Soviet Boarding Schools and the Social Marginalisation of the Urban Poor, 1958–1991

Abstract

In 1958, the Soviet residential childcare network was reformed by Nikita Khrushchev as part of his efforts to ‘relaunching’ socialism to free it from the taint of Stalinism. His administration sets up a network of boarding schools to raise ‘the builders of communism’ and thus supports parents who struggled with raising their children. However, in a mixture of conscious policy and local reactions to contingency, the new residential childcare network ended up targeting children from socially marginal families disproportionately. These institutions allowed the Soviet authorities to keep social problems out of the public eye by framing general issues as individual deviant behaviour. This paper will show how the criminalization of poverty by residential childcare led to a spatial and consequently social isolation of such children. The Soviet authorities invested as few resources as possible into these institutions and only stepped in if the boundary between the institution and the rest of society became threatened. Due to this spatial divide, Soviet children in care grew up in quite different social structures than ‘family children’, which prepared them more for life in other ‘total institutions’ whilst keeping them from learning the necessary social skills to cope in society, reinforcing their marginalization.