The Soviet government, which existed in the early stages of the formation of the USSR, criticized the household and the traditional family. Engels and Marx said that after the liquidation of private property, the emancipation of women would occur, and this, in turn, would allow gender relations to turn into an absolutely private matter. Lenin, based on such conclusions, argued that over time, the unpaid work of housewives and caring for children will be transferred to nurseries and kindergartens, public canteens and other institutions, which will entail the withering away of official marriage. Historian Lauren Kaminski spoke about how society did not allow this utopia to come true.
Among the first decrees adopted by the Soviet government in December 1917 was the decree on the dissolution of marriage and the introduction of civil marriage. A year later, the Central Executive Committee approved the RSFSR Code of Laws on Family, Marriage and Guardianship Law and Acts of Civil Status, which was based on gender equality and human rights. Despite this, some concepts still remained in it, in particular, the payment of alimony, registration of marriage and other outdated provisions. They were needed during the transitional period, while socialism was being built in the country. This document introduced the institution of civil marriage as an alternative to church marriage, facilitated the divorce procedure. In addition, the document was abandoned in order to free the woman from the concept of illegitimate children.
In addition, the Code established the right of one of the spouses who was experiencing financial difficulties, upon divorce, to demand maintenance from his other half. Children born out of wedlock were declared "children who were born of people who were not officially married." All this pointed to the preparation of the Soviet government for the times when unregistered, free marriages would be concluded in society. The presence of such a cautious wording over time led to the fact that in the 1926 Code, one of the norms stated: one of the spouses has the right to demand alimony from the other solely on the basis of the fact of having an intimate relationship. At that time, church marriage was becoming less and less popular, so it became necessary to move to a new level on the path to free relations between the sexes. The obligations of the partners had to be respected and the rights protected.
However, during the period of late Stalinism, the party's policy underwent significant changes. In 1936, a new USSR Constitution was adopted, and a new family code appeared that rejected the free morality of the 1920s, reinforced the importance of formal marriage and prohibited abortion.
At the same time, the new code retained the provisions that one partner could demand alimony for a child born out of an officially registered marriage. According to statistics, both women and men who were not officially married did this very rarely. Despite this, in the public consciousness of Soviet times, a persistent image of an alimony was formed, who gave birth to a child out of wedlock with the sole purpose of receiving support later.
In the summer of 1940, an article titled "Legal Consultation" appeared on the pages of the Soviet magazine Rabotnitsa, which dealt with alimony. Its author was Maria Grechukha, head of the Department of Judicial Bodies of the People's Committee of Justice of the Soviet Union. She said that a Soviet woman could apply for the establishment of paternity by providing information about the alleged father to the registry office, and after that, demand alimony from him.
The editorial office of the magazine began to receive letters from readers, which the editorial office of the magazine sent to the People's Commissariat of Justice. Some of the letters were published, but only those that fully corresponded to the official position of the authorities. At the same time, documents preserved in the archives indicate that opinions were different.
And at the end of the autumn of that same 1940, a letter was sent to the editorial office of the Rabotnitsa magazine, which was written by a woman named Fedotova. In her letter, the woman wanted to tell about those women who violate the rights of married men. In addition, the woman said that she was a “victim of the law” and that the law needs to be changed to tame the alimony's appetites.
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In her descriptions of such women, Fedotova was based on personal experience. She had two sons, who were never able to marry because they ended up in the hands of some "predators". The sons were forced to pay alimony to women with whom they entered into an intimate relationship, and therefore could no longer build a personal life. The woman said that men began to shy away from women, because they saw in each a desire to receive alimony. Thus, concluded Fedotova, an amendment to the law, which would awaken a sense of responsibility in women, could change this situation.
It should be noted that such letters were not one-to-one. The women Sak, Shchuchkina, Efimova and Kolotinova, who united in a group and introduced themselves as the collective of the Soviet country, asked to pay attention to women who behave shamelessly and mercilessly towards children and husbands. As an example, they talked about the situations that took place in their life: a man named Petrov married a certain Lyubov Klimenko, an uncultured and backward woman, and they had a child. However, these people soon divorced, and Klimenko remarried, but this time to a railway drummer, with whom she lived for six years and to whom she gave birth to two children.
While her husband was at work, Lyubov did nothing, only "wandered wherever she got, dressed up and pomaded." A group of women said that Klimenko did not look after the children at all, and her husband was forced to wash them himself, and also to clean the apartment. Once he broke down and kicked his wife out of the house. Then Klimenko filed a lawsuit against her first husband, obliging him to pay alimony for a common child.
At that time, Pavlov was already married for the second time, and he already had a daughter. According to the court ruling, he was forced to pay 300 rubles in alimony, as a result of which his family had only five rubles left. The authors of the letter demanded changes to the legislation in order to exclude such cases.
Efimova, Sak, Shchuchkina and Kolotinova, just like Fedotov, portrayed such women alimony as parasites and branded them with shame, demonizing and turning them into class enemies.
Love for walks and dancing, fashionable clothes and cosmetics, which are symbols of sexuality and independence, were portrayed only as signs of bourgeois degradation. The authors of the letter spoke of themselves as good mothers and worthy citizens of the country, moving away from the image of a free woman who has equal rights with a man.
The men mentioned in the letters were portrayed as examples of hardworking people. Young women who received alimony were portrayed as the destroyers of healthy Soviet families, moreover, they were portrayed as criminals, parasites and unproductive elements who enjoy the trust of society and the state.
There were many similar letters. Their authors were convinced that Soviet legislation should protect official families, not single mothers, and condemn extramarital intimate relationships and divorces. Some women perceived the improvement in the financial situation of single mothers as their own loss, because they were confident that children born in legal wedlock had more rights than those born out of wedlock.
Such letters were studied in detail in the People's Commissariat of Justice. Moreover, the issues raised in them were taken very seriously. All this led to the fact that the new family law, adopted on July 8, 1944, assumed that women who are not legally married cannot claim child support. It is worth noting that the time when this law was adopted was not at all accidental - the authorities were well aware that big problems would begin with the return of soldiers from the fronts.
In addition, a rule was introduced into the 1944 law that required spouses to provide a serious reason for divorce. Relationships on the side were not considered a serious reason for divorce, but if a child was born as a result of this relationship, the court, as a rule, allowed the divorce.
After the end of the war, mass divorces of young couples began in the Soviet Union, since one of the spouses, being in evacuation or at the front, began to live in an unregistered marriage. However, despite the amendments to the legislation, the courts tended more to dissolve marriages in favor of new families.
Thus, Lenin's utopian policy regarding marriage and family outlived its creator, but could not resist public pressure. The authorities encouraged, first of all, those who could make a great contribution to the process of building socialism, and set them up as an example to others. Society has adopted this model to promote traditional ideas about public morality.
The fact that the Soviet authorities tried to give couples living outside of an officially registered marriage the same rights as people living in legal wedlock looked in the eyes of people nothing more than an attempt to destabilize the institution of the family. The roots of public and official attitudes towards family issues, gender relations and sex lay in the contradictions between conservative morality and communist utopia, which determined the foundations of family life in the era of Stalinism.