WAIFS AND STRAYS IN RUSSIA

Evening Star, Issue 19663, 16 September 1927, Page 11

WAIFS AND STRAYS IN RUSSIA

PARENTS' SEARCH By an appeal to the “ general public ” for assistance, the Commissariat of Education at Moscow has disclosed a “ new aspect of the child vagrancy problem ” in Russia —the parents’ side (writes the Riga correspondent of ' The Times’), In the early years of the Revolution, when particular importance was attached to the breaking up of homes and the destruction of family ties, this was ignored. It is now recognised as desirable that some of tho ties should be restored, as the State is unable without public co-operation to deal with the “ sore ” question of Russia’s waifs and strays. The number of homeless children in Soviet Russia (which the Commissariat states reached more than half a million in the famine year of 1921) was reduced in 1923 to about 250,000, and in 1924, 1925, and 1926 fluctuated between 200,000 and 300,000. During the past two or three years attempts have been made by tho authorities to round up these chidlren in tho towns and on the railways, to “ tame ” them (as some prominent Bolshevist officials state) in Soviet “ homes ” and camps, to seek out and return some of (hem to their parents or guardians, or to induce peasant households to adopt ” them in return for a certaiiT payment. Now, apparently for tho fisrt time, the Commissariat lias made known the fact that these young vagrants are not only children who have strayed from their homes or been abandoned by their parents; about 100,000 were evacuated in 1921-22 from the Volga provinces by tho Soviet authorities, and about three-quarters of these were “lost.” Eventually some 30,000 were recovered by a “ special commission ” and returned to the homes of their relatives. For five years, however, thousands of parents have been seeking their children, but with little success. Tho Commissariat of Education has now published in its weekly journal the names of 60,000 children who cannot be traced and would be welcomed homo by their parents in the Volga provinces; but the chances of recovering them are small, as a great proportion of the stray children in Russia to-day do not even remember their own names, to say nothing of the thousands who have perished.