Research Focus Group Talk: “Children are an Extraordinary Plastic Material”: Juvenile Homelessness and Delinquency in the Early Soviet Union

The symbol of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in public memory in Russia and abroad has been the tragedy of the Romanovs’ family in which five children of Nicholas II and Alexandra had been executed by the Bolsheviks, along with their parents. What is less salient in public commemoration is the fact that thousands of ordinary children died in the years after the Revolution from hunger, diseases, and overall neglect as direct causes of the turbulent revolutionary time. Children became immediate victims of the collapse of the Russian empire and the Bolsheviks’ fierce fight for power. A combination of manmade disasters – First World War, 1917 Revolution and the Civil War, the policies of war communism, and the resulting famine of 1921–22 – led to hundreds of thousands of abandoned children. Children lost their parents, relatives, homes, and lives to the Bolshevik cause.

This talk explores the politics of the nascent Soviet state towards childhood. In the 1920s–30s, children were seen as an “extraordinary plastic material” by both scientific and political actors who proposed that institutionalization and “productive” labor would create the environment that would nurture anti-criminal habits and proletarian identities for young Soviet citizens in the making. To address the problem of children’s homelessness and crime, special homes and labor communes for orphans and young offenders were opened under the auspices of both the Ministry of Enlightenment and OGPU (political police) and were run by educators pioneering methods of rehabilitating troubled adolescents through collective labor. Noi will analyze several representative children’s homes and juvenile colonies of the 1920s–30s designed as places of experiments with ideas of human transformation. She will discuss how in the early Soviet Union the criminality of juvenile delinquents was considered reversible through the change in their environment – through institutionalization in communes/colonies and collective work in agriculture and industry.

Alexandra Noi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her B.A. and M.A. in China Studies before completing a Ph.D. in Modern Chinese Literature from St. Petersburg State University. At UCSB, she is pursuing her second Ph.D. in Soviet and Chinese history. She is interested in exploring the historical connections between modern science and incarceration. Her research problematizes the analysis of authoritarianism and state violence by uncovering entanglements between their political ideologies and contemporary scientific ideas and practices.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group