From the history of homeless children in Russia
80 years ago, 31 May 1935, a special resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) “On the Elimination of Child Homelessness and Neglect” was issued. The events of the First World War and the Civil War, as well as a number of external and internal conflicts led to the fact that millions of adults died and became refugees, many families were destroyed, this led to the emergence of a huge number of street children. In 1921, they numbered more than 4 million. The state had to take a whole range of targeted measures aimed at solving this problem.Of stories child homelessness
In pre-Christian Russia, the problem of homelessness was not. In the tribal community there was a tradition to take care of the orphans by the whole world, that is, together. In general, the community in Russia existed in one form or another until the beginning of the 20th century; therefore, in rural areas, the problem of orphans was solved in a natural way. However, with the advent of the state there is also a policy of taking care of children. The collection of legal norms of the Russian state, “Russkaya Pravda”, charged guardians with “grieving” about orphans (article 99). The term “to grieve” meant care for the upbringing of orphans, patronage of those who “will not hesitantly [will not] be able to grieve themselves”. In addition, orphans since ancient times have been the concern of the church.
In the days of Ivan the Terrible, there already existed a state policy of caring for orphans. Orphanages during this period were in charge of the Patriarchal Order. Stoglavy Cathedral decided to open schools in churches to teach children literacy and almshouses for the "orphaned and the weak."
Under Peter Alekseevich, she was encouraged to create shelters in which she received illegitimate. One of the first large orphan state houses was erected in 1706 by the Novgorod Metropolitan Iona at the Kholm-Uspensky Monastery. Monasteries were instructed to create schools, to teach children to read and count. One of these “orphan monasteries” was the Novodevichy, which received decent maintenance from the state treasury for the maintenance and upbringing of orphans. In 1718, Peter Alekseevich ordered “young and poor children” to be attributed to cloth and other manufactories. The number of homeless children, orphans sharply increased during the period of wars and unrest, when social and family ties were destroyed. The reign of Peter was a period of social upheaval. Therefore, poorhouses and hospitals were overcrowded and, on the royal order of the children, they began to be given to families for upbringing, and those who had already been 12 years were transferred to the fleet by young boys. Under Peter the First's successors, the educational homes were closed.
In the future, the charity (care) system was developed under Empress Catherine II. Under her patronage, there were "educational homes" and shelters. Their main task was to give the child shelter for a while, and then transfer it to a “well-meaning” family. In educational homes tried to give a "good education." The purpose of the empress was to create a third estate of educated people who would serve the motherland and own various crafts. At the same time, the church continued to take care of the orphans. Unlike the western church, which saw its main task in providing shelter and food to orphans, the Russian church not only provided shelter and bread, but also assumed the function of bringing up, primary education and treating children without parents. By the XIX century, almost all significant monasteries had almshouses and shelters with them.
In the 19th century, when capitalist relations began to develop actively in Russia, cities grew, the old social and family ties collapsed, there was a serious increase in the number of orphans. The 1812 War of the Year, sweeping through the fiery rampage through the western and central provinces, resulted in a large number of orphans. The number of orphans in educational homes grew rapidly, and no radical measures were taken to transform the charity system. As a result, conditions of detention seriously deteriorated. Large crowding, lack of food, poor medical care led to a very high mortality rate among orphans. Thus, under Emperor Alexander I, mortality in educational homes sometimes reached 75%.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the growth in the number of orphans continued. In 1911, in 438, there were shelters for 14439 children of pre-school and early school age. By 1917, 538 orphanages operated on the territory of the Russian state, where there were 29650 children. Shelters belonged to the spiritual and military departments, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The life of such shelters was strictly regulated. A significant part of the shelters belonged to private charities. Many shelters lived through self-sufficiency and self-sufficiency, which led to the involvement of children in production.
In the second half of the XIX century. to the problems of orphans connected to the public. The Russian public was engaged in the problems of legislation, the education and upbringing of children, the protection of orphans from criminal influence, the creation of special institutions for convicted juveniles. One of the main ills was considered the influence of the criminal environment on orphans. Then the children were kept together with adult prisoners. Therefore, they established special institutions for the maintenance of juvenile offenders, children of prisoners, as well as beggars, abandoned and homeless children.
Legislation developed, courts for minors were created. There were correctional facilities for suspected and accused children. Minors were placed in such places by a court decision. Children who left prison were living and working in such shelters for some time (sometimes for several years). In these institutions, where the internal routine of life was similar to that in correctional institutions, the children had to undergo a kind of preparation for ordinary life. Minors received general and vocational education, physical education. For example, such a shelter existed in Struga, where adolescents who volunteered from Warsaw's main prison arrived on a voluntary basis.
In total in Russia there were about a hundred correctional institutions of different types for children. According to the law “On educational and correctional institutions for minors” of 19 in April of 1909, such institutions had an educational, preventive nature and should have been referred to as educational and correctional. At the same time, in a number of institutions, the internal regime practically did not differ from the prison regime.
The Soviet period
During the First World War and the Civil War there was a sharp surge in street children. In 1921, according to various sources of homeless children in the country, there were 4,5-7 million people. It took 15 years to solve this problem. In the USSR, the fight against homelessness became a political task, since a huge number of street children and a strong increase in juvenile delinquency violated the stability of the state. To solve this problem it took great efforts of the state and the whole of Soviet society as a whole.
After the October Revolution 1917, the system of private charities was eliminated. The problem of orphans was fully assumed by the Soviet state. The main factors in the fight against juvenile delinquency were educational and preventive work. The goals of education have been changed, subordinated to the new ideology. Personality had to obey the goals of society. In addition, it is necessary to take into account the factor that children's neglect and crime (often worse than an adult) has become an epidemic. “Children’s homelessness, which is often in the most ugly, horrific forms, like child crime, prostitution, threatens the younger generation with the most dire consequences,” said F. Dzerzhinsky. The problem was necessary to solve in the shortest possible time. Therefore, literally all the available forces were mobilized to eliminate child homelessness and all resources were attracted, and in a country devastated by a long war, destroyed, and so there were extremely few. However, the Soviet government believed that children were the future of the country, so this problem was solved, despite other problems.
Literally, all the institutions of the young Soviet state were involved in the rescue of children, from the government and the All-Russian Emergency Commission headed by F.E. Dzerzhinsky to the village councils and committees of the poor. In the cities, they established educational and labor schools, orphanages, developed individual patronage and mentoring. A unique Soviet school of re-education of “difficult” adolescents (often actually hardened criminals) appeared, in which the outstanding role was played by the Soviet teacher Anton Semenovich Makarenko.
In 1917, in orphanages there were about 30 thousand children, in 1919 - 125 thousand in 1921-1922 years. - 540 thousand minors. Children were cared for by various bodies and departments: the NKVD, the people's commissariats of education and health, the party organs, the Komsomol, trade unions, women's departments, etc. The police and the criminal investigation department also dealt with the homeless. In 1920, a children's police was created. Children were engaged and public organizations established by representatives of the intelligentsia. In 1918, on the initiative of V.G. Korolenko in Soviet Russia was established League for the Salvation of Children. The league created children's colonies, clubs and gardens. League institutions usually occupied 2-3 rooms, where they worked with small groups of children in 20-30 people. Since 1921, all the institutions of the League have passed to the Moscow Department of National Education. Another such organization was the Council for the Protection of Children, chaired by the People's Commissar of Education A. V. Lunacharsky.
In the autumn of 1921, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee set up a commission to improve the lives of children, headed by Dzerzhinsky (the so-called DCHK, a children's emergency commission). The main method of fighting homelessness was to determine orphans in boarding schools. There were reception and distribution points where teachers and doctors worked with children. Then the children were sent to children's institutions of permanent residence (orphanages, boarding schools, children's camps, colonies, etc.), returned to parents, relatives, and more adults could be employed.
The main burden of work with street children was taken on by the local public education authorities (IT). The IT department included the departments of social and legal protection of minors (SPON). The SPON consisted of: a guardianship table, a children's address table, a legal advisory unit and a commission on juvenile affairs (“rooms”). The governing body was the Central Commission for Minors. In addition, there were children's social inspections (JI), which had the functions of mercy societies and the morality police. If the departments of social and legal protection of minors were more engaged in paperwork and working out tasks, the DSI inspectors worked on the “ground”, conducting raids on homeless children, carried out surveys on the conditions of children in shelters, etc. There were not enough inspectors total 1922 people. Therefore, a significant part of the homeless remained unattended.
The juvenile affairs commission dealt with the affairs of minors. Initially, the system to combat homelessness was simple: the child was taken from the street, transferred to a reception center, and from there to an orphanage. However, this led to the overflow of orphanages, which the state could no longer contain. In 1923, orphanages were transferred to the maintenance of local budgets. As a result, the number of children's homes and children in them has decreased dramatically. In the 1923 year, compared with 1922, the number of orphanages decreased from 6063 to 3971, children in them - from 540 thousand to 253 thousand people. Over the next five years, the number of children in orphanages was halved. Moreover, the situation of children in them was very deplorable. Especially difficult situation was in the receiver-distributors.
However, in general, the stabilization and positive dynamics of the development of the Soviet state led to a natural reduction of homelessness, the wave of the most unattractive phenomena was managed to be brought down, although it was still far from a complete solution of the problem.
The institution of patronage was developing when children were transferred to the families of workers under the control of local authorities and the public. A more effective system of work with adolescents has emerged: educational conversations, comments; return to the family or device to a new one; supervision of the child's behavior; placement in a closed child care facility.
The 1922 Penal Code mitigated the regime for homeless children: the minor accused was classified as a mitigating circumstance, it became possible to widely apply conditional convictions to adolescents, to replace the criminal punishment by the court with educational measures that were considered sufficient to accomplish the task of correcting the culprit. The system of institutions for the correction and re-education of difficult adolescents consisted of two elements: closed residential institutions with a strict regime, compulsory general and vocational training and labor houses in cities, labor colonies in rural areas.
In 1924, the First Moscow Conference on Combating Homelessness was held, at which Krupskaya and Lunacharsky focused on the social danger of homelessness. In Krupskaya’s speech, it was noted that the elimination of homelessness is “the issue of non-charity is a question of the health of the entire social organism.” Lunacharsky said: “The point is not only that we are surrounded by a whole sea of children's grief, but also that we risk getting anti-social, antisocial people out of these children ... who will join the army of crime.” As a result, in 1926, the Soviet government adopted the Regulation on Combating Homelessness and approved a three-year plan for this struggle. In 1928, the task was set to destroy child homelessness as soon as possible.
Emphasis was placed on the fight against street crime. The “removal” of street children from the streets took on the character of military operations, in which officers of the OGPU, the police and the criminal investigation took part. After raids, homeless children were placed in receivers and orphanages. For this, we had to urgently unload receivers-distributors and children's homes. Orphans passed to the families of peasants and handicraftsmen. In order to interest them, they were provided with additional land for each child, they were exempted from the single land tax for 3, the child received the right to free education, families received a one-time allowance.
However, by the end of the 1920s, homelessness could not be done away with. According to Krupskaya, by the beginning of the 1930-s more than 2 million children had the number of unaccompanied minors. In 1935, the resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) “On the Elimination of Child Homelessness and Neglect” was published. Indeed, it was possible to bring down the wave of mass homelessness, to create a system for combating juvenile offenders, their re-education, involvement in the normal life of Soviet society. But it was not possible to completely end homelessness.
After the start of the Great Patriotic War, a new wave of homelessness has risen, child crime has increased. The Soviet authorities again had to take extraordinary measures to organize the fight against juvenile delinquency and the elimination of homelessness.
Information