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CONDITION OF REFUGEE CHILDREN IN THE LIMITROPHE STATES IN 1920’S // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2018. Issue 5 (194). P. 129-135

The article concerns the legal status of refugee children in the interwar period in the limitrophe states. It reflects material and legal status and is based on the data kept in the so called Prague Archive (the Russian Foreign Historical Archive), which is the part of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (SARF). The article includes the analytical data concerning the quantity of refugee children. The article considers not only social and legal status, but also moral condition of refugee children in the limitrophe states and includes common and particular cases of this. The research concerns also living conditions of adults and children in emigration, their complicated material and moral conditions, difficulties which children had to face (either the necessity to work at an early age and, as a result, the inability to attend school, or the employment of parents at work and the inability to educate a child, which ultimately led to disobedience and permissiveness), identifies the factors, which affected this and means of providing assistance to refugee children. The author pays attention to the difficulties, which children faced in emigration: hunger, need, mental and physical violence and denationalization. The author also points out the means of struggle against such a regime and means of providing support from the government and emigration organizations (material support, organization of various children “settlements”, summer children camps and refuges) and problems, which they faced while organizing all this work. The author also gives the comparative analyses of refugee children’s position in recipient countries and points out that children conditions were different according to the policy of the government towards Russian emigrants and economical situation inside every country. Moreover the direct dependence of legal and material status on economical situation inside the country is also pointed out in the research.

Keywords: Russian emigration, denationalization, charity, the Civil War, Russian speaking population, repatriation, national identity