Working with Children in Leningrad Housing Administrations

Transcription

No 9 FORUM
FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE
200
Alexandra Piir
A Tradition that Never Was: Working with Children
in Leningrad Housing Administrations
Alexandra Piir
Peter the Great Museum
of Anthropology and Ethnography
(Kunstkamera), Russian Academy
of Science / European University
at St Petersburg,
Russia
[email protected]
1
For thirty years, from the middle of the 1920s
to the middle of the 1950s, all levels of Soviet
government made persistent and utterly fruitless attempts to organise work with children
where they lived, i.e. in a residential context.
The main aim of this was stated to be the
struggle to prevent children from being left
unsupervised. Given that most parents were
very busy, either at work or in the demanding
business of running the home, children were, as
representatives of state and social organisations
anxiously wrote, left to their own devices. In the
second and third decades of the century this was
called both lack of supervision (beznadzornost)
and lack of care (besprizornost), but later the
two terms came to mean different things. The
authorities managed more or less to solve the
problem of lack of care (that is, of children who
had no one to look after them at all) twice, after
each of the world wars, but lack of supervision
remained an almost universal problem. Given
that there were not many day centres, kindergartens or creches, this problem began with
many children before they reached school age,
at least to the extent that they were allowed out
by themselves.1 The question therefore arose,
who should supervise children like these.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the age at which children customarily started school was eight, meaning
that they were likely to be relatively independent and mobile well before they were kept in school for
several hours a day. In the later Soviet period, the starting age was seven [Eds.].
Alexandra Piir. A Tradition that Never Was: Working with Children in Leningrad Housing Administrations
201
SOVIET TRADITIONS
Before the revolution this was partly supposed to be the responsibility
of yardmen (dvorniki)1 and the lower ranks of the police, but they
were chiefly limited to returning children to their parents’ control.
Thus, ‘yardmen must by no means leave little children from their
building without supervision in the street, but must immediately
return them to their parents or to the people they live with; nor must
they allow them to play ball games or knucklebones or to fly kites or
to play other such games in the street in front of the building’ [Prava
i obyazannosti 1855: 142]. According to the ‘Rules for the Prevention
and Reduction of Crime’, ‘the yardman must see that the residents
do not leave children unsupervised in the yard or the street’ [Alfavitnyi
ukazatel 1870: 144–145]. From the 1880s on the city authorities and
the police issued orders to the lower ranks of the police and the
yardmen to prevent street urchins from throwing stones at passenger
steamers sailing up the Catherine Canal ‘and from skating and
tobogganing in the streets’ [Alfavitnyi sbornik 1886: 130; 1892: 61]. In
the orders of the 1890s, such ‘inappropriate games and misbehaviour’
in the streets are described: children race each other on the way home
from school, fight, throw stones at each other, ride on sledges, chase
carriages and hang on to them while they are in motion, and so on.
For the avoidance of accidents resulting from children behaving
in such a way, police inspectors are obliged: 1) to instruct beat
constables to be more vigilant in their supervision of the behaviour
of children in the streets, to put an immediate stop to any kind
of misbehaviour or inappropriate games, and to send children
engaging in such to their parents or guardians by means of the
yardmen, and 2) to instruct the yardmen: a) to prevent misbehaviour or inappropriate games by children on the streets and
pavements in front of the buildings entrusted to them, and b) to
see that small children are not let out into the street except under
the supervision of an adult, otherwise such children are to be
immediately returned to their parents’ or guardians’ homes
[Alfavitnyi sbornik 1902: 143–144].
The majority of these instructions refer to situations when children
are unsupervised by an adult in the streets. The yard is hardly
mentioned: in the first place, it was regarded as a safer environment
for the children themselves, and in the second place, it was private,
and therefore supervised (and in less need of outside control), and,
finally, children’s games which were ‘inappropriate’ for the public
space of the streets might be permissible in the yard. At the turn of the
century, children’s playgrounds began to be built in yards alongside
the usual domestic offices (sheds for firewood and carriages,
1
Dvorniki could also be translated ‘caretaker’ or ‘janitors’ (cf. the French concierge), but the difference is
that, as well as supervising the building itself, the dvornik was expected to regulate the external courtyard (dvor) — hence the name [Eds.].
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laundries, cesspits, ashpiles etc.). These could be quite primitive, as
described by Tito Colliander: ‘There were a few feeble trees and
berberis bushes in one corner of the yard, something like a garden
and playground for the children, but there was no sandpit for them,
only gravel, dust and rubbish’ [Colliander 1995: 23]. The appearance
of various amenities indicates that the yard was now beginning to be
used for more than practical household purposes: that the children
of the lower classes should go out and play was not only considered
normal, it was provided for by the way their environment was
organised. The large, impressive courtyards of the buildings inhabited
by the middle classes were laid out like city squares, and could be
provided with swings, sandpits, etc.
From the end of the nineteenth century social concern about stray
children (understood as those without families or without parental
supervision) was growing. Educated sectors of society regarded
practically all children from needy families who did not go to school
as such. This wave of concern led to the foundation of philanthropic
societies, such as the ‘Children’s Friend’ (1902), ‘Children’s Settlement’ (1910), ‘Children’s World’ (1911) and others in St Petersburg,
which used cultural and educational activities and the organisation
of constructive leisure as their main means of combating lack of care
or supervision.1 One aspect of this was the organisation of children’s
areas, clubs and centres where children and young people could play
games and engage in activities that furthered their development and
education, both indoors and out of doors. The organisers and activists
had two goals: the prevention of juvenile delinquency (i.e. protecting
the public from stray children), and care of the children themselves.
For instance, a publication about this sort of work might begin with
the words ‘The juvenile court has made it an axiom that the main
cause of juvenile delinquency is a lack of supervision.’ This is followed
by an account of the benefit of activities carried out with children to
promote their health and physical, mental and moral development2
and the conclusion that ‘If you cover Petrograd with a sufficient
network of summer playgrounds and youth clubs, you will strike at
the root of hooliganism […] and only then will the social calamity of
unsupervised childhood disappear’ [Polyakhin 1916: 987, 996]. The
main thing was that children’s leisure should be organised and
1
2
See the article by Catriona Kelly [2004] for the activity of philanthropic societies in the struggle
against lack of supervision for children.
‘The play area is first and foremost a place where the child can enjoy air and sunlight; it is covered in
grass and planted with trees, and the child comes there just to lie in the shade or run about the grass
and give his lungs a rest from the fragrance of the cesspit and the stink of the yard, staircase, and often
enough of his own home’ [Polyakhin 1916: 990]. ‘So, the playground first takes care of the physical
health of the future builders of society, and secondly takes them off the streets for as long as they are
there, providing them with pedagogical supervision and creating a moral bulwark against the influence
of the street by means of games and other activities’ [Polyakhin 1916: 995–996].
203
1
2
3
SOVIET TRADITIONS
supervised by adults, who would thus protect them, or, as they used
to write, distract them from the harmful influence of the street.1
It goes without saying that these measures did not by any means
reach all those who were considered to be in need of them. There
were, say, about fifteen playgrounds in Petrograd in 1915, of which
some (evidently the majority) only operated during the summer, and
each could serve between 200 and 700 children a day [Polyakhin
1916: 989]. The rest of the children remained without proper parental
supervision or pedagogical direction, fell into the category of ‘street
children’ or ‘yard children’, and thus under the supervision of yardmen and the police. One youth club leader, complaining that
‘lightning struck when the work was in full swing’ and that the club
had lost its premises, describes the melancholy prospects for the
children under his care as ‘the street again, the yardmen and police
again’ [Kira-Donzhan 1916: 1004].
The Soviet regime inherited (and intensified) the problem of
unsupervised children and the general idea of how to combat it.
New children’s clubs, in addition to the existing ones, were opened
in Petrograd and other places in the first years after the revolution,
but most had closed by 1921 because of financial difficulties [Pfeifer
1924: 16; Salova 2010: 152–153]. However, the government’s
plans were much wider: like the introduction of universal primary
education, to embrace and organise all children. They began to put
them into practice at the same time: the Pioneer organisation was
created in 1922; the plan for the introduction of universal education
was initiated in August 1923; and in the same year the ‘Children’s
Friend’ Society (ODD) was set up under the leadership of the
Commission for the Improvement of Children’s Life (Detkomissiya)
of VTsIK (the Central Executive Committee of the Communist
Party). Both the Pioneer organisation and the ODD were supposed
to organise cells at workplaces, in schools and in tenements. The
struggle against hooliganism2 began in parallel: it was made a criminal
offence in 1922 (project and Penal Code of 1922, art. 176); 1926 saw
the much-publicised prosecution of the ‘Chubarov Alley Case’3, and
in the same year the NKVD circular ‘On the Struggle against
Hooliganism’ was issued; in the 1926 RSFSR Penal Code hooliganism
was classified as an offence against administrative order (and not,
‘The “Children’s Settlement of Petrograd Side” Society has as its aim to foster the physical, mental, and
moral development of the younger generation by providing it, in its hours of leisure, with healthy
leisure activities, in order to protect it from the bad influence of the street and to arouse in it publicspiritedness and a sense of initiative’ [Nelyubov 1916: 4–5].
Khuliganstvo is conventionally translated ‘hooliganism’ into English, though a locution such as ‘antisocial behaviour’ might more effectively capture the range of undesirable practices grouped together
by the Russian term [Eds.].
A notorious gang-rape in Leningrad.
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as previously, as an offence against the person), and the penalty for
it was increased to five years’ imprisonment.
In accordance with all this, one of the main aims of work with
unsupervised children was the prevention of hooliganism, as indeed
it had been before the revolution. Professor P. G. Belsky, the
organiser of the Commission for Minors’ Affairs, wrote as follows in
the compendium Hooliganism and Crime: ‘The struggle against
hooliganism can be successful only when the state and society focus
all their efforts on rooting out the causes of hooliganism: lack of
supervision and lack of care for children and young people. […] The
general mass of juvenile hooligans may be divided into two groups:
hooligans from amongst the strays and hooligans from amongst the
unsupervised’ [Belsky 1927: 91–92]. Moreover, if stray children
were predominantly guilty of theft, robbery and similar offences,
‘amongst the unsupervised 80 % are pure hooligans’ [Belsky 1927:
109]. The problem of lack of supervision for children and hooliganism was one that faced many Soviet organs of government at once.
Organised work with the children living in particular buildings
undertaken by or with the active participation of the residents, was to
become part of everyday Soviet reality.
‘The Children’s Friend’
The ‘Children’s Friend’ society, founded in St Petersburg in 1902,
did not cease its activities in 1917, and carried on work with children
in their place of residence even before this became a state undertaking. As stated in one of its publications, ‘the cell at the housing
co-operative at 9, ulitsa Dostoevskogo in Leningrad began work in
April 1919’ [Bespalenko 1933: 28]. For a long time its principal
difficulties were lack of premises and lack of funds, which it had to
raise ‘through raffles and by other means’; it was not until 1931 that
it succeeded in obtaining first a room and then a flat for its activities
with children. As well as operating in the building, the cell
independently raised 4,500 roubles and bought and equipped two
dachas outside Leningrad where sixty children could have a summer
holiday, paid for by the society in the case of the poorest. As far as
one can tell from the brief description, the forms of work did not
greatly differ from those which the ‘Children’s Friend’ and similar
societies had developed before the revolution: the members of the
ODD tried to supply those things of which the children under their
care had been deprived: they provided various activities, fed them,
and took them on trips to the country.1 For this they required outside
1
Pre-revolutionary practice had also included excursions through the city and to museums, walks in the
park and out of town; it must be assumed that these continued in the present case, if only because the
housing co-operative cell did not have its own room for the first twelve years of its existence, and because of the habit, dating from before the Soviet period, of opposing the aforementioned beneficial
activities to the empty and inadequate leisure of the yard.
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SOVIET TRADITIONS
support and funding. The passage just quoted is entitled ‘The Cell
Needs Help’, and ends on a pessimistic note: without the ‘active help
and wide support’ of society, the co-operative and the district council
of the ODD, work with children in the building is in danger of ‘final
collapse’ [Bespalenko 1933: 28].
Unlike the ‘Children’s Friend’ in Petrograd / Leningrad, which had
fifteen years’ experience from before the revolution, the new
authorities and the new children’s organisations saw their work in
housing co-operatives somewhat differently. Firstly, it was not to be
conducted by their own efforts (which it would have been impossible
to do in every building), but rather to be ‘organised’ in the Soviet
sense of that term: that is, the building administration and the
residents themselves were to be involved.1 Against this background
lack of support and the passivity of both adults and children appeared
not so much a misfortune as a mess-up. Secondly their main aim was
not to conduct activities that were beneficial to the physical, mental
and spiritual development of the child, nor to provide social and
material assistance, but re-education, the transformation of each
unsupervised or unorganised child into the Soviet man, and to resist
the harmful effects both of the street and of the family and other
possible sources of a religious, unproletarian or simply ‘backward’
outlook.
There is no doubt that both the national ODD and its local branches
in the cities (including Leningrad) made efforts to conform their
work to these requirements. However, it is hard to imagine that every
building could put into practice the sort of work that the Children’s
Friend Society prescribed for its housing co-operative cells:
1. The cells organise out-of-school activities — children’s rooms,
playgrounds and sports complexes for children, and provide
daily activity hours for children in the co-operative club or in the
premises of the building administration.
2. The cells recruit members for pre-school co-operation.
3. The cells protect, defend and organise the child’s family life,
creating child protection posts which are closely linked with the
nearest schools and pre-schools.
4. The cells organise leisure for children through children’s
clubs — photography, radio, music, sport, children’s wall newspapers etc.
5. The cells combat truancy and lateness at school and kindergarten.
1
In the 1920s and early 1930s autonomous children’s work was not only actively promoted (in particular
in the writings of N. K. Krupskaya), but officially expected of those responsible for running schools and
clubs.
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6. The cells organise systematic conversations with parents (not
less than twice a month) on the subject of education, hygiene and
the place of children in the family, making use of doctors and
teachers living in the building or bringing them in from outside.
7. The cells organise work with children who are falling behind
in their schoolwork.
8. The cells organise the active participation of parents in the life
of the school and of children’s organisations: lunch and playground duty and such like [Nizovye organizatsii ODD 1935: 5].
At the beginning of the same publication in the Children’s Friend
magazine (published by the ODD) there is also some more ‘real’ information: in the Sokolniki district of Moscow ‘there are 52 housing
co-operative cells, but the district soviet regards 26 of them as dead,
and in practice only one cell at co-operative No. 1038 is working’
[Nizovye organizatsii ODD 1935: 1]. Against this background the
society’s work in schools appears more successful. Judging by the
report for 1929–30 of the ODD council for the Smolny and October
regions in Leningrad, 100 % of schools were included, whereas work
in housing co-operatives was limited to a small number of buildings,
where one-off activities took place with the involvement of parents,
and various sorts of assistance were provided to children and young
people ‘in acute need’ [Otchet 1930].
After the ODD was officially incorporated in 1923, its chief efforts
were directed towards stray children, which was the purpose for
which it had been founded; in comparison, its work with unsupervised
children was less significant. It was this key aim of the ‘Children’s
Friend’, decreed by the central authorities, together with an increase
in the severity of the methods used against juvenile delinquency in
1935, which determined the society’s fate. On 31 May an order was
issued by the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the
Central Committee of the Communist Party affirming that ‘in the
conditions of a continuing improvement in the material and cultural
position of the workers’ the existence of stray children in the country
could only be explained by poor work on the part of the local Soviet
and party organs, and responsibility for it was laid at the door of
the chairmen of city and village soviets, parents and guardians
[O likvidatsii 1935]. One month later, on 1 of July, a further order of
the same bodies liquidated the ODD [Drug detei 1999].
Pioneer and out-of-school work in the housing co-operatives
The framework for children’s activities in tenements was provided by
the so-called out-of-school work, which was actively developed
during the 1920s. The Scientific and Pedagogical Institute for
Methods of Out-of-School Work was founded in Moscow in 1923,
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SOVIET TRADITIONS
and in 1929 the Council for Out-of-School Work, headed by
Nadezhda Krupskaya,1 was formed under the auspices of the People’s
Commissariat for Education, and the journal Out of School (renamed
the following year Organise your Kids)2 began publication. The ideals
of out-of-school children’s work were propagated in the magazines
On the Way to a New School, Enlightenment, The People’s Teacher
and others; its relevance was conceived as follows:
Bringing up a child is a process which cannot be limited to work
in the school. A child acquires skills and picks up habits and
interests for the most part within the environment in which he
lives, the interests of which are close and comprehensible to him,
and in which he spends most of his time. Hence it is clear that if
we have an interest in the upbringing of a citizen of the Soviet
republic, a future builder of the socialist society, we must not
overlook the so-called great paedological process, the process of
the child’s upbringing in the domestic environment, in the yard
and in the housing co-operative [Bukhbinder 1928: 57].
The chief hopes for the creation of an educative process ‘in the yard’
were placed not in the ODD, but in the out-of-school pedagogues
and the Pioneer organisation. One of the writers in the Leningrad
journal Enlightenment remarks that the ‘Children’s Friend’s’ work in
the co-operatives consisted mostly in the rendering of ‘material
assistance to needy children’, and ‘opening and maintaining
children’s rooms’, which took in ‘pre-school children, and in the
best cases also younger schoolchildren’, but which ‘exist by no means
everywhere’. At the same time, the ‘most unsupervised and unorganised part of the child population’ were young people from
twelve to fifteen years old, which ‘has made the Leningrad provincial
bureau of the DKO3 […] direct the most serious attention of the
Pioneer bases to work amongst the children of the housing cooperatives’ [Arsh 1928: 50].
A sign of the perceived importance of the topic was the appearance of
three articles with relevant titles in a single issue of the Leningrad
Pioneer magazine The New Robinson (1925, No. 9): ‘Work in the
Yard’, ‘Pioneer Clubs instead of “Heads or Tails”’, ‘From Yard Boys
to a Squad’. One of the authors claims that to avoid children being
left without care, ‘every Pioneer must get involved. […] Work in the
yard should include games, talks, sport, singing, marching etc. The
Pioneer squad should teach the children to produce a wall newspaper for their building. They should get the residents’ association
1
2
3
Deputy People’s Commissar for Education of the RSFSR since 1929, and the widow of Lenin.
1929–1935, the official organ of the Chief Directorate of Social Education (and after 1930 of the
People’s Commissariat for Education) and of the Central Committee of the Komsomol.
Children’s Communist Organisation.
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to subscribe to Leninist Sparks and The New Robinson for them. All
the work in the Children’s Corner1 should be carried out under the
direct supervision of Pioneers and Komsomol members who live in
the building’ [Starostin 1925: 27, 28].
These remarks were published in support of work by the Pioneers
that had already begun. In the spring of the same year, 1925, ‘squads
from the Red Triangle factory made their first tentative assaults on
the yards of the workers’ housing co-operatives of Leningrad. A fresh
new breeze is blowing through the yards and playgrounds. Instead of
pointless pranks, hooliganism, bad language and ‘heads or tails’, the
Pioneers offer excursions, rational games, books and labour. […]
This autumn dozens of Pioneer groups threw themselves into the
struggle for an organised and cultural existence for the children of the
housing co-operatives’ [Danilov 1930: 3]. The Pioneers engaged in
cultural and political work in 157 co-operatives in Leningrad held
their first conference in March 1929. Its participants called on all the
Pioneer squads and schools in the city, and in other cities of the
Soviet Union, to join them [Danilov 1930: 4], and the first national
Pioneer congress, which took place in September of the same year,
proclaimed the slogan ‘Let us equip the yard for children’s activities’
[Kordes 1935: 24].
In support of these initiatives there were a number of publications,
beginning in the 1930s, on children’s work in tenements, ranging
from short comments to brochures, and including instructional
methods. Sometimes they were addressed to the Pioneers, but more
often to Soviet activists in the abstract. Their authors usually give
practical recommendations on how to organise work with children in
the housing co-operatives, how to avoid common difficulties, etc.,
and / or describe specific cases and achievements (often their own),
which should serve as a model for others. Besides their identical aims
and objectives, which were obviously imposed from above, these
texts (published in different towns from Archangel to Yalta), share
a common attitude to the yard and its inhabitants.2 The yard of
a building in the city is regarded as a sort of conductive medium: the
norms and practices of the underworld and criminal classes can
easily penetrate it, and through it a child may be drawn into that
world. In other words the yard is a dangerous place for children and
young people because of its mediativity.
The authors are no less concerned about the yard as mediating the
influences of ‘other classes’, disseminating ‘the traditions of the old
1
2
The Children’s Corner was an agitational facility for children; cf. the Red Corner mentioned below
[Eds.].
Not much of the material that I have found relates to Leningrad. I shall nevertheless include examples
that describe work with children in the housing co-operatives (mostly Moscow), since they are practically devoid of any regional characteristics.
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SOVIET TRADITIONS
way of life’, petty-bourgeois attitudes, religious views, superstitions,
anti-Soviet rumours, and so on. The unsupervised child in the years
is open to all kinds of ‘alien influences’ lurking in the dark recesses
of the co-operative. To resist this, it is necessary to take control of
the child’s life out of school, and fill up the free time and the minds
of young Soviet citizens with appropriate activities and ideas so as
to make them impermeable to influences incompatible with the
Soviet way of life.
The hard work of the school and the Pioneer squad in re-educating children is to a large extent going to waste as a result of
the corrupting environment of the tenement yard. The traditions
of the old way of life, which are consistently being eradicated at
school, at the Pioneers or at the club, are still holding strong in
the yard of a large building and it is often here that they are
expressed in their most anti-social form. Take the drunkenness,
slovenly living habits, quarrels, dirty linen washed in public,
bourgeois tittle-tattle and ‘kitchen feuds’ that become the
common property of all the residents, and you will realise that
the old way of life is still dominant in the dark recesses of the
co-operative. The debris of imperial Russia – the ex-generals,
merchants, shopkeepers, and beside them the profiteers, kulaks
and priests feeling the pinch of Soviet rule console themselves
by spreading rumours about famine, war, somebody somewhere
rebelling against the Bolsheviks, and so on and so forth. These
little people also go to work on the children. And often not
without success.
The tenement yard is the centre of the child’s independent life,
where he is not bound by rules, not controlled by anyone and
accumulates new impressions. […] Looking for easy diversions
he goes out with companions who are often extremely impudent
and badly brought up and, left to his own devices, is spoilt,
acquiring bad habits. […] The bad influence of the yard and its
anti-proletarian effect on children must be paralysed by
developing a wide network of out-of-school organisations,
lengthening the school day, organising children’s clubs, sports
complexes and excursion bases, which the state cannot as yet
fully provide. Most of all, we need a mass campaign by the
Pioneers against the yard, that strong bastion of the old way of
life [Danilov 1930: 5–7].
In accordance with the norms of Soviet rhetoric, work in the housing
co-operatives was represented as a struggle for the leisure and minds
of children and young people — a bridgehead already held by an
imaginary enemy, from which he must be dislodged. ‘Chess and
draughts are engaged in single combat with “heads or tails” and
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pristenok,’1 the shooting range with the catapult, the flower bed with
the rubbish tip, ‘collective’ holidays with ‘family’ ones (the Christmas
or name-day party), and the children’s wall newspaper with every
sort of hostile phenomenon at once. Activities with children did
not necessarily have to be ideological; they could include the
inculcation of good hygiene, introduction to the world of work, help
with schoolwork, or activities to develop the child (clubs, games,
competitions or excursions). But there were some that were Pioneer
activities in both form and spirit, talks on political topics. ‘Properly
conducted’ work should begin not with the youngest, but with the
adolescents, the “yard leaders”’, and ‘the existence of organised
children’s collectives in the residents’ association makes the work
easier’ [Gotlib 1929: 22].
Almost every building has its ‘leaders’, whose authority is followed unquestioningly by the children, but often these leaders
lead them into various undesirable activities. It is essential to get
these ‘leaders’ on one’s side from the very beginning, and not be
put off by the fact that sometimes they have a reputation as
hooligans or crooks. These lads who know how to exercise power
over the mass of children can be very useful in the organisation
and progress of the work [Kordes 1935: 6].
The former hooligans became participants in the movement to
reorganise the yard and under the direction of a pedagogue, Komsomol leader or Pioneer cell, scored a victory over the building
manager, co-operative administration and the residents in the struggle
over the redistribution of space. In practice, the organisers of work
with children were in no hurry to resolve the opposition between
groups of hooligans and the other residents of the building; sometimes
they even exacerbated it, at the same time transposing it into another
key. The structure of the community of children and adolescents and
the position of its leaders were legitimised. There was, however, an
occasion2 when the decision to teach the local louts, regulars of the
police cells, to look at the yard ‘through the eyes of its masters’ simply
turned them from street hooligans to yard hooligans.
The enthusiasm, to be sure, soon passed, but a turning-point had
been reached. The street receded into the background. Many of
its ‘amusements’ were transplanted into the yard. Now it was in
the yard that they broke windows and bullied the younger boys
and girls. Hostility broke out between the different staircases,
sometimes leading to bitter and bloody skirmishes [Studenetsky
1936: 26].
1
2
A gambling game depending on the fall of coins thrown against a wall.
This refers to the workers’ settlement of Abel’manovskaya Zastava in the Tagansky district of Moscow,
a new quarter built in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
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SOVIET TRADITIONS
The children themselves were often hostile towards organisers of
children’s work, particularly when they were the same age as themselves; Pioneers, who were perceived as outsiders come to ‘conquer
the yard’, were taunted, abused, prevented from engaging with more
receptive children, and at times simply beaten up [Arsh 1928: 51;
Danilov 1930: 22, 31–33]. It goes without saying that all the published
accounts have a positive finale — the yard accepts the Pioneers or
Komsomol members and receives them as its own and they become
the leaders of the children’s movement towards a new way of life.
Once the activists had won the trust of the younger generation, the
next step was the struggle for territory. The Pioneer outpost or
children’s club that had been formed would demand that the
administration of the housing co-operative should give them some
room in the building or a shed, part of the yard for a playground
(after liquidating any existing structures), set aside time in the Red
Corner or the building office for work with children, etc. Sometimes
these demands ‘were received with understanding and support’, but
they were often the source of conflict. The Pioneer outpost would
appeal to ‘society’ in the building and try to get the parents on its
side. As a result the residents would become involved in the ‘struggle’
and take sides according to how their own interests were affected by
the situation.
In the furthest of the many yards of number 25 we discovered
a large stone shed full of firewood and various kinds of junk. Of
course we had to fight a stormy battle with the residents who used
the shed, but we won [Meyerovich 1936: 4].
Despite the opposition of childless residents and some of the
administrators, the meeting decided that the Red Corner1 should
be put at the disposal of the children every day from nine till three
and three times a week from six till nine in the evening [Goldberg,
Slivkin 1930: 23].
It even went as far as ‘children’s’ letters to Krupskaya asking for
protection against ‘heartless grown-ups’ [Gotlib, Malisova 1930:
14–15] in the Pioneer and local papers:
Pay attention to us!
We, the schoolchildren of 17, Kozhevnicheskaya St, demand
from the administration of the building the planning and
construction of a volleyball pitch in the yard. It is time that
someone paid us some attention and took some thought for our
1
‘Red Corners’ were an agitational and educational facility that was particularly popular in the early
Soviet period, which might, by design, contain a ‘wall newspaper’ and other consciousness-raising
propaganda. In the late Soviet period, the ‘Red Corner’ (or ‘Lenin Corner’) tended to refer to a reading
room. In reality, these spaces were often used for board-games or even drinking, but cultural texts refer
to the ideal [Eds.].
No 9 FORUM
212
summer leisure activities, since most of us don’t go to camp. We
don’t want to ride on tram buffers or run about the markets
looking for fun. Organise our leisure in our own yard. (Followed
by 32 children’s signatures) [Kordes 1935: 5].
In 1932 Krupskaya responded to texts of this kind in her open letter
‘Be social activists!’ addressed to the Pioneers and published
in Pionerskaya pravda on 15 December. It was republished in
Zhilishchnaya kooperatsiya [Co-operative diving], prefaced by the
remark that ‘in housing and housing and building co-operatives work
with children has come to a dead stop’. Krupskaya herself wrote that:
‘The Pioneers should take steps to ensure that housing co-operatives
provide children’s rooms, where games, speeches, singing and other
forms of interesting work can be organised. Grown-ups should be
involved in out-of-school activities with children. They must help to
organise walks and excursions for all the children together. Readings,
and visits to children’s libraries by all the children should also be
organised. The Pioneers must work for the defence of children’s
rights in the housing co-operatives. They cannot allow any parents to
beat their children or keep them away from school’ [Krupskaya 1932:
19–20].
However, organising work with children (‘which the state cannot as
yet fully provide’) in the housing co-operatives was a task beyond the
powers of the Pioneers, the Komsomol and the out-of-school
pedagogues. In the 1920s low-level urban cells of the Pioneer organisation were mostly set up at works and factories. In 1932, by a decree
of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, it was reorganised
on a school principle. Consequently it was more effective (and easier)
to work at the places which received most support and funding. As
universal compulsory education was introduced, the schools were
overworked and overcrowded. Teaching in two or even three shifts left
no time or energy for out-of-school activities [Gotlib, Malisova 1930:
8; Gelmont 1935: 84]. The sort of work that took priority for out-ofschool pedagogues was in the clubs and Pioneer houses.
Despite the positive tone of the majority of publications, they always
deal with isolated cases which are held up as models for imitation
rather than becoming the rule. Even if we ignore the question of the
reliability of the published accounts, it is clear from them that not
every ‘assault on the co-operative’ was successful or met with any
support from children or adults. Above all, there are rarely any
descriptions of work with children that continued for even a few
years, and these are confined to the cells of the ODD. Evidently even
work that began successfully soon declined, because it demanded not
merely great but literally heroic effort: daily activities with the
children, and in different age groups, watching over their family life,
regular ‘conversations’ with the parents etc. There is a sharp drop
213
1
SOVIET TRADITIONS
in the number of publications about work with children in the housing
co-operatives in the middle of the 1930s; there is hardly any mention
of the Pioneers or the Komsomol in them, but new characters begin
to appear.
The housing co-operatives: playgrounds,
children’s rooms and Red Corners
People writing about work with children in the 1920s and early 30s
note as one of the main difficulties the opposition, or at least indifference of the residents, co-operative administration and building
manager. In the activists’ opinion, ‘the administration of the housing
associations and their cultural commissions still do not always
consider work with children to be their business. ‘Our business is
looking after the building and cultural work amongst adults, and the
“Children’s Friend” or their delegate can look after the children. We
will support them’ [Gotlib, Malisova 1930: 8]. At the same time the
residents of the building were supposed to be involved in activities
(under the slogan ‘Not a single member of the co-operative
uninvolved in work with children!’ [Kordes 1935: 13] and to take
over the greater part of the load.
The achievement of this goal was made more difficult by the fact that
‘elements from other social classes, whose ‘education’ and knowledge of ‘good taste’ can affect the masses who find it hard to
discriminate’1 were not to be allowed to participate in activities with
children. In other words, the hereditary intelligentsia had to be
excluded. As a result some parents were mistrustful of the work being
done, considering that their children were being brought up ‘not
decently, but as if in a factory’ [Gotlib, Malisova 1930: 9]. The less
well educated sections of society found other reasons for rejecting
activities of this sort: ‘75 % of the residents of this building are
illiterate; almost all of them drink, even the young women. Putting
boys and girls together for activities is regarded as prostitution, and
the social activist working with the children has been nicknamed the
pimp’ [Gotlib 1929: 27]. Finally, the activities organised might
simply disturb people. The activists complained that the residents
‘put their own interests above those of society:’ they would chase
noisy children out of the yard, stop them from playing ball games (in
case they broke any windows), and ‘forbade them to blow bugles’
[Verner, Goygel 1935: 43; Meyerovich 1936: 8]; in every building
‘there could be found plenty of people […] who thought that using
the housing co-operative to organise children was useless or
pernicious idea’ [Gotlib, Malisova 1930: 12]. However, it was the
According to the authors, ‘in one Moscow district one such “social activist” had to he arrested for
blatantly counter-revolutionary agitation amongst children’ [Gotlib, Malisova 1930: 6].
No 9 FORUM
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co-operative administration that was most mistrustful of work with
children, according to its organisers, who saw their chief opponents
as the chairmen and building managers, who ‘held back’ the work
and put the hooligans in the yard ‘in their place’ instead of reeducating them.
The chairman was summoned. He left his work unwillingly and
when the women started to explain to him that the question of the
playground should be raised at the meeting, […] he swore openly,
looked at me malevolently and said, ‘You and your playgrounds,
we’ve no use for ideas like that, they can play anyway’ [Poletaeva
1927: 31].
When one starts to propagandise the idea of out-of-school work,
people’s attitudes are generally sceptical: ‘it won’t do any good’,
‘you don’t know what our hooligans are like’, and so on. The
building manager, who is the keeper of order, says openly that
he doesn’t believe in modern pedagogues, and to prove his point
he compares himself with the school and the correctional facility,
which cannot keep their children in order. The only advice he
wants is on the following point: ‘what sort of paint does not show
up any graffiti, because our children write texts that make the
grown-ups blush’ [Gotlib 1929: 22].1
The management and residents did have their reasons for being
sceptical of work with children. One of the main problems was the
critical condition of the housing stock: the residents had to keep the
building in a fit state by their own efforts and at their own expense,
and the monthly contributions for repairs were often several times
more than the rent. In these circumstances fitting out a children’s
room or playground must have seemed an absurd extravagance. It
was often made more difficult by the lack of any spare room in the
building or the yard, and of any funds to equip them or maintain
regular activities. Housing co-operatives were supposed to put aside
1–2 % of their income for cultural work, but they did not always do
so, as their funds were sometimes insufficient even for the most
necessary repairs.2
Besides, the nineteenth-century idea that the yard was a dirty and
unhealthy place, and that spending your free time there was
unbecoming, fit only for the servants and outsiders, was still very
1
2
Cf. the scenario ‘War in the Yard’, written by a boy in the third form of a Moscow school and published
in Pionerskaya pravda. The main enemy of the Pioneers who want to make a playground in their yard is
once again the building manager.
Cf.: ‘Unfortunately, not all managers understand that the funds set aside in the budget for cultural
work are supposed to be spent mainly on work with children. There are many cases where money
assigned for cultural work has been spent on refuse disposal or building repairs. ‘The pipes are all rusty,
and you want culture’ is the co-operative chairman’s reply to any request for money for work with
children’ [Kordes 1935: 4–5].
215
SOVIET TRADITIONS
much alive in Leningrad. Unsupervised children and young people
were regarded as yard children or street children, in other words
hooligans that you should keep away from, and not organise activities
for them together with children from decent families. At a time when
class distinctions were being effaced after the revolution, avoidance
of the society of the yard on the part of those people who regarded
themselves as intelligentsia could become more rigorous, as a sort of
refusal to conform and a rejection of the new way of life. In contrast,
working-class people living on the outskirts of the city or who had
only recently moved into the centre, and those who had come from
the country and the provinces, found it natural to spend their free
time in the yard — what was unnatural was specially organising it.
At the same time, from the second half of the 1920s onwards, every
housing co-operative was supposed to have a cultural commission
made up of residents, which was responsible among other things for
working with children. The Leningrad authorities became more
demanding in this respect after 1928 and the rationalisation of
housing co-operatives in the interests of reducing domestic expenditure and freeing up material and human resources. Judging by the
archives, the co-operative cultural commissions really did do some
work. As a rule, this consisted of one or two events a month for the
adults and a similar number for the children: lectures, excursion,
trips to the theatre, club or cinema, tea parties or children’s
performances on the occasion of the 1 May or 7 November, and so
on. They were usually financed by the participants themselves
[TsGA-SPb. F. 7965. Op. 3. D. 110, 116].
There were some buildings where the parents were willing to pay for
an out-of-school pedagogue to visit. In others some housewives were
social activists who conducted regular activities themselves, according
to their capacity, skills and ideas of what was necessary. Some of these
are documented in photographs kept in the St Petersburg Archive of
Cinema, Photographic and Audio Documents (TsGAKFFD-SPb.).
Judging by the first of these photographs (fig. 1), where two women are
occupied with a group of fifteen pre-school children, with an
attendance list on the wall behind them, in this building work with
small children was regular, in demand and to some extent a solution to
the problem of the lack of kindergarten places.
Published evidence says the same: if the residents thought that work
with children was useful, it was work with small children that they had
in mind (‘they need more care and attention and make more demands
on their mothers’), and sometime the women organised their own
‘duty rotas’ to free up time for each other [Gotlib, Malisova 1930:
4–6]. In the second photograph the game being played by seventeen
children of a suspiciously varied range of ages appears artificial and
could hardly have been possible without adult leadership (fig. 2).
No 9 FORUM
216
Fig. 1. Working with children in the housing co-operative.
Leningrad, 1928. (TsGAKFFD-SPb. Gr. 43284)
Fig. 2. A playground at a housing co-operative.
Leningrad, 1932. (TsGAKFFD-SPb. Vr. 11307)
217
SOVIET TRADITIONS
Beginning in January 1930, the administrative organs of housing
collectives and co-operatives were instructed to provide the departments of education with ‘free space in gardens, squares, boulevards
and in the yards of separate buildings’ to build playgrounds, skating
rinks etc. [Ob uchastii 1930]. In the city centre the parks were used
for this; on the outskirts it could be fenced-off waste land, where
the children themselves planted trees and made flower beds. Some
of the playgrounds were set up in the yards of residential buildings,
for example by the Vasilievsky Island District Education Department
(figs. 3–5). It was this sort of playground that the housing cooperatives were supposed to organise their work with children
around.
From 1936, the Leningrad City Soviet required the city housing
organisations to open playgrounds at the housing co-operatives and
organise work with children twice a year, at the start of the summer
and winter holidays. Even so, the authorities frequently noted that
‘the majority of playgrounds […] do not meet the children’s
requirements because they lack even elementary facilities for games,
sport and rational diversions’ [O merakh 1937: 3]. For its part the
Leningrad Housing Union, as part of the campaign against
infringements of the traffic regulations by children, required all
housing co-operatives to ensure that children were supervised ‘under
the personal responsibility of the building managers and yardmen’
Fig. 3. A group of children during a talk from their educator.
Leningrad, 1937. (TsGAKFFD-SPb. Gr. 63939)
No 9 FORUM
218
Fig. 4. A group of children playing football.
Leningrad, 1937 (TsGAKFFD-SPb. Gr. 63787)
Fig. 5. A group of children playing chess.
Leningrad, 1937 (TsGAKFFD-SPb. Gr. 63833)
219
SOVIET TRADITIONS
and to expand work in the children’s rooms and playgrounds,
‘admitting […] in the first place the children whose parents are out at
work and unable to look after them’ [O borbe 1933].
As can be seen from the photographs above, in order to provide
a playground in the yard, it was enough for the building administration
to provide a table and a few benches and a minimum of sports
equipment. In some places they would make a sandpit for the small
children in the summer, and in the winter a slope for sledging out of
compacted snow and, if space permitted, a little ice rink. This
(together with the cultural commissions’ events) was usually as far as
work with children in the housing co-operatives went. The building
managers and yardmen — the very people whom the activists of
previous years had seen as the opponents of work with children —
were made responsible for them. And this was no accident.
The mid-1930s began a new phase in the war on hooliganism and
lack of supervision for children and young people, and severity was
now closer to the line taken by the authorities than the humanitarian
ideas and activities of previous years. The changes had begun earlier,
but the turning-point was the decision of the Central Executive
Committee and Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR ‘On
the means of combating delinquency among minors’ of 7 April 1935.
It lowered the age of criminal responsibility for the most serious
offences to twelve, and the result of this was the development of
a network of young offenders’ institutions, the creation of sections
to deal with stray and unsupervised children and young people, for
whom their parents and guardians were made responsible. Efforts
to re-educate the hooligans in the yard were now superfluous.
Since children’s activities were now the responsibility of specific
institutions (the district education departments, housing organisations and co-operatives), there was no longer any need for calls to
action and ‘model’ publications. The latter declined in number
significantly from the middle of the 1930s, and their heroes were now
for the most part the ‘cultural activists’ of the building, female social
workers, and, less often, professional pedagogues. The activities
themselves were transferred from the sheds, basements and other
outlying and less valuable parts of the building which had had to be
‘won’ and ‘made their own’ to official premises, usually the Red
Corners. In this way the places assigned to children gained greatly in
status, but ceased to be the children’s own territory, separate from
the adult world.
From now on work with children would no longer meet with
opposition on the part of the residents and administration. Quite the
reverse, the cultural commission would have to render an account to
them of its activities and assist the administration — or after the
co-operatives were abolished in 1937 the building manager —
No 9 FORUM
220
in organising the Red Corner, working with parents and children,
and preventing children from going unsupervised [Polozhenie 1939:
101; Utverzhdenie polozhenia 1940: 4]. In this way the Red Corners
and the children’s activities finally came under the control of the
building manager, assisted by the cultural commission and ‘active
parents’. The author of one article complained that the work of the
Red Corners was impeded by their ‘multiple leadership’ — they were
subordinated to the district education departments, and to the district
housing authorities, and to the district committees of the Komsomol,
and to the district soviets’ children’s work sections [Myasoyedova
1939: 19]. Calls for enthusiasm were replaced by instructions and
accountability. However, regular children’s activities in residential
buildings and social supervision still remained an unattainable goal.
In the two large corpora of interviews assembled for research on the
yards of Leningrad (45) and Soviet childhood (84),1 memories of
organised cultural work are always the same. In the Red Corners it
consisted of separate holidays or women’s handicraft circles for
adults and children, which were far from appealing to everybody. In
the yards it consisted of Saturday and Sunday voluntary work and, on
the eve of the war, self-defence groups, which the children found
more attractive. It is most likely that if regular events did take place
anywhere, they involved an insignificant number of children, and the
rest preferred diversions that were not organised or the ‘real’ clubs at
the schools or ‘Pioneer houses’. This makes the rare exceptions all
the more valuable. The interview below describes the situation in
a living complex built at the beginning of the 1930s and occupied by
families from the Soviet intelligentsia. This not only had a Red
Corner, but funds for the purchase of books and magazines and to
pay for a librarian and music teacher. In other words, it was a model
example of the authorities’ decrees put into practice. Moreover, the
children and young people themselves did not despise the Red
Corner, but read with enjoyment. What is interesting, however, is
how this was incorporated into the system of relationships between
children’s and adult society.
Inf.: There were two remarkable people, with whom I was personally
connected, in this Red Corner. The first of them was Maria
Samsonovna, who taught us music on a grand piano provided by the
state. Besides […] there was a library, which was looked after by
Emma Khristoforovna. She was an elderly German lady, remarkably
patient, with very good manners, who knew all our grandmothers
and whose contribution to the furtherance of knowledge among the
masses was to use the co-operative’s money to subscribe to magazines
1
The first was for my dissertation, the second was for Catriona Kelly’s research project ‘Childhood in
Russia: A Social and Cultural History’ supported by the Leverhulme Trust (grant F/08736/A).
221
SOVIET TRADITIONS
and books. Emma Khristoforovna would issue these books […] and
particularly the magazines, if they had any social value, first of all to
people whom she knew personally, respected and wanted to show her
good opinion of. […] My grandmother and Emma Khristoforovna
knew each other. […] In 1937 and 1938 there was a constant struggle
to have the first turn at reading two publications, the magazine The
Bonfire, because that was where Kaverin’s The Two Captains and
The Adventures of Karik and Valya were published, […] and Around
the World magazine, [which printed] fantasy stories and novels:
Arctania, Professor Dowell’s Head — things by Belyaev. While The
Bonfire was meant for the most part for people in the 5th or 6th class
[i.e. 13–14-year-olds], Round the World was primarily for people
who had a special right to it. Among these were gangling youths of
fifteen, sixteen and seventeen who, it should be said, understood how
these journals were distributed. They would never have dared
interfere with this in their personal dealings with Emma Khristoforovna. But Round the World, which I used to receive as the first
reader (it was known that the magazine had arrived and that it
would be given to me), would be seized by an older person as I was
on my way home with it. […] He would usually be sitting on a pile of
firewood, waiting for the moment — small yard, small world — and
without getting up would simply beckon me and say ‘Hand it over.’
I had to give way to force, but the curious thing is that he would read
the magazine overnight and give it back to me early in the morning.
That is, there was a certain ethics to his acquisition of it, it wasn’t
theft, but, so to speak, a sort of […] jus primae noctis over that little
book (SPb-01 PF-24, m., born 1929).
The practices of distributing the resources of the Red Corner library
were supplemented (and mutually supported) by a situation in which
being well read could have practical benefits. One of the leaders of
the older adolescents in the yard (the very one mentioned in the
interview) used to re-tell the stories that he had read (such as Victor
Hugo’s L’Homme qui rit) in the dark, in a frightening voice and, of
course, for money. It turns out that even such a model Red Corner,
which functioned in reality and not only in the reports made by the
building administration to various offices, and did attract children,
was no alternative to the yard, as the ideologists of children’s work
had imagined. The values offered to the residents of the building
could easily be accommodated in the yard’s system of relationships,
and even support it.
After the war
The growing problem of lack of care and supervision for children in
the post-war years forced the central and municipal authorities to
make another attempt to arrange work with children in a domestic
No 9 FORUM
222
setting.1 In 1946 Leningrad City Soviet proposed that the Leningrad
Housing Authority and the district executive committees should
‘obtain the active engagement [of the residents] in the campaign
against the lack of supervision for children and young people […] by
means of organising and revitalising the activity of those posts which
are engaged in the campaign against the lack of supervision for
children and young people, involving engaged residents in work with
children by means of the organisation of playgrounds and special
children’s rooms’ [O nekotorykh merakh 1946: 9]. Such orders were
issued every years, and every time the city authorities noted that
despite their decisions, the situation remained unsatisfactory: ‘There
are still no children’s rooms and posts organised in large residential
complexes; there are no children’s playgrounds in the yards, gardens,
parks and squares and as a result children are forced to spend their
free time in the streets, where they play their games and run into
danger’ [Ob usilenii mer 1950: 1]. In the 1950s the final phrase came
to be repeated word for word, that is, it became a cliché describing
the usual state of work with children in the city, rather than an attempt
by the authorities to change it.
At the same time there was yet another attempt to make use of the
resources of society. From 1945 in Leningrad and from 1946 in other
cities, social commissions to assist the restoration and exploitation of
domestic units were set up attached to the building administrations;
their task, among other things, was to combat the lack of supervision
for children, look after the Red Corner, and organise cultural and
educational events for adults and children [Ob organizatsii 1946:
121–122]. The orders were followed by various collections of articles
describing model examples of such work, including activities with
children.2 As in the second half of the 1930s, there are neither failures
not conflicts among the activists (the title of one article about
improving the yards, ‘How we assist the building manager’, is telling
[Fomina 1947]). Nor could there be, because now work with children
‘requires planning’: ‘We work strictly according to the plan, which
we draw up and confirm every month. The activists among the
children and parents take a lively part in composing it. […] At the end
of the month we check how well the plan has been fulfilled, whether
anything has been missed, and what should be borne in mind in
subsequent work’ [Donskaya 1948: 60]. The description of this
planned idyll was accompanied by the regulation photographs of the
activists and the children playing under their close observation.
1
2
The campaign for improved yards, with a rhetoric stressing care for children, began in parallel with this
in Leningrad. The history of the improvement of Leningrad’s yards is examined in more detail elsewhere
[Piir 2011].
Mostly in Leningrad and Moscow, though I have come across one publication relating to Omsk.
223
SOVIET TRADITIONS
Work with children was not confined to the efforts of the assistance
commissions. The authorities seem at this time to have tried to use all
possible resources and to have involved pedagogues and the Pioneers
and the Komsomol again. It is interesting, though, that in the articles
published in the post-war years in Semya i shkola, at a time when
the assistance commissions were being actively formed, there is not
a word about them or about co-operation with them. Schoolteachers
and pioneer leaders, parents’ committees and social activist mothers
are carrying on the same children’s activities in residential buildings
as before [Bruk 1946; Zhurin 1948; Popova 1949]. In the articles in
Vozhatyj they are naturally being conducted by Pioneer leaders from
the nearest schools, or by Pioneer and Komsomol members living in
the building, assisted by adult residents [Vo dvore 1956; Loginova
1956]. It looks as if the multiple leadership that grew up in the late
1930s had formulated corresponding patterns and a corresponding
system of reporting each event to many institutions at once.
The archives of the district executive committees provide fuller
information. For example, meetings of the leadership and commissions of the Sverdlovsky district1 of Leningrad in 1949 reveal that
the children’s rooms in domestic buildings had not been opened, the
playgrounds had not been equipped, Pioneer work was not being
done, and the managers were not making premises or funds available
for cultural work [TsGA-SPb. F. 4948. Op. 1. D. 420. L. 1, l. 4,
l. 9ob, l. 12, ll. 16–17]. And inspection of the Red Corners of the
Smolny and Frunze districts showed that thirty-five out of fifty-eight
were closed and turned into offices for the management or flats, and
that only ten were actively working [O rabote 1949]. The archives of
other district executive committees for this year and those that
followed present a similar picture: parents’ committees in residential
accommodation had either not been formed or were inactive, and
since the elections the Red Corners had been occupied by the rehousing fund [TsGA-SPb. F. 47. Op. 5. D. 31; D. 200. L. 103; Op. 5.
D. 443].
At the same time the management had to find some way out of this
situation and present its reports to the appropriate places. In most
cases, the answers given by the assistance commissions to the
Sverdlovsky District executive committee’s questionnaire on work
with children say that ‘There are no posts dealing with lack of
supervision for children’ [TsGA-SPb. F. 4948. Op. 1. D. 420. Ll. 24–
49 ob.]. However there are some quite reasonable solutions to the
problem: ‘This work has been given to the yardmen on duty, since
they are constantly on the street (on the corner of Bolshoi prospekt,
19) and observe the behaviour of the children there’; ‘There are no
1
The Sverdlovsky District existed from 1936 to 1961 and included that part of Vasilevsky Island west of
the Twelfth Line.
No 9 FORUM
224
special posts, lack of supervision for children is dealt with by the
yardmen on duty’; ‘No one from the commission or the local activists
occupies such a post, but the yardmen on duty are entrusted with
looking after the children and reporting to the commission afterwards’
[TsGA-SPb. F. 4948. Op. 1. D. 420. L. 38, l. 40, l. 44 ob.].
Children and Yardmen
Everything had come full circle: the only real possibility for
supervising the children in the yard and in the street was still the
yardmen, from whom the philanthropist at the beginning of
the century and the activists of the first period of children’s work in
the co-operatives had tried to deliver them. How is the lack of success
of all these efforts, the inefficacy of government decrees, and the
unwillingness of residents to organise work with children in their
homes to be explained?
First, from the ordinary citizen’s point of view it looked quite
different. Those who did not look down on the yard thought that it
was a suitable place for children to play in precisely because it was
a supervised area. It was considered that even while their parents
were away children were looked after by the other residents and by
the yardman, because they could be seen and heard through the
windows that looked out onto the yard. Besides, the yard was rarely
empty: it was the place where people cut firewood, hung out the
washing, played dominoes, sat and gossiped on the benches... there
was almost always someone there to intervene in an emergency,
though not to interfere with the children’s games. It was convenient
for the children to be in the yard, because this did not require adults to
be specially present and engaged with them. By contrast, ‘supervision’
as understood by the authorities meant the organisation of children’s
free time, which somebody had to spend time and energy on and be
responsible for to various institutions.
Secondly, the pre-revolutionary tradition according to which it was
the yardmen who were supposed to keep an eye on children in the
yard and the street (and on everything else that happened on the
premises) was still going strong. Indeed, the city authorities themselves reinforced it in the regulations of 1933 cited above in which
they placed responsibility for unsupervised children on building
managers and yardmen, repeating this more than once in different
forms [O borbe 1933].1 According to the instructions issued by the
Leningrad City Executive Committee, yardmen were to watch over
the behaviour of children in the yard and in the street in front of the
1
Moreover, even in the 1922 NKVD instructions the yardmen were supposed to see ‘that nobody living in
the building lets small children out into the street unsupervised’ [O vvedenii 1924: 31], thus the old
obligation was perpetuated in the Soviet definition of yardmen.
225
SOVIET TRADITIONS
building, see that they were not unsupervised, being hooligans or
breaking the traffic regulations, take lost children to the police
station, and inform the police of any parents who ‘have a corrupting
influence on their children’ or make them engage in begging or black
marketeering [Instruktsia 1935: 4; O pravakh 1938: 7; O preduprezhdenii 1938: 7]. The building managers had in turn to inform
parents of such misdemeanours or see that they were called to
account [O pravilakh 1946: 13; 1952: 8].
The yardmen and building managers were not the general public,
they could not avoid their responsibility and they carried out the
instructions of the authorities to the best of their ability. In citydwellers’ memoirs it is the yardmen who were the grown-ups who
impinged most directly on the lives of children and young people.
For example, in Daniil Granin’s Leningrad Catalogue: ‘The yardmen
were the highest authority for us’ They told us where we could play
and where we couldn’t, and they broke up fights. They knew our
names, told us how to behave, they knew all our bolt-holes, and they
helped our mothers to find us’ [Granin 1990: 483–484]; or in Nikolai
Kryshchuk’s Childhood City: ‘Childhood is a hierarchy. My childhood
hierarchy was a peculiar one. At the top were the yardmen. They
looked after the yard and kept an eye on everything. Even the local
policeman was lower in rank, because he only kept an eye on
criminals’ [Kryshchuk 1997: 170].
According to material from the interviews, if anyone conducted
activities with the children or organised them to work on improving
the yard, it was not Pioneer leaders or out-of-school pedagogues or
the cultural commission, but the building manager: ‘When it was
spring, and we planted trees, and the manager taught the children
how to do it and had various games with them. […] There was one
manager we had, an avuncular type, and he organised the games’
(SPb-01 PF-36, yardman, f., born 1925). The person who laid out
benches, a sandpit or a slope of snow was, of course, the yardman,
and he let the children water the flowers from a hosepipe or shovel
the snow with a wooden shovel. The relationships between yardmen
and the children of the building ranged from protection, support,
mutual assistance and even something like friendship to open
hostility, as when teenagers used to overturn the dustbins (SPb-01
PF-36, yardman, f., born 1925), steal their tools (SPb-01 PF-26, m.,
born 1940), and, to judge by the archives, even beat them up [TsGASPb. F. 4948. Op. 4. D. 310. L. 81]. Without going into this subject in
detail, I shall quote as an illustration from two contrasting memoirs
about yardmen, one by a woman and one by a man, both concerning
post-war yards in central Leningrad.
We were all afraid of the yardman. Because they all looked imposing,
to start with, not like the ugly old women of today. The yardmen were
No 9 FORUM
226
all men, and they had a special sort of haircut, and beards. […]
They knew everyone, and knew them by name. They knew all the
residents by name. They knew all the children. Of course, if someone
like that was after you, we were more afraid of them than we were of
our parents. Because they demanded discipline. […] And of course
they kept an eye on us. […] And always, we were in the yard, and
they were in the yard too. […] There were always old women sitting
there, and they also knew everything about everybody and would
also tell our parents what we’d been up to. […] And somehow the
yardmen, evidently, protected us from the rowdies (SPb-00 PF-4,
f., born 1937).
Our worst enemy was the yardman. He was the most awful man. […]
Yardmen would yell and shout at you, and cut up your ball [if you
had broken a window]. Whenever they appeared everything would
go quiet. They used to get up early in the morning, at four or five
o’clock, wash the stairs every day, tidy the yard and then go back to
sleep. Then they would wake up again, go around somewhere, and
then start… When there was no plywood, when they couldn’t find
their crowbar.1 You understand, that was their usual reason. They
shouted at us thirteen-year-old boys (SPb-01 PF-26, m., born
1940).
One gets the impression that while the authorities, ideologists and
activists were trying to organise work with children in residential
buildings, ordinary people either took no notice or were completely
unaware of it. Life went on as usual, people sent their children out to
play in the yard, and the yardmen kept an eye on them (‘so that no
one was unkind to anyone else, and to put the person who had been
nasty in his place. I didn’t even have to be asked to do this, we looked
out for this — that is, if anyone was being a bully’).2 This situation
more or less suited everybody, except the authorities themselves and
to a certain extent those who were charged with carrying out their
decisions and instructions.
* * *
From the middle of the 1950s the government gradually gave up its
attempts to mobilise society for work with children. The housing and
building organisations had improved the yard, which, after the
woodsheds and other domestic offices had been demolished, were
fitted up for the children; in the summer some of them were even
turned into ‘children’s fitness grounds’. The decisions of the
1
2
A sheet of plywood attached to a rope was used for clearing snow. The children used to purloin the
plywood from the yardmen, attach it to a moving trolleybus and ride on it. Crowbars were used for
another sort of entertainment. They would put a glass jar on the crowbar, lean it against the door of
a flat on one of the upper storeys, and ring the bell; when the door was opened, the whole thing came
down with a crash.
SPb-01 PF-36, caretaker, f., born 1925.
227
SOVIET TRADITIONS
Leningrad City Soviet still demanded the organisation of parents’
committees and children’s circles (technology and domestic
science) in residential buildings, but most attention was now given to
expanding networks of children’s out-of-school activities, the
DJuSSh (children’s and young people’s sports schools), and clubs
and sections attached to the palaces of culture and Pioneers,
DOSAAF,1 etc. In 1956–58 the building managements were replaced
by housing offices, and while the building managers and yardmen
were still supposed to inform parents about their children’s disorderly
conduct, they soon lost their function of supervising the residents,
and their connexion with them.
Khrushchev’s speech to the twentieth Communist Party Congress on
the sixth five-year plan put forward the ‘huge educational task’ of
providing ‘all children whose parents so desire’ with creches and
kindergartens, and during the late 50s they were planned and began
to be built on a large scale. In the same speech Khrushchev suggested
that it would be appropriate to build boarding schools for children
who had no fathers or who were from families ‘where both parents
are out at work in factories or offices’ and ‘could only deal with
bringing up their children from time to time. In this situation many
children are left in the care of relatives or neighbours, and sometimes
without any care at all. In this way a significant proportion of children
are left to their own devices, and this often has bad consequences’
[Otchetnyi doklad 1956: 82–83]. In 1955 the Council of Ministers of
the USSR issued a decree organising extended day groups in the
schools of Moscow and Leningrad [Ob organizatsii 1959], which
were introduced in other cities from 1960. Neither the boarding
schools nor the extended day groups attempted to take in all
unsupervised children — they were admitted ‘only at the wishes of
their parents’. This was the beginning of another age. And work with
children in residential buildings no longer meant what it had.
Abbreviations
TsGA-SPb. — Tsentralnyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga
[St Petersburg Central State Archive]
Archival materials
TsGA-SPb. F. 47. Op. 5. D. 31. Executive Committee of the Vasilievsky
Island Soviet of Workers’ Deputies of Leningrad, 1951–56.
TsGA-SPb. F. 47. Op. 5. D. 200. Executive Committee of the Vasilievsky
Island Soviet of Workers’ Deputies of Leningrad, 1956.
TsGA-SPb. F. 103. Op. 5. D. 443. Executive Committee of the Moskovsky
District Soviet of Workers’ Deputies of Leningrad, 1957.
1
DOSAAF — a voluntary organisation supporting the armed forces.
No 9 FORUM
228
TsGA-SPb. F. 151. Op. 5. D. 139. Executive Committee of the Petrogradsky
District Soviet of Workers’ Deputies of Leningrad. Reports and
correspondence with residential organisations concerning the state
of Red Corners, 1942.
TsGA-SPb. F. 4948. Op. 1. D. 420. Executive Committee of the Sverdlovsky
District Soviet of Workers’ Deputies of Leningrad. Materials concerning the work of social commissions for assistance with children
in residential organisation, 1949.
TsGA-SPb. F. 4948. Op. 4. D. 310. Executive Committee of the Sverdlovsky
District Soviet of Leningrad. Minutes of the meetings of the social
commissions for assistance with children in residential organisation,
1957–59.
TsGA-SPb. F. 7965. Op. 3. D. 110. Minutes of the meetings of the cultural
and sanitary commission of House No. 37, 14 Line, Vasilievsky
Island. 1928.
TsGA-SPb. F. 7965. Op. 3. D. 116. Minutes of the meetings of the governing
body of the united housing co-operative of Nos. 27–37, 14 and
15 Lines, Vasilievsky Island, 1929.
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Translated by Ralph Cleminson

Working with Children in Leningrad Housing Administrations

Transcription

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