Defining “Neglect” in Early Soviet Turkestan: Terminology, Historiography and the Source Base for the Study of Institutions for Homeless Children and Adolescents, 1918–1924

The mass appearance of homeless and neglected children (besprizornye) was one of the most visible social consequences of war, revolution and famine in the former Russian Empire. Yet the vocabulary used to describe these children was unstable, and in Soviet Turkestan it was applied to a society whose family, charitable and legal institutions differed markedly from those of central Russia. This article examines how the categories “neglected child” (bezprizornost’, beznadzornost’) and “neglected adolescent” took shape in Russian and Soviet legal-pedagogical thought, how they were consolidated in Soviet legislation by 1926, and how they should be adapted for research on the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Turkestan ASSR, 1918–1924). It then offers a four-part survey of the scholarship (Soviet-era practitioners, post-independence Uzbek historians, Russian and Kazakh historians, and Anglophone Sovietology) and reviews the archival and published sources on which the history of Turkestan’s educational and rehabilitative institutions can be written. The article argues that existing studies treat Turkestan mostly as a chronological or geographical fragment of broader Uzbek or all-Union narratives, and that the region’s specific institutional arrangements deserve to be studied in their own right.