This volume ably contributes to the body of work on street children of the Soviet Union—the besprizorniki—aiming to explain the endemic nature of children’s suffering over the first two-and-a-half decades following the October revolution. In it, Boris Gorshkov argues that “misconceived and vicious Soviet domestic policy caused a general humanitarian catastrophe” (3), resulting in mass starvation, homelessness, and high mortality rates among children.

Posing compelling questions about the origins, geography, and perpetuity of the besprizorniki, Gorshkov lays the blame for their existence and conditions solely upon the Bolshevik regime. This sets up his work in opposition to that of many others who foreground world war, civil war, political transition, and famine in explaining the explosion of orphans on the streets of the USSR. He contends that the Bolsheviks’ realpolitik approach, which he defines as pragmatic and punitive rather than ideological or moral (3, 102), led to tragic conditions for Soviet children. Three Soviet state initiatives are identified as key to understanding where and why children suffered: the elimination of all philanthropic children’s institutions by the Bolsheviks, food requisitioning during war communism, and collectivization. Each decision, according to Gorshkov, spawned a fresh wave of imperiled children. The effects of state policies on the young and their caregivers are traced through the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the NEP era, and the era of collectivization, ending with the “triumph” over besprizorniki via Stalinist coercion.

The book is at its best when using sources such as the Federal Security Service (FSB) archive and regional archives to reveal previously unknown elements of the story of Soviet street children. For example, discussion of NEP-era commercial ventures by the Children’s Commission, including a short-lived “joint-stock company” (103) that sold goods produced by children alongside luxury items, sheds light on the state’s role in the mixed economy of the 1920s and the ways children participated in it. Also, Gorshkov should be commended for the reminder that though we primarily envision the besprizorniki as an urban issue, it radically affected rural areas as well.

Greater engagement with the history of childhood and youth would have made a good book better. Gorshkov dubs the definition of “children” as “obvious” (1), but any historian of childhood would dispute that characterization. Age is never obvious, as Alfredo Luis Escudero has recently written; defining who is and who is not a child is, among other things, a political act situated in specific historical circumstances that change over time. Because the term is not problematized, some of the author’s interpretations feel anachronistic. More interaction with the history of childhood might also have prevented Gorshkov from overgeneralizing the experiences of street children, as it is a norm of the sub-discipline to recognize multiple, coexisting childhoods. The tragic narrative he offers is a story of early Soviet childhood—an important one—but it is presented as the story of early Soviet childhood. Consequently, the book collapses all Soviet childhoods into one and erases the uniqueness of the childhood of the besprizorniki, which is surely the opposite of the author’s intent.

Gorshkov provides powerful evidence, especially from areas affected by famines and collectivization, of the ubiquity of child vagrancy and the increasingly coercive means used to address it. A tendency toward overstatement wends throughout the volume, however, most notably the assertion that historians generally accept that Soviet children had a “happy childhood” (74, 164). No scholarly works take the Stalinist slogan literally, so it is difficult to understand the author’s insistence. Likewise, statements about the conversion of all children’s homes into labor colonies (153) or the exploitative cruelty of labor education (78–80) or the absence of a Bolshevik understanding of childhood (75) are hard to defend. Works on Soviet children, orphans, institutions, and the child studies movement by Nick Baron, Andy Byford, Rachel Green, Olga Kucherenko, Ann Livschiz, Karl Qualls, and Andrew Stone might have aided the author’s ability to refine his conclusions.

Nevertheless, this book adds productively to a growing historiography of childhood in the Soviet Union. The work is marred by the occasional inexplicable conjecture about irrelevant, unprovable topics (77, 84–85, 124) and careless copyediting throughout. While Gorshkov’s thesis is not entirely persuasive—for one thing, the Soviet state needed children alive and thriving to protect the legitimacy of their experiment and for another, blaming the regime alone discounts a World War so hard on the continent’s children that it birthed the international children’s rights movement—his fundamental contention that the Soviet state deprioritized the welfare of its children is on point.