Soviet efforts to destroy the family 100 years ago

For the attention of our readers, we publish a text from the July 1926 issue of The Atlantic magazine by a Soviet Union resident about the then-regime's efforts to abolish marriage.

"Men began exchanging wives with the same fervor they showed when drinking the 40-proof vodka recently returned to the market."

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The question of abolishing the institution of marriage is currently being debated throughout Russia with an ardor and passion not heard since the rebellious early days of the revolution. Last October, a draft law was introduced in the Central Executive Committee (CEC) that would eliminate the distinction between registered and unregistered marriages and grant an unmarried but cohabiting woman the status of a legal wife and rights to property. However, the enormous unanticipated resistance to the proposed law led the CEC to postpone its final adoption to the next session, while merely encouraging a vigorous nationwide discussion of the project.

Since then, factories, offices, clubs, and various other Soviet organizations and institutions have passed resolutions for and against the draft law, and halls in cities, towns, and villages could no longer accommodate the crowds flocking to meetings. To understand the reasons for this heated debate and the passionate for and against, you must live in today's Russia and feel the atmosphere of suffering, disgust, uncertainty, and tragedy hanging over the Russian family.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they viewed the family, like every "bourgeois" institution, with fierce hatred and expressed their intention to destroy it. "To wipe away the dust accumulated over centuries from the family, we had to shake it well, and that is exactly what we did," declared Mrs. Smidovich, the communist leading this discussion and an active participant in it. Thus, one of the first decrees issued by the Soviet Russian government abolished the term "illegitimate child." This equalized the legal status of all children, regardless of whether they were born in or out of wedlock, and now the Soviet government boasts that Russia is the only country without illegitimate children. The child's father is compelled to contribute to the child's support, usually paying the mother a third of his salary in case of divorce, provided she has no other means of subsistence.

At the same time, a law was issued allowing divorce within just a few minutes, and either spouse could demand it. This law was followed by chaos. Men began exchanging wives with the same fervor they showed when drinking the 40-proof vodka recently returned to the market.

"Some men have twenty wives, living with one for a week, with another for a month," declared an indignant representative during the CEC session. "They have children with all those women, and those children are thrown out into the street for lack of financial support." (Today there are three hundred thousand homeless children in Russia who are literally thrown out into the street. These children are one of the greatest social threats of our time, as they become professional criminals. More than half of these children are drug addicts or sexual perverts. Many communists claim that the cause of such a large number of these children is the collapse of the family.)

Perhaps the peasants living in the countryside suffered the most from this sexual revolution. A real epidemic of marriages and divorces swept through the country's districts. Peasants who had been married for forty years suddenly decided to leave their wives and marry a second time. Young peasant men viewed marriage as an exciting game and changed wives with the changing seasons. It became common for a twenty-year-old youth to have been divorced three times, and a girl of the same age to have had three or four abortions. Peasants in Borisovo-Pokrovskoye bitterly complained: "Abortions are the shame of our villages. We had never even heard of them before." But women, to defend themselves, replied: "Easy for you to talk. If you tried carrying a baby yourselves, you would sing a different tune."

Once I discussed the issue of frequent divorces with the chairman of a Soviet village. "What makes women divorce?" I asked him. At that moment, a girl of about eighteen entered the room. "Here is one who divorced the other day," he laughed. "Go ahead and ask her." But when I turned around, the girl was gone; through the window I saw her running away from us as fast as she could. I ran after her and finally caught up with her in the fields near the village. When we sat down on a haystack, I asked the girl to talk to me openly – woman to woman.

Her eyes filled with tears as she told me that she still loved her nineteen-year-old husband, but he had forced her to ask for a divorce just two months after the marriage. He thought he loved another girl and threatened to kill his wife if she did not agree to leave him herself.

I remember another victim of the collapse of family ties – a tall, pale, quiet Cossack woman. Her husband filed for divorce after the birth of their first child. Then he married another woman, had a child with her, but left her and returned to the first, with whom he had another child. The deeply religious woman was tormented by the thought that her second child was illegitimate, despite the priest's assurance that because the Church does not recognize divorce, her union was lawful.

In the country's districts, there were several strange cases of abuse related to the variability of marriage norms. Many loose women decided that marriage and childbirth were profitable activities. They had relations with the sons of wealthy peasants and then blackmailed their fathers for child support. There were cases where peasants had to sell their last cow or horse to pay the demanded alimony. The law caused even more confusion because, due to the possibility of retroactive application, women could claim support even for a child born many years earlier.

Other peasants took advantage of the ease of divorce and married "summer brides." Since private employers are restricted by various rules and limitations in hiring workers in Russia, in some regions wealthier peasants would marry a strong girl for the harvest season and divorce her as soon as the field work was done.

The new sexual relations in the city also caused certain problems. In the winter of 1924-1925, several older communists accused the youth, especially students, of indulging too much in loose living and wasting their health and energy on casual affairs; they accused girl students of having abortions too frequently. "Be either students or mothers; you cannot be both under these conditions," one of the educators explained to modern Russian female students. The latter indignantly declared that love was perhaps the only cheap amusement left to them and demanded that they be given at least the same opportunities for free abortions as factory workers enjoyed. Moreover, they sharply retorted that not all old communists could serve as examples of pure living.

Some members of the Communist Youth League, an organization now numbering between one and a half and two million young people, believe that abstaining from temporary sexual relations is a bourgeois superstition and a mortal sin in the eyes of a communist. Some provincial branches of this league organized series of "Down with shame!" and "Down with virginity!" but these actions were soon severely condemned in official reports of the Communist Party and the Communist League as turbulent deviations from the norm.

Both in the countryside and in the cities, the very acute problem of unmarried mothers severely and mercilessly tests communist theories. In the early period of the revolution, communists held the theory that the state should raise and care for children. But it soon became clear that the state, especially a Russia exhausted and impoverished by wars, was financially incapable of taking on such a heavy burden of responsibility. The ten thousand abandoned children reported in just over half a year in thirty-two provinces of the Soviet Union well illustrate the danger posed by the growing number of vagrant homeless children, as their parents are unable or unwilling to care for the offspring of their temporary relationships.

The CEC session last autumn, during which the abolition of marriage as an institution was discussed, took place in the famous Tsar's throne hall in one of the Kremlin palaces. The gilded walls and ceilings remained unchanged, but instead of the throne stands a simple wooden structure used as a platform. Here, red-faced peasant women wearing red kerchiefs, workers in plain dark blouses but without ties or collars, commissars in high boots, democratically mingled together and argued with equal passion.

Mr. Kursky, the Commissar of Justice, a giant with huge yellow mustaches, introduced the draft law. He pointed out that while under the old law a wife had no rights if she was not officially married, the newly proposed law would grant her the same rights as a legal spouse in matters of property and other issues. Another point stated that both husband and wife would have equal rights to claim support from the spouse if they became unemployed or disabled. A woman would have the right to claim financial support for her child even if she had lived with several men at the time of conception, but contrary to custom, she or the court would choose which man would be considered responsible for support. Commissar Kursky seemed particularly proud of this point, as it differs immensely from the "bourgeois customs" prevalent in Europe and America. He claimed that in those countries, a man could bring a friend who, by declaring that he had also lived with the woman, would leave her with no way to defend herself. In the countryside, where even long-married couples live with their parents, if a woman demands alimony, under the proposed draft law the entire family will be responsible.

When Kursky finished his report and allowed people to discuss, such heated resistance arose that representatives from villages and factories spoke for several days and at one point, the list of those wishing to speak kept growing. The question that concerned everyone most was whether granting an unregistered wife full legal rights would prevent men from engaging in many hasty and temporary relationships, or whether such amendments would simply lead to polygamy and polyandry.

Commissar of Internal Affairs Beloborodov argued that the state cannot consider marriage exclusively a personal matter. In his view, stable marriages would better ensure the education of children. He claimed that the destruction of the family is the cause of the many children begging and committing crimes on the streets.

Another speaker objected to the proposed law, claiming that there would be women who would take advantage of the liberal provisions offered by this law and enter into relationships with wealthy men in order to then blackmail them for alimony. Krasikov, a high-ranking official in the Commissariat of Justice, argued that it would be extremely difficult to determine whether people truly lived in marriage, and concluded that a law prohibiting polygamy would be a dead letter. One of the debaters vividly described the issue: "You want to turn Russia into one huge marriage, where everyone is married to everyone."

A woman worker from Kostroma, with a scarf on her head, joined the general chorus of opponents. "In our factories," she said, "you can observe very unpleasant things. As long as a young man does not participate in public activities, he respects his wife. But as soon as he gets a little ahead, gets a little education, something seems to stand between them. He leaves his wife with a child, moves in with another woman, and condemns both of them to poverty and suffering. I ask the women workers to pass a law that would prevent such a practice of many husbands and many wives."

Mrs. Gypova, a peasant woman from Kursk province, insistently demanded that "men and women not be allowed to live like gypsies, constantly changing their partners. Children suffer too much because of this. Many men who lived peacefully with their wives for twenty years suddenly began to shout: 'Now we are free. Let us divorce.' If we do not set clear limits on frequent marriages and divorces, we will have to discuss this issue at every session and we will never get good results."

The opposition to the proposed law seemed to revolve around four points: 1) it would abolish marriage; 2) it would destroy the family; 3) it would legalize polygamy and polyandry; 4) it would ruin the peasants.

It soon became clear that the draft law could not be passed at the autumn session, so it was decided to postpone it to the next session. About two weeks later, a mass meeting was held in Moscow to discuss the proposal. Krilenko, the Soviet prosecutor, who contributed greatly to the drafting of the bill and is one of its most ardent defenders, argued that there is neither necessity nor importance in registering marriage, and that it is not even beneficial to do so. "Why should the state know who marries whom?" he exclaimed. "Of course, if people live together without registering to test what it means to be married, polygamy or polyandry may arise, but the state cannot prevent that. The main goal of a socialist state is free love; in such a state, marriage will not be restricted by any obligations, including economic ones, and it will become a completely free union of two people. In the meantime, although we strive for a free union, we must recognize that there are certain economic obligations in marriage, so the law undertakes to protect the weaker partner economically."

Leon Trotsky also declared his support for the proposed new law at a conference of medical workers working for the welfare of mothers. Trotsky emphasized that such a law would not only better protect women but also benefit the country's children.

On the other hand, Mr. Soltz, a well-known and authoritative communist legal expert and one of the sharpest opponents of the proposed law, held a completely different view on the possible consequences. According to him: "We are now imposing responsibility for the consequences of loose living on men who are guilty of it, but at the same time we know they are incapable of bearing such a burden of responsibility. Women do not receive even a hundredth part of the alimony awarded by the courts, because their spouses simply cannot pay it. The proposed law seems beneficial to women, but in reality it will be very detrimental to them, because men are already running away from their wives, and they are vainly chasing their husbands and their alimony. Women enter into temporary relationships because they hope the law will protect them. We must tell them that only registered marriages involve economic obligations, then they will be more cautious. You say we can put the alimony payer in prison, but then there will not be enough prisons for the guilty. Women will defend themselves much better if they know they cannot expect protection from the law."

Mrs. Smidovich expressed the opinion that the family is still necessary to fulfill functions such as raising children and other obligations that the state is not yet capable of assuming. She liked the law because she thought that a woman could best be defended legally by ensuring her rights as a wife, regardless of whether the marriage was contracted or not. "Most applauded Soltz," she added, "because they are pleased with the idea that obligations are only assumed in registered marriage, and at the same time one can maintain several other relationships without assuming any responsibility for them."

Mrs. Kollontai, the leading Russian feminist and the first woman ambassador (to Norway), made an interesting contribution to this discussion. She did not support the draft law because she did not think women would be able to obtain alimony, especially if a man had two families. She did not support registration and at the same time disagreed with free love. As a solution to the alarming problem of children, she proposed a "marriage insurance" scheme, under which an annual fee of one dollar would be collected from every adult Soviet citizen. This would create a fund of sixty million dollars a year, enough to provide for all infants born from free love unions. She also noted that although modern Russian youth are accused of loose living and amusements, it is forgotten that prostitution has significantly decreased. (Here it is very appropriate to recall the saying "amateurs spoil the profession.")

If opinions in the cities differ regarding the proposed law, then in the countryside, where 80% of all Russians live, the majority oppose it. Recently, the official Soviet newspaper Izvestia published a summary of peasants' opinions on this draft law. Perhaps the most widespread opinion was expressed by A. Platoy, a peasant representative from Vologda province.

He said: "Marriage among peasants has not yet become a toy, fashionable today but broken tomorrow or the next week. The new proposal to have many wives and husbands is considered illegal in the villages. Responsibility for the sins committed by one person should not be imposed on the entire family. Every divorce in the village causes discord in the family, mutual quarrels, lawsuits, revenge, murders, and ruin. One must not forget the hesitation of the rural population, because they feel that the new law will be a cause of polygamy, grief, demoralization, and the extinction of the nation."

The peasant meeting in the Tatar village of Tetushi was described as "noisy, even stormy." It began at two in the afternoon and lasted until the next morning. During the meeting, people unanimously voted for the registration of marriage. Although discussions are still ongoing throughout Russia, there is some doubt that the next CEC session, to be held in the summer, will be able to pass this draft law, albeit with some amendments.

Respecting the widespread public protests and resistance, the Commissariat of Justice agreed to these more important amendments to the law:

1. Unregistered marriages will acquire legal rights only in cases where the parties mutually recognize each other as husband and wife, when their life together and shared property are established in court or confirmed by third parties, or proven by documents and personal correspondence that they jointly maintained and raised children.

2. A husband or wife may request support from their partner only for a year if they are disabled, or for six months if they have become unemployed. (This change was introduced due to numerous suggestions that some Russians are so lazy that they would gladly marry working women and never look for work if they could demand financial support from their wives.) Preference will be given to registered marriages, because registration is considered complete proof of marriage.

3. For the support of a child of one of the family members, the entire peasant family will be responsible, but the amount given should not be so large as to ruin the family.

It is hardly only the technical details of the proposed new marriage law that could have caused such a passionate public discussion, but the public's attention was directed to the problem of gender relations. The ensuing discussion allowed long-suppressed feelings on this topic to burst forth.

The course of the discussion quite clearly showed two possible directions in modern Russia's approach to the problems of marriage, sex, and the family. First, undoubtedly, both communists and the public reacted disapprovingly to excessive promiscuity. Some communists particularly emphasized that a comrade who devotes too much time to love cannot properly fulfill his duties to the party and the proletariat. It is now common for communist writers to disparage excessive sex, portraying it as a symptom of bourgeois decadence. The public, especially the peasants, recognizes the difficulties, both material and otherwise, that have befallen them as a result of too literal an application of the slogan of "free love," so they long for more stable relationships at home.

Secondly, it is now clear that the widespread revolutionary ideas aimed at abolishing the family have failed to destroy the old passions of love and jealousy. Police reports are full of cases of murder, violence, and suicide, even very horrible ones, committed by women driven by jealousy. One of these cases will serve as an example. A peasant abandoned his wife in the village and took up with a woman worker in the city. The village wife kept coming and making scenes for the second wife, until the latter, irritated and losing self-control, poured gasoline over her rival, set her on fire, and burned her. Such elementary outbursts of jealousy are condemned by communists as remnants of bourgeois superstitions, but they still occur, and it is known that even communists' wives commit suicide because their husbands' attention was directed elsewhere.

Translated from Theatlantic.com