TY - JOUR
T1 - Stalin’s humanitarian government
T2 - class, child homelessness and state security in a historical perspective (1930s–40s)
AU - Franco, Rosaria
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2018/1/2
Y1 - 2018/1/2
N2 - Informed by Didier Fassin’s concept of humanitarian government, this article reveals a distinct pattern of secret care provisions imposed under Stalin by the secret police and its successor agencies (NKVD, MVD) first to the peasant children displaced by class war and the famine of 1932–33, and then to the children made homeless by the Great Terror and the 1940s’ national deportations. The article also identifies the under-researched reception centres as crucial sites for both administering emergency assistance and establishing the social classification necessary to apply these discriminatory measures. Affected by the decreasing faith in their possible socialist rehabilitation and lack of any official display of compassion, these children’s lives appeared even less worthy of saving in the course of major emergencies. These findings challenge the official Soviet view of the existence of a universal childhood worth protecting, which guided the first socialist country’s intervention to save other children nationally and internationally.
AB - Informed by Didier Fassin’s concept of humanitarian government, this article reveals a distinct pattern of secret care provisions imposed under Stalin by the secret police and its successor agencies (NKVD, MVD) first to the peasant children displaced by class war and the famine of 1932–33, and then to the children made homeless by the Great Terror and the 1940s’ national deportations. The article also identifies the under-researched reception centres as crucial sites for both administering emergency assistance and establishing the social classification necessary to apply these discriminatory measures. Affected by the decreasing faith in their possible socialist rehabilitation and lack of any official display of compassion, these children’s lives appeared even less worthy of saving in the course of major emergencies. These findings challenge the official Soviet view of the existence of a universal childhood worth protecting, which guided the first socialist country’s intervention to save other children nationally and internationally.
KW - Child homelessness
KW - Stalinism
KW - reception centres
KW - social classification
KW - social policy
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85020205031&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/13507486.2017.1319341
DO - 10.1080/13507486.2017.1319341
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85020205031
SN - 1350-7486
VL - 25
SP - 121
EP - 146
JO - European Review of History/Revue Europeenne d'Histoire
JF - European Review of History/Revue Europeenne d'Histoire
IS - 1
ER -