Homeless Children

Walter Duranty, Homeless Children. Spring 1922

 

It is easy to see how completely the Soviet authorities of the Volga towns were overwhelmed by this invasion, which might well have taxed the resources of a prosperous and efficient administration. The Soviets on the Volga were far from that, and the towns and cities of the North Caucasus and the Ukraine were in no better plight. As I have said, the most striking characteristic of all Russia at that period was exhaustion. The whole country was on the verge of succumbing to the triple strain of Civil War, Military Communism, and the attempt at management by people who lacked the necessary training, ability and experience. The spur of war and the fanatic belief in the Tightness of the Communist Cause had kept them going before, although hundreds were broken by excessive effort; but once the pressure was relaxed it seemed as if the whole country was paralyzed by nervous reaction. It must not be forgotten, too, that NEP. was bewildering and repugnant to the best and bravest Communists, especially in the provinces, where their intellectual level was often not high enough for them to understand the necessity for the New Policy and Lenin’s motives in introducing it. They felt, as one of them told me, like officers of a vessel whose compass had ceased to function. “Has all this bitter struggle been in vain?” he asked me sadly, “that now when the victory seems won we are ordered to retreat and abandon what we fought for?” He did not know, as Lenin knew, what price the “victory” had cost. In the words of Tacitus, the Bolsheviks and their Military Communism had made (of Russia) a wilderness, and called it peace.

It was therefore unfair of me to be shocked, as I was shocked, by the apathy and hopelessness of the local authorities at Samara and the other Volga cities I visited, in face of the famine-refugee problem. In Samara, for instance, I went to a so-called “children’s home,” which was more like a “pound” for homeless dogs. They picked up the wretched children, lost or abandoned by their parents, by hundreds off the streets, and parked them in these “homes.” At the place I visited an attempt had been made to segregate those who were obviously sick or dying from their “healthier” fellows. The latter sat listlessly, 300 or 400 of them in a dusty court-yard, too weak and lost and sad to move or care. Most of them were past hunger; one child of seven with fingers no thicker than matches refused the chocolate and biscuits I offered him and just turned his head away without a sound. The inside of the house was dreadful, children in all stages of a dozen different diseases huddled together anyhow in the most noxious atmosphere I have ever known. A matron and three girls were “in charge” of this pest-house. There was nothing they could do, they said wearily; they had no food or money or soap or medicine. There were 400 children or thereabouts, they didn’t know exactly, in the home already, and a hundred or more brought in daily and about the same number died; there was nothing they could do.

“At least you could make fires and heat some water and attempt to wash them, even without soap,” I said indignantly, “and surely you can get some rations from the city Soviet to make soup or porridge for some of them.”

The matron shrugged her shoulders, “What is the use?” she said. “They would die anyway.”

At first she had tried to do something, she said, and the city had tried, but now there were too many. She suddenly stiffened into protest. “God has hid his face from Russia,” she cried. “We are being punished for our sins. In one month there will not be a soul alive along the Volga. I tell you and I know.” She slumped into a chair and buried her face in her hands.

Source: Walter Duranty, I Write as I Please (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935), pp. 130-131.

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