The Homeless. Wandering Childhood in Soviet Russia (1917–1935)

Among the horrors of the 20th century, few phenomena compare to that of the homeless children, as they were called in post-revolutionary Russia, who were orphaned after World War I and the Civil War. In 1922, there were between six and seven million of them. Dirty, dressed in rags, they wandered alone or in groups through cities and rural areas in search of food, traveling across the country, clinging to train cars, finding shelter from the cold in station basements or inside garbage bins, 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, the issue of homelessness has become the subject of historical research. However, only Luciano Mecacci managed, through direct testimonies and documents from 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. In 2022, the book was honored with the highest award of the Florentine Literary Prize, the "Golden Florin," in the category of "Documentary Literature."