DEVIANT BEHAVIOR OF MINORS IN RUSSIA IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 19TH – EARLY 20TH CENTURIES IN THE COVERAGE OF POST-SOVIET HISTORIOGRAPHY

In: Vestnik Permskogo universiteta: Perm University herald. Serija Istorija = Series History, Heft 2, S. 123-132

Abstract

The article analyzes the results of post-Soviet Russian studies of such negative forms of juvenile deviance in Russia in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries as crime, suicide, prostitution, and alcoholism. Despite the growing interest in this topic during the period under review, it did not fully take shape as an independent academic problem. In post-Soviet historiography, the prevailing conclusion is that the level of criminalization of the representatives of the age group under consideration increased during the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries. Some authors associate this trend mainly with the effect of socio-economic factors (O.I. Pospelova, E.V. Mishina, etc.), while other researchers believe that such prerequisites for the deterioration of the criminal situation as the crisis of traditional values and social regulators, political instability, and Russia's participation in military conflicts were of no less importance (N.A. Zotkina, O.V. Harseeva, etc.). B.N. Mironov excludes the possibility of a negative impact of socio-economic processes on the criminal situation in the post-reform period. Some features of research positions are revealed in the explanation of the causes of the "epidemic of school suicides" at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The generally recognized prerequisites for this deviation can be considered the imperfection of the school education system, and problems in the family and in personal relationships with peers. S.A. Zavrazhin, M.V. Egorova and I.V. Sinova believe that one should also consider the disappointment in the results of the First Russian Revolution. A.B. Lyarsky names such factors of suicidal behavior as the peculiarities of the outlook of the Russian intelligentsia and participants in the revolutionary movement, protest, the "fashion" for suicide, the distance between representatives of different generations in a bourgeois family, and the age characteristics of schoolchildren. Modern researchers recognize the problem of child and adolescent prostitution in the pre-revolutionary period.