Soviet Ideology v. Reality
Some observations on the Bolsheviks' first four family law codes.
Prior to the Russian Revolution Lenin is said to have said that sexual intercourse between a random man and woman should be as natural as drinking a glass of water. His statement typified a libertine approach to family and sexuality. The original Bolshevik1 family law code codified this philosophy. Yet in 1939, scarcely a generation after the revolution, the journal of the Commissariat of Justice stated: “The state cannot exist without the family. Marriage is a positive value for the Socialist Soviet State only if the partners see in it a lifelong union. So-called free love is a bourgeois invention and has nothing in common with the principles of conduct of a Soviet citizen.”
This is an astonishing change! In 1918 the Bolsheviks embarked upon the most radical remaking of the family ever attempted in the West; by 1944 the traditional family was given as much state support in the Soviet Union than in any other country in the West. Why did Soviet family law moved from a libertine ideal to the promotion of the traditional family structure? The Soviets confronted reality and reality won.
The Law Code of 1918
In Tsarist Russia the Orthodox Church was closely allied with the ruling elite and it wielded a considerable amount of influence on society, specifically in the area of family law. As a result, marriage was by and large a religious event, and divorce was rare and difficult to obtain.
In contrast, the Bolshevik family law code of 1918 declared men and women legal equals and made civil marriage the only legitimate form of marriage, which removed marriage and divorce from the control of the Church. Under the new law, bride and groom performed the act of matrimony by a simple signature indicating that they freely chose the act; there was no attempt to solemnize the ceremony.
This law code also legalized abortion and made it widely available and it abolished all distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children. Moreover, marriages could be annulled at the wish of one or both parties and the law decriminalized bigamy, incest, and adultery.
The Soviets instituted this law code, like the ones that would follow, at a time of chaos. Russia had overthrown its government, been humiliated by its surrender to Germany and its accompanying loss of territory when it exited the First World War, and it was in the midst of a civil war. This would appear to be a poor time for change, but for the Bolsheviks it was the most opportune time for radical social engineering. Lenin believed that people would be more likely to accept fundamental changes during times of social upheaval, so it was the duty of the revolutionary to take advantage of such times and even create such moments if possible. And he, like other Marxists, believed that law was a powerful means of bringing about social change. As a result, immediately after taking power he worked aggressively to change and mold human behavior. This begs the question: what was the Bolsheviks’ end goal?
The Bolsheviks hoped to strip the nobles, the church, and patriarchal heads of family of their power and legitimacy and encourage people to instead find their identification in the collective. Beyond that, different groups of Bolsheviks had varying goals for the family.
Radicals wanted to immediately destroy the family as a ‘bourgeois institution.’ Their goal was to replace the family with the collectivized upbringing of children through state-run homes and boarding institutions. They believed that the family was too influential and would hamper societal transformation if allowed to continue, for the family creates “egoists”, not those who want to serve and advance the collective.
Incrementalists wanted to minimize the role of the family to the extent they believed was possible. Parents would continue to house their children, but the state would take over financial support and the moral and intellectual development of kids. Inspectors would regularly go to houses to determine which parents were fit to keep their kids.
A third group promoted the notion that the state should use children as revolutionary agents. The state would educate and train children in such a way that they would be equipped to return home to educate and train their parents in the principles of the revolution.
For various reasons (but mostly a lack of funds), none of these specific visions were advanced. However, the law code did weaken the traditional family structure, mostly as the result of unintended consequences. As women joined the work force in unprecedented numbers, many left their children to fend for themselves while they pursued their dreams. And as the state promised more support to families a very casual attitude toward marriage and parenthood developed among young urban men, leading to large numbers of deserted wives and even more unsupported kids. However, because they viewed adoption as a bourgeois institution, the Soviets outlawed it. This was a key contributor to the rapid growth of abandoned children.
Most abandoned children took to roaming the streets and begging, while others formed gangs. Leading Soviet Historian, Geoffrey Hosking, contends that this ongoing problem of abandoned children, and the corresponding desire to restore stability, was the impetus for the subsequent reforms to family law.
The Law Code of 1926
The Law Code of 1926 attempted to reintroduce some traditional family functions and responsibilities to combat the problem of abandoned children. At this time the state moved from its original ideal of complete socialization of the care of women, sick, children, and the elderly to a more traditional, family-centered system.
The most significant aspect of this law code was that it made divorced men financially responsible for children they fathered in marriage as well as for children they fathered out of wedlock.
Yet this law code was not a complete break with revolutionary ideas. For even though parents were once again responsible for the maintenance of their children, the state did not restore to them the right to educate or raise their children according to their values.
In a bit of a paradox, while individual responsibility for children increased, the Soviets continued to further the revolutionary goal of grounding family law in a libertine philosophy by increasing the availability of divorce. In this law code they introduced the so-called “postcard divorce” provision. One only needed to inform their spouse of their desire to divorce and a divorce would be granted. Many did this by sending a postcard, hence its name.
Publicly the Soviet leaders argued that law must reflect behavior and that the Law Code of 1926 did exactly that. Since people were divorcing and coupling in untraditional manners (creating new revolutionary forms of life, as they saw it) it followed that divorce should be made easier to obtain so that the people would be able to further redefine the family structure.
Yet statics tell a different story: the 1926 Law Code did not so much reflect society and its behavior as transform it. In Leningrad there were 265 divorces per 1,000 marriages in 1926 and 657 in 1927. In Moscow, the numbers jumped from 477 to 741. And these rates continued to climb. By 1929 almost four-fifths of all marriages in Moscow ended in divorce.
To be fair, radical economic changes may have also bolstered these numbers. This was the beginning of the period of forced industrialization and collectivization. During this period millions moved into cities and between 1928 and 1937 6.6 million women entered the labor force. Increased opportunity in the workforce made women less dependent on men and more likely to leave an unhappy marriage. Indeed, on some level, these two things worked hand-in-glove: women, freed from marriage were free to move to the city and work and thereby support industrialization.
While free movement and equality were said to empower women, they in fact hurt many. Many women left their provider to work on their own (or were left by their provider and forced to work on their own), but often there was not sufficient employment or wages to sustain them. Likewise, the state lacked the resources to protect them. This led many women to cohabitate with men out of economic necessity. But these men were free to leave. When they did, these women were left without any security. It was a desire to protect these vulnerable women that the Soviet’s recognized de facto marriages in the 1926 Law Code.
This led to further unintended consequences. Recognizing de facto marriages undermined civil marriages and put legally married women in a vulnerable position. If a single woman could seek support from a married man for a de facto marriage which produced children, the family which that man was already supporting was thereby endangered. The state could not provide childcare and many women could not earn enough to support themselves; as a result, married women were in desperate need of the entirety of their husband’s wages. If a husband coupled with another, his wife and their children suffered.
Ivan Stepanov, the editor of a major Soviet paper wrote: “We thought we could create institutions through which the development of harmonious, beautiful, and communist forms of marriage would be possible. But what has happened? Women remain chained to the ruined family hearth, and men, whistling gaily, walk out, leaving women with the children.” In other words, the law failed on both ends. Women were not liberated to work, yet men were freed of responsibility to their wives.
Women lost the protection that traditional divorce laws provided without obtaining the promised freedom of greater liberty and movement.
There was also much opposition among men to the provision allowing for the recognition of de facto marriages; to them it was an open invitation for women to trap and blackmail them into alimony.
At the second session of the Central Executive Committee, a peasant delegate presented two typical scenarios under the two new provisions of this law code that he thought were unavoidable and unacceptable:
“I divorce my wife. We have three children. My wife immediately appeals to the court and I am ordered to pay for the children. As there is a common household, the court decides that my entire household must contribute. Why should my brother be punished?
“Two brothers live together; one of them has six children, the other is a bachelor but has fathered a baby. For a year he has not paid for it; then the court orders him to pay 60 or 70 rubles and the entire household must be ruined.”
Meanwhile, many women blamed men for their promiscuity and failure to take responsibility. They argued that men were taking advantage of the law’s intended protections in order to abandon their wives. These women petitioned the state for a law code that would create greater stability.
The Law Code of 1936
The middle of the 1930’s marked a significant change in Soviet policy—it was the beginning of the infamous five-year plans that would come to radically transform the Soviet economy. Stalin was the driving force behind these plans. He believed the road to socialism would be found in state-controlled economic modernization rather than state-directed transformation of social attitudes and behavior.
As a result, Stalin made significant changes to the Soviet law code to support his goals of industrialization. The Law Code of 1936 was the first to completely abandon a family law code based on libertine ideals and to move toward a return to the traditional family structure as a means of bolstering social stability.
At the core of this law code was a decree outlawing abortion. The Soviet Central Executive Committee declared that any doctor performing an abortion would be imprisoned for two years and any woman receiving an abortion would be subject to a fine for a first offense, but liable for greater penalties if she repeated her crime.
Publicly it was said that the standard of living was so high and the joy of motherhood so great that abortion was no longer needed. The Soviet-run press joyously proclaimed that every woman could now realize her right to be a mother! But this begs the question: if abortion was no longer needed, why did the Soviets think it was necessary to criminalize it?
Because of their blind adherence to Marxist ideology, Soviet leaders thought that abortions would cease as material conditions improved and opportunity increased. But the opposite result occurred. It was well to do married women in the prime of their lives who were procuring the majority of abortions. Why were they getting abortions? They had new opportunities for education and work and they wanted to advance their material well-being.
Increased opportunities for women led many women to not only forego childbearing by means of abortion, but to divorce and abandon children they already had. Likewise, new employment opportunities and liberal divorce laws allowed men to leave their children to fend for themselves. To stem the growing tide of abandoned children, the Bolsheviks encouraged couples to stay together by limiting their access to divorce. They restricted divorce by making it more expensive—the first divorce cost 50 rubles, the second 150, and the third 300.
As for child support, a father would have to pay a third of his income if he had one child, half his income if he had two and sixty percent or more of his income if he had any additional children. Those unwilling or unable to pay were penalized with two years’ incarceration. Parents were also made liable for the actions of their children; if a child committed a crime they were to be removed to another location at their parents’ expense.
This emphasis on personal responsibility demonstrated a marked change in policy. The early family law codes proclaimed the superiority of the state’s ability to raise children. With this law code many efforts were made to encourage parents to keep their children from becoming wards of the state.
To some degree it appears as though this law did succeed in directing behavior to the desired end. For example, in Moscow in July after the June decree was issued the number of divorces dropped from 2,214 to 215. This change alone would not be sufficient to stabilize the family to the degree the Soviet leaders desired, but it was a significant step in that direction.
The Law Code of 1944
Faced with the demographic catastrophe of the Second World War,2 the Communist Party tried to replace the dead by promulgating the pronatalist Family Law Code of 1944. Publicly the Soviet government claimed that the purpose of this law code was to protect women. But documents from the once hidden Soviet archives reveal the true intent of this law: to increase the Soviet population in order to rebuild the military and further advance industrialization.
In World War II the Soviet Union experienced an unprecedented demographic crisis. It lost 27 million soldiers and civilians, and the sex ratio imbalance deteriorated enormously. The average ratio of men and women of reproductive age reached as low as 19:100 in some rural areas. Furthermore, a large percentage of the Soviet population was dislocated by repeated mass mobilizations, evacuations, deportations, and occupations. As a result, many families were broken up.
The Soviets believed they needed to act quickly to increase their population. But even a totalitarian state cannot be so crass as to say, “we need you to have kids to fight our wars and work in our factories.” They needed a popular reason to give to the public so that the public would accept the law and help bring about their desired ends. The justification they advanced was the protection of women.
Believing that those who desired divorce were “frivolous to the family”, the 1944 law code made divorce yet harder to obtain by increasing both the price of divorce and public shame. In order to divorce one had to first submit a petition to the court and pay 100 rubles. Next, they had to summon their spouse and witnesses to the court. Then the plaintiff had to publish an announcement of the divorce at their own expense. After that the parties were required to attend mediation. If this was unsuccessful the court would order further investigation to determine child placement. Finally, after a lengthy wait, they had to pay 300 to 1,000 rubles to register the divorce (these were prohibitive sums for most citizens), which the court could still reject. Consider: only twenty years earlier all one had to do was send a postcard!
This law code encouraged women to reproduce by penalizing “crimes against the dignity of mothers and children.” These were activities that caused moral or material difficulties and thereby discouraged women from child rearing: they included firing pregnant women or reducing their salaries and insulting or humiliating unmarried mothers. The law code also increased the punishments for abortion to the woman and doctor alike. Additionally, bachelors and infertile couples were penalized by means of taxes to encourage and subsidize those who had families.
One of the more interesting provisions of this law code was the use of symbols. The Soviets abolished de facto marriage as the legal equivalent of civil marriage. They also reintroduced ceremony, opening up the houses of the old nobility for weddings and allowed churches to preside over wedding ceremonies in an attempt to bolster the institution of marriage. Further, the state began to award medals to women, married or unmarried, who bore many children. Children were publicly instructed to obey their parents and allowed to inherit up to 10,000 rubles. All of this was done to create continuity over the years and provide family members with a vested interest in maintaining relationships with one another.
The most radical provision freed men from child support and promised all single mothers the aid of the state. Before 1944 no one was considered a single mother. Every mother could name the father of her child and make a claim on the dad for financial support. The prewar law required these fathers to pay child support. Men with prior obligations of support could not afford to have a big family with their new wives. Nor did men with large families wish to jeopardize their family’s well-being by having an affair that could produce a child able to reach marital property. Likewise, single or divorced women not receiving support from the fathers of their children were loath to have more children. In short, from all angles the prior law code had worked against population growth. What is more, despite the threat of incarceration, fathers often failed to provide child support. This in turn forced many women to enter the work force, further contributing to the ongoing problem of abandoned children.
The Soviets solution to this dilemma was to encourage procreation by giving single mothers state aid. With promised support, unwed women would no longer have to fear getting pregnant nor men fear getting another woman pregnant. In the eyes of the Soviet leaders this was the most direct way of increasing population.3
Ironically, despite being “pro-women”, women were the strongest opponents of the aspect of this law that aided single mothers. Their concern was that all too often men took advantage of the law’s provisions in their relations with women. A 1948 study revealed a disturbing pattern. Numerous male partners were abandoning women as soon as they impregnated them. This became a rallying point for women and organized them against the law.
One man caught in this campaign, nagged for leaving his responsibility, responded to the mother of his child:
“Have you not heard of the Law of July 8, 1944? According to Article 29 of KZOBS, since the child was born in a non-registered marriage, I owe nothing to you or your child. Extricate yourself as you wish. You are now an adult. No one asked to you to bear children. Our socialist fatherland will direct and raise the boy in the Communist spirit.”
This type of attitude by men prompted some women to petition the state to rethink the law. One such woman wrote to a local paper:
“As you know, it turns out that during the years of war our young people were a little spoilt, and they need to be tightened up. This regards men, who have no sympathy for women who give birth to children. A man lives with a woman, let’s say, three to four years. For personal reasons he does not or is not able to marry legally and cheats on her. Then after some time, without feeling responsibility for what he has done, he looks for another woman, who has not given birth to his children and lives contentedly. He says that the government will help, because the son or daughter is not his, does not carry his family name, and is illegitimate. What a pity to hear those words when men become imprudent and don’t want to recognize illegitimate children, taking shelter in the 1944 Law.”
The letter concluded by asking for the law to be amended and claimed that a change would benefit fertility.
Though it is beyond the scope of this post, it must be briefly noted that in due time the Soviets repealed this law code as well. This is not difficult to believe given the deep internal contradictions in the very core of the code. On the one hand there were restrictions on divorce to strengthen the traditional family; on the other hand, the state sanctioned and encouraged people to have children outside of wedlock.
Conclusions
Liberalized divorce, legalized abortion, and state aid to needy, unwed mothers—how truly radical were the measures in these reforms? Later Soviet scholars came to admit that these policies were no different than modern, western policies.
Given these parallels, what can we learn from Soviet experiments in family law?
First, we can recognize that “pro-women” laws such as the recognition of de facto marriages and state aid to single mothers had unintended effects that harmed women. Since we cannot foresee the effects laws will have, and since these effects will often contribute to the destabilization of society, we should be loath to move quickly in our legal reforms.4
What is more, we need to look past the stated justification of a law or measure and consider its effects to discover unstated goals. For example, many of our family laws, liberalized divorce law in particular, are justified on the basis that they help women. But are there other, less benevolent, motives for such laws?
Divorced women, as opposed to married women, are more likely to work outside the home.5 While women were entering the workforce in greater numbers even before the liberalization of divorce, no-fault divorce exacerbated that trend. This prompts one to ask: who benefits from women entering the work force in large numbers? Business. As the amount of available labor increases, the laws of supply and demand dictate that employers can (and will) pay their workers less. Furthermore, if a former husband and wife live in separate houses they need double of everything that it takes for a home to function. This creates a higher demand for goods. Business benefits on both ends: increased demand for goods and an increased supply of labor.
The Soviet experiments also demonstrate that it is not sufficient for the state to merely provide financial support to unwed mothers. The Soviet Union asked women to bear children while making it easier for men to leave. This led many women to protest against and reject laws that they perceived as fostering cruelty—men took what they wanted and then left without a hint of remorse because they knew the state would step in and help the women and children they left behind. The state did help these women economically, but that was all the aid the state could provide. The problem with this limitation is that people are more than economic machines.
People crave and need emotional connection and support: things no state can provide.
By reducing romantic and sexual relationships to dollars and cents (or in this case, rubles and kopeks) the Soviet state ultimately created a failed policy.
When men and women give and receive long-term, reliable emotional and economic support, they flourish, as do their children. This flourishing extends beyond their family and bolsters societal stability that contributes to lower rates of crime, increased productivity, better mental health, etc. Given these goods, governments should support institutions that fosters the long-term, dependable, mutual support of men and women and their children. We have one of those: it is called marriage. When marriage is undermined, chaos ensues. Everyone suffers, but women and children most acutely. Even the Soviets, in spite of their ridiculous and dehumanizing ideology, came to understand this.
It is a historical fact that societies that have had strong marriages and families have been more stable, prosperous, healthy, and happy.
Marriage entails a restriction of the sexual impulse, and many argue that it is unjust and unnatural to ask people to restrain their sexual impulses and desires. “Are not our sexual impulses natural? And is not what is natural good?” But the state asks people to restrain natural impulses in many other fields. For example, anger is a natural and often justified reaction to an insult. Yet we are told, under threat of punishment, to restrain our anger and to refrain from acting in certain ways (namely with physical violence). Why should the sexual impulse be treated differently from other natural impulses?
Furthermore, the argument against restricting sexual behavior is grounded in the assumption that acts follow feelings: people desire to engage in certain sexual behaviors, so they do. But the opposite assumption is also true: feelings follow actions. For example, Edmund Burke argued that people don’t engage in civic ceremonies because they are good citizens, but rather that engaging in civic ceremonies helps to create good citizens. In the same way, when people are encouraged to act in a sexually restricted way that promotes stability, their feelings move toward conforming to their behavior.6
The attitudes of Soviet citizens, as quoted in the anecdotes above, demonstrate that changes in behavior brought on by law are often accompanied by changes in attitude. When the divorce laws changed to make divorce accessible to more people, more people divorced. As more people divorced their attitudes towards family obligations changed as well. This evidence reveals the power of law to not only change behavior, but also to affect thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs.7
Finally, in considering how to structure family law, we must understand why the original radical reforms were abandoned for more traditional laws. The Bolsheviks came into power as an oppositional party. Their libertine philosophy of sexuality stood in stark contrast to the morality of the Orthodox Church. After the Bolsheviks had firmly grasped power, they no longer needed to distance themselves from the former regime. Instead, they had the difficult task of ruling a diverse, war torn, impoverished nation. If they could not keep a semblance of order, they would lose power. After gaining power, their policy changed from using the state to promote destabilizing ideas that would undermine the established authorities and thereby help them gain power, to manipulative references of their ideals to maintain their hold of power.
There comes a time in all organizations when the goal changes from using the organization to advance certain ideals to using ideals, now reduced to slogans, to perpetuate the organization. Many communist party leaders began as idealists,8 wanting to change the world, but they ended up working to maintain the status quo for their own sake. It is within this great pragmatic movement that the changes within Soviet family law may be best understood—the Soviets came to understand that they needed to provide a modicum of stability to maintain their position and that traditional expressions of the family provide stability.
We simply cannot have our pie and eat it too. A society cannot have the liberty of free love with the corresponding stability that strong families provide. The Soviets wanted to reject traditional morality and family structure and increase peace and prosperity. These goals are contradictory. When forced to choose between advancing their ideology or maintaining power, the Soviets recognized that their ideology created chaos and poverty and chose to largely abandon their ideology in order to protect their elite status.
The Soviets fought against reality, and reality won.
Throughout this post the terms the Bolsheviks and the Soviets will be used interchangeably.
Or “The Great Patriotic War” as Russians still call it.
Scholars like Martha Fineman believe this is a good model for contemporary societies. Fineman in her work, The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies, argues that the state should “give women privacy (without paternity), subsidy (without strings), and space to make mistakes.”
Why should we worry about the stability of society? History shows us that without stability there can be no liberty.
I am not against women working outside of the home; I am against unbiblical divorce and the people and forces that encourage it.
The reverse is also true: indulging in one’s sexual desires heightens and increases them. In the Gorgias Plato compares indulging in illicit passions to scratching an itchy bug-bit—it provides no relief, but rather increases the itch/desire. I recognize that sexual desire is far more complicated than I am treating it here, but this principle still holds. To recognize the validity of this principle, think about food. Consider how eating Cheetos and drinking a Pepsi every day for a month v. eating broccoli every day for a month would affect your cravings for food. . . .
It is also evidence for the argument that feelings follow acts.
And many were opportunists, but that is another story.