Soviet Street Children and the Second World War: Welfare and Social Control under Stalin By Olga Kucherenko (review)

In Soviet Street Children and the Second World War, Olga Kucherenko offers a vivid account of the last major wave of besprizornost' (child abandonment and homelessness) in the Soviet Union. In the early 1920s, millions of besprizorniki (waifs, orphans, or street children) born of the successive crises of world war, civil war, and famine overwhelmed state institutions and ultimately derailed visionary efforts to transform them into the constructors of the communist future. In the 1930s, as studies including Dorena Caroli's L'enfance abandonnée et délinquante dans la Russie soviétique, 1917–1937 (2004) and Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky's Children of the Gulag (2010) have shown, the actions of the Soviet state itself fueled a second wave of besprizornost'. Never entirely rejecting the possibility of transformation, the Stalinist state increasingly criminalized the besprizorniki, whom the dislocations of industrialization, collectivization, and the purges did so much to produce and whom its poorly funded children's institutions failed to educate or rehabilitate.

Between 1941 and 1945, the chaotic and difficult circumstances of total war coupled with the Stalinist state's repressive responses produced a third wave of besprizornost'. Kucherenko argues that these besprizorniki have been "ousted" from the "collective memory" of the war, victims of the still-powerful Soviet narrative of the wartime state's "unmatched care for children" (173). Thus the book aims not only to recover the stories of wartime orphans and waifs but also to replace the myth of "unmatched care" with a detailed description of the incompetence, corruption, and "dysfunctional nature" (9) of the Stalinist state that proclaimed its commitment to protecting children from the ravages of war while implementing policies that added to children's misery and marginalization.

Kucherenko draws extensively on state and local archives as well as memoirs and party, legal, and pedagogical newspapers to explore the lives of besprizorniki. The sources lead her to focus less on children surviving on the streets than on those, mostly adolescent boys, housed in state institutions. Because child vagrants often became or were treated as criminals, Kucherenko investigates not only children's homes but also makeshift "children's rooms" in police stations and "labor colonies" that that held juvenile convicts.

The book's organization is primarily thematic. Part 1, "Bezottsovshchina" (Fatherlessness), emphasizes the state's inability to count, let alone cope with, the perhaps two million homeless children and juvenile delinquents produced during the war. Soviet experts often blamed the rising numbers of besprizorniki on the absence of fathers, a factor that Kucherenko agrees "considerably increased" (17) a child's risk of ending up on the streets. But she gives more weight to systemic factors such as understaffed schools, meager food rations that led children (often at a relative's behest) to begging and crime, and disorganized evacuations from the war zone that left children without adequate care and supervision. At the same time, she acknowledges that the state welfare system and public volunteers made "genuine" (51), if insufficient, efforts to protect children.

Part 2, "Step-Motherland," assesses the role of state practices and policies in generating large numbers of homeless and abandoned children. Part of the problem was poor implementation of welfare measures; corruption, negligence, red tape, and incompetence denied many children (and others) promised housing, food, or supplies. In some cases, children preferred the streets to the abysmal conditions in state institutions. More directly, state repression put many children on the streets. Deportations of so-called enemy nationalities and alleged traitors were not aimed specifically at children, but had devastating effects on them, impoverishing most and separating many from their parents. The conscription of teenagers into the labor force and poorly provisioned trade schools along with the criminalization of absenteeism added to the army of besprizorniki and juvenile delinquents. Some prosecutors criticized the juvenile justice system's "heartless attitude towards minors" (109), but it nonetheless often meted...