Still recovering
The history of 20th century Russia is one of social and political upheaval, and the family, being the “natural and fundamental group unit of society” (Article 16.3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), could not escape being profoundly affected.
Society’s development and its stability and prosperity depend, among other things, on the continuous growth or, at the very least, stability of population size. This piece of common knowledge is complemented by a vast body of research indicating that the stability and security of the natural family are vital to such development. The environment provided by the natural family plays a crucial role in the social well-being and productivity of younger generations. In other words, securing society’s prosperity requires not only reversing the current depopulation trend, but also ensuring that most children are being born and raised in intact, two-parent (mother-father) families.
This is especially important in Russia, where the birthrate continuously lags behind replacement levels. According to official Rosstat figures, natural population loss in 2010 amounted to 239,600 people. The aggregate birthrate in 2009 was 1.54, compared to the replacement level of 2.1, a figure even the most optimistic Rosstat forecasts say Russia will not be able to reach before 2030. Meanwhile, Russia leads the world in abortions, with abortion rates in 2010 reaching 1,186,100 per year. The institution of the family in Russia is, too, undergoing a crisis—in 2011, 51 marriages out of 100 ended in divorce.
Today’s Russia needs to develop and implement a comprehensive family policy that would strengthen marriage, fatherhood, motherhood, and with it family life and family values. This need makes it worthwhile to study the history of family policy in Russia, both to observe the roots of some of the current issues and to avoid serious mistakes in the future.
The Revolution and Its Consequences (1917 — 1921)
The first signs that industrialization in Russia and the processes related to it were beginning to drag the family into a systemic crisis began appearing as far back as the end of the nineteenth century. Cities and industrialized regions of the country saw birthrates decreasing, children increasingly born outside of marriage, marriages becoming less stable, and multigenerational families and family ties weakening.
Laying what later became the ideological groundwork for the post-1917 Communist authorities in Russia, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are widely known to have entertained largely negative views of the traditional family. According to Marx and Engels, under Communism the “bourgeois” family would have to “disappear,” just as “the capital” would. The practice of parents “exploiting” their children would be abolished, and family education would be replaced by public education.
These ideas were taken up and further radically developed into early post-revolutionary Russian ideology. The new authorities’ first steps were to “liberalize” family relationships—and thus simultaneously to undermine the influence of religious institutions such as the Russian Orthodox Church.
The year 1917 saw the Soviet government passing decrees “On Civil Marriage, Children, and Registries” and “On Dissolution of Marriages.” The decree “On Dissolution of Marriages” granted spouses unconditional freedom to a divorce, performed by a local court, at the desire of either one or both parties. “On Civil Marriage” decreed that all except civil marriage (including religious marriage) would cease to be recognized by the state, while at the same time abolishing all distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children. (It should be noted that the sole aim of introducing civil marriages was to undermine religion. Writing in 1922, one Soviet lawyer stressed that “[t]he institution of Registrars was necessitated by the fight against the Church.”
Affirming such moves, the 1918 Family Code introduced a whole new morality, contravening the existing practices of marital and family law. In its provisions for divorce, the new legislation granted spouses rights to separate property and thereby abolished shared, family property. The Code also included vague criteria for deprivation of parental rights. Article 153 stated that “[p]arental rights are exercised exclusively in the interests of the child, with courts invested with the right to deprive the parents thereof in case said rights are exercised improperly.” Article 183 prohibited adoption, replacing it with a system of state-appointed foster caretakers. The Soviets were also the first government to proclaim complete freedom of abortion.
All of these steps were in line with the new authorities’ ideology of considering the family the backbone of the oppression of women. Russian Communists thought the liberation of women required destroying family households and family education for public versions of both, while drawing women en masse into public production. Writing in 1919, Lenin argued that “true liberation of women, true Communism comes about only when and where the masses rise up . . . against . . . small-scale households.”
In his 1920 work The ABC of Communism, Nikolay Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, ideologues of the new order, wrote:
In a bourgeois society, a child is viewed as being exclusively, or at the very least, largely a property of his parents. When parents speak of a child as “their daughter, their son,” it implies not only their parenthood, but also the right to educate their own children. From a Socialist point of view, this right is entirely and completely unfounded. An individual does not belong to itself, but to society—humankind.This view is seconded by Lenin, writing in 1920: “We are serious in delivering on our manifesto commitment to transfer the economic and educational functions of the individual household to the society.”
The new ideologues explicitly stated the need to destroy the family. A. M. Kollontay, one of the Communist party’s most active family policy makers, formulated this need in no uncertain terms as far back as 1918: “The family is doomed. It will be destroyed.” N. Bukharin also wrote that “in a Communist society, when private property and oppression of women finally come to an end, so, too, will prostitution and marriage.”
As a natural consequence of the new authorities’ antifamily policy, a rapid disintegration of the family followed. Freedom of divorce led to serial polygamy and prostitution masquerading as marriage. In 1920 Petrograd (now St Petersburg), 41% of marriages lasted only three to six months, 22% less than two months, and 11% less than one month. Open prostitution was rampant.
The number of divorces skyrocketed. While in 1913 there were 0.15 divorces to 1,000 marriages for Russian couples, 1926-1927 saw 11 (almost 100 times more). In 1920 Petrograd 92 marriages out of 1,000 ended in divorce,9 and in 1926 Moscow it was 477 per 1000. The state widely advocated freedom of sexual relations.
One can say with certainty that the period dealt the natural family a devastating blow, one from which Russian family policy is still recovering.
See also:
- The “New Economic Policy” Period (1921 — 1929)
- The Stalin Period (1929 – mid-1950s)
- The “Full-fledged Socialism” Period (1950s – mid-1980s)
- The Perestroika and Post-USSR Period (late 1980s – 2010)
- The Modern Period (2010 – the present)
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