RUSSIAN PROBLEM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21977, 12 June 1933, Page 7

RUSSIAN PROBLEM

THE HOMELESS CHILDREN A SOLUTION SOUGHT. LONDON, May 31. The Riga correspondent of The Times states that M. Vishinsky, Soviet State Prosecutor, has conferred with the leaders of the Ogpu, and other police chiefs, to devise measures to combat the “ new scourge ” of roving, homeless children. In spite of an expenditure of 100,000,000 roubles in six months in rounding up and reclaiming waifs, they continue to increase in number, and the Soviet is obliged to allot more money to extend the reclamation campaign throughout the country.

Following upon the great grain drives in the autumn, village children whose parents had been evicted or banished streamed into the towns .in thousands. The invasion has been reinforced by the recent purge on collective farms, combined with the widespread famine, which rendered hundreds of thousands of peasants destitute and homeless. The passport decrees have resulted in the depopulation of industrial - centres and created more waifs.

“ Undesirable ” adults were expelled from restricted areas, but thousands of children remained or became lost. Ragged, roaming children, begging and stealing, are particularly numerous in Leningrad, Kharkov, and other southern towns, but the police until recently kept Moscow comparatively free. Now, however, the vagrants are increasing so rapidly that the authorities have announced a resolute measure to remove the “sore” from the face of the proletarian metropolis.