Template:Soviet policies which encouraged adultery
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After the Soviet Revolution, the Bolsheviks intervened more directly in domestic life. The new Code on Marriage and the Family (1918) established a legislative framework that clearly aimed to facilitate the breakdown of the traditional family. It removed the influence of the Church from marriage and divorce, making both a process of simple registration with the state. It granted the same legal rights to de facto marriages (couples living together) as it gave to legal marriages. The Code turned divorce from a luxury for the rich to something that was easy and affordable for all. The result was a huge increase in casual marriages and the highest rate of divorce in the world – three times higher than in France or Germany and twenty-six times higher than in England by 1926 – as the collapse of the Christian patriarchal order and the chaos of the revolutionary years loosened sexual morals along with family and communal ties.[1][2]
It was a commonplace that the Bolshevik made a bad husband and father because the demands of the Party took him away from the home. ‘We Communists don’t know our own families,’ remarked one Moscow Bolshevik. ‘You leave early and come home late. You seldom see your wife and almost never see your children.’ At Party congresses, where the issue was discussed throughout the 1920s, it was recognized that Bolsheviks were far more likely than non-Party husbands to abandon wives and families, and that this had much to do with the primacy of Party loyalties over sexual fidelity. But in fact the problem of absent wives and mothers was almost as acute in Party circles, as indeed it was in the broader circles of the Soviet intelligentsia, where most women were involved in the public sphere.15[4][5][6] |
- ↑ Wendy Z. Goldman. 1993. Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936. Cambridge. 107
- ↑ Natalia Lebina. 1999. Povsednevnaia zhizn’sovetskogo goroda: normy i anomalii, 1920–1930 gody. St Petersburg. 272.
- ↑ Igal Halfin. 2002. Intimacy in an Ideological Key: The Communist Case of the 1920s and 1930s’, in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities. London. 187–188.
- ↑ Orlando Figes. (2008). The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. Picador.
- ↑ Leon Trotsky. 1973. Problems of Everyday Life: Creating the Foundations of a New Society in Revolutionary Russia. London. 72
- ↑ Alex Inkeles & Raymond Augustine Bauer. 1959. The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society. Cambridge, Mass. 205.