HOMELESS HORDES

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6867, 23 March 1929, Page 15 (Supplement)

HOMELESS HORDES

RUSSIA’S STARVING CHILDREN PREY TO DISEASE AND CRIME Count Kokovtzoff, former Finance and Prime Minister of Russia, has contributed a striking article to the “Revue des Dues Mondes” on the homeless children of his country under the rule of the Soviet. Most of the statistics quoted by him come from official Bolshevik sources, states the “Morning Post’s” Paris correspondent. Since 1925, when the world learned to its horror that there were in Russia millions of children homeless, uncared for, the prey to every form of disease, vice, and criminal tendency, the official figures have been reduced to some 300,000. Count Kokovtzoff gives reasons for thinking that the diminution is on paper merely, and that this almost incredible social plague continues with its full force to blight a once flourishing land. It was Lunacharsky himself, the Commissar for Education, who said, speaking to a conference in November, 1927: “We have new cadres of homeless children created by the social conditions of life to-day.” This admission effectively disposes of the ordinary Soviet pretence that the problem was a heritage of the war. Indeed, anyone who was, like the present writer, in Russia in 1919, can testify that there was no real class of homeless children then at all. Deserted Their Parents What Lunacharsky said is borne out by the “Trud,” the official organ of the Bolshevik Trade Unions, which in an article on April 23, 1927, attributes the majority of cases of homeless children to the children having deserted parents who were unable to give them food. Parents had no food to give on account of the famines that ravaged Russia in 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, and were the direct result of the Soviet economic system.

This is, in Count Kokovtzoff’s view also, the chief explanation of the existence of the hordes of homeless children. The famine of 1921 resulted in between 1,250,000 and 3,000,000 deaths, and caused a startling outbreak of cannibalism. The famines of subsequent years affected severally from eight to 20 million. Partial famines have recurred again since. All that the Soviet Government has done to cope with the evil is to abolish two excellent private societies for the help of children that were already in existence and to open a number of Children’s Houses in different places that, according to Lenin’s widow in 1923, were sheltering at the most 800,000 out of 7,000,000 homeless children. Worse still, these houses, by the testimony of Bolshevik papers, themselves are hotbeds of disease, crime and vice, and are a very emblem of misery.