Child Savers and Child Saviors: Horror, Hope, and the Russian Famine of 1921

• In Event: Other World(s): Childhood, Nation, and the Price of Feeling Good

Abstract

In today’s globalized economy, humanitarian organizations such as UNICEF, CARE and Save the Children International encourage Americans to see children’s suffering anywhere in the world as their responsibility. This paper offers a historical perspective on humanitarian relief’s child centeredness by examining American relief to the children of Soviet Russia during a period the U.S. refused to recognize the Bolsheviks. The Russian child became a touchstone in debates about happy, healthy childhood.

Immediately following the Bolshevik revolution, Russian children–members of the first generation to be shaped by the new, revolutionary ethos—became central figures in modern fantasies of social regeneration by way of the child. U.S. periodicals commented extensively upon Soviet Russia’s innovative education system, groundbreaking children’s literature and theater, and the legal provisions designed to improve maternal and child welfare. But from the beginning, hope mixed with horror: following the revolution and amidst a civil war, famine swept over much of Russia in the summer of 1921. Millions of young Russians, orphaned, homeless, and starving, became almost unrecognizable as children.

“The age of the child” at the dawn of the twentieth century coincided with an increasingly internationalist outlook in the United States. World War I produced a range of humanitarian organizations ranging from the American Relief Administration (ARA) to the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), to the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Their international relief efforts focused primarily on children who, by definition, could not be enemies. The 1921 famine, coming so soon after the revolution and amidst an allied blockade of Soviet territory, made Russian children the focus of a massive program of U.S. relief. Administered under the aegis of the ARA, humanitarian relief was also an effort to influence Russia’s future.

This paper will focus on relief efforts undertaken through the AFSC, the only organization working under the ARA umbrella that refused to apply a political litmus test to its volunteers, and also the only one to allow women in the famine zone. It thus became a primary vehicle for middle class women enamored with the revolution to enter Soviet Russia. AFSC publicity materials feature contrasting images of Russian children—starving, with bones nearly protruding through their skin, or happily singing for American visitors, praising Comrade Lenin, and, implicitly, promising a new era. Other children described in these materials combine both elements to become cruel caricatures of the happy Soviet child: Visiting a children’s home, one AFSC volunteer describes “sick and sorry eyed” children forced to sing for American visitors, “with tiny raucous voices, swaying from side to side in disconsolate rhythm, as if under some dreadful spell.” When a teacher suggests the children dance for their visitors, this volunteer demurred: “we could not bear to see all those painwracked little bodies making such a travesty of joy.” The dialectic between suffering and joy in the image of the Soviet child marks a fundamental tension in modern American childhood, for which Russian children became bellwethers.

Author

• Julia Mickenberg, University of Texas, Austin (TX)