When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they aimed to fundamentally change society. In their imagination, children and young people played an important role in this change. Against the background of a pronounced belief in behaviorism, children promised “almost unlimited malleability” (36). Within the Bolshevik project of social engineering, “total institutions” (Erving Goffman), such as the camps of the Gulag but also asylums, mental hospitals, labor colonies, and summer camps all played a vital part as places of exclusion, inclusion, and reformation. In her dissertation, Kathleen Beger picks out two such institutions for children: the Artek pioneer camp in the Crimea, founded in 1925, and a labor colony for minors in Arkhangelsk, existing from 1934 to 1959. Although the target audience was thoroughly different—originally the sick children of workers and later outstanding members of the Komsomol on the one hand, and criminal and difficult-to-educate youths on the other—both institutions, Beger argues, served ultimately the same aim: to (re)educate and discipline children, to mold them into valuable members of the socialist state. The title of the book, which plays with the Bolshevik concept of re-education and reinterprets it as “uneducation,” indicates that Beger sees the ambitions invested in both institutions as ultimately having failed.

Beger's “contrasting social-historical micro-study” (8) features refreshingly new (or newer) conceptual approaches. First, it complements research, which tends to focus on institutions of exclusion, by contrasting a repressive one with one that focused on integration and reward. Second, it draws on sociological considerations of institutions charged with exercising social control, namely Goffman's elaborations on the “total institution” and Michel Foucault's thoughts on “heterotopia.”

The book is basically chronological. Chapter 1 deals with Soviet political and scientific conceptions of children and their malleability from the 1920s to the early 1930s. Within the chapter, Beger skillfully introduces the various branches of paedology. The author attributes the shift from care and anti-authoritarian measures to a concept based on coercion and repression starting in the late 1920s in part to the fact that paedologist activities had failed to solve the problem of besprizornost΄: “Implicitly, [the paedologists]… fueled social fears among politicians and society about the loss of order, norms, and values” (107), fears that then lead to a more authoritarian approach towards besprizorniki. In a transferred sense, Beger thus explains the turn to coercion, discipline and repression under Iosif Stalin through the social disruptions of the 1920s and the associated fear of the loss of order and security.

The second chapter, devoted to the successes, or rather failures, of the educational concepts of both institutions deals mainly with the years of and ultimately after the Second World War. Chapter 3 examines phases of opening to the outside world, whether national or international, and focuses in particular on the 1950s and, in the case of Artek, the years leading up to Perestroika. In this chapter, the discussion of Goffman's concept is most evident.

The contrasting study reveals interesting similarities. Both institutions suffered equally from supply shortages, especially during crisis years, which Beger attributes both to the peripheral location of the camp or colony and to mismanagement and malfeasance by the staff. Additionally, both institutions suffered from acute and permanent staff shortages. This situation favored arbitrariness and violence and prevented successful educational approaches. While at least a few critical voices in Artek repeatedly criticized the lack of the implementation of utopia and tried to improve the circumstances, the labor colony in Arkhangel΄sk turned in the 1940s “into a veritable violent space (Gewaltraum)” (182). Overall, the realities of the “total institution,” whether aiming at exclusion and reintegration or inclusion and betterment, obviously perverted Utopian visions.

On a side note, Beger maintains that despite the official abandonment of paedological approaches in the 1930s and 40s, they did not totally disappear and experienced a revival under a different label in the 1950s. This finding is consistent with the observation from other research contexts that reformist approaches of the 1920s were never as absolutely repudiated under Stalin as they often appear.

Due to the limited accessibility of the sources, the study inevitably has gaps. At other points, the author trips herself up when she raises expectations that are ultimately not fulfilled. For an assertion that she perceives the children as “capable protagonists” (22), they appear far too little in the book. As an institutional history, however, the study makes an important contribution to Soviet studies.