Violence, Childhood and the State: New Perspectives on Political Practice and Social Experience in the Twentieth Century

Nurturing the Nation examines the history of child displacement – understood as both state practice and social experience - in Eastern Europe and Russia in the first half of the twentieth century.

'nationalizing' and 'internationalizing' forces, operating either across borders with regard to refugee children (White's and Zahra's chapters) or within borders (Kaznelson and Baron on the persistence of regional and local identities among Soviet deportees; Balkelis on the preservation of ethnic identities among exile communities). Yet while states and their exercise of government remain fundamental in shaping the lives and subjectivities of displaced children, we must recognize the need to address other variables if we are fully to grasp their diverse experiences and the contexts and conditioning factors of these experiences. 3 The volume will have realized its aim if it provides a useful stimulus to further scholarship and a foundation for new studies. But new research needs also to look beyond the analytical, geographical and chronological frameworks of our studies to address themes that have not received adequate consideration here and, indeed, have been accorded very little attention at all in the existing scholarship on child displacement and displaced children, whether historical or contemporary in focus. 4 These themes include: questions of gender, sexuality and the body; 5 the role of parents or extended family and intergenerational relations; 6 leisure, culture and peer group relations; 7 longer-term historical change and transnational or cross-cultural comparisons; 8 and labour, consumption and the role of economic structures and forcesincluding social class and globalization -in shaping displaced children's lives and enabling or constraining their agency. 9 Historical studies of child displacement and displaced children that are organized around or take fuller account of these themes, in many cases requiring an enterprising and imaginative critical engagement with sparse and oblique sources (especially if these are read to grasp not only adult perceptions and practices but also children's perspectives and agency) will add needed detail and nuance to our understanding. ******************** The case studies presented here focused on lands of the former Russian empireprincipally on Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland -between 1915 and the early 1950s. In this region, during four decades of world wars and conflict-ridden peace, the governments of new post-imperial states, their populations fractured by class and ethnicity, strove for integrity, security and sustainability through programmes of far-reaching political and social change.
All too often, enforced change generated sharper conflict and chaos. As future citizens of these nascent states, children were at the heart of their transformational strategies.
Children who had undergone displacement, many orphaned or cast adrift from their parents by war, civil strife or state interventions, played a defining role in the structural and symbolic development of many of these new or aspiring territorial entities. As Purs discussed in his chapter, Latvia in the interwar period represented an exception that proved this rule.
There, refugee and orphaned children were consciously excluded from an emerging narrative of national rebirth that stressed a continuous and stable relationship between the national community and the land. Particularly after 1934, Latvian identity was predicated on historical rootedness in place, a deliberate denial of the lived experience of a majority of Latvians who had undergone displacement during the First World War and of the significance of refugeedom and repatriation for the republic's establishment of independence. 10 All new East European states throughout these decades -including the Latvian interwar administrations, the Soviet regime and new post-Second World War communist governments in the region, as well as nationalist activists aspiring to self-administration or statehood (such as the Russian émigré elites in White's chapter or the Polish Jewish intelligentsia of Finder's essay) believed that by 'saving' their displaced children from the physical depredations and moral dangers of the 'street' they could demonstrate not only their organizational capacities but also their legitimate role as guardians of the nation. In the course of reclaiming these childrenconceived and represented as valuable 'national property', as Zahra discussed in her chapter (see also the essays by White and Finder) -and of regulating their re-placement, though return to their 'natural' or adoptive families, fostering or institutionalization, these state and communities each also elaborated and established a normative socialization process.
By examining how both the Soviet regime and other East European governments, in the process of forming or re-forming themselves, acted towards displaced children, the chapters in this book have offered new comparative perspectives on the emergent character of these state systems, conventionally distinguished from each other by their contrasting socialist or 'bourgeois' ideologies, their internationalist or nationalist visions, and their revolutionary or democratic conceptions of the state and state-society relations. In fact, the analyses presented here suggest that all twentieth century states, regardless of ideological colour, had much in common with regard to practices of government in general and perceptions and treatment of displaced children in particular. That is to say, all regarded displaced children as both opportunity and threat. Green, for example, notes the duality of Soviet perceptions of orphans during the war, as both innocent victims, to be rescued and rehabilitated, and agents of social disorder, to be punished or excluded. To be sure, a state might define some categories of displaced children as helpless and others as dangerous, or might place greater emphasis on their benign passivity or malevolent agency at different conjunctures -for example, the Soviet regime's policy towards kulak children evolved from active persecution to ambivalent re-integration, as discussed by Kaznelson and Baron. But at different times, and varying according to targeted group, all twentieth century states deployed a mix of strategies and solutions ranging from the coercive to the co-optive. As Zahra demonstrated in her chapter, liberal governments oriented towards welfare, as well as international agencies upholding universal rights, also undertook forcible removals or repatriations. 11 Crucially, many of the chapters have considered displacement not only as a function or consequence of state policy but as a formative lived experience for the migrant subject. To this end, many of the authors have made substantial use of first-person testimonies, including children's diaries and adult memoirs of childhood, as well as oral histories, offering insight into the impact of displacement on children's lives after re-settlement or institutionalization. Rather, Kaznelson and Baron emphasized the need to analyse each individual case on its own terms, to the extent that historical sources permit us to do so, and to relate narratives of experience, memory and selfhood to their multiple discursive contexts in past and present.
It follows that we should seek to distinguish between the trauma 'victim' who suppresses, denies or distances the memory of earlier experiences (perhaps while 'reliving' the experience viscerally in ways they cannot communicatelike the children described above) and the resilient 'survivor' who remains silent as a positive 'coping' strategy or because of habituationas well as to acknowledge the social dimensions of concepts such as 'victimhood'. 12 If modes of self-presentation, including speech, writing and affect, are shaped by social norms, we need to reflect on the extent to which silence or absence of overt emotion are socially-constituted and the extent to which they are psychologically determined (for discussion of silence, see Finder's essay)? We need to consider the role of gender in experience and in shaping memory practices (see the chapter by Kaznelson and Baron)? We also need to take account of age as a variable (see the discussion of Gabriels Matrosovs' memory narrative in Purs, also noted in Chapter One; considerations of displacement as The ambitious programmes of social reconstruction launched by East European states in the period examined here went hand-in-hand with extensive and penetrating spatial reconfiguration. 15 Authorities strove to 'place' their populations through redistributive interventions (which could range from coerced resettlement to placement in homes or adoptive families, from forced expulsions to refugee repatriation), as well as ensuring that everyone knew their proper 'place' by assigning social value to sites and spaces and by regulating mobility (as Purs noted, for example, many early twentieth century experts considered urban environments 'hazardous and corrupting' to children). Populations were categorized, sorted and separated into 'core' and 'marginal' groups, both discursively and through their physical redistribution. Several contributors to this volume have drawn an opposition, implicitly or explicitly, between, on the one hand, the 'street' as a space of social disorder, personal danger and loss, associated with the condition of itinerancy, displacement, refugeedom and exile, and, on the other, 'home' or 'homeland' as the conventional site of comfort, security and stability, associated with rootedness and belonging. Of course, this simple dichotomy did not always hold true. Conceptions both of 'street' and 'home' assumed different inflections at different times and places, when framed in different perspectives and by different interests, as our studies also demonstrate.
Viewed 'from below', by the child subjects, the opposition between movement and stasis had variable associations. As the authors here have emphasized, the experience of displacement was for most children one of intense and unremitting physical hardship and emotional suffering. However, displacement for some children could represent escape, excitement or opportunity. Flight from a homeland torn by conflict, or racked by famine or whether 'nationalizing' or 'revolutionizing', the parental home could in some circumstances constitute a symbol and site of stasis, regression or corruption. In such cases, children were to be re-placed, forcibly if necessary, by adoption or into institutional 'condensers' to be nurtured by the nation to become sound and healthy subjects. Latvian orphanages, as discussed by Purs, were charged with taking in unaccompanied child refugees and transforming them into productive and loyal citizens of the nation. The Stalinist regime placed Even when states promoting pronatalist policies valorized the nuclear family as the normative place of the child, the parental home was generally construed as a site of open public concern not an occluded private space. As discussed in Green's chapter, when Stalinist policy in the late 1930s reasserted the role of the family, it defined this institution as a constituent part of the wider community and means of social integration, not as an autonomous private unit. Similarly, it promoted adoption during and after the war as an act of patriotism and civic duty rather than personal fulfilment. Both Green and Zahra invoke notions of 'theft', when children were considered to have been removed from their 'proper' place to the 'wrong' family or 'wrong' national community. In such cases, national governments and activists, or families with the backing of courts, strove to reclaim and replace the child 'correctly'. Invariably, the child's individual 'best interests' were deemed best met in the socially normative place: the 'biological' family or national community. 18 The chapters by Purs, White and Zahra demonstrate how national governments in this period asserted their right to reclaim children also when they were thought to be at risk of Both conceptual confusion and institutional conflicts over different accounts of the normative place of the child, of the needs and interests of children 'out of place' and of related notions of children's rights of course persist to this day. 21 As White noted in her 19 The fear of 'denationalization' could encompass loss of political identity when the state defined normative belonging in sociopolitical rather than ethnonational terms. Thus the Soviet government became deeply concerned that the large contingent of Soviet children who had been evacuated to Czechoslovakia in late 1921 to escape famine was being subjected to anti-Soviet propaganda and pressures, and took measures to repatriate the children, see Tat chapter, the notion of universal children's rights that had evolved over preceding decades first found expression in the 'Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child', compiled by Eglantyne Jebb's Save the Children International Union in 1923 and adopted by the League of Nations in September 1924. This stated that 'mankind owes to the Child the best that it has to give' and must assist the child as a priority 'beyond and above all considerations of race, nationality, or creed.' 22 Yet this was not so much a declaration of children's autonomous rights as of adult obligations towards children, motivated by internationalist ideals. Children's rights were for the first time formally and separately acknowledged in the United Nations (UN) Declaration of the Rights of Children in 1959. This too was non-binding and still based on a conception of children as passive subjects, as the 'property' of the family, in primary place, and then of the nation-state -by mid-century, as Zahra argued in her chapter, the discourse of primary national identity and belonging, as the necessary condition for 'psychological normalcy', had trumped ideologies of internationalism. 23 Thirty years later, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) of 1989 was the first international legal instrument that recognized children's agency and gave them a voice in the government of their own lives 24 However, the United States still refuses to ratify the 1989 Convention on the grounds that children's interests are best protected within and by the family, not by an international statute that defines them as rights-bearing citizens equal to adults; many other states have opted out of specific obligations; and many (if not most) states do little to implement or enforce the law. 25 Different states' positions and practices with regard to the UNCRC and the principle of children's agency reflect or consciously express, as we have argued throughout this volume, their different conceptions of the actual or ideal nature and scope of their own power and prerogative, the relationship between state and society, and the relationship between the state and international regimes of governance, as well as their own social and cultural norms -in particular, their normative conceptions of the role and place of the child and the nature of childhood -and their particular constructions of social identity, subjectivity and selfhood. 26 The persisting nexus between state power and human mobilities, and the appalling outcomes this generates for millions of children in the present day, mean that it is vital for scholars to engage with child displacement as both state practice and social experience and with displaced children as both social subjects and objects of social practice. We hope that the framework proposed by this volume will encourage further research and facilitate a better understanding of the structures and forces that create child displacement and condition the children's experiences, as well as of the interrelations between their self-identities and their