Among the horrors of the 20th century, few compare to the phenomenon of the "besprizornye," as the orphaned children and adolescents were called in post-revolutionary Russia after the First World War and the Civil War. In 1922, their numbers ranged from six to seven million. Dirty and dressed in rags, they wandered alone or in groups through cities and rural areas in search of food. They traveled across the country by clinging to train cars, finding shelter from the cold in station basements or inside garbage bins, driven by hunger to acts of aggression and violence.

In the 1930s, this topic was censored by the state, which could not allow the existence of homeless children in the "paradise" of Soviet society. In recent decades, homelessness has become a subject of historical research. However, only Luciano Mecacci, through direct testimonies and documents from that time—many of which were studied for the first time—managed to present a complete reconstruction of the fates of the main characters, whose life realities today sometimes seem fictional.

In 2022, the book was awarded the highest honor of the Florentine Literary Prize "Golden Florin" in the category of "Documentary Literature."

The translation of the book was supported by the European Secretariat for Scientific Publications (SEPS).