The role of children’s reception centers in the fight against child homelessness and neglect in the Kazakh SSR during the war years (1941-1945)

Abstract

Children's reception centers-distributors of the NKVD during the Great Patriotic War played an important role in the fight against child neglect and homelessness. Their work helped to streamline the process of distributing Soviet children to children's institutions of the People's Commissariat for Health, the People's Commissariat for Education, and the People's Commissariat for Social Welfare. The article deals with the work of children's reception centers in the Kazakh SSR in 1941-1945. On the basis of data from domestic and foreign archives, the authors show that child homelessness and neglect had a constant dynamic of growth during the war years, which became a huge problem of state scale. One of the elements of solving this problem was the mass work of children's reception centers-distributors of the NKVD. The number of receivers in the republic was growing, as was their capacity. The authors have identified the main sources of minors' admission to NKVD reception centers, the reasons why children were most often placed in difficult living conditions and their further placement. The authors also study the conditions of children's stay in reception centers by regions of the Kazakh SSR. As well as problems related to the supply of food and clothing allowances, schooling and medical care for children in reception centers. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that the problems of functioning of children's reception centers-distributors of the NKVD in the Kazakh SSR, as a measure to combat homelessness and neglect, are considered by the authors on the basis of previously unused archival documents