Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-12T22:23:35.377Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Utopian Visions of Family Life in the Stalin-Era Soviet Union

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2011

Lauren Kaminsky
Lauren Kaminsky
Affiliation:
New York University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Soviet socialism shared with its utopian socialist predecessors a critique of the conventional family and its household economy. Marx and Engels asserted that women's emancipation would follow the abolition of private property, allowing the family to be a union of individuals within which relations between the sexes would be “a purely private affair.” Building on this legacy, Lenin imagined a future when unpaid housework and child care would be replaced by communal dining rooms, nurseries, kindergartens, and other industries. The issue was so central to the revolutionary program that the Bolsheviks published decrees establishing civil marriage and divorce soon after the October Revolution, in December 1917. These first steps were intended to replace Russia's family laws with a new legal framework that would encourage more egalitarian sexual and social relations. A complete Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship was ratified by the Central Executive Committee a year later, in October 1918. The code established a radical new doctrine based on individual rights and gender equality, but it also preserved marriage registration, alimony, child support, and other transitional provisions thought to be unnecessary after the triumph of socialism. Soviet debates about the relative merits of unfettered sexuality and the protection of women and children thus resonated with long-standing tensions in the history of socialism.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 63 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 While Charles Fourier's rejection of the family as the basic unit of social life makes him the most prominent example, other French utopias imagined increasing women's social status by rescuing them from the patriarchal family. Manuel, Frank Edward and Manuel, Fritzie Prigohzy, French Utopias: An Anthology of Ideal Societies (New York: Free Press, 1966), 12–13Google Scholar.

2 Engels, Friedrich, “From Principles of Communism,” in Communist Morality, ed. Liubisheva, V. A., Lavrov, R., and Bychkova, N. V. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962), 23Google Scholar. For an analysis of the relationship between Marxism and the women's movement, see Stites, Richard, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 233–77Google Scholar.

3 Pervyi kodeks zakonov ob aktakh grazhdanskogo sostoianiia, brachnom, semeinom i opekunskom prave (Moscow, 1918)Google Scholar. For more on the development of the 1918 Family Code, see Goldman, Wendy Z., Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936, Cambridge Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 48–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Timasheff, Nicholas S., The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1946)Google Scholar. Igor Kon has argued that, “Repressive sexophobia was an integral part of maintaining totalitarian control over individuality.” Kon, Igor Semenovich, The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 1Google Scholar.

5 Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution, 100.

6 Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 6Google Scholar.

7 For a discussion of legal culture and the ways in which the Russian state's differential assignment of rights and duties “created conditions for including even lowly subjects in the basic practices of governance,” see Burbank, Jane, “An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 3 (2006): 400CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s,” Slavic Review 55, no. 1 (1996): 80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 The Family Code of 1918 defined “need” as not possessing the minimum necessary for subsistence and/or the inability to work, to be determined in court. “From the Code of Laws concerning the Civil Registration of Deaths, Births, and Marriages, of Oct. 17, 1918,” in Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia: The Family in the U.S.S.R., ed. Schlesinger, Rudolf (London: Routledge & Paul, 1949), 36Google Scholar.

10 Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution, 54–55.

11 The phrase “factual marriage” (fakticheskii brak) was used interchangeably with “unregistered marriage” to describe as marriages unions that were not registered. See, for example, Gosudarstvennyi arkiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF) f. 9492, o. 1, d. 404, l. 54.

12 Further analysis of the draft can be found in Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution, 214–53.

13 “Discussion of the Draft of the Code in the Second Session of the Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR,” October 25, 1925, through November 15, 1926, in Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia, ed. Schlesinger, 81–91.

14 Ibid., 98, 101–08, 13, 51.

15 Ibid., 88, 95–96.

16 Ibid., 99–100.

17 Iodkovskii, A. N. and Rodnianskii, A. K., Kodeks zakonov o brake, sem'e, i opeke (Moscow: Sovetskoe Zakonodatel'stvo, 1931)Google Scholar.

18 “Discussion of the Draft of the Code in the Second Session of the Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR,” October 25, 1925, through November 15, 1926, in Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia, ed. Schlesinger, 88, 95–96.

19 Wood, Elizabeth A., The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 51Google Scholar.

20 Solomon, Peter H., Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 153Google Scholar.

21 Sharlet, Robert, “Stalinism and Soviet Legal Culture,” in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. Tucker, Robert C. (New York: Norton, 1977), 155Google Scholar.

22 See, for example, GARF f. 3316, op. 40, d. 15, ll. 54, 105, 141; d. 18, ll. 120, 122, 123; op. 41, d. 40, l. 21; d. 41, l. 3. In the end, the article describing women's unique protection as women was retained in the final draft of the constitution. Unger, Aryeh L., Constitutional Development in the U.S.S.R.: A Guide to the Soviet Constitutions (London: Methuen, 1981), 155–56Google Scholar.

23 “Proekt postanovleniia TsIK i SNK Soiuza SSSR o zapreshchenii abortov, uvelichenii material'noi pomoshchi rozhenitsam, ustanovlenii gosudarstvennoi pomoshchi mnogosemeinym, rasshirenii seti rodil'nykh domov, detskikh iaslei, detskikh sadov, usilenii ugolovnogo nakazaniia za neplatezh alimentov i o nekotorykh izmeniiakh v zakonodatel'stve o razvodakh,” Pravda, May 26, 1936. See also Pravda, May 28, 1936, in Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia, ed. Schlesinger, 252–4. The “nationalization of women” idea was widespread enough to be reported as fact in the New York Times. See Simmons, R. E., “Bolshevism Bared,” New York Times, February 18, 1919Google Scholar.

24 Evans, Janet, “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Women's Question: The Case of the 1936 Decree ‘In Defense of Mother and Child,’” Journal of Contemporary History 16, no. 4 (1981): 263–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Hoffmann, David L., “Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 1 (2000): 45–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 “Decree on the Prohibition of Abortions, the Improvement of Material Aid to Women in Childbirth, the Establishment of State Assistance to Parents of Large Families, and the Extension of the Network of Lying in Homes, Crèches, and Kindergartens, the Tightening-up of Criminal Punishment for the Non-Payment of Alimony, and on Certain Modifications in Divorce Legislation, (Decision of the C.E.C. and the Council of People's Commissars of the U.S.S.R.),” in Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia, ed. Schlesinger, 271–78.

27 Section 8, “On Severer Penalties for the Non-Payment of Alimony and Alterations in the Legislation on Divorce,” Article 29. The following statute stipulates that “Payments to collective farm women should to be made in labor-days on the same basis.” Ibid., 278.

28 See Statute 31, ibid., 279.

29 GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, l. 54.

30 Grechukha, Maria, “Iuridicheskaia konsul'tatsiia (Alimenty)” [“Legal Consultation (Alimony)”], Rabotnitsa, June 1940Google Scholar.

31 Births, deaths, marriages, and divorces were registered in the official record at any organ of the Zapis' aktov grazhdanskogo sostoianiia (ZAGS). Ibid.

32 GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 399, l. 63.

33 See, for example, GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 399, l. 87 and l. 113.

34 Published regularly (monthly or bimonthly) after 1923, Rabotnitsa's circulation was quite large: from 165,000 subscribers in 1928, it reached 400,000 in 1941. Circulation rose again in the postwar era and peaked in the Brezhnev era, when it was counted in the millions. Since magazines could be passed between friends, family members, and coworkers, the actual number of people reading Rabotnitsa was probably even higher than these figures suggest, and the vast majority of those people were undoubtedly women. Attwood, Lynne, Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women's Magazines As Engineers of Female Identity, 1922–53, Studies in Russian and East European History and Society (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 12–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 26–30, 174.

35 GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, l. 5.

36 GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, l. 7.

37 GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, l. 8.

38 Ibid.

39 “NEP wives” were the women who benefited financially from their husbands' involvement in the New Economic Policy (NEP), a policy introduced by Lenin in 1921 to allow for some private businesses while the state controlled banking and major industries. As the gap between impoverished peasants and rich merchants grew, merchants' wives were maligned as bourgeois consumers of luxury goods who did not work. Naiman, Eric, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 181–207Google Scholar.

40 See, for example, Roberts, Mary Louise, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1960), 214–16Google Scholar.

42 GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, l. 142.

43 GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, ll. 132–133. The Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which constituted the largest and most populous republic of the Soviet Union.

44 GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, l. 141.

45 GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, ll. 132–133.

46 GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, l. 18.

47 GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, l. 18ob. Emphasis in original.

48 The phrase, “he who does not work, neither shall he eat,” appeared in Lenin's State and Revolution (chapter 5, part 3) and in the 1936 “Stalin” Constitution (chapter 1, article 12). Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, The State and Revolution, trans. Robert Service (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 85Google Scholar. Unger, Constitutional Development in the U.S.S.R., 141.

49 GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, ll. 9, 11.

50 GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, l. 135.

51 Merridale, Catherine, Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 263–98Google Scholar.

52 “Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. on increase of State aid to pregnant women, mothers with many children, and unmarried mothers; on strengthening measures for the protection of motherhood and childhood; on the establishment of the title ‘Heroine Mother’; and on the institution of the order ‘Motherhood Glory’ and the ‘Motherhood Medal,’” in Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia, ed. Schlesinger, 367.

53 The tax applied to childless men (ages twenty to fifty) and women (ages twenty to forty-five), as well as citizens with one or two children. Exempt from this new tax were service men, service officers, wives of service men, women receiving assistance or pensions from the state for the support of children, citizens whose children perished or disappeared on the fronts of the patriotic war, students of secondary or higher educational institutions (limited to men and women under twenty-five years of age), and invalids. According to the terminology used in the law, every unmarried man was legally childless, and an “unmarried” man was one who had never been married. Section IV, articles 16–18, and section V, article 19. Ibid., 372–3.

54 To encourage all women to have more than two children, government aid for mothers began with a one-time subsidy upon the birth of a third child, and monthly subsidies were provided for five years following the third child's second birthday. Nakachi, Mie, “N. S. Khrushchev and the 1944 Soviet Family Law: Politics, Reproduction, and Language,” East European Politics and Societies 20, no. 1 (2006): 46–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 The average number of divorces in Moscow just before the war was around 10–12,000 each year. During the war, the number of divorces dropped to just less than 4,000 per year in 1943 and 1944, but in 1945, after the new law went into effect, the number of divorces dropped to 679. Although the war certainly contributed to the plummeting divorce rate, the disconnect between the sharp drop in the number of divorces in the same year that evacuees and soldiers began to return home demonstrates the efficacy of the restrictions on divorce introduced in 1944. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 256–8Google Scholar.

56 See, for example, GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d.491, l.57.

57 See, for example, GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d.491, l.126.

58 Cohn interprets as related to family misconduct any case involving “unworthy conduct in everyday life” or a “violation of the law on marriage and the family.” Edward Cohn, “Disciplining the Party: The Expulsion and Censure of Communists in the Post-War Soviet Union, 1945–1961” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2007), 382–4, n. 34.

59 For examples of unregistered marriages cited as evidence in Komissiia partiinogo kontrol'ia (hereafter KPK) investigations, see Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkiv noveishei istorii (hereafter RGANI) f.6, op.6, d.1599, l. 41.

60 RGANI f.6, op.6, d.1599, ll. 7–8.

61 Ibid.

62 Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 4Google Scholar, 9.

63 “Casual connections” (sluchainye sviazi) was a dismissive euphemism used to describe unregistered, factual marriages. See, for example, GARF f. 9491, op. 1, d. 404, l. 142.

64 Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Agrarian Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 3Google Scholar.

65 Chadaga, Julia Bekman, “Light in Captivity: Spectacular Glass and Soviet Power in the 1920s and 1930s,” Slavic Review 66, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks!, 260.

67 See, for example, Davies, Sarah, Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934–1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Warner, Michael, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999), 82Google Scholar.

69 Field, Deborah A., “Irreconcilable Differences: Divorce and Conceptions of Private Life in the Khrushchev Era,” Russian Review 57 (1998): 601CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Gal, Susan and Kligman, Gail, Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5Google Scholar.

71 Harsch, Donna, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 2Google Scholar, 10–11.