Iuliia Skubytska outlines the history of the Soviet summer camps Russia is employing in the mass deportation and re-education of Ukrainian children. Her overview shows how the complex legacy that Russia is exploiting encompasses infrastructure, ideology, and personal memory, and raises questions about the role of individuals in implementing state policy.
On 18 February 2025, Ukraine marked three years since the start of Russia’s mass deportations of Ukrainian children, a crime of genocide, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The date is significant, as it precedes the start of the full-scale invasion, reminding us that, prior to 24 February 2022, Russia had already been occupying Ukrainian territories for eight years. It also highlights the fact that Russia’s mass deportation of Ukrainian children has been an organised effort that involves multiple state actors and well thought out logistics. In accomplishing it, Russia has relied on a developed infrastructure that includes an extended network of summer camps and childcare facilities that Russia and Ukraine inherited from the USSR. For those unfamiliar with the way Soviet authorities understood the role of summer camps in children’s upbringing, this transformation of spaces normally associated with nature, innocence, and playfulness into a de facto prison system for minors can seem like a leap of imagination. Even for a scholar of Soviet childhood like myself, the replication of the Soviet agenda by Russian ideologues is surprising. Once again, the Russian leadership has not invented anything new. Instead, it is successfully extending Soviet repressive practices into the twenty-first century.
The USSR was not alone in using summer camps to educate children. For instance, in the late nineteenth-century US, the development of summer camps was driven by anxiety over the possibility that American boys would be emasculated by being brought up primarily by women. Concerned citizens believed that boys needed to spend more time outdoors under male guidance to fit current ideas of masculinity. This attitude changed over time, although it never disappeared completely.
From the very inception of the Soviet state, its authorities were also concerned about children, and even studied the American experience. There were, however, significant differences in the specific concerns each state sought to address and how they approached designing summer camps. Proponents of the American summer camp movement worried about middle-class children, and their early twentieth-century answer to the issue of ‘emasculation’ was a racist imitation of the ‘savage’ Native American way of life. The Soviets, on the other hand, were dealing with a major demographic crisis. After World War I, the Red Army continued waging war to reclaim the former territories of the collapsed Russian Empire, leaving millions of parents dead or unable to take care of their progeny. By the 1920s, the USSR, which positioned itself as a country that cared about workers’ welfare, could not find resources to take seven million children off the streets, where criminal activities and sex work were the prevalent means of survival. Soviet children were already, in a sense, running wild, while the authorities wanted discipline, control, safety, and better health for children. Summer camps were initially envisaged as comfortable places with exemplary modern facilities, although it took several decades before the USSR managed to achieve this goal.
In the 1920s, Soviet ideologues started to believe that children, who could conceivably be moulded into model Soviet citizens, needed to be under consistent state guidance. Given the high risk of children slipping into the world of petty and not-so-petty crime, authorities made them the most heavily disciplined category of people in the USSR. Summer camps were developed to ensure that when children were not at school, they were still under state supervision. According to Soviet authorities, if children were not working, they did not need to rest, so summer camps were educational, and not recreational, facilities. The camps were supposed to follow a centralised agenda aimed at turning children into good Soviet citizens. A typical day in a Soviet summer camp included three to five meals, a flag ceremony in the morning, work in various hobby groups, reading newspapers, political discussions or activities with counsellors, sports, evening concerts, dancing, music lessons, and sometimes military training. Until the late 1950s, children were also supposed to have several hours of free time every day. However, the state’s demands for what children had to learn at summer camp grew more intense over time, practically filling the entire day with prescribed activities.
The initial agenda for Soviet summer camps was conceived under Joseph Stalin’s rule, and its development can roughly be divided into three periods. Under Stalin, summer camps were rare and the approach to organising their daily operation was somewhat flexible. The state had not yet developed a funding scheme that would allow for the mass construction of these institutions. Moreover, the Soviet Union did not have enough educators to lead all the activities that summer camps were supposed to provide. Things changed when Nikita Khrushchev came to power. Under Khrushchev, state enterprises and other organisations (such as hospitals, schools, research institutions, etc.) became responsible for summer camps, which accelerated the growth of the camp network. Khrushchev also believed in introducing children, and especially adolescents, to manual and agricultural labour while they were still in school. So children at summer camps had to spend a certain number of hours working — primarily on collective farms. The final change to the summer camps’ agenda was introduced by Leonid Brezhnev, who prioritised military training for Soviet young people. Under his rule, summer camp activities had to include military exercises or paramilitary games like Zarnitsa (Russian for ‘heat lightning’), a Soviet analogue of the American Capture the Flag.
To a person who did not grow up in the Soviet system, these camps can look like disciplinary institutions far removed from what we usually understand under the term ‘recreation’. And, to be sure, children’s experiences at Soviet summer camps did include various types of disciplinary violence and bullying. Yet people who grew up in the USSR whom I interviewed often remember them as spaces where they connected with nature, made new friends, explored romantic relationships, and generally led a rather carefree life. Over the past three years of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, occupation authorities in Ukrainian territories held by the Russian military have exploited these positive memories to convince parents to send their children to summer camps further from the frontline, promising rest and protection from wartime conditions.
However, what Ukrainian children encounter in these Russian summer camps has nothing to do with safety. Children are sent to camps, often with dilapidated facilities, throughout the Russian Federation and parts of Ukraine currently occupied by Russia. Conservative estimates by the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health indicate that, as of 2023, forty-three summer camp facilities located around the Black Sea, Moscow, Kazan, and Ekaterinburg were hosting at least six thousand Ukrainian children. [1] These include children with parents, children in the custody of Ukrainian state institutions, orphaned children, and those whose custody could not be determined. Occupying authorities often exert pressure on parents to sign documents releasing their children to attend camp; in some cases, they even tell the children that they can forge their parents’ signatures. Once children are in the camps, they find out that personnel often impede their communication with relatives; returning home becomes a complicated and dangerous endeavour. Children who have returned to Ukraine recount their experiences at Russian summer camps as featuring forced labour, interrogations, beatings, incarcerations, poor food quality, lack of food, as well as various forms of emotional violence aimed at demoralising and ultimately erasing children’s Ukrainian identity.
On the foundation of the Soviet summer camps as educational institutions, Russia essentially created a robust incarceration system. The inmates of this system — Ukrainian children — are deprived of their rights and can thus be subjected to any form of violence, including their forced militarisation, which has received international attention. [2] In addition to the summer camps, young Ukrainians are also sent to specialised military facilities, where they are trained to become Russian soldiers, which includes the development of skills necessary for military service and intense indoctrination. Since Russia regularly coerces people from occupied Ukrainian territories into military service on its behalf, it is only a matter of time before young Ukrainians will be forced to fight against their fellow citizens. [3]
Ukrainian children’s stories about their time in Russian camps remind a historian of a dark page in Soviet history associated with another camp system, which never inspired romantic memories, the Gulag. Contrary to Russian claims, over more than three years of full-scale invasion, Russia has not been saving Ukrainian children. It has been penalising them for being Ukrainian through exposure to the full potential of Russia’s repressive power. What raises special concern in this respect is the complicity of Russian citizens in this process. My archival and oral history research on everyday life in Soviet summer camps shows that people remember them fondly — but not because the Soviet state prioritised children’s happiness and joy. Just like Russia, the USSR wanted to discipline, not entertain. What made the difference was that many Soviet adults working in the camps saw the Soviet system as too repressive towards children and resisted. Taking advantage of the geographic isolation of summer camps, they created their own version of children’s recreation. The Russian camps hosting abducted Ukrainian children, on the contrary, are staffed with people who willingly align with the state’s policy of institutionalised violence.
It is often believed that the treatment of children shows how humane a society is. Our knowledge of how Russia instrumentalises summer camps in the mass deportation and re-education of Ukrainian children suggests a grim assessment of Russian society today.
Endnotes
[1] According to a report on 28 April 2025 by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), this year Russia plans to send 53,000 children from occupied parts of Ukraine to summer camps in occupied Ukraine or the Russian Federation (the report features a map with the camps’ locations). See: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-occupation-update-april-28-2025
[2] The Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as well as a May 2025 article in The Globe and Mail, have documented the military training of Ukrainian children deported to Russia.
[3] Since 2014, Russia has been implementing cultural and educational programmes in the parts of Ukraine it has occupied to militarise the local youth population. See: https://cpd.gov.ua/en/report/analytical-report-militarization-of-ukrainian-children-in-temporarily-occupied-territories-of-ukraine/
Iuliia Skubytska specialises in public history, oral history, the history of childhood, and human rights. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr Skubytska has taught at Princeton University and Bard College. From 2020 to 2022, she also served as Director of the War Childhood Museum’s Ukrainian office. In 2025, Dr Skubytska is joining the research project ‘Nuclear Reaction on Khreshchatyk: Ukrainian Society and its Path from Perebudova to Decoloniality, 1986–1994’ at ZZF Potsdam. She is currently working on a book that explores the Soviet colonisation of Crimea and the role of the Artek summer camp in it.
Image: Stanislav Turina, Drawing (special for the London Ukrainian Review), 2025
