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

A time of great hardship, the Second World War became a consequential episode in the history of Soviet childhood policies. The growing social problem of juvenile homelessness and delinquency alerted the government to the need for a comprehensive child protection programme. Nevertheless, by prioritizing public order over welfare, the Stalinist state created conditions that exacerbated the situation even further, transforming an existing problem into a nation-wide crisis. In this comprehensive account based on exhaustive archival research, Olga Kucherenko investigates the plight of more than a million street children and the state s role in the reinforcement of their ranks. By looking at wartime dislocation, Soviet child welfare policies, juvenile justice and the shadow world both within and without the Gulag, Soviet Street Children and the Second World War challenges several of the most pervasive myths about the Soviet Union at war. It is, therefore, as much an investigation of children on the margins of Soviet society as it is a study of the impact of war and state policies on society itself. Review "This volume contributes to four subjects in Soviet history: the history of the home front during World War II, childhood, social welfare policies and institutions, and children's colonies and labor in the Gulag. Anyone teaching or pursuing research on these topics will find valuable information to enrich lectures or explain the institutions encountered in other research materials ... [The] text is also accessible to advanced undergraduate students." - Journal of Modern History"The study is argumentative but scholarly, including 69 pages of supporting materials." - CHOICE"Uncovering the stories of wartime street children, Kucherenko makes a significant contribution to the history of childhood. The book also constitutes a provocative intervention in debates on the nature of Stalinism. Kucherenko not only challenges the heroic narrative of exemplary Soviet care for children; she argues that Soviet officials indifferent to children's suffering and partial to repression as a means of social control deserve much of the blame for producing, brutalizing, and then forgetting millions of homeless and abandoned children." - Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth About the Author Olga Kucherenko is the author of Little Soldiers: How Soviet Children Went to War, 1941-45 (2011). She is a former Research Fellow at St. John s College, Cambridge, UK.