Soviet Street Children and the Second World War

Soviet historians, journalists and educational specialists long repeated the triumphalist myth that the Soviet state was ‘unparalleled’ in its benevolent approach to child welfare during the Second World War. Olga Kucherenko challenges this assertion by focusing on the wartime experiences of street children, defined broadly as homeless (besprizornye) and unsupervised (beznadzornye) youth. The myth of unrivalled care for children was carefully constructed by the image-conscious Soviet state even during the war years. As the fragmented statistics on child displacement were classified and discussions of the prosecution of children were largely absent from newspapers, widespread juvenile delinquency was ‘ousted from collective memory’ (p. 173). Kucherenko revises this narrative by moving street children from the social margins to the centre of the history of the Great Patriotic War. Throughout the book, Kucherenko convincingly argues that there was a significant disjuncture between state objectives and the corresponding reality, drawing on extensive archival research and careful consideration of personal memoirs. Legislation promoted the resocialisation of juvenile delinquents through education and occupational training, yet central government failed to allocate appropriate funding or resources. Regional administrators struggled to implement, or in some cases deliberately ignored, the ambitious policies put forward by those in power. The combination of extremely harsh punitive practices on the one hand, and the corruption and apathy of both central and local authorities on the other, further destabilised the already precarious lives of Soviet youth housed within state institutions, penitentiaries and labour colonies

Criminology · Government (linguistics · Legislation · Memoir · Mythology · Political science · Punitive damages · Sociology · State (computer science · European history and politics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law