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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
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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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