and economic dislocation pushed surviving children out on the streets. By 1922, historian Alan Ball estimates, there were seven million homeless children in Russia.
These homeless children represented a profound crisis for the Bolshevik government. They roamed the country alone and in groups, often following rail arteries to Moscow, Rostov-on-the-Don, Samara, Saratov, Tashkent, and other cities. Seemingly omnipresent waifs begged for food in train stations and other public places. Most resorted to stealing, petty crimes, and prostitution. The state sent children to special homes (detdoma), long-term boarding institutions run by the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros). Initially intended to offer programs capable of instilling in the waifs an instinct for the collective and preparing them to join the ranks of the proletariat, these children’s homes were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of homeless children. Many children’s homes lacked food and heat and were rife with dysentery, scurvy, and syphilis. Countless children escaped from these institutions, preferring to take their chances on the streets. Labor communes, most notably the secret police’s Dzerzhinsky Labor Commune run by Anton Makarenko, sought to rehabilitate young delinquents and met with mixed success.
Convinced that socialized child rearing was an impossible ideal, the state, beginning in 1925, shifted its focus back to the family as the basic unit for social structure. The 1926 Family Code emphasized the family as a unit for effecting social
HRUSHEVSKY, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH
change rather than the state; thousands of bespri-zorniki left state-funded children’s homes and were adopted. By 1927 besprizorniki were considered less a pedagogical than a social problem stemming from the breakdown of the Soviet family. Increasingly, the state relied on punishment rather than pedagogy to clear the streets of besprizorniki, ordering militia sweeps of the children in the 1930s. The problem of homeless children did not go away; collectivization and the famine of 1932 and 1933 produced another wave of homeless children. Most of these besprizorniki were placed in children’s homes and special schools for young delinquents. The number of homeless children continued to increase during times of severe social strain, notably World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union, though not on the scale that the country witnessed in the 1920s. See also: FAMILY CODE OF 1926
Ball, Alan M. (1994). And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldman, Wendy. (1993). Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Stevens, Jennie. (1982). “Children of the Revolution: Soviet Russia’s Homeless Children (Besprizorniki) in the 1920s.” Russian History 9(2-3):242-264. Stolee, Margaret Kay. (1988). “Homeless Children in the USSR, 1917-1957.” Soviet Studies 40:64-83.
JACQUELINE M. OLICH
HONOR AND DISHONOR See BESCHESTIE. founded new scholarly journals, and established his school of Ukrainian history. After the 1905 Revolution Hrushevsky lived in St. Petersburg and Kiev, where he became increasingly involved in liberal politics. In Kiev he founded the Ukrainian Scientific Society (1907), as well as a cluster of journals and newspapers. Arrested and exiled to eastern Russia during World War I, Hrushevsky emerged after the February Revolution as a recognized leader of moderate Ukrainian nationalists. In March 1917 he was elected president of the Central Rada (Council), which eventually developed into a Ukrainian parliament. During the Revolution Hrushevsky moved to the left and joined the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, which had a majority in the Rada. On the last day of its existence, April 29, 1918, the Rada elected Hrushevsky president of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.
Hrushevsky lived abroad after 1919, but returned to Soviet Ukraine in 1924 and soon resumed his role as the dean of Ukrainian historians. But the authorities increasingly criticized his scholarship as nationalistic and in 1931 transferred him to Moscow. By the time of his death in 1934, his school in Soviet Ukraine was destroyed by arrests and condemnations. Hrushevsky’s main scholarly achievement is his monumental History of Ukraine-Rus’ (10 vols., 1898-1937) covering the period until 1658. He also authored several short surveys of Ukrainian history and a five- volume History of Ukrainian Literature. Rejecting the history of state formations in favor of the history of the people, Hrushevsky criticized traditional Russian historical models and was influential in claiming Kievan Rus as a part of Ukrainian history. In contrast to Hru-shevsky’s denigration by the Soviet ideologues as a bourgeois nationalist, in post-Soviet Ukraine Hrushevsky is lauded as the nation’s greatest historian and statesman. See also: UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS
HRUSHEVSKY, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH
(1866-1934), prominent Ukrainian historian and statesman.
In 1890 Mikhail Hrushevsky graduated from Kiev University, where he studied under Volodymyr Antonovych. In 1894 he was appointed to the newly created chair of Ukrainian history at Lviv University (at the time, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire). While in Lviv, Hrushevsky reorganized the Shevchenko Scientific Society (est. 1873) into an equivalent of a Ukrainian Academy of Sciences,
Hrushevs’kyi, Mykhailo. (1993-). History of Ukraine-Rus’, vols. 1, 7, 8. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. Hrushevs’kyi, Mykhailo (1941). A History of Ukraine. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Prymak, Thomas M. (1987). Mykhailo Hrushevsky: The Politics of National Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
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Human rights are the rights individuals are said to have as human beings. They are claims on society- its members and government (Henkin, 1996). They are spelled out in international law, drawing on the norms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) (Steiner and Alston, 2000). Russia has a long history of authoritarian rule and human rights abuses. Nikolai Berdyayev went so far as to connect the depth and longevity of Russian communism, a system inimical to human rights, to this persistent culture of despotism (1960). In the vivid phrasing of Alexander Radishchev, an eighteenth-century dissident, in his Journey from Saint Petersburg to Moscow (which landed him in Siberia), the rigid censorship under Catherine the Great resembled a restrictive nursemaid who stunts children’s growth toward self-reliant maturity.
Human rights improved somewhat thanks to the liberating effects of Russia’s rapid industrialization after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the judicial and local government reforms in 1864. In Tsarist Russia by 1914, a liberal and democratic socialist professional class of educators, lawyers, judges, social workers, women’s rights advocates, and rapidly growing and mainly non-Bolshevik political parties increasingly demanded the protection of individual rights and a law-governed state. That meant broadening the selective westernization, launched two hundred years earlier by Peter the Great and aimed at strengthening Russia, to include the rights and freedoms he and his successors generally sought to exclude.
Following the abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917, the Provisional Government of March- November 1917 produced what the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin himself called the freest country in Europe, before he and his minority party of Bolsheviks forcibly ended that freedom by sharply curbing human rights.
The Bolsheviks socially cleansed Russia’s reformed courts, democratic professionals, and growing autonomous civil society. They held Russia to the constitutional principles that rights must serve the cause of socialism as interpreted by the Communist Party. Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924 opened the way to the consolidation of total power by Josef Stalin, his forced collectivization of the peasants, his five-year plans for heavy industrialization, and his purges of alleged enemies of the people. The cultural thaw after Stalin’s death in March 1953 ended with the ousting of Party leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. Ensuing trials of social satirists and critics sparked a courageous dissident movement in Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Its members, who were promptly imprisoned or exiled, included Andrei Sakharov, proponent of East-West convergence; Yuri Orlov and the Moscow Helsinki Group; and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, chronicler of Soviet labor camps.
Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet leader from March 1985 to December 1991, introduced glasnost- openness or free
