The Dark Side of Early Soviet Childhood, 1917-1941: Children's Tragedy [Paperback]

The Civil War and early Soviet food policies left millions of children homeless and starving in Russia in the first half of the 20th century. Child mortality rates reached 95% in certain areas, and all of these problems remained endemic throughout the 1920s and 1930s. InThe Dark Side of Early Soviet Childhood, 1917-1941, Boris B. Gorshkov investigates the causes of this prolonged homelessness and starvation, the conditions faced by huge numbers of children, and the state's unsuccessful efforts to solve these horrendous issues. Gorshkov pays particular attention to the critical role of the secret police (the VChKa and the NKVD) in this story and draws on a range of previously unused archival sources to reveal the full extent of the suffering of children in Russia at this time, as well as the interconnected causes behind it.This book examines the inter-related issues of children's hunger, homelessness and high mortality in the USSR between 1918 and the outbreak of the Second World War.Boris B. Gorshkovis Assistant Professor of History at Kennesaw State University, USA. He is the author ofPeasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin(Bloomsbury, 2018), Russia'sFactory Children, Society, and the State: Childhood, Apprenticeship and Law, 1800-1917(2009) andA Life under Russian Serfdom: Memoirs of Savva Dmitrievich Purlevskii, 1800-68(2005).

[Boris B. Gorshkov] offers a chance to revive the debate on one of the most controversial and interesting chapters of Soviet history in reconstructing the evolution of the Soviet system into a totalitarian one. H-Net: Humanities & Social Science Online

This book adds productively to a growing historiography of childhood in the Soviet Union & Gorshkov provides powerful evidence, especially from areas affected by famines and collectivization, of the ubiquity of child vagrancy and the increasingly coercive means used to address it. Slavic Reviews

For scholars of early SolãT