This article has been written for Easy History by Sophie Watkins.
The Full Stalinist Society Series:
- “Women and Children First”: Traditional Family Values and Motherhood
- “The Opium of the People” Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Persecuting Religion in the Soviet Union
- The Fine Line Between Love and a Life Sentence
Introduction to Stalin’s Soviet Union:
History has been witness to a range of rulers and methods of ruling over societies – from the rise and fall of absolute monarchies to the contemporary avenues of democracies and, of course, the reign of dictators and despots. From Attila the Hun to Xi Jinping, across continents and throughout the course of history, dictators have consolidated and enforced their power through fear tactics, repressive policies and force, ruling over populations with an absolute mandate. One such dictator, infamous for atrocities such as Holodomor (The Great Famine), and the inhumane GULAG system of labour camps that swallowed up over 3.7 million citizens seen as undesirable or to be criticising the state, was Joseph Stalin.
Stalin was the second leader of the Soviet Union and the wider Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the leader with the longest tenure, spanning almost 30 years from 1924 up until his death in 1953. During his reign of terror, the evolution of the state and its people was substantial, and there is much to comment on as historians. Much of the research conducted on Stalinist Russia centers around the political, economic and military aspects of the state under his power. Many more academics have also focused on the man himself, the conclusions drawn often incendiary, such as Norman Naimark’s comparison of the Soviet despot with Hitler, stating that they were both “dictators who killed vast numbers”, and were “both – in the end” genocidaires. Much of Stalin’s despotic and ruthless characteristics are visible in the makeup of society and the state of its citizens. The social and relational consequences of this era in Soviet history still have the potential to be explored and analysed at length.
In a series of articles, I will be examining areas of social change betwene 1924 and 1953 in the Soviet Union, including the fate of religion and its institutions, the persecution of subversive sexualities and sexual attitudes, and beginning with the structure, purpose and values of the family, family life, and the role of women and mothers under Stalin.
A Note of Sources:
The Soviet Union and Soviet society has been an academic interest of mine for many years, culminating in both my undergraduate dissertation A Comparative Analysis of Lenin and Stalin’s Approaches to Sex and Sexuality in the Former Soviet Union, and research in support of my current Master’s thesis “Enemies from Within”: A Comparative Analysis of Political Rhetoric Toward ‘Subversive Groups’ Under McCarthy and Trump.
As such, a range of background knowledge has aided the writing of this article and those that will follow. However, an immense amount of credit is owed to David Hoffman, whose article Mothers in the Motherland has played an immense role in the curation of this piece, and whose work on the Soviet Union I have greatly enjoyed. Other academic articles make up the skeleton of this work, and they have been cited at the end.
The Evolution of the Family Unit:
To understand how the ‘family’ was conceptualised under Stalin, it is important to understand how it was previously imagined and nurtured under the monarchy and in the immediate aftermath of its overthrow. In October 1917, Lenin’s Bolshevik’s overthrew the existing institutions of Russia, only recently removed from longstanding monarchical rule, and pledged to restructure Russian society to align with communist ideals and to undo the previous Tsarist laws and norms that dictated how the state was governed and structured – Russian society was about to be turned on its head,
Amongst a range of reforms, many changes to the values, structure and purpose of the family unit came about. Under the Tsars, the family unit was seen as an extension of the royal family, imbuing families with traditional family values, a sense of obedience and duty and an alleigence to the Orthodox Church. The family was built upon a traditional, patriarchal structure in which men were the head of the family and women were the homemakers and responsible for bearing children – the belief was that this family structure would strengthen a sense of national pride and, primarily, keep it productive, producing a workforce that would contribute to society and support the state, and this remained the case even as the Russian economy rapidly industrialised in the twentieth century, as industry cried out for workers to support its incessant growth.
By 1917, this perception of the family would all but disappear, albeit for a brief time known as the ‘experimentation’ period when the Bolshevik’s first came to power. However, even before the revolution occurred, the family unit was forced to adapt and evolve. Russian men in their thousands had been drafted and sent to the Eastern Front as the First World War raged on, and in their absence, women had to step in to go and earn a living and support their families. A sense of financial and social independence was sprung upon Russian women, which led to an unprecedented wave of ‘masculinisation’ and a lack of resources or ability to solely focus on motherhood. This would only worsen as more and more men failed to return from the frontline, and more and more men had to be drafted in to replace them – due to a lack of equipment and supplies, ineffective command and bloodied mutinies en masse, more men were dying than could be replaced; coupled with the decreasing birth rates and already low life expectancies in Russia at the time, this would lead to a population deficit. This would become a key justification for the Stalinist regime and what would follow in coming decades.
Under the initial Bolshevik government, paired with the events of the First World War redefining the dynamic of the family unit, an anti-religious stance, a distancing from the institution of marriage, and the legalisation of abortion of homosexuality entirely shifted the structure and the purpose of the family in Russia.
However, upon Lenin’s death in 1924, and Stalin’s rise to power, these reforms would be revoked and much of the state’s approach to the family would return to a similar perspective as that of the overthrown Tsar’s, this time framed as being for the communal good and in support of a socialist state.
The Family Under Stalin:
When Stalin took power in the Soviet Union, several of the concessions to individual rights made under the Bolshevik government were undone, including criminalising heterosexuality, criminalising abortion, decreasing access to contraceptives, and making divorce harder and more expensive to obtain. All of these actions were in an effort to reinforce traditional family structures and values, Stalin believing that the most productive and most beneficial family maintained a heteronormative, patriarchal society, wherin the women embraced motherhood and no subversions were tolerated, in an effort to focus Soviet citizens on socialisation and the spread of communism, as well as to keep them under control and in line – by controlling the makeup of Soviet families, the government had a relatively unwavering hold on their population, allowing them to stay in power.
Family values were symbiotic with the values of the state, and as such, communal needs came above those of the individual. The state took an increased interest in the family to ensure this remained the case, and to sew out individualism. The government took the position that – as David Hoffman phrases it – “sexual liberation (was) a distraction from, if not a perversion of, socialism”, arguing that for the Soviet Union to truly embrace communism as a society, it had to focus on social growth and neglect personal sexual pleasures.
The glue that held this structure together, in the eyes of the government, was the institution of marriage and the rearing of children. As such, access to divorce and abortions was restricted or even criminalized and removed entirely, forcing the citizens of the Soviet Union into families with a single purpose – haivng and raising as many children as possible.
Remember that population crisis we hinted at earlier? By the 1930s, it had arrived. Stalin’s government faced a plummeting birth rate, an accelerating death rate and life expectancies of an average as low as 32.59 in 1935, and – alarmingly – 23.6 in 1945.
To combat this, the government began to incentivise women to have more children, beginning a policy of pronatalism in the Soviet Union which would narrow the purpose of Soviet women as being motherhood, and nothing more. David Hoffman, in his article Mothers in the Motherland, gives an overview of how this was achieved;
- The Soviet Union gave financial incentives to mothers for having more children;
- “The same Soviet decree that outlawed abortion granted women a 2,000- ruble annual bonus for each child they had over six children, and a 5,000- ruble bonus for each child over ten children”.
- The government increased funding for resources, entirely committing itself to supporting mothers. It established the Department of Maternal and Infant Welfare, diverting funds where it could to medical and childcare to reassure women they could have children safely and securely.
- Media propaganda was rampant – Soviet media began publishing testimonials from women who claimed medical advancements made childbirth less painful, and that there were advantages to having more children who could raise one another, lifting the burden of motherhood – all this, to incentivise childbirth.
- Accolades and awards were given to women who had more children, following on from other European states at the time facing similar plunges in their populations.
For those who had ten or more children, the state awarded the honourary title
“Mother Heroine”, accompanied with a medal and certification. Other such awards included the Maternity Medal for five-six children and the Order of Maternal Glory for seven-nine.
The more children born, the larger the workforce, and the more developed the state could become, meaning the family unit was expected to be productive.
Conclusion:
All in all, despite a revolution, the despotic government of Stalin reverted much of the state’s approach to the social unit of the family back to Tsarist policies, and the retention of traditional, patriarchal family models. To combat declining birth rates, the purpose of family became to grow the population, and the role of women became ‘mother’, and not much beyond that. Stalinist society had a great gift for being very instructive and supportive in areas that it deemed important to its own survival, funding the institutions and the avenues that would allow women to have more children, in order to benefit the state, the family becoming the most productive tool the state held in their toolbox.
Sources:
- John Donovan, “7 Atrocities Dictator Joseph Stalin Committed”
- Norman M. Naimark, “Stalin’s Genocides”
- David Hoffman, “Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its Pan-European Context”
- Statista, Life expectancy (from birth) in Russia, from 1845 to 2020. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041395/life-expectancy-russia-all-time/
About the Author:
I am currently completing my Masters degree in History at the University of Lincoln, where I graduated from last year with my undergraduate degree in Politics and International Relations. I have always loved reading about history and retelling it in my own words, analysing events and people and ironing out the hidden details. My main area of interest is the Russian Revolution, Soviet Union and Cold War and I’m also greatly interested in the history of sexuality and gender, and social history!
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