This is not a book with an argument; it is a book of laws. Soviet Legislation on Children's Rights is a compilation — some ninety statutes, codes, decrees and ministerial orders, given in extract and arranged under six headings: general enactments, the child within the family, the protection of childhood, the right to education and upbringing, social security, and labour privileges for adolescents. It was compiled by two jurists of the Soviet academy, Professor V. N. Tolkunova (Sections I and VI) and E. G. Azarova (Sections II–V), translated by Jane Sayer, and issued by Progress in Moscow. Between the codes sits a short introduction over Tolkunova's name, and it tells you at once what the collection is for. "The year 1979 was the twentieth anniversary of the UN Declaration of the Right of the Child," it opens, and the book presents itself as the Soviet Union's contribution to the conversation the International Year of the Child of 1979 had opened: here is what one state has actually legislated, laid out for the world to inspect.
Date the object before reading it. The spine says 1982, and for once the spine is close to honest: the latest instrument in the collection is the resolution "On Measures for Increasing State Assistance to Families with Children" of 22 January 1981, and the education decrees speak of the Eleventh Five-Year Plan, which ran from 1981. This is a late-Brezhnev book — its author died in November 1982 — assembled in the twilight of "developed socialism," the doctrine the 1977 Constitution had enshrined and which opens the volume: "In the USSR a developed socialist society has been built." It belongs to a particular moment in the Cold War of paper. Helsinki had made human rights a field of superpower competition in 1975; Western governments and a growing dissident movement pressed the Soviet Union on its record; and the International Year of the Child gave Moscow a stage on which to answer not with rebuttal but with statute. The book is soft power in legal dress — an export document, addressed past the specialist to the sympathetic foreign reader and the non-aligned world, and it wears its international frame openly, invoking the UN, the 1959 Declaration, the Women's International Democratic Federation, and the 700 delegates from 135 countries who came to the 1979 "World Conference for a Peaceful and Secure Future for All Children" in Moscow. Its implicit claim is large: that Soviet law is the international children's-rights ideal already made real. "In the socialist countries," the introduction says of that Declaration, "the principles ... are implemented in practice."
The doctrine that organises the whole is simply stated, and the book states it in a single sentence: "The primary guarantee of children's rights is the humanism and democratism of the Soviet legislation on the rights and protection of children." The guarantor of childhood is the socialist state. Where a liberal constitution tends to shield the child, and the family, from the state, this collection makes the state the active provider, financier and supervisor of childhood at every point — and the introduction's register is frankly proprietary and tender at once: "Children are the future of mankind and are more valuable than anything else in the world. All adults are responsible for what happens to them." The Constitution of 1977, with which the collection opens, sets out the entitlements as positive rights guaranteed by state performance: the right to education "ensured by free provision of all forms of education ... the free issue of school textbooks; by the opportunity to attend a school where teaching is in the native language" (Article 45); the right to health protection, including "special care for the health of the rising generation" (Article 42); the protection of the family by the state (Article 53). The remaining five sections are the machinery beneath those promises.
Much of what that machinery delivered was real, and a reader told otherwise would be badly misled. This is the point at which honesty about the book earns the right to be hard on it later. The Soviet Union had, by 1982, built a genuine welfare architecture for children, and the collection documents its legal skeleton accurately. Education to the end of secondary school was compulsory and free, in a country that within living memory had been largely illiterate; textbooks were provided without charge, a reform the collection dates to a resolution of 24 November 1977. The introduction's figures — over 150,000 general schools, creches and kindergartens with 80 per cent of the cost borne by the state, some 22 million children a year in Pioneer and holiday camps, free issue of textbooks, subsidised or free places for low-income families — describe a system that, whatever its coercions, did lift the material floor under childhood for tens of millions. The public-health provisions establish a paediatric network, sanatoria for tubercular and chronically ill children, and free medical care as a matter of right. The social-security sections codify pensions for the loss of a breadwinner, allowances to large and single-parent families, and full state maintenance of orphans. The labour sections carry protections — a prohibition on employing anyone under eighteen in listed dangerous trades, shortened hours for working adolescents, mandatory rest — that many wealthier states reached later or not at all. The maternity and infant provisions — paid leave, allowances on the birth of a child, a network of infants' homes and creches — were, for their time, genuinely advanced, and the collection's insistence that most of the cost fell on the state rather than the family was substantially true. And the collapse of the mass child homelessness that had scarred the 1920s was a real achievement of exactly this kind of institution-building. None of this is nothing. It is the substance on which the book's claim rests, and it should be credited plainly before the claim is tested.
The test is the one this series applies to every volume: not how warm the language is, nor how real the achievements, but whether the law on the page describes the practice, and whether the categories the book wields can ever be turned on the state that wrote them. On both counts a book of laws is unusually revealing, because the machinery of coercion is not hidden in it — it is printed, in the same neutral register as the benefits, a few pages away.
Begin with the state's power over the child where it collides with the family. The collection presents the family and the state as partners in upbringing, but it is candid about who is senior. The Constitution obliges citizens "to concern themselves with the upbringing of children ... and to raise them as worthy members of socialist society" (Article 66) — the goal of child-rearing is defined by the state, and the family is deputised to reach it. The family law spells out the sanction. A court may deprive parents of their rights not only for cruelty or neglect but where they have "exerted a harmful influence on them by their immoral, anti-social behaviour" — an elastic ground, its content supplied by whoever administers it. And beyond deprivation lies a further, quieter power, set down in the RSFSR family code and easy to read past: "A court may order that a child be taken away and placed in the care of trusteeship and guardianship agencies, even if the parents have not been deprived of their parental rights, on the grounds that the child would be in danger if it remained with the persons in whose care it had been." The child may be removed from parents who have done nothing to forfeit their rights, on a finding of "danger" the statute does not define. In a state that had built the whole apparatus of upbringing around the formation of a particular kind of citizen, the question of what counted as a harmful influence, or a danger, was never going to be answered only by a child's welfare.
It was not. The plainest instance sits inside this very collection, though the book does not see it as one. Section IV prints the resolution "On Measures to Further Develop the Economy and Culture of the Peoples of the North" of 21 April 1967, and among its provisions is the authority to accept, "at full state expense, in boarding schools, residential sections of schools ... the children of all citizens of the rural population of these regions and localities not residing where the given educational establishments are located." That single clause is the legal skeleton of the internat system — the residential schools into which the children of the small indigenous peoples of the Soviet North, and of scattered rural districts generally, were gathered for the greater part of the year, often hundreds of kilometres from families who were themselves being settled off the land. The sibling volume in this series, Vladimir Uvachan's The Peoples of the North and Their Road to Socialism (Progress, 1975) — written, remarkably, by an Evenk raised in that very system — presents the boarding school as pure benefaction, "opened to correspond with national customs, particularly the nomadic way of life," and records with pride that by 1970 some 24,000 indigenous children lived in such schools at state expense. What the system became — the routine removal of children from their parents and their land, and above all the attrition of the native languages it was built to serve — indigenous northerners would later describe as the great wound of the Soviet century. This collection prints the guarantee and the machine in the same book. Article 45 of the Constitution promises "the opportunity to attend a school where teaching is in the native language"; the education law repeats it, giving parents "the right to choose for their children a school with an appropriate language of tuition." And the boarding-school apparatus that Section IV goes on to authorise is precisely the instrument through which, for the northern peoples, that right was hollowed out — the children boarded away from the language, and instruction consolidated in Russian. The right on paper and the practice that emptied it are bound between the same covers.
Then there are the silences, and for a book of children's law two are deafening. The first is the children of the Terror. When the Soviet state shot or imprisoned "enemies of the people" on a mass scale in 1937–38, it had a policy for their children too: NKVD Operational Order No. 00486 of 15 August 1937 provided for the arrest of the wives of "traitors to the motherland" and the disposal of their children, who were placed — their surnames sometimes changed — in a network of orphanages run by the security organs, while adolescents judged old enough were themselves sent to camps. Children were born and died in the camp system. This is not contested history; it is the documented record of the state whose children's law this book compiles, and it lies within the lifetime of the compilers. A collection that reaches back to cite an instruction of the People's Commissariat for Education of 1944 on the property rights of children's-home inmates has no room for the reason so many of those homes were full. The second silence is nearer the book's own date. Article 19's ground of "immoral, anti-social behaviour" was used, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, to strip parental rights from religious dissenters — Baptists, Pentecostals and others — on the reasoning that raising a child in an unregistered faith was itself a harmful influence; children were removed to state care to be brought up correctly. The punitive use of psychiatry against dissent, and the pressure it placed on their families, belongs to the same account. None of this appears. The collection is not falsifying a record here so much as declining to hold up the mirror: the very powers it codifies in the language of protection were, in the hands of the same state, instruments against the parents it disapproved of.
Behind all of it stands the book's frankest premise, which it states without embarrassment because it does not regard it as a problem: the child is the object of the state's formation of a new kind of human being. The education law lists among the "basic principles of public education" the "unity of instruction and communist education," and the vocational statutes make the goal explicit — "the cultivation in pupils of a Marxist-Leninist world outlook ... Soviet patriotism, a communist attitude to labour." Upbringing here is not the neutral nurture of a person who will choose her own ends; it is the production of a citizen to a specification the state has written. That is a coherent philosophy of childhood, and it is the opposite of the liberal one the book borrows its vocabulary from when it invokes the UN Declaration. The tension is never acknowledged, because acknowledging it would require the book to admit that the rights of the child and the communist upbringing of the child are not always the same thing, and may sometimes be at war. A right held against the state is one kind of thing; a child raised to the state's specification is another; and this collection uses the first vocabulary to describe the second arrangement.
The answer to this book was written, from within the revolutionary-Marxist tradition, nearly half a century before it — and it answers precisely the doctrine of the serene, guaranteeing state. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), in the chapter "Family, Youth and Culture," Trotsky traced what the Soviet state had already done to the emancipatory family law of the revolution's first years. October, he wrote, "honestly fulfilled its obligations in relation to woman," giving her legal equality and attempting, through creches, kindergartens and communal provision, "a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters." But "society proved too poor and little cultured"; the plans outran the resources, and by the mid-1930s the state was in retreat — restoring the family not as a hearth but as an instrument of order, "the need of the bureaucracy for a stable hierarchy of relations, and for the disciplining of youth by means of 40,000,000 points of support for authority and power." The right to abortion, "one of her most important civil, political and cultural rights," was withdrawn by the law of 27 June 1936. And on children specifically Trotsky recorded what the optimists would not: that "the resolution on the liquidation of homeless and uncared-for children is being weakly carried out," that the besprizornye — the abandoned children of the great social crisis — were "the most unmistakable and most tragic symptom of the difficult situation of the mother." He drew the exact conclusion this 1982 collection is built to forestall: "The mere fact of the furious criminal measures that have been adopted against homeless children is enough to suggest that the socialist legislation in defense of women and children is nothing but crass hypocrisy." He would not rest there — he refused, equally, the reading that the fine laws were mere fraud, insisting on "the broadness and boldness of the social plan." But he named the thing this book cannot: that a magnanimous law and a coercive practice can inhabit the same state, and that the gap between them is not an accident of poverty soon to be filled but a fact about who holds the power. Trotsky wrote in 1936, before the Terror's orphanages and before the internaty; he cannot be cited as a witness to those. What he supplies is the method — the refusal to read a code as a description of a society — and it is the method this collection most needs and most lacks.
Soviet Legislation on Children's Rights should therefore be read for both of the things it is. It is a genuine record of a genuine welfare state for children: compulsory free schooling and free textbooks, a paediatric health service, subsidised child care, maintenance for orphans and large families, real protections for young workers, and the end of the mass homelessness of the 1920s — achievements a serious reader should not let the book's other failures obscure. And it is a monument to what a state built on the formation of the new man could not say about its own power over the young: that the same statute which promised schooling in the mother tongue authorised the boarding schools that took the mother tongue away; that the same courts empowered to protect a child from "danger" could remove it from parents whose only offence was their faith; that the orphanages whose inmates' property the book so carefully protects had been filled, in part, by the state's own terror. The law on the page is real. So is everything the page leaves out. The distance between them is the subject this book of laws was compiled precisely in order not to have.