Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The origins of the Bolshevik vision: Love unfettered, women free
- 2 The first retreat: Besprizornost' and socialized child rearing
- 3 Law and life collide: Free union and the wage-earning population
- 4 Stirring the sea of peasant stagnation
- 5 Pruning the “bourgeois thicket”: Drafting a new Family Code
- 6 Sexual freedom or social chaos: The debate on the 1926 Code
- 7 Controlling reproduction: Women versus the state
- 8 Recasting the vision: The resurrection of the family
- Conclusion: Stalin's oxymorons: Socialist state, law, and family
- Index
- Soviet and East European Studies
1 - The origins of the Bolshevik vision: Love unfettered, women free
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The origins of the Bolshevik vision: Love unfettered, women free
- 2 The first retreat: Besprizornost' and socialized child rearing
- 3 Law and life collide: Free union and the wage-earning population
- 4 Stirring the sea of peasant stagnation
- 5 Pruning the “bourgeois thicket”: Drafting a new Family Code
- 6 Sexual freedom or social chaos: The debate on the 1926 Code
- 7 Controlling reproduction: Women versus the state
- 8 Recasting the vision: The resurrection of the family
- Conclusion: Stalin's oxymorons: Socialist state, law, and family
- Index
- Soviet and East European Studies
Summary
It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of “free love” comes into the foreground.
Frederick Engels, 1883[The family] will be sent to a museum of antiquities so that it can rest next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe, by the horsedrawn carriage, the steam engine, and the wired telephone.
S. la. Vo'fson, 1929, Soviet sociologistIn October 1918, barely a year after the Bolsheviks had come to power, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet (VTsIK), the highest legislative body, ratified a complete Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship. The Code captured in law a revolutionary vision of social relations based on women's equality and the “withering away” (otmiranie) of the family. According to Alexander Goikhbarg, the young, idealistic author of the new Family Code, it prepared the way for a time when “the fetters of husband and wife” would become “obsolete.” The Code was accordingly constructed with its own obsolescence in mind. Goikhbarg wrote, “Proletarian power constructs its codes and all of its laws dialectically, so that every day of their existence undermines the need for their existence.” In short, the aim of law was “to make law superfluous.”
Goikhbarg and his fellow revolutionaries fully expected not only marriage and the family to wither away, but the law and the state as well. Lenin had carefully analyzed the future of the state in his famous essay, The State and Revolution, completed in September 1917, merely a month before the Bolsheviks took power.
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- Information
- Women, the State and RevolutionSoviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936, pp. 1 - 58Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993