In the book Soviet Criminal Justice Under Stalin by Peter H. Solomon and published by Cambridge University Press, it appears that the source I used which stated children could be executed was incorrect. The book states that the source of the allegation about the death penalty was the memoir of Alexander Orlov, a high ranking official of the political police. Police apparently used it as a threat when conducting interviews.
In any case, the reason for lowering the age of responsibility was that many children had been orphaned, abandoned or separated from home during Stalin’s collectivization campaigns and famines of 1932 and 1934 with the resultant epidemic of homeless children. Moscow was their favorite destination and many of them managed to ride the trains to the city. The result was the police, courts and children’s homes were overwhelmed when police made regular sweeps to round up homeless kids and put them in state run institutions ostensibly for adoption. The problem was that conditions in the homes were abysmal and at least half of the kids ran away.
In 1932 at a huge cost the Moscow police cleared the streets of over 15,000 homeless children between the ages of 12 and 17. And in 1933 a police dragnet scooped up nearly 28,000 kids.
These kids were homeless, had no money and were outcasts so they often resorted to crime to the point that in 1934 papers were reporting concerns about the soaring crime rates among this group.
Criminal youth gangs were terrorizing local markets and the public was blaming everybody in the government, the police, the courts and educators. Most of the arrests were made for theft and Soviet authorities singled out “socially dangerous” classes...the kids who came from rural, non-collective farms or city kids whose parents either didn’t work or were not professionals.
One result of repeated arrests was that these youths were simply being recycled through children’s homes where, as is frequently the case, they were educating each other in the fine art of everything from grab and run thefts to murder. At the time there were legal restrictions against prosecuting youth under 17 as adults and all the police could do was deposit them at one of the youth centers.
This lead to a series of changes in the law in 1935 that gave the NKVD sweeping powers to deal with homeless and criminal children. The changes involving lowering the age of responsibility was the result of an edict issued by Stalin himself. The edict sent all kids to regular courts, subjected them to adult punishment and, also, established criminal responsibility for adults who enticed children into crime.
Reducing the age of criminal accountability from 16 to 12 essentially brought the children’s homes under control of the NKVD and they established labor camps for juvenile criminals. In fact, being homeless was considered a crime in itself. Further reading...Angel Factories
Authorities were alarmed when they discovered that of the children in those labor camps, a little over half lived with both of their working parents and were not from the so called socially dangerous class. How to explain this?
Authorities linked youth crimes to anti-Soviet thinking and that had to be taken seriously. At one time the crime of “Hooliganism” involved insulting people and “rambunctious” behavior, but now it also included organized violence and assaults with weapons, murder, rape, banditry and counter-revolutionary activity.
