About the book: 2023 / Among the horrors of the twentieth century, little compares with the phenomenon of street children, as children and adolescents were called in post-revolutionary Russia, orphaned after the First World War and the Civil War. In 1922 there were between six and seven million. Dirty, dressed in rags, they wandered alone or in groups through cities and countryside in search of food, moved around the country, clinging to train cars, finding shelter from the cold in station basements or inside garbage cans, driven by hunger to acts of aggression and violence. In the 1930s, this topic was censored by the state, which could not allow the existence of homeless children in the “paradise” of Soviet society. In recent decades, homelessness has become the subject of historical research. But only Luciano Mecacci managed, thanks to direct evidence and documents of that time, many of which were studied for the first time, to present a complete reconstruction of the destinies of the main characters, the realities of whose lives today sometimes seem like fiction.