Unguarded. A city of street children.
How the Ugreshskaya labor commune re-educated children without barbed wire
There are eleven juvenile correctional colonies in Russia and 1030 juvenile offenders in them—these figures were published by the government last year. These are the latest official figures. A hundred years ago, the Nikolo-Ugreshsky Monastery alone housed 1300 juvenile offenders at a time, without barbed wire or armed guards.
These were children as young as nine and young adults up to 25. They were collected from prisons, camps, train stations, streets, and markets. The Ugreshskaya Dzerzhinsky Work Commune was one of hundreds of shelters that took on the humanitarian catastrophe of post-revolutionary Russia: homelessness.
Why did my mother give birth to me?
Homelessness has always followed and accompanied great upheavals. After World War II, there was mass orphanhood in Poland and Yugoslavia, thousands of homeless children in the squares of Tokyo and Osaka, and in Germany, Wolfskinder, or "wolf children." But the scale of homelessness in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s was exceptional—six million little children on the streets. This is comparable to the population of St. Petersburg. An entire city of street children.
Several factors converged here: World War I, then the Revolution and Civil War, the brutal Soviet food tax system that left peasants without a crust of bread, drought, the famine of 1920–1923, and epidemics.
Let's imagine a typical urban family in 1920: the father has died at the front or is serving in the army, the mother is mobilized for forced labor under the laws of War Communism, food is scarce, and schools operate intermittently. If the mother dies of typhus or starvation, the path to homelessness is direct and very short.
Younger children formed groups and robbed market vendors en masse, while older children joined gangs of adults. The Council of People's Commissars created a Council for the Protection of Children, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky. Thus, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage (VChK) assumed control of homeless children. Subsequently, security officers from the OGPU and NKVD became the primary educators.
Why not the People's Commissariat of Education? Because street children fuel crime, and thus undermine the new Soviet regime. The Cheka has several hospital trains where they gather children. They are given homeless certificates, some bread, and money. But there are no educational institutions. Where is this train going?
Dmitry Donskoy and others
"It was here, when Dmitry Donskoy was traveling to the Battle of Kulikovo, that the icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker appeared to him. And he said, 'All this has warmed my heart,' meaning it all warmed his heart. That's why the monastery is called Nikolo-Ugreshsky, and the area itself is called Ugreshi," says seminarian Sasha, fiddling with a school notebook. Leading tours is his obedience this month. "I feel more comfortable making candles. I get a lot of anxiety here. I talk about the architecture and history. I won't mention the juvenile colony. It's not convenient. I know the children lived in the monastery's guesthouses and the fraternal buildings. And we have a small zoo here. There are peacocks, sheep, chickens, donkeys, a bull, even deer. I think there was a petting zoo in the commune too; I read something about a frog."
An ancient monastery is the main landmark of the small town of Dzerzhinsky near Moscow. The town is named after the labor commune that was based there from 1927 to 1938. Anyone visiting the town will surely pass by the Gazprom oil refinery, which was twice attacked by Ukrainian drones. Footage of a huge floating lid went viral online. However, the refinery's tanks and pipes still sparkle in the sun. The domes of St. Nicholas Cathedral, destroyed by the labor commune and restored in the late 90s, also shine.
Labor Commune — a form of educational institution for troubled teenagers based on self-discipline, collective responsibility, paid labor, and vocational education. It was a kind of Soviet pedagogical utopia of the 1920s and 1930s.
The most famous labor communes were founded by Anton Makarenko in Ukraine. His fiction books, "Pedagogical Poem" and "Flags on the Towers," were read by generations of Soviet educators. And not only Soviet ones. UNESCO lists him among the four figures who defined 20th-century educational thinking: the American Dewey, the German Kerschensteiner, the Italian Montessori, and the Soviet-Ukrainian Makarenko.
Labor Commune No. 1 in Bolshevo, near Moscow, achieved worldwide fame. It was there that the first Soviet sound film, "Road to Life," was filmed. The film was named Best Director in an audience poll at the first Venice Film Festival. Actor Nikolai Batalov played the lead role wearing a red astrakhan hat. The commune's director, the renowned Chekist Matvey Pogrebinsky, also wore a similar hat, earning him the nickname "Kubanka." Maxim Gorky and Genrikh Yagoda, one of the ideologists of the Gulag, revered Kubanka-Pogrebinsky. Colony No. 1 was named after Yagoda. Pogrebinsky also played an active role in the creation of Labor Commune No. 2 in Ugresh.
From one monastery to another
Compared to others, the Ugreshskaya Commune appears rather modest. But thanks to it, an entire town emerged, and it also reclaimed the historic territory where the Old Believers—the main opponent of the reforms, Archpriest Avvakum and his comrades—and, according to one version, the great icon painter Simon Ushakov—once languished in monastery dungeons.
Monasteries were almost ideal places for isolation. They were usually located far from cities, surrounded by fields and rivers, and seclusion—often forced. The Soviet regime adopted this approach: Solovki, the Suzdal Spaso-Evfimiev Monastery with its NKVD camp, the Sviyazhsk Dormition Monastery in Tatarstan with its labor commune for street children and a Gulag prison, and the Kirillo-Novoezersky Monastery near Vologda—a prison for "enemies of the revolution" and a colony for political prisoners. Ugresha took in street children and rebellious monasteries from Zvenigorod.
There, in the Savvino-Storozhevsky Monastery—it's hard to imagine for those who come today to venerate the relics of Savva Storozhevsky—in 1927, explosions thundered, flames blazed, and unwashed, unruly teenagers jumped about. Street children gathered there by the Cheka, somehow obtained gunpowder, fashioned guns from drainpipes, fired, and blew up walls. There was no bloodshed, but the émigré press not without malice noted the helplessness of the Soviet government, the complete devastation and fear of the ordinary people.
A thousand rebels are transported to the large, bright Nikolo-Ugreshsky Monastery on the banks of the Moskva River. Surprisingly, they weren't sent to prison. Immediately after the revolution, Soviet pedagogy was dominated by the theory of the moral defectiveness of street children. Therefore, their re-education required strict measures: solitary confinement, strict discipline, and oversight by guards.
In Ugresh, the rules are different, based on the Makarenko system. Drugs, alcohol, and theft are strictly prohibited. Work and study are strongly encouraged. But you have to choose this yourself. Agree with it. Just like you used to agree to join a gang. It's also a kind of gang, but it's called a "commune."
Rules of the Ugresh labor commune
1. Live if you want, or leave if you don’t want.
2. Everyone is responsible for everyone, everyone is responsible for everyone.
3. To live a working life, you must be able to do something.
4. While educating yourself as a conscious proletarian, help others to become one too.
5. Everyone should study with us.
6. Everyone should decorate the house they live in and the street they walk on.
7. The honor of the commune is above all else, everyone is responsible for it.
8. There is a dry law for everyone in the commune.
9. Be polite in your dealings with everyone.
10. Stop gambling and stealing.
11. A working man will never allow himself to appropriate someone else’s penny.
It was reminiscent of a thieves' code, where nobility was prized. Children with deviant behavior, a plethora of addictions, and extensive life experience found it appealing. In the eleven years of the Ugreshskaya labor commune's existence, fewer than a dozen people were expelled. Less than ten percent went free.
Anya was 15 when she was brought from the Solovetsky camp to Ugresha. A thief and the mistress of a gang leader, she had been convicted for robbing the Historical Museum. She didn't immediately settle into the labor commune, but later became interested in theater, became a mechanic, and became an assistant teacher. Her criminal record was expunged.
Alexey Chekmazov. A fairly mature Don Cossack who had "rampaged" across the battlefields of the Civil War. A thief, con artist, and bandit with two dozen convictions. He served time on Solovki. He became the director of the labor commune's music factory and wrote for the magazine "For the Commune." His convictions were expunged.
Kolya Gorlov. Born in Omsk. On the train to Ugresha, he drew portraits of passengers using charcoal borrowed from the stokers. In exchange, he received bread and eggs, sometimes even sausage, which he generously shared with other street children. He studied at an art studio in the commune. Nikolai Gorlov's works are now in the Tretyakov Gallery.
This painting by Gorlov depicts Aphrodite, who adorned the fountain of the labor commune. It was most likely removed from the Sandunovsky Baths by Chekist educators, stood for over 60 years, and was successfully stolen during the "wild" 90s.
These are all success stories. But the success of the fight against homelessness wasn't in raising elite writers, managers, and artists in the work communes. Rather, it was in returning to normalcy. That was the bare minimum. What was the life of an ordinary street child like before Ugresh? Starving, stealing, a frequent visitor to the police, always at markets or train stations. Commercial sex, drugs, alcohol. In Ugresh and after—literacy, work, a profession, housing, family. An ordinary citizen. A philistine. The key to this re-education system was productive labor.
Balalaikas and chickens
When the NKVD suggested to Anton Makarenko that he remove children from production so as not to torment them with labor and instead replace them with adult professionals, Makarenko said, "We don't make cameras here, but people." The legendary Soviet "FED" (Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky) cameras were assembled in the Kharkiv labor commune. The production process was supposed to be something more enjoyable.
In Ugresh, the workshops were initially located in the Transfiguration Church. But within five years, four factories were operating in the commune. They manufactured poultry incubators, boat motors, radio equipment, and fiberboard. Back then, fiberboard was a new, inexpensive building material made from wood chips. Until recently, fiberboard houses still stood in Dzerzhinsky. There was also a music factory. A hundred balalaikas a day, 20 guitars, 40 drums, 15 mandolins and domras, and 17 gramophones, not to mention suitcases and children's toys.
Here, for the first time in the country, orchestral instruments were produced. It felt like the entire Soviet Union was singing, dancing, and playing. The OGPU made good money from troubled youths, and they didn't complain when they received cash. There was a shortage of laborers. Thus, civilian workers were hired, and then a settlement grew on the site of the Ugreshskaya Sloboda, and then a city, whose first residents were former street children.
Not only street children lived and worked in the commune; family-owned children were brought here so they could eat well at the factory kitchen, attend the club, study (even at universities), and earn money. The children were still relatively free, and discipline was based almost entirely on "concepts." According to Makarenko, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, who then worked in the People's Commissariat of Education, was quick to call this model a "slave and serf school." In 1928, during the New Economic Policy (NEP), there was still room for debate.
The method was, indeed, simple and brutal. The "most privileged" boy (or girl) was promoted to the head of the primary collective—the one "capable of controlling everything: commanding, insisting, pressuring." Authority was transferred from the teacher to the students, establishing a natural hierarchy, without adult coercion. The "active" had no privileges—the best, not the worst, were to be punished for every little thing. This is how Ugresha, Labor Commune No. 2, lived and worked. Without guards or perimeter.
Vikniksor. Creativity above labor
Before the labor commune became the official re-educational doctrine of the Soviet regime, a completely different kind of life unfolded in a single building in Petrograd, located between the Fontanka and Obvodny Canal embankments. Here, street children studied foreign languages, performed in the theater, wrote poetry, and published newspapers. Ten lessons a day, six or seven in the summer.
This is the Dostoevsky Commune School, which operated from 1920 to 1925, until its director, Viktor Nikolaevich Soroka-Rosinsky, was fired. He was also known as "Vikniksor"—that's what the ShKID students called Soroka-Rosinsky. We remember how he was played by Sergei Yursky in the film "The Republic of ShKID," based on the book by Belykh and Panteleyev, students of the school.
Compared to the work ethic of Ugresha, Bolshev, and Makarenko's communes, SHKID might have seemed a striking but curious experiment. Play and creativity were the key here. Soroka-Rosinsky could negotiate with his students at length, arguing, and persuading. He was convinced that there were no morally defective children, only lost children with their own individuality. A teacher must be an artist, a "well-bred," as they say, and this is essential for working with difficult teenagers.
From the outside, life at SHKID might even look chaotic. And then Krupskaya appears again. She saw in this seminary i (A dormitory at a religious educational institution was a bursa. In pre-revolutionary Russia, it was often associated with neglect, abuse, and hazing.)"Not in Chukhloma, but in Leningrad, a Soviet seminary is thriving, led by people whose work has nothing in common with the tasks set by the Soviet government," she wrote in the newspaper Pravda.
The book "The Republic of ShKID" by Belykh and Panteleyev played a key role in this misunderstanding. It was published in 1927, when the authors were 19 and 18 years old. It was an adventure story, largely a fantasy, with fictitious details, but the People's Commissariat of Education took it very seriously. Vikniksor was long banned from teaching in public schools, and Makarenko called ShKID "a story of pedagogical failure."
Ironically, in the fall of 1960, Viktor Nikolaevich was rushing to get a movie ticket for his student, who had earned her first A. He died after being hit by a tram on Makarenko Street, six years before the release of the film "Republic of ShKID." His neighbors discarded his final years' work on child psychology. But much remained, such as his idea of creating special rooms for privacy and creativity in orphanages. In this, they aligned with Anton Makarenko, whose system envisioned "quiet rooms" within the noisy collective work commune.
Grigory Belykh, one of the authors of the novella about Dostoevsky's School, had a short life. In the book, he is portrayed as a street child named Chernykh, nicknamed Yankel. A romantic, amorous, and just poet, Belykh was arrested in 1935 after being denounced for authoring counterrevolutionary works, including the poem "Two Greats" about Stalin and Peter the Great.
I surrender, I surrender, Joseph the First.
My idea for a channel
You, without sparing the efforts of others,
They finished it off very brilliantly.
I was rich in ideas,
But he was not so rich in slaves.
Writer and reporter Grigory Belykh died in a prison hospital from tuberculosis.
Cultural Chekists
Makarenko turned a street child into a Soviet citizen. Vikniksor turned him into a human being. Ugresha was somewhere between the regular labor communes and the SHKID. Advanced communards would say, "It feels like we're at the Pushkin Lyceum. Today we're going to the Tretyakov Gallery, tomorrow to Abramtsevo." In the sculpture studio, they made ashtrays, statues of Leo Tolstoy and Gorky, and busts of Dzerzhinsky. In the art studio, they went to see landscapes. The theater staged contemporary plays and situation comedies with masks. Goldoni's "The Servant of Two Masters" was a resounding success.
There were four orchestras, the brass section being particularly proud. Aleksandrov himself managed the local song and dance ensemble. Some communards joined him, joining the famous Red Army ensemble. They learned to fly gliders and airplanes, jumped from a diving board into the monastery pond, and played basketball and football. Using their own income, they built the largest stadium in the region, which hosted Spartak, Dynamo, and even the Uruguayan national football team. The communards, however, lost to the Uruguayan national team. In short, life was a roller coaster. Or was this all just Soviet propaganda?
Even if you divide it all by twenty, as they say, the Ugresha Commune was a good and generally lively place. Or perhaps history hasn't preserved the critical and sad memories of former street children. Ugresha owes this agitational and enthusiastic spirit to Maxim Gorky and the renowned journalist Mikhail Koltsov.
Their tour of labor communes in 1928 was organized by the director of the Bolshevo Commune, Chekist Matvey Pogrebinsky (remember Kubanka from "Road to Life"?) and one of the leaders of the Soviet secret services, Genrikh Yagoda, a member of Stalin's inner circle. The "architect" of the Gulag was the curator and patron of the labor communes. It seems he did so quite sincerely.
Gorky in his multi-page essay "Po Soyusu Sovetov" writes about Ugresh:
"A nameless boy of about sixteen, with a face remarkably resembling that of Feodor Chaliapin in his youth, has set up a 'biogarden,' as he calls a huge wire cage, in the park near the monastery wall. Inside are baby magpies, blind owls, a hedgehog, and a large toad, which he has named Banker... The dark-haired boy, with delicate features, matte skin on his cheeks, slender, and apparently familiar with another life, immediately wrote and gave me some very good poetry. It later turned out that the poems were not his and had already been published."
The writer is touched, moved, and asks the children to avoid compliments. Mikhail Koltsov watches from the sidelines. He will write a textbook Article "In the Monastery", it is still studied in universities.
Gorky anxiously begs Lenka:
— There, in Moscow, on Red Square, there's a monument to Minin and Pozharsky. So please, leave it where it is. Okay?
Sly Lenka frowned and turned purple, straining his ten-year-old brain to choose a way to keep the conversation going. The homeless practical man only knows two: brazenly provocative and plaintively miserable. Lenka realizes both tones are inappropriate. He turns even redder and snaps back, quite artlessly:
"I told you I wouldn't run away from the commune again. I gave my word, why bring up bygone days! What, didn't I give my word or something?"
Lenka ran off, and the crowd quickly dispersed. Here, everyone has their place, their duties; hanging around during work hours for more than a few minutes is inconvenient and unpleasant. The horde that has occupied the stone masses of the Nikolo-Ugreshsky Monastery works as if in a proper factory, where productivity requires no propaganda.
From M. Koltsov's article "In the Monastery"
Soviet society is enchanted by the Ugreshi, and everyone in the OGPU is happy. There are still ten years to go before the Great Terror and the destruction of any experiment in Soviet pedology i (Pedology is the science of children, which combines research in psychology, pedagogy, biology, medicine, anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines. Its goal is to study child development comprehensively.)In 1935, the age limit for juveniles in criminal law would drop to twelve. From that age, a teenager who committed a serious crime could be tried as an adult, up to and including the death penalty.
The highest penalty for educators
The death penalty also awaited the Chekists involved in labor communes. Not for the communes, but for espionage and counterrevolution.
Genrikh Yagoda was executed in 1938. He was also charged with the murder (poisoning) of Maxim Gorky.
Matvey Pogrebinsky-Kubanka. Head of Labor Commune No. 1 in Bolshevo. In 1928, it was Pogrebinsky who traveled to Italy to persuade Gorky to return to the USSR. Gorky wrote the preface to Pogrebinsky's book "The Human Factory" and personally oversaw a collection of essays on the commune. He preached the idea of labor communes throughout Soviet Russia. After Yagoda's arrest, Pogrebinsky shot himself in his office. He was buried secretly in an unknown grave.
He left a letter to Stalin: "With one hand, I turned criminals into the most honest people, but with the other, I was forced, obeying party discipline, to label the noblest revolutionary figures of our country as criminals..." In 1938, 400 communards were arrested and executed in his labor commune in three days.
Mikhail Koltsov, journalist and author of a lively essay about Ugresh, was a hero of the Spanish Civil War. He was executed on February 2, 1940, for treason, espionage, and other fictitious crimes. Nine months later, Ernest Hemingway's great novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, was published, in which Koltsov is the prototype for the Soviet journalist and agent Karkov.
Maxim Gorky finally returned from exile in 1932. Four years later, he died of pneumonia. It is said that when a foreign correspondent asked him, "How was life in the Soviet Union all this time?" he simply replied, "As miserable as it gets." He wholeheartedly supported the labor communes.
Little is known about the fate of the staff and inmates of the Ugreshsky prison colony during the Great Terror. Chekist Pavel Perepelkin was the manager of the labor commune at the Nikolo-Ugreshsky Monastery. He rose to become the head of the NKVD labor colony department for the entire USSR. Makarenko himself was his subordinate. Perepelkin was expelled from the party, but was bailed out by communards working for the NKVD. For a long time, he worked as a janitor in Moscow, then managed municipal services in Perm.
The students remembered him for this moral lesson: "Remember! Never complain or beg. Life will eventually put everything in its place." She "put everything in its place" with condescension for Perepelkin.
A crowd favorite was Yefim Smelyansky, a distinguished member of the Cheka-OGPU and the commune's manager in its final years. He "saw right through people," traveling to prisons and camps, selecting new inmates, and cheerfully reining in those who were too tough: "Every Sunday, citizens of the free Nikolo-Ugreshskaya Republic filled the club's spacious hall and balcony to capacity. Yefim Pavlovich would summarize the past week. Everyone laughed. Everyone was amazed by his extraordinary artistry. The offenders burned with shame, and those in the audience clutched their stomachs with laughter." Smelyansky was executed either at the Butovo firing range or in Kommunarka.
Anton Makarenko briefly donned the uniform of an NKVD officer, but then moved to Moscow to fully establish himself as a writer. On April 1, 1939, he was traveling from the Union of Writers' House of Creativity in Golitsyno on a commuter train to Moscow. He had a film script in his briefcase. In the train, he slumped onto a bench and managed to say, "I'm the writer Anton Makarenko."
After Yagoda's execution, all labor communes became NKVD production centers, and their educational function was abolished. Thus ended the daring experiment, replaced by the familiar, strict, and austere model. When else had a system created for repression ever allowed itself such common sense, ingenuity, and compassion? And does anyone even remember?
Ugresha now
Today, it's quiet and peaceful. Monks advise workers on how to plant hydrangeas. Tourists throw pebbles into the monastery pond and take photos near the relief of the Jerusalem Wall, which encircles the monastery and symbolizes the Heavenly City. Surprisingly, the reckless, homeless past hasn't destroyed it. Fifty meters from the wall stands a monument to a crying boy.
"I think it's for the street kids," says Lyuda, who works at the monastery's pilgrimage center. "I just don't understand why he's standing with his back to the eternal flame. We don't talk about the labor commune. Because people don't ask for that. You see? Not at all. About religion—yes."
Lyuda is mistaken. A crying boy is not a homeless child. He is meant to embody all the horrors and inhumanity of war, to convey the helplessness, pain, and anguish of a child. The monument was erected many years ago at the personal initiative of Academician Boris Zhukov, former director of the Soyuz dual-use center. The center's entrance is right behind the monastery gates, across from the seminary. Solid rocket fuel and engines are produced here, including for the Iskander missile system. It's clear that Soyuz is under sanctions.
It seems as if the history of the Dzerzhinsky labor commune has also been sanctioned. No one remembers anything, and even tries to forget. Eras don't speak to each other here. A luxury car pulls up, and men in fine suits with State Duma deputy badges on their lapels emerge. They need Dmitry Donskoy and forgiveness of their sins.
Lyuda won't tell them about the amazing, provocative, ancient experience when very difficult children, criminals, lived here without security, strict regime, or humiliation. And they became human beings. Apparently, Lyuda is right: there's no demand.
