Soviet power was the first to recognize that taking care of the life and health of children is a state obligation. Only the October Revolution, liberating the worker from the yoke of capitalism, made it possible to realize this task, setting it on a strictly determined correct track, having torn it from the hands of private charity and philanthropy.

But the fulfillment of this task, a duty of the highest order, has been complicated to the extreme by the course of events over recent years. The difficult legacy of the tsarist-bourgeois order, the bloody imperialist slaughter-house which threw thousands, tens of thousands of orphans onto the street, having taken the country into a serious economic crisis, demanded of the proletariat a colossal exertion of all its strength and resources to achieve even simply satisfactory results in the matter of improving children's daily lives.

On the other hand, the bitter civil war and economic collapse constantly demanded that the Soviet Power dedicate all its attention, the maximum of its best forces and means to these fronts. And it is natural that under these circumstances [ . . . ] caring for children retreated to the third or even more distant planes. And the improvement of their situation, the creation of the kind of those conditions which the worker would have wanted to create, could not develop successfully, could not achieve even the essential minimum [ . . . ]