Students of Barnaul in the practice of charity work during the First World War

The article discusses the involvement of students of primary and secondary educational institutions of Barnaul in the practice of charity work during the First World War. Evaluation of the psychological mood of the people, the study of the socio-economic and cultural aspects of life of the population of provincial Russian cities during the war is impossible without an analysis of the degree of involvement of children and adolescents in the system of measures for the protection and defense of the country. Materials of the State Archive of Altai Krai and local periodicals shows that the city's public charity organizations involved students in different kinds of work to help victims of the hostilities (mug fees, tailoring and manufacture of clothes and gifts for soldiers, organization and holding of charity performances and parties, field work in the farms of the mobilized, etc.). For charitable associations it was one of the ways to get possession of additional human and financial resources. In the Siberian cities the number of persons engaged in charity had always been small, and in the war period, with more people in need, the personnel issue was exacerbated. Women's charitable organizations actively collaborated with students. Ladies' committees made the participation of children in social work permanent and broad, supported it organizationally and financially. Many educational institutions were a kind of branches of women's committees. A significant part of charity employees were teachers, so in their work they sought to combine philanthropic and educational goals. The involvement of the youth to help families of the mobilized, orphans, the disabled, refugees, prisoners of war through the educational system was part of the military-patriotic education, one of the forms of socialization of the younger generation. The local press reported extensively on these stories as evidence of the unity and cohesion of the Russian people to strengthen the fighting spirit of the people at the front. It was not a forced measure of general mobilization of the civilian population in the rear, as in the years of the Great Patriotic War when the practice of encouraging students to different types of work through the system of educational institutions was widely used at the state level. Thus, the period of the First World War demonstrated that in the early 20th century a new understanding of charity was formed in the Russian society which consisted in the realization of a person as part of the civil society, in personal responsibility for the future of their family, country, society. Charity assistance did not just mean parting with a certain amount of money, not particularly significant for a person, but providing possible support to those who needed it by every member of society.

Keywords

Authors

References