The Return of Evacuated Children to Leningrad, 1944–6

Abstract

During the Second World War around seven million Soviet children were evacuated from frontline areas.¹ Approximately 500,000 were evacuated in groups from Leningrad. These went mainly to Siberia and the Urals, where they formed children’s homes for the duration of the war, usually on collective farms. This chapter looks at what happened to these children at the end of the war, how and under what conditions they returned to Leningrad, and the attempts by the state to reunite families separated by war. Some of the measures taken to deal with children back in the city and the limited public discussions on the impact of the war and evacuation on children are outlined. As elsewhere in Europe at the time, children were both pitied and feared, viewed as innocent victims of war but also as ‘outlaws’ and potential producers of present and future social disorder and crime. In the Soviet case such fears were heightened because of the earlier experience of mass child vagrancy. In the 1920s millions of abandoned children, the bezprizornie, had resulted from the sequence of violent catastrophes in Russia between 1914 and 1921, and had been one of the state’s most urgent social problems.² In 1944, Leningrad’s authorities therefore did all they could to control the return of children to the city, help the reformation of families and manage children’s re-absorption into the education system as well as their public and private behaviour.