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Stalinist Families: Motherhood, Fatherhood, and Building the New Soviet Person
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Stalinist Families: Motherhood, Fatherhood, and Building the New Soviet Person Greta Bucher It will come as a surprise to no one that parenting in Stalinist Russia was far from a private affair; it was always viewed as a social service that parents performed for the good of the collective and as the main social justification for marriage1 After the utopian dreaming of the 1920s gave way to the hard reality of the 1930s, the Party reverted to touting the family as the basic unit of society. As with many aspects of the Stalinist system, retaining the family was a cost-effective option: the existing structures could remain and all the state needed to do was ensure that the education of children within the family was in accordance with socialist values. 111e return to the family, along with the other measures taken in the new family law of 1936, was simply the most expeditious way to encourage a higher birth rate, combat the continuing problem of neglected and abandoned children, and provide a significant measure of control over the population that did not require direct government funding . Perhaps m ost importantly, the family was also the least expensive way to raise and begin the education of children, since all the communal options suggested in the 1920s required vast amounts of money, trained personnel, building space, and other material resources which were all needed for the industrialization drive, and were in short supply in any case. The family suddenly took on a new halo of sanctity (or resumed its old one) as the most important foundation for developing the new Soviet society and the New Soviet Person. Thus, the state shifted some of the burden for creating this new person to the parents, with significant input from "experts," state schools, and childcare institutions , and with mothers consistently expected to take the m ost active part in raising children. Parenthood as an institution was, of course, a constant throughout the period, but notions of parenting were not. I will argue that motherhood and fatherhood had an inverse relationship that evolved throughout the Stalinist period into a construct that can be recognized as Stalinist parenting. 1 Wendy Goldman, Womel1, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy al1d Social Life, 1917-1936 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 333; David L. Hoffmann, Stalil1ist Values: The Cu/tural Norms of Soviet Modernity (1917-1941) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003),106-07. The Making of Russian History : Society, Culture, and the Politics of Modern Russia . Essays in Honor of Allan K. Wildman. John W. Stein berg and Rex A. Wade, eds. Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2009, 129- 52. 130 GRETA BUCHER The state had a somewhat schizophrenic approach to parenting. On the one hand, no central organization existed to oversee this important activity. The lack of a central administrative body to oversee childhood development is striking. While there were ideological reasons for rejecting separate party or state organizations for other population groups (women spring to mind), there seems to be no ideological justification for avoiding a People's Commissariat of Childhood. The omission is in keeping with the decision to concentrate on industrial rather than social development-the party leadership did not want to spend precious resources on a commissariat to research and monitor child development when they could leave that to individual families. Nor would such an organization have been met with much enthusiasm from parents or the other state institutions that considered at least parts of childhood to be their domain-particularly the People's Commissariats of Enlightenment (Narkompros) and Health (Narkomzdrav). On the other hand, the state displayed a clear concern with how children were raised and, in the 1930s, had a definite policr for how schools should manage their side of creating New Soviet people. Legislation governed the physical and economic structure of the family, and these laws became increasingly prescriptive in the 1930s and 1940s. This legislation covered many aspects of family life, and other works have extensively examined their impact on women3 In this paper, we will concentrate specifically on their impact on parenting. The Stalinist paradigm for parents began to develop in the early 1930s with a rejection of the notion that families operated against Soviet ideology. Instead of trying to "nationalize" children to liberate them from the backward bourgeois notions of their parents, as one early Soviet educator suggested,4 policy of the 1930s instructed parents to work with educators to raise good socialist citizens. To this end...