Homelessness and the Hungarian Story of Criminalisation

Victoria Sztanek

In a bid to control poverty with punitive measures, the Hungarian government recently criminalized one of the most visible manifestations of homelessness: ‘sleeping rough’. A recent October 2018 Constitutional amendment banning sleeping on Hungarian streets, has attracted much domestic and international criticism on the basis of human rights violations and infringement of the European Pillar of Social Rights. However, despite recent attention, such discourses, which place the blame for poverty on the individual, have been present for many years in Hungarian politics. The path to the criminalization of homelessness was laid decades ago.

Since the late 1980s, the Eighth District of Budapest, Józsefváros, has been considered one of the capital’s poorest neighbourhoods, though like many areas in Budapest, it has undergone gentrification in recent years.[1] The former mayor of Józsefváros, Máté Kocsis (who was also responsible for addressing homelessness on a national level) launched a public order campaign in 2011, banning ‘dumpster diving and rough sleeping’  in conjunction with a wider local law that forbade living in public spaces in Budapest.[2] Unsurprisingly, hundreds of homeless people have subsequently been detained for routine daily actions like ‘living in public space, public urination, consumption of alcohol, picking through garbage and begging’.[3] In April 2012, the Hungarian Parliament went further and made living and keeping one’s belongings in public spaces illegal, effectively furthering the ban of visible homelessness.[4]

The Hungarian Constitutional Court, in an effort to uphold the values of human dignity and property it had established during a period of judicial activism in the early 1990s, declared this ‘anti-homeless’ legislation unconstitutional, annulling it in November 2012.[5] In response, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán amended the Constitution, allowing local authorities ‘the right to decide whether homeless people can live permanently on their streets or not’, reflecting both Orbán’s increasingly authoritarian leadership, and the diminishing authority of the historically progressive Constitutional Court.[6] As a result, many local authorities passed decrees in line with Orbán’s anti-homeless agenda. This agenda was justified by the aims of protecting ‘public order, public security, public health and cultural values’. With a two-thirds majority in its support, the amendment passed in 2013, and it has subsequently been scrutinized by international watchdogs as an indicator of a deteriorating democracy.[7]

An example of ‘sleeping rough’ in Budapest’s Fifth District, taken November 2016. Image provided by the author.

This punitive anti-homeless legislative agenda belongs to a broader political and media discourse regarding ‘the “undeserving” and delinquent poor populations’.[8] The media tends to report on ‘cases where homeless individuals are allegedly involved in gruesome crimes’, portrayals which dehumanize them, and marginalize them from ‘mainstream’ society. [9] Eoin Devereux highlights this discourse of differentiation in media where sensationalist reality TV shows such as now-cancelled ‘The Big Chance’, have homeless contestants compete in a style akin to that of the TV show ‘Big Brother’. Devereux’s research demonstrates how the homeless of Budapest are portrayed as addicted to alcohol, gambling and smoking, and in need of moral salvation, which can be attained only by owning up to their own personal laziness.[10]

The emphasis on explaining ‘poverty and exclusion in terms of individual weaknesses’ not only contributes to a culture inopportune for cultivating real solutions, but also reflects a certain continuity with socialist times, when citing structural reasons as an explanatory factor for homelessness was forbidden as a critique of the socialist system, which should have rendered social inequality obsolete. [11] Socialism proposes principles of collectivism and a more equal society, with a remit that involved the central distribution of public housing and nationalization of apartment buildings.[12]  In the hands of Hungary’s twentieth-century leaders, this programme also included significant limitations on personal freedoms, including criticisms of the state. Instead of state responsibility, personal deviances were blamed for social inequality and homelessness, and in the 1950s poverty was declared non-existent.[13]

During this period, however, government programmes for social housing and work were set in place, including shelters to accommodate workers. Once social welfare policies were employed, alcoholics or individuals deemed to be living idly were subject to punitive measures.[14]   These punitive measures included work therapy institutions that resembled a jail workhouse as well as ‘deportation to correctional facilities’. Individuals charged and ‘arrested for the ‘dangerous avoidance of work’ faced fines and compulsory work.[15]

The transition from socialism in the 1990’s included an economic crisis that left many people unemployed and homeless. Inequality in the distribution of wealth also widened, where privatization afforded already ‘wealthy and, above all, educated people’ with ‘better housing at the beginning of the privatization wave’[16]. The political transition saw a re-stratification of society and made homelessness and poverty more visible, as the Hungarian economy suffered. The legacy of socialism and the thirty-year-old transition into capitalism is therefore incredibly relevant to understanding the context of the housing crisis today. Now, similar policies and ideas are used under Orbán’s increasingly authoritarian reign, where the aesthetics of presenting an orderly country are paramount and freedom of speech suffers.

In 2011, Hungary introduced a similar, highly controversial compulsory work program that forces long-term unemployed individuals, including some homeless, to work at a rate lower than the minimum wage.[17] In 2019, the gap between public workers earnings and the minimum wage widened when the government froze wages for the third year in a row. The program contributes to a flawed statistic of decreasing unemployment, which the Hungarian government cites to insist poverty is decreasing substantially.

While an average of 200,000 participants are considered ‘employed’ under the public works scheme, these numbers don’t capture the lived experience of those in poverty nor the full picture of employment. It also acts as a scapegoat for the government, as the unemployed technically have the opportunity to find employment through these work programs. However, it does not address practical barriers like mental health issues, addictions and physical disabilities. Additionally, those who earn such meager wages still live in poor conditions and while they may not be so visible on the streets, they are at risk of dying in their homes due to the effects of poverty. Moreover, the statistics used to justify the reduction of poverty highlight the glorification of a program that is punitive and exploitative in nature.

The leading grassroots advocacy organization for homelessness and housing rights The City is For All (A Város Mindenkié), reports that there were almost 600 criminal cases between 2013 and 2016 involving homeless people arrested for ‘sleeping in public spaces’, with the majority resulting in the ‘warning of mandatory public work’. On the ground, those subjected to punitive measures are not offered viable or practical alternatives to the housing insecurity they face. Institutional responses to homelessness have mostly consisted of emergency solutions and an ineffective shelter system, neglecting to focus on exit strategies or the diverse needs of the homeless. Shelters that do exist are usually dangerous, causing many people to avoid them and further contributing to the visibility of people living on the streets.[18]

Efforts to decrease the visibility of people living on the streets have been extended by the October 2018 Constitutional amendments. These amendments strip away the choice of individual municipalities to criminalize the act of habituating public premises in their jurisdiction. In effect, if those identified by police refuse to go to shelters or enroll in the compulsory work programme, they can face jail and have their belongings confiscated.

A “homeless” camp in Hungary. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

While homeless people are being pushed outside of visible spaces to help create an image of order on Hungarian streets, social justice groups like A Város Mindenkié are visible in their active petition against the government.  In the media, organizations that serve the 1,200 homeless in Budapest bring awareness to the issue of poverty, despite a government that strives to hide it.[19] Perhaps offering a glimmer of hope for more liberal politics, a recent October 2019 city election saw the victory of Gergely Karácsony as mayor of Budapest. Karácsony provides an encouraging alternative to the far-right and increasingly authoritarian reign of Orbán’s Fidesz party. Karácsony has proposed a plan to improve homeless shelters before winter approaches, and his election invokes a cautious sentiment of hope in the capital of a nation that has seen the encroachment of authoritarianism and a backslide in democratic values for decades.

The tendency to blame individuals and their ‘poor choices’ for their current socioeconomic positioning is a phenomenon not unique to Hungary. It is however, important to note that Hungary is the first nation where criminalizing homelessness is ‘explicitly enacted in the highest law of the nation.’[20]  It is also a country with inadequate and short-term institutional solutions for homeless people. When coupled with punitive legislation, poverty is reinforced and reproduced, punishing an already vulnerable population. These punitive measures coincide neatly with blaming individuals and their personal choices to avoid a critical analysis of the system, like under socialist times, structures and policies that contributed to their circumstances. The public works program and the criminalization of homelessness operate as an expression of power and authority, to keep statistics of unemployment favorable as well as to ensure tidiness and order on Hungarian streets.

Victoria Sztanek is a writer with an M.A. from the University of Toronto, Centre for European, Eurasian and Russian Studies. She has worked in the due diligence industry and is a Certified Anti Money Launderer. She  specializes on topics such as financial crime and is passionate about the environment and social justice issues. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

References

[1] Marton Czirfusz, Vera Horvath, Csaba Jelinek, Zsuzsanna Posfai, Linda Szabo, ‘Gentrification and Rescaling Urban Governance in Budapest – Jozsefvaros’, Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics, 4, no. 1, (2015), pp. 62, 72.

[2] Eva T. Udvarhelyi, ‘“If we don’t push homeless people out, we will end up being pushed out by them”: The criminalization of Homelessness as State Strategy in Hungary’, Antipode, 46, no. 3, (2014), p. 821.

[3] Ibid., p. 821.

[4] Ibid., p. 823.

[5] Deena A. Zakim, ‘Housing over Handcuffs: the Criminalization of Homelessness in Hungary’, Suffolk Transnational Law Review, 37, no. 1, (2014), p. 146.

[6]  Orbán’s amendment is cited from Zakim, ‘Housing over Handcuffs’, p. 148. Historically the Hungarian Constitutional Court has played a pivotal role in the development of democratic practices through the country’s transition from socialism. Legal scholar Kim Lane Scheppele notes how since the early 2000s, structural changes have immobilized the Court’s independence and effectiveness, with recent rulings showing ‘a strong tendency to defer to the new government’. Kim Lane Scheppele, ‘Guardians of the constitution: constitutional court presidents and the struggle for the rule of law in post-Soviet Europe’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 154, no. 6, (2006), p. 1786.

[7] Ibid., p. 163.

[8] Czirfusz, Horvath, Jelinek, Posfai, Szabo, ‘Gentrification and Rescaling Urban Governance in Budapest – Jozsefvaros’, p. 72.

[9] Udvarhelyi, ‘“If we don’t push homeless people out, we will end up being pushed out by them”’, p. 820.

[10] Eoin Devereux, ‘Thinking Outside the Charity Box: Media Coverage of Homelessness’, European Journal of Homelessness, 9, no. 2 (2015), p. 268.

[11] Eva T. Udvarhelyi, “‘You People Would Keep on Dwelling’: Twentieth-Century State Responses to Homeless in Hungary from Above and Below,” Journal of Urban History, 41, no. 4 (2015) p 700.

[12] Bence, Rita and Udvarhelyi, Eva T, ‘The Growing Criminalization of Homelessness in Hungary – A Brief Overview,’ European Journal of Homelessness 7, no. 2 (2013), p. 134.

[13] Udvarhelyi, ‘”You People Would Keep on Dwelling”’,p. 700.

[14] Housing Rights Watch. “Mean Streets A Report on the Criminalisation of Homelessness In Europe” http://www.housingrightswatch.org/sites/default/files/Mean%20Streets%20-%20Full.pdf p. 103 (accessed January 9, 2020).

[15] Győri, P. (2010) Fedél Nélküli Emberek (Részlet).

[16] Judit Bodnar, ‘”He That Hath to Him Shall be Given”:  Housing Privatization in Budapest after State Socialism’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 20, no. 4, (1996), p. 631.

[17] T.E. Budapest, ‘Public works in Hungary – Do as the Chinese do’, The Economist http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2011/06/public-works-hungary (accessed December 20, 2015).

[18] Udvarhelyi, “‘If we don’t push homeless people out, we will end up being pushed out by them’, p. 816.; Zakim, “Housing over Handcuffs”, p. 138.

[19] Than, Kirsztina, ‘Sandwiches and Hope for Christmas’, December 11, 2019, Reuters https://www.reuters.com/article/us-christmas-season-hungary-bikers/budapest-bikers-hand-out-sandwiches-and-hope-for-christmas-idUSKBN1YF1RB (accessed December 11, 2019).

[20] Udvarhelyi, “‘If we don’t push homeless people out, we will end up being pushed out by them’”, p. 824.

‘An amoral lifestyle’ – criminalizing female sexuality in the Soviet 1960s

by Mirjam Galley

That the USSR did not turn out to be the utopia of gender equality that some revolutionaries had dreamt of in 1917 can no longer really surprise anyone. A glimpse into how the Soviet authorities dealt with juvenile delinquency allows us to fathom the extent to which boys and girls were thought of and treated differently. Looking at how deviance and sexuality were addressed in the 1960s also point to the limits of so-called ‘liberalization’ under Nikita Khrushchev.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet leaders were left with a difficult legacy. His successor Khrushchev had to find a way of reinventing Soviet socialism and removing the taint of Stalinist terror. To prevent the destabilization of the Soviet regime, Khrushchev needed to come up with a way to ensure public order and impose certain norms of behaviour without ubiquitous state terror.

The Soviet 1960s were shaped by a fear of deviance, a fear which was rekindled time and again by actual or perceived waves of juvenile crime. These fears were predominantly evoked around the image of unsupervised youths hanging out in the streets, in staircases, and in the dvory (courtyards), where they were thought to be drinking, smoking, and gambling, all seen as gateways into delinquency and crime.[1]

These anxieties were often personified by the ‘hooligan.’[2] The ‘hooligan’ was the concept most widely invoked in Soviet society to label deviant behaviour. As Brian LaPierre has shown, hooliganism was mainly a ‘crime’ committed by working class

Group of young people walking through Moscow, 1964 (courtesy of CREEES, UVA, via Wikimedia Commons)

men. This might suggest that in the Soviet Union, deviance was ‘male’. A closer look at convictions of underage boys and girls, however, shows that there was also ‘female’ deviance, and that Soviet notions of delinquency and deviance were deeply gendered. Archival documents reveal surprisingly conservative notions of gender roles and sexuality within the Soviet system of justice and even among youths.

At first glance, this seems surprising in a state claiming to have ‘freed’ women and reached the equality of the sexes. Instead, bureaucrats worked with crude impressions of ‘fallen women’ and resorted to victim blaming in cases of sexual abuse and rape. Although there were also girls who committed crimes, it seems like girls were mostly sent to institutions for delinquent minors (reform colonies or ‘special’ schools) for promiscuity (amoral behaviour), or even prostitution – if they could prove that money had been exchanged. Boys, on the other hand, would be sent away most frequently for hooliganism, theft, or assault.

To compare these gendered notions of deviance, I will look at two inspection reports from 1962 about so-called collection and distribution points (priemniki), one for boys in Leningrad and one for girls in Pushkin. Minors would be brought to these places by the police, and wait there to be transferred to an institution. The Leningrad priemnik mostly held boys waiting to be sent to a reform colony. These boys were accused of theft, hooliganism, drunkenness, and ‘refusing to study or work.’ The report also mentions particularly bad previous cases, such as stealing state property, breaking into apartments, organizing gangs, escaping from a colony, and rape.[3]

In contrast, the report about the 11 girls waiting in the Pushkin priemnik for their place in a colony shows most interest in their sexual behaviour, which is vividly described. The girls would either roam around at night or had left home to stay with some guy. The men in question are named as shady people, foreigners (in one case Swedish tourists), soldiers, delinquent people, ‘unknown’ men, people from the Jazz scene – covering every possible stereotype of a bad match for ‘good Soviet girls.’ According to the report, most of the girls were either skipping school, misbehaving or drinking and smoking. Five of them lived in a boarding school, two were students, four had dropped out or were between jobs. Their families (often single parents) are mostly described as drinkers, as leading ‘an amoral lifestyle,’ or as mentally ill.

The report emphasizes cases in which girls exerted a bad influence on their environment, either literally by catching (and potentially spreading) venereal diseases – two of them had been hospitalized for gonorrhoea – or more metaphorically by ‘having amoral conversations in her boarding school’s dorm,’ and ‘tainting’ the other girls at her school. Another common feature is the failure of other agencies to influence or re-educate them, be it schools, factory ‘collectives’, the Komsomol, the police or house committees.

Only one of the girls committed an actual crime; aside from all of her deviant acts, she committed a rather grim act of cruelty against animals.[4] Although the boys and

Young women walking through Revolution Square, Moscow, 1964 (image courtesy of CREEES, UVA, via Wikimedia Commons)

girls found themselves in similar institutions and came from similar social(ly destitute) backgrounds, they are convicted for very different offenses and could hardly have been described more differently.

Another such case demonstrating the gendered notions of deviance is the conviction of a 14-year-old girl to a reform colony for leading an ‘amoral life style’, which included running away from school and petty theft. The Latvian prosecution chose to protest against this conviction, as the story behind it is rather tragic, and the girl was not known for misbehaving. A 20-year-old man had (illegally!) started a relationship with this girl and was terrorizing her emotionally. When her schoolmaster found out that the girl was sexually active, he persuaded her mother to send her to a boarding school. The man continued pursuing the girl and threatened to break up with her if she did not come to see him at once.

Scared, she ran away from school, stole some clothes to wear, and went to meet him. She was picked up by the militsiia (police) and brought back to school, where the headmaster chose to put her in ‘quarantine’ for three weeks and then had her sent to a colony, bullying her mother into agreeing to this. At the time of the prosecution’s protest, the girl was stuck in a priemnik, awaiting transfer. The prosecutor demanded for her to be sent back, and for the security forces to charge the guy who had abused and pressured her instead, as seemingly no one had thought of this before. The commission in charge followed that recommendation, although this came quite late for the girl: the trail of documents suggests that between the decision to send her to a colony and its reversal a whole year had passed.[5]

The tendency to blame girls for having sex even goes as far as influencing the outcome of rape trials. In the 1960s in Latvia, a rapist was charged but not arrested, because the victim had been a ‘promiscuous’ girl – which is a gross, but sadly familiar, trivialisation of rape.[6] In a discussion about juvenile crime among senior Latvian education, health, and juvenile justice officials, a law scholar considers rape a serious problem amongst minors. He inexplicably links it to the phenomenon of uneducated single mothers, somehow implying that it is the father’s job in a family to tell his sons not to rape anyone, or that such basic moral ground rules require a certain level of schooling. To explain the status of rape among such youngsters, the scholar evokes the case of three boys being tried for raping a 26-year-old. Towards the end of the trial, one of the accused admitted that he actually did not take part in the crime, but asked the court ‘not to tell anyone because it would embarrass him in front of his friends.’[7]

These examples bear witness to an underlying culture of criminalizing female but not male sexuality, and of victim blaming in the case of rape – a culture so widespread and unquestioned that not to rape a girl could apparently be cause for embarrassment.

Mirjam Galley is a third-year PhD student in Sheffield’s History Department. Her doctoral research deals with children in care in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953, exploring both how the Soviet leadership sought to ‘form’ children in institutions into productive workers, and how children coped in these institutions. Her research interests include cultural history, especially the history of everyday life, of violence, and of marginalised groups. She is one of the co-founders of the Sheffield Modern International History Group. You can reach her on Twitter @M_E_Galley.

References

[1] Susan Reid, ‘Building Utopia in the Back Yard. Housing Administration, Participatory Government and the Cultivation of Socialist Community,’ in Karl Schlögel (ed.), Mastering Russian Spaces: Raum und Raumbewältigung als Probleme der russischen Geschichte (Munich, 2011), (149-186), pp. 171-172.

[2] Deborah Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York, 2007), p. 22.

[3] GARF, f. A385, op. 26, del. 203, ll. 126-133. (1962)

[4] GARF, f. A385, op. 26, del. 203, ll. 119-125. (1962)

[5] LVA, f. 270, ap. 3, lie. 1982, pp. 7-8. (1963)

[6] LVA, f. 270, ap. 3, lie. 2283, (86-115), p. 100. (1964)

[7] LVA, f. 270, ap. 3, lie. 2283, (86-115), p. 100-101. (1964)

Full Image Attributions

Image 1: By CREEES.UVA (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Image 2: By CREEES.UVA (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Educating the ‘Uneducable’: Soviet Deaf-Blind Education and the New Soviet Person

By Charles Beacroft

In 1928, Lucy Wilson, an experienced educator and pedagogue, travelled from the United States to the Soviet Union to compile an accurate account of the advances of Soviet education for the Vanguard Studies of Soviet Russia. In her travels, she arrived to a school for the deaf-blind in the Ukraine and was stunned. She concluded that ‘in Kharkov… there is an experimental school for the scientific study of the deaf-blind which in its ideal, its equipment, its teachers and its results is far ahead of anything that I have chanced to see in any other country.’[1]

Three children being led by their teacher at the Kharkov School for the Deaf-Blind

Wilson’s amazement concerned the Kharkov Institute for the Deaf-Blind, a school-clinic that remained the focal point for surdotiflopedagogika (deaf-blind education) within the Soviet Union during the interwar period. The founder of the school, Professor Ivan Sokolyansky, who was considered the father of surdotiflopedagogika, had formulated a method that involved the use of self-care techniques, educational practices and mechanical prosthetics to educate previously ‘uneducable’ deaf-blind children.

This was representative of the transformative mind-set of social constructivism during the 1920s and 1930s, personified through the proliferation of the New Soviet Person myth. His system, termed ‘humanization’, ensured that deaf-blind children, despite their sensory deprivation, could lead productive, purposeful lives within Soviet society.

Congenital deafblindness is defined as the combination of both sight and hearing loss, often through the catching of tuberculosis, meningitis or Usher’s syndrome at an early age.[2] Children who have not developed language before the onset of their multi-sensory deprivation, face an enormous challenge in communicating with others. They are unable to form relationships or interact successfully with their environment, yet they have a perfectly functioning brain.

Sokolyansky retorted that ‘the child himself will never reach full mental development through his own efforts. Without special pedagogical help, a child is totally disabled for life.’[3] Sokolyansky wished to bring about an ‘awakening’, to create the means for the deaf-blind child to utilise their active mind and develop a method of communication with others.

Before the deaf-blind child could be taught how to speak, Sokolyansky wished to teach such children how to form their own independence. All of his pupils were reliant on others to feed, dress and take care of them before they entered the school. Sokolyansky’s method relied on the formation of their own self-care skills. One particular method,

A Deaf-Blind man using a ‘reading machine’

known as ‘direct installation’, had the teacher place their hands on the inside of the palms of a deaf-blind child.[4] Together, they would complete a series of activities, such as dressing, washing and eating, so that the child would passively learn how to complete such activities.

Over a period of time, the child would eventually take a dominant role and would learn how to successfully complete these actions themselves, independent of their teachers. Sokolyansky was concerned with the creating of useful, industrious children who could think for themselves, form their own opinions and make decisions. His method began the process of ‘humanization’ and lay the foundation for subsequent development.

Language was the next step in surdotiflopedagogika. The ‘oral method’ was shunned by Sokolyansky, and he promoted a teaching curriculum that involved gesticulation, the learning of the dactyl alphabet and Braille.[5] The development of their tactile sense was paramount to the creation of language within the mind of the deaf-blind child. Language would lead to the formation of independent thought and the advancement of their education. With such an education, they could learn to live within Soviet society, free of the confines of their pre-institutionalized selves.

Mechanical prosthetics also formed a significant part of Sokolyansky’s approach to
language development, specifically through his creation and development of both the ‘reading machine’ and the ‘teletaktor’. Both of these machines had developed to allow for the deaf, blind and deaf-blind to successfully have an artificial means of communication within Kharkov.

The ‘reading machine’[6] was developed in Kharkov to allow for the transfer of electronical oscillations that passed through the tips of fingers of a blind or a deaf-blind child, thus creating language through tactile means. Likewise, the ‘teletaktor’[7] served deaf or deaf-blind children and converted sounds into vibrations.

Hence, the child would be able to ‘hear’ their own voices, the voices of others and from what direction the noises came from through the feeling of the vibrations. It was an example of mechanical social engineering and utilised the availability of modern contemporary technology to overcome the sensory impairments of the deaf-blind child.

Ivan Sokolyansky (left) helps transcribe Olga Skorokhodova’s (right) memoirs

Sokolyansky’s revolutionary methods bore fruit, with every single child within the Kharkov school being able to read, write and communicate (through various mediums) with each other and their peers. Wilson also reiterated how ‘none of the pupils hear, none of them see, but all of them have acquired the necessary basic habits, meaning that they can take care of themselves efficiently, making their own beds, eating like refined human beings, playing and working together happily.’ [8]

One student, named Olga Skorokhodova, became the triumph of surdotiflopedagogika after eventually writing her own autobiography in 1947, entitled How I Perceive the World, and defending her PhD thesis in 1961.[9] She succeeded in becoming a productive, useful member of Soviet society and her achievements paved the way for others to follow in her footsteps in the late Soviet period.

Charles Beacroft is a second year CHASE funded PhD student within the University of East Anglia’s History Department. His doctoral research deals exclusively with the education of deaf-blind children in the early Soviet period. His research interests revolve around the history of disability, social history, and marginalised groups, specifically homeless children and orphans.

References

[1] Lucy Wilson, The New Schools of New Russia (Vanguard Press, New York, 1928), p. 86

[2] David Bakhurst and Carol Padden, The Meshcheryakov Experiment: Soviet Work on the Education of Deaf-Blind Children, Learning and Instruction (1991) Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp. 201 – 215

[3] GARF, f. 10049, op. 2, d. 389, l. 3

[4] Tatiana A. Basilova, Istoriya Obucheniya Slepogluhih Detei v Rossii (Eskmo Punlishers, Moscow, 2015), pp. 88 – 89

[5] Tatiana A. Basilova, ‘About Sokolyansky and his Method of Teaching Deaf-Blind Children’, Cultural Historical Psychology Journal (2006), Issue 3, p. 12; Irina Sandomirskaya, ‘Skin to Skin: Language in the Soviet Education of Deaf-Blind Children, the 1920s and 1930s’ (2008), Studies in East European Thought, Vol. 60, pp. 332 – 333

[6] S-FPS, f. 1, op. 3.2, d. 51, l. 43

[7] S-FPS, f. 1, op. 3.2, d. 49, l. 62

[8] Wilson, New Schools, p. 86

[9] O. I. Skorokhodova, How I Perceive and Imagine my World (Pedagogy Publishers, Moscow, 1972)

Image Attributions

Image 1: S-FPS, f. 8, op. 189, d. 14, l. 1

Image 2: S-FPS, f. 8, op. 190, d. 21, l. 1

Image 3: S-FPS, f. 8, op. 191, d. 30, l. 1

Explaining away poverty: Soviet residential childcare and social problems after 1953

By Mirjam Galley

Until Stalin’s death, Soviet children’s homes had been orphanages, housing children who had lost their parents to war, disease, or Stalin’s own terror campaigns. His successor Nikita Khrushchev set out to change that system of institutions for good. Khrushchev renounced his predecessor’s rule of terror in his so-called Secret Speech (1956) and, in some sort of ideological rebooting, promised to lead the peoples of the Union to communism within 20 years.

In order to bring up the generations that would ‘build’ communism, Khrushchev pledged to expand the state education system to educate every child according to socialist ideology in state-run boarding schools.[1] However, lacking financial means – and the simple fact that parents did not want to give their children away – this project was never completely realized.

Visit of Khrushchev to a television factory, 1963 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

So, Khrushchev’s policies did not result in an all-encompassing network of boarding schools, but in a network of residential childcare institutions (children’s homes, boarding schools, and children’s colonies). These mainly housed and educated children from ‘problem families,’ orphans, and children with disabilities. They were meant for children who, in the leadership’s opinion, were not or could not be properly cared for by their parents.[2]

Yet, because of this complicated formation of the residential childcare system, its practical aims are not easy to make out. Soviet files from central as well as regional administrations mention three of them: the ideological purpose of turning children into productive, useful contributors to (socialist) society; the provision of social welfare, helping children in need; and the enforcement of public order, of removing ‘undesirables’ from the public eye.

Ideology is the most explicitly stated purpose of that childcare system in both legal documents and everyday bureaucratic correspondence. Several texts are quite explicit about the network of boarding schools being set up to raise the younger generations as ‘the most active builders of communism.’[3] Documents about more specific aspects of

Accepting new Komsomol members on Red Square, Moscow, in 1968 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

institutional education tend to name the values that these schools should convey, such as ‘collectivism’ and a ‘communist attitude towards work’. Children were supposed to work for the common good and help the state,[4] in order to turn out ‘healthy, happy, and useful’.[5]

The second purpose, of isolating unwanted groups of people, tends to be stated more implicitly. This attitude towards the children becomes apparent in different forms of institutionalized neglect. Staff in such institutions worked for much lower wages than teachers or educators in general schools or kindergartens.[6] Agencies in charge of helping ‘difficult’ children individually often just sent kids to reformatory colonies without even meeting them.[7] Explicit statements about isolating children tended to refer most frequently to delinquent children and children with disabilities.

When in the late 1950s a regional Party organization wanted to close a reform colony, they argued that it was too close to an important railway, where tourists and travellers (some of whom were foreign) might see them.[8] In 1961, an internal document from the Soviet Council of Ministers stated that children with a significant intellectual disability should be institutionalized so as not to hinder the parents in raising healthy children.[9]

In terms of these two aims, there is no clear change throughout the years, but the third element of social support for needy families only seemed to occur from the 1970s onwards. A draft law by the Council of Ministers in 1974 mentioned the social function of such institutions, and the Soviet state’s obligation to bring up children whenever their parents could not.[10]

Ten years later, the chairman of the Soviet Children’s Fund Al’bert Likhanov again stressed the responsibility of bringing up ‘state’ children, ‘meaning our common (obshchii) children’.[11] These examples seem to suggest that the Soviet leadership began to admit to the existence of social problems. However, paying attention to the language used by Soviet bureaucrats to describe these problems, it becomes clear that this concession was very limited. For instance, words like ‘poverty’ or ‘social problem’ are never mentioned.

Official documents do not present social problems as a phenomenon concerning society as a whole or at least parts of it, but rather individual families. Awkward formulations like

‘Sobriety – a norm of life’ 1985 stamp (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

‘families in which bad conditions for raising children prevail’ are used instead.[12] The most common term to label ‘bad’ families is neblagopoluchnyi, which in the context of families means ‘dysfunctional,’ denoting in practice phenomena like poverty, alcoholism, neglect, or domestic violence.[13] Common labels for ‘bad parents’, such as ‘previous offender,’ ‘drunkard/alcoholic,’ or ‘mentally ill,’ also tended to pathologise general social problems, or place the blame on individual shortcomings.[14]

These findings suggest that the Soviet leadership failed to admit to the existence of social problems like poverty in Soviet society and, more importantly, to their responsibility to solve those problems. Instead, state agencies tended to blame individual people (for being alcoholics, for being bad parents) for more general social phenomena and tried to keep such ‘deviant’ people out of sight as much as possible.

Mirjam Galley is a first-year PhD student in Sheffield’s History Department. Her doctoral research deals with children in care in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953, exploring both how the Soviet leadership sought to ‘form’ children in institutions into productive workers, and how children coped in these institutions. Her research interests include cultural history, especially the history of everyday life, of violence, and of marginalised groups. She is one of the co-founders of the Sheffield Modern International History Group. You can reach her on Twitter @M_E_Galley.

References

[1] See for example: Polly Jones (ed.), The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (London/New York: Routledge, 2006); Melanie Ilic/ Jeremy Smith (eds.), Khrushchev in the Kremlin: Policy and government in the Soviet Union, 1956-64 (Routledge: London, 2009).

[2] Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing up in Russia, 1890-1991 (London/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p.267.

[3] GARF, f. A259, op. 42, d. 9624, l. 81.

[4] GARF, f. A385, op. 26, d. 204, l. 63r; GASO, f. R233, d. 1471, l. 35; GARF, f. R5446, op. 145, d. 1258, ll. 33-34.

[5] GASO, f. 1427, op. 2, d. 115, l. 32.

[6] GARF, f. R5446, op. 145, d. 1258, l. 29.

[7] GARF, f. A385, op. 26, d. 203, ll. 6-10.

[8] GARF, f. A259, op. 42, d. 2718, l. 3. Evidently the motive behind wanting to close that institution might have been a different one but the fact that individuals thought that this was a valid point hints to their perceptions of such children.

[9] GARF, f. R5446, op. 95, d. 240, l. 17.

[10] GARF, f. R5446, op. 109, d. 1079, ll. 3-4.

[11] GARF, f. R5446, op. 145, d. 1258, ll. 13.

[12] GARF, f. R5446, op. 109, d. 1079, l. 3.

[13] TsDOOSO, f. 4, op. 69, d. 181, ll. 2, 22, 43-44, 60; GARF, f. A385, op. 26, d. 203, ll. 1-2; GARF, f. 9527, op.1, d. 2124, l. 43. Officials either use the adjective neblagopoluchnyi, or even more complicated formulations like neblagopoluchno v sem’e or semei v kotorykh neblagopoluchno s vospitaniem detei, which makes it sound like a disease.

[14] TsDOOSO, f. 4, op. 69, d. 181, ll. 175-179; GARF, f. R8131, op. 32, d. 5042, ll. 52-54.

Full image attributions

Image 1: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B0118-0010-027 / CC-BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Image 2: RIA Novosti archive, image #705239 / Lev Polikashin / CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Image 3: Scanned and processed by Andrei Sdobnikov (Personal collection) [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons