This book examines, through a detailed study of Soviet residential
childcare homes and boarding schools, the much wider issues of Soviet
policies towards deviance, social norms, repression, and social control.
It reveals how through targeting children whose parents could not or did
not take care of them, as well as children with disabilities, the system
disproportionately involved children from socially marginal and poor
families. It highlights how the system aimed to raise these children
from the margins of society and transform them into healthy, happy,
useful Soviet citizens, imbued with socialist values. The book also
outlines how the system fitted in to Khrushchev's reforms and social
order policies, where the emphasis was on monitoring and controlling
society without the recourse to direct repression and terror, and how
continuity with this period was maintained even as the rest of Soviet
society changed significantly.