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Chapter III. Family relations in Russia: from premodern to modern

Let us now turn to the analysis of the evolution/revolution of the family and family relations in the period after the October Revolution of 1917. The sociocultural changes of the 20th century were distinguished by a total, universal character, extending to almost all spheres of human life, including the system of values, behavior patterns, adaptive strategies of the individual, family forms, models of family relations, gender roles of men and women.

The intensity of the dynamics of the socio-cultural environment exceeded its historical counterparts, requiring new adaptation strategies, turning norms, values, social positions, models of everyday existence into “museum exhibits”, meaningless in new segments of historical dynamics. To characterize Russia as a transitional society, the term "halbmoderne Gesellschaft" - a semi-modern society, by the well-known researcher of modern society W. Beck, is quite applicable.

In this regard, the characteristic given to the Russian society by A.S. Akhiezer. There are traditional societies that are trying to preserve the foundations of traditionalism, the belief in the ability to live according to mythological cycles, trying to combine them with attainable values. Russia could also be included among these countries, but with one important caveat. Russia has not developed effective institutions capable of ensuring conflict-free cooperation, a dialogue between the values of communities that have embarked on the path of traditional modernization and the values of an ideological society; there has not been a sufficiently developed ability to overcome the split that has historically developed in the country between archaic and achievement cultures.

In post-revolutionary, Soviet Russia/USSR, huge masses of people were affected by the process of mass marginalization, which consisted mainly in the loss of the past social status and the uncertainty of the current status, a more or less sharp break with the sociocultural tradition, which manifested itself, including in relation to the family, the content of gender roles. and models of human reproductive reproduction.

The social institution of the family in Russia in the post-revolutionary period has undergone significant changes. After the October Revolution of 1917, ideas of women's equality began to spread in Russia / USSR, which most clearly articulated the two "muses" of the Russian revolution - Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai. They spoke of marriage as a loving and comradely union of two equal members of communist society, free and equally independent.

Kollontai wrote that "the modern family has lost its traditional economic functions, which means that a woman is free to choose her own partners in love." In 1919, her work The New Morality and the Working Class, based on the writings of the German feminist Greta Meisel-Hess, was published. Kollontai argued that a woman should be emancipated not only economically, but also psychologically. The ideal of "great love" ("grand amour") is difficult to achieve, especially for men, because it conflicts with their life ambitions. To become worthy of the ideal, the individual must undergo a period of apprenticeship, in the form of "love games" or "erotic friendship", and master sexual relations free from both emotional attachment and the idea of the superiority of one person over another.

Kollontai believed that only free and, as a rule, numerous connections can give a woman the opportunity to preserve her individuality in a society dominated by men (a society of patriarchy). Any form of sexual relationship is acceptable, but "consecutive monogamy" is preferable, each time based on love or passion, a change of marriage partners, a serial relationship of men and women. family society patriarchal social

As People's Commissar for State Charity, she set up public kitchens as a way to "separate the kitchen from marriage." She also wanted to entrust the care of raising children to society. She predicted that in time the family would wither away, and women would learn to take care of all children indiscriminately as if they were their own.

Yes, and the leader of the RSDLP (b) and the Soviet state V.I. Lenin, although he did not share the theory and practice of free love, attached great importance to the socialization of the material side of life, the creation of public canteens, nurseries, kindergartens, which he called "examples of the shoots of communism." These are “those simple, everyday, nothing pompous, eloquent, solemn means that in fact are capable of freeing a woman, in fact capable of reducing and destroying her inequality with a man in her role in social production and social life.”

Although abortions were not officially legalized, in the first three years the Soviet government treated them quite tolerantly. Since this operation was often performed by unskilled people, in unsanitary conditions, which led to serious consequences and deaths, the decree of November 18, 1920 ordered abortions to be performed under strict medical supervision. Although abortion was labeled as a "relic of the past", women were not forbidden to take this step, provided that the operation was performed by doctors in a hospital setting. It was also the first law of its kind.

Speaking about the new legislation in the field of family and marriage, V.I. Lenin emphasized his focus on the liberation of women and children, on the protection of their rights: “... the laws (of Soviet Russia. - S.G.) do not consecrate the hypocrisy and disenfranchised position of a woman and her child, but openly and on behalf of the state authorities declare a systematic war against all hypocrisy and all lawlessness.

The discussion of the draft of a new code of laws on marriage and the family in the early 1920s was accompanied by calls for the abolition of any form of marriage registration, including secular state registration: “Destroying the superstition that a church wedding is necessary for the legality of marriage, there is no need to replace it with another superstition - investment of a free union of a woman and a man in the form of a registered marriage.

The second Soviet code of laws on marriage, family and guardianship was adopted in 1926. In general, the code continued the Western liberal tradition in the field of family and family relations, which developed in the first post-revolutionary years. For example, the registration of marriages became optional, since the code recognized as legitimate existing de facto marriages. At the same time, a marriage was recognized as actual, which met the following conditions: “The fact of cohabitation, the presence of a common household in this cohabitation and the identification of marital relations with third parties in personal correspondence and other documents, as well as, depending on the circumstances, mutual material support, joint upbringing children, etc."

It should be noted that in the first decade of Soviet power, a gender-oriented part of Newspeak entered our life and, accordingly, into the Russian language, concerning, first of all, the position of women and their participation in the construction of socialism/communism. This remark is important because changes in language are an indicator of changes in everyday life.

We know that the Marxist ideology does not contain any evidence in favor of the preservation of the family; rather, it leads to the opposite conclusion. In the early days of the revolution, it was widely believed that the family was nothing more than a "bourgeois relic" and that the process of its "elimination" was inevitable.

Thus, the prominent Russian-American sociologist P.A. Sorokin, in his article “On the Impact of the War,” published in the Economist magazine, No. 1, 1922, presented the following data on the state of the Petrograd family after the 1917 revolution: “92.2% of divorces now account for 10,000 marriages in Petrograd - a fantastic figure , and out of 100 divorced marriages, 51.1% were less than one year, 11% - less than one month, 22% - less than two months, 41% - less than 3-6 months and only 26% - more than 6 months. These figures indicate that modern legal marriage is a form that essentially hides extramarital sexual relations and enables lovers of "strawberries" to "legally" satisfy their appetites, which caused V.I. Lenin.

Then there was such a strong reaction that by means of legislation a much stronger coercion of citizens to fulfill their family responsibilities began to be implemented than was the case in most Western countries. It can be assumed that a certain complex of forces has emerged acting in this direction, which could coincide with the policy of the ruling elite.

The institution of the family, shaken in the 1920s, when there were still conscious Marxists in the USSR, and Marxism itself had not yet gone through a period of rebirth, on the wave of Stalinist Thermidor, already in the 1930s, not only completely restores, but even strengthens its positions. In the Soviet Union, not only did there not appear any significant tendency towards the withering away of the state, which should have happened according to Marxist theory, but the opposite trend towards its strengthening was manifested. Already in the 30s of the last century, the Soviet state managed to rise to the “foothills” of imperial organization and power, reaching these peaks after the end of World War II.

Not without reason, at all times, starting from Antiquity, stable family relations were considered a powerful political stabilizing factor. Monarchs and political dictators, trying to consolidate society under their leadership, appealed to family values, comparing the state with one big family, considering themselves as the “father of the nation” or “Big Brother”.

In the process of establishing the Stalinist dictatorship, political centralization and state orientation towards the accelerated construction of socialism intensified. The life of citizens of the Soviet Union, both men and women, was controlled by non-economic coercion to work, political repression, and the establishment of strict control over the sexual and reproductive behavior of the country's citizens. But the policy of state repression against the family has only limited effectiveness. Thus, the famous author of the dystopian novel "1984" J. Orwell defined the family as "the center of loyalty not to the party, but to each other." But this rule also contains a certain percentage of exceptions; Soviet people well remembered the choice of Pavel Morozov, who made a choice not in favor of the family, but in favor of the Soviet state.

The USSR, which was surrounded by a hostile capitalist environment, needed soldiers and free labor to carry out the “great construction projects of communism,” which involved the sublimation of human sexual energy (as you know, there is no sex in the USSR) and its use for the needs of the Soviet state. On the other hand, in her ideal state, a Soviet woman of childbearing age was seen both as a mother of many children and as an economically cheap labor force ready to work for an idea. The rights of women, as well as human rights in general, did not bother the Soviet leadership in the 1930s, and in 1930 the women's departments were closed in the country. I.V. Stalin announced the final resolution of the women's issue. “This culminated in 1936, when a new family code was adopted, prohibiting abortion ... the state began to fight to strengthen the family: “free love” was branded as anti-socialist.”

The Soviet government in the second half of the 1930s, both consciously and unconsciously, turned to Russian sociocultural traditions, moving away from the obsession with the idea of the practical implementation of the world revolution, the complete and widespread remaking of the world. Shoulder straps and officer ranks of the old Russian army were introduced into the army, red commanders were taught dances and rules of behavior in society, brass bands played in public gardens. It was a partial return to the past, to the old world that used cutlery and danced at balls. It turned out that it is not always necessary to remake the world and the life of a person in all its manifestations, often the old is better. It was, as historians say, a "conservative rollback", which meant, among other things, a transition to a conservative, protective policy towards the family.

Having briefly reviewed the evolution of the family, morals, and demographic characteristics in Soviet Russia, let us now summarize some of the results. As a result of the revolutionary transformations of the Soviet era, some of the problems facing Russia were solved, industrialization, urbanization were carried out, a transition was made from a patriarchal to an egalitarian family, including a demographic transition, incredible progress was made in ensuring universal literacy, medicine, and the social sphere in general. But the price of the revolutionary path for the country turned out to be incredibly high, the accomplishments are basically ambivalent, achieved on the basis of mobilization, overstrain of all the vital forces of society, which largely predetermined the civilizational demolition of the post-Soviet era.

Wedding rituals are one of the most stable components of traditional everyday culture. It incorporates fragments of different eras - from the beliefs and magical practices of the past to patterns of ceremonial behavior developed in modern times. The social essence of marriage is determined by the relations prevailing in society.

In the pre-revolutionary years, Russian family law was the object of serious criticism from society. Registration of acts of civil status was administered by religious institutions, and legal practice constantly revealed a discrepancy between the real state of affairs and the declared postulates. Church rules distinguished first, second and third marriages, marriages of persons of the same faith and mixed marriages. For a number of categories of the population, there was a church ban on registering marriage and on recognizing paternity or motherhood. The imperfection of the procedures for concluding and dissolving marriages led to the fact that by the beginning of the 20th century, about 1/6 of those born in Russia as a whole and more than 1/4 in the capital, St. Petersburg, were illegitimate. At the same time, such children and their mothers were affected in civil rights.

The actions of the new government to reform the family were dictated by the communist ideology, which declared the “bourgeois” family guilty of the moral and social pathology of the old society. One of the first Soviet laws were the decrees of December 18-20, 1917 on the dissolution of marriage and on civil marriage as an act establishing the civil and moral equality of spouses, on the equalization of the rights of illegitimate children with legitimate children, and also on the maintenance of books of acts of civil status ( work with registration books was entrusted exclusively to the Soviet authorities; pre-revolutionary marriage registration documents issued by the church were equated with documents issued by Soviet registry offices subordinate to the NKVD).

The new way of life made changes in the symbolism and rituals of marriage and family. They were based on the ideological guidelines of the ruling party, aimed at establishing the Soviet way of life, behavior and norms.

In contrast to the church wedding in the 1920s. began to practice the so-called. "red weddings" They were considered primarily not as a family event, but as a socio-political event, as an occasion for anti-religious agitation, and as a mass phenomenon lasted until the first half of the 30s. The first red wedding was the wedding of people's commissars Alexandra Kollontai and Pavel Dybenko (the marriage lasted from mid-March 1918 to 1923).

On November 19, 1926, the Code of the RSFSR on marriage, family and guardianship was adopted (entered into force on January 1, 1927). According to this code, church marriage became a “private matter of the spouses”, and the joint life of spouses without registration in the registry office was equated to a marriage officially registered by the state (an actual marriage was recognized as having legal force by a court decision). This was also declared by the laws of a number of union republics, except for the Azerbaijan, Tajik, Uzbek and Ukrainian SSRs.

There are no descriptions of the wedding ceremony in the fiction and cinema of the 20s, and this is no coincidence. The Soviet family was not a value in itself (some of the Bolsheviks advocated the elimination of the institution of the family as such), but was perceived as part of a team of like-minded people - builders of a new society, and the main responsibility for educating the younger generation was assigned by the state to preschool and school institutions designed to correct the “negative” impact of the family on the development of the child's personality.

However, by the 1930s, the Bolsheviks were forced to abandon radicalism in the topics of family and gender relations. It is important to note here that the difficulty of talking about the Soviet wedding ceremony is due to the basic phenomenon of Soviet culture - the impossibility of trusting the “official word”. The rhetoric of marriage and family that arose in the early years of Soviet power persisted in official culture until the mid-1950s, but the real state of affairs was not so revolutionary.

On March 20, 1933, in addition to the Code, an Instruction on the procedure for registering acts of civil status was adopted (the new version entered into force on August 29, 1937), and on June 27, 1936, a resolution of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR “On the prohibition of abortions, the increase in material assistance to women in childbirth, the establishment of state assistance to multifamilies, the expansion of the network of maternity hospitals, nurseries and kindergartens, increased criminal penalties for non-payment of alimony and some changes in divorce laws.” The legislation of 1936 essentially restored, albeit in new forms, the pre-revolutionary institution of the family. The ideology of the “proletarian marriage of love” failed. This was also shown by statistics: the percentage of registered unions between very young women and elderly, well-to-do men has steadily increased in the country; abortion and even advice to do it were severely punished (in the early 1920s, about 2 million abortions were carried out in the country annually). The Soviet government actively opposed only two traditional phenomena in a number of regions - polygamy and forced marriage.

The threat of a depopulation catastrophe, which became apparent during the Great Patriotic War, predetermined the adoption of laws aimed at strengthening marriage and family relations. So, on September 8, 1943, by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, it became possible to register adopted children as relatives while maintaining the secrecy of adoption (in the 1920s, “postscripts” in determining paternity and motherhood were condemned). And on July 8, 1944, the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR was adopted “On increasing state assistance to pregnant women, mothers with many children and single mothers, strengthening the protection of motherhood and childhood, establishing the honorary title “Mother Heroine”, establishing the Order of Mother’s Glory and a medal” Motherhood Medal. In accordance with this document, mandatory registration of marriage was approved. The expression "legal marriage" has again become common. All married couples who are in unregistered de facto marital relations were required to visit the registry offices for their official recognition. In the event of the death of one of the spouses or his disappearance at the front in wartime, the other spouse had the right to apply to the court for recognition of his spouse as a deceased or missing person. On March 14, 1945, a Decree was adopted establishing that parents who married after the birth of a child had the right to recognize him as legitimate. The divorce procedure became tougher (mandatory proceedings were introduced in the people's court). Marriage without registration in the registry office began to be officially called the word "cohabitation" (this term existed until the end of the 1990s - only in the last decade the expression "actual marriage" is used).

The mid-1950s were marked by two landmark events in the field of family and marriage.

Firstly, abortions were again legalized (by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Court of August 5, 1954, criminal and administrative prosecution of women was terminated, and by a decree of November 23, 1955, abortions performed at the request of a woman and exclusively in medical institutions were again allowed).

Secondly, in 1956, the registry offices were transferred from the subordination of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the jurisdiction of local Soviets of Deputies. Previously located in the police departments, the registry offices received separate premises and were staffed with a more qualified contingent of employees (most clerks had a complete secondary education; whereas before, the employees mostly had an elementary school or a seven-year school behind them).

In the registry offices of large cities, a special time was allocated for registering births and marriages: these acts were registered from 15 to 19 hours on all days of the week, except Wednesday, and other acts (death, divorces, corrections in documents, etc.) - from 10 am to 2 pm.

The solemnity of the registration of marriages was provided by the district Soviets of People's Deputies and their civil registry offices. In settlements where there were no registry offices, civil ceremonies were carried out by rural, settlement Soviets of People's Deputies. And in 1958, at the suggestion of the Komsomol members of the Leningrad Production Association "Svetlana" and with the support of the Leningrad City Party Committee, the first wedding palace in the USSR was created.

As for Moscow, traveling marriage registrations began to be practiced here: in 1959, a massive one-time registration of marriages (80 couples) was carried out in the Gorbunov House of Culture.

On December 15, 1960, by decision of the executive committee of the Moscow City Council, the Wedding Palace No. 1 (Griboedovsky) was opened in the capital, in which it became possible to register marriages with foreigners.

The general methodological guidance of the civil registry offices in 1956-1971 was carried out by special legal commissions.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, changes were again made to the marriage registration procedure aimed at “introducing new civil rites into the life of Soviet people” (the so-called resolution of the Council of Ministers, issued on February 18, 1964, on the basis of which large-scale work began to be carried out on the creation of a system of rituals accompanying acts of civil status). A certain period of waiting for the registration of marriage was set (one month from the date of filing the application), the institute of certificate was introduced (the presence of witnesses from both newlyweds became mandatory). To help organize wedding celebrations, bridal salons were created. At the place of work, the newlyweds were given 2-3 days off - “for the wedding”.

Gone are the years when those entering into marriage celebrated their wedding only in a modest family setting - now the company "Spring", Yuvelirtorg, Tsvettorg, the department of road transport, photo factories, etc. worked for them. The wedding ceremony has become an industry.

Weddings, as a rule, began to be played with the invitation of a large number of people. At the same time, rituals that imitate age-old folk traditions have become widespread. These included, in particular, a parental blessing, decoration of the wedding procession (the car was decorated with ribbons, toy bears were put on the bumper, and later - dolls in the costumes of the bride and groom), Komsomol parting words, as well as semi-legal fortune-telling for a happy life (which became popular at the turn of the 1970s-80s astrological forecasts).

In the 1960s-80s, a number of obligatory ritual elements were introduced into the wedding procedure: a trip to “places of memory” (visiting the monument to the leader of the world proletariat V.I. Lenin, a monument or mass grave of fallen soldiers and laying flowers), a symbolic farewell to the young ( reading the “Vow of fidelity”, giving the “key” to family happiness, “Chronicles of the family”, the medal “Advice and love”), planting a “family tree” or participating in the creation of the “newlyweds alley” ... Honeymoon trip to the capital, in hero cities, in their native country (the ticket was received in bridal salons or in public organizations of institutions at the place of work or study). The printing industry produced millions of copies of the “Wedding Invitation” postcards (traditional design - flowers and two connected rings) ...

In the 80s, folk elements began to be introduced into the marriage ceremony: for example, at the meeting of the bride and groom, laudatory songs were sung, bread and salt was presented on an embroidered towel. In those same years, great attention was paid to silver and gold weddings, marriage anniversaries.

In addition, during wedding celebrations, relevant socially significant events and campaigns were often taken into account. For example, during the active struggle against drunkenness and alcoholism, weddings were held that excluded the use of alcoholic beverages.

In 1968, the Fundamentals of the Legislation of the USSR and the Union Republics on Marriage and Family were adopted, on the basis of which Codes on Marriage and Family (KOBIS) were developed in the republics.

In 1977, family norms were first included in the Constitution of the USSR: “Article 53. The family is under the protection of the state. Marriage is based on the voluntary consent of a woman and a man; spouses are completely equal in family relations. The state takes care of the family by creating and developing a wide network of children's institutions, organizing and improving the service of everyday life and public catering, paying benefits on the occasion of the birth of a child, providing benefits and benefits to large families, as well as other types of benefits and assistance to the family”, “Article 66 Citizens of the USSR are obliged to take care of the upbringing of children, to prepare them for socially useful work, to raise them as worthy members of socialist society. Children are obliged to take care of their parents and provide them with assistance” (Chapter 7 “Basic Rights, Freedoms and Duties of Citizens of the USSR”).

In the second half of the 1980s, the Soviet marriage ceremonial, like society as a whole, was undergoing a crisis: the years of perestroika were marked, on the one hand, by a rise in the popularity of church rites of legitimizing marriage, and on the other hand, by an increase in the percentage of refusals from state registration of marriage relations.

Armand I.F. Communist morality and family relations. - L., 1926.

The evolution of the family and family policy in the USSR / Ed. ed. A.G. Vishnevsky. – M.: Nauka, 1992.

Family ties: models for assembly / Comp. and ed. S. Ushakin. - M .: UFO, 2004. - In 2 books.

Tatiana Vorontsova

Part 1. Soviet marriage from 1917 to the early 1950s

Despite external intimacy, the form of the wedding ceremony is almost always determined by the authorities. In imperial Russia, there was only a church marriage, which was concluded with the blessing of the church, and the wedding was carried out according to strict religious rites. Only this marriage then had genuine legal force, and the registration of acts of civil status was assigned exclusively to religious institutions. The paraphernalia of this significant "action" included a wedding in the temple, which meant the presence of wedding rings, a white wedding dress of the bride and a veil, as well as a magnificent festive feast.
Since 1917, the new communist government abandoned the sophisticated aesthetics of the Russian wedding, putting an end to its pomp and splendor. The official marriage ceremony was now characterized by revolutionary simplicity, restraint and extreme asceticism: no ring, no white wedding dress, no subsequent festive feast.
In the new Soviet state, the symbols of weddings were now defined by codes of marriage and family. The first such document appeared already in 1918. Thus, the long overdue social need for the introduction of civil marriage was realized. This form of marriage provided a certain freedom of private life and contributed to the destruction of the obsolete, feudal features of the Russian family.

In Soviet Russia, registry offices began to operate under local governments, while they were also subordinate to the NKVD.
The rules of the secular wedding ceremony were greatly simplified. The code only stated that the marriage should be publicly held in a certain room. In this case, the future spouses must have a preliminary application and proof of their identity.
Already after the transition to the NEP, the question arose again - in what form and with what rules should marriage be concluded in a society of builders of communism. Although, at the same time, the new government could not offer a clear and digestible judgment about the form of the marriage ritual. One part of the Bolshevik elite was skeptical about the institution of marriage. “Does a free Soviet person need him now?” The other, with particular frenzy and fanaticism, fought with church wedding rites and rituals.
As early as the beginning of the century, Trotsky wrote to Lenin that he considered the family to be a completely outdated bourgeois institution. And that this must be explained to the workers. Lenin agrees with him: “... And not only the family. All prohibitions regarding sexuality must be lifted... We have much to learn from suffragettes: even the ban on same-sex love must be lifted.” Perhaps due to such bold and super-liberal views of the Bolsheviks in power, in 1918 the Soviet state passed a law abolishing the punishment for homosexuality.

In December 1917, the decrees "On the abolition of marriage" and "On the dissolution of marriage", as well as the decree "On civil marriage" were issued. According to the new laws, only civil marriage was recognized, and church marriage, "along with the obligatory civil one, is a private affair of the spouses." Marriage, according to the new law, becomes an act that established the civil and moral rights of spouses, and illegitimate children were now equal in their rights with legitimate children. The maintenance of civil registration books was now entrusted to the official state bodies of the country, and marriage documents issued in the pre-revolutionary period by religious institutions were now equated with documents issued by Soviet registry offices.
One of the most prominent figures opposing the institution of marriage during the NEP was Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai. She was the leader of the women's movement, one of the developers of the Marriage Code, and also the first woman - people's commissar (minister) and diplomat in Soviet Russia. During the NEP period, Kollontai was the head of the women's department of the Central Committee of the RCP (b). This department fought to raise the status of women in the new society and to equalize her rights with men. In addition, the Zhenotdel was actively working to eliminate illiteracy among women, which at that time was simply catastrophic, and was also engaged in informing about new working conditions and family organization.
By the way, few people know, but, in the very first post-revolutionary months, the Decrees adopted by the new government contained items that related to women's rights. Firstly, the night work of women was prohibited, secondly, since November 1917, women were entitled to benefits for pregnancy and childbirth, thirdly, equal pay was established for both men and women, and fourthly, in the Decree on Civil marriage equalized women's rights in the family and marriage.

In the first half of the 20s of the twentieth century, their own communist rituals appeared - “red christenings”, “Octobers” and “red weddings”. Such ceremonies were perceived by the Soviet people not as family celebrations, but as significant social and political events. Such a mass phenomenon as "red weddings" lasted almost until the mid-30s. The first "red wedding" can be called the wedding of People's Commissars Kollontai and Dybenko (the famous leader of the Baltic "brothers"), which took place in March 1918. The bride was 17 years older than the groom. By the time of the wedding, Alexandra was 46, and the blue-eyed handsome Pavel was 29. Their passionate, fiery revolutionary marriage lasted until 1923.
By the mid-1920s, registry offices were no longer subordinate to the NKVD and completely transferred to the jurisdiction of local councils. But the adoption in 1926 of a new marriage and family code, which equated unregistered marriages with registered ones, nullified the significance of the wedding ceremony. The actual marriage could now be legally enforceable by a court decision at any time. Thus, power was completely removed from its regulation.
The legal registration of marriage and the form of the ceremony (ecclesiastical or civil) now became a private matter for those entering into marriage. At the turn of the 20-30s. the tradition of wearing wedding rings, which originated in ancient times, began to die off. Now they were not worn not only by newlyweds, but also by spouses with experience. The reason for this was, first of all, the ideological power installation - the denial of the previous church wedding ceremony, as a relic of the past. As well as material difficulties, which often force them to give family heirlooms dear to their hearts to the Torgsin system. In the early 1930s, in connection with the general passportization of the population and the introduction of mandatory registration of passports, the registry offices were again reassigned to the NKVD. This was done in order to be able to take into account the demographic changes in the country.
The registry offices of the NKVD now began to be located in the buildings of local police departments. This, of course, did not give the ceremony of marriage additional solemnity, except for the stamp in the passport. The only entourage is a table covered with a red tablecloth, on the wall is a portrait of Lenin and a strict clerk. And as a musical accompaniment - a hymn ... So the wedding became the most common event in the life of a Soviet person.

An interesting description of the Soviet wedding is given by a foreign citizen (notary) Luis Hoyos Cascon in his book "Moscow Meridian". He was "fortunate" to attend the wedding of engineers in August 1932 as a witness. The groom "had a three-day stubble, he stood in a shirt with rolled up sleeves and no socks." The bride "also had no stockings, and her head was uncovered." They only presented their union cards to the registry office employee, she “registered their marriage without any solemnity”, and a minute later they left the premises. That's the whole ceremony.... That is, the wedding, in his opinion, has turned into the most boring and mundane procedure, it’s like stopping and “drinking an aperitif in order to then go your own way.”
In the 1920s and 1930s, in Soviet society, the family lost its former status, and the words “family hearth”, “family way of life” began to be perceived by society as a kind of archaism, the “bourgeois” family with its selfish, ossified individualism was declared guilty of moral and social pathology of obsolete pre-revolutionary society. The family was now perceived as a "cell of society", as part of a large and friendly team of like-minded people - happy builders of a new communist society. The main responsibility for the upbringing of children was now assigned to state preschool and school institutions. They were supposed to correct the "negative" influence of the family on the formation of the child's personality.

By the end of the 1930s, the norms of family life were officially proclaimed in the USSR, including an orientation towards monogamous marriage. Despite changes in the form of the marriage ritual, the essence of family values and norms of family life in Soviet society remained the same. They almost completely coincided with the traditional, religious-patriarchal ones. And in 1944, the government draws up a Decree, which again returns the official marriage to its former status. Now only a registered marriage will be recognized as legally valid. The impetus for this was the reconciliation during the war between the state and the Orthodox Church. This gave rise to the hope among the people for a more loyal attitude towards church wedding marriage, or at least towards traditional marriage rituals.

In the period of late Stalinism, wedding celebrations are already beginning to be welcomed. This is evidenced by such films as "The Pig and the Shepherd", "Wedding with a Dowry", "Kuban Cossacks". In "A Wedding with a Dowry", which was released in 1953, the love of the foremen of two competing collective farms, Olga and Maxim, was shown. The apotheosis of the relationship between young people (who were brilliantly played by Vera Vasilyeva and Vladimir Ushakov) was the traditional autumn big wedding, at which the bride appears in a white dress and a white silk scarf carelessly thrown over her head, resembling a veil.
But in the Stalin era, the authorities adhered to very strict rules for regulating the procedure for concluding a marriage. So, in 1947 it was officially forbidden to marry Soviet and foreign citizens. The wedding ceremony itself, with its traditional dresses of the bride and groom, bouquets of flowers, exchange of rings, feast and dances of the young, was not legally fixed, remaining as before only a private act. The ritual was carried out only at the request of those entering into marriage.
Perhaps that is why many wonderful traditions and rituals of the Russian wedding in our time have been irretrievably lost. But in the old days, these rituals were given great importance. They were considered the most important on the way of young people to marriage. And if, for any reason, the wedding ceremony was violated, or not performed as expected, then this marriage was already considered untenable, that is, not completely perfect.

Friends, but there is a very interesting topic - family and marriage in and now - so to speak, to compare when it was better. From the fans of the USSR I constantly hear exclamations - they say, how well people lived then, they didn’t even close the doors to the apartment, and the family was the concentration of Soviet spirituality in general! Not like the current generation!

In fact, in the USSR there were marriages of convenience, and a ban on marriages with foreigners, and the collective could interfere in your family affairs - so everything was far from being as rosy as it might seem.

1. Weddings were banned in the USSR.

Almost immediately after coming to power, the Bolsheviks banned weddings, replacing it with civil registration of marriage - this practice continued until the last years of Perestroika (1988-90), and somewhere until the very end of the USSR. In principle, I personally take this calmly, but something else is more interesting here - the cancellation of the wedding for yesterday's illiterate workers and peasants destroyed the "sacrament of marriage", which was reduced to a simple signature in the registry office. As a result, in the 1920s and 30s, 8 out of 10 (according to other sources - 9 out of 10) marriages concluded in this way broke up. In the USSR, marriage ceased to be an important and responsible decision.

Now, in my opinion, this is still better, and the divorce rate is lower than in the early USSR.

2. Abortions were banned in the USSR.

Such a ban has existed since 1936, when the so-called "Third Family Code" was adopted. It was officially proclaimed - "we need new people", but no one thought about the rights of "equal" women. Of course, all this only led to the fact that abortions went underground and began to be done in all sorts of "safe houses" - because of which the level of female mortality from this procedure has sharply increased.

After looking at all this, the Soviet authorities decided to allow abortions, but they immediately classified the statistics. Statistics on abortions in the USSR surfaced only during Perestroika, and as it turned out, the peak of abortions occurred in 1964, when more than 5.5 million abortions were performed. Why were there so many? Including because there was no normal contraception in the Soviet family, but more on that below.

Now abortions are allowed in Russia, and in Belarus, and in Ukraine, and I ask all supporters of prohibitive measures to look at the Soviet experience - this will not lead to anything good.

3. There was a ban on marriage with foreigners.

The ban on marriage with foreigners appeared in the USSR on February 15, 1947. As usual in any dictatorial decrees, it was explained by "concern for the people", the decree stated in plain text - "our women who married foreigners and ended up abroad feel bad in unusual conditions and are discriminated against." As if women can't decide without the old deer from the Politburo what is good for them and what is bad)

Under Khrushchev, for an affair with a foreigner, they were expelled from work, and they could also be sent to remote areas (beyond the 101st kilometer), as a parasite or a recidivist criminal. Such repressions began to become a thing of the past from the beginning of the 1970s (already under Brezhnev), but in reality, even in those years, such marriages were not welcomed, and the state put up all sorts of obstacles so that such marriages would not take place.

Nowadays, people have the freedom to marry whoever they want.

4. "Marriages of convenience" were widespread in the USSR.

Fans of the USSR will argue with this, but there were much more marriages of convenience in the USSR than now. The reason here is banal and obvious - in the USSR, people were placed in extremely cramped living conditions and had an extremely small range of opportunities to somehow fulfill themselves. It was much easier for a married couple to get "free" housing, it was also easier for two to survive on a small salary, and it was much easier for a family man to advance in the service.

In addition, bachelors and single women in the USSR were often "looked askance" - they say, they are obviously engaged in some kind of anti-state affairs, and often people signed with an unloved person, just to "be like everyone else" - alternative behavior and lifestyle in the USSR were not welcome.

Today, people can live as they wish, civil and guest marriages are common, and the actual "painting of convenience" has become much less - this is no longer necessary.

5. In a Soviet family, the wife could not help but work.

The profession "housewife" did not exist in the Soviet Union. It was officially considered that such a profession allegedly "humiliates" a woman, and therefore she was equated with parasitism. At the same time, of course, no one asked the opinion of the woman herself. It often turned out that a woman with a Soviet family was forced to work somewhere, and then also to run a household - she could not go to work.

Now the right not to work is officially enshrined in the Constitution - and a woman can take care of family affairs without officially working anywhere at all.

6. There were no normal contraceptives in the USSR.

And as a result, many unwanted and often unloved children were born. Why did this happen? Pharmacological contraception in the USSR either did not exist at all, or (in the late Soviet years) it was harmful / difficult to obtain. Plus, in rural areas, no one thought, and often did not know about such things.

A more or less reliable means of protection was the Soviet condom, called "product number two." There are two versions of where such a name came from - one says that in some classifier the Soviet gas mask was the product number one, the product number two was actually it, and the product number three was an eraser. Another version is simpler - on the condom itself it was written "Rubber condom. No. 2" - which meant size (medium). Previously, there were also sizes 1 and 3, but they were not in demand - the first was too small (it was considered "non-comme il faut" to buy), and the third was too large. In general, only "product number two" remained on sale.

What was the Soviet condom? It was a product made of rather thick rubber (about like medical gloves), reeking of a gas mask and generously sprinkled with talcum powder. They say that the new Soviet condom withstood a good bucket of water poured inside. In general, such a thing was rarely used in the family. It should also be mentioned that Soviet condoms were often spoiled - they were sold in paper packaging, and with the slightest violation of its integrity, they dried out.

Nowadays, any means of contraception is available, and unwanted children in normal families have become much less.

7. There was a "tax on childlessness" in the USSR.

One of the insanities of Soviet family life is the so-called "childlessness tax." Such a tax was required to pay all childless men aged 20 to 50 years and all childless married women aged 20 to 45 years. The size of the tax on childlessness was considerable - 6% of the salary, which averaged 8-9 rubles. For students of universities and colleges under the age of 25, there were benefits, but in general, everyone paid the tax.

In order not to pay tax, it was also possible to take foster children - then they were exempted from paying it. Incidentally, the childlessness tax was abolished only in 1992. Well, now there are no such taxes - everyone can live as they want.

8. Divorce with passion.

After the abolition of weddings in the 1920s, a junk attitude towards marriage became in the Soviet country - people easily got together, signed, and then just as easily divorced. This practice ended in 1944, when "in order to strengthen the family and marriage" the divorce procedure was complicated for Soviet citizens - now it had to be done through the courts. Even if both family members expressed an active desire to disperse, the court could refuse to do so, considering the reason for the divorce "insignificant" or "not deserving of attention."

It's much easier to get a divorce now, and that's a good thing. Why live with someone you don't love?

9. Marital disputes and the team.

It was common practice in the USSR when family disputes (especially concerning young families) were resolved, so to speak, "collectively", at some kind of party or Komsomol meeting. It happened something like this - both family members came to meetings where a team of 20-30 people, under the leadership of some lively Komsomol member or party leader, tried to delve into their family vicissitudes and make a "weighty collective decision."

In our days, such insanity, thank God, has long been gone - and family affairs remain only in the family circle.

In general, here is such a story. In my opinion, today family life is arranged much better than in Soviet times.

What do you think about this? Write in the comments, interesting)

The intensity of the dynamics of the socio-cultural environment exceeded its historical counterparts, requiring new adaptation strategies, turning norms, values, social positions, models of everyday existence into “museum exhibits”, meaningless in new segments of historical dynamics. To characterize Russia as a transitional society, the term “halbmoderne Gesellschaft”, a well-known researcher of modern society W. Beck, is quite applicable148.

In this regard, the characteristic given to the Russian society by A.S. Akhiezer. There are traditional societies that are trying to preserve the foundations of traditionalism, the belief in the ability to live according to mythological cycles, trying to combine them with attainable values. Russia could also be included among these countries, but with one important caveat. Russia has not developed effective institutions capable of ensuring conflict-free cooperation, a dialogue between the values of communities that have embarked on the path of modernization of the traditional type, and the values of an ideological society; there has not been a sufficiently developed ability to overcome the split that has historically developed in the country between archaic and attainable cultures149.

The social institution of the family in Russia in the post-revolutionary period has undergone significant changes. After the October Revolution of 1917, ideas of women's equality began to spread in Russia / USSR, which were most clearly articulated by the two muses of the Russian revolution - Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai150. They spoke of marriage as a loving and comradely union of two equal members of communist society, free and equally independent.

From the first days of its existence, the Soviet state began to actively reform civil legislation, including the part regulating marriage and family relations. First of all, the Orthodox Church was excluded from the process of this regulation. So, already in 1917, “on December 18, the registration of births and marriages was taken away from the church. On December 20, civil marriage was introduced as the only one having legal force”152. Although abortions were not officially legalized, in the first three years the Soviet government treated them quite tolerantly. Since this operation was often performed by unskilled people, in unsanitary conditions, which led to serious consequences and deaths, the decree of November 18, 1920 ordered abortions to be performed under strict medical supervision. Although abortion was labeled as a "relic of the past", women were not forbidden to take this step, provided that the operation was performed by doctors in a hospital setting. It was also the first law of its kind.

Speaking about the new legislation in the field of family and marriage, V.I. Lenin emphasized its focus on the liberation of women and children, on the protection of their rights: “... the laws (of Soviet Russia. - S.G.) do not consecrate the hypocrisy and disenfranchised position of a woman and her child, but openly and on behalf of the state authorities declare a systematic war against all hypocrisy and all lawlessness.

The discussion of the draft of a new code of laws on marriage and the family in the early 1920s was accompanied by calls for the abolition of any form of marriage registration, including secular state registration: “Destroying the superstition that a church wedding is necessary for the legality of marriage, there is no need to replace it with another superstition - investing the free union of a woman and a man in the form of a registered marriage”155.

The second Soviet code of laws on marriage, family and guardianship was adopted in 1926. In general, the code continued the liberal tradition in the field of family and family relations that had developed in the first post-revolutionary years. For example, the registration of marriages became optional, since the code recognized as legitimate existing de facto marriages. At the same time, a marriage was recognized as actual, which met the following conditions: “The fact of cohabitation, the presence of a common household in this cohabitation and the identification of marital relations with third parties in personal correspondence and other documents, as well as, depending on the circumstances, mutual material support, joint upbringing children, etc."156.

It should be noted that in the first decade of Soviet power, a gender-oriented part of Newspeak entered our life and, accordingly, into the Russian language, concerning, first of all, the position of women and their participation in the construction of socialism/communism157. This remark is important because changes in language are an indicator of changes in everyday life.

Thus, the largest Russian-American sociologist P.A. Sorokin, in his article “On the Impact of the War”, published in the Economist magazine No. 1 for 1922, presented the following data on the state of the Petrograd family after the 1917 revolution: “92.2% of divorces now account for 10,000 marriages in Petrograd - a fantastic figure , and out of 100 divorced marriages, 51.1% were less than one year, 11% less than one month, 22% less than two months, 41% less than 3-6 months and only 26% more than 6 months. These figures indicate that modern legal marriage is a form that essentially conceals extramarital sexual relations and enables lovers of “strawberries” to “legally” satisfy their appetites,” which caused V.I. Lenin158.

The institution of the family, shaken in the 1920s, when there were still conscious Marxists in the USSR, and Marxism itself had not yet gone through a period of rebirth, on the wave of Stalinist Thermidor, already in the 1930s, not only completely restores, but even strengthens its positions. In the Soviet Union, not only did there not appear any significant tendency towards the withering away of the state, which should have happened according to Marxist theory, but the opposite trend towards its strengthening was manifested. Already in the 1930s, the Soviet state managed to rise to the “foothills” of imperial organization and power, reaching these “tops” after the end of World War II160.

Not without reason, at all times, starting from Antiquity, stable family relations were considered a powerful political stabilizing factor.

Monarchs and political dictators, in an attempt to consolidate society under their leadership, appealed to family values, comparing the state to one big family (and viewing themselves as the “father of the nation” or “Big Brother”)161.

In the process of establishing the Stalinist dictatorship, political centralization and state orientation towards the accelerated construction of socialism intensified. The life of citizens of the Soviet Union, both men and women, was controlled by non-economic coercion to work, political repressions162, and the establishment of strict control over the sexual and reproductive behavior of the country's citizens. But the policy of state repression against the family has only limited effectiveness. Thus, the famous author of the dystopian novel "1984" J. Orwell defined the family as "the center of fidelity not to the party, but to each other"163. But this rule also contains a certain percentage of exceptions; Soviet people well remembered the "feat" of Pavlik Morozov, who made a choice not in favor of the family, but in favor of the Soviet state.

The Stalinist leadership of the country, aimed at war, needed soldiers and free labor to carry out the “great construction projects of communism”, which, on the one hand, involved the sublimation of human sexual energy164 (as is known, there is no sex in the USSR) and its use for the needs of the Soviet state. On the other hand, in her ideal state, a Soviet woman of childbearing age was seen both as a mother of many children and as a cheap labor force. The rights of women, as well as human rights in general, did not bother the Stalinist regime, and in 1930 the women's departments were closed in the country, I.V. Stalin announced the final resolution of the women's issue. “This culminated in 1936, when a new family code was adopted, prohibiting abortion ... the state began to fight to strengthen the family: “free love” was branded as anti-socialist”165.

The authoritarian-totalitarian regime, which gained a foothold in the USSR in the second half of the 1930s, to a large extent threw back the gains of the October Revolution, both consciously and unconsciously turning and dissolving in the historical thickness of the Russian socio-cultural archaism. Having made a radical conservative rollback, the Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party and the Soviet state switched to a conservative, protective policy towards the family. True, church weddings were not restored as an obligatory element of socio-cultural legitimation, but the family began to be defended at meetings of party committees and trade union committees,166 abortions were banned in the country, practically the only form of birth control and Soviet family planning at that time.

It so happened that the Stalinist USSR, which had made a conservative rollback, in its legislation and practice of everyday life acquired some common features with similar areas in National Socialist Germany: “As in Nazi Germany, the emphasis was on educating healthy and faithful defenders of the fatherland”167.

And these common features, of course, within the framework of the problems we are considering, we can demonstrate, in particular, by quoting an excerpt from an article published on October 14, 1931 in the National Socialist daily newspaper "Volkischer Beobachter" ("People's Observer"): "The preservation of already existing large families is determined by social feeling, the preservation of the form of a large family is determined by the biological concept and national character. A large family must be preserved ... because it is an important and necessary part of the German people.

A large family is important and necessary not only because it alone can ensure the preservation of the population in the future, but also because national morality and national culture find in it the strongest support. The maintenance of the existing extended families and the maintenance of the form of the extended family are two inseparable problems. The preservation of the form of a large family is dictated by national, cultural and political necessity ... The termination of pregnancy is contrary to the meaning of the existence of the family, whose task is to educate the future generation. In addition, the termination of pregnancy will lead to the final destruction of the extended family.

In this passage we see the rationale for why the National Socialists must defend the patriarchal family, and this is the general rationale of conservatives in different countries. After all, it is in it that the future of Germany (the name of the country can be changed arbitrarily, the essence will remain the same), the future is in the past, this is the main informal slogan of the German, Russian, French, and any other conservative revolution.

In the same 30s of the twentieth century, a talented Russian philosopher of a religious, by definition conservative, protective direction, P.?. Florensky, speaking about the future of Russia, also saw his ideal in the past, and not in the individual, but in the family: “First of all, it is necessary to improve the family. Contrary to the views that form the background of many modern sayings, society is not made up of individual atoms, but of families of molecules. The unit of society is the family, not the individual, and a healthy society presupposes a healthy family. The disintegrating family also infects society. The state must necessarily (create) the most favorable conditions for the strength of the family, for (strength) a system of measures must be developed to encourage strong nepotism. As required measures, a tax on bachelors may be introduced into the appropriate fund for some incentive measures.

We believe that the manifestations of the conservative principle in the sphere of family and family relations go back genealogically to ancient times, relying on the power of the authoritarian socio-cultural tradition, in which the family was an agent and continuation of the state / power: “The authoritarian family serves as the most important source of reproduction of all types of reactionary thinking. In essence, it is a kind of enterprise for the production of reactionary structures and ideologies. Therefore, the first commandment of any reactionary policy in the field of culture is to "protect the family", namely the large authoritarian family. In principle, this is precisely the meaning concealed in the formulation “protection of the state, culture and civilization”170.

There is a general pattern in history: the more aggressive a given political regime, ethnic group, nation, the more it welcomes and supports a large patriarchal family. As soon as the country becomes democratic, the standard of living rises radically, so the large patriarchal family becomes a vanishing historical anachronism. Absolutely clear is the comparison of the family, family relations and birth rates in the National Socialist Third Reich and democratic Germany. The Germans began to think more about their personal interests, and not about the interests of the nation, they became more hedonists, not militarists, one of the most free countries in Europe in terms of relations between the sexes. Today's "reality of the skyrocketing number of 'unregistered marriages' (probably) far outstrips official marriage and divorce statistics. According to estimates, about 1-1.5 million people are currently living in an unregistered marriage in Germany171.

But we will talk about the German family in our next paragraph, but now we will return to the evolution of the Soviet family and family relations in the context of our not so distant history. We see a return to some elements of the revolutionary policy of the 1920s after the death of I.V. Stalin in 1953. N.S. Khrushchev initiated reforms that, among other things, led to the opening of more new schools, kindergartens and an increase in state subsidies for children, and abortion was again legalized in the country.

These measures of state support for a person, taken regardless of his marital status, including support for the so-called single-parent families, improved medical care and increased social protection, including the gradual extension of the pension system to peasant collective farmers, coupled with involvement in the production sector , science, education, health care for a huge number of women - undermined the economic and social functions of the patriarchal family in the RSFSR.

And this liberation from the burden of the authoritarian-patriarchal socio-cultural tradition, which was much longer than several decades of Soviet power, was perceived by the Soviet people quite positively. Remembering the atmosphere that prevailed in Soviet society in the 60s of the twentieth century, P. Weil and A. Genis summarize their memories as follows: “The Motherland was absolutely beautiful. She had no vices. All of her was like an older brother, like a father, like a mother, like one big family. And his own, personal, family seemed to be just a branch of national unity”172. By and large, this was the desired result that the Soviet leadership had been striving for since the October Revolution.

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