„Wir schlagen wie eine Faust“: Die Bande als Lebensform sowjetischer Straßenkinder unter Stalin

Abstract

The phenomenon of besprizornye, street children, has been explored several times by scholars as one of the gravest social problems of the early Soviet and Stalinist times. However, the strategies of survival and self-empowerment of these waifs have either been omitted or remained on a purely descriptive level. This article deals with the state’s struggle for hegemony on the streets and the resulting repression of street children on the one hand, and with the besprizornyj gang life on the other. Waifs usually formed gangs to survive on the street, often mingling with the criminal underground. Their everyday life was deeply shaped by violence, due to their criminal subsistence and violent clashes with the police or the general population, but also to gang fights and practices of ritual violence ensuring internal hierarchy and discipline. Violence began to shape the waif’s profile and communication, so that these everyday practices led to the formation of a subculture of violence. Although street children were marginalized and repressed by the Stalinist state, the criminal underworld or the GULAG were not the only outcome for them. The communication and power structures the besprizornye grew up with did also equip them well for the Red Army, the NKVD or the Party apparatus in general - all three of which gladly recruited among former children’s home inmates. This double compatibility of street children with the criminal world and state apparatuses shows how the Stalinist regime, by repressing and marginalizing these children, driving them into violent subcultures, had in fact formed subjects perfectly adapted to Stalin’s system of violence.