Family in the Soviet Union
Encyclopedia
The view of the Soviet family as the basic social unit
in society evolved from revolutionary to conservative; the government of the Soviet Union
first attempted to weaken the family
and then to strengthen it. According to the 1968 law "Principles of Legislation on Marriage and the Family of the USSR and the Union Republics", parents are "to raise their children in the spirit of the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism
, to attend to their physical development and their instruction in and preparation for socially useful activity."
was replaced by civil marriage, divorce
became easy to obtain, and unwed mothers received special protection. All children, whether legitimate or illegitimate, were given equal rights before the law, women were granted sexual equality under matrimonial law, inheritance of property was abolished, and abortion
was legalized.
In the early 1920s, however, the weakening of family ties, combined with the devastation and dislocation caused by the Civil War
(1918–21), produced a wave of nearly 7 million homeless children. This situation prompted senior party officials to conclude that a more stable family life was required to rebuild the country's economy and shattered social structure. By 1922 the government allowed some forms of inheritance, and after 1926 full inheritance rights were restored. By the late 1920s, adults had been made more responsible for the care of their children, and common-law marriage had been given equal legal status with civil marriage.
During Joseph Stalin
's rule, the trend toward strengthening the family continued. In 1936 the government began to award payments to women with large families, banned abortions, and made divorces more difficult to obtain. In 1942 it subjected single persons and childless married persons to additional taxes. In 1944 only registered marriages were recognized to be legal, and divorce became subject to the court's discretion. In the same year, the government began to award medals to women who gave birth to five or more children and took upon itself the support of illegitimate children.
After Stalin's death in 1953, the government rescinded some of its more restrictive social legislation. In 1955 it declared abortions for medical reasons legal, and in 1968 it declared all abortions legal. The state also liberalized divorce procedures in the mid-1960s but in 1968 introduced new limitations.
In 1974 the government began to subsidize poorer families whose average per capita income did not exceed 50 rubles
per month (later raised to 75 rubles per month in some northern and eastern regions). The subsidy amounted to 12 rubles per month for each child below eight years of age. It was estimated that in 1974 about 3.5 million families (14 million people, or about 5% of the entire population) received this subsidy. With the increase in per capita income, however, the number of children requiring such assistance decreased. In 1985 the government raised the age limit for assistance to twelve years and under. In 1981 the subsidy to an unwed mother with a child increased to 20 rubles per month; in early 1987 an estimated 1.5 million unwed mothers were receiving such assistance, or twice as many as during the late 1970s.
and the Caucasus
tended to have more children than families elsewhere in the Soviet Union and included grandparents in the family structure. In general, the average family size followed that of other industrialized countries, with higher income families having both fewer children and a lower rate of infant mortality. From the early 1960s to the late 1980s, the number of families with more than one child decreased by about 50% and in 1988 totaled 1.9 million. About 75% of the families with more than one child lived in the southern regions of the country, half of them in Central Asia. In the Russia
n, Ukrainian
, Belorussian, Moldovian
, Estonia
n, Latvia
n, and Lithuania
n republics, families with one and two children constituted more than 90% of all families, whereas in Central Asia those with three or more children ranged from 14% in the Kyrgyz Republic to 31% in the Tajik
. Surveys suggested that most parents would have had more children if they had had more living space.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, the government promoted family planning
in order to slow the growth of the Central Asian indigenous populations. Local opposition to this policy surfaced especially in the Uzbek
and Tajik
republics. In general, however, the government continued publicly to honor mothers of large families. Women received the Motherhood Medal, Second Class, for their fifth live birth and the Mother Heroine medal for their tenth. Most of these awards went to women in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
Extended families helped perpetuate traditional life-styles. The patriarchal values that accompany this life-style affected such issues as contraception, the distribution of family power, and the roles of individuals in marriage and the family. For example, traditional Uzbeks placed a higher value on their responsibilities as parents than on their own happiness as spouses and individuals. The younger and better educated Uzbeks and working women, however, were more likely to behave and think like their counterparts in the European areas of the Soviet Union, who tended to emphasize individual careers.
Extended families were not prevalent in the cities. Couples lived with parents during the first years of marriage only because of economics or the housing shortage. When children were born, the couple usually acquired a separate apartment.
The transformation of the patriarchal, three-generation rural household to a modern, urban family of two adults and two children attests to the great changes that Soviet society had undergone since 1917. That transformation did not produced the originally envisioned egalitarianism, but it has forever changed the nature of what was once the Russian Empire
.
The great Volga famine
of 1921-1922 played a greater role in depriving children of their homes than any other single cause and accounted for some five million deaths. Vast numbers of children were deserted, many abandoning their families themselves, and many parents actively abandoning their children. By the spring of 1921, one-quarter of the peasantry in Soviet Russia was starving. The famine brought with it severe typhus and cholera epidemics which killed off those already weakened by hunger. Where the famine crisis was at its worst, cannibalism was not uncommon, especially with the onset of winter. People ate their own relatives, including their children and siblings. By the summer of 1921, starvation had become so extreme that official plans were begun for mass evacuations of juveniles from afflicted provinces. From June 1921 to September 1922 the state evacuated approximately 150,000 children and moved trainloads of youths across the country in order to lessen the burden placed on institutions and clinics in hungry regions. Foreign relief organizations fed nearly 4.2 million children. The American Relief Administration (ARA) took on 80% of this total. Altogether, including both the state’s and foreign organizations’ distribution of food, close to 5 million youths received occasional meals. However, millions more went unfed.
Begging, peddling, and prostitution were the means by which besprizornye survived. Of these three endeavors, begging was the most widely practiced; it demanded no experience or inventory, and could be carried out anywhere. Destitution often left waifs too physically broken to do more than plea with an open hand. Rather than possible beatings and arrest, indignant rejection was the worst outcome that a beggar faced. The majority of citizens regarded abandoned children as nuisances or threats and refused appeals, but many offered aid without hesitation. Official campaigns spoke out against contributions to young urchins in the fear that such gifts sustained drug addictions and contributed to the ruin of youths. When alms grew scarce, children with more experience and energy sought money through trade. The line between peddling and begging was often indistinct, and urchins possessed meager inventories, but with the elimination of large private enterprises and the Soviet state’s inability to supply more than a “trickle” of consumer products, populations came to rely heavily on this small-scale trade. In many cities there was no adequate alternative. Waifs hawked food, flowers, cigarettes, and all kinds of cheap haberdashery. Tobacco trusts and newspaper companies employed urchins to sell merchandise in the street. Besprizornye also sold their own raw labor; they hauled loads and held places for people in long lines. Swarms of young beggars and peddlers permeated train stations, markets, stores, nightclubs, cinemas, and theaters. Waifs made daily rounds at apartments. On Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, they crowded churches and cemeteries. Restaurants, cafeterias, snack bars, taverns, and all manner of establishments were beset by hordes of homeless youths. Competition for locations was fierce and those who trespassed others’ territories fell victim to knives and beatings. Thousands of children, unable to support themselves through begging and peddling turned to prostitution. Girls especially turned down this path. The height of desperation occurred throughout the famine crisis of 1921-1922; during this time, child prostitution reached its peak. Many youths would sell their bodies for as little as a piece of bread. In 1920, a survey of 5,300 street girls up to the age of fifteen revealed that 88% had engaged in prostitution. Among a smaller assortment of children taken from the Northern Caucasus railroad at the end of the decade, every one of the girls had worked as a prostitute. The majority of young prostitutes were girls, but many boys were similarly experienced. In Khar’kov in the mid 1920s, boy prostitutes tended to be extremely young, usually seven to nine years of age. The number of children forced to sell their bodies increased during harsh winter conditions, when other means of survival became difficult or near impossible. Prostitution had begun to decrease by the middle of the decade, but the number of homeless children continued to rise and child prostitution remained a cause of extreme concern for Soviet authorities.
The existence of millions of homeless youths led to widespread juvenile delinquency throughout Russia. When street children looked beyond begging and petty trade, they turned to stealing. Juvenile crime rose rapidly during WWI and reached its peak during the famine of 1921-1922, at which point juvenile crime was increasing more rapidly than adult crime. Minors arrested by the Russian Republic’s police stood at 6% of all people apprehended in 1920, and reached 10% by the first quarter of 1922. More than other factors, hunger prompted waifs to steal. Robberies became routine, a natural feature of survival on the street. Thefts also provided funds for narcotics, stylish clothes, movie tickets, and other items outside the realm of necessity. On the street, crime could be a form of amusement and adventure. For many waifs, particularly boys, it was an essential “means of proving one’s reliability and prowess” to the rest of a gang. Abandoned children arriving from the countryside were often slower to embrace thievery than those from urban backgrounds, but in general, the longer a child was left astray, the more likely he or she was to succumb to crime. Gangs and groups of children as large as ten or thirty ambushed individuals for their belongings; even healthy men of substantial strength were constantly at risk of being beaten and robbed. Constant illegal activity and life in the street insured contact between besprizornye and the criminal underworld of adults; older vagabonds schooled young newcomers in the art of crime. Street life also forced abandoned children into a torrent of drugs and sex. Tobacco and alcohol addictions ran rampant, and the first half of the 1920s saw the influx of a larger supply of cocaine as well as the development of a more extensive network of drug dealers. Urchins lived and worked in the midst of this network and drug expenses spurred on juveniles’ thefts. In addition to drugs, the street introduced large percentages of its inhabitants to early sexual activity. Waifs generally began their sex lives by the age of fourteen, many girls as early as seven. Rape was pervasive in the underworld and waifs were quickly saturated with sexually transmitted diseases. Crime, drugs, sex, and the harsh nature of life on the street caused a deep imprint on generations of abandoned children. Besprizornye developed and vividly displayed qualities considered threatening by the rest of society. Homelessness yielded bitter fruit: the revolution’s offspring were victims of personality problems, terrible hygiene habits, and severe psychopathic disorders. Despite besprizornye’s deep moral and physical deformities the Soviet government set out not only to save them, but also to develop them into the builders and inheritors of a new, communist society.
Following the October Revolution the new Bolshevik government had taken on the ambitious task of feeding, clothing, and raising a significant share of the country’s children. Government agencies prepared to construct a network of socialist children’s homes that would be capable of raising the nation’s offspring. In a “heady” atmosphere of revolutionary triumph, the regime confidently advocated its vision of replacing the traditional bourgeois family environment with socialist asylums and institutions administered by the state. Communist pedagogy aimed to create a “vast communistic movement among minors.” Narkompros, The People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, assumed primary responsibility for reclaiming homeless juveniles. It relied mainly on children’s homes (sing. detdom; pl. detdoma) to accomplish this. Detdoma provided room and board, education, and activities, all of which were intended to “win” children from the street. These institutions also implemented systems of “self-service” which meant that youths took on chores and made administrative decisions; the intention was for them to gain a sense of self-control and an instinct for the “collective.” The detdoma were inaugurated in a spirit of revolutionary idealism, but were soon overwhelmed by a relentless deluge of besprizornye. Even before famine struck the Volga region in 1921, spawning millions of additional starving refugees, Russia’s homeless host of children roamed the country in numbers that far exceeded the government’s capacity to respond. The Volga famine unleashed a new wave of abandoned youth upon detdoma that were already overflowing with victims of previous calamities. Institutions swelled and conditions inside them deteriorated to a level of chaos. Facing conditions that rendered original hopes of education and rehabilitation impossible, officials’ priorities shifted to sheer survival. The state had to save the new generation before it could train it.
By the mid-1920s, the Soviet state had undergone the painful realization that its resources for detdoma were inadequate, that it lacked the capacity to raise and educate the USSR’s besprizornye. The Soviet government now initiated new policies, which combined revolutionary idealism with strategic concession. The state reached out to society for assistance. Foster care was a primary manifestation of the regime’s “bow to necessity;” the enlistment of private families to raise homeless children marked an “about-face” from the original goal of socialist upbringing in state institutions. Night shelters were also strategic concessions: they acted as an inexpensive, “stopgap” source of minimal care where detdoma had failed. The Soviet Union entered the second half of the 1920s having deployed a new range of measures to save homeless youths, and no longer faced anything like the catastrophes that had struck five years earlier. The latter half of the decade brought with it a renewed hope to reclaim the “Revolution’s children.”
During the second half of the 1920s, the conditions of detdoma improved significantly, but enduring deficiencies remained. The Soviet state succeeded in saving besprizornye, but its mission of socialist upbringing stagnated. Most homeless children now received rudimentary shelter and food where before they had not, but the majority of detdoma, especially those in the provinces, wallowed in defects. A report in 1927 presented to The All-Russian Conference of Detdom Personnel stated that over 80% of children’s institutions in the Russian Republic were not organized or operating properly. Troubling questions lingered concerning the health of detdoma and the fate of future Soviet generations. These questions carried over into the 1930s, a decade which brought with it new calamities and new waves of abandoned children.
Social unit
Social unit is a term used in sociology, anthropology, ethnology, and also in animal behaviour studies, zoology and biology to describe a social entity which is part of and participates in a larger social group or society....
in society evolved from revolutionary to conservative; the government of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
first attempted to weaken the family
Family
In human context, a family is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, or co-residence. In most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children...
and then to strengthen it. According to the 1968 law "Principles of Legislation on Marriage and the Family of the USSR and the Union Republics", parents are "to raise their children in the spirit of the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism
Moral Code of the Builder of Communism
Moral Code of the Builder of Communism was a set of twelve codified moral rules in the Soviet Union which every member of the Communist Party of the USSR and every Komsomol member were supposed to follow....
, to attend to their physical development and their instruction in and preparation for socially useful activity."
Evolution of the Soviet family
The early Soviet state sought to remake the family, believing that although the economic emancipation of workers would deprive families of their economic function, it would not destroy them but rather base them exclusively on mutual affection. Religious marriageMarriage
Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found...
was replaced by civil marriage, divorce
Divorce
Divorce is the final termination of a marital union, canceling the legal duties and responsibilities of marriage and dissolving the bonds of matrimony between the parties...
became easy to obtain, and unwed mothers received special protection. All children, whether legitimate or illegitimate, were given equal rights before the law, women were granted sexual equality under matrimonial law, inheritance of property was abolished, and abortion
Abortion
Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...
was legalized.
In the early 1920s, however, the weakening of family ties, combined with the devastation and dislocation caused by the Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
(1918–21), produced a wave of nearly 7 million homeless children. This situation prompted senior party officials to conclude that a more stable family life was required to rebuild the country's economy and shattered social structure. By 1922 the government allowed some forms of inheritance, and after 1926 full inheritance rights were restored. By the late 1920s, adults had been made more responsible for the care of their children, and common-law marriage had been given equal legal status with civil marriage.
During Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
's rule, the trend toward strengthening the family continued. In 1936 the government began to award payments to women with large families, banned abortions, and made divorces more difficult to obtain. In 1942 it subjected single persons and childless married persons to additional taxes. In 1944 only registered marriages were recognized to be legal, and divorce became subject to the court's discretion. In the same year, the government began to award medals to women who gave birth to five or more children and took upon itself the support of illegitimate children.
After Stalin's death in 1953, the government rescinded some of its more restrictive social legislation. In 1955 it declared abortions for medical reasons legal, and in 1968 it declared all abortions legal. The state also liberalized divorce procedures in the mid-1960s but in 1968 introduced new limitations.
In 1974 the government began to subsidize poorer families whose average per capita income did not exceed 50 rubles
Soviet ruble
The Soviet ruble or rouble was the currency of the Soviet Union. One ruble is divided into 100 kopeks, ....
per month (later raised to 75 rubles per month in some northern and eastern regions). The subsidy amounted to 12 rubles per month for each child below eight years of age. It was estimated that in 1974 about 3.5 million families (14 million people, or about 5% of the entire population) received this subsidy. With the increase in per capita income, however, the number of children requiring such assistance decreased. In 1985 the government raised the age limit for assistance to twelve years and under. In 1981 the subsidy to an unwed mother with a child increased to 20 rubles per month; in early 1987 an estimated 1.5 million unwed mothers were receiving such assistance, or twice as many as during the late 1970s.
Family size
Family size and composition depended mainly on the place of residence—urban or rural—and ethnic group. The size and composition of such families was also influenced by housing and income limitations, pensions, and female employment outside the home. The typical urban family consisted of a married couple, two children, and, in about 20% of the cases, one of the grandmothers, whose assistance in raising the children and in housekeeping was important in the large majority of families having two wage earners. Rural families generally had more children than urban families and often supported three generations under one roof. Families in Central AsiaCentral Asia
Central Asia is a core region of the Asian continent from the Caspian Sea in the west, China in the east, Afghanistan in the south, and Russia in the north...
and the Caucasus
Caucasus
The Caucasus, also Caucas or Caucasia , is a geopolitical region at the border of Europe and Asia, and situated between the Black and the Caspian sea...
tended to have more children than families elsewhere in the Soviet Union and included grandparents in the family structure. In general, the average family size followed that of other industrialized countries, with higher income families having both fewer children and a lower rate of infant mortality. From the early 1960s to the late 1980s, the number of families with more than one child decreased by about 50% and in 1988 totaled 1.9 million. About 75% of the families with more than one child lived in the southern regions of the country, half of them in Central Asia. In the Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n, Ukrainian
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
, Belorussian, Moldovian
Moldava
Moldava may refer to:*Moldavia, historical region in Eastern Europe*Moldava nad Bodvou, town in Slovakia*Moldava , village in the Czech Republic- See also :*Republic of Moldova, a country in the south-east of Europe....
, Estonia
Estonia
Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...
n, Latvia
Latvia
Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...
n, and Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...
n republics, families with one and two children constituted more than 90% of all families, whereas in Central Asia those with three or more children ranged from 14% in the Kyrgyz Republic to 31% in the Tajik
Tajik SSR
The Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic , also known as the Tajik SSR for short, was one of the 15 republics that made up the Soviet Union. Located in Central Asia, the Tajik SSR was created on 5 December 1929 as a national entity for the Tajik people within the Soviet Union...
. Surveys suggested that most parents would have had more children if they had had more living space.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, the government promoted family planning
Family planning
Family planning is the planning of when to have children, and the use of birth control and other techniques to implement such plans. Other techniques commonly used include sexuality education, prevention and management of sexually transmitted infections, pre-conception counseling and...
in order to slow the growth of the Central Asian indigenous populations. Local opposition to this policy surfaced especially in the Uzbek
Uzbek SSR
The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic , also known as the Uzbek SSR for short, was one of the republics of the Soviet Union since its creation in 1924...
and Tajik
Tajik SSR
The Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic , also known as the Tajik SSR for short, was one of the 15 republics that made up the Soviet Union. Located in Central Asia, the Tajik SSR was created on 5 December 1929 as a national entity for the Tajik people within the Soviet Union...
republics. In general, however, the government continued publicly to honor mothers of large families. Women received the Motherhood Medal, Second Class, for their fifth live birth and the Mother Heroine medal for their tenth. Most of these awards went to women in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
Family and kinship structures
The extended family was more prevalent in Central Asia and the Caucasus than in the other sections of the country and, generally, in rural areas more than in urban areas. Deference to parental wishes regarding marriage was particularly strong in these areas, even among the Russians residing there.Extended families helped perpetuate traditional life-styles. The patriarchal values that accompany this life-style affected such issues as contraception, the distribution of family power, and the roles of individuals in marriage and the family. For example, traditional Uzbeks placed a higher value on their responsibilities as parents than on their own happiness as spouses and individuals. The younger and better educated Uzbeks and working women, however, were more likely to behave and think like their counterparts in the European areas of the Soviet Union, who tended to emphasize individual careers.
Extended families were not prevalent in the cities. Couples lived with parents during the first years of marriage only because of economics or the housing shortage. When children were born, the couple usually acquired a separate apartment.
Function of family
The government assumed many functions of the pre-Soviet family. Various public institutions, for example, took responsibility for supporting individuals during times of sickness, incapacity, old age, maternity, and industrial injury. State-run nurseries, preschools, schools, clubs, and youth organizations took over a great part of the family's role in socializing children. Their role in socialization was limited, however, because preschools had places for only half of all Soviet children under seven. Despite government assumption of many responsibilities, spouses were still responsible for the material support of each other, minor children, and disabled adult children.The transformation of the patriarchal, three-generation rural household to a modern, urban family of two adults and two children attests to the great changes that Soviet society had undergone since 1917. That transformation did not produced the originally envisioned egalitarianism, but it has forever changed the nature of what was once the Russian Empire
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
.
Abandoned Children, 1918-1930
By the early 1920s, millions of orphaned and abandoned children known as besprizornye crowded cities, towns, and villages across the new Soviet state. By 1922, the Great War, revolution, and Civil War had resulted in the loss of at least 16 million lives within the Soviet Union’s borders, and severed contact between millions of children and their parents. At this time, Bolshevik authorities were faced with an estimated seven million homeless youths.The great Volga famine
Russian famine of 1921
The Russian famine of 1921, also known as Povolzhye famine, which began in the early spring of that year, and lasted through 1922, was a severe famine that occurred in Bolshevik Russia...
of 1921-1922 played a greater role in depriving children of their homes than any other single cause and accounted for some five million deaths. Vast numbers of children were deserted, many abandoning their families themselves, and many parents actively abandoning their children. By the spring of 1921, one-quarter of the peasantry in Soviet Russia was starving. The famine brought with it severe typhus and cholera epidemics which killed off those already weakened by hunger. Where the famine crisis was at its worst, cannibalism was not uncommon, especially with the onset of winter. People ate their own relatives, including their children and siblings. By the summer of 1921, starvation had become so extreme that official plans were begun for mass evacuations of juveniles from afflicted provinces. From June 1921 to September 1922 the state evacuated approximately 150,000 children and moved trainloads of youths across the country in order to lessen the burden placed on institutions and clinics in hungry regions. Foreign relief organizations fed nearly 4.2 million children. The American Relief Administration (ARA) took on 80% of this total. Altogether, including both the state’s and foreign organizations’ distribution of food, close to 5 million youths received occasional meals. However, millions more went unfed.
Begging, peddling, and prostitution were the means by which besprizornye survived. Of these three endeavors, begging was the most widely practiced; it demanded no experience or inventory, and could be carried out anywhere. Destitution often left waifs too physically broken to do more than plea with an open hand. Rather than possible beatings and arrest, indignant rejection was the worst outcome that a beggar faced. The majority of citizens regarded abandoned children as nuisances or threats and refused appeals, but many offered aid without hesitation. Official campaigns spoke out against contributions to young urchins in the fear that such gifts sustained drug addictions and contributed to the ruin of youths. When alms grew scarce, children with more experience and energy sought money through trade. The line between peddling and begging was often indistinct, and urchins possessed meager inventories, but with the elimination of large private enterprises and the Soviet state’s inability to supply more than a “trickle” of consumer products, populations came to rely heavily on this small-scale trade. In many cities there was no adequate alternative. Waifs hawked food, flowers, cigarettes, and all kinds of cheap haberdashery. Tobacco trusts and newspaper companies employed urchins to sell merchandise in the street. Besprizornye also sold their own raw labor; they hauled loads and held places for people in long lines. Swarms of young beggars and peddlers permeated train stations, markets, stores, nightclubs, cinemas, and theaters. Waifs made daily rounds at apartments. On Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, they crowded churches and cemeteries. Restaurants, cafeterias, snack bars, taverns, and all manner of establishments were beset by hordes of homeless youths. Competition for locations was fierce and those who trespassed others’ territories fell victim to knives and beatings. Thousands of children, unable to support themselves through begging and peddling turned to prostitution. Girls especially turned down this path. The height of desperation occurred throughout the famine crisis of 1921-1922; during this time, child prostitution reached its peak. Many youths would sell their bodies for as little as a piece of bread. In 1920, a survey of 5,300 street girls up to the age of fifteen revealed that 88% had engaged in prostitution. Among a smaller assortment of children taken from the Northern Caucasus railroad at the end of the decade, every one of the girls had worked as a prostitute. The majority of young prostitutes were girls, but many boys were similarly experienced. In Khar’kov in the mid 1920s, boy prostitutes tended to be extremely young, usually seven to nine years of age. The number of children forced to sell their bodies increased during harsh winter conditions, when other means of survival became difficult or near impossible. Prostitution had begun to decrease by the middle of the decade, but the number of homeless children continued to rise and child prostitution remained a cause of extreme concern for Soviet authorities.
The existence of millions of homeless youths led to widespread juvenile delinquency throughout Russia. When street children looked beyond begging and petty trade, they turned to stealing. Juvenile crime rose rapidly during WWI and reached its peak during the famine of 1921-1922, at which point juvenile crime was increasing more rapidly than adult crime. Minors arrested by the Russian Republic’s police stood at 6% of all people apprehended in 1920, and reached 10% by the first quarter of 1922. More than other factors, hunger prompted waifs to steal. Robberies became routine, a natural feature of survival on the street. Thefts also provided funds for narcotics, stylish clothes, movie tickets, and other items outside the realm of necessity. On the street, crime could be a form of amusement and adventure. For many waifs, particularly boys, it was an essential “means of proving one’s reliability and prowess” to the rest of a gang. Abandoned children arriving from the countryside were often slower to embrace thievery than those from urban backgrounds, but in general, the longer a child was left astray, the more likely he or she was to succumb to crime. Gangs and groups of children as large as ten or thirty ambushed individuals for their belongings; even healthy men of substantial strength were constantly at risk of being beaten and robbed. Constant illegal activity and life in the street insured contact between besprizornye and the criminal underworld of adults; older vagabonds schooled young newcomers in the art of crime. Street life also forced abandoned children into a torrent of drugs and sex. Tobacco and alcohol addictions ran rampant, and the first half of the 1920s saw the influx of a larger supply of cocaine as well as the development of a more extensive network of drug dealers. Urchins lived and worked in the midst of this network and drug expenses spurred on juveniles’ thefts. In addition to drugs, the street introduced large percentages of its inhabitants to early sexual activity. Waifs generally began their sex lives by the age of fourteen, many girls as early as seven. Rape was pervasive in the underworld and waifs were quickly saturated with sexually transmitted diseases. Crime, drugs, sex, and the harsh nature of life on the street caused a deep imprint on generations of abandoned children. Besprizornye developed and vividly displayed qualities considered threatening by the rest of society. Homelessness yielded bitter fruit: the revolution’s offspring were victims of personality problems, terrible hygiene habits, and severe psychopathic disorders. Despite besprizornye’s deep moral and physical deformities the Soviet government set out not only to save them, but also to develop them into the builders and inheritors of a new, communist society.
Following the October Revolution the new Bolshevik government had taken on the ambitious task of feeding, clothing, and raising a significant share of the country’s children. Government agencies prepared to construct a network of socialist children’s homes that would be capable of raising the nation’s offspring. In a “heady” atmosphere of revolutionary triumph, the regime confidently advocated its vision of replacing the traditional bourgeois family environment with socialist asylums and institutions administered by the state. Communist pedagogy aimed to create a “vast communistic movement among minors.” Narkompros, The People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, assumed primary responsibility for reclaiming homeless juveniles. It relied mainly on children’s homes (sing. detdom; pl. detdoma) to accomplish this. Detdoma provided room and board, education, and activities, all of which were intended to “win” children from the street. These institutions also implemented systems of “self-service” which meant that youths took on chores and made administrative decisions; the intention was for them to gain a sense of self-control and an instinct for the “collective.” The detdoma were inaugurated in a spirit of revolutionary idealism, but were soon overwhelmed by a relentless deluge of besprizornye. Even before famine struck the Volga region in 1921, spawning millions of additional starving refugees, Russia’s homeless host of children roamed the country in numbers that far exceeded the government’s capacity to respond. The Volga famine unleashed a new wave of abandoned youth upon detdoma that were already overflowing with victims of previous calamities. Institutions swelled and conditions inside them deteriorated to a level of chaos. Facing conditions that rendered original hopes of education and rehabilitation impossible, officials’ priorities shifted to sheer survival. The state had to save the new generation before it could train it.
By the mid-1920s, the Soviet state had undergone the painful realization that its resources for detdoma were inadequate, that it lacked the capacity to raise and educate the USSR’s besprizornye. The Soviet government now initiated new policies, which combined revolutionary idealism with strategic concession. The state reached out to society for assistance. Foster care was a primary manifestation of the regime’s “bow to necessity;” the enlistment of private families to raise homeless children marked an “about-face” from the original goal of socialist upbringing in state institutions. Night shelters were also strategic concessions: they acted as an inexpensive, “stopgap” source of minimal care where detdoma had failed. The Soviet Union entered the second half of the 1920s having deployed a new range of measures to save homeless youths, and no longer faced anything like the catastrophes that had struck five years earlier. The latter half of the decade brought with it a renewed hope to reclaim the “Revolution’s children.”
During the second half of the 1920s, the conditions of detdoma improved significantly, but enduring deficiencies remained. The Soviet state succeeded in saving besprizornye, but its mission of socialist upbringing stagnated. Most homeless children now received rudimentary shelter and food where before they had not, but the majority of detdoma, especially those in the provinces, wallowed in defects. A report in 1927 presented to The All-Russian Conference of Detdom Personnel stated that over 80% of children’s institutions in the Russian Republic were not organized or operating properly. Troubling questions lingered concerning the health of detdoma and the fate of future Soviet generations. These questions carried over into the 1930s, a decade which brought with it new calamities and new waves of abandoned children.