!£ Now My And Soul Hardened Is Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia. 1918-1930 Alan M. Ball Now My And Soul Hardened Is Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930 Alan M. Ball Few who traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1920s failed to bring back accounts of homeless children prowling city streets. As the visitors discovered, years of warfare, epi- demics, and famine had deprived several mil- lion juveniles of adult supervision and strewn them across the nation as beggars, peddlers, prostitutes, and thieves. In these roles they enter Alan Ball's initial chapters, occupying a realm that stretched from secluded under- world haunts to bustling train stations and outdoor markets. Here, often in surprising fashion, legions of young vagrants sought — shelter, sustenance, and recreation and acquired an outlook that seemed incorrigible to other citizens. These children alarmed Soviet authorities as well, for the magnitude of the problem threatened plans to mold a new socialist generation. The millions of waifs appeared to form an embryonic criminal element large enough to darken Bolshevik dreams unless the government could rehabilitate them as "state children," trained to build a better society. How, then, did officials proceed? What strategies did they develop for round- ing up youths and steering them from the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY Digitized by the Internet Archive 2012 in http://archive.org/details/andnowmysoulishaOOalan And Now My Soul Is Hardened Now My And Soul Hardened Is Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930 Alan M. Ball UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London • • UniversityofCalifornia Press Berkeley and LosAngeles, California UniversityofCalifornia Press,Ltd. London,England © 1994 by The RegentsoftheUniversityofCalifornia LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData Ball, Alan M. And nowmy soulishardened : abandonedchildrenin SovietRussia, 1918-1930/Alan M. Ball, p. cm. Includes bibliographicalreferencesand index. ISBN0-520-08010-6(alk. paper) — — 1. Abandonedchildren SovietUnion History. I.Title. HV887.S58B35 1994 362.7 '6 '094709041—dc20 92-46236 CIP Printed in theUnited StatesofAmerica 987654321 The paper used in this publication meetsthe minimum—requirementsof American National Standard forInformationSciences PermanenceofPaper © forPrinted LibraryMaterials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.