Comintern Children’s Town No. 1 was the primary inіstitution in Odesa meant to refashion errant youth shorn of parental care by war, revolution, and famine. Soviet authorities inherited a tsarist-era fear of moral contagion represented by the city’s street children and merged multiple orphanages into this single settlement to meet the pressing challenge. As a remedy to the perceived social ills that youth suffered, the administrators of the children’s town sought to inruct their wards in the value and practice of group labor and thereby ready them for their generation’s common task: the building of socialism. But the town was not simply an educational inіstitution. Its multi-positionality made a wider collectivist ambition possible. Although isolation, correction, and salvation were inherently bound up in the enterprise of the town, they could not be reduced to a singular punitive focus.