Abstract
The history of Soviet childhood in the first decades after the October revolution may be book-ended by two contrasting epics, vastly different in scale. Firstly, there were the orphaned besprizorniki, or “unattended ones,” a consequence of the general chaos and dislocation of revolution, civil war, famine, and forced resettlement. These abandoned children were omnipresent in Soviet cities and villages until their eventual disappearance, under Stalin, through mass arrests and deportations. David Lean's 1965 cinematic adaptation of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957) is a story set in motion by one of these orphaned children of the revolution. The antithesis of the besprizorniki were the niños de la guerra: three thousand orphans of the Spanish Civil War, aged 5–12 years, evacuated to Stalin's Soviet Union in 1937 and 1938, where they enjoyed privileged lives in unusual comfort, housed in fine orphanages, and doted on by numberless Soviet caregivers.
Karl Qualls, Professor of History at Dickinson College, has written the first book-length account of the niños. Based on hitherto unseen Soviet documentation, and incorporating a rich memoir literature, this vital scholarship fills a conspicuous gap in several historiographies, most notably Soviet education policy under Stalin. Whereas scholars including Larry E. Holmes, E. Thomas Ewing, Anne Livschiz, and Lisa Kirschenbaum have produced major works devoted to youth culture and orphanages in the interwar and Second World War periods, Qualls is the first to analyze in detail the schooling of the Spanish orphans, and their transition to adulthood. The study also fleshes out the last remaining unexplored component of “Operation X”—Moscow's military-political support for the Spanish Republic. That subject was long mired in Cold War controversy and archival inaccessibility, but the last two decades have transformed the possibilities for a deeper analysis of Soviet involvement in the war. Beginning with the millennial publication of Russian Colonel Iurii Rybalkin, and followed by continental historians Antonio Elorza, Marta Bizcarrondo, Rémi Skoutelsky, Frank Schauff, as well as the author of this review, the field achieved its pinnacle with the Spaniard Angel Viñas's trilogy, completed in 2008. Nonetheless, until now, the Soviet evacuation of Republican war refugees has not received the same level of attention as military, diplomatic, cultural or economic ties.
Qualls’ work also complements a rich literature that treats the confluence of childhood and the Spanish Civil War. This field takes into account the effects on children of the first modern aerial bombings of urban populations, the mobilization of youth in combat, children's artwork, the wartime consequences for childhood illnesses and increased mortality, and the evacuation of 30,000 children sent to safe havens in Britain, Denmark, Belgium, France, Mexico, and the USSR. According to Qualls, those who were given refuge in the USSR experienced childhood quite unlike any other children of that country, or indeed, of the century. The “niños de Rusia” as they have long been known in Spain, grew up to be neither Soviet nor Spanish but rather Hispano-Soviet. Their remarkable Stalinist-era upbringing, set against the backdrop first of the conflagration in Spain and then the Great Patriotic War and late-Stalinism, tells us much about Soviet education, about the endless capacity of children to adapt to adverse circumstances, and suggests an applicable template for humane refugee treatment.
Qualls wastes few words in getting his subjects to the Soviet Union, but the context of the Spanish war is well-handled. One interpretive challenge immediately apparent is that the niños arrived in the USSR on four separate expeditions, between March 1937 and December 1938, and each—even the sea route—was distinct. Of particular interest is the second sailing, which began on a rainy day in mid-June 1937, at the port of Bilbao, where, under the constant threat of the fascist aviation, children assembled with hastily created travel documents, a suitcase, and a favorite doll or toy. With local militias standing guard, the niños boarded not a passenger vessel, but a freighter. A Soviet-made newsreel shows the vessel slipping away from the dock, the decks teeming with some 4500 children. Days later, under calmer French skies, 1500 of this number were transferred to a second freighter, the Sontay, and continued on to Baltic Russia. Their minders included a support team of teachers, nurses, doctors, and representatives of the Basque regional authorities. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the Politburo directed Commissariat for Public Health to prepare for the niños’ arrival. Qualls is particularly skilled in simultaneously recounting the experience from the point of view of the children while explaining how efficient Soviet functionaries working behind the scenes left nothing to chance.
If the logistics of relocation merit scrutiny, and the reader's interest riveted by the cast of thousands involved in the rescue of the orphans, Qualls’ trenchant mining of the memoir literature reveals the poignant, personal side of the evacuation. Here we meet the five Molinas siblings who walked four hundred miles to the Valencian docks where they boarded the Cabo de Palos, destination Yalta. And the reader learns of Angel Rodríguez's agonizing wait to leave Gijón in an improvised shelter, exploding enemy shells a constant menace. Qualls also explores recent Spanish analysis that tells us a great deal about those who sailed to Russia: their gender, age, province of origin, level of education, native language, and social status. While the children were a diverse group that cannot be easily summarized, they overwhelmingly shared a common sense of relief in leaving a shrinking Republican zone devastated by war, privations, and hunger. None of those evacuated anticipated that their sojourn in the USSR would outlast not only the Spanish Civil War, but their childhood.
Following a sea journey of nearly a fortnight, those who sailed in June 1937 were greeted in Baltic Russia by a display of solidarity that reduced many to tears. Their vessel was escorted into the port of Leningrad by a flotilla of uncounted smaller ships and even submarines. On approach to the docks, the Spanish children on deck were cheered by scores of well-wishers, whose numbers included local and national leaders and brigades of Red Guard troops. As the niños descended the gangway, Komsomol and Pioneer children pressed forward with bouquets of flowers and spontaneous bear hugs for the sea-weary youngsters. This rousing spectacle was set to music as local bands played patriotic tunes, encouraging the crowds to sing along. It was, in the words of one child, “like reaching paradise after being in hell” (16).
Next the children were inspected for disease and subjected to upsetting but de rigueur prophylactic measures. Many had their heads shaved and their clothing and meagre possessions confiscated—if not tipped overboard prior to disembarkation. Distressingly, even small reminders of home, like a family bible or Sunday dress, were unceremoniously seized. Starched white uniforms were provided almost as soon as children could strip off the old clothes. In letters home to their families, which Qualls uses extensively, the children never fail to mention their new apparel. For those from poorer families, these were the finest clothes they had ever worn. With these formalities out of the way, the children were sent to temporary lodging while their specially prepared homes were completed. Those with tuberculosis were separated from the main group and promptly sent to convalesce in the healthier climate of Crimea, specifically at Artek, one of Ukraine's oldest spa towns. Here they resided in a Tsarist palace until their condition improved—some for a few weeks, others for several years. The healthier Spaniards stayed in Leningrad or continued on to Moscow, but all were put up in luxurious accommodations. Indeed, the niños were initially installed in the country's fanciest residences, not least the Hotel October in Leningrad.
Finally, the children arrived at new homes and began their schooling, which mirrored in some respects education methods applied elsewhere to non-Russian Soviet nationalities. In the 22 special schools established for Spanish war orphans, the niños were never required to assimilate. They learned Russian as a second language, and were introduced to Soviet history, culture, and ideals, but their main studies were Spanish-centered, and indeed, conducted in Castilian. The project of educating the niños was handicapped by two obstacles, and Qualls explores how Soviet authorities overcame each. The first was linguistic, such as the dearth of Soviet speakers of Spanish in the late 1930s. Spanish was neither a Comintern language nor one taught in Soviet universities; when the children arrived, no Spanish-Russian dictionary was available in the USSR. Soviet specialists in French studies were called up to translate textbooks into Spanish, or to teach together with the Spanish minders who had sailed with the niños. The second problem had to do with the way Soviets envisioned the creation in these schools of a unique Hispano-Soviet young person. Here, the Soviets insisted on supporting a generic Spanishness—Hispanidad—that contradicted the fact that almost half of the refugees were Basque. Moscow was ill-prepared to reinforce regional Iberian cultural differences, much less the mutually unintelligible languages of the peninsula.
While no expense was spared to give the children the best possible housing and instruction, their destiny was soon altered by international developments. In spring 1939, Franco's Nationalists emerged triumphant in the civil war. Given the Republican bona fides of the families of the niños, repatriation was out of the question, and Moscow prepared to keep the niños’ schools running permanently. However, the coming of the Second World War augured a new round of evacuations, and the niños again found themselves war refugees, now moving towards the interior east, along with millions of other Soviet children. Wartime conditions catapulted many of the teenagers into adulthood, and that often meant military service. Some were conscripted, others dug anti-tank ditches, and not a few died in combat. Qualls explores how the war changed the nature of education for the niños, now focused on self-discipline and labor.
The book closes with the end of the Stalinist period, Soviet rapprochement with Franco's Spain, and the long-delayed repatriation of many of the Spaniards. That return was not easy. The men, many of whom had careers in medicine, administration, or engineering, were considered suspect due to their Soviet upbringing, and relegated to manual labor. The women—who had enjoyed an education equal to the boys and who had entered the Soviet workforce after the war—soon learned that in Spain they were expected to be homemakers and mothers. Few experienced a smooth transition and, within a year or two, over half returned to the USSR.
This book is timely in ways the author might not have anticipated when he began research some years ago. Ours is an era increasingly typified by rolling displaced person crises, when photographs of drowned toddler refugees go viral and children separated from their parents are kept in cages. In Qualls’ important book, we learn that even at the height of Stalinist terror, the apparatus working under the Soviet dictator could institutionalize a humane, magnanimous, and culturally sensitive reception for thousands of innocent children. In contrast to the other states that accepted the refugees in 1937, only the Soviet regime refused to send them back to an uncertain fate in Franco's Spain. Instead, Moscow accepted responsibility for these niños, affording them an education and living standard far beyond the possibilities in their war-torn country of origin. The achievement of this excellent, highly readable, and meticulously-researched book should not be understated. The successive cultural shocks and wartime dislocations experienced by the niños may have been unique to their circumstances, but this study proves, more generally, the vital role a state may play in caring for and educating children, even war orphans from a distant land.