In the Russian and Karelian volosts at the end of the 19th century. the game "Kitty, kitty, sell the child" was popular. It was not just a child's play: in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. children were actually bought and sold. Even in the second half of the twentieth century. from the villagers of Karelia one could hear stories about how local merchants, in addition to firewood, hay, game, delivered live goods to Petersburg. They collected young children from the poor, burdened with large families, and took them to the capital, where child labor was in wide demand.
An old resident of the Karelian village of Peldozha A. I. Barantseva (born in 1895) recalled the collision that unfolded in the Maryan family: “A lot of children were born to them … All their parents were sent to St. Petersburg, and lived there. Earlier, poor parents often sold their children as servants to the rich in St. Petersburg ….
Traditionally, a child was considered “ready” to be sent to the city at 10 years old. But if possible, the parents preferred to postpone the boy's departure from the family until 12-13, and girls - until 13-14.
In the first week of Great Lent, hundreds of carts, each of which housed up to ten children, stretched along the strong crust from the Olonets province to the capital. Based on his impressions, the Petersburg writer and journalist MA Krukovsky wrote a cycle of essays “Little People”. One of them - "Senka's Adventure" - draws the story of a peasant boy, given by his father for 5 rubles. to Petersburg.
"Among the peasants of the Olonets Territory," wrote Krukovsky, "in many Prionezh villages there is an unreasonable, heartless custom to send children to St. Petersburg unnecessarily and give them to small traders for service," for training, "as the people say." The publicist was not quite right. It was precisely the need that forced the peasant to make a difficult decision. The family got rid of their extra mouth for a while, hoping to receive financial assistance from the "barge haulers" (as the peasants called those living and earning "on the side") in the future.
The sale of children and the delivery of cheap labor to St. Petersburg became a specialization of individual peasant industrialists, who in everyday life were called "cabbies" or "rowmen". “I remember well, a certain Patroev lived in Kindasovo… He kept recruiting children and taking them to St. Petersburg… And then there were merchants, craftsmen, they forced children to work in sewing shops…”, Barantseva recalled.
In the second half of the nineteenth century. The delivery of children from the Olonets district to St. Petersburg was successfully carried out by the peasant Fyodor Tavlinets from the village of Pogost of the Rypushkal volost. For 20 years, he sent about 300 peasant children to the capital. There he arranged for them in craft institutions, entered into a contract with artisans for training and received a reward for supplying students. The authorities became aware of his activities when the "cabman", violating the agreement, tried to evade transferring part of the proceeds to his parents.
Boys were usually asked to be placed in shops, and girls in fancy workshops. The child was supplied with clothes and provisions for the journey, while passports were handed over to an industrialist. From the moment they were taken away, the fate of the children depended entirely on chance and, above all, on the driver. The "cabman" was not paid for the transportation; he received money from the person to whom he gave the child to study. “It is clear that under such conditions,” wrote N. Matrosov, a resident of the village of Kuzaranda, “the latter is scouring the capital and looking for a place where he will be given more money, without asking if the child is capable of this craft, whether he will live well and what will happen subsequently ".
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For each child who was put in training for 4-5 years, the "cabman" received from 5 to 10 rubles. With the increase in the training period, the price increased. It was 3-4 times higher than the amount given by the buyer to the parents, and to a large extent depended on external data, the state of health and efficiency of the young worker.
The shopkeeper or the owner of the workshop issued a residence permit for the child, provided him with clothes and food, receiving in return the right to dispose of him sovereignly. In the judicial practice of that time, such a phenomenon was recorded precisely as trafficking in children. For example, the owner of one of the craft workshops explained at the trial that in St. Petersburg it is customary to buy children for teaching, as a result of which the buyer acquires the right to use the child's labor force.
The scale of trafficking in children at the end of the 19th century, according to contemporaries, acquired enormous proportions. Krukovsky painted a depressing picture that was observed when a buyer appeared in early spring: "Moans, screams, crying, sometimes - swearing is heard then on the streets of silent villages, mothers give up their sons in battle, children do not want to go to an unknown foreign land."
The law recognized the need for the compulsory consent of a child who is sent into education or "service." In fact, the interests of children were usually not taken into account. In order to consolidate their power over the child, buyers took an IOU from their parents.
But not only poverty forced peasants to part with their children. Also influenced by assurances that the child will be assigned "to a good place" in the city. Popular rumor kept the memory of the rich immigrants from Karelia who managed to get rich in St. Petersburg. The stories about their capital excited the thoughts and feelings of the Karelian peasant. It is no coincidence that the world will set a price, the city will make a girl better. According to the observations of officials, priests, teachers, every father who had several children dreamed of sending one of them to the capital.
However, not all children could quickly get used to the new living conditions in the city. The Karelian storyteller PN Utkin said: “They took me to St. Petersburg and assigned me to a shoemaker for five years. Well, I began to live very badly. At 4 o'clock in the morning they will wake up and run errands until 11 pm”.
The hero of the story decided to flee. Many, for various reasons, left the owners, were forced to wander. In the report of the district police officer to the Olonets governor at the end of the nineteenth century. It was recorded that children who were sent to study, but in fact sold to St. Petersburg, "sometimes almost half-naked in winter, arrive in their homeland by different ways."
Child labor protection was legally extended only to large-scale production, where supervision over the implementation of laws was carried out by the factory inspection. Crafts and trade establishments were outside this sphere. The age of entry into apprenticeship was not legally stipulated.
In practice, the restrictions on the duration of the working day for students, from 6 am to 6 pm, established by the "Charter on Industry" were usually not observed, and even more so, the edification of the masters: “… not to punish and take due time with science, without forcing them to do housework and work."
The living conditions in which the teenagers found themselves pushed them to commit crimes. One third of all offenses committed by children in the early twentieth century. (and these were mainly thefts caused by malnutrition), accounted for by apprentices of craft workshops.
Materials from the Olonets press give an idea of the fate of the children sold in St. Petersburg. To some, as the proverb said, Peter became a mother, and to someone - a stepmother. Many of the children who found themselves in the capital soon found themselves "at the bottom" of St. Petersburg life.
About such inspector of public schools S. Losev wrote: “At the same time, when during Great Lent carts with live goods are sent to Petersburg from Olonets province, from Petersburg they wander through the villages and villages on foot, begging, tattered, with drunken faces and burning eyes, quite often drunk … young guys and mature men who have tasted the Petersburg "learning" in the workshops, Petersburg life … ".
Among them were many who were deprived of a residence permit in the capital as punishment for begging or other misdeeds. Torn away from peasant labor from childhood, these people had a destructive effect on their fellow villagers. Drunkenness, which was not previously characteristic of the Karelians, became widespread among them in the late 19th - early 20th centuries, especially among young people and 15-16-year-olds. Those who were ashamed of their return to their native village as a loser joined the ranks of the "gold-motorists".
However, there were many young people who “stayed afloat” and adapted to city life. According to contemporaries, of all the "values" of urban civilization, they mastered only servile manners and the so-called "jacket" culture, which consisted in the manner of dressing according to a certain template. The adolescents were eager to return to the village in a "city" suit that aroused the respect and respect of their peers. The appearance of a new thing did not go unnoticed by relatives and friends. It was accepted, congratulating on the new thing, to say: "God grant a new thing, and next year a woolen one."
As a rule, the first thing a teenager did was buy galoshes, which, upon returning to the village, regardless of the weather, put on on holidays and for conversations. Then, if funds allowed, they bought patent leather boots, a watch, a jacket, a bright scarf …
Unlike migrant workers for logging and other nearby trades, who earned a new shirt for Easter, boots or jacket, "Piteriaks", "Petersburgers", i.e. the guys who worked for a long time in the capital, had a "dandy" suit and made up a particularly respected and authoritative group of the village youth community.
Here are the details of one of the variants of the "graceful" suit of a 14-year-old boy who returned to Olonets Karelia from Petersburg in 1908: colorful trousers, a bowler hat, red gloves. An umbrella and a scented pink handkerchief might also have been present.
The most successful and enterprising "pupils of St. Petersburg", who managed to get rich and even become the owners of their own establishments, were, of course, few in number. Their visiting card at home was a large beautiful house, in which relatives lived and where the owner came from time to time. The fame and capital of these people was a weighty argument for a peasant who sent his child to the capital.
The influence of the city on the life of a teenager in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. was ambiguous. Contemporaries could not fail to note the positive impact - the intellectual development of boys and girls, the expansion of their horizons. To a greater extent, this applied to those who worked in factories or factories in St. Petersburg. Having returned to the village, this small part of the youth never parted with the book.
And yet, the forced sending of children to the city caused concern among the progressive section of society. A Karelian peasant V. Andreev from the village of Syamozero wrote: “When they are taken to the city and placed in workshops, they are forced to live in premises worse than dog kennels, fed by garbage and various heaps, constantly beaten by the owners and craftsmen - the majority are withering, and the guest of all these workshops - fleeting consumption is carried away to the grave. The minority, who miraculously endured all these ordeals, reached the rank of a master, but, living in a drunken and depraved company for several years, they themselves became infected with these vices and prematurely went to the grave or joined the ranks of criminals. There were and are considered to be very few efficient and hard-working craftsmen."
Peasant P. Korennoy echoed him: “Dozens of people go out, hundreds perish. They are suffocated by city life, poisoned by the organism, spoiled morally, returning sick people to the village, with spoiled morality."
Based on materials from Olga Ilyukha
O. BULANOVA