Handy: Wandering childhood in Soviet Russia. Mekachchi L.

Among the horrors of the twentieth century, little is compared with the phenomenon of homeless, as children and adolescents who were orphaned after the First World and Civil Wars were called in post -revolutionary Russia. In 1922 there were from six to seven million. Dirty, dressed in rags, they wandered alone or groups in cities and rural areas in search of food, moved around the country, clinging to train wagons, finding shelter from frost in the basements of stations or inside garbage tanks, hungry to acts of aggression and violence.

In the 1930s, this topic was censored by the state, which could not allow the existence of stray children in the "paradise" of Soviet society. In recent decades, homelessness has become the subject of historical research. But only Luchano Mekachchi succeeded, thanks to direct evidence and documents of that time, many of which were first studied, to submit a complete reconstruction of the fate of the main characters, the realities of which are sometimes like today. In 2022, the book was awarded the highest award of the Florentine Literary Prize "Golden Florin" in the nomination "Documentary Literature".