Placing the Child in Twentieth-Century History: Contexts and Framework

In the Ukraine ragged homeless boys came and beat on the train doors and begged, many of them hanging onto the train in hopes of getting to somewhere where there might be food. [. . .] Miss Daunt says bitterly that there are no girls in Leningrad. She exaggerates, but she has cause to speak bitterly, as she lives down a street where there is a sailors’ club and she sees girls, who she thinks cannot be more than twelve, accosting sailors there. Diary of British diplomat Reader Bullard, 13 June 19332


Thanks to you, great Stalin
For our miraculous time! Eulogy by Pioneer Valia Shevchenko, December 1936 1 In the Ukraine ragged homeless boys came and beat on the train doors and begged, many of them hanging onto the train in hopes of getting to somewhere where there might be food. […] Miss Daunt says bitterly that there are no girls in Leningrad. She exaggerates, but she has cause to speak bitterly, as she lives down a street where there is a sailors' club and she sees girls, who she thinks cannot be more than twelve, accosting sailors there.
Diary of British diplomat Reader Bullard, 13 June 1933 2 I should like to thank Elizabeth Harvey and Maiken Umbach for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
as well as the forces that shape the lives and life-worlds of individuals and populations, both those displaced from their homes or homelands and those who remain 'in place'.
By integrating diverse historical and conceptual perspectives on childhood, spatiality and mobility, the essays presented here thus offer a new scholarly lens on many wider themes of central importance for understanding the twentieth-century world and the formation of present-day political and social realities. These include the impact of conflict and political violence on communities and individuals; the rise of modern population politics and its role in state-building and governance; social reform as state project, its forms, aims and instruments; the evolving principles and practices of modern welfare and humanitarianism; the interrelations and interactions of sovereign states, civic interests, non-governmental organizations and transnational agencies; the changing character of state-society relations, categories of social identity and constructions of contemporary selfhood and subjectivity; and the nature of social experience, including the experience of childhood as mediated in children's own testimonies and in adult memory narratives.
Contributors to this volume have drawn on rich and varied source materials to inform their analyses, including government documents; the records of relief agencies and international organizations; personal diaries and correspondence; published and unpublished memoirs; data from sociological, pedagogical, psychiatric and other research reports; film and oral history. These sources have enabled the authors to reflect on and elucidate the unifying themes of the volume from many standpoints -those of politicians and bureaucrats; nationalist organizers and communist activists; philanthropists and welfare workers; political police, jurists and judges; educationalists and psychologists; filmmakers, propagandists and social campaigners; and parents, both 'natural' and adoptive.
Crucially, most of the contributors to this volume also attend closely to the words and voices of the displaced children themselves, many orphaned as well as uprooted, in order 8 became, as a scholar has written with regard to postcolonial and postwar Uganda, 'a primary space in which national prosperity will either be made or broken.' 10 Even more urgent anxieties were manifested in relation to children viewed as 'out of place', that is to say dis-placed from normative sites of child-rearing and socialization -home, school, club -to the margins of the established social order. 11 These were children who were neglected or had been abandoned by destitute, desperate or otherwise 'unfit' parents; who had run away from exploitation or abuse; or who had been orphaned. Increasingly, in the early twentieth century, these were also children who had been separated from family by war, civil conflict or social upheaval, or who had fled political violence or been expelled or evacuated from their homes (sometimes with their parents, often without) to become refugees in their own country or abroad. These displaced children, especially those without adult care or support and struggling for survival on the street, were seen and represented in various, often contradictory ways: they were associated with violence and vice yet also with vulnerability and victimhood. Particularly the youngest children (and perhaps also those displaced from 'cultured' homes) sometimes elicited sympathy, but often even they, and invariably the older Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 273-310; and Hamilton Cravens, 'Child-Saving in the Age of Professionalism, 1915-1930', in Hawes andHiner (eds), American Childhood, pp. 415-88;Leroy Ashby, Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, and Abuse in American History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997). See also works on delinquency cited in fn. 7 above. 10 Kristen E. Cheney, Pillars of the Nation. Child Citizens and Ugandan National Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 2. 11 For discussion of 'displacement' as a relational concept that acquires meaning by reference to notions of normative 'place', see Baron and Gatrell,'Population Displacement,and Social Identity',. The concept 'out of place' derives from Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1966). For a rich analysis of displacement as the condition of being (seen as) 'out of place', see Siobhan Peeling, 'Dirt, disease and disorder: population re-placement in postwar Leningrad and the 'danger' of social contamination', in Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell (eds), Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in Soviet Eastern Europe, 1945-1950(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. For children 'out of place', see M. Connolly and J. Ennew, 'Introduction: Children out of Place', Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research ('Children out of Place: Special Issue on Working and Street Children), Vol. 3, No. 2 (1996), pp. 131-45. It is also important to stress that the concept of 'socialization' is used in this volume to refer to historically contingent strategies of social integration and identity-formation (we also use the term 'normalization'), without reference to normative theories of child socialization, the subject of substantial recent sociological critique. See William A. Corsaro Modernizing states developed different ways to manage perceived challenges to social stability arising from within their populations, and especially from juveniles 'out of place'. Some tended more towards coercion: excluding, isolating, institutionalizing individuals or social groups considered alien or socially dangerous; at the most extreme, annihilating them. Others tended towards more 'co-optive', welfare-oriented interventions: providing the disadvantaged or disenfranchised with care, protection and material support and creating opportunities for their social re-integration. 13 Many of these interventions, both excisionary and welfare-oriented, involved subjecting already marginalized individuals, communities or entire populations to planned displacement. Coerced mobility took various forms, many of which we examine in the case studies: transfers and exchanges between states; internal resettlement; deportation, exclusion or expulsion on the basis of ethnicity, socioeconomic status or other categories of classification and discrimination; re-placement through fostering or adoption, sometimes legally-grounded but often more akin to theft or kidnap; incarceration in prisons, colonies or camps, or institutionalization in orphanages, hospitals, asylums, boarding schools or reformatories. 14 Often, as we shall discuss in this volume, these actions were targeted specifically at children and youth perceived as 'out of place'. Even when benign in their aims, such displacements often entailed violence, wrenching upheaval and loss for those uprooted and transferred to new homes or places of resettlement. Most modernizing states deployed, at different times or in different places, a range of strategies along the spectrum between brute force and accommodation. 15 Increasingly, states developed means of avoiding overt coercion and violence in favour of more sophisticated, cost-effective and humane means of constructing cultural conformity and normalizing behaviour. Still, intrinsic to 'biopolitics' as a form of twentieth century government, as it emerged and has evolved, has been violence, implicit or explicit. 16 The differing interventions of modernizing states in the lives of displaced children, to rescue them, redeem them, punish them or provide for them, often entailing their further displacement and re-placement, were a function of how state authorities conceived and strove to project their own role, their legitimating principles, their visions for the future, their organizational capacities and their relationship with citizens. Their interventions, however, also served to constitute the state itself, as the structured outcome of conflict and compromise among diverse political, social, economic and bureaucratic interests, each with their own prescriptions for managing populations and social groups -including, often especially, children -and arbitrated, regulated or directed by a central executive authority. Finally, these 15 Thus Muncie cites David Garland's notion of a new 'penal-welfare complex' emerging in Britain in the period 1895-1914, 'in which classical conceptions of punishment and generalized deterrence were contested and disrupted by positivist conceptions of reclamation and individualized treatment. The end result was new means of "normalizing", "correcting" and "segregating" young people, which in their complexity and interrelation could no longer be simply viewed as either humanitarian or repressive. '  states' interventions aimed to transform society, reinforcing reconceived categories of social belonging, strengthening the reformed social base of state power, consolidating new strategies of acculturation and socialization, and physically excluding undesired elements. In the process of working on the displaced child, that is to say, modernizing states were also working on themselves and reworking their relationship with citizens. Studying these states' conceptions of children 'out of place' and their policies towards them, therefore, we gain much wider insights into the history of modern statehood and social relations. 17 In elucidating how states, and also non-state actors such as émigré communities, international organizations and transnational agencies, conceived of and acted towards displaced children, the case studies here are also concerned to examine how 'childhood' itself, in the time and place under survey, was constructed conceptually, inscribed in discourse and institutionalized in social norms and legal structures, and to consider how different understandings of childhood shaped practice with regard to children and children's own realities. Acknowledging that childhood is a social construct (see next section), this volume adopts no normative definitions of 'the child' or of 'childhood'. At the same time we recognize, of course, that age matters. Gabriels Matrosovs, as a teenager in a Latvian orphanage in the early 1920s, recalled his family's flight from home during the First World War, when he was five years old. In the midst of burning houses and crowds of desperate refugees, his mother in anguish because she had to abandon his older brother, the little boy had only positive emotions: '[I] liked going by train. I was happy, but the other people were upset. I still did not know what fleeing meant'. 18 Gabriels was not greatly affected even when his father died after their arrival in central Russia. At that time, he later remembered, 'life was pretty good'. However, they subsequently moved further eastwards, and the death of his mother from typhus during a long Siberian winter and then his own serious illness scarred his memory: that was, he wrote in his autobiography, 'the worst time of my life'.
Thus both age and experience produce a more 'mature' self-awareness, albeit at a different pace for individual children, and possibly at a different rate for girls and boys. 19 Older children and adolescents become ever more conscious of the complexity and contingency of life as well as of the potential meanings and wider ramifications of events. At the same time, they become physically stronger, cognitively more developed and more able to take care of themselves and others. Over and again in this volume, we witness not just children's terrible suffering but their resourcefulness, courage and capacity to survive. A key theme of several chapters -addressed most directly by Kaznelson and Baron -is the impact that the experience of violent displacement has on children and on their future lives and wellbeing as adults. What we may see as evidence of childhood resiliency (such as working to maintain their family), many of these adults construed in retrospect as signifying their 'loss' of childhood. Prompted by the same assumptions of childhood as a time of sheltered innocence, Russian adults working with child refugees in the mid-1920s commented on their 18 For Gabriels' story, see the chapter by Purs in this volume. 19 The role of gender in shaping children's lives, experiences, perceptions and understandings is an important theme that deserves greater attention than accorded in this volume.  20 What, then, is the appropriate role of the child? Where is the child's proper place? When is 'childhood'? These are vital questions of context, standpoint, perception and construction with which the case studies engage, as they examine official discourse and practice, adult myths and memories, and children's own lives and evolving self-consciousness and sense of identity.
Ideology, Identity and Experience: Childhood as Social Construct The last two decades have seen an explosion of new sociologies, anthropologies and histories of modern childhood and youth that critically examine the discursive constructions and reconstructions that shape children's lives and experiences. 21 Among these a growing number of works adopt a child-centred perspective. This scholarship explicitly rejects the traditional standpoint of the grown-up observer, whether politician, parent, policeman, welfare worker or academic, who views 'minors' principally 'as objects and motivators of adults' actions'. 22 Instead, it focuses on children as autonomous subjects, whose lived experiences, understandings of reality and histories are distinct from, though entangled with, those of their adult counterparts in a particular period or place. Some sociologists have proclaimed that this approach represents a 'new paradigm' in child studies. 23 Childhood is now investigated as a separate social category, institution or identity -the child is no longer merely an embryonic adult passively undergoing socialization, but an agent of social change in their own right. 24 Much of the new child-centred sociological work on children is ethnographic. For historians, of course, this perspective raises thorny questions of sources, as I discuss below.
Despite these innovations, much of the recent historical work on children remains concerned with official conceptions of childhood and strategies for the care and acculturation of children; in short, with what adults 'did for (or to) children'. 25 The present volume seeks to combine both 'old' and 'new' perspectives by examining moments and sites of intersection or interaction between adults' interventions and children's experiences, directing attention, when sources permit, to children's 'partial and situated' capacity to re-imagine and act on the worlds in which they lived. 26 A child-centred research agenda demands that we reflect on the distinctiveness of children's perceptions as well as the ways these are conditioned and constrained by adult views of childhood. This directs our attention to issues of ideology and identity and the interconnection of the two. We understand ideology here not solely as state doctrine, as an intellectual framework for political action, but as discourse that shapes a particular view of the world, including notions of selfhood and social relations. Ideology in this sense orders 23   to the same range of sources, especially qualitative data based on direct observation of child subjects or interaction with them. As historians, we must recognize that the available 27 Michel Foucault, 'The Eye of Power. A Conversation with Jean-Pierre Barou and Michelle Perrot', in Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980 Oswell, The Agency of Children, especially Chapters 4 and 5. 29 For general discussion of researching children's perspectives and experiences, see e.g. Allison James, 'Researching Children's Social Competence', in Martin Woodhead, Dorothy Faulkner, Karen Littleton (eds), Making Sense of Social Development (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 231-49 (positing four 'research strategies' that correlate to four ideal types: the developing child, the tribal child, the adult child, the social child -it is the final vision of children as active social participants, albeit with different social competencies to adults, that we find most useful for our present purposes); James,Jenks and Prout,Theorizing Childhood, through writing. Which discursive structures provide a framework of significance for recollected experience? What does it mean for the narrator to recreate themselves in memory as object rather than subject of remembering and then revert to the first person to render experience in the form of self-narrative? If childhood is a staged and contested entry into discourse, what difference does age make in remembering and narrating? 33 How do experiences of violence affect or shape memory practices? To address these questions, we must understand testimonies of childhood, whether composed by children or adults, as a poetic rather than documentary genre: they decontextualize and essentialize impressions or intuitions of the past retrieved and assembled because these bear on present concerns, as well as accord with present-day norms and notions of 'truth'. 34 Historians must be aware that the meaning of testimonies derives as much from affect, imagination and impulse as from any 'authentic' past experience. The challenge, then, is to re-contextualize and de-essentialize the elements and structures of self-narrative. (In this regard, Finder's chapter in this volume offers a revealing study of questions of ideology, narrative form and identity with reference to fictionalized first-person testimonies presented in film, including through the use of flashbacks.) None of these considerations, of course, devalues first-person testimony as evidence of children's experiential worlds and of the impact of their childhood lives on adult narrators. Rather they prompt us to reflect on the questions such sources answer in relation to those that historians generally ask. I discuss issues of narrative, memory, trauma, temporality and selfhood further in Chapter Four. Elsewhere I have sought to understand the historical meanings of population displacement, as both state practice and social experience, with reference to the opposition between 'spaces of movement' and 'places of being '. 35 Contributors to the present volume have been encouraged to reflect on their materials in light of this framework. As analytical concepts, neither has any intrinsic moral value: mobility in space may be associated with freedom, adventure and selfdevelopment or with deprivation, danger and loss of identity; rootedness in place with security, stability and nurture or with surveillance, dependency and oppression.
Conventionally, however, as we saw earlier with regard to street children, this opposition has most often been constructed as such within stridently moralizing discourses that valorize the condition of being sedentary 'in place' over that of being itinerant and 'out of place'.
Soviet culture of the 1920s demonstrated an ambivalence towards street children (besprizorniki) characteristic of a system intent on transforming social structures and norms, yet with no consensus on either ends or means, while at the same time securing social order.
Whereas many Bolshevik officials and experts pointed to the prevalence of violence, exploitation and abuse among street children, and others viewed them as a social threat, some believed that their experience of life outside the conventional sites of childhood (especially the traditional family), the resourcefulness they developed and the unity of the gangs they formed made them ideal material to be 'reforged' into model new socialist citizens. 36 One Soviet official told a foreign visitor that street children were 'very energetic' and possessed a strong 'sense of honour'; another noted: 'You find they have an extraordinary amount of 35 Baron and Gatrell,'Population Displacement,and Social Identity', Ball, And Now my Soul is Hardened,pp. 40,[80][81]. A Soviet psychiatrist distinguished between 'passive' and 'active' besprizorniki. The former were on the street mainly because of social hardship, manifested only minor symptoms of nervousness and easily re-integrated into society. The latter were often 'career' runaways, impelled by existing psychological conditions or made 'so dissolute by life on the street that they become almost like child-psychopaths'. These children demonstrated a more deep-seated 'anti-sociality' [antisotsial'nost'], having become 'untrusting, embittered, deceitful, aggressive, etc.' But, the expert stressed, even they had 'positive qualities: loyalty to comrades [tovarishcheskaia predannost'] and Green's chapter addresses the persistence of these tensions in subsequent decades).

FIGURE 1.1 HERE (HALF-PAGE)
These modes of spatial experience and discourse also have temporal axes that we consider in relation both to subjects' life-worlds and to questions of memory and trauma.
That is to say, the displaced children whom we study in this volume generally experienced a sequence of displacements and re-placements that shaped how they understood their own lives as well as constructed their own histories, as children writing autobiographies and as adults seeking through memory practice to impose order and meaning on earlier experience. 38 As remarked earlier, childhood itself is constructed on spatial and temporal axes: traditionally, the child has been defined in large part by identification with specific sites 37 Lenka von Koerber, Soviet Russia Fights Crime (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1934), pp. 88-90. 38 Thus Riccardo Lucchini writes of the 'career of the street child' whose perceptions and understandings of the 'street' evolve with age and experience, in Enfant de la Rue. Identité, sociabilité, drogue (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1993), pp. 134-61. In her exploration of immigrant identity, Andreea Deciu Ritivoi notes that we prefer to conceive of 'exile and homesickness in spatial rather than also temporal and even less so in existential terms', since space (and, in relation to the concerns of the present volume, displacement) allows for returns (replacement), while time is irreversible, in Yesterday's Self. Nostalgia  (especially home and school) and, by implication, with rootedness 'in place'; reaching adulthood, they 'move on' from these places, and it is this mobility that marks their maturity. 39 As Figure 1.1 illustrates, the displaced child is seen to have foregone childhood, to have grown up prematurely, to exhibit 'unchildishness' (thus also pointing to the disconnection between biological age and social ideas of childhood). 40 This framework highlights the fact that the modern citizen has become fixed 'in place', or within a network of interrelated places, from which they derive a more or less stable sense of identity, and where state authorities can register, classify and monitor them. For the modern child, excluded from most of the rights and duties of citizenship (although they have usually been held to account before the law), the experience of place has conventionally been spatially more restricted and socially more restrictive. 44 In the words of a contemporary sociologist: 'Children's lives are structured by boundaries of time and place set by adults; their daily lives marked by permission seeking, negotiations and rules.' 45 For adults, the principal sites of childhood, where 'minors' are to be nurtured, regulated and instilled with appropriate values and norms of behaviour, have traditionally been school and home -usually in the sense of the family hearth, but at times its functional substitutes or symbolic extensions: this volume considers institutional homes and adoptive families as well as notions of the national 'homeland'. 46 At times, these modernizing processes of 'scholarization' and 'familization' have come into conflict with one another, as radical states strove to use public institutions, such as the school or youth organizations, to subvert, substitute or transform the traditional family as a private institution. 47 Later in this chapter, I discuss the vilification of the family in early Soviet ideology, citing communist activist Zlata Lilina's demand for the 'nationalization' of children. An anti-Soviet cartoon of the 1920s, titled 'An Ideal Child', satirizes these ambitions (Figure 1.2). The émigré artist, A. Uspenskii, has been inspired to draw this image by an alleged Soviet news story, cited above the picture, about a two yearold girl who had been expelled from the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) because of her failure to attend meetings. For Uspenskii, such a case evidently exemplified, to the point of absurdity, the Soviet regime's design to destroy the family and revolutionize the essence and experience of childhood. The communists, in this account, through their endeavours to indoctrinate and mobilize the young generation, were transforming children into unnatural creatures such as little Rosa, who rejects loving nurture in the private family home for public work in political committees and government offices. 48 In so doing, Uspenskii implies, the communists were in effect destroying childhood.

FIGURE 1.2 HERE (FULL PAGE SO TEXT IS LEGIBLE).
Children may be displaced from their conventional sites of belonging in various ways. If a state believes that parents are unable or unwilling to provide adequate care for their own children or to instil in them appropriate norms and values, it may remove these minors from their homes to an alternative place, to be reared in accordance with official conceptions of the community's -and hence, in its view, the child's -best interests. As I have just noted, some radical early Soviet activists demanded full 'nationalization' of children, though this was never implemented. Several of the case studies address issues of child-parent relations, family policy, child welfare and institutionalization (when the state acts in loco parentis) in relation to child displacement and re-placement. At other times, political, societal or natural catastrophes may cause the child to be separated from their parents and family, who may or may not remain alive. In some desperate circumstances, parents may decide to abandon their children. Or children may independently resolve to escape the 'boundaries of time and place set by adults' that structure their lives, especially if they experience abuse, neglect or deprivation. Displacement does not necessarily entail children's loss of kin -they may flee or be uprooted from their home in the company of their parents or other family members (though frequently, in the chaos of movement, they subsequently become separated). The case studies in this volume touch on all these forms of displacement.
The studies also reveal that most displaced children experience more than one form of displacement and re-placement: itinerancy, as noted above, is a condition characterized by alternating motion and stasis. Thus Purs and White consider children who, with their families, fled from home and homeland because of war, civil conflict or fear of political persecution.
In the course of repeated settlement and resettlement, these child refugees became separated from their parents or lost their immediate family to violent death or disease and were placed in orphanages. Baron and Kaznelson as well as Balkelis examine the experiences of children deported by state authorities, during peacetime, with their entire families to special settlements. In most cases the children's parents, sometimes all their kin, perished in exile and they were left to fend for themselves and then placed in state institutions. Qualls looks at children who were evacuated from one country to another in organized groups, with adult carers but without their parents, and then placed in special children's homes. Finder's chapter focusses on a home for children who had lost all their relatives to genocide. The children in Green's and Zahra's chapters had been separated from parents, and many had become orphans, as a result of wartime occupations, evacuations or deportations -some had been formally or informally fostered, others taken for illegal adoption, and many were homeless and without adult care at the moment they were collected for re-placement. In all these diverse cases it is evident that violence was the context, catalyst and condition of the children's displacement and itinerancy. For many children, violence persisted during their replacement, overshadowed their subsequent experiences and haunted their memories. War, conflict and violence are not the principal focus of our analysis, but they are a prominent leitmotif throughout all the case studies. 49 Those separated from their parents, and especially those who had no adult support, found themselves for longer or shorter periods of time on the 'street'. In the case studies, the notion of the 'street' stands for a range of different spaces constructed discursively in opposition to conventional notions of 'home'. 50 The 'street' is as much about existence in a marginal social milieu, often (though not always) without fixed abode or adult oversight, as about presence in a specific locale. If a child's life at 'home' is circumscribed and constrained by the explicit or implicit rules of adult society, life on the 'street' entails contestation of adult values -it is a space in which children 'out of place' are forced to improvise their own order and establish their own norms, in the face of many hazards and hardships, to secure their own survival. 51 Their challenge to adult norms often manifests itself in conflict over the occupation and use of public space. According to a memoir source, waifs in a southern  Europe. International Perspectives, 1945-1949, in Past & Present, Vol. 210, Supplement 6 (2011.  Coercion, Capital, andEuropean States AD 990-1992 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992). On transnational governance: Mark Mazower, Governing the World. The History of an Idea (London: Allen Lane, 2012), especially Chapters 5-8. 59 For insightful discussions of continuities and change in early twentieth century notions of childhood, and of associated practices, see Schuman (ed.), Raising Citizens in the Century of the Child; Hendrick, Child Welfare; Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land. For a (now slightly dated) literature review: Hendrick, Children, Childhood and English Society, 1880-1990(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, especially Chapter that emerged from the former Russian imperial domains -here we mainly consider Soviet Russia and Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland -were the site of radical early experiments in twentieth-century post-imperial state-building and social reconstruction. Over the next three decades, populations across the region found themselves embroiled in state-orchestrated schemes of unprecedented scope aimed at creating territories that were ethnically or socially homogenous. 64 States both 'nationalizing' and 'revolutionizing' in their ideological selflegitimation deployed coercive population displacement as a primary means of achieving their visions. 65 From late 1939, Soviet and Nazi regimes that had already brutally repressed sections of their core populations unleashed all-encompassing campaigns of social or ethnic cleansing in newly-occupied areas across the region, involving mass deportations and genocide. 66 During wartime chaos and postwar reconstruction, as well as peacetime crisis and conflict provoked by state interventions, the lands of the former Russian empire thus became a testing ground where many of the ideas and practices of population management that I discussed earlier were implemented on a scale and with an intensity hitherto unimagined. In this context, ideas and practices of child displacement and re-placement were given greater force and urgency by revolutionary visions of social change, which in their orientation towards the future placed strong emphasis on the socially transformative significance of the child's social formation. New regimes promoting powerful ideologies of collective regeneration, whether socialist or nationalist in form, and asserting radical models of modernization, saw children as the makers or breakers of fundamental change, and were accordingly preoccupied with questions of family policy and child socialization, welfare and control. 67 For many proponents of change, the parental home represented a symbol and site of stasis, regression or corruption. These activists proposed that children should to be re-placed in institutional homes to be nurtured by the nation as sound and healthy citizens. Even when states accepted or promoted the family as the normative place of the child, it was now an open focus of public concern and scrutiny not an occluded private space. 68 Among these radical new regimes improvising strategies of post-colonial statebuilding, social transformation and modernization (and thereby establishing models that would be adopted by other new states later in the century), the Soviet Union, as noted earlier, was merely the most explicit in its pronouncements on the political significance of children.
communists. […] And to do this the first priority must be to sweep out of the schools and orphanages all those bourgeois stooges, all those pedagogues and teachers, who are steeped in the poison of the bourgeois worldview […] We must [also] remove children from the harmful influence of the family. We must register them all, to speak frankly -nationalize them. From their first days they will come under the benevolent influence of communist kindergartens and schools. There they will learn the A to Z of communism. There they will grow to be real communists. To compel the mother to give her child to us, to the Soviet state -that is our practical task. 70 Civil war and foreign intervention, epidemics, massive social dislocations, lack of resources, scepticism on the part of many leading (male) communists and the prioritization of other policy areas meant that Soviet children remained un-nationalized; indeed, within fifteen years the state had rehabilitated the family as a site and means of socialization, albeit the new 'Soviet family' was now refigured as a 'cell' in the wider socialist body politic, subordinate to Stalin, the 'father of the nation', as discussed in Green's chapter. 71 Yet owing to recurrent crises during the first three decades of Soviet rule, millions of children found themselves without family, homeless and itinerant. In effect, the bezprizorniki became the 'direct responsibility' of the Soviet state, even though, as we have already discussed, it was ambivalent about their social status and had no coherent conception of how to respond to a challenge that it viewed as simultaneously humanitarian, social and political. 72 Eight years after the October Revolution, the Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin warned of the urgent need to 'save' the many hundreds of thousands of children who were still living on the streets. In his eyes, they posed not only a menace to public order in the 70 Quoted in V. Zenzinov', Bezprizornye (Paris: Sovremennyia Zapiski, 1929), p. 36. 71 Wendy Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life 1917-1936(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. See also other works cited in Green's chapter, fn. 5. 72 On this crisis, see the works cited in fn. 74 below. See also Figure 1.1. and Soviet characterizations of street children above and fn. 36. present but a threat to cultural renewal and a test of the legitimacy and integrity of the socialist system: 'The situation here threatens grave dangers for the future if we are not able to eradicate promptly in youths the bad habits that a vagrant life imparts to them.' 73 The Soviet government continued to be concerned about and to involve itself, albeit with no consistent or coherent policy and often with disastrous effect, in the lives of the country's children and youth. As an experiment in 'utopian' modernization, grounded in ideals of individual and collective welfare, and undertaking comprehensive political, economic and social restructuring, the Soviet Union exerted a powerful influence on ideas and practices of development worldwide during the twentieth century, among states that sought to emulate its 'model' and among those that found themselves forced to respond to the ideological challenge that it posed. In this way, the Soviet Union in the period surveyed here, as well as other states of the region that shared similarly high hopes and bitter anxieties for 'their' young generations, drawing on pre-existing principles and practices of child displacement and re-placement, crystallized new radicalized discourses and interventions and established precedents that, directly or indirectly, reshaped global conceptions, visions, strategies and solutions with regard to the place of children and the government of childhood.
Thus the region on which we focus in this volume within the chronological bounds that we have defined offers rich opportunities to engage with a crucial themes in the history of twentieth century child displacement and re-placement, as well as the many broader issues of state-building, population policy and social experience that this study opens up. The volume also affords the possibility of comparative analysis by its inclusion of case studies focussing on the Soviet Union and on other East European states and nations professing different, often opposed ideologies, as well as several chapters that address perceptions, policies and practices on a transnational scale -a vital perspective, since mobility frequently 73 Pravda, 7 November 1925, No. 277, p. 2, cited in Ball, And Now my Soul is Hardened. p. 193. entails border-crossings and since territorial borders in this tumultuous period underwent many changes.

Outline of Chapters
While the case studies, as noted, engage with a range of different forms and aspects of child displacement and re-placement, use diverse sources and engage with various disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, they are bound together by many shared thematic, conceptual and methodological concerns. In particular, they all address questions of ideology and identity and of children and childhood as social constructs; the challenge of reconstructing children's lives in the past and of gaining insight into their subjective experiences of past worlds; the role of space and time in structuring children's lives and state practice, and also as analytical concepts for understanding mobility and settlement; and the tensions between official impulses, on the one hand, to repress and, on the other, to rehabilitate and reintegrate.
In Chapter Two, Aldis Purs draws on a unique set of archival texts to examine the experience of Latvian child refugees during the First World War and after their resettlement in an orphanage in the newly independent Latvian nation-state. This collection of autobiographies written by young people as they graduated from the children's home, together with accompanying commentaries by the institution's director, offers insight not only into their earlier experiences of displacement and of loss and exile, their notions of home and belonging, and the routes they took back to their 'native' land (which some had never before seen), but also into the new state's administrative and symbolic self-construction as a 'homeland' for the displaced and as a 'home' for the orphans. Purs concludes that, paradoxically, the Latvian state excluded refugee children from its narrative of national birth, which stressed historical continuity and rootedness in the land, while at the same time working to incorporate these children in the national community.
In Chapter Three, we turn our attention to Constantinople, which in 1920 became a temporary haven for many thousands of Russian refugee children fleeing the Russian Civil War and Bolshevik depredations in their homeland. Using a large collection of first-person testimonies written by the displaced children a few years later, Elizabeth White analyses how they remembered and recounted their experiences of revolution, war, escape and resettlement, focussing like the previous chapter on children's sense of loss and nostalgia for the homeland and on their hopes and aspirations for the future. The chapter also discusses the humanitarian relief work carried out by the League of Nations, by transnational agencies such as the Save the Children Fund and by the Russian émigré community. On the basis of official records and personal papers, it considers how different organizations and interests constructed and represented the children as deserving beneficiaries of relief, reflecting especially on tensions that arose between nationalist and internationalist discourses of the rights, needs and interests of the displaced children.
My own Chapter Four, co-written with Michael Kaznelson, is based on oral history interviews that Kaznelson conducted with former child deportees in western Siberia, as well as on our analysis of published and unpublished memoirs written by former victims of Stalinist terror. It investigates how the children experienced deportation and exile and how, as adults, they remembered and narrated their experiences. A central theme in all their accounts is the significance of the lost rodina, their place of origin, even though, as in the case of the Latvian orphans discussed by Purs, few of the former 'kulak' children remembered their original homes and homeland. By considering the meaning of rodina in adult narratives of child displacement, we suggest ways in which the experience of displacement and orphanhood, and the double stigma that attached to this status, shaped their lives and evolving sense of self. We relate their accounts to the evolution of the society in which they lived and the changing contexts in which they undertook their labours of memory. The chapter also engages with theoretical and methodological questions of agency, trauma, memory, identity and subjectivity that recur throughout this volume.
The focus of Chapter Five is the mass evacuation of children of Spanish Republican families during and after the Spanish Civil War and their resettlement in special children's homes in the Soviet Union. In these institutions, as Karl D. Qualls discusses, their adult carers were meant not only to restore their physical health, to educate them and to provide ideological training, but also to instil Soviet values and norms of behaviour while maintaining their connection with Spanish culture. Using the children's own testimonies, as well as later memoirs, Qualls considers the children's experiences of escape and resettlement.
Drawing on Soviet archival materials, he also analyses the strategies of their Soviet hosts to transform the niños into model Soviet citizens, in particular by establishing adult role models, and the problems they encountered in this process of cultural and social 'reforging'.
The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the intensity of warfare on the Eastern Front generated momentous demographic upheavals and catalyzed a third crisis of Soviet child displacement, following the first crisis caused by the Civil War and the second crisis generated by collectivization and dekulakization, addressed in earlier chapters. 74 In Chapter Six, Rachel Faircloth Green looks at Soviet policies aimed at re-placing the huge numbers of children orphaned, lost and abandoned during wartime and in the immediate postwar years, focussing especially on attitudes and practices of adoption. 75 On the one hand, orphans were seen as the most innocent victims of the invaders' barbarism. On the other, they were seen as a threat to present and future social order. The Soviet authorities and public demonstrated a corresponding ambivalence towards the adoption of these orphans. Soviet newspapers and journals launched and supported campaigns to promote and valorize adoption as a long-term solution to restoring orphaned children to health and reintegrating them into society. By caring for an orphaned child, Soviet newspapers declared, families could help to repair the damage wrought by war. The Soviet government made adoptive families equivalent in law to 'natural' families. Yet at the same time, as Green demonstrates on the basis of archival documentation and personal testimonies, the courts gave precedence to family claims on orphans based on 'biological' ties, and adopted orphans continued to be stigmatized by society, as already discussed in the chapter by Kaznelson and Baron.
As the Second World War ended, millions of children displaced from their homes in Eastern Europe found themselves stranded in Germany and Austria. Many had been separated from parents who had been deported to Germany. Others had been orphaned or lost in the chaos of war or had been kidnapped by the Nazis for Germanization. Tara Zahra in Chapter Seven examines the history of international activism and diplomatic conflict around these 'lost children' in the context of postwar reconstruction, the contentious emergence of new international norms and regimes concerned with children's rights and the incipient Cold War. Echoing many of the themes addressed earlier (in particular, in White's chapter on Russian refugee children), Zahra investigates custody battles over post-1945 East European 75 On Soviet unaccompanied children during the war, in addition to works cited in Green's chapter, see Olga Kucherenko, Soviet Street Children and the Second World War: Welfare and Social Control under Stalin (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). child refugees that erupted into bitter controversies among international relief agencies, nationalist activists, western military and civil authorities, and representatives of the new communist governments of the region. These conflicts, Zahra argues, were shaped by a longer tradition of nationalist activism around children in Eastern Europe, through which children had come to be seen as a form of precious national property. In these disputes, and often despite the wishes of the displaced young people themselves not to be repatriated, international agencies, notwithstanding their internationalist ideals, mostly favoured returning them from Germany to their countries of origins, on the grounds that children could not grow into healthy individuals without a stable sense of national identity and belonging.  (Our Children, 1948-49), the last Yiddish-language feature made in Poland, which was both set and filmed in a children's home and featured child survivors who were residents in the institution playing fictionalized versions of themselves. The filmmakers' agenda, Finder argues, was to create a positive image of Jewish child survivors who would lead the Jewish people into a bright future after unprecedented tragedy. Striving to construct an inspirational stereotype, the filmmakers consciously rejected a traumatic representation of Jewish children, using flashbacks in order to transform the child survivors who acted in it into narrators and, by implication, agents of their own (fictionalized) survival. In so doing, Finder suggests, the filmmakers excluded from representation the significant number of Jewish children who were recognized by physicians, psychologists, educators and social workers as suffering, owing to their experiences of displacement, extreme violence and loss, from profound problems of individual adjustment and social integration.
Finally, Tomas Balkelis in Chapter Nine reflects on the experience of Lithuanian child deportees in Soviet labour camps and places of exile after their forcible displacement during the 1940s. The chapter explores the specificities of children's perceptions and actions -most of these children were deported with their families -by paying close attention to their own voices. Central themes are the children's strategies of survival and the meanings of ethnicity and homeland for their self-identity. It argues that in the social environment of the Soviet camp and forced settlement system, their ethnicity functioned as a defence mechanism and source of solidarity, in large part shaped by shared perceptions of 'homeland' as an idealized imagined site of harmonious social and political order. Homeland thus became the most significant symbolic trope of their 'displacement utopias'. In the adult memoirs of the deported children, as in the narratives of the former kulak children considered in the chapter by Kaznelson and Baron, 'homeland' became a spatiotemporal motif for their early lives.
In Chapter Ten, I attempt to draw together the key findings of the chapters, as regards both the history of child displacement and re-placement in the region and period and, more generally, the evolution of state practice and social experience in the early to midtwentieth century. I also suggest some directions for future research. I conclude by stressing the actuality and urgency of engaging critically with the powerful and persisting nexus between state power and human mobilities.
As I write this in early September 2015, Europe has been moved, belatedly, by a photograph of the drowned body of three year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi on a Turkish beach to take action to relieve the immediate plight of tens of thousands of refugees displaced from their homes by civil wars and political violence. 76 Yet the asylum-seekers who are risking their own and their families' lives to find safety and succour within European borders are only a small proportion of the millions of people who are currently fleeing conflict and repression at home and find themselves internally displaced within their countries of origin or in overcrowded refugee camps in neighbouring countries. The leaders of European states need to acknowledge that the 'refugee crisis' demands more than a half-hearted and transient commitment to humanitarian relief. 77 States and citizens globally must recognize that this crisis, like the many crises of population displacement throughout the last century, raises essential questions about the political and economic power that states wield, the principles they proclaim to legitimize their authority, the ways in which they define and demarcate their duties towards citizens and non-citizens, and the stories they tell about place and displacement, identity and otherness, entitlement and exclusion, both at home and beyond their borders. We hope that the historical case studies in this volume help to elucidate these questions.