9412/1/17/2–2ob.

Table A.8 Number of children’s colonies throughout the Soviet Union Year

TVKs

TKs

Total

Capacity

Number of inmates

1944

61

40

101

44,300

32,115

1945

76

50

126

41,600

42,884

1946

68

57

125

41,000

29,354

1947

62

65

127

42,000

49,219

1948

56

78

134

65,500

67,436

1949

54

83

137

57,500

54,893

1950

53

80

133

54,500

53,138

186

Appendix

Year

TVKs

TKs

Total

Capacity

Number of inmates

1951

52

73

125

47,000

38,357

1952

56

59

115

43,250

36,504

1953

59

58

117

45,000

42,938

1954

64

28

92

33,300

24,651

1955

62

53

115

38,500

33,657

1956

65

70

135

45,850

40,785

Source: GARF 9412/1/35/86, 116; 9412/1/800/115.

Table A.9 Information on juvenile labour colonies, 1951–6 (select data) 1951

1952

1953

1954

1955

1956

At the beginning of the year

22,474

20,794

Arrived during the year

18,159

22,294

26,208

8,212

16,901

21,593

14,007

22,106

23,966

33,111

Left during the year

19,840

16,880

32,003

13,417

20,908

35,877

1 2

18,194

23,895

7,493

15,260

17,724

16,384

2,447

2,200

693

1,580

2,156

2,332

152

113

26

61

79

111

Number of convictions:

3 and more Sentence: Up to six months

220

200

71

143

175

91

Up to one year

897

1,226

594

1,441

1,663

1,976

Up to three years

4,974

7,354

2,098

6,543

7,583

8,254

Up to five years

4,442

5,420

1,923

3,572

4,270

3,679

Up to ten years

8,788

10,326

2,771

4,137

5,045

3,991

Up to fifteen years

1,219

1,418

566

851

998

688

Up to twenty years

216

237

163

194

212

147

37

27

26

Up to twenty-five years Number of minors who had their sentences reduced

20

13

1

3,381

9,217

13,347

Types of crime:a Theft and embezzlement Robbery and banditry Murder and grave injury

19,721

5,233

10,641

11,595

9,906

1,311

800

1,823

3,209

3,298

748

431

352

405

457

1,815

948

1,756

2,115

2,724

112

76

28

12

7

Rape

1,095

310

no data

no data

no data

Other crimes

1,406

414

1,635b

1,946b

1,704b

Hooliganism Counterrevolutionary crime

Notes: aCumulative data; bincomplete data. Source: GARF 9412/1/360/133–133ob, 9412/1/430/237–237ob, 9412/1/670/120–120ob, 9412/1/800/246–246ob, 9412/1/737/183–183ob, 9412/1/508/202–202ob.

Notes Introduction 1 2

3

4

5 6 7 8

9

An interview with Sergei Volkov, ‘Deti nachnut voinu protiv vzroslykh,’ available at http://www.vz.ru/culture/2011/3/23/477991.html (accessed on 6 September 2011). V. Tadevosian, ‘Pravovaia okhrana detei v usloviiakh Otechestvennoi voiny,’ SZ, no. 1 (1944): 24; for similar wartime publications, see V.I. Kufaev, ‘Zabota o detiakh v dni Otechestvennoi voiny’, SP, no. 7 (1942): 24–31; G.M. Sverdlov, Voina i pravovaia okhrana detei v SSSR (Tashkent, 1943). Soviet People’s Commissar of Health, writing for the British audience, quoted in Julie K. deGraffenried, Sacrificing Childhood: Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 46. See panegyric accounts by foreign observers, like Nathan Berman, ‘The Place of the Child in Present-Day Russia,’ Social Forces 21, no. 4 (May 1943): 448 (quotation), 451, 454–5 and The Anglo-Soviet Journal quoted in Juliane Fürst, ‘Between Salvation and Liquidation: Homeless and Vagrant Children and the Reconstruction of Soviet Society’, The Slavonic & East European Review 86, no. 2 (April 2008): 255. See, for instance, Elena Zubkova, ‘S protianutoi rukoi: nishchenstvo v poslevoennom SSSR’, Cahiers du monde russe 49, no. 2 (2008): 471. TsGAMLI 670/1/165/6. Olga Rusanova, Sestry (Moscow, 1953), 224. A.M. Sinitsyn, ‘Zabota o beznadzornykh i besprizornykh detiakh v SSSR v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,’ Voprosy Istorii, no. 6 (1969): 20, 21, 25, 28, 29; see earlier claims to that effect in V. Tadevosian, ‘Bor’ba za likvidatsiiu pravonarushenii nesovershennoletnikh v SSSR’, SZ 10 (1957): 43; for other embellished assessments of the wartime welfare programme, see G.I. Aleksandrova, ‘Kommunisticheskaia partiia – organizator vsenarodnoi zaboty o detiakh, ostavshikhsia bez roditelei v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (na materialakh Kalininskoi i Iaroslavskoi oblastei)’ (Doctorate Candidacy diss., Ivanovo, 1977); E.N. Simontseva, ‘KPSS – organizator vsenarodnoi pomoshchi evakuirovannomu naseleniiu v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (na materialakh partiinykh organizatsii Ivanovskoi, Kostromskoi, Iaroslavskoi oblastei)’ (Doctorate Candidacy diss., Kalinin, 1981); L.V. Zenkova, ‘Deiatel’nost’ kommunisticheskoi partii po okhrane detei v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (na materialakh organizatsii Nizhnego Povolzh’ia)’ (Doctorate Candidacy diss., Moscow, 1984), etc. S.K. Zhiliaeva, ‘Organizatsionno-pravovye osnovy bor’by Orlovskoi militsii s detskoi besprizornost’iu v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny i poslevoennyi period (1941–1951)’ (Doctorate Candidacy diss., Orel Law University of MVD, 2004); S.V. Romanovich, ‘Bor’ba s detskoi beznadzornost’iu i besprizornost’iu na Iuzhnom Urale v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: 1941–1945’ (Doctorate Candidacy diss., Orenburg State University, 2006); O.A. Rokutova, ‘Sotsial’naia zashchita detei i podrostkov v Srednem Povolzh’e v 1941–1950gg’ (Doctorate Candidacy

188

10

11

12

13

Notes diss., Orenburg State Pedagogic University, 2008). Among Western scholars who see a generally positive outcome of the government policies regarding street children during the war, see Margaret Kay Stolee, ‘Homeless Children in the USSR, 1917–1957’, Soviet Studies 40 (1988): 64–83 and Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia 1890–1991 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). N.V. Semina, ‘Bor’ba s detskoi besprizornost’iu v 1920–1940-e gody v Rossii: na primere Penzenskogo regiona’ (Doctorate Candidacy diss., abstract, Penza State Pedagogic University, 2007), 17; E.G. Ermakov, ‘Оrganizatsionno-pravovye osnovy deiatel’nosti organov vnutrennikh del po bor’be s detskoi besprizornost’iu i beznadzornost’iu v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny i poslevoennyi period (1941–1950gg.)’ (Doctorate Candidacy diss., MVD Management Academy, 2002), 16. See, for instance, Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘ “Parazity obshchestva”: kak brodiagi, molodye bezdel’niki i chastnye predprinimateli meshali kommunizmu v SSSR’ in Sovetskaia sotsial’naia politika: stseny i deistvuiushchie litsa, 1940–1985, eds E.R. IarskaiaSmirnova and P.V. Romanov (Мoscow : TsSPGI, 2008), 219–54; E.Iu. Zubkova and T.Iu. Zhukova (eds), Na ‘kraiu’ sovetskogo obshchestva: sotsial’nye marginaly kak ob”ekt gosudarstvennoi politiki: 1945–1960-e gg (Moscow : ROSSPEN, 2010) (thereafter Na kraiu); Zubkova, ‘S protianutoi rukoi’; Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Gabor T. Rittersporn, ‘Between Revolution and Daily Routine: Youth and Violence in the Soviet Union in the Interwar Period’ in Sowjetjugend 1917–1941: Generation zwischen Revolution und Resignation, ed. Corinna Kuhr-Korolev (Essen: Klartext, 2001), 63–82; Brian LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). Among them, Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky, Children of the Gulag (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Cathy A. Frierson, Silence Was Salvation: Child Survivors of Stalin’s Terror and World War II in the Soviet Union (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2015); Corinna Kuhr, ‘Children of “Enemies of the People” as Victims of the Great Purges’, Cahiers du monde russe 39 (1998): 209–20; Lynne Viola, ‘ “Tear the Evil from the Root”: The Children of the Spetspereselentsy of the North’, Journal Studia Slavica Finlandensia 17 (2000): 34–72; Michael Kaznelson and Nick Baron, ‘Memories of Displacement: Loss and Reclamation of Home/Land in the Narratives of Soviet Child Deportees of the 1930s’ in Displaced Children in Russia and Eastern Europe, 1915–1953: Ideologies, Identities, Experiences, ed. Nick Baron (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Jennie Stevens, ‘Children of the Revolution: Soviet Russia’s Homeless Children in the 1920s’, Russian History/Histoire Russe 2–3 (1982): 242–64; Dorena Caroli, L’enfance abandonnée et délinquante dans la Russie soviétique (1917–1937) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004); Stolee, ‘Homeless Children’; Alan M. Ball, And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918–1930 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1994); René Bosewitz, Waifdom in the Soviet Union: Feature of the Sub-Culture and Re-Education (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1991); A.Iu. Rozhkov, ‘Bor’ba s besprizornost’iu v pervoe sovetskoe desiatiletie’, Voprosy Istorii, no. 1 (2000): 134–9; T.M. Smirnova, ‘ “Luchshe vyvesti i rasstreliat”: Sovetskaia vlast’ i golodnye deti (1917–1923)’ in Ezhegodnik Istoriko-Antropologicheskikh Issledovanii (Moscow : Ekon-Inform, 2003); L.A. Zhukova, ‘Opyt kompleksnoi likvidatsii besprizornosti v RSFSR v 20-30e gody’ in Materinstvo i detstsvo v Rossii XVIII-XXI vv.: Sbornik nauchnykh statei (Moscow : MGUS-M, 2006), 218–54; Fürst, ‘Between

Notes

14

15

16

17

189

Salvation’; Rachel F. Green’s unpublished study merges the war and post-war years, thereby making it difficult to trace the dynamic of child homelessness and neglect during the war. See her ‘ “There will not be Orphans among Us”: Soviet Orphanages, Foster Care, and Adoption, 1941–1956’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2006). Peter H. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941 (Washington: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); David Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). deGraffenried, Sacrificing; Ann Livschiz, ‘Growing Up Soviet: Childhood in the Soviet Union, 1918–1958’ (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2007); Kelly, Children’s World. Reflecting on the dearth of Western scholarly works on the social history of the Soviet Union in wartime, Amir Weiner warned against the then prevailing attitude towards the Second World War as ‘a mere évènement in the longue durée’ (Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 12–14 and idem, ‘The Making of a Dominant Myth: the Second World War and the Construction of Political Identities within the Soviet polity’, Russian Review 55, no. 4 (October 1996): 639). Over the following decade, social historians have answered the call producing a growing number of publications that treat the war years as an important, even formative, event in Soviet history. See, among others, Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch (eds), The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Jeffrey W. Jones, Everyday Life and the ‘Reconstruction’ of Soviet Russia during and after the Great Patriotic War, 1943–1948 (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2008); Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (London: Cornell University Press, 2009); David R. Stone (ed.), The Soviet Union at War, 1941–1945 (Barnsley : Pen & Sword, 2010); Donald Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The idea of the ‘warfare state’ was developed by Mark Edele in his ‘Veterans and the Welfare State: World War II in the Soviet Context’, Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 20, no. 6 (2010): 18–33. Several other authors have noted that, despite official proclamations, real changes in the field of health care, public sanitary infrastructure, urban housing, pension contributions and education occurred only after Stalin’s death. See Christopher Burton, ‘Zdravookhranenie v period pozdnego Stalinizma i dukh poslevoennogo gosudarstva blagodenstviia, 1945–1953 gody’, Zhurnal Issledovanii Sotsial’noi Politiki 5, no. 4 (September 2007): 541–58; Filtzer, The Hazards; Steven E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington, DC/Baltimore: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press/the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Mark B. Smith, ‘The Withering Away of the Danger Society: The Pensions Reforms of 1956 and 1964 in the Soviet Union’, Social Science History 39, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 129–48; Beate Fieseler, ‘Soviet-Style Welfare: The Disabled Soldiers of the “Great Patriotic War” ’ in Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. History, Policy and Everyday Life, eds Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013), 18–41; Robert Dale, ‘Rats and Resentment: The Demobilization of the Red Army in Postwar Leningrad,

190

18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

26

27

28 29 30 31

32

Notes 1945–50’, Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 1 (2010): 113–33, etc. Specifically on children, see Livschiz, ‘Growing Up’, 513 and idem, ‘Dorevoliutsionnye po forme, sovetskie po soderzhaniiu? Obrazovatel’nye reformy v gody voiny i poslevoennye poiski normy’ in Sovetskaia sotsial’naia politika, 151–73; see Dorena Caroli for her analysis of the pre-war years, which also questions the welfare nature of the Soviet state, ‘L’assistance sociale à la delinquance juvenile dans la Russie soviétique des années 20’, Cahiers du monde Russe 40, no. 3 (1999): 385–414; idem, ‘Socialisme et protection sociale: une tautologie? L’enfance abandonée en URSS (1917–1931)’, Annales HSS (Histoire, Science Sociale) 6 (1999): 1291–316. Na kraiu, 5. Mark Edele, Stalinist Society 1928–1953 (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). See Fürst, ‘Between Salvation’, 255 (quotation). Rosaria Franco, ‘Social Order and Social Policies toward Displaced Children: The Soviet Case (1917–1953)’ (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2006), 266. On the weakening of the youth league during the early years of the war and its revival, see deGraffenried, Sacrificing, ch. 5. Donald Filtzer, ‘Starvation Mortality in Soviet Home-front Industrial Regions during World War II’ in Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II, eds Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer (Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015), 265–338. Fürst, ‘Between Salvation’, 252. Kelly argues that the children of collaborators did not suffer the consequences of their parents’ actions, and that society was led to believe that they were innocent victims, just as other war orphans, and should be treated as such. See Kelly, Children’s World, 244. E.Iu. Shutkova ‘Sovetskie politicheskie repressii v otnoshenii nesovershennoletnikh (1917–1953)’ (Doctorate Candidacy diss., Udmurtiia State University, 2003), 192; A.Iu. Gorcheva, ‘Detskie lageria OGPU i NKVD i Pressa’, Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta 10, no. 4 (1993): 13–23. The idea of the Gulag being ‘a social mechanism of mass torture on a large scale’ was advanced by Alexander Etkind during the 29 June 2012 conference ‘Gulag Unbound’, Cambridge, UK. Although the discussion of mass displacement has much in common with Rebecca Manley’s pioneering study of the Soviet evacuation efforts, it focuses specifically on the consequences of the evacuation on child homelessness and delinquency. ‘Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie prokurorov po delam nesovershennoletnikh’, SZ, no. 11/12 (1945): 53; Shearer, Policing, 219. See Alexander Statiev, ‘Soviet Ethnic Deportations: Intent versus Outcome’, Journal of Genocide Research 11, no. 2–3 (2009): 243–64. A. Yakovlev, Omut Pamiati (Moscow, 2000), 392; Livschiz, ‘Growing Up’. In this study, I follow Mark Edele who proposes to extend the chronology of the ‘Soviet long Second World War’ from the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 to the pacification of the Soviet ‘western borderlands’ in 1949. See his ‘The Second World War as a History of Displacement: the Soviet Case’, History Australia 12, no. 2 (2015), 17–40. On the power dynamics within the Stalinist governing structure, see, for instance, Larry E. Holmes, War, Evacuation and the Exercise of Power: The Center, Periphery, and Kirov’s Pedagogical Institute, 1941–1952 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012); Nick Baron, Soviet Karelia: Politics, Planning and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1920–1939

Notes

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(New York: Routledge, 2007); J. Arch Getty, ‘ “Excesses Are Not Permitted”: Mass Terror and Stalinist Governance in the Late 1930s’, Russian Review 61, no. 1 (January 2002): 113–38; Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); James R. Harris, The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Karl Qualls, From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol after World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), etc.

Chapter 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/102, 114 (Stalingrad oblast). GARF 9412/1/35/142ob-143; RGASPI 17/126/19/20. RGASPI М1/7/69/27оb; GARF 9412/1/4/70. GARF 9412/1/19/65, 9412/1/28/83, 9412/1/35/48, 8131/20/31/149ob, 8131/27/244/2, 8131/37/1846/247оb; RGASPI М1/7/35/19оb. GARF 8131/37/1846/247оb-248. GARF 9412/1/35/59оb. GARF 9412/1/33/114. GARF 9412/1/35/63, 66ob-67, 68ob, 142. GARF 9412/1/35/63, 66ob, 142ob; RGASPI 17/126/19/20. GARF 9412/1/35/57, 59ob, 62-62ob, 9412/1/97/135; for a similar situation in Omsk oblast, see L.I. Snegireva (ed.), Vo imia pobedy: evakuatsiia grazhdanskogo naseleniia v Zapadnuiu Sibir’ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny v dokumentakh i materialakh, Vol. 3 (Tomsk: TGPU, 2005), 289. GARF 9412/1/28/83 (first quotation); RGASPI М1/7/69/39, 27ob (second quotation). GARF 9412/1/35/59ob, 63. GARF 9412/1/35/59, 66ob, 67, 69. From March 1943 to February 1944, the children’s room in Kuibyshev serviced 13,000 homeless and neglected children. GARF 9412/1/35/69-69ob. GARF 8131/37/2951/10; RGASPI М1/7/26/19ob. GARF 9412/1/27/223, 9412/1/19/69ob, 9412/1/27/274; RGASPI M1/32/186/6ob-7. See Kenneth D. Rose, Myth and the Greatest Generation: A Social History of Americans in WWII (New York: Routledge, 2008), 105, 110–16; Victor Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender, 1914–1948 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 269–70; William M. Tuttle, Daddy’s Gone to War: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children, e-book (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), chs. 3, 7; Sean Longden, Blitz Kids: The Children’s War against Hitler, e-book (London: Constable and Robinson, 2012), ch. 17; Sarah Fishman, Battle for Children: World War II, Youth Crime, and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Such beliefs survived into the post-war period. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, some Soviet critics blamed single mothers for neglecting their children and allowing delinquency to thrive. The specialists even suggested depriving the women of their parental rights. See Brian La Pierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance During the Thaw (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 166; see also Boris Urlanis, ‘Bezottsovshchina’, Literaturnaia

192

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21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

Notes Gazeta, 7 January 1970, 12; on the discussion of Western scholarly works that implicated fatherlessness in children’s maladaptive behaviour, see Fishman, Battle for Children; Bailey, Delinquency, 11 and H. Elaine Rodney and Robert Mupier, ‘Behavioural Differences between African American Male Adolescents with Biological Fathers and Those without Biological Fathers in the Home’, Journal of Black Studies 30, no. 1 (September 1999): 46. See, for instance, a report from Khabarovsk Krai in GARF 9412/1/29/158. When the war broke out, the NKVD oversaw forty-two labour colonies for boys and five for girls. By 1944, the number of colonies of both types grew to 101, only nine of which accommodated girls (five labour educational colonies and four labour colonies). At the end of the war, the overall number of reformatories reached 123, although the currently available official reports do not yield their numerical distribution based on the gender of inmates (GARF 9412/1/35/86, 116 and RGASPI 17/126/39/51-4). Accurate statistics on vagrant children is likewise difficult to obtain. Anecdotal data shows that, for instance, in 1944–5 Ukrainian police apprehended 74,736 neglected or homeless boys and 14,517 girls, 73,834 of whom were between eleven and sixteen years old (GARF 9412/1/27/263). Vagrant boys outnumbered girls in Krasnodar Krai; in the neighbouring Stavropol Krai the girl-to-boy ratio in this age group was 1:3 in 1943. Bashkirskaia ASSR reported a similar situation a year later (GARF 9412/1/28/3-4, 9412/1/29/37, 57). Demographers calculate that more than 76 per cent of human losses were men, many of them of paternal age (see Julie K. deGraffenried, Sacrificing Childhood: Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 35). Donald Filtzer argues that men who had not been called up but instead were engaged in the war production were more likely to die of starvation and overall exhaustion than their female counterparts, the most vulnerable being those aged thirty to fifty-nine. See his ‘Starvation Mortality in Soviet Home-front Industrial Regions during World War II’ in Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II, eds Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015), 270. Olga Kucherenko, Little Soldiers: How Soviet Children Went to War 1941–45 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). GARF 9412/1/27/26, 51, 137–8, 147, 148. GARF 9412/1/27/51, 152, 311. GARF А461/12/6/11. GARF 9412/1/7/17. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/106. GARF 8131/22/7/217. Modern psychologists and criminologists question the prevailing view that fatherlessness breeds delinquency, instead suggesting that an unhealthy home environment, created by emotionally and economically unstable mothers, not the composition of the family unit, is likely to provoke behavioural problems, potentially leading to criminality in the future. See Rodney and Mupier, ‘Behavioural Differences,’ 47, 56; and Douglas D. Koski, ‘The Relative Impact of Educational Attainment and Fatherlessness on Criminality’, Journal of Correctional Education 47, no. 4 (December 1996): 182. GARF 8131/20/31/119-120. GARF A2306/70/2759/6, 13–16, 21–4, 62–3, 92, 133, 174, 185. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/108. On wartime teaching practices, see RGASPI 17/126/2/164-5, 167–8, 182; GARF 9412/1/19/72, A2306/70/2759/12, 71, 124, 135, 137–8, 143, 146, A2306/70/2850/12;

Notes

33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

193

on schools in front line zones and liberated areas, see GARF A2306/69/2984/4, A2306/70/2759/1; on difficult material conditions and the resulting insanitariness, see GARF A2306/70/2759/34, 71 and RGASPI M1/7/26/8. GARF 9412/1/19/72, A2306/70/2759/45, 46, 71, 78, 137; RGASPI М1/7/69/26оb. RGASPI M1/7/69/1ob, M1/7/70/55ob, 17/126/9/6-7, 21–2, 28–9; GARF A2306/69/2974/21, 27, А461/12/5/227. RGASPI 17/126/9/23 (quotation), 37, M1/7/69/26ob, 27, M1/7/70/27. RGASPI 17/126/16/16, 17/126/7/16-17, 18, 125, М1/7/25/30; GARF A2306/70/2759/45, 46, 78, 120, 123, 137, 142ob, 143. GARF 9412/1/7/15оb. RGASPI М1/7/69/26, 17/126/7/17; GARF 9412/1/7/15ob, 9412/1/29/59; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/107, 127ob; see also an official acknowledgement of the difficult situation in ‘Rech’ narodnogo komissara prosveshcheniia RSFSR V.P. Potemkina na sobranii aktiva uchitelei,’ SP 5/6 (1943): 3. RGASPI М1/7/25/29, 30. GARF A2306/70/2759/139; RGASPI 17/126/39/217, 17/126/7/111, 120, 126, 133. RGASPI М1/7/69/24, 17/126/19/8. GARF 9412/1/35/17, 159. RGASPI М1/7/69/37оb. RGASPI М1/7/69/26, 17/126/19/25; GARF 9412/1/7/73. Many urban children also contributed to agricultural work. See deGraffenried, Sacrificing, 48–56. Ibid., 138, 210n21. RGASPI М1/7/101/4, М1/7/70/65. RGASPI М1/23/1360/42. deGraffenried, Sacrificing, 134–41. RGASPI М1/7/35/4, M1/5/118/1. RGASPI М1/23/1360/44-6, M1/7/35/29-30ob, М1/32/186/1, М1/7/69/37оb, М1/7/70/49оb, 100, 17/126/39/216-17; GARF 9412/1/23/147, 9412/1/35/3, 17ob, 9412/1/7/16оb. RGASPI М1/7/69/26. M.S. Zinich, Budni voennogo likholet’ia, 1941–1945, Issue 2 (Moscow: RAN, 1994), 67. GARF 9412/1/27/266, 9412/1/19/69; N.N. Karamasheva, ‘Nekotorye problemy okhrany detstva v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (na materialakh Vostochnoi Sibiri)’, Problemy Otechestvennoi Istorii 2 (1993): 98. GARF 9412/1/1/79оb-80. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/109. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/109, 120; RGASPI M1/3/299/109-109оb. GARF 9412/1/27/223, 9412/1/28/148 (quotation). GARF 9412/1/29/65. Jerzy Kmiecik, A Boy in the Gulag (London: Quartet Books, 1983), 192. Vil’ Mirimanov, Prozhita zhizn’. Neskol’ko zhiznei (Moscow : RGGU, 2012), 114, 116. RGASPI М1/7/69/37. RGASPI М1/7/35/6, М1/32/186/7, М1/7/70/8. RGASPI M1/7/61/8-9. Kmiecik, A Boy, 80; GARF 9412/1/29/65. See recollections of Nina Sergeeva in Viktor Bakin (ed.), Detdomovskie sorokovye: Dokumental’naia povest’ (Kirov : Molodaia Gvardiia, 1989), 84 (hereafter Detdomovskie).

194 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Notes Kmiecik, A Boy, 80. B. Mikhailov, Na dne blokady i voiny (St Petersburg: VSEGEI, 2000), 105–8. E.S. Kochergin, Kreshchennye Krestami: Zapiski na kolenkakh (St Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2009), 80–92. Kmiecik, A Boy, 192. Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-war Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 173. Kochergin, Kreshchennye, 111. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 84–5, 87 (quotation). GARF 9412/1/30/108-9. Kochergin, Kreshchennye, 157–8, 161–2. Ibid., 159. See Eduard Kochergin, Angelova kukla (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Ivana Limbakha, 2008). RGASPI М1/7/35/10.

Chapter 2 1 2

3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11

12

RGASPI М1/7/35/4, 9, 10, 19ob, 22, 23, M1/7/70/100, М1/7/101/16; GARF 9412/1/24/177. Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-war Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 169; GARF 9412/1/27/84. On the amnesty, see GARF 9412/1/28/46, 9412/1/59/75. GARF 9412/1/38/1-2; 9412/1/57/5-5ob. RGASPI M1/7/35/10, 44 and GARF 9412/1/35/17, 9412/1/7/7ob. On the 1920s dynamic, see Alan Ball, ‘Survival in the Street World of Soviet Russia’s “Besprizornye” ’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 39, no. 1 (1991): 44; on the first half of the 1930s, see GARF 8131/14/48/77; on the reverse trend in the 1940s, see RGASPI М1/7/35/10, 17/122/22/126 and GARF 8131/37/1846/48. RGASPI М1/7/69/38ob, М1/7/70/8оb. GARF 9412/1/22/17, 24, 9412/1/27/52, 139, 9412/1/28/96, 9412/1/30/71. GARF 9412/1/22/17; Rachel F. Green ‘ “There Will Not Be Orphans among Us”: Soviet Orphanages, Foster Care, and Adoption, 1941–1956’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2006), 55–6. Donald Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5. On pre-existing difficulties with provision, see William Moskoff, The Bread of Affliction: The Food Supply in the USSR during World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5, 9, 12, 17, 41 and Wendy Goldman, ‘Ne khelbom edinym: prodovol’stvie, rabochie i gosudarstvo’ in SSSR vo Vtoroi mirovoi voine: Okkupatsiia. Kholokost. Stalinism, eds Oleg Budnitskii and Liudmila Novikova (Moscow : Politicheskaia Entsiklopediia, 2014), 221–2; on bad harvests and mass starvation in the rear, see Filtzer, The Hazards, 163, and Nicholas Ganson, ‘Food Supply, Rationing and Living Standards’ in The Soviet Union at War 1941–1945, ed. David R. Stone (Barnsley : Pen & Sword, 2010), 70. Donald Filtzer, ‘ “Smertnost” ot goloda v promyshlennykh raionakh tyla v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny’ in SSSR vo Vtoroi mirovoi voine: Okkupatsiia. Kholokost.

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27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39

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Stalinism, eds Oleg Budnitskii and Liudmila Novikova (Moscow: Politicheskaia Entsiklopediia, 2014), 196; also see idem, The Hazards, 169–70n15. Filtzer, ‘Smertnost’, 196; Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 212; Ganson, ‘Food Supply’, 84; M.S. Zinich, ‘Sotsial’naia politika voennykh let (1941–1945)’ in Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina v kontekste Rossiiskoi istorii (Saratov : Izdatel’stvo Saratovskogo Universiteta, 2000), 75; Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 96, 97; M.B. Zefirov and D.M. Degtev, Vse dlia fronta? Kak na samom dele kovalas’ pobeda (Moscow : AST, 2009), 349. Filtzer, ‘Smertnost’, 203–4. Moskoff, The Bread, 137. Gary Berkovich, Watching Communism Fail: A Memoir of Life in the Soviet Union (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 53. N.D. Alenchikova, ‘Moe voennoe detstvo’, Vestnik Permskogo Universiteta 1, no. 13 (2010): 70. Goldman, ‘Ne khlebom’, 225–6. RGASPI М1/7/101/19. RGASPI М1/7/70/55; GARF 9412/1/22/24; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/106. Raisa Arsenishvili cited in Detdomovskie, 40. Timothy Johnston, Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life under Stalin, 1939–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 84. Ibid., 119; GARF 9412/1/23/181. RGASPI М1/7/70/8, 8ob, 22-22оb; Johnston, Being Soviet, 119. Johnston, Being Soviet, 118; RGASPI М1/7/70/8. Some girls reportedly engaged in a different kind of trade, although both the archival documents and official publications are very coy on the subject of prostitution. The only report I was able to find mentions briefly that ‘many girls’ were being detained and sent to DPRs for promiscuity. See RGASPI М1/7/35/8. See, for instance, an instruction letter from the General Prosecutor of the RSFSR detailing one such case, in GARF А461/12/4/30. Jones, Everyday Life, 182. GARF A461/12/4/6-8. GARF 8131/37/1849/221оb. See a draft decree, dated 31 January 1944, in RGASPI М1/7/101/1. GARF 9412/1/27/52, 139. Green, ‘There Will Not Be Orphans’, 58, 63. In its 19 December 1944 editorial, Pravda Ukrainy insisted that ‘it is no secret that children who engage in street trade of any sort, quickly develop bad habits’ (see a copy of the article ‘Usilit’ bor’bu s detskoi beznadzornost’iu’ in GARF 8131/22/9/67ob). V.S. Tadevosian, Rassledovanie del o prestupleniiakh nesovershennoletnikh (metodicheskoe rukovodstvo) (Moscow : Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1944), 17. See recollections of Iania Chernina in Svetlana Aleksievich, Poslednie svideteli (sto nedetskikh kolybel’nykh) (Moscow : Palmira, 2004), 133. On the origins of the movement, see A.Iu. Davydov, Meshochniki i diktatura v Rossii, 1917–1921 (St Petersburg: Aleteia, 2007). RGASPI М1/7/35/16-18, М1/7/69/38оb; for reports from other regions for 1944 and 1945, see GARF 9412/1/28/80 and GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/127ob. RGASPI 17/126/12/13. Zefirov and Degtev, Vse dlia fronta?, 351–2.

196 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47

48 49 50 51 52

53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Notes From a letter by Julia Speranskaia in L.N. Mashir (ed.), Dnevnik detskoi pamiati. Eto i moia voina (Moscow : AST, 2014), 16 (hereafter Dnevnik). Berkhoff, Motherland, 97. Filtzer, The Hazards, 165; Ganson, ‘Food Supply’, 79, 81. Speranskaia in Dnevnik, 16. Interview with Tatiana Nikolaeva in ibid., 206. Interview with Vera Tashkina in Aleksievich, Poslednie svideteli, 51. Vil’ Mirimanov, Prozhita zhizn’. Neskol’ko zhiznei (Moscow : RGGU, 2012), 84; for other testimonies, see Julie K. deGraffenried, Sacrificing Childhood: Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 23. See recollections of Maria Ermolina in Viktor Bakin (ed.), Detdomovskie sorokovye: Dokumental’naia povest’ (Kirov : Molodaia gvardiia, 1989), 39 (hereafter Detdomovskie). See recollections of Rimma Isaeva in ibid., 183. Debora Mikhlina’s testimony in Internat. Metlino. Voina: Sbornik Vospominanii (Moscow : FIAN, 1998), 104. GARF 9412/1/35/81, 119, 128, 156, 9412/1/7/1, 8131/37/1846/24. Interview with Nina Khomiakova in Dnevnik, 132. V.I. Vorozhilova, ‘Deti pogibshikh sovetskikh soldat v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny i posle nee’ in Kinder des Krieges, Bulletin no. 3 (Moscow: Deutsches Historisches Institut Moscau, 2009), 53. GARF 9412/1/19/85; RGASPI М1/7/70/55ob, 60. I.B. Orlov, ‘Khlebnoe i prodovol’stvennoe snabzhenie detei v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’ in Materinstvo i detstvo v Rossii XVIII–XXI vv: Sbornik nauchnykh statei, part 1 (Moscow : GOUVPOMGUS, 2006), 206–7. On monthly ration norms, see Moskoff, The Bread, 139, Orlov, ‘Khlebnoe’, 198 and Zinich, Budni, 22. GARF 9412/1/28/96, 9412/1/29/113; RGASPI M1/7/35/4ob-5. Berkovich, Watching Communism Fail, 52. Internat. Metlino, 57. GARF 8131/27/200/10, А461/12/6/11; RGASPI М1/7/35/4оb-5. GARF 9412/1/27/83, 9412/1/28/96, 109, 211; RGASPI М1/7/35/12, М1/7/70/8оb. Anna Reid, Leningrad: Tragedy of a City under Siege, 1941–44 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 284; Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 53; Sergei Iarov, Blokadnaia etika: Predstavleniia o morali v Leningrade v 1941–1942 gg (Moscow : Tsentrpoligraf, 2013), 65, 65n1, 103. See Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin, Blokadnaia kinga (St Petersburg: Lenizdat, 2013), 181–2 and Iarov, Blokadnaia etika, 328–9. Iarov, Blokadnaia etika, 331n3. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 66–7. Ibid. Ibid., 68. RGASPI М1/7/35/12. RGASPI М1/7/70/71оb; GARF 8131/20/31/122. See S.N. Firulev, Vam, iz vremeni surovogo (Perm: Pushka, 2000), 27–9. Interview with Marlen Robeichikov in Aleksievich, Poslednie svideteli, 144–4. Quoted in deGraffenried, Sacrificing, 31.

Notes 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81

82 83

84

197

Quoted in ibid., 144. RGASPI М1/7/70/21, М1/32/186/7; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/176-7, 9412/1/34/28, 9412/1/35/17. RGASPI M1/7/101/16, 17/122/22/126; GARF 8131/37/1849/222. GARF 9412/1/24/177-8. GARF 9412/1/30/4. For a similar case, see GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/18. GARF 9412/1/30/5, 8131/27/208/39; RGASPI М1/7/35/4оb. GARF 8131/27/163/10, 8131/27/208/41, 42; A.R. Dzeniskevich and N.Iu. Cherepenina (eds), Iz raionov oblasti soobshchahiut...: Svobodnye ot okkupatsii raiony Leningradskoi oblasti v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: 1941–1945. Sbornik dokumentov (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2007), 188. Ibid., 457–8. GARF 9412/1/4/80. For a further discussion of Soviet children in German service, see Kucherenko, Little Soldiers: How Soviet Children Went to War, 1941–45 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 214–18. Gelii Pavlov, ‘Deti i Gulag’, Literaturnoe Obozrenie, no. 4 (1991): 101. See recollections of Valdemar Weber, ‘101-yi kilometr, dalee vezde’, Neva, no. 8 (2011). Available at http://magazines.russ.ru/neva/2011/8/ve6.html (accessed on 17 January 2012). See, for instance, Kenneth D. Rose, Myth and the Greatest Generation: A Social History of Americans in WWII (New York: Routledge, 2008), 88–93, 94–5, 113.

Chapter 3 1 2

3

4 5

6 7

RGASPI 17/126/19/23. See Donald Filtzer, ‘Labour “desertion” in Soviet Defence Industry during World War II’ (paper presented at the annual meeting of Association of Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies, November 2010), 9; M.S. Zinich, Budni voennogo likholet’ia, 1941–1945, Issue 2 (Moscow : RAN, 1994), 64; testimonies by Irina Antonova in Elena Joly (ed.), Pobeda liuboi tsenoi (Moscow : Iauza/Eksmo, 2010), 332, and Tamara Teterina in L.N. Mashir (ed.), Dnevnik detskoi pamiati. Eto i moia voina (Moscow : AST, 2014), 143–4 (hereafter Dnevnik). See eyewitness accounts in Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (London: Cornell University Press, 2009), 147, 150, 150n10. Ibid., 150, 156. Elizabeth White ‘The Evacuation of Children from Leningrad during World War II’ in Children: The Invisible Victims of War: An Interdisciplinary Study, ed. Martin Parsons (Cambridge: DSM, 2008), 115; see also diary entries by Verzhbitsky in Tsena pobedy: rossiiskie shkol’niki o voine. Sbornik rabot pobeditelei 5 i 6 Vserossiiskikh konkursov istoricheskikh issledovatel’skikh rabot starsheklassnikov ‘Chelovek v istorii. Rossia-XX vek’ (Moscow : Memorial, 2005), 110–11. RGASPI 17/122/21/97–99оb (quotations), 111–12ob. M. N. Potemkina, ‘Otrazhenie voiny v pamiati evakuirovannykh detei’ in Vtoraia mirovaia voina v detskikh ‘ramkakh pamiati’: Sbornik nauchnykh statei, ed. A.Iu. Rozhkov (Krasnodar : Ekoinvest, 2010), 246–7; for another example of ethnic strife among children, see Julie K. deGraffenried, Sacrificing Childhood: Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 29.

198 8

9 10

11

12

13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29 30

Notes Manley, To the Tashkent Station, 150–1; idem, ‘The Perils of Displacement: The Soviet Evacuee between Refugee and Deportee’, Contemporary European History 16, no. 4 (2007): 507. Idem, To the Tashkent Station, 152–3. John Dunstan, Soviet Schooling in the Second World War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 85; see also a report from Cheliabinsk oblast in RGASPI 17/122/21/67. See, for instance, Wendy Goldman, ‘Ne khelbom edinym: prodovol’stvie, rabochie i gosudarstvo’ in SSSR vo Vtoroi mirovoi voine: Okkupatsiia. Kholokost. Stalinism, eds Oleg Budnitskii and Liudmila Novikova (Moscow : Politicheskaia Entsiklopediia, 2014), 233; RGASPI 17/122/21/97, 17/126/19/23. Donald Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. ch3; idem, ‘Smertnost’’, 211–12. White, ‘The Evacuation’, 119; on rising juvenile delinquency rates from 1943 onwards, see reports from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tatar Autonomous Republic, in GARF 9412/1/7/27, 8131/37/1846/13; RGASPI М1/7/70/100. RGASPI М1/7/69/37, RGASPI M1/7/35/13, 17/122/22/130; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/128. GARF 9412/1/7/7оb, 11ob, 9412/1/27/195, 203–5; RGASPI М1/7/70/49-49ob. On 10 June 1945, the deputy of the Leningrad soviet boasted in Leningradskaia Pravda about the unparalleled success of the evacuation. See White, ‘The Evacuation’, 114. Ibid., 108; Manley, To the Tashkent Station, 13, 19, 20, 34. GARF A2306/69/2739/5оb. See Gabriel Merzon’s testimony in Internat. Metlino. Voina: Sbornik Vospominanii (Moscow : FIAN, 1998), 85. Tsena pobedy, 109–10; Manley, To the Tashkent Station, 89; GARF 2306/69/2739/1; RGASPI М1/7/25/7. RGASPI 17/126/2/156-158, 160; also see William Moskoff, The Bread of Affliction: The Food Supply in the USSR during World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 34. From a letter of Berta Gorokhova in Viktor Bakin (ed.), Detdomovskie sorokovye: Dokumental’naia povest’ (Kirov, 1989), 32–3 (hereafter Detdomovskie). Elena Kuz’mina’s testimony in ibid., 37. G.M. Sverdlov, Voina i pravovaia okhrana detei v SSSR (Tashkent, 1943), 15–16; Anna Reid, Leningrad: Tragedy of a City under Siege, 1941–44 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), ch. 5. White, ‘The Evacuation’, 109; RGASPI 17/126/2/159. E. Krinko et al., ‘Na grani vyzhivaniia: detskie doma Kubani v 1941–1945 gg.’, in Sovetskaia sotsial’naia politika: stseny i deistvuiushchie litsa, 1940–1985, eds E.R. Iarskaia-Smirnova and P.V. Romanov (Мoscow : TsSPGI, 2008), 42, 44. Ibid., 42, 43; Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 26. Aleksandr Fradkin, ‘Voina okazalas’ pravdoi’, 31 October 2012. Available at http:// www.world-war.ru/vojna-okazalas-pravdoj/ (accessed on 20 January 2013). Valia Brinskaia’s testimony in Svetlana Aleksievich, Poslednie svideteli (sto nedetskikh kolybel’nykh) (Moscow : Palmira, 2004), 230. Gary Berkovich, Watching Communism Fail: A Memoir of Life in the Soviet Union (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 20.

Notes 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50

51 52

53 54 55

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Stefan Waydenfeld, The Ice Road: An Epic Journey from the Stalinist Labour Camps to Freedom (Los Angeles: Aquila Polonica, 2011), 281. Manley, To the Tashkent Station, 186n251; GARF 9412/1/7/7ob, 12-12ob, 9412/1/35/119, 9412/1/28/5. Manley, To the Tashkent Station, 157. Ibid., 121, 186. Reid, Leningrad, 278. RGASPI 81/3/352/25, 81/3/353/4, 6. Potemkina, ‘Otrazhenie’, 237–8. Elena Kozhina, Through the Burning Steppe: A Memoir of Wartime Russia, 1942–1943. Transl. Vadim Mahmoudov (New York: Riverhead, 2000), 91. Fradkin, ‘Voina okazalas’ pravdoi’. L.I. Snegireva (ed.), Vo imia pobedy: evakuatsiia grazhdanskogo naselenia v Zapadnuiu Sibir’ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny v dokumentakh i materialakh, Vol. 3 (Tomsk: TGPU, 2005), 79, also see 117–18. For examples of unrest, see RGASPI 17/132/200/1-3; also Rachel F. Green, ‘ “There Will Not Be Orphans among Us”: Soviet Orphanages, Foster Care, and Adoption, 1941–1956’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2006), 126. RGASPI M1/7/70/53-54, М1/7/101/30. Detdomovskie, 77, 79. Ibid., 66–7, 74, 75, 80, 81, 83, 86–7, 118, 140; also see Aleksievich, Poslednie svideteli, 18. In 1942, only 58 per cent of 15,000 staff members of detdoma across the RSFSR possessed any pedagogical competency. There were cases when orphanages ended up with people who did not make the cut in normal schools or received poor references upon graduation from pedagogic courses. Too often janitors acted as caregivers, although this certainly does not mean that they were less dedicated to their charges than specially trained educators. See RGASPI М1/7/69/27, М1/7/26/22, 17/126/19/78. RGASPI М1/7/23/47; Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 294. RGASPI 17/126/19/38. Green, ‘There Will Not Be Orphans’, 114–15. RGASPI 17/132/200/3 (quotation). Boris Faifman, ‘Three Death Certificates But No Grave’ in Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile, eds J.M. Gheith and K.R. Jolluck (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 124; Krinko et al., ‘Na grani vyzhivaniia’, 57; Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 43; Detdomovskie, 81, 87; GARF A2306/70/5510/96, 9412/1/22/62; RGASPI 17/126/5/14, М1/7/23/36, 47, М1/32/186/6оb, М1/7/101/31. Faifman, ‘Three Death Certificates’, 123–5. Elizabeth White, ‘The Return of Evacuated Children to Leningrad, 1944-46’ in The Disentanglement of Populations Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Postwar Europe, 1944–49, eds J. Reinisch and E. White (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 264. RGASPI 17/126/5/2. RGASPI М1/7/23/32–4, 130–7, 141–6. See John Dunstan, Soviet Schooling in the Second World War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 84; deGraffenried, Sacrificing, 40; White, ‘The Evacuation’, 112; Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 82; A.R. Dzeniskevich and N.Iu. Cherepenina (eds.) Iz raionov oblasti soobshchahiut...: Svobodnye ot okkupatsii raiony Leningradskoi oblasti v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: 1941–1945. Sbornik dokumentov (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2007), 36 (quotation).

200 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74

75

Notes See the reports cited in deGraffenried, Sacrificing, 136 and RGASPI 17/126/5/13. Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 82–3; RGASPI М1/7/24/140, М1/7/26/2. GARF A2306/69/2977/3, 4; RGASPI М1/7/24/81, М1/7/26/1-1оb, 2-2оb, М1/7/70/54. RGASPI 17/126/5/18. RGASPI М1/7/27/19, 163. GARF 9412/1/35/20ob. GARF 9412/1/7/22ob-23, 43–4, 9412/1/19/71, 9412/1/35/20, 23; RGASPI М1/32/186/1, М1/7/69/38, М1/7/70/99, 100. GARF 9412/1/28/80, 9412/1/29/58; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/106; RGASPI 17/126/19/23. GARF 8131/22/6/6; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/34/131-2. On measures to contain the stem of re-evacuation in Leningrad and Moscow, which were replicated in other cities, see White, ‘The Return’, 252, 256, 258; idem, ‘After the War Was Over: The Civilians Return to Leningrad’, Europe-Asia Studies 59, no. 7 (November 2007): 1145, 1148–9; Irina Karpenko, ‘Sotsial’naia podderzhka reevakuantov (leningradskii opyt 1940-kh godov)’ in Sovetskaia sotsial’naia politika: stseny i deistvuiushchie litsa, 1940–1985, eds E.R. Iarskaia-Smirnova and P.V. Romanov (Moscow : TsSPGI, 2008) (Мoscow, 2008), esp. 86–90; Siobahn Peeling, ‘Dirt, Disease and Disorder: Population Replacement in Postwar Leningrad and the “Danger” of Social Contamination’ in Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945–50, eds Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 125; Tsena pobedy, 110; Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2012), 295; GARF 327/2/398/200, 202. Karpenko, ‘Sotsial’naia podderzhka’, 87; Joly Pobeda liuboi tsenoi 334; see also White, ‘The Return’, 253. White, ‘The Evacuation’, 115. GARF 9412/1/4/85. RGASPI 17/126/19/38, 71–8, 81; GARF 9412/1/19/63ob, 64, 69. GRAF 8131/20/31/87–87оb. GARF 9412/1/33/91, 115, 5446/47/2011/2; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/2; RGASPI М1/7/27/42, М1/7/23/34. G. Golish and L. Golish, ‘Tragediia znivechennogo dytynstva’ in Ukraina v drugii svitovii viini: pogliad z 21 st.: Istorichni narisi, eds V.A. Smolii et al. (Kiev : Naukova Dumka, 2011), 159. The situation was similar even in the regions unaffected by combat. See, for instance, a report from Omsk oblast in Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 287. GARF 9412/1/27/51, 137–8, 147, 148, 159, 316. For further discussion, see Bohdan Kordan, ‘Making Borders Stick: Population Transfer and Resettlement in the Trans-Curzon Territories, 1944–1949’, International Migration Review 31, no. 3 (Autumn, 1997), 704–20; Kateryna Stadnik, ‘UkrainianPolish Population Transfers, 1944-46: Moving in Opposite Directions’ in Warlands, 165–87, and Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003), 41. Iaroslav Dashkevich and Vasil’ Kuk (eds), ‘Osobye Papki’ Stalina i Molotova pro natsional’no-vizvol’nu borot’bu v Zakhidnii Ukraini u 1944–1948 rr.: Sbirnik dokumentiv (L’viv : Piramida, 2010), 295, 302–3, 304; Alexander Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Notes

76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84

201

Press, 2013), 181; Stadnik, ‘Ukrainian-Polish’, 170, 173; O. Buts’ko, ‘UkrainaPol’shcha 1944–1946 rr. Pereselen’skii protses’ in Ukraina v Drugii svitivii viini, 486. DAOO R2000/3/82/107ob, 133, 165, 228ob, R2000/3/84/1, 5–8, 10, 62ob. For other regions, see Stadnik, ‘Ukrainian-Polish’, 176. Stadnik, ‘Ukrainian-Polish’, 176; DAOO R2000/3/84/49-52, 62ob. See, for instance, DAOO R2000/3/82/103, 107ob, 112-112ob, 128, 142, 288ob, 242, R2000/3/84/1ob, 30. DAOO R2000/3/82/54, 97, 131, 309, R2000/3/84/1, 28–9, R2000/3/91/43, 111, 176. There were, of course, exceptions when kolkhoz administrations took charge of orphans and provided their full upkeep (DAOO R2000/3/84/29). RGASPI 17/22/117/44, 48. See also DAOO R2000/3/91/19, 82, 142, 143, 167, 176. DAOO R2000/3/91/43. RGASPI 17/22/117/45, 47, 51, 58. See a letter from a mother who refused to abandon her child, apparently to no detriment to herself, in DAOO R2000/3/95/21. DAOO R2000/3/95/51.

Chapter 4 1

2

3 4

5 6 7

8 9

10 11

RGASPI М1/7/23/6–17, М1/7/70/4–6, 101–7, М1/7/32/1–5, 18, 37–37оb, 7, M1/3/287/53–53ob, М1/7/101/17, М1/7/35/7; L.I. Snegireva (ed.), Vo imia pobedy: evakuatsiia grazhdanskogo naselenia v Zapadnuiu Sibir’ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny v dokumentakh i materialakh, Vol. 3 (Tomsk: TGPU, 2005), 127–8. By the end of the conflict the number of children’s homes reached 6,000, which was 4,340 more than in January 1940. F.M. Turovskaia, ‘Itogi massovoi ozdorovitel’noi raboty sredi detei Moskvy v 1943 g’, SZd 4/5 (1944), 41–2; I.B. Orlov, ‘Khlebnoe i prodovol’stvennoe snabzhenie detei v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’ in Materinstvo i detstvo v Rossii XVIII-XXI vv.: Sbornik nauchnykh statei, part 1 (Moscow : GOUVPOMGUS, 2006), 201–2. RGASPI 17/126/7/17. A. R. Dzeniskevich and N. Iu. Cherepenina (eds), Iz raionov oblasti soobshchahiut...: Svobodnye ot okkupatsii raiony Leningradskoi oblasti v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: 1941–1945. Sbornik dokumentov (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2007), 84–5, 129 (hereafter Iz raionov). RGASPI 17/126/7/17. See PP, 10 February 1943. RGASPI 5446/43/1051/22, 128–9; GARF 9412/1/7/46, 47; G.M. Sverdlov, Voina i pravovaia okhrana detei v SSSR (Tashkent, 1943), 35; A.A. Abakumov et al. (eds), Narodnoe obrazovanie v SSSR: Obshcheobrazovatel’naia shkola, Sbornik dokumentov 1917–1973 gg. (Moscow, 1974), 117–19; ‘Sovetskii uchitel’ v dni Otechestvennoi voiny’, NSh 1/2 (1942):3; V.A. Kufaev, ‘Zabota o detiakh v dni Otechstvennoi voiny’, SP 8/9 (1942): 25–6, 28. RGASPI М1/5/145/2–2ob. On school buildings, see John Dunstan, ‘Soviet Schools in the Great Patriotic War’ in Education and the Second World War: Studies in Schooling and Social Change, ed. Roy Lowe (New York: Routledge, 2012), 36. RGASPI M1/3/351а/2–6. RGASPI 17/126/12/13.

202 12

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18

19

20 21 22 23

24

25

26

27 28 29

Notes On the authorities’ efforts to accommodate adolescents, see, for instance, Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (London: Cornell University Press, 2009), 188; RGASPI М1/7/26/19 and DAOO R2000/3/93/117, 120, 123, 124, 127, 129, 130, 132; on the reluctance of the management, see RGASPI М1/7/70/22, 52, М1/7/69/3. RGASPI М1/7/70/21оb; GARF 8131/37/1849/11; also see ch. 7. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/68; RGASPI М1/7/69/1ob, 24 (quotation). GARF 9412/1/19/1ob, 90; for other similar complaints, see RGASPI М1/5/118/2 and GARF 9412/1/19/87, 8131/27/162/9. GARF 8131/22/7/215. On the mass media campaign and its positive effects, see RGASPI 17/126/19/83-4; Elizabeth White, ‘The Return of Evacuated Children to Leningrad, 1944-46’ in The Disentanglement of Populations Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Postwar Europe, 1944–49, eds J. Reinisch and E. White (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 262; Rachel F. Green, ‘ “There Will Not Be Orphans among Us”: Soviet Orphanages, Foster Care, and Adoption, 1941–1956’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2006), 154; on examples of such press releases, see KP, 4, 13 February 1942, 1, 29 March 1942 and Pravda, 24 March 1942. RGASPI М1/7/26/19, М1/7/101/49, M1/7/35/1, 2, 15, 16, М1/7/70/46, GARF 9412/1/19/69ob, 9412/1/7/46, 47, 9412/1/27/139, 140; on the 1930s campaigns, see David Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 184, 218, 231–3 and Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926-1941 (Washington: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 103–4. PP, 8, 15 February and 14 March 1944; ‘Usilit’ bor’bu s detskoi beznadzornost’iu’, Pravda Ukrainy, 19 December 1944; RGASPI 17/126/7/154, 155, 157, 160, 162, М1/7/5/20, М1/7/35/7; GARF 8131/27/205/2, 9412/1/27/223; Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 56, 233. RGASPI М1/7/70/101; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/70. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/112, 186. RGASPI М1/7/70/15. Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2012), 275. For official instructions, see RGASPI М1/7/27/4, 12; Sergei Iarov, Blokadnaia etika: Predstavleniia o morali v Leningrade v 1941–1942 gg. (Moscow : Tsentrpoligraf, 2013), 424–5. Juliane Fürst, ‘Between Salvation and Liquidation: Homeless and Vagrant Children and the Reconstruction of Soviet Society’, The Slavonic & East European Review 86, no.2 (April 2008): 239. On public and Komsomol initiatives, see RGASPI М1/7/101/49, М1/7/23/27–34, 35, 42–6, 50–6, 66–7, 69–71, М1/7/24/126–8, 127a, 129–30, М1/7/27/5, М1/7/70/46оb and Iarov, Blokadnaia etika, 139; on assistance offered by kolkhozes, see RGASPI М1/7/24/68–77, М1/7/25/1–6, 17/126/5/3; for the press campaign, see, for instance, KP, 9, 10, 25, 27 January, 4, 18, 20, 27 February, 14, 21 March and 5, 9, 18, 23 April 1942. RGASPI 17/126/19/53, M1/7/61/48. RGASPI M1/7/61/48, M1/3/351а/2–6, 17/126/19/3. Orlov, ‘Khlebnoe’, 202–3; Turovskaia, ‘Itogi massovoi’, 42, 43.

Notes 30

31

32

33

34

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GARF 8131/27/198/2–5, 9412/1/28/190–1, 9412/1/4/93, 109, 9412/1/29/67, 9412/1/35/40, 147; RGASPI М1/7/35/7; Manley, To the Tashkent Station, 182–5; M.N. Potemkina, ‘Otrazhenie voiny v pamiati evakuirovannykh detei’ in Vtoraia mirovaia voina v detskikh ‘ramkakh pamiati’: Sbornik nauchnykh statei, ed. A.Iu. Rozhkov (Krasnodar: Ekoinvest, 2010), 236. The state earmarked from 3.5 rubles (rural areas) to 5 rubles (towns) per day on meals for each child, plus other expenses incurred by boarding institutions, although in some areas the allocated amount was arbitrarily cut in half. Therefore, it was more advantageous to the state to place as many children as possible into foster families, even given a monthly allowance of 50 rubles in addition to a one-time compensation for clothing in the amount of 200 rubles. On allocations and abuses, see E. Krinko et al, ‘Na grani vyzhivaniia: detskie doma Kubani v 1941–1945 gg.’, in Sovetskaia sotsial’naia politika: stseny i deistvuiushchie litsa, 1940–1985, eds E.R. Iarskaia-Smirnova, P.V. Romanov (Мoscow : TsSPGI, 2008), 47; GARF 5446/43/1051/54 and RGASPI M1/7/26/20; on numbers of adopted or fostered children, see Nicholas Ganson, The Soviet Famine of 1946–47 in Global and Historical Perspective (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 28; on the enthusiastic response trumpeted by the regime via the mass media, see Fürst, ‘Between Salvation’, 240–4; for examples of such media campaigns, see KP 9 and 25 January 1942, 12 February 1942, 6 and 22 March 1942, 11 and 19 April 1942, Pravda 4 February 1942 and 24 March 1942. GARF 5451/28/51/15, 19–20, 5451/28/258/3, 13, 124, 5451/28/257/52–60, 69; S.V. Romanovich, ‘Bor’ba s detskoi beznadzornost’iu i besprizornost’iu na Iuzhnom Urale v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: 1941-1945’ (Doctorate Candidacy diss., Orenburg State University, 2006), 15. On charitable activities of the armed forces, see RGASPI М1/7/23/99, 117, 119–20, М1/7/24/123, 176, 183, 192, 195, 197; DАОО R1965/12/2/85; Gary Berkovich, Watching Communism Fail: A Memoir of Life in the Soviet Union (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 52; Interview with Ksenia Zenkevich in L.N. Mashir (ed.), Dnevnik detskoi pamiati. Eto i moia voina (Moscow : AST, 2014), 108; Kucherenko, Little Soldiers, chs. 5, 7; on the examples of individual fundraising and distance fostering of orphaned children by servicemen, see articles and open letters in KP, 4, 20 February, 6, 7 March and 16 April 1942. For a more detailed discussion of junior cadet schools, see Olga Kucherenko, ‘In Loco Parentis: Junior Cadet Schools as an Instrument of State Parenting in the Soviet Union during the Second World War’ in Parenting and the State in Britain and Europe, c. 1870–1950: Raising the Nation, eds Hester Barron and Claudia Siebrecht (London: Palgrave, 2016). GARF A2306/69/2999/23, 81. Livschiz, ‘Growing up Soviet: Childhood in the Soviet Union, 1918–1958’ (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2007), 468–9; Green, ‘There Will Not Be Orphans’, 142–4, 146, 147. GARF 8131/37/1849/185. Former waifs and orphans at Yalta naval cadet school also made the most effort. See the AChMP Р1965/1L/40/15оb, P1965/1L/43/17. See Victor Gekht’s recollections in Mashir, Dnevnik, 45. GARF 8131/22/9/126. Julie K. deGraffenried, Sacrificing Childhood: Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 153.

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Jeffrey W. Jones, Everyday Life and the “Reconstruction” of Soviet Russia during and after the Great Patriotic War, 1943–1948 (Bloomington: Slavica, 2008), 122–3; for newspaper articles making such a claim, see KP, 10 January, 4 February and 30 March 1942. KP, 1 March 1942. On the inflated claims by the Soviets, see William Moskoff, The Bread of Affliction: the Food Supply in the USSR during World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 134n4; on rations in the occupied countries, see Children in Bondage, A Survey of Child Life in the Occupied Countries of Europe and in Finland (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1942), 122–33; on malnourishment, see deGraffenried, Sacrificing, 45; on a man-made famine in the Netherlands in 1944–5, see C. Banning, ‘Food Shortages and Public Health, First Half of 1945,’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 245 (May 1946): 93–110; on famine in Greece as a result of a combination of factors, including German procurement policies, see Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). Children in Bondage, 17, 56, 96. E.H. Beardsley, ‘No Help Wanted: Medical Research Exchange between Russia and the West during the Second World War’, Medical History 22, no.4 (1978): 365–77. Penny Elaine Starns and Martin L. Parsons, ‘Against Their Will: The Use and Abuse of British Children during the Second World War’ in Children and War: A Historical Anthology, ed. James Martin (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 267–8, 272, 274. On attitudes towards beggars of all ages in the post-war years, see Elena Zubkova, ‘S protianutoi rukoi: Nishchenstvo v poslevoennom SSSR’, Cahiers du monde russe 49, no.2 (2008): 441–74. On arrests and convictions, see Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-war Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 169 and Julie deGraffenried, Sacrificing Childhood: Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 44; on declining rates of juvenile delinquency across the Soviet Union in 1945, see GARF 9412/1/27/82-3, 250 9412/1/28/5, 10, 47, 85, 133, 147, 149, 158, 210ob, 9412/1/29/3, 4, 62, 157, 9412/1/30/3, 56, 107–8, 8131/27/202/2, 5; Na ‘kraiu’ sovetskogo obshchestva: sotsial’nye marginaly kak ob”ekt gosudarstvennoi politiki: 1945-1960-e gg. (Moscow, 2010), 294–5. See, for instance, GARF 9412/1/28/46. For a discussion of the famine, see Nicholas Ganson, The Soviet Famine of 1946–47 in Global and Historical Perspective (New York: Palgrave, 2009). Donald Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 163–4, 166; Ganson, The Soviet Famine, 31–33, 58–60. N.V. Semina, ‘Bor’ba s besprizornost’iu v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, Nauchnyi Vestnik 1 (Penzenskii Gosudarstvennyi Pedagogicheskii Universitet) (2007), 67; M.R. Zezina, ‘Sotsial’naia zashchita detei-sirot v poslevoennye gody (1945–1955)’, Voprosy Istorii, no. 1 (1999): 129–30. GARF 9401/2/168/70; Na kraiu, 297–8. Starvation did not disappear entirely and sporadic hunger continued to strike the Soviet countryside into the early 1950s. See Ganson, The Soviet Famine, xv, xvi.

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GARF 9414/ch1/151/17; Na kraiu, 318. On the positive outcome of such involvement see a 1948 report in RGASPI М1/7/197/2–4, 27–28, 30, 63–4. On the role of obeshchestvennost’, see Brian LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), ch.4. deGraffenried, Sacrificing, 40. The government, however, remained suspicious of public fundraising and even attempted to curtail it during the 1946–7 famine, claiming that such relief campaigns were subject to abuse and mismanagement if not carefully supervised. See Ganson, The Soviet Famine, 42, 44. Ann Livschiz, ‘Growing Up Soviet: Childhood in the Soviet Union, 1918–1958’ (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2007), 484, 513–14, 517. deGraffenried, Sacrificing, 138, 209n18. Ann Livschiz, ‘Dorevoliutsionnye po forme, sovetskie po soderzhaniiu? Obrazovatel’nye reformy v gody voiny i poslevoennye poiski normy’ in Sovetskaia sotsial’naia politika: stseny i deistvuiushchie litsa, 1940–1985, eds E.R. IarskaiaSmirnova and P.V. Romanov (Moscow : TsSPGI, 2008), 164.

Chapter 6 1

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For wartime representations of the state’s role in childcare, see, for instance, Jeffrey W. Jones, Everyday Life and the “Reconstruction” of Soviet Russia during and after the Great Patriotic War, 1943–1948 (Bloomington: Slavica, 2008), 122–3. I.B. Orlov, ‘Khlebnoe i prodovol’stvennoe snabzhenie detei v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’ in Materinstvo i detstvo v Rossii XVII–XXI vv.: Sbornik nauchnykh statei, part 1 (Moscow : GOUVPOMGUS, 2006), 207. M.S. Zinich, Budni voennogo likholet’ia, 1941–1945, Issue 2 (Moscow : RAN, 1994), 8. RGASPI М1/7/26/31-5, 17/122/21/101; GARF А461/12/5/189; Zhenskoe litso pobedy: 100 dokumentov o zhenshchinakh Cheliabinskoi oblasti v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny 1941–45 gg. (Cheliabinsk: Kniga, 2001), 161, 163, 166–7. Quoted in Jones, Everyday Life, 131. Quoted in Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2009), 179; on the positive reports in the press, see Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 111. See A. Kobranov, Iz pokoleniia detei velikoi voiny (Moscow : MEI, 2000), 14. GARF 9412/1/29/110, 9412/1/7/13–13оb; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/107; RGASPI М1/7/70/52-52оb, М1/7/101/32. GARF 8131/27/205/3, 9412/1/23/147–8. GARF 9412/1/7/47; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/34/28. RGASPI М1/7/70/9, 52. RGASPI 17/122/21/113, 115, 116 (quotation); GARF А461/12/5/189. RGASPI 17/122/21/62–3. Quoted in V.B. Konasov, Istoriia politicheskikh repressii i penitentsiarnoi praktiki v Vologodskom krae, 1918–1953 (Vologda: VIPE, 2006), 170–1. On the bureaucratic semi-legal supply system see Vladislav Shabalin, ‘Nomenklaturnye soobshchestva sovetskogo tyla’ in SSSR vo Vtoroi mirovoi voine: Okkupatsia. Kholokost. Stalinism, eds Oleg Budnitskii and Liudmila Novikova

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Notes (Moscow : ROSSPEN, 2014), 267–79; Berkhoff, Motherland, 96; on the rationing policy, see Donald Filtzer, ‘Smertnost’ ot goloda v promyshlennykh raionakh tyla v gody vtoroi mirovoi voiny,’ in ibid., 203, 207. Sergei Iarov, Blokadnaia etika: Predstavleniia o morali v Leningrade v 1941–1942 gg. (Moscow : Tsentrpoligraf, 2013), 411 (quotation), 414, 416; Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 154, 300–1. Quoted in Iarov, Blokadnaia etika, 146. Shabalin, ‘Nomenklaturnye’, 273–4: see also a special report from Leningrad oblast, dated 18 April 1942, in A. R. Dzeniskevich and N. Iu. Cherepenina (eds) Iz raionov oblasti soobshchahiut...: Svobodnye ot okkupatsii raiony Leningradskoi oblasti v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: 1941–1945. Sbornik dokumentov (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2007), 171 (hereafter Iz raionov). Tamara Teterina quoted in L.N. Mashir (ed.), Dnevnik detskoi pamiati. Eto i moia voina (Moscow : AST, 2014), 146–7 (hereafter Dnevnik). A. Spektorov, ‘Neuklonno okhraniat’ prava semei zashchitnikov Rodiny’, SZ 1 (1944): 17, 18. GARF А461/12/6/1, 112; see also Orlov, ‘Khlebnoe’, 204–5. GARF 9412/1/27/76–7 and L.I. Snegireva (ed.) Vo imia pobedy: evakuatsiia grazhdanskogo naselenia v Zapadnuiu Sibir’ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny v dokumentakh i materialakh, Vol. 3 (Tomsk: TGPU, 2005), 290. GARF 5446/43/1051/93. A. Levin, Pol’skii dom na Urale (Ekaterinburg: Poligrafist, 2006), 22. GARF 8131/37/1849/109; RGASPI 17/126/5/3, 17/126/19/44 and Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 292; also see a letter of complaint from the Russian Commissar of Enlightenment to the SNK in GARF 5446/43/1051/58. RGASPI М1/7/69/27, 38, М1/7/26/1оb; GARF A2306/70/5621/12–13, A2306/70/8178/3. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/22, 38; GARF 5446/43/1051/229; RGASPI М1/7/101/20. Rachel F. Green ‘ “There Will Not Be Orphans among Us”: Soviet Orphanages, Foster Care, and Adoption, 1941–1956’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2006), 91; for a similar situation in other children’s boarding institutions in later years, see GARF 9412/1/35/22, 24–5, 38; Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 292. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/20ob; GARF 5446/43/1051/80, 84, 224. See recollections of Gennadii Buketov in Viktor Bakin (ed.), Detdomovskie sorokovye: Dokumental’naia povest’ (Kirov, 1989), 75. Elizabeth White, ‘The Evacuation of Children from Leningrad during World War II’ in Children: The Invisible Victims of War, ed. M. Parsons (Cambridge: DSM, 2008), 116. See, for instance, a report from Omsk oblast in Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 43, 84. GARF 5446/43/1051/229, 5462/20/35/23; Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 293. First quotation cited in White, ‘The Evacuation’, 113. RGASPI 17/126/19/75–6, М1/7/101/20, М1/7/70/54; GARF 8131/20/31/20оb–21, 8131/37/1849/40; Green, ‘There Will Not Bbe Orphans’, 96. RGASPI М1/7/70/55оb; GARF A2306/69/2974/21, 27, 5446/43/1051/83, 216–17. Green, ‘There Will Not Be Orphans’, 96–7. RGASPI М1/7/26/1оb, М1/7/69/23, 27, 17/126/5/3; GARF 5446/43/1051/84; N.K. Petrova (ed.), Voina glazami detei: Svidetel’stva ochevidtsev (Moscow : Veche, 2011), 8. GARF 5446/43/1051/58–9.

Notes 40

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48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

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N.N. Karamasheva, ‘Nekotorye problemy okhrany detstva v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (na materialakh Vostochnoi Sibiri)’ in Problemy Otechestvennoi Istorii 2 (1993): 92. See recollections of Revekka Slavina-Vasil’eva, Internat. Metlino. Voina: Sbornik Vospominanii (Moscow: FIAN, 1998), 12 and E. Maksimova quoted in White, ‘The Evacuation’, 113; GARF А461/12/4/146. RGASPI М1/7/70/5, 50ob, 56, 10ob (second quotation), М1/7/35/20оb (first quotation), 17/126/12/5; Petrova, Voina glazami detei, 6; for examples of such letters, see GARF 2306/70/5727/61 and Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 88–9. Iarov, Blokadnaia etika, 410. See, for instance, a report from Leningrad oblast in Iz raionov, 560 and a decision by the Tomsk city executive committee in Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 118. Quoted in E. Krinko et al., ‘Na grani vyzhivaniia: detskie doma Kubani v 1941–1945 gg.’ in Sovetskaia sotsial’naia politika: stseny i deistvuiushchie litsa, 1940–1985, eds E.R. Iarskaia-Smirnova, P.V. Romanov (Мoscow, 2008), 39. RGASPI М1/7/70/9оb, М1/5/145/1ob. Wendy Goldman, ‘Ne khelbom edinym: prodovol’stvie, rabochie i gosudarstvo’ in SSSR vo Vtoroi mirovoi voine: Okkupatsiia. Kholokost. Stalinism, eds Oleg Budnitskii and Liudmila Novikova (Moscow : Politicheskaia Entsiklopediia, 2014), 242–3, 247. See, Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 215. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/24. GARF 9412/1/58/1. RGASPI М1/7/69/1, 38, М1/7/70/99. GARF 9412/1/27/10. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/159. GARF 9412/1/7/21, 8131/27/199/1оb; RGASPI М1/7/69/58, М1/7/70/9оb. GARF 9412/1/29/60 (first quotation), 61, 9412/1/7/20оb, 21ob; RGASPI 17/126/19/21, 25. See, for instance, inquiries from Tomsk, dated 8 July 1943 and 14 November 1945, in Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 170, 332. RGASPI М1/7/70/59, 59ob. GARF 8131/27/199/1. RGASPI М1/7/70/50ob, 59оb; on the inactivity of children’s commissions throughout the country, see RGASPI М1/7/69/1–1оb, М1/7/70/50оb, 17/126/19/30; GARF 8131/27/202/4, 8131/37/1846/25, 8131/37/1849/184, А461/12/5/183. Such clearing campaigns had been the primary method of crime-fighting during the 1930s, reflecting the inefficiency of the police force. See David Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 241–2. See, for instance, a 1943 report from Uzbekistan in RGASPI М1/7/70/98; also, see reports from Omsk and Tomsk oblasts from August 1944 and November 1945, respectively, in Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 289, 331–2. V. Tadevosian, ‘Pravovaia okhrana detei v usloviiakh Otechestvennoi voiny’, SZ 1 (1944): 25. ‘Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie prokurorov po delam nesovershennoletnikh’, SZ 11/12 (1945): 54. RGASPI M1/3/293/152, М1/5/118/2ob; GARF 9412/1/35/62–3, 9412/1/29/61, 9412/1/7/21оb. For the 1930s practices in controlling juvenile homelessness, see Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941 (Washington: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 113.

208 65 66 67

68 69 70

71

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73 74 75 76

77 78

Notes RGASPI М1/7/35/20, М1/7/70/59оb; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/62. RGASPI М1/7/70/21–21ob. For examples of criticism, see RGASPI M1/3/287/81; GARF 9412/1/29/130, 9412/1/33/113; on the availability of resources, see RGASPI М1/7/27/43, 17/126/19/45, GARF 9412/1/22/18. RGASPI 17/126/19/45. RGASPI М1/7/32/25, 38, 43. RGASPI М1/7/69/27оb, М1/7/26/20; GARF 8131/37/1849/40; on high death rates among foster children, see T.I. Dunbinskaia, ‘Sotsial’naia adaptatsiia detei na territorii Zapadnoi Sibiri v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: Analiz istoricheskogo opyta’ (Doctorate Candidacy diss., Abstract, Tomsk State University, 2004), 17; for a comprehensive English-language discussion of foster care and guardianship during this period, see Green, ‘There Will Not Be Orphans’, Vol. 2. RGASPI М1/7/70/18; GARF 8131/22/6/2; on similar abuses by adoptive families, see Rachel Faircloth Green, ‘Making Kin Out of Strangers: Soviet Adoption during and after the Second World War’ in Displaced Children in Russia and Eastern Europe, 1915–1953. Ideologies, Identities, Experiences, ed. Nick Baron (Leiden: Brill, 2016). RGASPI М1/7/24/123; on the popular scepticism regarding adoption and the continuous stigmatization of adopted children by wider society, see Green, ‘Making Kin Out of Strangers’. ‘Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie’: 55 (quotations). RGASPI М1/7/27/33–4, 146–7, 17/126/19/50оb; Tadevosian, ‘Pravovaia okhrana’, 26. GARF 8131/22/6/2; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/108–9. GARF 9412/1/30/72–3, 8131/37/1849/40; Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 288. Rosaria Franco, ‘Social Order and Social Policies toward Displaced Children: The Soviet Case (1917–1953)’ (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2006), 226; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/159; N.V. Semina, ‘Bor’ba s besprizornost’iu v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, Nauchnyi Vestnik 1 (2007): 62. RGASPI М1/7/101/2. ‘Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie’, 54.

Chapter 7 1 2

3

4

See Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlers (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). On a very real threat emanating from anti-Soviet nationalist organisations in Western Ukraine and the Baltic states, see Alexander Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 166–8 and Idem, ‘Motivations and Goals of Soviet Deportations in the Western Borderlands’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 6 (December 2005): 980–1. T.V. Tsarevskaia-Diakina (ed.), Spetspereselentsy v SSSR, Vol. 5 of Istoriia satlinskogo Gulaga. Konets 1920-kh – pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov: Sobranie dokumentov v 7 tomakh (Moscow : ROSSPEN, 2004), 55; D. Brandes et al. (eds), Entsiklopedia izgnanii: Deportatsiia, prinuditel’noe vyselenie i etnicheskaia chistka v Evrope v XX veke (Vienna and Moscow : ROSSPEN, 2013), 137. On the debates about the total of the deported from the newly acquired territories, see Tsarevskaia-Diakina, Spetspereselentsy, 54–6; K.R. Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the SU during WWII (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,

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2002), 12–13; Tadeusz Piotrowski (ed.), The Polish Deportees of World War II: Recollections of Removal to the Soviet Union and Dispersal throughout the World (Jefferson: McFarland & Co. Inc., 2007), 6. Irena Grudzinska-Gross and Jan Tomasz Gross (eds), War through Children’s Eyes: The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations, 1939–1941 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1981), xxiii; Dzintra Geka (ed.), The Children of Siberia: We had to tell this ... Memories of the Children deported from Latvia to Siberia in 1941, Vol. 1 (Riga: Sibīrijas Bērni, 2008), 7 (hereafter the Children of Siberia). Gross and Gross, War, xxiii, 127; Tomas Balkelis, ‘Lithuanian Children in the Gulag: Deportations, Ethnicity and Identity Memoirs of Children Deportees, 1941–1952,’ Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences, 51, no. 3 (Fall 2005). Available at http://www.lituanus.org/2005/05_3_2Balkelis.htm (accessed on 3 September 2014); also see idem, ‘Ethnicity, Identity and Imaginings of Home in the Memoirs of Lithuanian Child Deportees, 1941–53’ in Displaced Children in Russia and Eastern Europe, 1915–1953. Ideologies, Identities, Experiences, ed. Nick Baron (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Tsarevskaia-Diakina, Spetspereselentsy, 273. Balkelis, ‘Lithuanian Children’. Jolluck, Exile, 18. Ibid., 18–19. Children of Siberia, 14. Irena Wasilewska, Suffer Little Children (London: Maxlove Publishing, 1946), 10–11, 16–19. Children of Siberia, 14. Tsarevskaia-Diakina, Spetspereselentsy, 274; Children of Siberia, 7; Jolluck, Exile, 102. Tsarevskaia-Diakina, Spetspereselentsy, 274–5, 280–1. S.S. Vilensky et al., Deti Gulaga, 1918–1956 (Moscow : MFD, 2002), 355–6 (hereafter Deti Gulaga). Tsarevskaia-Diakina, Spetspereselentsy, 274, 278–9, 301, 306–7. Ibid., 279; Balkelis, ‘Lithuanian Children’. Balkelis, ‘Lithuanian Children’. Antanina Garmuté quoted in ibid. Ibid.; ‘Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea: The Siberian Memoirs of Dalia Grinkevičiūtė’, trans. Laima Sruoginytė, Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences 36, no. 4 (Winter 1990). Available at http://www.lituanus.org/1990_4/90_4_05.htm (accessed on 1 October 2014); Gross and Gross, War, 61, 134. Jolluck, Exile, 118, see also 233. Children of Siberia, 14. GARF 9479/1/372/74–6. Jolluck, Exile, 108–9. Golfo Alexopoulos, ‘Amnesty 1945: The Revolving Door of Stalin’s Gulag’, Slavic Review 64, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 294; see also Aleksander Topolski, Without Vodka: Adventures in Wartime Russia (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 2001). Gross and Gross, War, 87. Ibid., xxv; Piotrowski, The Polish Deportees, 9. Gross and Gross, War, 48. See Wasilewska, Suffer, 68–70. For the arrangements, see GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/116/29–31; for the testimony, see Stefania Buczak-Zarzycka in Piotrowski, The Polish Deportees, 18. GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/178/316ob. On complex motivations behind limited collaboration with the Germans, as well as the regime’s hidden ambitions to Sovietize certain national groups, see Alexander

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Notes Statiev, ‘The Nature of Anti-Soviet Armed Resistance, 1942–44. The North Caucasus, the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic, and Crimea’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 281–314; on guerrilla warfare in the North Caucasus, especially in Chechnya, see ibid., 290–8 and Jeffrey Burds, ‘The Soviet War against “Fifth Columnists”: The Case of Chechnya, 1942–4’, Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 2 (2007): 267–314. Larisa Belkovets, Administrativno-pravovoe polozhenie rossiiskikh nemtsev na spetsposelenii 1941–1955 gg.: Istoriko-pravovoe issledovanie (Moscow : ROSSPEN, 2008), 45. In fact, from 22 June to 10 August 1941, only 145 persons were arrested for alleged sabotage and espionage in the Volga German Autonomous Republic. See A.N. Kichikhin, ‘Sovetskie nemtsy: otkuda, kuda i pochemu?’, Voenno Istoricheskii Zhurnal 9 (1990): 34. See Burds, ‘The Soviet War’, 305. Michael Herceg Westren, ‘Nations in Exile: “The Punished Peoples” in Soviet Kazakhstan, 1941–1961’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2012), 66. GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/180/7. Although the report mentions 5,000–6,000 Gypsies living in exile together with Crimean Tatars, it is possible that Gypsies from other regions, whether deported, displaced or nomadic, had swelled their ranks, since another source indicates that only 1,109 Crimean Gypsies had been banished from the peninsula (Mark Edele, ‘The New Soviet Man as a “Gypsy”: Nomadism, War, and Marginality in Stalin’s Time’, REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia 3, no. 2 (2014): 296); on the limited deportations from Georgia and other regions of the Soviet Union, see ibid. and Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003), 155. GARF А327/2/721/85. In 1944, authorities of Stavropol Krai reported about the difficulties of resettling Poles in the former territory of Chechnya owing to the increased activity of criminal bands (GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/178/285, 288–9). J. Otto Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949 (London: Greenwood, 1999), 79–80; on poor reporting, see GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/86/294. GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/165/1оb. GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/86/284ob. Irina Mukhina, ‘ “The Forgotten History”: Ethnic German Women in Soviet Exile, 1941–1955,’ Europe-Asia Studies, 57, no. 5 (July 2005): 729, 733. Valdemar Weber, ‘101-й километр, далее везде’, Neva, no.8 (2011). Available at http://magazines.russ.ru/neva/2011/8/ve6.html (accessed on 17 January 2012). GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/83/105. El’za-Bair Guchinova, Pomnit’ nel’zia zabyt’: Antropologiia deportatsionnoi travmy Kalmykov (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2004), 106; Brandes et al., Entsiklopediia izgnanii, 39. Westren, ‘Nations in Exile’, 49, 51; Guchinova, Pomnit’, 66–7 and passim. GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/86/284, 9479/1/83/171, 174, 9479/1/85/75; Belkovets, Administrativno-pravovoe, 51–2; Tsarevskaia-Diakina, Spetspereselentsy, 329; Statiev, ‘Soviet Ethnic Deportations’, 250–2. ‘Deportatsiia glazami ochevidtsev’, Karta 41/2 (June 2005): 29. GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/86/303, 9479/1/164/12, 9479/167/103; Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 267; Mukhina, ‘The Forgotten History,’ 743.

Notes 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

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Westren, ‘Nations in Exile’, 236, 252; GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/165/106–8, 165, 9479/1/164/15, 9479/1/180/7. GARF 9479/1/83/139–40; Guchinova, Pomnit’, 137; Balkelis, ‘Lithuanian Children’. See Westren, ‘Nations in Exile’, 34, 188–90, 196; GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/161/139, 9479/1/85/155, 9479/1/166/257. Guchinova, Pomnit’, 98–9, 100–1. Ibid., 174. Ibid., 148–9. See recollections in Gul’nara Bekirova, ‘Vyvezeny vse’, Karta 41/2 (June 2005): 26. Guchinova, Pomnit’, 104. Deti Gulaga, 399–400; for a similar story, also see GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/161/12; Mukhina, ‘The Forgotten History,’ 737. GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/165/10. GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/179/101, 9479/1/168/15, 21; Westren, ‘Nations in Exile’, 98. GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/168/15. Westren, ‘Nations in Exile’, 114, 118–19; Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 148; RGASPI 17/22/117/10-12, 16; GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/161/13ob, 81ob, 82, 9479/1/164/12, 9479/1/168/22. GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/161/14, 71, 9479/1/164/11, 9479/1/165/10–11, 106, 147, 9479/1/166/98, 260; Westren, ‘Nations in Exile’, 135. Tsarevskaia-Diakina, Spetspereselentsy, 68. GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/157/110. Deborah Hoffman, The Littlest Enemies: Children in the Shadow of the Gulag (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2009), 170–1. Guchinova, Pomnit’, 109. Westren, ‘Nations in Exile’, 131. GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/164/42, 194. GARF 5446/47/2011/47–47оb, 48. Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing, 107. GARF 9412/1/27/79, 9412/1/7/11ob. Rosaria Franco, ‘Social Order and Social Policies toward Displaced Children: The Soviet Case (1917–1953)’ (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2006), 234. Guchinova, Pomnit’, 157–8. See, for instance, a 1943 report from Kazakhstan, GARF 9412/1/7/11оb. See Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 287. Mukhina, ‘The Forgotten History’, 740. GARF 9479/1/157/63. Government orders, in fact, stipulated that Germans should be employed only in the heaviest work, such as timber felling and unloading cargo. See Mukhina, ‘The Forgotten History’, 740. Polian, Against, 137; Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing, 76; for an extensive discussion of the conditions in the ‘Labour Army’, see Andrei Suslov, Spetskontingent v permskoi oblasti 1929–1953 (Moscow : ROSSPEN, 2010), esp. 246–64; G. Goncharov, ‘Ispol’zovanie “Trudovoi Armii” na Urale v 1941–1945 gg.’ in Istoriia Stalinizma: Prinuditel’nyi trud v SSSR. Ekonomika, politika, pamiat’, eds L.I. Borodkin, S.A. Krasil’nikov and O.V. Khlevniuk (Moscow : ROSSPEN, 2013), 132–54; also see GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/161/45, 9479/1/164/67, 9479/1/166/39; Tsarevskaia-Diakina, Spetspereselentsy, 60–2, 346.

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Notes Petr Stark’s recollections in L.N. Mashir (ed.), Dnevnik detskoi pamiati. Eto i moia voina (Moscow: AST, 2014), 162–3 (hereafter Dnevnik). GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/164/14, 9479/1/165/174. On similar involuntary relocations from other regions, see N.L. Pobol’ and P.M. Polian (eds), Stalinskie deportatsii 1928–1953 (Moscow : Demokratiia, 2005), 245–5. Afanasii Munkhalov’s recollections in Dnevnik, 63–8. Half a year before the German invasion, the Central Committee and the SNK had decreed that close relatives of ‘traitors to the Motherland’, including those crossing the border into the neighbouring states, were to be exiled. Should the illegal emigrant in question be apprehended or killed while crossing the border, his or her relatives became criminally responsible as well, unless the military tribunal reclassified the indictment as a non-political offence. On 28 June 1941, NKVD, NKGB (People’s Commisariat of State Security) and the General Prosecutor issued a joint directive that became the first in a series of wartime decrees that ordered repression of family members of servicemen and civilians who collaborated with the enemy. Order no. 270 issued on 16 August 1941, decree No.1074ss of 27 December 1941, the Prosecutor’s directive of 30 May 1942 the GKO decree of 24 June 1942 and the NKVD directive no.215/51s issued a month prior to the GKO decree, as well as an additional NKVD directive of 27 June 1942, further formalized the repression of family members of deserting officers and civilians. For the 28 June and 16 August orders, see V.P. Iampolskii et al. (eds), Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine: Sbornik dokumentov, Vol. 2, b.1: Nachalo (Moscow: Akademiia FSB, 2000), 114, 482–6; for the decree of 24 June 1942, see ibid., Vol. 3, b.1: Krushenie ‘Blitskriga’, 557, 570–1; for further discussion, see Tamara Vrons’ka, ‘Vikoristannia simeinogo zaruchnitstva u radianskii represivnii praktitsi,’ in Ukraina v Drugii svitivii viini: Pogliad s XXI st. Istorychni narysy, eds, V.A. Smolii et al., Vol. 2 (Kiev: Naukova Dumka, 2011), 313, 318; Idem, Upokorennia strakhom: Simeine zaruchnitstvo u karal’nii praktitsi radians’koi vladi (1917–1953 rr.): Naukove vidannia (Kiev: Tempora, 2013), 284–5; on the missing soldiers’ family members being unable to receive rations, pension entitlements and lodgings, see Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (London: Cornell University Press, 2009), 179. Juliia Speranskaia’s letter in Dnevnik, 15; Vrons’ka, ‘Vikoristannia’, 323; Idem, Upokorennia, 286. See Vrons’ka, Upokorennia, 285 and Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives (New Haven/ London: Yale University Press, 2012), 125. On their effect, see Mark Edele, Stalin’s Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers Became Hitler’s Collaborators, 1941–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), ch.3. Martin Dean, ‘Where Did All the Collaborators Go?’, Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 791; Jones, Everyday Life, 165–6; Nick Baron, ‘Remaking Soviet Society: The Filtration of Returnees from Nazi Germany, 1944–49’ in Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945–50, eds Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 105. See S. Kudryashov and V. Voisin, ‘The Early Stages of “Legal Purges” in Soviet Russia (1941–1945)’, Cahiers du monde russe 49, no. 2–3 (2008): 263–96. Disregard for legality was not unique to the Soviet judicial system dealing with collaborators. Tanja Penter notes that convictions of collaborators in other European countries ‘did not always proceed on a legal basis’. In the Soviet Union the problem was compounded by widespread amateurism of legal officials. Nevertheless, as several historians have argued, judicial practice gradually

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became more sophisticated. See Tanja Penter, ‘Local Collaborators on Trial: Soviet War Crimes Trials under Stalin (1943–1953)’, Cahiers du monde russe 49, no. 2/3 (2008): 343, 345–8 and Diana Dumitru, ‘An Analysis of Soviet Postwar Investigation and Trial Documents and Their Relevance for Holocaust Studies’, in The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses, eds Michael David–Fox, Peter Holquist and Alexander M. Martin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 142–57. From 1941 to 1954 a total of 369,130 ‘civilian collaborators’, mainly those involved in the Nazi administration or police, were charged with treason and counter-revolutionary activity. See Robert Gellately, Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (Knopf: New York, 2013), 179. Penter, ‘Local Collaborators’, 349–50; Vrons’ka, Upokorennia, 279, 286–90, 293–4, 297–8; Idem, ‘Vikoristannia’, 321, 329, 330–2; also see Igor Govorov, ‘Fil’tratsiia sovetskikh repatriantov v 40-e gg. XX v: tseli, metody i itogi’, Cahiers du monde russe 49, no. 2 (2008), esp. 372–3. Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky, Children of the Gulag (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 283. GARF 9401/1a/22/112–112ob. Westren, ‘Nations in Exile’, 68; see a report from Beria to Stalin, dated 29 May 1944, listing the alleged ‘crimes’ of the minority groups from Crimea in GARF 9401/2/65/161–3. Vrons’ka, ‘Vikoristannia’, 331; also see Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 195. Idem, Upokorennia, 300–1, Volodymyr Kosyk, Ukraina i Nimetchyna u Druhii Svitovii Viini (Paris/Lviv: Naukove tovarystvo imeni T. Shevchenka u Lvovi, 1993), 337 and Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 298; on the persecution campaigns in Europe, see Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (London: Penguin Books, 2013), ch.14. See, for instance, two NKVD reports pertaining to the members of the Ukrainian Nationalist Organization and their sympathizers, dated 14 and 28 March 1944, in Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency, 49, 52. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 173; Iaroslav Dashkevich and Vasil’ Kuk (eds), ‘Osobye Papki’ Stalina i Molotova pro natsional’no-vizvol’nu borot’bu v Zakhidnii Ukraini u 1944–1948 rr.: Sbirnik dokumentiv (L’viv: Piramida, 2010), 52. Vrons’ka, Upokorennia, 306, 314–15; on the deportations from the western borderlands and for cases of abuse, see Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency, 173–5. Ibid., 321. E. Kustova, ‘Trud i adaptatsiia spetsposelentsev. Na primere poslevoennykh deportatsii iz Vostochnoi Evropy’ in Istoriia stalinizma, 65–77; on central directives regarding the treatment of this category of special settlers, see Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency, 188. GARF 9479/1/104/9–9ob; GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/179/101. GARF 9479/1/111/204. Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency, 188–9. See, for instance, reports from Dzhambul region in Kazakhstan regarding the living conditions of special settlers in local kolkhozes, in GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/167/103, 105. Westren, ‘Nations in Exile’, 154. GARF (Hoover) 9479/1/164/2. On ‘protectionism’ and tolerance towards petty corruption within the party’s ranks, see Jones, Everyday Life, 270–1 and Rachel F. Green, ‘ “There Will Not Be Orphans among Us”: Soviet Orphanages, Foster Care, and Adoption, 1941–1956’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2006), 19; Westren, ‘Nations in Exile’, 154.

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See the 2 October 1940 decree ‘On the State Labour Reserves of the USSR’, Pravda, 3 October 1940. RGASPI M1/23/1420/15–17, 19, 112–14, 120; GARF 8131/18/16(b)/4, 148, 189, 246–7, 250; TsGAIPD SPb К598/2/953/6–7, 10. TsGAIPD SPb К598/2/953/16, 30–1, 32–4. See O vrednykh i opasnykh rabotakh dlia podrostkov (Moscow, 1923), 26. See also M.B. Zefirov and D.M. Degtev, Vse dlia fronta? Kak na samom dele kovalas’ pobeda (Moscow, 2009), 84. RGASPI M1/23/1128/50–5, M1/23/1187/86. GARF 8131/18/16(b)/196–7, 244–5, 261–3; RGASPI M1/23/1420/118. See the SNK decree ‘On the introduction of fees in upper grades of secondary schools and higher educational institutions of the USSR...’, dated 2 October 1940, in Sobranie postanovlenii pravitel’stva SSSR (SP SSSR) 27 (1940): 637. For a discussion of the decree and its impact on secondary education, see Ann Livschiz, ‘Growing up Soviet: Childhood in the Soviet Union, 1918–1958’ (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2007), 363. TsGAIPD SPb К598/2/953/38. GARF 8131/18/16(b)/10, 149; RGASPI M1/23/1420/18, 116–17, 119. Peter Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 299. A worker or a state employee committing absenteeism, in other words being more than twenty minutes late for work, was liable to receive a 25 per cent deduction from his/her earnings for a first-time offence; the second violation, however, landed the offender in jail. See L. Gromov, ‘Sudebnaia praktika v RSFSR po delam o progulakh i samovol’nom ukhode,’ SIu 24/25 (1941): 9. GARF 8131/37/249/8–10. GARF 8131/37/249/10. GARF 8131/18/16(b)/81, 197. See V.N. Zemskov, ‘Ukaz ot 26 iiunia 1940 goda ... (eshche odna kruglaia data)’, Raduga 6 (1990): 45; John Barber and Mark Harrison, Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London: Longman, 1991), 60–3, 151, 154–5, 163. GARF 8131/22/8/262; M. Konopliasov, ‘Voprosy obshchei chasti ugolovnogo prava i dela o progulakh i samovol’nom ukhode’, SIu 11 (1941): 24–5. A.Ia. Kodintsev, ‘Kampaniia po bor’be s “dezertirstvom” s predpriiatii voennoi promyshlennosti SSSR v 1941–1948 godakh’, Otechestvennaia Istoriia, 6 (2008): 102–3. RGASPI M1/7/70/87ob; GARF 8131/37/1849/41, 82, 8131/37/1609/5. See Olga Kucherenko, ‘State v. Danila Kuz’mich: Soviet Desertion Laws and Industrial Child Labor during World War II’, Russian Review 71 (July 2012): 401. RGASPI M1/32/186/6ob, M1/5/204/21; GARF 8131/22/7/11. See also A.Ia. Livshin and I.B. Orlov, Sovetskaia povsednevnost’ i massovoe soznanie, 1939–1945 (Moscow : ROSSPEN, 2003), 141. RGASPI M1/5/204/44, M1/7/69/1ob; GARF 8131/22/8/314ob–315, 8131/27/244/2. GARF A461/12/6/158; N.A. Shumilova and E.M. Donskikh, ‘Gosudarstvennye trudovye rezervy Cheliabinskoi oblasti’. Available at http://unilib.chel.su:6005/ el_izdan/kalend2010/rezerv.htm (accessed on 3 October 2010). GARF 5446/43/1051/174.

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N.N. Mel’nikov, ‘Podgotovka kadrov dlia predpriiatii tankovoi promyshlennosti v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’. Available at http://bg-znanie.ru/print .php?nid=9431 (accessed on 3 October 2010). GARF 8131/22/7/61ob–62, 8131/ 27/200/16; RGASPI M1/7/101/55, 57, 17/125/107/39; A.G. Tseitlin, ‘O rezhime i meditsinskom obsluzhivanii rabochikh -podrostkov’, SZd 6 (1944): 21. GARF A461/12/5/9. In accordance with the SNK decree of 3 February 1943, girls could be mobilized to study at RU only when they turned fifteen. However, there were cases of fourteenyear-olds being prosecuted for leaving their trade schools. GARF 8131/20/31/85–6. An interview with Tamara Belykh in Tsena pobedy: rossiiskie shkol’niki o voine: Sbornik rabot pobeditelei 5 i 6 Vserossiiskikh konkursov istoricheskikh isseldovatel’skikh rabot starsheklassnikov ‘Chelovek v istorii. Rossiia – XX vek’ (Moscow: Memorial, 2005), 170. G.S. Mursalimov, ‘Detstvo, opalennoe voinoi’, Vestnik Permskogo Universiteta 1, no. 13 (2010): 76. RGASPI M1/5/204/45, M1/3/296/79–79ob; GARF 8131/22/7/11, 8131/19/7/10ob and Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2012), 279. There were, nevertheless, some model schools which managed to organize reading circles and sporting activities, despite material difficulties. RGASPI M1/5/230/7–9, M1/5/200/3, 5–7, M1/5/204/1–2. RGASPI M1/7/70/10, M1/5/100/31; Zh.A. Agapova, ‘Deti i molodiozh’ Prikam’ia v gody voiny’, available at http://www.politarchive.perm.ru/publikatsii/stati/deti-i -molodezh-prikamya-v-gody-vojny.html (accessed 3 October 2010). GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/257, GARF 8131/19/7/10ob, 8131/22/7/12, 8131/27/200/16; and Agapova, ‘Deti’; Bidlack and Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944, 279. Tseitlin, ‘O rezhime’, 26; GARF 8131/22/7/98. GARF 9412/1/35/257, 258. GARF 8131/22/7/10ob–11ob. For a similar complaint at a different institution see 8131/19/7/11. GARF 8131/22/7/12, 8131/27/208/9. RGASPI M1/7/69/38ob, 17/126/19/31; GARF 9412/1/31/6, 8131/22/7/12ob, 9412/27/200/14; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/110, 9412/1/35/28–9ob, 255, 9412/1/35/30. RGASPI M1/7/70/56; B. Mikhailov, Na dne blokady i voiny (St Petersburg: VSEGEI, 2000), 111. Livschiz, ‘Growing Up’, 470; GARF 9412/1/23/120ob. GARF 9412/1/7/16ob; RGASPI 17/122/22/127, M1/7/101/52, M1/7/35/10, M1/7/70/10, 11, 50, 87ob. Besprizorniki and school children committed the least number of crimes. GARF 9412/1/33/95. RGASPI M1//23/1420/72, 76. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/134. GARF 8131/37/1481/70, 9412/1/5/3, 5446/44/778/6; RGASPI M1/7/70/25. Also see S.S. Vilensky et al., Deti Gulaga, 1918–1956 (Moscow : MFD, 2002), 392. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/111. GARF 9412/1/7/20ob; L.I. Snegireva (ed.), Vo imia pobedy: evakuatsiia grazhdanskogo naselenia v Zapadnuiu Sibir’ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny v dokumentakh i materialakh, Vol. 3 (Tomsk: TGPU, 2005), 148–9.

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67

68 69 70

Notes GARF A461/12/6/150, 8131/22/9/141; Bidlack and Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944, 279, 309; ‘Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie prokurorov po delam nesovershennoletnikh’, SZ 11/12 (1945): 56. Agapova, ‘Deti’. Anna Reid, Leningrad: Tragedy of a City under Siege, 1941–44 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 280–1, 287; Sergei Iarov, Blokadnaia etika: Predstavleniia o morali v Leningrade v 1941–1942 gg. (Moscow : Tsentrpoligraf, 2013), 73 n2; on the NKVD reporting cases of attempted defection, see Bidlack and Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944, 278, 286. RGASPI M1/7/69/58, M1/7/70/52, M1/7/101/33; GARF A2306/69/2852/71. RGASPI M1/7/70/10. See Anatolii Genatulin’s interview in Jean Lopez and Lasha Otkhmezuri (eds), Grandeur et misère de l’armée rouge (Paris: SEUIL, 2011), 112–13. RGASPI M1/7/101/19. For other cases of teenagers failing to obtain medical exemption, see GARF 8131/27/202/10, A2306/69/2852/72. RGASPI M1/7/74/7, М1/7/70/9оb. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/111. GARF 9412/1/7/21; RGASPI M1/7/101/18; Kodintsev, ‘Kampaniia’, 103. RGASPI M1/7/70/59ob, 60, M1/7/69/38ob, M1/7/101/34, 17/126/19/31; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/33/110, 9412/1/35/254. GARF 9412/1/7/20, 22–22ob, 23ob. GARF 8131/22/7/216. RGASPI M1/5/200/2, 9, 10, 11, 21, 22, 29, M1/7/69/1ob; GARF 8131/20/31/109; Tseitlin, ‘O rezhime’, 25–6; Snegireva, Vo imia pobedy, 283. RGASPI M1/7/101/33, 17/125/107/10, 17/122/22/33; GARF 8131/37/1849/109, 8131/22/7/213, A2306/69/2852/7; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/250ob. Quoted in Zefirov and Degtev, Vse dlia fronta?, 299; for accounts that corroborate this statement, see Valerian Belov’s recollections in Obozhgla nashe detstvo voina...: Sbornik vospominanii detei voennogo vremeni (Omsk, 2010), 32 and B. Sergeev, quoted in Julie K. deGraffenried, Sacrificing Childhood: Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 54. Genatulin’s interview in Lopez and Otkhmezuri (eds), Grandeur et misère, 113. See Rima Egorova’s recollections in L.N. Mashir (ed.), Dnevnik detskoi pamiati. Eto i moia voina (Moscow : AST, 2014), 185. Wendell L. Willkie, One World (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1944), 61. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/250–3ob, 258. RGASPI М1/7/101/18. Nina Liutsko-Volkovskaia’s testimony in Zhenskoe litso pobedy: 100 dokumentov o zhenshchinakh Cheliabinskoi oblasti v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny 1941–45 gg. (Cheliabinsk: Kniga, 2001), 196. On safety violations, see RGASPI 17/125/107/7–8, GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/250 and ‘Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie’, 56; on the provision of medical care and industrial accidents, see Tseitlin, ‘O rezhime’, 23–4, 27, 28 and A.M. Dvorkin, ‘Medikosanitarnoe obsluzhivanie oboronnykh predpriiatii’, SZd 5/6 (1942): 35, 38; on the spread of tuberculosis and dystrophy among teenagers in Kirov oblast, see GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/253ob. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/251. RGASPI M1/7/69/42; GARF 9412/1/7/20ob, 9412/1/7/27/268, 9412/1/29/60. GARF 9412/1/7/21, 8131/22/7/216.

Notes 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88

217

RGASPI M1/5/100/23; GARF 8131/22/7/9. RGASPI M1/7/70/73–73ob. GARF 9412/1/31/6, 8131/19/7/10, 8131/27/202/10. RGASPI М1/7/70/34. For other examples of similar convictions, see RGASPI M1/7/70/33, 35, 36 and GARF 8131/37/1609/8. GARF 8131/19/7/10ob, 8131/20/31/97–104; RGASPI M1/5/204/21, M1/7/70/34–5. GARF 8131/27/200/16. GARF A461/12/6/184, 8131/27/200/15; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/29; Kodintsev, ‘Kampaniia’, 105, 107; Donald Filtzer, ‘Labor “Desertion” in Soviet Defence Industry during World War II’ (paper presented at the annual meeting of Association of Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies, November 2010), 8, 29–31 (cited here with the author’s permission). Filtzer argues that 41.5 per cent of all alleged ‘desertions’ across industry did not lead to convictions; up to 60 per cent of those convicted never served time, having evaded authorities and thus being sentenced in absentia, the method employed in three quarters of all labour violation cases (ibid., 10; see also GARF 8131/32/9/117). Martin Kragh discovered that the majority of those sentenced in absentia had never been found and those who remained in hiding ‘could be close to confident they would remain unpunished’. See Martin Kragh, ‘Stalinist Labour Coercion during World War II: An Economic Approach’, Europe-Asia Studies 63, no. 7 (2011): 1266; see also RGASPI M1/5/100/2, 5, 17, 31, M1/7/70/34–5. RGASPI M1/5/100/2; GARF 8131/20/31/10–10ob. RGASPI M1/7/70/24ob, 34, 72ob. Martin Kragh, ‘Soviet Labour Law during the Second World War’, War in History, no. 18 (2011): 542–3. GARF 8131/37/1609/17. GARF 8131/22/7/215–16. GARF 8131/20/31/109–109ob, 8131/22/7/105, and 8131/22/8/301, 307, 309, 317, 8131/27/208/8, and 8131/27/205/8, and 8131/37/1846/26ob; Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labor and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 126; ‘Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie,’ 56. Agapova, ‘Deti’. Kragh, ‘Stalinist Labour’, 1267. See V.S. Tadevosian, Rassledovanie del o prestupleniiakh nesovershennoletnikh (metodicheskoe rukovodstvo) (Moscow : Iuridicheskaia Literatura, 1944), 16. RGASPI M1/5/204/21; GARF 8131/27/205/8. GARF 8131/20/31/133; Zemskov, ‘Ukaz,’ 46.

Chapter 9 1

2

‘Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie prokurorov po delam nesovershennoletnikh’, SZ 11/12 (1945): 55; on the abuses within the juvenile system, see Peter H. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43, 135, 204 and Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941 (Washington: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 191. RGASPI М1/7/69/1ob, 17/126/19/20, M1/7/35/4–7 and GARF 8131/27/244/2, 8131/37/1849/12.

218 3 4 5 6

7

8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

Notes See Harold J. Berman, ‘Law Reform in the Soviet Union,’ American Slavic and East European Review 15, no. 2 (1956): 186. GARF А461/12/4/134. GARF 8131/37/1846/25, 8131/37/1849/6, 12, 188 and 8131/27/162/24ob. GARF 8131/27/162/26, 8131/27/208/4, А461/12/5/183; RGASPI М1/7/35/4оb, 5оb; V.S. Tadevosian, Rassledovanie del o prestupleniiakh nesovershennoletnikh (metodicheskoe rukovodstvo) (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia Literatura, 1944), 26. GARF 8131/27/200/17, 8131/27/208/4, 8131/22/7/110–110ob, 111, 112, 172, 8131/27/162/24ob, 25, 8131/37/1846/25, 8131/37/1609/14, 8131/37/1849/8; RGASPI М1/7/35/4ob, 5ob. Also see testimonies in Irena Grudzinska-Gross and Jan Tomasz Gross (eds), War through Children’s Eyes: The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations, 1939–1941 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1981), 69; Irena Wasilewska, Suffer Little Children (London: Maxlove Publishing, 1946), 55–6 and Jerzy Kmiecik, A Boy in the Gulag (London: Quartet Books, 1983), 68–78. Torture of juveniles suspected of political crimes was described by Petr Iakir in his A Childhood in Prison (London: Macmillan, 1972), 82 and I.P. Sergienko in S.S. Vilensky et al., Deti Gulaga, 1918–1956 (Moscow : MFD, 2002), 272. RGASPI М1/7/70/71оb. Tadevosian, Rassledovanie, 30. A.R. Dzeniskevich and N.Iu. Cherepenina (eds.) Iz raionov oblasti soobshchahiut...: Svobodnye ot okkupatsii raiony Leningradskoi oblasti v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: 1941–1945. Sbornik dokumentov (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2007), 582 n92. GARF 8131/27/202/7. GARF 8131/27/200/17. GARF 8131/27/200/11. GARF 8131/27/202/6, 8131/27/208/4, 8131/22/7/110–110ob, 112, 172 and А461/12/5/182. GARF 9412/1/21/12; Tadevosian, Rassledovanie, 32–3. Tadevosian, Rassledovanie. GARF 8131/27/208/3, 4, 8131/37/1849/8, 8131/37/1609/14, 18, 8131/22/7/111, 172 and RGASPI М1/7/70/24–24оb. GARF 8131/27/200/17. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/34/141–2. RGASPI М1/7/35/5оb–6. Tadevosian, Rassledovanie, 15, 26. Ibid., 25–6; GARF 8131/22/7/108. GARF 8131/37/1609/15. GARF 8131/37/1846/42, 8131/27/200/11, 8131/27/202/6, 8131/27/208/4; RGASPI М1/7/35/4оb, 5оb; ‘Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie’, 56. GARF 8131/27/200/10, 12. RGASPI М1/7/70/34–5. GARF 8131/37/1609/5, 8131/37/1846/42, 8131/27/200/12. RGASPI М1/7/35/4оb. GARF 8131/27/202/8, 10; on the Code of Criminal Procedure, see Tadevosian, Rassledovanie, 40. D. Gorvits, ‘Iz praktiki rassmotreniia del o nesovershennoletnikh,’ SZ 1/2 (1945): 32–3; Tadevosian, Rassledovanie, 38; see also a complaint that judges rarely established contact with defendants’ families, and when the parents were invited they served exclusively as witnesses, RGASPI М1/7/35/4оb. Gorvits, ‘Iz praktiki’, 33–4.

Notes 32

33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58

219

Even though the psychologists did not work with juvenile delinquents, their conclusions about war-induced trauma are relevant here, for they indirectly supported the jurists’ view on child criminality in wartime. See an English language post-war reprint of G.E. Sukhareva, ‘Psychologic Disturbances in Children during War’, American Review of Soviet Medicine 5, no. 1 (December–January 1947): 32–7. I am grateful to Julie deGraffenried for sharing this source with me. Ibid., 33; Tadevosian, Rassledovanie, 21; GARF 8131/37/1609/17; see also, Rachel F. Green, ‘ “There Will Not Be Orphans among Us”: Soviet Orphanages, Foster Care, and Adoption, 1941–1956’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2006), 64. RGASPI М1/5/118/1 (first citation) and GARF 8131/22/7/215–16 (second citation). GARF 8131/22/7/215, 217. Gorvits, ‘Iz praktiki,’ 35, 36. GARF 8131/27/208/5–6. GARF 8131/37/1609/5, 15, 8131/27/200/11, 8131/37/1849/12, 93, 188, 9412/1/28/98 and RGASPI М1/7/35/5оb. GARF 8131/27/202/8, 8131/27/200/11. RGASPI М1/7/35/5оb; Deti Gulaga, 189, 387; GARF 8131/37/1609/15, 19. See Olga Kucherenko, ‘State v. Danila Kuz’mich: Soviet Desertion Laws and Industrial Child Labor during World War II’, Russian Review 71 (July 2012), 409. RGASPI M1/7/35/4ob, 5. GARF 8131/37/1609/12–12оb. GARF 9412/1/19/85. RGASPI М1/7/70/74. GARF 8131/22/7/108, А461/12/6/11. GARF А461/12/5/183, 9412/1/19/85, 8131/37/1849/12. See also a 1943 draft decree from the Komsomol Central Committee requesting the General Prosecutor Bochkov to review and reconsider cases of under sixteen-year-olds confined in prisons. RGASPI М1/7/69/32. GARF 8131/20/31/88, 9412/1/29/97. RGASPI M1/7/35/5ob; Gorvits, ‘Iz praktiki,’ 34. See Sbornik dokumentov po istorii ugolovnogo zakonodatel’stva SSSR i RSFSR, 1917–1952 (Moscow, 1953), 381–2. RGASPI М1/7/35/5; GARF 8131/22/7/92. RGASPI М1/7/70/8оb. GARF А461/12/5/183. GARF 8131/27/202/8, 8131/27/200/17, 8131/37/1609/15, 8131/37/1846/4, 8131/37/1849/12, 9412/1/21/10, A461/12/6/10, А461/12/5/183; Tadevosian, ‘Pravovaia okhrana detei v usloviiakh Otechestvennoi voiny’, SZ 1 (1944): 29; ‘Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie’, 54. GARF 8131/22/7/25–7. On the decree, see GARF 9412/1/21/13. GARF А461/12/5/183, 8131/27/162/8. GARF 8131/27/162/23-24оb, 8131/27/201/1. Green, ‘There Will Not Be Orphans’, 57, 60.

Chapter 10 1

See, for instance, Alexander Statiev, ‘The Nature of Anti-Soviet Armed Resistance, 1942–44. The North Caucasus, the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic, and Crimea’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 315–16;

220

2

3

4

5 6

7

8 9

Notes Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003), 3; Michael Herceg Westren, ‘Nations in Exile: “The Punished Peoples” in Soviet Kazakhstan, 1941-1961’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2012), 69. Kenneth D. Rose, Myth and the Greatest Generation: A Social History of Americans in World War II (New York: Routledge, 2008), 156; see also William M. Tuttle, Daddy’s Gone to War: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), ch.10. Karen L. Riley, Schools behind Barbed Wire, The Untold Story of Wartime Internment and the Children of Arrested Enemy Aliens (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 32–5, 44. On security failures, see Nick Baron, ‘Remaking Soviet Society: The Filtration of Returnees from Nazi Germany, 1944–49’ in Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945–50, eds Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 90–1; on the intensification of the resistance movement, see Jeffrey Burds, ‘The Soviet War against “Fifth Columnists”: The Case of Chechnya, 1942–4’, Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 2 (2007): 305n119 and N.F. Bugai, ‘Deportatsiia Narodov’, available at http:// scepsis.ru/library/id_1237.html (accessed on 19 July 2013), 10; on the ethnic tensions, see Yoram Gorlizki, ‘Policing Post-Stalin Society’, Cahiers du monde russe 44, no. 2/3 (2003): 472. On the negative economic consequences, see Polian, Against, 156 and Andrei Suslov, Spetskontingent v permskoi oblasti 1929–1953, (Moscow : ROSSPEN, 2010), 276. For further discussion, see Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926-1941 (Washington: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 109, 150–1, 182–3 and David Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 223, 225–6, 232. On the developments in Western countries, see Walter A. Lunden, ‘War and Juvenile Delinquency in England and Wales, 1910 to 1943′, American Sociological Review 10, no. 3 (June 1945): 390–3; Robert M. Mennel, Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquents in the United States, 1825–1940 (New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1973); Linda Mahood, Policing Gender, Class and Family. Britain, 1850–1940 (London: University of Alberta Press, 1995); Sarah Fishman, The Battle for Children: World War II, Youth Crime and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Michael Torny and Anthony N. Doob (eds), Youth Crime and Youth Justice: Comparative and CrossNational Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 391–441; David Smith, ‘Official Responses to Juvenile Delinquency in Scotland during the Second World War’, Twentieth Century British History 18, no. 1 (2007): 78–105; Roddy Nilsson, ‘Creating the Swedish Juvenile Delinquent: Criminal Policy, Science and Institutionalization c. 1930–1970′, Scandinavian Journal of History 34, no. 4 (2009): 357–8; James Schmidt, ‘Children and the State’ in Paula S. Fass (ed.), The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 183–4; Victor Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender, 1914–1948 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 51, 274. Mary McAuley, Children in Custody: Anglo-Russian Perspectives (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 78–9. On practices in Nazi Germany and in Western liberal states, see Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale

Notes

10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21

22 23

24 25 26 27

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University Press, 2004), 364–6; on the increase of the number of youths aged fourteen to eighteen receiving protective measures in Japan, see David R. Ambaras, ‘Juvenile Delinquency and the National Defense State: Policing Young Workers in Wartime Japan, 1937–1945,’ The Journal of Asian Studies 63, no. 1 (February 2004): 37 n6. See Julie K. deGraffenried, Sacrificing Childhood: Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 56. Bailey, Delinquency, 283. See, for instance, GARF 9412/1/33/94; on the engagement of adolescents in productive labour in other countries and the authorities’ fear of their financial independence, see, for instance, Ambaras, ‘Juvenile Delinquency’, 36, 37; Lunden, ‘War’, 392; Sean Longden, Blitz Kids: The Children’s War against Hitler, e-book (London: Constable and Robinson, 2012), chs.17 and 18. The concern was reflected in a 1943 American social guidance film, As the Twig Is Bent. Available at https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=Sj8w0NqqwGU. On the failure of the mobilization efforts, see Olga Kucherenko, ‘State v. Danila Kuz’mich: Soviet Desertion Laws and Industrial Child Labor during World War II’, Russian Review 71 (July 2012): 411–12. Walter D. Conner, Deviance in the Soviet Union: Crime, Delinquency and Alcoholism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 102–3. See Peter H. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 211, 435, 437. GARF 9414/p.1/151/1–3. On judges’ resistance, see Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice, ch.12. GARF 9414/p.1/151/4, 8, 13, 66–7. GARF 8131/14/36/31–2, 48ob-50, 8131/14/48/11–13, 44, 46, 8131/17/8/20, 35, 45, 46, 70, 92, 97, 99, 103, 123; Shalaginov, ‘Sudebnaia repressiia po delam o prestupleniiakh nesovershennoletnikh v Vostochno-Sibirskoi oblasti’, SIu 10/11 (1937): 73–5; D. Gorvits, ‘Rassmotrenie del o nesovershennoletnikh v Moskve’, SZ 12 (1938): 83; also see Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice, 204–6 and Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police, 191–2. Harold J. Berman, ‘Law Reform in the Soviet Union,’ American Slavic and East European Review 15, no. 2 (April 1956): 180. L. Gaziiants, ‘Nedostatki sudebnoi praktiki po delam o prestuplenniakh nesovershennoletnikh’, SZ 5 (1956): 48; K. Zhudko, ‘O bor’be s prestupleniiami nesovershennoletnikh’, SZ 5 (1957): 61; S. Kozin, ‘Bor’ba s beznadzornost’iu i prestupnost’iu nesovershennoletnikh’, SZ 6 (1957): 72. GARF 9412/1/903/48. S. Heifets, ‘Bor’ba s prestupnost’iu nesovershennoletnikh’, SZ 3 (1957): 41; V. Tadevosian, ‘Bor’ba za likvidatsiiu pravonarushenii nesovershennoletnikh v SSSR’, SZ 10 (1957): 46; Zhudko, ‘O bor’be’, 61; М. Gritskevich, ‘Bor’ba s prestupnost’iu nesovershennoletnikh’, SZ 3 (1958): 30–1. S. Nikiforov and K. Chausovskii, ‘Bor’ba s prestupnost’iu nesovershennoletnikh’, SZ 5 (1958): 61. Each Union Republic had its own set of Codes, all of which were similar except the numbering of Articles. Tadevosian, ‘Bor’ba’, 41–7; E. Polotskii and E. Sheino, ‘Poriadok rassledovaniia prestuplenii nesovershennoletnikh i rassmotreniia del o nikh’, SZ 9 (1957): 20–4. On the promulgation of the ‘soft line’ by the Khrushchev’s reforms and its swift curtailment, see Brian LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), ch.5.

222 28 29 30 31 32

Notes RGASPI М1/1/128/191, 207, 208. LaPierre, Hooligans, 189, 191. Conner, Deviance, 127. RGASPI М1/1/405/3. LaPierre, Hooligans.

Chapter 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27

V.S. Tadevosian, Rassledovanie del o prestupleniiakh nesovershennoletnikh (metodicheskoe rukovodstvo) (Moscow : Iuridicheskaia Literatura, 1944), 6–8. GARF 9412/1/23/180, 8131/20/31/149оb. RGASPI М1/5/118/2оb; GARF 9412/1/29/62, 8131/27/163/10. Iu.K. Aleksandrov, Ocherki kriminal’noi subkul’tury (Moscow : Prava Cheloveka, 2001), 60. Eduard Kochergin, Kreshchionnye Krestami: zapiski na kolenkakh (St Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2009), 22, 34, 41, 45, 229. GARF 8131/20/31/92. Tadevosian, Rassledovanie, 8. GARF 9412/1/4/14. GARF 9412/1/22/17. On the situation in the 1930s, see GARF 5446/16/4068/4. GARF 9412/1/22/18. GARF 9412/1/7/25, 9412/1/19/88, 9412/1/25/192, 9412/1/27/80, 9412/1/59/74, 80–1, 8131/37/1846/24оb; RGASPI М1/5/118/1ob, М1/32/186/7оb. RGASPI М1/7/69/42. GARF 9412/1/35/147. The situation seemed to be widespread and remained unchanged throughout the war. See reports from various regions and for different years in RGASPI М1/7/70/51, М1/32/186/7, М1/7/69/42, 17/126/19/21–2, 39, 43, 50 and GARF 8131/27/163/10, 8131/37/1846/24оb, 44, 56, 8131/37/1848, 8131/37/1849/5, 9412/1/7/24ob–25, 9412/1/19/4, 9412/1/22/59оb; GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/142ob. GARF 9412/1/40/22. Kochergin, Kreshchionnye, 24; on the shortage of medical personnel, see GARF 8131/37/1846/24ob, 9412/1/19/56, 88. GARF 9412/1/19/8. Kochergin, Kreshchionnye, 21–2, 52–4. GARF 9412/1/22/61ob. GARF 9412/1/4/75ob, 85. On the lack of clothing, see RGASPI M1/7/24/122, M1/32/186/7ob, М1/7/70/51; GARF 8131/37/1846/3, 44, 9412/1/7/25, 9412/1/23/180; on illiteracy, language proficiency and trade skills, see GARF 8131/37/1849/220ob, 9412/1/27/309. GARF 9412/1/40/2. On the availability of places, see RGASPI M1/32/186/7, 17/126/19/21; GARF 8131/37/1846/2, 9412/1/28/4; on DPR practices concerning children, see GARF 9412/1/4/43, 9412/1/35/104ob, 9412/1/4/75; RGASPI M1/7/70/98. RGASPI M1/7/35/48, 17/126/12/26, М1/5/118/1ob. RGASPI M1/32/186/7; GARF 8131/37/1849/5, 9412/1/7/25. Kochergin, Kreshchionnye, 141–2.

Notes 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

223

Ibid., 42–4. Ibid., 39, 47–8. GARF 9412/1/7/11, 9412/1/22/17, 8131/37/1846/44, 8131/37/1849/5; RGASPI М1/7/70/51. RGASPI 17/126/39/218–19, 17/126/19/9. GARF 9412/1/17/1–1ob. For a discussion of a decades-long battle between courts and security services for the authority to enforce Soviet laws, see Sofiya Grachova, ‘ “CounterRevolutionary Agitation” in the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War’, Cahiers du monde russe 52 (2011/12), 376; on the NKVD’s discretional powers pertaining to minors, see Rosaria Franco, ‘Social Order and Social Policies toward Displaced Children: The Soviet Case (1917–1953)’ (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2006), 238. GARF 9412/1/25/31оb, 8131/37/1846/24оb, 8131/20/31/149оb. GARF 9412/1/21/12–15, А461/12/6/19. GARF А461/12/6/13. See Tadevosian, Rassledovanie, 20, 23 and idem, ‘Pravovaia okhrana detei v usloviiakh Otechestvennoi voiny’, SZ 1 (1944): 27; for the actual text of the decree, see Deti Gulaga, 1918–1956 (Moscow : MFD, 2002), 385–7. Tadevosian, Rassledovanie, 24. GARF 8131/18/16(b)/72, 8131/27/200/6–7, 8131/27/244/3, 8131/37/1849/7; RGASPI М1/7/70/24–24оb, М1/7/70/12, М1/7/35/6. Aleksander Topolski, Without Vodka: Adventures in Wartime Russia (South Royalton: Steefrorth Press, 2001), 132–3. GARF 9401с/1/568/452–4. GARF 8131/37/533/30–31ob. RGASPI М1/7/70/12, 24–24ob. Similar concerns were raised about the maintenance of juvenile inmates in the late 1930s. See, for instance, a 1939 report from a Moscow jail and a remand home in GARF 8131/17/8/161, 192–3. GARF 9401/1а/20/116, 9401/1a/35/230–1. GARF 8131/27/199/29, 8131/20/31/125оb–26. Sergo Mikoyan’s interview in Elena Joly (ed.), Pobeda liuboi tsenoi, 255–8, 256 (quotation). Topolski, Without Vodka, 48. See the testimony in Irena Wasilewska, Suffer Little Children (London: Maxlove Publishing, 1946), 49. See recollections of S.A. Mashkin in Deti Gulaga, 248. GARF 9412/1/37/6, 9412/1/21/9оb. The order to withdraw those over the age of sixteen to replace them with under-sixteens arriving from jails came into force on 7 November 1942 (GARF 9412/1/4/3), although in accordance with the 1 April 1938 NKVD decree, those inmates who showed promise in their academic work or labour training could be left to serve their time at the reformatory, even if they had reached the age of legal maturity (GARF 9401/1а/3/41). GARF 9412/1/4/15. This had been practised occasionally before the war. See P.I. Iakir, A Childhood in Prison (London: Macmillan, 1972), 103. RGASPI М1/7/35/6. GARF 8131/20/31/89оb, 9412/1/4/15, 9412/1/43/14, 15; RGASPI М1/7/70/13. See, for instance, a report on juvenile colonies in Kirov oblast, GARF 9412/1/24/171.

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4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Gabor T. Rittersporn, ‘Between Revolution and Daily Routine: Youth and Violence in the Soviet Union in the Interwar Period’ in Sowjetjugend 1917–1941: Generation zwischen Revolution und Resignation, ed. Corinna Kuhr-Korolev (Essen: Klartext, 2001), 67. GARF 9412/1/69/138. In order to avoid considerable expenses related to establishing new labour colonies for juveniles, the Gulag head Nasedkin suggested in March 1941 to use four-tier wagon-like bunks instead of single beds in order to increase the utility of the existing children’s colonies (GARF 9414/1/42/4–5). They were considered to be safer than solid plank beds, while offering an occupant more space. Throughout the war all three types of bedding existed in juvenile penitentiaries. In the event, the space allotment per inmate in 1944 was only 0.5 square metres per person (RGASPI М1/7/129/9). For Leoniuk’s report, see RGASPI M1/5/232/2-3; for a report on the situation in May 1945, see RGASPI 17/126/28/39; on the legal requirements, see GARF 9401/1а/81/114оb. N.N. Karamasheva, ‘Iz istorii bor’by s detskoi besprizornost’iu i beznadzornost’iu v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: (Na materialakh Krasnoiarskogo kraia)’, Problemy Otechestvennoi Istorii 1 (1991): 133. RGASPI М1/7/129/9. See, for instance, a report from Kabardino-Balkariia in GARF 9412/1/22/8. GARF 9412/1/37/2. GARF 9412/1/22/26, 31, 59, 9412/1/23/231–42, 9412/1/25/16, 9412/1/69/2–2оb, 40, 9412/1/37/9, 84, 9412/1/3/47–47оb. GARF 5446/44/778/26, 28. GARF 9412/1/25/191. GARF 9412/1/22/1–3, 4ob. GARF 9412/1/25 65–9, 70–1, 75, 92. For comparison, see images in GARF 9412/1/24/30–8, 85–90. GARF 9414/1/50/156. RGASPI М1/7/298/14. GARF 9412/1/25/192, 196–7. GARF 9412/1/28/103. GARF 9412/1/69/140. GARF 9412/1/22/56, 78–85, 114–16, 9412/1/69/139, 8131/27/201/1оb, 8131/27/162/27ob–28. GARF 8131/27/162/10–10оb, 13. Arkhangelsk labour colony, for instance, was situated 30 kilometres from the town itself (GARF 9412/1/23/176). GARF 9412/1/69/46–7; see also Ch.3. GARF 9412/1/69/112. GARF 9412/1/69/108–10. See Gelii Pavlov, ‘Deti i Gulag’, Literaturnoe Obozrenie 4 (1991), 100. Topolski, Without Vodka, 170–1; on similar practices in jails, see Jerzy Kmiecik, A Boy in the Gulag (London: Quartet Books, 1983), 68. GARF 9412/1/59/12; RGASPI M1/5/232/7. GARF 9412/1/19/94–5оb. GARF 9412/1/19/97. Pavlov, ‘Deti i Gulag’, 99.

Notes 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

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GARF 9412/1/22/26. GARF 9412/1/19/8–9, 28, 89. GARF 9412/1/3/26. GARF 9412/1/44/44. GARF 9412/1/6/32–32оb, 9412/1/19/27. GARF 9412/1/3/29оb–30ob. GARF 9412/1/25/31; Pavlov, ‘Deti i Gulag’, 100; Topolski, Without Vodka, 236; see also reports from various colonies complaining about monotonous, unappetizing diet, in GARF 9412/1/23/179, 9412/1/69/122. GARF 9412/1/22/30, 9412/1/3/30. GARF 9412/1/69/72. Rations were further increased by 25 per cent for model colonies, as well as institutions situated in the Far North and mountainous regions (GARF 9412/1/19/36). GARF 9412/1/3/41. Sokolov had been suggesting this since July 1943, also including DPRs in the scheme (GARF, 9412/1/19/1ob, 2ob). GARF 9412/1/3/32-3, 9412/1/37/4. GARF 9412/1/37/4. GARF 9412/1/3/43. GARF 9412/1/59/11; RGASPI M1/5/232/6–7. GARF 9412/1/69/102, 107–8. RGASPI М1/7/129/9. See the order, dated 20 March 1944, ‘On carrying out sanitary anti-epidemic and prophylactic measures in children’s colonies’, in GARF 9401/1а/7/135ob. GARF 9412/1/69/106, 113 GARF 9412/1/69/133, 9412/1/44/15. See a report from November 1944 in GARF 9412/1/6/57. GARF 9412/1/69/132–3. GARF 9412/1/44/43. GARF 9412/1/19/56–56ob, 62. Pavlov, ‘Deti i Gulag’, 100.

Chapter 13 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

8

See a top secret NKVD order, dated 2 July 1942, in GARF 9401/1a/81/115ob, 116, 117. GARF 9412/1/43/22–3. GARF 9412/1/69/2–2ob. Gelii Pavlov, ‘Deti i Gulag’, Literaturnoe Obozrenie 4 (1991): 100. RGASPI М1/7/129/10; GARF 8131/27/202/11, 9412/1/29/98, 8131/27/200/3. GARF 9412/1/69/73; on the punishments in camps for adults, see S. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 55. See, for instance, reports in V.A. Kozlov (ed.), Vosstaniia, bunny i zabastovki zakliuchionnykh’, Vol. 6 of Istoriia satlinskogo Gulaga. Konets 1920-kh – pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov: Sobranie dokumentov v 7 tomakh (Moscow : ROSSPEN, 2004), 118–22; S.S. Vilensky et al., Deti Gulaga, 1918–1956 (Moscow : MFD, 2002), 309–11 (hereafter Deti Gulaga). Thus, for instance, in the second half of 1950, a wave of riots swept across the country with at least four children’s colonies affected. In later years, a similar pattern emerged (GARF 9412/1/327/77, 9412/1/954/6, 7, 10, 13, 16, 85–6).

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17 18 19 20 21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32

Notes This does not mean that provisions were not made for such work. See the NKVD order ‘On the operative work in labour colonies for minors and receiversdistributors’, dated 11 February 1938, in GARF 9401/1a/20/58–58ob; on adult camps, see Kozlov, Istoriia, 52–3, 133–48, 151–60, 161–72 and Barnes, Death, 138. See Kozlov, Vosstaniia, 33. GARF 9412/1/22/69, 79. GARF 9412/1/22/69/70–2, 73ob, 78, 80–3, 118–20, 122–122ob. See Petr Iakir, A Childhood in Prison (London: Macmillan, 1972), 91–2; for another instance with similar definitions, see Kozlov, Vosstaniia, 119; for disturbances in juvenile colonies in the years leading up to the German invasion, see Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivisation to the Great Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 213–14. GARF 9412/1/25/16–16ob, 32-34оb. GARF 8131/37/1846/18. The organization and participation in mass disorders were punishable with the deprivation of freedom from one to three years under Article 59 of the RSFSR Penal Code of 1926 (1934 edition). The actions of both groups of juveniles came within the purview of the Article, but only the second group actually stood trial under subsection 59–3 (banditism). See an English-language translation of the Penal Code at http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/uk-toc-e.html. RGASPI M1/5/232/21; GARF 9412/1/23/120оb, 9412/1/22/170оb, 9412/1/69/65. GARF 9412/1/27/84. GARF 9412/1/29/64, 97. Rachel F. Green, ‘ “There Will Not Be Orphans among Us”: Soviet Orphanages, Foster Care, and Adoption, 1941–1956’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2006), 66. Before it came to mean ‘thief ’, the Russian word ‘vor’ used to be a generic term for a criminal. See V. Chalidze, Criminal Russia: Essays on Crime in the Soviet Union, trans. P.S. Falla (New York: Random House, 1978), 4. See a very informative work on the mores of the criminal community, including its ‘table of ranks’ by Aleksandrov, Ocherki kriminal’noi subkul’tury (Moscow: Prava Cheloveka, 2001). On subtle, historically determined, differences between zhigany and urki and their role in the formulation of the ‘laws’, see ibid., 26–7. For a concise English language account of the criminal fraternity and its customs during the period under consideration, see Federico Varese, ‘The Society of the Vory-v-zakone, 1930s–1950s’, Cahiers du monde russe 39, no. 4 (1998): 515–38. Kochergin, Kreshchionnye, 209. Aleksander Topolski, Without Vodka: Adventures in Wartime Russia (South Royalton: Steerforth Press, 2001), 174, 214. GARF 9412/1/23/120оb, 149–50, 9412/1/22/83, 170–170оb, 9412/1/69/67. GARF 8131/27/205/12, 38. Iakir, A Childhood, 45. RGASPI М1/7/129/4, 8. According to Chalidze, self-mutilation is part of a criminal’s training in self-defence that shows courage and ability to endure pain. Some inmates also torture themselves to evade work, while others see it as an end in itself ‘with manifestations that are senseless and frightening to an outside observer’. See his Criminal Russia, 61, 63. GARF 9412/1/23/120оb; Topolski, Without Vodka, 157, 161–2; Iakir, A Childhood, 46–7. Valerii Frid, Piat’desiat vosem’ s polovinoi: Zapiski lagernogo pridurka (Moscow : Izdatel’skii Dom Rusanova, 1996), 267. Topolski, Without Vodka, 157; see also Iakir, A Childhood, 45, 47.

Notes 33 34 35

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Topolski, Without Vodka, 178. See Aleksandrov, Ocherki, 64; Chalidze, Criminal Russia, 51–3; Varese, ‘The Society’, 518–19. Topolski, Without Vodka, 220–2; Deti Gulaga, 430–1; see also the impressions of one Polish girl, sentenced to a term in a juvenile labour colony for an attempted border crossing, in Irena Wasilewska, Suffer Little Children (London: Maxlove Publishing, 1946), 54 (quotation). Topolski, Without Vodka, 174–5. On the thief ’s law, see V. Abramkin and V. Chesnokova (eds), Tiuremnyi mir glazami politzakliuchionnykh (Moscow : Muravei, 1998). GARF 9412/1/69/119. On self-governing, see the top secret NKVD order ‘Regulations concerning labour colonies of the NKVD for underage criminals’, dated 2 July 1942, in GARF 9401/1a/81/111ob–112. GARF, 9412/1/27/254, 9412/1/23/158–158оb, 9412/1/40/18оb (quotation), 9412/1/69/78. See Wasilewska, Suffer, 55. For a discussion of the inter-prison violence of the post-war years, see Barnes, Death, 175–7 and Varese, ‘The Society’, 526–31; on the post-war strife among juveniles within the context of the ‘bitches’ war’, see GARF 9412/1/903/45, 80 and 9412/1/954/5, 201. Reportedly, in 1956, ten colonies were in a state of open rebellion. For a description of a small scale such’ia voina among juvenile convicts at the Verkhoturie colony in 1938, see Iakir, A Childhood, 91. Topolski, Without Vodka, 174–5; Pavlov, ‘Deti i Gulag’, 100. See B.A. Boris Nakhapetov, ‘K istorii sanitarnoi sluzhby GULAGa’, Voprosy istorii 6 (2001): 133. On the ban on physical coercion in Soviet children’s institutions, see I.S. Kon, ‘Telesnye nakazaniia detei v Rossii: proshloe i nastoiashchee’, Istoricheskaia Psikhologiia i Sotsiologiia Istorii 1 (2011): 83. This does not mean that all teachers abstained from an occasional application of physical force. See, for instance, a discussion of homes for Spanish children in Karl D. Qualls, ‘From Hooligans to Disciplined Students: Displacement, Resettlement, and Role Modelling of Spanish Civil War Children in the Soviet Union, 1937–51’ in Displaced Children in Russia and Eastern Europe, 1915–1953. Ideologies, Identities, Experiences, ed. Nick Baron (Leiden: Brill, 2016). GARF 9412/1/43/16, 9412/1/69/116. Topolski, Without Vodka, 158. Ibid., 158, 218. GARF 9412/1/69/83. See the secret NKVD order ‘Regulations concerning labour colonies of the NKVD for underage criminals’, dated 2 July 1942, in GARF 9401/1a/81/116–116ob. GARF 9412/1/69/122. Wasilewska, Suffer, 65. GARF 9412/1/19/84. GARF 9412/1/19/66–66оb. RGASPI М1/7/70/ 71–4, M1/5/232/22; GARF 9412/1/69/64. Rosaria Franco, ‘Social Order and Social Policies toward Displaced Children: The Soviet Case (1917–1953)’ (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2006), 238–9. GARF 9412/1/19/66–66оb. GARF 9412/1/69/9оb.

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7

8

9

10

11

12

13

The order proclaimed that ‘as we introduce strict but reasonable discipline, instil work skills in children, we should combine this with the most lively, tactful and caring attitude to them ... Thus we need to educate the children entrusted to us so as to turn them into socially useful, patriotic people, who would become the model of a new, healthy and happy person.’ See S. S. Vilensky et al., Deti Gulaga, 1918–1956 (Moscow : MFD, 2002), 188 (hereafter Deti Gulaga). GARF 9401/1a/81/111ob. A.Ia. Vyshinskii cited in D. Gorvits, ‘Iz praktiki rassmotreniia del o nesovershennoletnikh’, SZ 1/2 (1945): 35. On the role of prisoners in the Soviet modernising project, see Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton/ Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 13–14. GARF 9401/1a/7/57–57ob. In 1944 juvenile delinquents produced 113 million rubles worth of goods with an overall capital investment of 19 million. From 1943 to 1945, the army received more than 44 million rubles worth of ammunition from children’s colonies (GARF 9412/1/69/135, 137). On the rejection of the economic rationale of the Gulag’s existence see O.V. Khlevniuk (ed.), Ekonomika Gulaga, Vol. 3 of Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga. Konets 1920kh – pervaia polovina 1950kh godov: Sobranie dokumentov v 7-mi tomakh (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), 29, 52; Golfo Alexopoulos, ‘Amnesty 1945: The Revolving Door of Stalin’s Gulag’, Slavic Review 64, no. 2 (Summer 2005), 303; Barnes, Death, 7–8. A report composed in mid-1944 reveals that more inmates attended lessons than worked on the production floor. A monthly ratio across TVKs was 60 per cent to 43 per cent in January, 74 to 54 in February, 79 to 58 in March and 87 to 63 in April. The situation was not considerably different in TKs, with 74 per cent of all inmates engaged in schooling and 47 per cent in production in January, 76 and 50 in February, 77 and 51 in March, and 80 and 57 in April. See GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/11. O.A. Olicheva, ‘Gosudarstvennaia politika v otnoshenii besprizornikov i prestupnosti nesovershennoletnikh v 1917–1941gg’ (Doctorate Candidacy, diss., Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Oblastnoi Universitet, 2009), 126. See the NKVD Circular ‘On the labour regime of underage prisoners in juvenile labour colonies, corrective labour camps and colonies’, dated 22 April 1943, and the SNK directive ‘On the reinforcement of measures against child homelessness, neglect and hooliganism’, dated 15 June 1943, in Deti Gulaga, 380, 383. V. Bublichenko, ‘Organizatsionnaia struktura detskikh trudovykh kolonii NKVDMVD SSSR. 1930e – nachalo 1950kh godov (na materialakh Komi ASSR i Vologodskoi oblasti)’ in Politicheskie repressii v Komi i na Severe Rossii: organizatory i zhertvy. Materialy regional’noi nauchnoi konferentsii, Syktyvkar, 28–29 October 2005 (Syktyvkar, 2006), 23. RGASPI 17/126/12/12, М1/7/129/9, M1/5/232/26; GARF 9412/1/40/17-19. On shortages of writing materials and textbooks in ‘free’ schools, see S.A. Chernik, Sovetskaia obshcheobrazovatel’naia shkola v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: Istoriko-pedagogicheskoe issledovanie (Moscow, 1984), 132. On attendance rates, see GARF 9412/1/59/77 and RGASPI M1/5/232/4. Another report gives a more nuanced analysis of the situation, claiming that by March 1944, 81 per cent of TVK and 77 per cent of TK inmates were involved in schooling. Only

Notes

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31

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36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

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eighteen TVKs and fifteen TKs could boast from 90 to 100 per cent attendance rates, while six colonies did not offer any instruction at all. See GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/5ob, 6. GARF 9412/1/40/45. GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/6. RGASPI M1/5/232/23–4, 26. Aleksander Topolski, Without Vodka: Adventures in Wartime Russia (South Royalton: Steerforth Press, 2001), 177. See a testimony in Irena Wasilewska, Suffer Little Children (London: Maxlove Publishing, 1946), 56–9. E.S. Kochergin, Kreshchennye Krestami: Zapiski na kolenkakh (St Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2009), 114–17. GARF 9412/1/25/99–100, 101, 104, 9412/1/22/78ob–79, 166, 9412/1/7/35–7, 59оb–61. Topolski, Without Vodka, 177. RGASPI 17/126/28/41. GARF 9412/1/22/56. GARF 9412/1/69/39, 42. GARF 9412/1/69/2–2оb, 76, 9412/1/19/2. RGASPI M1/5/232/4–5; GARF 8131/27/200/5, 8131/27/205/38. RGASPI M1/5/232/5, 6, 11, 112оb. GARF 9412/1/25/16–16ob, 31ob. Gelii Pavlov, ‘Deti i Gulag’, Literaturnoe Obozrenie 4 (1991), 100. See ‘Regulations concerning labour colonies of the NKVD for underage criminals’, dated 2 July 1942, in GARF 9401/1a/81/114; on adults in TVKs, see RGASPI М1/7/129/3, 4. On a widespread practice of adults sharing dormitories with juveniles, see a 1945 report in RGASPI M1/5/232/9; on cohabitation at the Kineshmensk colony, see GARF 9412/1/40/45оb. RGASPI M1/5/232/9; GARF 8131/27/205/12. GARF 9412/1/38/1–2, 3-3ob, 9412/1/57/5-5ob, 6–7. GARF 9412/1/43/25оb, 9412/1/40/45оb. N.N. Karamasheva, ‘Iz istorii bor’by s detskoi besprizornost’iu i beznadzornost’iu v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: (Na materialakh Krasnoiarskogo kraia)’, Problemy Otechestvennoi Istorii 1 (1991): 132–3. GARF 8131/27/200/4, 9412/1/43/25, 9412/1/69/81–2, RGASPI М1/7/129/4. GARF 9412/1/43/25оb. RGASPI M1/5/232/11, 13–14 (quotation), 25, 28, М1/7/129/7; GARF 9412/1/69/79–80. Pavlov, ‘Deti i Gulag’, 100; also see Topolski, Without Vodka. On the role of labour in re-education of adult convicts, see Barnes, Death, 16, 126. RGASPI M1/5/232/4, 9, 16, 17, M1/7/129/5, 6, 17/126/28/36; GARF 9412/1/22/27, 56, 85–6, 166, 183, 9412/1/28/102, 9412/1/30/31, 9412/1/40/17–19. GARF 5446/46/2270/9–10. GARF 9412/1/22/71, 79. GARF 9412/1/37/80, 9412/1/40/44ob, 9412/1/29/14; RGASPI M1/7/129/5, M1/5/232/16. By mid-1944, fifty out of ninety-five inspected colonies of both types had their own production base; seventeen cooperated with factories and four with agricultural enterprises; sixteen were still being equipped with machinery and eight used manual labour (GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/5).

230 45 46

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60

61 62 63 64

Notes GARF 9412/1/37/70ob, 80оb. RGASPI М1/7/129/5–6. One report states that as of January 1944, only 21 per cent of inmates were involved in industrial training/production in Briansk oblast, 44.6 per cent in Georgia, 53.2 per cent in Gorky oblast, 59.6 per cent in Irkutsk oblast, 63.2 per cent in Bashkir ASSR and 81.3 per cent in Ukraine (GARF 9412/1/37/82). The percentage of inmates involved in ‘labour education’ throughout the country rose from 40 per cent in January 1944 to 61.9 per cent in March of the same year (GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/35/5). RGASPI 17/126/28/37–8. Property theft and rowdy behaviour of colonists might have accounted for the refusal of some factories to employ juvenile delinquents. See, for instance, a report from Omsk in GARF 9412/1/25/30–30ob. Iakir, A Childhood, 108; Wasilewska, Suffer, 55. Pavlov, ‘Deti i Gulag’, 99–100. Wasilewska, Suffer, 53. A.Iu. Gorcheva, ‘Detskie lageria OGPU i NKVD i Pressa’, Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta 10, no.4 (1993): 17–18. According to the 11 November 1940 NKVD circular on the working regime of minors in colonies, youngsters below the age of sixteen had to spend four hours a day working and four hours studying; the daily working time increased to eight hours for those between sixteen and eighteen years of age. A 6 June 1942 circular prescribed six hours of work for twelve- to fourteen-year-olds, eight hours for fourteen- to sixteen- year-olds and ten hours for sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds incarcerated in correctional institutions for adults. A 22 April 1943 circular countermanded the previous provisions and stipulated four hours of industrial training on top of four hours of classroom instruction for twelve- to fourteen-year-olds and six and eight hours of work for fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds and sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds, respectively (GARF 9401/1a/19/43 and Deti Gulaga, 346, 380). RGASPI M1/7/129/7; Pavlov, ‘Deti i Gulag’, 100. Topolski, Without Vodka, 162. Wasilewska, Suffer, 52. The report mentions eleven- to twelve-year-olds (GRAF 9412/1/40/45). On poor attendance due to tiredness see also Karamasheva, ‘Iz istorii bor’by’, 134. Topolski, Without Vodka, 176; RGASPI M1/5/232/23. See the top secret NKVD order ‘Regulations concerning labour colonies of the NKVD for underage criminals’, dated 2 July 1942, in GARF 9401/1a/81/116ob; also see GARF 9412/1/7/39. GARF 9412/1/37/3; RGASPI 17/126/28/39. Although the law did not provide for any differentiation of norms for general and maximum security juvenile colonies, shockworkers in the latter category of reformatories did not receive increased rations like their peers in the first group (GARF 9412/1/44/44–44оb). For this line of argument, see E.Iu. Shutkova ‘Sovetskie politicheskie repressii v otnoshenii nesovershennoletnikh (1917–1953)’ (Doctorate Candidacy diss., Udmurtiia State University, 2003) and Gorcheva, ‘Detskie lageria’. GARF 9412/1/44/18. RGASPI M1/5/232/19. GARF 9412/1/69/9. By 1 January 1939, there were 759 under-sixteen-year-olds and 14,251 undereighteen-year-olds in Soviet labour camps (GARF 9414/1/1140/189). In January 1941, their cumulative number was 66,603 (see A.B. Bezborodov and V.M. Khrustalev (eds), Naselenie Gulaga: Chislennost’ i usoviia soderzhaniia, Vol. 4 of Istoriia

Notes

65

66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78

79 80

81 82

231

Stalinskogo Gulaga: konets 1920-kh – pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), 99). For the conditions in which juveniles were forced to live and the kind of treatment they endured prior to the invasion, see Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivisation to the Great Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 234–5 and A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. Parts 3–4. Trans. By Thomas P. Whitney (London: Collins & Harvill Press, 1975), ch.17. Bezborodov and Khrustalev (eds), Naselenie Gulaga, 82–3, 91, 99. Paul Hagenloh argues that Soviet penal authorities tended to underestimate the number of minors serving time and ‘were weary of reporting the existence of a large population of underage children in their adult labour colonies’ (Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941 (Washington: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 388 n166). See a joint NKVD/Procuracy directive on a temporary referral of underage lawbreakers aged sixteen and above for the term of punishment to local corrective labour camps and their involvement in production therein, dated 3 September 1941, in Bezborodov and Khrustalev (eds), Naselenie Gulaga, 84. RGASPI M1/5/232/19. GARF 9412/1/4/11. It is impossible to determine their age, however, because the official data combines all those under eighteen in the same age group. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, ch.17; Lev Razgon, Plen v svoiom otechestve, e-book (Moscow : Knizhnyi sad, 1994), ch. ‘Kostia Shul’ga’. See, for instance, post-war recollections of Valerii Frid, Piat’desiat vosem’ s polovinoi: Zapiski lagernogo pridurka (Moscow : Izdatel’skii Dom Rusanova, 1996), 314–15. Topolski, Without Vodka, 226. Frid, Piat’desiat vosem’, 194 (first quotation) and Lev Razgon, Plen, ch. ‘Kostia Shul’ga’ (second quotation). Memoir of Olga Mikhailovna Kuchumova, Memorial 2/1/79/103–5. Memoir of Maria Karlovna Sandratskaia, Memorial 2/1/105/51–6. See the top secret NKVD order ‘Regulations concerning labour colonies of the NKVD for underage criminals’, dated 2 July 1942, in GARF 9401/1a/81/111ob. GARF 9412/1/69/53. RGASPI M1/5/232/25. According to the July 1942 Regulations, an ekspeditor was supposed to accompany under-fifteen-year-olds on their way back to relatives, so the youths in question might have been only fifteen or younger. GARF 9412/1/69/53; RGASPI 17/122/22/130. It was only in August 1952 that the Council of Ministers (formerly SNK) made an attempt to solve the monetary issue. In accordance with the decree ‘On the use of moneys earned by the charges of children’s colonies of MVD’, each colony would set up a special fund to help orphaned and disadvantaged inmates due to be released. A deduction of 3 per cent (for TVKs) to 5 per cent (for TKs) would be taken from each inmate’s monthly salary. Additionally, 50 per cent (TVKs) to 33 per cent (TKs) of the inmate’s salary would go into his/her personal account; the rest would cover the juvenile’s upkeep (RGANI 3/33/37/9). GARF 8131/22/7/109оb. On internal passports, complemented by a complex system of urban registration, introduced in the first half of the 1930s, see Gijs Kessler, ‘The Passport System and State Control over Population Flows in the Soviet Union, 1932–1940’, Cahiers du monde russe 42, nos 2–3–4 (April–December 2001): 477–504. RGASPI M1/7/35/6. GARF 8131/22/8/345–6, 349.

232 83 84

85 86 87

Notes RGASPI M1/5/232/22, М1/7/35/6; GARF 8131/22/8/338. On serious difficulties in finding jobs in Tomsk for fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds, especially those recently freed from penal institutions, see L. I. Snegireva (ed.), Vo imia pobedy: evakuatsiia grazhdanskogo naseleniia v zapadnuiu Sibir’ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny v dokumentakh i materialakh. Vol. 3: ‘Spasionnoe detstvo’ (Tomsk: TGPU, 2005), 170. GARF 9412/1/69/54–5. Rachel F. Green, ‘ “There Will Not Be Orphans among Us”: Soviet Orphanages, Foster Care, and Adoption, 1941–1956’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2006), 77. GARF 9412/1/7/21.

Chapter 15 1 2

3 4 5 6

7

8 9 10 11

12

Terms of imprisonment were sometimes determined on the basis of an NKVD instruction (GARF 9412/1/21/13). N.N. Karamasheva, ‘Nekotorye problemy okhrany detstva v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (na materialakh Vostochnoi Sibiri)’, Problemy Otechestvennoi Istorii 2 (1993): 102. GARF 9412/1/17/1–2. A.Iu. Gorcheva, ‘Detskie lageria OGPU i NKVD i Pressa’, Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta 10, no.4 (1993), 17. GARF 9412/1/69/135–7. For instance, in 1945, the Chelyabinsk TVK had a difficulty balancing its books as a result of considerable underfinancing of actual expenses. Whereas before the colony had been able to make a profit and cover its costs, the reduction of the inmate contingent in the wake of the 1945 amnesty meant productivity loss, higher production costs, rising value of maintenance and lower inmate earnings. Government subsidy covered the one million ruble gap by only 40 per cent, while some of the colony’s clients could not settle the bills. The situation worsened in the beginning of 1946 when the colony could not cover even its maintenance expenses, only to improve slightly when the government and the Gulag allocated additional funds (GARF (Hoover) 9412/1/34/78–9). On Soviet war production, see Mark Harrison, ‘The Soviet Union: The Defeated Victor’ in The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison, ed. M. Harrison (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 268–97. See GARF 9412/1/69/135, 137 and S. S. Vilensky et al., Deti Gulaga, 1918–1956 (Moscow : MFD, 2002), 332 (hereafter Deti Gulaga). E.Iu. Shutkova ‘Sovetskie politicheskie repressii v otnoshenii nesovershennoletnikh (1917–1953)’ (Doctorate Candidacy diss., Udmurtiia State University, 2003). Deti Gulaga, 396. See V.A. Kozlov (ed.), Vosstaniia, bunny i zabastovki zakliuchionnykh’, Vol. 6 of Istoriia satlinskogo Gulaga. Konets 1920-kh – pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov: Sobranie dokumentov v 7 tomakh (Moscow : ROSSPEN, 2004), 59. For a discussion of two NKVD directives dated 27 January 1944 and 25 March 1944, see Natalia Smirnova, ‘Deiatel’nost’ organov NKVD-MVD v bor’be s besprizornost’iu i beznadzornost’iu nesovershennoletnikh v Leningrade i Leningradskoi oblasti (1941–1949 gg.) (Istoriko-pravovoi aspekt)’ (Doctorate Candidacy diss., St Petersburg, 1997), 75.

Notes 13

14

15 16 17

18 19 20

21

22

23

233

On the allure of the criminal culture among youngsters, especially from affluent families, see Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-war Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 189; Miriam Dobson, Khurshchev Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (New York: Cornell University Press, 2009), 123–6; Daniel Glaser and Kent Rice, ‘Crime, Age, and Employment’, American Sociological Review 24, no. 5 (1959): 685. On the anti-theft law of 4 June 1947 and its effect on the growth of the Gulag population, see A.K. Sokolov, ‘Prinuzhdenie k trudu v sovetskoi ekonomike 1930e – seredina 1950kh gg.’ in Gulag: Ekonomika prinuditel’nogo truda, eds Leonid Borodkin, Paul Gregory and Oleg Khlevniuk (Moscow : ROSSPEN, 2008), 62–3 and Yoram Gorlizki, ‘Theft under Stalin: A Property Rights Analysis’, Economic History Review (15 July 2015), online version. Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation, 181. Rosaria Franco, ‘Social Order and Social Policies toward Displaced Children: The Soviet Case (1917–1953)’ (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2006), 271–2. E.Iu. Zubkova and T. Iu. Zhukova (eds), Na ‘kraiu’ sovetskogo obshchestva: sotsial’nye marginaly kak ob”ekt gosudarstvennoi politiki: 1945–1960-e gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010), 343; see also a decree ‘On the measures against child homelessness and neglect in RSFSR’, dated 8 April 1950, in RGANI 3/33/37/1. According to the MVD, in 1954 DPRs registered 6,000 former orphanage wards who had been found employment but were now homeless again (RGANI 3/33/37/15). In 1955, between 2,000 and 2,500 juveniles were transferred from prisons to labour colonies monthly (GARF 9412/1/774/11). GARF 9414/ch1/151/9, 17. GARF 9412/1/978 /25–7. See the decree of the Council of Ministers ‘On the reorganisation of educational colonies into special schools and vocational colleges’, dated 31 June 1964, in RGANI 3/33/37/151. Labour colonies were renamed as educational labour colonies on 11 July 1969. On 27 August 1952, the Council of Ministers issued a decree ‘On assistance measures to children’s colonies of the MVD’ to improve professional training and ‘labour upbringing’ of juvenile inmates. In 1956, the labour training programme was still deemed unsatisfactory that prompted yet another decree, this time by the Central Committee Secretariat (RGANI 3/33/37/5, 108). In the meantime, as one governor put it during an All-Union meeting of juvenile colonies’ officials in February 1957, ‘many colonies have become de facto production enterprises’, where ‘the questions of upbringing and the use of labour as professional training of adolescents take a back seat’ (GARF 9412/1/903/205–6). On the improvements of medical care and food provision, see GARF 9412/1/288/4, 10, 76; 9412/1/750/1, 2, 5, 7; on shortages of buildings, see GARF 9412/1/774/14; RGASPI M1/1/742/15, 17; on the abusive staff, poor academic results and shortage of qualified personnel, see GARF 9412/1/327/77, 9412/1/903/42, 9412/1/903/51; RGASPI M1/1/129/39–40, 47–8, 53, M1/1/407/14, 17, 24, 25; on mass disturbances in juvenile colonies, see GARF 9412/1/903/45, 9412/1/774/71–6, 9412/1/954/6, 7, 10, 13, 16, 85–6 and RGASPI M1/1/129/52. A number of decrees, issued regularly by various state authorities, also point to unsatisfactory conditions in juvenile colonies, RGANI 3/33/36/139–43, 3/33/37/108. A. Elivanov, ‘Ustranit’ nedostatki v ispravlenii nesovershennoletnikh prestupnikov v detskikh trudovykh koloniiakh’, SZ 10 (1956): 63–4.

234

Notes

Conclusion 1 2

GARF 9412/1/6/45. On the division of state policies into soft- and hardline issues, see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 21 and Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘The Soft-line on Culture and Its Enemies’ in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).

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Index Note: The letter ‘n’ following locators refers to notes activists 13, 51, 54, 101, 175. See also concerned citizens; public-spirited citizens among deported nationalities 82 anti-Soviet nationalist 75 address bureaux 55 adoption 51, 55, 73 by army units 17 by foreign sailors 27 by workers 47, 55, 173 age of criminal liability 111, 114, 125, 131, 151, 179 Anders’ Army 79–80 anti-homelessness campaign 6, 102 ‘anti-Soviet element’ 81 anti-theft laws of 1947, 61, 120, 170, 177 apprentice 8, 70, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 181 asocial identity 3 besprizornik(i) 24, 25, 72, 102, 142, 146, 165, 177. See also besprizornye; homeless child besprizornye 2, 22, 23, 177. See also besprizornik(i); homeless child beznadzornye 2, 177 boarding. See also residential institutions homes 66 institution(s) 13, 19, 30, 44, 45, 47, 51, 54, 68, 69, 70, 74, 84, 87, 118, 144, 167, 170, 173, 177, 203 n.31 school(s) 33, 39, 46, 55, 67, 69, 72, 85 camps children’s 9 internment, in the USA 117 labour 45, 91, 133, 137, 140, 144, 149, 155, 158, 168, 181, 182

minors in camps 150, 161–3, 164, 171, 231 n.65 summer 19, 33, 40, 80 childhood 4, 5, 58, 119, 152 duality of 8 happy 1, 4, 153 policies 4, 9, 27 romanticized concept of 174 sentimentalization of 4 children abandoned 1, 20, 32, 39, 60, 65, 71, 79, 87, 177, 181 delinquent 53, 74, 106 (see also delinquent(s)) displaced 2, 48, 51, 71, 72, 73, 74, 100, 117, 122, 130, 174, 175, 180 disadvantaged 7, 55, 70, 231 n.78 of German nationals 92 of insurgents 92–3 marginalized 2, 10, 97 neglected 2, 4, 13, 14, 20, 25, 32, 39, 46, 130, 168, 175, 177, 181, 183, 184, 192 n.20 (see also beznadzornye) unsupervised 2, 4, 17, 20, 25, 47, 66, 72, 102, 177, 178 ‘socially orphaned’ 2, 180 of soldiers 52, 55, 65–8 of traitors or collaborators 91–3, 190 n.25, 212 n.85 Children’s Aid Foundation 55, 72 children’s commissions 2, 72, 74 evacuation 33, 62 children’s home(s) 6, 21, 22, 44, 45, 46, 47, 67, 68, 70, 72, 79, 128, 133, 151, 177. See also children’s residential institutions; detdom(a); orphanage children’s residential institutions 6, 56, 57, 68, 79, 167. See also children’s homes; detdom(a); orphanage

Index children’s rooms 14–16, 28, 53, 177–8 special, in kolkhozes 74 child worker (teenage labourer) 106–8, 117 exploitation of 105, 119 neglected 119 collaboration 6, 35, 41, 81, 91 with authorities in camps 181 colonies 87, 121, 125, 131, 135–42, 143, 144, 146, 149–50, 151, 152, 154, 158, 161, 167, 168, 178, 185, 192 n.20. See also correctional or custodial institutions; penal institutions; penitentiaries; reformatories activists in 149–50, 160 adult convicts in 157–9 beatings in 150–1, 162 ‘bitches’ war’ 150, 181 contribution to war production 160, 168, 228 n.6 criminal hierarchy 147 education in 152, 154–6, 158, 161, 228–9 n.13 escapes from 144, 146, 150, 152, 156, 158 exploitation 160, 161, 168, 170 labour 2, 9, 25, 60, 98, 99, 102–3, 122, 144, 146, 147, 149, 153, 167, 170, 181, 186 labour education 153–4, 158, 230 n.52 labour educational 26, 79, 130, 131, 146, 147, 151, 154, 157, 167, 168, 170, 182 labour in 158–61, 233 n.21, 229 n.44, 232 n.6, 233 n.21 malnutrition in 139–40, 145, 157 mortality rates in 139–40, 142 non-consensual sex 148 penalty cell or solitary confinement 149, 150, 151, 160 as places of childhood 152, 169 political convicts in 158 post-war expansion 170 protest or riots or mass disturbances or uprisings or rebellions 144–8, 149, 152, 157, 158, 169–70, 181, 227 n.42 release from 163–5, 231 n.78 self-government or trusty system 149, 150 self-mutilation 148, 159, 226 zemliachestvo 150

241

concerned citizens 13, 16, 54. See also activists; obshchestvennost’; publicspirited citizens correctional or custodial institutions 9, 10, 114, 119, 142, 153, 156, 157, 168, 181. See also colonies; penitentiaries; reformatories corruption 7, 38, 62, 65, 74, 75, 117, 169, 174 crime 7, 8, 17, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 31, 34, 47, 51, 52, 53, 60, 61, 72, 100, 109, 110, 118, 120, 121, 122, 125, 131, 134, 151, 162, 165, 167, 170, 174, 175, 177, 179, 183, 184 banditry 34, 145, 158, 186 committed by deportees 83, 84, 87 homicide 24, 34, 145, 183, 184 hooliganism 46, 111, 112, 115, 126, 157, 182, 184, 186 manslaughter 34 mendicancy or begging 18, 20, 21, 26, 28, 29, 38, 48, 54, 60, 71, 72, 78, 85, 115, 133, 179 murder 22, 25, 26, 34, 141, 145, 147, 157, 158, 179, 186 offence against the person 25, 34 political or counterrevolutionary 145, 186 prevention 2, 3, 7, 53, 54, 61, 73, 174, 175 public order violation 25, 33, 54 rates 7, 35, 48, 61, 102, 167 reports 16 robbery 25, 32, 34, 112, 114, 183, 184, 186 speculation 28, 29, 179 street trade or peddling 19, 21, 26, 28, 29, 32, 54, 106, 126, 147, 158 theft 17, 18, 21, 24, 25, 31, 32, 48, 54, 102, 111, 114, 115, 120, 146, 164, 165, 170, 177, 183, 186 criminal underworld 23, 149, 153, 170 custodial measures 119 sentences 5, 8, 112, 113–14, 121, 122 delinquent(s) 2, 3, 4, 6, 13, 25, 102, 103, 106, 112, 116, 117, 122, 130, 131, 138, 152, 161, 162, 164, 168, 173, 181, 219 n.32 activities 33 behaviour 16 habits 17, 56

242

Index

Department for Combating Child Homelessness and Neglect (OBDBB) 53, 110, 130, 135, 136, 139, 140, 142, 143, 146, 152, 161, 169, 180 deportation 3, 7, 75, 76, 81, 82, 83, 87–90, 92, 93, 118, 135. See also exile deserters labour 99, 104, 108, 114 military 90 detdom(a) 6, 22, 30, 32, 44, 46, 55, 56, 61, 67, 68, 72, 87, 88, 92, 97, 128, 136, 141, 177, 184, 185. See also orphanages; residential institutions detention 61, 118, 121, 131, 134, 167, 175. See also custodial disease 6, 18, 26, 37, 38, 44, 47, 49, 60, 76, 79, 82, 106 in juvenile colonies 140, 142 in receiver-distribution centres and prisons 127–8, 134 displacement 1, 4, 7, 20, 39, 51, 59, 89, 173, 177, 182 child 8, 53, 61, 71, 72, 180 (see also children, displaced) epidemics 39, 44, 49, 77, 89, 142, 174 erroneous judicial sentencing 122. See also wrongful convictions ethnic cleansing 175, 182 ethnic minorities 8, 81, 91 evacuation 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 59, 60, 79, 80, 87 in Britain 60 of children 39–42 re-evacuation 46–7 evacuees 30, 35, 37, 38, 41, 43, 47, 65 exclusion 5, 47, 130 exile 6, 75, 76, 79, 81, 82, 85, 88, 91, 92, 93, 175, 180. See also deportation in the USA 117–18 expatriates 48 extrajudicial conviction 116 punishment 8, 151, 167 famine 1, 61 of 1946–7 61, 170, 177 forced migration 94, 118 foreigners 27, 148, 150

foster care 55, 73 fostering 51 fundraising 54, 203 n.33, 205 n.19. See also philanthropy gang 21–2 genocide 182 Gulag 8, 9, 79, 120, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144, 147, 153, 154, 162, 168, 169, 178 home front 3, 5, 7, 8, 24, 26, 37, 83, 117, 129, 175 homeless. See also besprizornik(i); besprizornye child deportees 87 child(ren) 106, 138, 173, 192 n.20 drifter 21, 22 vagabond 13 waif 6, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22, 46, 48, 53, 56, 60, 66, 70, 71, 72, 103, 119, 125, 125, 130, 175 homelessness (besprizornost’) 1, 2, 5, 7, 30, 53, 60, 65, 71, 72, 88, 110, 117, 121, 122, 130, 135, 143, 161, 162, 169, 173, 175, 177, 180, 181, 182 secondary 70 hunger 16, 18, 26, 29, 30, 32, 33, 41, 44, 45, 49, 56, 59, 68, 70, 77, 78, 79, 82, 84, 87, 88, 89, 90, 104, 106, 114, 128, 141, 148, 168, 170, 204 n.14. See also starvation interrogation 33, 109, 110 application of physical force 110 investigation 53, 91, 109–10, 111, 113, 115, 121, 122, 125, 126, 146, 180, 184. See also preliminary inquiry or pre-trial inquiry investigator (sledovatel’) 33, 109, 110, 112, 121, 125, 131, 132, 180, 184 junior cadet colleges or schools 6, 55–8, 66 Nakhimov naval colleges 55, 56 naval cadet schools 55 ‘special’ military schools 55 Suvorov colleges 55, 57 justice 162 criminal 3, 28, 108, 116, 119, 120, 122 discretionary 8

Index juvenile 5, 109, 111, 117, 118, 122, 138, 163 miscarriage of 8, 119, 121, 167 juvenile court 113, 121, 178, 179 juvenile delinquency 1, 3, 14, 16, 17, 25, 65, 120, 121, 122, 168, 170, 174 centres studying 113 juvenile legislation 3 Komsomol scholarships 52 Labour Army 88, 94, 179, 181, 182 labour battalions 88, 179 labour law 78, 151 infringement 25, 182 violations 97, 99, 100, 111, 162, 217 n.77 (see also ukaznik) labour mobilization 97, 151, 165 labour reserves 98, 100, 165, 180 law enforcement 6, 7, 8, 26, 52, 60, 61, 106, 109, 118, 125, 129, 131, 181 legality 4, 8, 92, 115, 132, 138 illegality 6, 167 Makarenko, Anton 149, 179 meshochnichestvo 29, 179 miscarriages of justice 8, 121 mismanagement 7, 62, 74, 117, 174, 205 n.19 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 75 nationalist guerrillas or insurgents 48, 90, 92, 93, 180 obshchestvennost’ 54, 61. See also activists; concerned citizens; public-spirited citizens orphanage 21, 41, 45, 48, 49, 57, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 87, 89, 90, 125, 128, 177, 178, 183. See also detdom(a) children running away from 20, 70 employees, personnel or administrators 44, 61, 68–9, 70, 73, 92 graduates 71 hunger in 68 for Polish children 67, 79 property 67 residents or wards 20, 45, 48, 56, 61, 70, 81 for Spanish children 70

243

orphans 2, 3, 6, 13, 20, 38, 48, 54, 55, 61, 67, 68, 70, 71, 102, 104, 117, 173, 175, 177, 181, 190 n.25, 201 n.79, 203 n.38 of deportees 78, 86, 87, 88, 90 Polish 79–80 parental supervision 2, 16, 20, 91 paternal absence or fatherlessness 16, 177, 192 n.28 penal institutions 5, 161. See also colonies; correctional or custodial institutions; penitentiary; places of internment; reformatories for children or juveniles 154, 163 penal system 6, 8, 9, 10, 119, 130, 133, 135, 151, 154, 161, 165, 167, 168, 174, 175, 178, 181 reform after Stalin’s death 170 penitentiary 146. See also colonies; correctional or custodial institutions; places of internment; reformatories machine 9 philanthropy 62, 175 places of internment 133, 134. See also colonies; correctional or custodial institutions; reformatories preliminary inquiry or pre-trial inquiry 109, 111. See also investigation prisons 6, 18, 21, 60–1, 131–3, 134, 139, 140, 151, 162, 233 n.17 procedures criminal 112, 113, 122 judicial 110, 121 legal 109, 130 oversimplification of 174 prostitution 179, 195 n.26 public order 8, 27, 47, 49, 51, 61, 62, 73, 75, 78, 116, 117, 167, 173, 174 violations 25, 33, 54 public-spirited citizens 54. See also concerned citizens; activists; obshchestvennost’ ‘punished’ peoples 182. See also suspect nationalities purges 9, 127

244 rations 18, 26–7, 31, 32, 37–8, 51, 56, 59, 61, 65, 66, 67, 69, 73 cards 26, 32, 33, 38, 44, 49, 59, 65, 67, 69, 90, 115 of deportees 77, 78, 87 in juvenile colonies 45, 140–1, 146, 147, 150, 160 in labour camps 162–3 in prisons 132 rationing scheme 29, 31, 47, 59 in trade schools 85, 100, 102, 103, 104, 106 receiver-distribution centre (DPR) 5, 6, 13, 14, 17, 30, 47, 53, 54, 56, 61, 66, 67, 70, 71, 87, 102, 125–9, 130, 134, 139, 140–1, 147, 155, 160, 162, 164, 167, 170, 177, 178, 180, 181, 183, 184, 195 n.26 escapes from 129, 183 malnutrition in 128 receiver 21, 68, 72, 125–8, 129 reconstruction, post-war 171 refugees 37, 38, 39 child, in Greece 60 Polish and Romanian 75 rehabilitation 6, 8, 118, 134, 140, 141, 153, 160, 179 reoffending 165, 167 repatriates 49 repression 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 92, 94, 100, 107, 116, 117, 118, 130, 135, 154, 168, 175, 212 n.85 resettlement 7, 38, 48, 75, 78, 81, 83, 89, 118, 164, 175 residence permit (propiska) 37, 47 resocialization 3, 133, 135 school 16, 17, 18–19, 27, 38, 40, 49, 51, 52, 54, 83, 84, 158, 170. See also junior cadet schools; trade schools boarding 39, 46, 55, 67, 69, 72, 85 buildings 52 cafeteria 45, 51 fees 18, 52, 98, 183 and schooling in colonies 154–6, 158, 160 special industrial 170 social control 5, 60, 119 control institutions 53

Index disorder 16 inequality 132 organs of 175 support networks 8 support 47 work 7, 54, 55, 175 workers 2, 62 Polish 79–80, 81 ‘socially dangerous elements’ 75, 133 ‘Soviet family’ 59 Soviet state as surrogate parent 4, 175 as an extended family 5 Soviet totalitarianism 5 Soviet–Polish population exchange agreement 48 special canteens 31, 51 special settlement 78, 86, 89, 180 special settlers 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 93, 94, 118, 180 Stalinist governance 9 starvation 6, 26, 29, 31, 44, 54, 55, 59, 77, 78, 82, 110, 128, 139, 140, 144, 174, 192 n.21, 204 n.14. See also hunger state care institutions 5, 7 subculture delinquent or criminal 9, 126, 147, 169 suspect nationalities 75. See also ‘punished’ peoples systemic dysfunctions 171 thief ’s law 147–9, 159, 181, 182, 226 n.21 trade organizations 68, 69, 70, 73, 74, 106, 126, 141 trade schools 6, 21, 22, 52, 71, 97, 98, 99–104, 106, 107, 114, 115, 119, 125, 128, 162, 178, 180, 184, 185, 215 n.25 canteens 101, 102 mortality at 103 student turnover at 98, 102, 104 trade unions 39, 55, 106, 112, 175 ukaznik 100, 150, 162, 182 vagrancy 2, 3, 13, 39, 48, 52, 54, 59, 61, 177, 182 victimization 7, 116 Volksdeutsche 91, 182 volunteers 7, 16, 18, 53, 54–5, 60, 62, 73, 175

Index welfare 7, 46, 49, 60, 61, 70, 167, 190 n.17 agencies 7, 9, 53 child 5, 9, 10, 51, 60, 69, 73, 79, 92, 117, 135, 138, 153, 167, 174 funds 6 institutions or facilities 2, 38, 66, 131 as a ‘soft-line’ concept 174 social 2, 4, 61, 175

245

state 4, 174 system 6, 8, 54, 118 workers 71 (see also social, workers) wrongful convictions 8, 114. See also erroneous judicial sentencing youth league 6, 10, 19, 54, 115, 119, 175, 179 Young Pioneers 19