Utopian Visions of Family Life in the Stalin-Era Soviet Union

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9645822
AutoresLauren Kaminsky (0000-0003-3409-4431, New York University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2011
Volumen44
Número1
Páginas63-91
Fecha de publicación2011-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCentral European History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0008-9389 • E-ISSN: 1569-1616
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0008938910001184
OpenAlexW2121163314
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas28

Soviet socialism shared with its utopian socialist predecessors a critique of the conventional family and its household economy. Marx and Engels asserted that women's emancipation would follow the abolition of private property, allowing the family to be a union of individuals within which relations between the sexes would be “a purely private affair.” Building on this legacy, Lenin imagined a future when unpaid housework and child care would be replaced by communal dining rooms, nurseries, kindergartens, and other industries. The issue was so central to the revolutionary program that the Bolsheviks published decrees establishing civil marriage and divorce soon after the October Revolution, in December 1917. These first steps were intended to replace Russia's family laws with a new legal framework that would encourage more egalitarian sexual and social relations. A complete Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship was ratified by the Central Executive Committee a year later, in October 1918. The code established a radical new doctrine based on individual rights and gender equality, but it also preserved marriage registration, alimony, child support, and other transitional provisions thought to be unnecessary after the triumph of socialism. Soviet debates about the relative merits of unfettered sexuality and the protection of women and children thus resonated with long-standing tensions in the history of socialism

Communism · Doctrine · Emancipation · Human sexuality · Legal guardian · Political science · Politics · Sexual revolution · Socialism · Sociology · Vision · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law · Soviet and Russian History