UDC

376: 376.1; 159.922.7; 37.013.42; 364.4; 316.334.3; 93/94

Authors

Kalinnikova-Magnusson Liya Vladimirovna
Uppsala University; Gävle University College (Gävle, Sweden)
e-mail: liya.kalinnikova@hig.se
Magnusson Magnus Stockholm
University (Stockholm, Sweden); Institute of Philology and Cross-Cultural Communication, Northern (Arctic) Federal University named after M.V. Lomonosov (Arkhangelsk, Russia)
e-mail: magmag48@hotmail.com

Abstract

The social policy on child “defectiveness” during the war period and the first years of Soviet power (1914–1920) was forming in the conditions of a major sociopolitical disaster. Many millions of demographic losses of potential human resources in the form of unhealthy children, high rate of infant mortality and unborn children in the decades that followed are among many other consequences of that period. Textual analysis of various historical documents relevant to the dominant political and scientific discourse in this area allowed us to determine the essence of the social doctrine of the Soviet Union and its role in understanding key actors of the new social policy on “defective” children. The term “child defectiveness” was expanding; there appeared the so-called “new defective” children – homeless and street children and adolescents. Charitable and private forms of social care for “defective/sick”, children supported by the social policy of the Russian Empire, were nationalized. They were replaced by new institutions: prototypes of Soviet boarding schools (“communal schools for the morally defective”). The traditionally understood “defective/sick” and “new defective” children and adolescents formed a single “army of morally defective children”. The new social doctrine of the Soviet Union, expressed in the principle of socialist humanism, in practice (for various reasons) failed to protect the right of the most disadvantaged groups of children to integrate into the new society. The scientific discourse of care originated in the depths of therapeutic pedagogy and pedology. Defectology, which gradually took the place of scientific philanthropy, formed the basis for the scientific knowledge about “defective” children and directed the social and political debate over the provided care for them in the decades of the Soviet era that followed.

Keywords

child defectiveness, “new defective” children, social policy, socialist humanism, special institutions

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