Orphans

This chapter explores orphans' stories, comparing the older cohort's recollections of kin care and child labor before collectivization with stories from the younger cohort of orphans, focusing on child labor, schooling, and widowed mothers who worked on the farm. It highlights how Soviet collectivization restructured childhood and family life. Although the Soviet state emphasized rearing orphaned children in children's homes as its solution to a pervasive social issue, oral histories highlight the significance of collective farms as the source of livelihood for orphans and widows, breaking enduring patterns of precarity. Indeed, life trajectories among orphaned respondents illustrate shifts in sources of social status: as collectivization brought agricultural innovation and government institutions to rural Uzbekistan, orphans tapped into success by becoming teachers and rising through the kolkhoz administration. On kolkhozes, the lives of orphans came to look like those of non-orphans.