ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 zooms further into the management of Soviet residential childcare, looking at living and working conditions in institutions, the role and behaviour of staff, as well as mechanisms of change within the system, how problems were solved, conditions improved, and mistakes corrected. Administrative correspondence and inspection reports give insight into the problems in residential childcare, how staff members and bureaucrats talked about them and dealt with them. This analysis shows that the Soviet administration ran residential childcare institutions at a low priority, just about keeping the institutions working and intervening only if it was in their direct interest to do so. It examines the conditions in which change was possible in Soviet residential childcare, which ranged from individual staff members’ dedication to unexpected interventions from above (often out of ulterior [political] motives). To explain this type of (mis)management, this chapter looks at Soviet residential childcare through the lens of Goffman’s concept of a tension between the inside and outside of total institutions.
