Orphans during the Civil War: from homelessness to concentration camps

We investigate specifically and comprehensively the orphans situation and transformation of social protection system in the Civil War years and its ultimate phase Tambov Rebellion in the Tambov Governorate through the lens of children’s everyday life and policy of the Soviet government. On the basis of a wide complex of primary materials attraction, first of all archival documents, we representatively and specially investigate various little-known aspects of the scientific problem declared in study. We generalize practices of children survival in the incredibly bloody and violent clashes of rebels and parts of the Red Army in one region – Tambov Governorate. We reveal the conditions of children placement in concentration camps, as well as attempts of the authorities to regulate their situation, to stabilize the morbidity of children and catastrophic child mortality. We provide the specific data on the peculiarities of orphans charity in the conditions of Civil War, Tambov Rebellion, new economic policy at the regional and county level, which allows to evaluate not only the social policy of the Soviet government, but also the survival of children’s society in the chronological period under consideration. We clarify the consequences of taking rebel family members (residents of the region who joined A.S. Antonov) hostage and using children as an attractive mechanism to combat “banditry”. We specially consider the influence of “party and class” selection of children at their admission to orphanages, as well as taking into account their social origin, the position of parents. We reveal the main results of the new economic policy (NEP) impact on children’s social protection and the constriction of the existing practice of orphans charity in the conditions of the actual cessation of funding for many children’s institutions. We draw conclusions about the historical experience, traditions and features of the children survival, including orphans at the regional level (governorate and county) in the conditions of hunger strikes of the 20s of the 20th century, which allowed to successfully reconstruct the actual population situation of the Tambov Governorate in the post-revolutionary period. We give the characteristics of the local authorities’ policy, the interaction of the capital and the regions in the conditions of almost incessant cataclysms and social disasters of the first years of Soviet power.

orphans, Civil War, homeless, concentration camps, Tambov Rebellion (“Antonovshchina”), provincial society, hunger strikes, new economic policy