IngentaConnect Between Salvation and Liquidation: Homeless and Vagrant Children ...

Author: Fürst, Juliane¹

Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Volume 86, Number 2, 1 April 2008 , pp. 232-258(27)

Publisher: Modern Humanities Research Association

Abstract:

Homeless and vagrant children were one of the most visible and traumatic consequences of the Soviet experience of World War Two. They were living testimony not only to the physical destruction and hardship of a merciless war fought largely on Soviet territory but also to the ideological fractures in the Soviet system. The latter's doctrine of happy Soviet childhoods had to give way in the face of hundreds of thousands of needy and often delinquent and disobedient children. This article examines the rhetoric that surrounded the problem of child besprizornost' and beznadzornost', analyses Soviet society's responses to both the phenomenon itself and to official policy dealing with the phenomenon, and reconstructs the world in which these `non-Soviet' children of the post-war era lived. It argues that it was precisely the high expectations of `perfect Soviet childhoods' that prevented the acknowledgment of post-war trauma and led to the ideological and physical exclusion of those who did not fit the narrative of quick integration and salvation. Ultimately, the way the Soviet system and society related to the problem of child homelessness and delinquency reveals much of the political and ideological contradictions that were characteristic for the late Stalinist years, yet also indicates how the central and defining Soviet device of integration through discriminatory exclusion was resurrected and maintained in the decades to come.

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Between Salvation and Liquidation: Homeless and Vagrant Children and the Reconstruction of Soviet Society