Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [201]
Not surprisingly, children ran away from such orphanages—in large numbers. Once they found themselves on the streets, they fell very quickly into the criminal netherworld. And once they were part of the criminal netherworld, the vicious cycle continued. Sooner or later, they would probably be arrested too.
At first glance, the 1944–45 annual NKVD report from one particular group of eight camps in Ukraine show nothing out of the ordinary. The report lists which of the camps met the Five-Year Plan, and which did not. It praises inmate shock-workers. It notes sternly that in most of the camps the food was very poor and monotonous. It notes more approvingly that an epidemic had broken out in only one camp, during the time period surveyed— and that that was after five inmates had been transferred there from the overcrowded Kharkov prison.
A few of the report’s details, however, serve to illustrate the precise nature of these eight Ukrainian camps. An inspector complains, for example, that one of the camps is short of “textbooks, pens, notebooks, pencils.” There is also a strict note about the propensity of certain inmates to gamble their food away, sometimes losing their bread rations for many months in advance: the younger denizens of the camp were, it seems, too inexperienced to play cards with the older ones.83
The eight camps in question were the eight children’s colonies of Ukraine. For not all of the children who fell under the jurisdiction of the Gulag belonged to arrested parents. A portion of them found their way into the camp system by themselves. They committed crimes, were arrested, and were sent to special camps for juveniles. These were run by the same bureaucrats who ran the adult camps, and they resembled the adult camps in many ways.
Originally, these “children’s camps” were organized for the besprizornye, the orphans, waifs, and dirty street children who had gotten lost or run away from their parents during the years of civil war, famine, collectivization, and mass arrest. These street children had become, by the early 1930s, a common sight in the train stations and public parks of Soviet cities. The Russian writer Victor Serge described them:
I saw them in Leningrad and in Moscow, living in sewers, in billboard kiosks, in the vaults of cemeteries where they were the undisturbed masters; holding conferences at night in urinals; traveling on the roofs of trains or on the rods below. They would emerge, pestiferous, black with sweat, to ask a few kopecks from travelers and to lie in wait for the chance to steal a valise ...84
So numerous and so problematic were these children that in 1934 the Gulag set up the first children’s nurseries within the adult camps, in order to prevent the children of arrested parents from roaming the streets. 85 Slightly later, in 1935, the Gulag decided to set up special children’s colonies as well. Children were picked up off the streets in mass raids, and sent to the colonies to be educated and prepared to join the workforce.
In 1935, the Soviet authorities also passed a notorious law making children as young as twelve liable to be charged as adults. Afterward, peasant girls arrested for stealing a few grains of wheat, and children of “enemies” suspected of collaborating with their parents, found their way into juvenile prison alongside the underage prostitutes, young pickpockets, street children, and others.86 According to an internal report, NKVD agents in the 1930s picked up a twelve-year-old Tartar girl who spoke no Russian and had been separated from her mother at a train station. They deported her, alone, to the far north.87 So numerous were the Soviet Union’s child criminals that the NKVD created children’s homes with a “special regime” in 1937, for children who