Boris B. Gorshkov, The Dark Side of Early Soviet Childhood, 1917-1941. Children’s Tragedy, London, New York, Oxford, New Delphi, Sydney, Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, 220 pp., ISBN: 978-1-3500-9867-1

The social problem of abandoned children that occurred in postrevolutionary Russia can be considered one of the most debated issues of Soviet social history over the past three decades. It represented an unprecedented phenomenon in terms of size and features that underwent a profound evolution. Numerous historians have attempted to reconstruct the causes and evolution of the policy elaborated by the new Soviet state over a fifteen-year period after the 1917 Revolution until the outbreak of World War II. The present research considers some aspects of the historiographical debate that began in the late 1990s both in the field of children’s social history and the field of “children’s studies,” and which shed light on the stages of Soviet social and educational policy at a centralized and local level.