Trauma and Pathology: Normative Crises and the Child Population in Late Tsarist Russia and the Early Soviet Union, 1904–1924

Focusing on the major sociopolitical upheavals of the first quarter of the twentieth century in Russia, this article examines the key contexts in which children became objects of mass intervention in the midst and aftermath of a succession of wars and revolutions. It ties together the following cases in the history of childhood in Russia: (1) the “epidemic” of child suicides diagnosed in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution; (2) public concern over the psychological effect of war on children during the First World War; and (3) the early Soviet efforts to deal with the problem of mass child “delinquency” in the aftermath of the revolutionary civil war