Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association

Utopian Visions of Family Life in the Stalin-Era Soviet Union

Author(s): Lauren Kaminsky
Source: Central European History, Vol. 44, No. 1, HUMAN RIGHTS, UTOPIAS, AND GENDER
IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY EUROPE (MARCH 2011), pp. 63-91
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Conference Group for Central
European History of the American Historical Association
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Central European History 44 (2011), 63-91.
© Conference Group for Central European History of the American
Historical Association, 20 11
doi:10.1017/S0008938910001184

Utopian Visions of Family Life in the Stalin-Era

Soviet Union

Lauren Kaminsky

socialism shared with its Utopian socialist predecessors a critique of the

Soviet conventional
that women's family andwould
emancipation its household economy.1
follow the Marx
abolition of and Engelsproperty,
private asserted
allowing the family to be a union of individuals within which relations between
the sexes would be "a purely private affair."2 Building on this legacy, Lenin imag-
ined a future when unpaid housework and child care would be replaced by com-
munal dining rooms, nurseries, kindergartens, and other industries. The issue was
so central to the revolutionary program that the Bolsheviks published decrees
establishing civil marriage and divorce soon after the October Revolution, in
December 1917. These first steps were intended to replace Russia's family laws
with a new legal framework that would encourage more egalitarian sexual and
social relations. A complete Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship
was ratified by the Central Executive Committee a year later, in October
1918.3 The code established a radical new doctrine based on individual rights
and gender equality, but it also preserved marriage registration, alimony, child
support, and other transitional provisions thought to be unnecessary after the
triumph of socialism. Soviet debates about the relative merits of unfettered sexu-
ality and the protection of women and children thus resonated with long-standing
tensions in the history of socialism.

I would like to thank Atina Grossmann, Carola Sachse, and Mary Nolan, as well as the anonymous
reader for Central European History, for their comments and suggestions.
1 While Charles Fourier's rejection of the family as the basic unit of social life makes him the most
prominent example, other French utopias imagined increasing women's social status by rescuing them
from the patriarchal family. Frank Edward Manuel and Fritzie Prigohzy Manuel, French Utopias: An
Anthology of Ideal Societies (New York: Free Press, 1966), 12-13.
Friedrich Engels, "From Principles of Communism," in Communist Morality, ed. V. A. Liubisheva,
R. Lavrov, and N. V. Bychkova (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962), 23. For an analysis of the
relationship between Marxism and the women's movement, see Richard Stites, The Women's
Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bobhevism, i 860-1 930 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1978), 233-77.
3Pervyi kodeks zakonov ob aktakh grazhdanskogo sostoianiia, brachnom, semeinom i opekunskom prave
(Moscow, 1918). For more on the development of the 1918 Family Code, see Wendy Z.
Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 19Í1-Í936,
Cambridge Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 48-58.

63

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 64 LAUREN KAMINSKY

By locating Soviet family life in the context of Utopian notions about the lib-
eration of sex from the household economy, this essay will explore Stalin-era
family policy as the continuation of a radical revolutionary tradition. Following
Nicholas TimashefF, many scholars have understood the Stalin years as a conser-
vative "retreat" that drove Utopian ideas about sexual equality out of official dis-
course, sometimes asserting sexual repression as a hallmark of totalitarianism.4 In
her groundbreaking study of early Soviet family policy, Wendy Goldman has
used the language of retreat to explain that the family was resurrected as a solution
to child homelessness (bezprizomosť) "because it was the one institution that
could feed, clothe, and socialize a child at almost no cost to the state."5 The his-
torical narrative of Stalinism as a retreat effectively addresses the possible alterna-
tive outcomes of the Bolshevik Revolution, but its assertion of discontinuity
overshadows the aspects of Soviet life in the Stalin-era that appeared to fulfill
the promises of 1917. As Stephen Kotkin has argued, "Stalinism, far from
being a partial retreat, let alone a throwback to the Russian past, remained
forward-looking and progressive throughout."6 This essay will focus on progres-
sive family policies enacted under Stalin's leadership that were explicit in their pro-
motion of equality. By examining the rigorous public debates that these policies
prompted about legitimate and illegitimate sex, this essay contributes a fuller
appreciation of the complexity of sexual politics in the period from Lenin's
death in 1924 until Stalin's death in 1953.

Soviet leaders in the Stalin-era sought to transform sexual and social relations
radically by legal means, leading some citizens to object that the promotion of
equality had gone too far. This protest frequently came in the form of letters
expressing particular outrage over the laws on alimony. These letters employed
the language of rights to assert differential moral and legal entitlements, evidence
of popular participation in Stalinist legal culture.7 Letter writers protested equal
rights for all women and mothers to argue in favor of the restoration of the dis-
tinction between legitimate families based on registered marriages and illegitimate
families based on biological relation. Letters about alimony expressed frustration
that Soviet law did not reflect the popular conviction that some families were
more valuable - and therefore more worthy of official concern and financial

4 Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia
(New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1946). Igor Kon has argued that, "Repressive sexophobia
was an integral part of maintaining totalitarian control over individuality." Igor Semenovich Kon, The
Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 1.
Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution, 100.
6Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1995), 6.
7 For a discussion of legal culture and the ways in which the Russian state's differential assignment of
rights and duties "created conditions for including even lowly subjects in the basic practices of gover-
nance," see Jane Burbank, "An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire,"
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 3 (2006): 400.

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 UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FAMILY LIFE 65

support - than others. In evaluating letters from ordinary citizens to public figures
in the 1930s, Sheila Fitzpatrick has written that "public" letter writing "was essen-
tially a form of individual, private communication with the authorities on topics
both private and public." Situating these letters in a long Russian tradition dating
back to petitions sent to the Tsar, Fitzpatrick has argued that "for all the qualifica-
tions that have to be attached to the term 'public' in this context, the writing and
reading of these letters to the authorities is as close to a public sphere as one is
likely to get during the Stalin period."8 In writing letters of protest to Soviet au-
thorities, Soviet citizens invited state involvement in family life, blurring the
boundary between the personal and the political at the same time that they re-
affirmed the boundaries of legitimacy, respectability, and propriety. Their oppo-
sition to the laws on alimony in particular exposed a rift between official Soviet
discourse and unofficial family values, which (to borrow George Orwell's famous
formulation) asserted that some families were more equal than others.

Alimony in Soviet Law and Society

The original Soviet Family Code of 1918 constituted a compromise between
Utopian ideals and pragmatic considerations. With this law, the Bolsheviks estab-
lished civil marriage, simplified divorce, and abolished the concept of illegitimate
children in the name of the liberation of women and the dissolution of bourgeois
family life.9 It also established the right of a spouse in need to be maintained by the
other spouse in the case of divorce. The jurists who drafted this transitional code
were mindful of the changes they imagined were yet to come, carefully crafting
the language used to describe children born out of wedlock, for example, as "chil-
dren of parents who are not in a registered marriage" instead of children born
"outside marriage," in order to retain the possibility of free, unregistered
unions.10 Later, this careful phrasing paved the way for the right of a spouse to
collect maintenance from the other spouse and was extended even to those
who did not register their unions, provided that they were judged to live in a
"factual marriage" based on evidence of cohabitation.11 This was by far the
most controversial clause in the 1926 code, a draft of which was circulated and
discussed by high-ranking party members in special meetings of the Central

8Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter- Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s,"
Slavic Review 55, no. 1 (1996): 80.
9The Family Code of 1918 defined "need" as not possessing the minimum necessary for subsistence
and/or the inability to work, to be determined in court. "From the Code of Laws concerning the Civil
Registration of Deaths, Births, and Marriages, of Oct. 17, 1918," in Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia:
The Family in the U.S.S.R., ed. Rudolf Schlesinger (London: Routledge & Paul, 1949), 36.
10Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution, 54-55.
1 * The phrase "factual marriage" (fakticheskii brak) was used interchangeably with "unregistered mar-
riage" to describe as marriages unions that were not registered. See, for example, Gosudarstvennyi
arkiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF) f. 9492, o. 1, d. 404, 1. 54.

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 66 LAUREN КАМШКУ

Executive Committee beginning in the autumn of 1925. The transcript of the

debates concerning the draft of the new code reveals the logic of the law, as
well as the issues that vexed participating party members.12
On October 17, 1925, People's Commissar of Justice D. I. Kursky opened the
discussion of the draft by addressing the reasons for replacing the 1918 code,
which granted recognition only to civil marriage in order to deprive church mar-
riage of any significance. Much had changed from 1918 to 1925, he argued: civil
marriage had already successfully superseded church marriage, according to data
from the Moscow Registrar's office showing that one-third of marriages involved
a church service and two-thirds were "purely civil, non-church, Soviet mar-
riages." Restricting the definition of marriage to registered unions was necessary
in 1918 to counterbalance the church, he argued, but "even at that time the criti-
cism was voiced that by such limitations de facto marriages would be deprived of
absolutely all rights." Since church marriages no longer posed a threat to regis-
tered civil marriage, the time had come for "registered and non-registered mar-
riages [to] become equal in their material consequences," Kursky explained. The
one respect in which de facto unions were recognized by the Soviet state under
the 1918 code was in connection with children, since children's rights were based
on the fact of parenthood and therefore safeguarded regardless of whether the
marriage was registered. "But the wife in a de facto marriage enjoyed no
rights," he argued. Although the unregistered spouse could theoretically be
male or female, Kursky and other speakers made clear that this draft sought to
protect vulnerable women from economic hardship.13
In response to Kursky's opening remarks, several party members voiced serious
concerns about the draft and some explicitly argued that it needed to be changed.
One participant worried that the draft would not do enough to discourage
divorce, considering that "a great deal of the present neglect of children
[detskoy bezprizornost] must be attributed to the disintegration of the family."
Another delegate emphasized the importance of encouraging the husband to
stay faithful to his wife, even when "she no longer pleases him," since "the
husband must pay more attention to the reeducation of the wife." To downplay
the frequency of divorce, Kursky asserted that the majority of divorces dissolved a
first marriage, and "this proves that we are not faced with endless series of divorces.
The age of the majority of persons divorcing each other lies between twenty and
twenty-four . . . This shows that these people divorce in order to achieve a new
and stable marriage." (In response to these statistics, one delegate shouted ironi-
cally from the floor, "Yes, general stability, quite normal and not in the least

12Further analysis of the draft can be found in Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution, 214-53.
13"Discussion of the Draft of the Code in the Second Session of the Central Executive Committee
of the RSFSR," October 25, 1925, through November 15, 1926, in Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia,
ed. Schlesinger, 81-91.

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 UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FAMILY LIFE 67

alarming.") But the most frequent criticism of the draft by far concerned what
participants felt would be an unfair burden on family members of individuals
forced to pay alimony to unregistered spouses. Despite Kursky's assurances that
families, households, and collective farm communities would not bear responsi-
bility for the alimony payments owed by one of their members, he was unable to
propose any measure to prevent this side effect of economic codependence.14
This challenge to the draft code focused on an argument against providing for
the unemployed, unregistered spouse. "If we accept the project as it stands," one
delegate argued, "a number of dandies and spongers are bound to make it their
reason for choosing the most well-off working girls . . . The women dandies
will do the same." He imagined the same thing happening among workers:
"for example, there are ladies suffering from a weak heart or migraine who set
off in pursuit of men from the rank of bus conductor to that of sanitary inspector
inclusive - as long as he earns 160 or 140 rubles - and all the rest are out of the
running (laughter)." The laughter from the floor suggests that the audience recog-
nized this scenario as plausible and familiar, though exaggerated for effect. "Since
he is unsuitable - a drainage man is obviously not suitable for a lady afflicted with
migraine - then she divorces him and the fellow is obliged to pay her, seeing that
she is ill, some twenty or thirty rubles a month because she is 'needy' (laughter),
and how are you to prove that she is not 'needy'? (laughter)." The delegate con-
cluded by demanding that the law be revised and "the spongers will have to be
burnt out, and burnt out with a red-hot iron. We must make certain that
dandies of this kind or the type of woman-chaser cannot exploit our law to
live at other people's expense. (Female voices from the public: 'They'll exploit it
whatever happens!')"15
Reacting to the laughter on the floor, a female party member admonished
those in attendance for their lightheartedness. "I have noticed that some comrades
are laughing and giggling," she announced. "But during this session this question
[of divorce] will have to be discussed in common and seriously." She argued that
women were worse off than men after divorce, because a husband "will find
another woman to live with," but a wife will have to raise her children in
poverty. For her, the draft under discussion was only part of the solution to this
problem, which could only really be resolved with the proliferation and improve-
ment of children's homes. She asked the men in attendance to "be the first to give
the women a hand, to teach them, show them the way about which Vladimir
Ilyich [Lenin] used to tell us. You must not forget that Vladimir Ilyich was the
first to sound the battle cry on behalf of the oppressed women. His road
should be followed." Short ofthat, she implored, "there should not be laughing
at women. To us this is very insulting." Ultimately, she focused the blame for

14Ibid., 98, 101-08, 13,51.

15Ibid., 88, 95-96.

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 68 LAÜREN KAMÍNSKY

divorce and infidelity on men, saying that men may be able to "take two wives,"
but "we peasant women, we have no time for that."16 Her contribution ulti-
mately echoed Kursky's defense of the new draft code on the basis that it did a
better job of protecting the rights of women, especially those women in unregis-
tered unions who were most vulnerable after divorce.

As a consequence of these bitter disagreements, the continuation of the discus-

sion and the decision on the draft were postponed until a year later. At this 1926
debate, Kursky argued for the protection of women in unregistered unions, a
population that seemed to have very few defenders. "The suggestion that
women exploit alimony, that there are - to repeat the phrase used here -
'alimony women,' is a mistaken one," Kursky argued. "It is an overstatement
of isolated cases which themselves are usually exaggerated," he said, citing the
fact that the law limited alimony to a fixed period (six months in the case of
unemployment) and that the child was already entitled to maintenance by
both his or her parents. "This means that the mother, too, has to bear a certain
proportion of the alimony," Kursky maintained, overstating his point by insisting
that "complete equality exists here." Nevertheless, the Code of Laws on Marriage
and Divorce, the Family, and Guardianship finally passed by decree of the All-
Russian Central Executive Committee on November 19, 1926. This code estab-
lished for couples in de facto marriages the same rights and duties as those whose
marriage was made official at the registry office, especially the right of alimony for
unregistered spouses after the dissolution of the union.17
While the language of the law was phrased in such a way that either spouse
could sue for alimony, lawmakers explicitly stated that it was written for the pro-
tection of women. When asked whether alimony could be claimed only by
women, Kursky replied, "Article 11 is concerned with the rights of men also,
since by 'spouse' it is meant either husband or wife; but the article is primarily
intended to safeguard the women. And it is right that this should be so."18 The
combination of gender-neutral language in the law and the expressed intention
to protect women reveals the tensions surrounding the issue of women's equality
in the early Soviet period. As Elizabeth Wood has argued, much of the language
of the early Soviet decrees was deliberately gender neutral. "The primary thrust of
the new legislation was thus to neutralize gender differences, specifying such
differences only where biology seemed to intervene (particularly in questions
relating to maternity, protective legislation in the workplace, and minimum mar-
riage age, which was set at sixteen for girls and eighteen for boys) or where special

16Ibid., 99-100.
17 A. N. Iodkovskii and A. K. Rodnianskii, Kodeks zakonov о brake, sem'e, i opeke (Moscow: Sovetskoe
Zakonodatel'stvo, 1931).
18 "Discussion of the Draft of the Code in the Second Session of the Central Executive Committee
of the RSFSR," October 25, 1925, through November 15, 1926, in Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia,
ed. Schlesinger, 88, 95-96.

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 UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FAMILY LIFE 69

emphasis had to be placed in order to overthrow centuries of cultural practice."19

Sensitive to immediate problems and future solutions, the architects of the 1926
code sought to protect women without acknowledging gender-specific needs
that would enshrine in law the historic inequality of women that socialism
would render obsolete. The 1926 code was notable for being the last major
Soviet law introduced in order to protect women as a distinct population; from that
point forward, Soviet family law focused its energies on the protection of families.
The prioritization of the family in Soviet law developed in tandem with what
Peter Solomon has called the return to "traditional legal order," which occurred
at the same time that Stalin began to make extensive use of the weapon of extra-
legal terror against enemies.20 On February 2, 1935, the Central Committee
announced Stalin's initiative to revise and "correct" the 1924 constitution, but
by July of that year a decision was made to produce an entirely new document.
As Robert Sharlet has argued, "One of the paradoxes of Soviet history is that a
major movement to revive legality occurred at the very height of the great
purges of the thirties."21 So at the same time that millions of citizens were
accused, tried, sentenced, and in some cases executed by extralegal means, the
Soviet government expressed a renewed commitment to the law and legality as
a permanent feature of the socialist state. Throughout the summer and into the
fall of 1936, Soviet newspapers published a constant stream of editorials,
reports, and suggestions from Soviet citizens to the draft constitution.
Responses to Article 122, which explicitly addressed the rights of women,
provide a window into popular understandings of the role of women and the
family in Soviet life. Citizens debated the very existence of this article, question-
ing whether women should be accorded special protection under the constitution
(like children), or whether they (like men) should be accorded the rights and
duties of all citizens.22 Thus, the renewal of the rule of law coincided with a
shift from the state protection of women to that of children and families that
required the reinstatement of the family as a politically correct social, economic,
and political network of dependency that could be relied on as an agent of surviv-
al, stability, and prosperity. Furthermore, the public debate around the 1936
constitution, much of which took the form of letters to the editors of newspapers,

19Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 51.
20Peter H. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 153.
Robert Sharlet, "Stalinism and Soviet Legal Culture," in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation,
ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1977), 155.
22See, for example, GARF f. 3316, op. 40, d. 15, 11. 54, 105, 141; d. 18, 11. 120, 122, 123; op. 41,
d. 40, 1. 21; d. 41, 1. 3. In the end, the article describing women's unique protection as women was
retained in the final draft of the constitution. Aryeh L. Unger, Constitutional Development in the
U.S.S.R.: A Guide to the Soviet Constitutions (London: Methuen, 1981), 155-56.

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 70 LAUREN KAMÍNSKY

demonstrated real and meaningful public engagement with Soviet law as a form of
civic duty.
Then, on May 26, 1936, the draft of a new family law appeared on the front
page of Pravda with an appeal to begin a public discussion of the proposal in
the press and in factory and collective farm meetings. Two days later, another
article in Pravda identified the law's lineage with "the great Utopians, More,
Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet," whose critique of capitalism included attention
to the plight of working-class children. "This love of children and this joy of par-
enthood have been given to men by the Soviet reality. Not on an imaginary isle of
Utopia, but in this real and great country of ours the working people have found
the bliss of being free and living a full life." To reconcile this new emphasis on the
permanence of the family with earlier ideas that the family might wither away
under communism, the article continued by blaming class enemies for the
theory. "More than once the enemies of the people suggested to us the foul
and poisonous idea of liquidating the family and disrupting marriage. The bour-
geoisie has tried to use it as a weapon in the struggle against socialist progress."
Citing "slander" about the "nationalization of women," the article sought to reas-
sure the reader about the historical consistency of this official position. "The
bourgeois for whom his own family is but a thin veneer covering prostitution
and sexual debauchery, naturally thought that everyone would fall for his lie
about 'free love' in the country where the exploitation of man by man has
been abolished and women have been liberated. But he failed." On the contrary,
the Pravda article concluded that such a profound transformation had already
taken place in the Soviet family that "there is no doubt that the free woman of
our time values and loves her family differently."23
According to the introduction to the 1936 decree, the new law constituted a
response "to numerous statements made by toiling women," a reference to the
popular discussion of a draft of the decree that took place in newspapers across
the Soviet Union. While some letters to the editors of newspapers were critical
of the proposed law, many more articulated approval of the law strengthening
the family. Letters discussing the draft law's section on enforcing alimony pay-
ments elicited particular approval. As Janet Evans has argued, "Women appeared
to feel exploited by the advent of the 'new morality' in the 1920s," caught off
guard by the sudden changes in sexual behavior, in attitudes toward marriage
and divorce, and in the devaluing of motherhood that came with the expectation

23"Proekt postanovleniia TsIK i SNK Soiuza SSSR o zapreshchenii abortov, uvelichenii material'-
noi pomoshchi rozhenitsam, ustanovlenii gosudarstvennoi pomoshchi mnogosemeinym, rasshirenii
seti rodil'nykh domov, detskikh iaslei, detskikh sadov, usilenii ugolovnogo nakazaniia za neplatezh ali-
mentov i o nekotorykh izmeniiakh v zakonodatel'stve o razvodakh," Pravda, May 26, 1936. See also
Pravda, May 28, 1936, in Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia, ed. Schlesinger, 252-4. The "nationaliza-
tion of women" idea was widespread enough to be reported as fact in the New York Times. See R. E.
Simmons, "Bolshevism Bared," New York Times, February 18, 1919.

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 UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FAMILY LIFE 7 1

that women's work outside the home was synonymous with independence.24
While most letters printed in newspapers during the discussion supported the
draft law, the voices of opposition were significant. "It was no coincidence that
the Soviet government guaranteed parental responsibility at the same moment
that it outlawed abortion," David Hoffmann has argued in his analysis of
Stalinist pronatalism. "They therefore sought to buttress the family as a positive
incentive for women to have more children, at the same time that they instituted
coercive measures to prevent abortions." After a limited, temporary increase in
the number of births, in 1 938 the birthrate began to decline again and did not
rise to pre-industrialization levels, calling into question the effectiveness of the
decree as a pronatalist measure.25
One month later, on June 27, 1936, the new law was passed by decision of the
Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the
U.S.S.R. The law enacted on June 27 differed from the original draft only in that
the maximum amount of alimony that could be claimed was reduced, and the
amount invested in institutions for the care of mothers and children was increased.

There was no change in the most prominent clause of this decree that criminalized
the acts of providing and receiving an abortion, which had been legal since
November 18, 1920. All of the measures included in this 1936 decree were
united in their alleged necessity of ensuring the protection of mothers and children:
abortion was abolished "in view of the proven harm of abortions" to women;
material aid by the state was provided to women in childbirth and to those with
large families "in order to improve the material position of mothers"; the
network of maternity homes was extended "in order to extend medical service to
women in childbirth in rural localities"; the network of nurseries and kindergartens
was expanded to help mothers care for children; and penalties for the nonpayment
of alimony and the legislation of divorce were altered "with the aim of combating
light-minded attitudes toward the family and family obligations."26
While the 1936 decree has been widely seen as a turning point in the historical
narrative of Stalinist retreat from Leninist ideals, attention to its treatment of
alimony establishes striking continuity with previous Soviet family policy, demon-
strating ways in which it constituted an amplification rather than a betrayal of the

24Janet Evans, "The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Women's Question: The Case
of the 1936 Decree 'In Defense of Mother and Child,'" Journal of Contemporary History 16, no. 4 (1981):
263-65.

25 David L. Hoffmann, "Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its Pan-European

Context," Journal of Social History 34, no. 1 (2000): 45-47.
26 "Decree on the Prohibition of Abortions, the Improvement of Material Aid to Women in
Childbirth, the Establishment of State Assistance to Parents of Large Families, and the Extension of
the Network of Lying in Homes, Crèches, and Kindergartens, the Tightening-up of Criminal
Punishment for the Non-Payment of Alimony, and on Certain Modifications in Divorce
Legislation, (Decision of the C.E.C, and the Council of People's Commissars of the U.S.S.R.)," in
Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia, ed. Schlesinger, 271-78.

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 72 LAUREN KAMINSKY

1918 and 1926 codes. The 1936 decree introduced standardized percentages of the
defendant's salary that should be collected in alimony suits: one-fourth of the wages
of the defendant for the maintenance of one child; one-third of the wages of the
defendant for two children; and one-half of the wages of the defendant for
three or more children.27 Furthermore, the decree raised the penalty to two
years' imprisonment for nonpayment of sums awarded by a court for the mainte-
nance of children, with the search for persons refusing to pay alimony to be
made at their expense.28 Soviet alimony law up to and including the decree of
1936 opened up the definition of "marriage" to include more casual cohabitating
lovers, and provided fixed amounts of alimony that could be demanded by one
of these lovers from the other for the support of any children who resulted from
this union. In this light, the 1936 decree can be seen as a continuation of the cam-
paign against male irresponsibility that was at least a decade old.
Factual marriages were by nature unregistered, making them difficult to quantify
and compare in relation to the total number of registered marriages in the Soviet
Union. According to a survey administered by the Central Pediatrie Institute of
the People's Commissar of Health of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist
Republic (RSFSR), the percentage of factual marriages increased between their
survey of 5,066 mothers in 1932 and their survey of 7,200 mothers in 1937. In a
1941 memo addressed to the Chief Administrator of Judicial Organs of the
People's Commissar of Justice of The U.S.S.R., the Institute Director revealed
that 14.4 percent of mothers surveyed reported to live in factual marriages in
1932, compared to 17.7 percent in 1937. In both years, the remainder of
mothers surveyed (comprising 85.6 percent and 82.3 percent of the respective
survey pools) were counted as living in registered marriages. The memo went on
to describe that an average of 4.1 percent of all births were children born to
mothers living outside registered marriage in 1932, compared to 3.5 percent in
1937. These figures were consistent with the information provided by city registry
(ZAGS) offices, suggesting that 3 to 4 percent of children in the 1930s were born to
parents whose marriage was unregistered. Of the 45,998 children whose births were
registered in the city of Moscow in 1938, for example, an average of 3.3 percent
(1,518 births) were registered without the father, indicating the absence of a regis-
tered marriage. The report concluded that "the percent of births outside marriage,
3.5 percent, corresponds to the number of children whose birth is registered without
the father, 3.3 percent." Moscow city registry offices were consistent in reporting
that 3 to 4 percent of births were registered without the father, a strong indication
that this was also the proportion of factual marriages.29

27 Section 8, "On Severer Penalties for the Non-Payment of Alimony and Alterations in the
Legislation on Divorce," Article 29. The following statute stipulates that "Payments to collective
farm women should to be made in labor-days on the same basis." Ibid., 278.
2bSee Statute 31, ibid., 279.
29GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, 1. 54.

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 UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FAMILY LIFE 73

However fragmentary, the data suggest that there was a critical mass of people
living in factual marital relations, people whom the Soviet government accorded
protection under the law and who could therefore make legitimate alimony
claims. The nature of these claims, however, was further complicated by the con-
siderable slippage in use of the term alimony (alimenty), which was used to refer to
both child support and spousal support. One consistent complaint about
Soviet alimony policy was the insinuation that alimony payments were squan-
dered on the upkeep of unemployed single mothers rather than their children,
and that efforts to prevent this abuse were insufficient. The number of citizens
in unregistered unions who were eligible for alimony but who did not take advan-
tage of the new laws most likely outnumbered even legitimate alimony claims after
the dissolution of unregistered unions. Nevertheless, the notion that women
whose marriages were unregistered preyed on registered families for livelihood
in the form of alimony payments loomed large in the popular imagination.

Popular Opposition to Soviet Alimony Law

In June 1940, the Soviet women's magazine Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker) pub-
lished an article entitled "Legal Consultation (Alimony)" by Maria Grechukha, the
Head of the People's Court Department of the Commissariat of Justice of the
U.S.S.R. Grechukha's article was printed in the back of the magazine, an area rou-
tinely filled with recipes, dress patterns, and advice columns. It appeared directly
below an article on menopause written by a professor from the Commissariat of
Health, suggesting that both menopause and alimony were facts of women's lives
that required démystification by experts. The article began by citing the June
1936 decree, which "clearly emphasizes what enormous care and love surrounds
mothers and children in our country." Based on this decree, Grechukha argued
that the task of the Soviet court, "careful to protect the rights of mothers and chil-
dren, is to lead the struggle against light-minded attitudes toward family and family
responsibilities, and to struggle against remnants of capitalism in questions of moral-
ity." The article enumerated the improvements in the way that alimony cases were
handled (including taking measures to establish the residence and place of employ-
ment of the defendant, and declaring a search by the militia when necessary), but
the main purpose of her advice was to acquaint readers with the legal process
involved in an alimony suit. As justification for this explanation, Grechukha
noted that the editors of Rabotnitsa published her article in response to letters
from readers asking for assistance in understanding the complicated processes
surrounding the claim and receipt of alimony payments under Soviet law.30

30Maria Grechukha, "Iuridicheskaia konsul'tatsiia (Alimenty)" ["Legal Consultation (Alimony)"],

Rabotnitsa, June 1940.

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 74 LAUREN KAMINSKY

According to Grechukha's article, every mother had the right to submit an

application to her local ZAGS office naming the father of her child either
during the pregnancy or after the birth. The mother's application to establish
paternity required the name, patronymic, surname, and residence of the father
of the child, and after the birth the mother had the right to sue the father of
her child for alimony. If the court awarded alimony, one-quarter of the defen-
dant's wages was required for one child, one-third of his wages was required
for two children, and one-half of his wages was required for three or more chil-
dren. Furthermore, Grechukha explained, when children could not receive
means from the father (for example, if he died or disappeared) and the mother
had no sufficient means to support them, minor children had the right to
receive maintenance from financially secure grandparents or older brothers or
sisters. Grechukha concluded her "consultation" by imploring the active
readers of Rabotnitsa to acquaint other women with the rules governing
alimony, the submission of alimony claims, and Soviet laws on alimony, since citi-
zens' understanding of the alimony laws facilitated the work of the people's
courts.31 Grechukha's article testified to the Soviet state's interest in allying
itself with women in general and mothers in particular, publicizing attempts to
identify, prioritize, and satisfy women's needs. In this way, the Soviet state
positioned itself as the third-party arbiter that would oversee the transfer of
funds from family to family rather than being the source of single mothers'
financial support.
In response to Grechukha's article on alimony, readers sent letters to the editors
of Rabotnitsa offering their own opinions on Soviet alimony law, and the editors
forwarded these letters to the Commissariat of Justice. The note that accompanied
the forwarded letters simply stated that the editors of Rabotnitsa enclosed collec-
tive and individual letters received from women-workers regarding amendments
and additions to the alimony law.32 The editors continued to forward bundles of
letters throughout the following year, as letters from readers continued to arrive.33
In stark contrast to the letters published in Rabotnitsa, the unpublished letters
found in the archives were unanimously critical of the opinions expressed in
the pages of the magazine, which were a reiteration of official Soviet policy.
And unlike published letters, there is no reason to suspect the authenticity or
authorship of these unpublished letters, since they were made available only to
the editors to whom they were addressed and to bureaucrats within the
Commissariat of Justice. Official published discourse certainly adhered closely
to state policy, bowing to the demands of political convention, but archives

31 Births, deaths, marriages, and divorces were registered in the official record at any organ of the
Zapis' aktov QrazhdanskoQO sostoianiia (ZAGS). Ibid.
32GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 399, 1. 63.
33See, for example, GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 399, 1. 87 and 1. 113.

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 UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FAMILY LIFE 75

reveal rich unpublished sources that illustrate the variety of political opinions
espoused by Soviet citizens.
Like its sister periodical, Kresťianka (The Peasant Woman), Rabotnitsa was a
popular party publication for women, "a magazine by women-workers for
women- workers," as the inside cover of each issue announced. Whereas
women's magazines in capitalist countries trafficked in bourgeois models of fem-
inine behavior aimed at middle-class women (or women aspiring to middle-class
status), Rabotnitsa1 s model of womanhood combined prerevolutionary traditions,
including the Orthodox Church's emphasis on the sanctity of motherhood and
the literary trope of the strong, self-sacrificing Russian peasant woman. As
Aleksandra Kollontai wrote in Rabotnitsa in 1946, "I always promoted the idea
that the woman must have the right to build a new life in the socialist state and
to be a citizen with full rights, but never to forget that her second obligation is
motherhood." The difficulties inherent in this "second shift" were especially
felt by single mothers, a problem frequently discussed in the pages of
Rabotnitsa. Readers were encouraged to contribute to the magazine on an ad
hoc basis and also as regular worker or peasant correspondents, but control of
the magazine was largely in the hands of the professional editors, members of
the party tasked with selecting and editing all published content. It was these
editors who received letters protesting Soviet alimony law and sent them to the
Commissariat of Justice. Since publishing these protest letters would have been
impossible, and discarding them might seem inadequately vigilant, the editors'
decision to forward the letters was likely the most conservative option, perhaps
even motivated by an earnest desire to see justice prevail.34
In November 1940, the editors of Rabotnitsa received a letter from a woman
named Fedotova. "An old woman, a citizen with full rights, a mother who has
lost any kind of shame, conscience, and pity, writes to you about the freedom
of the Soviet woman," she began. "I speak about the 'alimony hunter' - a
woman who violates the rights of family men, whose personal life is supported
by the healthy family and the unknowing state, who does not wish for her
own holy of holies, femininity and morality." In her indictment, Fedotova com-
pared herself to the many women who were "abused by law," necessitating the
reconsideration and alteration of Soviet law to "reduce the appetites" of the
"alimony hunter." Fedotova based her villainous depiction of the "alimony

34Published regularly (monthly or bimonthly) after 1923, Rabotnitsa s circulation was quite large:
from 165,000 subscribers in 1928, it reached 400,000 in 1941. Circulation rose again in the
postwar era and peaked in the Brezhnev era, when it was counted in the millions. Since magazines
could be passed between friends, family members, and coworkers, the actual number of people
reading Rabotnitsa was probably even higher than these figures suggest, and the vast majority of
those people were undoubtedly women. Lynne Attwood, Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women's
Magazines As Engineers of Female Identity, Í 922- 53, Studies in Russian and East European History
and Society (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 12-14, 26-30, 174.

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 76 LAUREN KAMINSKY

hunter" on personal experience, but she presented her personal circumstances as a

microcosm of Soviet society as a whole. "I recount the facts only from my family,
and they will show by example how all people live," Fedotova wrote, explaining
that her two adult sons remained unmarried because they are already "bound
hand and foot by women - 'huntresses.'"35 According to Fedotova, the fault
for these out-of-wedlock pregnancies and the financial burdens they intro-
duced - and therefore the fault for her sons' persistent bachelorhood - lay
squarely on the single mothers who took advantage of Soviet alimony law.
Part of her anger was therefore directed at the architects of Soviet law and
family policy who positioned themselves as the protectors of single mothers.
Like Fedotova, many letter writers addressed the financial hardship caused by
the laws regarding alimony, which they considered to be unfair. Soviet family law
in the Stalin-era allowed for the very real possibility that an alimony suit brought
against a relative could cause the financial ruin of families. This was due in part to
the fact that alimony law was written explicitly in favor of abandoned single
mothers, shifting the burden of proof to their male lovers - and unintentionally
burdening the other members of these men's families. Fedotova concluded her
letter with a warning: "It has reached the point that men have begun to avoid
women, in each of whom they see the inclination toward alimony." Presenting
Soviet alimony law as a force favoring single women, destroying men's trust in
women, and therefore undermining families, Fedotova narrated a scenario in
which registered marriages and legitimate children were threatened by
alimony-hunting single mothers. It is "hard to live in this atmosphere," she com-
plained, arguing, "the law on alimony should and must be changed, if not by con-
sciousness then by law, since law awakens consciousness in women." In
Fedotova's opinion, it was the duty of Soviet law to change women's attitudes
toward alimony and the family "so that their behavior does not disgrace or soil
honest women worthy of the name Soviet women, having full equal rights."36
Suggesting that the law be brought in line with popular values so that it could
in turn reinforce those values, Fedotova articulated a circular logic of the law as
an expression of the will of the people indoctrinated by it.
Fedotova was not alone in blaming "alimony hunters" for jeopardizing the
stability of the Soviet family. In December 1940, a group of women sent a
letter to the editors of Rabotnitsa addressed to the "collective of our Soviet

country" and signed it Shuchkina, Sak, Efimova, and Kolotinova. "Devote

more and more attention to the backward and uncultured life of women who
behave shamelessly and ruthlessly toward their husbands and children," they
wrote, recounting the story of Pavlov, a twenty-five-year-old man who purport-
edly shot himself over alimony paid to a "backward and uncultured" woman.

ibGARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, 1. 5.

36GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, 1. 7.

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 UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FAMILY LIFE 77

Pavlov was married to Liuba Klemenko, "who got pregnant and abandoned him
because she didn't like him." She later married a railroad mechanic, "a toiler for
the Soviet country," with whom she lived for six years and had two more chil-
dren. "Liuba's husband was a member of the party and always busy with work,
and Liuba was a kept woman who never did anything but go to the store . . .
the children were most often found under the supervision of the street."
According to these letter writers, "Liuba is always made up and dressed up, strol-
ling everywhere, because her husband is a great worker for the Soviet nation.
When he gets home, he finds his wife away from home one, two, and then
three times. He has to wash the children and tidy up the bedroom himself
because Liuba is busy gossiping and has no time. He tolerated it, and then sud-
denly one day, he chased her out." The letter writers claimed that Liuba felt
guilty about the failure of her second marriage, and then remembered her first
husband, Pavlov.37
According to the letter, Liuba took Pavlov to court after her second marriage
ended, claiming that Pavlov abandoned her with their child. The Petrovsk region
court allegedly tried Pavlov in absentia and ruled that he pay Liuba alimony. For
the previous five years, Pavlov had been married to his second wife, with whom
he had a three-year-old son and one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. "The night
after the first 300 rubles were withheld from Pavlov's paycheck, leaving him
and his family with five rubles in their hands, he shot himself, leaving his
happy family fatherless," they wrote, using Pavlov's sad story to criticize
Soviet alimony law. "The government thinks that everyone lives well and it's
necessary to take twenty-five percent from everyone," they reasoned, "but it's
not so easy when she abandoned him, drove him out, robbed him, and then
sued him in court and robbed him again - taking away his last kopeks from his
family." They insisted that alimony was a punishment too severe for a man
who worked hard, had a family, and respected the law. "In the event that a
man abandons his happy family, if he is absent and tardy at work, then we
need a basic court to which he can be brought." On the contrary, they argued,
women who collected alimony should be punished. "If a wife leaves her
husband and marries many times, and then gives it some thought and seeks out
someone weak from whom to grab more resources, since she doesn't work and
lives her whole life off of someone else's honest labor, she needs to be con-
demned." The main opposition these writers had to Soviet alimony law was
therefore the advantage that it gave to single women: "It seems to us that
where there are more women, there should be stricter laws."38
By characterizing women as selfish and untrustworthy, Shuchkina, Sak,
Efimova, and Kolotinova echoed Fedotova's demonization of the "alimony

37GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, 1. 8.

38Ibid.

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 78 LAUREN KAMÍNSKY

hunter" as a failed mother, wife, and worker undeserving of material assistance.

Evoking caricatures of the "NEP [New Economic Policy] wives" from the
1920s, the letter writers' representations of women who received alimony pay-
ments were thoroughly cloaked in the iconic imagery of the class enemy.39
And like the "new woman," whose proliferation troubled nations across
Europe in the 1920s, the "alimony hunter" was a product of war, industriali-
zation, and urbanization.40 A fictional example of this trope can be found in
Abram Room's 1927 film Bed and Sofa (released in the Soviet Union under the
title Third Meshchanskaya), in which a husband invited an old acquaintance to
stay in the room he shared with his wife. Frustrated by housework, the wife's
affections shifted to the more attentive boarder, and he and the husband traded
places on the bed and the sofa. When she discovered that she was pregnant, the
two potential fathers (both of whom announced themselves as her husband) sent
her to a clinic to have an abortion. Disgusted, she fled the clinic and the two men,
deciding to have the baby on her own and leaving the men without a woman to
wash and cook for them.41 While exemplary of a theme in journalism, literature,
and film in this period, Bed and Sofa was exceptional in the degree to which the
female character was not only given the power to choose between her two men
(or to have them both if she pleased), but also the independence to escape from
the love triangle and live on her own. As vehicles for connections between
men, shared women facilitated one set of early Soviet values - collectivism and
comradeship - at the same time that they seemed to embody fears of sexual
depravity and the dissolution of the family.
Makeup, fashionable clothes, dancing, and strolling appeared in women's
letters about alimony as pointedly nonproductive symbols of bourgeois deca-
dence that implicated alimony claimants as class enemies. That this characteriza-
tion was so consistent in women's letters suggests that makeup and fashionable
clothes - symbols of consumption, independence, and sexuality - rendered the
maternity of alimony claimants unrecognizable. Averse to reflections of their
own femininity, the writers declared themselves to be good mothers and citizens
by denouncing women marked by autonomous female sexuality. In contrast, the
people whom the "alimony hunter" was accused of hurting (Fedotova's bachelor
sons, Fedotova herself, Liuba's second husband, Pavlov and his widow) were

39 "NEP wives" were the women who benefited financially from their husbands' involvement in
the New Economic Policy (NEP), a policy introduced by Lenin in 1921 to allow for some private
businesses while the state controlled banking and major industries. As the gap between impoverished
peasants and rich merchants grew, merchants' wives were maligned as bourgeois consumers of luxury
goods who did not work. Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 181-207.
40See, for example, Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar
France, 1917-Î927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
41Jay Leyda, Kino: Л History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.,
1960), 214-16.

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 UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FAMILY LIFE 79

portrayed in the letters as exemplary workers and citizens. Young mothers who
accepted alimony payments were thus depicted not only as wreckers of
"healthy" Soviet families, but also as criminals, parasites, and vagrants, nonpro-
ductive elements who preyed on the trust and goodwill of the Soviet state,
law, and society.
Many letters about alimony were written collectively by groups of women. In
another letter of this type, nine women who identified themselves as "the Office
of Doctor G. F. Bodganova" sent a letter to Rabotnitsa asking the government "to
establish the law of a correct life." They sought the elimination of alimony pay-
ments to unregistered spouses, "since in most cases these accusations prove to be
false and those who are not at all guilty have to pay. Because of it an unhealthy,
crippled home life is created, there are divorces, family depravity, etc. We ask the
government not to encourage casual connections."42 Another letter was signed
by thirty-three women who identified themselves as "a collective of women-
workers from the Consumers' Cooperatives of the Blagoveshensky Factory of
the Bashkir Republic, composed of sixty-six people."43 This letter offered the
example of a male coworker who found himself with only forty-three rubles
to spend on each of his six dependents after alimony payments were deducted
from his salary each month. The writers concluded that the payment of
alimony without a marriage certificate must stop, since only this "can eliminate
debauch in life and put an end to obvious disgraces." The pattern established
by these group letters was one that made the strongest impression possible
while requiring the least possible personal risk. There was strength in numbers
in the logic of Soviet ideology, where a collective based in a factory or office
was less likely to be accused of acting out of self-interest or dismissed for being
out of touch with the needs or opinions of workers. This kind of letter was
written from the perspective of model citizens who understood themselves to
be doing a great service by drawing the attention of the authorities to some
"omission" in the law that should be addressed.44
The Ministry of Justice apparently received so many letters from citizens
regarding alimony that letters were summarized and grouped together based on
their proposals, goals, and conclusions. One such chart cataloged twenty-two
letters received in 1940 and 1941, of which four were written collectively by
more than one author. These collectively written letters included a letter
signed by nine coworkers from Chimkent Communication Management, a
letter signed by three women (Alekseeva, Valueva, and Pindiurina), a letter
signed by a woman named Ivanova and 163 other people, and the letter signed

42GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, 1. 142.

4JGARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, 11. 132-133. The Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was
part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which constituted the largest and most popu-
lous republic of the Soviet Union.
44GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, 1. 141.

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 80 LAUREN KAMINSKY

by thirty-three women workers from the Bashkir Republic, quoted above.45 All
of the twenty-two letters cataloged included some proposal that the law should be
changed so that alimony would only be paid in cases where the marriage had been
officially registered, calling for the reinstatement of a legal distinction between
registered and unregistered marriages. Furthermore, the demographic diversity
of the letter writers accounted for in these catalogs reflects the degree to which
this anxiety about the stability of the family crossed class, ethnic, and regional
boundaries. Collective farm workers, factory workers, teachers, doctors, and
housewives alike all signed their names to letters of protest in response to
Soviet alimony law, demonstrating that alimony was a fact of life for all
women, rich and poor, urban and rural.
One letter sent by a woman named E. Nesterova stands out as beautifully
written by someone who was clearly comfortable expressing herself in writing,
and who therefore was probably well educated. Like the other letter writers,
Nesterova made her case by allying herself with the goals of the Soviet party-
state, in this case by praising the state for its accomplishment in passing a law
"on work and work discipline that soundly chased out loafers and drifters."
She quoted party slogans and celebrated this new law for the ways in which it
would restore the advantage to "the fair worker, the citizen of the Great Soviet
Union." To that end, Nesterova wrote, it was also necessary to change the law
on alimony for the education of children, a law that "has become outdated and
does not justify itself." Like the other letters, Nesterova's primary critique of
Soviet alimony law was that it protected the wrong women. "Under the letter
of the law there has arisen a new type, 'the housewife,' whose income depends
upon the reception of alimony," she wrote. Nesterova then narrated the
example of one "former family X": after the mother and father of two children
divorced, the children remained with the father and the mother remarried.
With the advent of the alimony law ruling the deduction of twenty-five
percent from the father for the education of children, this woman decided to
take custody of the five-year-old, leaving the father with the other child. The
father was then forced to pay alimony in the sum of 400 rubles ("on which a
whole family could live"), and in Nesterova's estimation, the mother was there-
fore "twice provided for." Nesterova's studiously objective argument continues
with a flurry of rhetorical questions: "Why in the allotment for children does
the law award to the woman alimony payments if she brought the divorce?
Why is only the man obliged to feed the children even if they have agreed to
split them up? Why is this worker depersonalized, denied the right to speak as
a person? Why does the law ask for neither his opinion nor his reasons?"46

45GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, 11. 132-133.

46GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, 1. 18.

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 UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FAMILY LIFE 81

Nesterova grounded her argument in the equal rights of women, reminding

the reader that "women in our country have been given the right to study and
to earn equal qualifications and equal right to pay (based on ability). Our
women (we shout) have grown in all areas of work as citizens who labor for
the Soviet Union. So why are these citizens given protection by the law from
equality in rights and duties in the education of one's own child?" Nesterova's
answer to "this awkward question" was to limit alimony payments to "the
CERTAIN SUM that would suffice for the education ONLY of the CHILD."
With such a limitation on alimony, Nesterova explained, the state could
protect the rights of children without an undue burden on parents. "Children
are not guilty," she wrote. "But upon the divorce of parents the woman is
obliged to work instead of living off the support of the child. Limiting the sum
to the education of the child will force the mother to care for the child and to
work herself." For all the differences between Nesterova's letter and the others,
her scorn was similarly reserved for single women who collected alimony but
did not work, and also like the others she called for greater restrictions on
alimony to protect society from these women.47
Finally, near the end of her letter, Nesterova's argument took a personal turn:
"I live with a husband paying alimony. I love my husband, and I wish to live with
him, but my salary and my husband's salary together does not give us the sum of
money for each of our children to have as much as his first wife receives. This
injustice has forced me to write such a letter, to which I ask you to respond . . .
It seems to me that regarding marriage-divorce laws it is necessary to stop and
develop a law appropriate to the demands of contemporary life." Nesterova
characterized herself and her husband as responsible workers and devoted
parents; in contrast, she portrayed her husband's ex- wife as lazy, manipulative,
and selfish. Nesterova's criticism was not that alimony should not be paid for
the maintenance and education of children after the divorce of their parents,
but rather that alimony should not be levied universally. Arguing that the hus-
band's ex-wife did not deserve his salary when she divorced him and did not
work, Nesterova argued for the conditional distribution of alimony according
to her system of family values, in which monetary value was connected to worthi-
ness and usefulness to society.
Although the inclusion of statements attesting to the righteousness of the
Soviet state and its people were almost certainly a technique used by letter
writers to gain the favor of their readers, these affirmations of loyalty most
likely contain at least a grain of truth. Considering the helplessness that women
such as Nesterova must have felt as they saw their husbands' salaries diverted
from their children to the children of their husbands' ex- wives, it must have
taken a firm belief in the goodwill of Soviet authorities to continue to write

47GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, 1. 18ob. Emphasis in original.

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 82 LAUREN KAMÍNSKY

such letters. As statements of faith in Soviet power and articulations of the logic of
Soviet law, these letters demonstrate citizens' dutiful participation in Soviet legal
culture. In writing to Soviet authorities, citizens such as Nesterova were not only
confirming their faith and loyalty to the state, but also demanding a change in the
way that the Soviet Union was governed. In claiming privileged status as good
citizens, these writers were able to criticize the decisions of the Soviet leaders
responsible for the alimony laws without dissenting from the overall mission of
the state itself. That this vociferous protest happened at all in the Stalin era shatters
many notions of the supposedly totalitarian Soviet state; that these letters of
protest were written in the wake of the Stalinist purges is especially remarkable.
The experience of the Great Terror may have even reinforced the idea that
denunciation was an everyday practice of loyal citizenship, an ethical obligation
of men and women who were politically engaged and eager to see the Soviet col-
lective improved.
Despite the fact that it was legal for a woman to sue the father of her child for
alimony regardless of whether their union had been registered, women's protest
letters exhibited contempt for those who took advantage of the law. These writers
argued that instead of protecting single mothers, the law should favor "healthy"
Soviet families by discouraging divorce and extra-marital sex. By allying them-
selves with the goals of the authorities they addressed in their appeals, these citi-
zens protested what they understood to be injustice in Soviet governance. Their
understanding of justice was based on a moral system tolerant of the redistribution
of wealth but only as long as it happened according to a hierarchy of worthiness,
in which some individuals and families were more valuable than others. In

accordance with the Leninist principle, "He who does not work, neither shall
he eat," these letters assumed that rights were not inalienable, but rather contin-
gent on the fulfillment of duties.48 According to the authors of these letters, the
main problem with Soviet alimony law was that illegitimate children had the right
to fixed percentages of their father's income while his legitimate children did not.
In some cases, they argued, illegitimate children received a greater percentage of
the father's salary than did his legitimate children - a prospect that horrified the
wives and mothers of men forced to pay alimony. In the zero-sum game of house-
hold economics, those who protested the laws on alimony saw other women's
gains as their losses, and they understood these losses to be unjust due to their
belief that children born in registered marriages had a greater claim to support
than those who were not.

48 The phrase, "he who does not work, neither shall he eat," appeared in Lenin's State and Revolution
(chapter 5, part 3) and in the 1936 "Stalin" Constitution (chapter 1, article 12). Vladimir Ilich Lenin,
The State and Revolution, trans. Robert Service (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 85. Unger,
Constitutional Development in the U.S.S.R., 141.

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 UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FAMILY LIFE 83

The Postwar Protection of Families

Women who wrote letters protesting Soviet alimony law argued that the party-
state would do a better service to women by shifting the focus from the protection
of women to the protection of family integrity. This concern on the part of citi-
zens dovetailed with the opinions of lawyers, judges, clerks, and other legal pro-
fessionals whose wartime articles and memos expressed frustration with the flood
of alimony cases overwhelming the resources of courts, especially provincial
courts that found the prospect of judging the veracity of alimony claims particu-
larly bewildering. In a letter sent to the Commissar of Justice, an employee of the
Gorky Regional Appeals Department explained the inherent difficulties involved
in the enforcement of the law. "In the practical work on alimony penalties," he
wrote, "meeting defendants is often very difficult, if only because the summons is
investigated lightly and in certain cities we have nothing to go on but the defen-
dant's given name, patronymic, family name, and other basic information, such as
the year or place of birth." He went on to explain the problem of mistaken iden-
tities involving common surnames, in which case the defendant "then has to
spend a long time proving the truth before the court will release him from
illegal alimony withdrawals."49 A memo from an unknown writer from the
Ministry of Justice corroborated the problems faced by those charged with the
enforcement of the law on alimony. "I see our practical work in court, how
often suits are brought against people absolutely not involved, but who are hit
with the suit by persons who hope to collect alimony because of their high
salary. In fact, under the existing decree it is quite enough to name the
surname of a person and have one witness in order to begin collecting
alimony, and against this nothing helps." To remedy the situation, he wrote,
"it is necessary to reconsider this law radically and to establish that only at a
divorce of a registered marriage is it possible to collect alimony ... it is necessary
to publish such a law as soon as possible."50
The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. introduced a new family
law on July 8, 1944, just five days after Red Army troops took Minsk as part of the
massive Operation Bagration that drove the German army out of Belorussia, a
vital step toward victory almost one year later.51 The peculiar timing of this
family law passed during total warfare was most likely a measure to resolve the
confusion over alimony before the return of demobilized soldiers from the
front. According to the 1944 law, legal family relationships no longer existed
except on the basis of a registered marriage or of common descent from an
unmarried mother. This was a major departure from all previous Soviet law,

49GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, 11. 9, 11.

50GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d. 404, 1. 135.
bl Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1 939-Í 945 (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2006), 263-98.

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 84 LAÜREN KAMINSKY

which defined legal family relationships only on the basis of "common blood."
For the first time, fatherhood outside wedlock created neither rights nor obli-
gations. In essence, this law restored to Soviet society the distinction between
children born in and out of wedlock that had been abolished with the first
Soviet Family Code of 1918. The introduction to the 1944 law offered an expla-
nation of its necessity: "In safeguarding the interests of mother and child, the state
is rendering great material aid to pregnant women and mothers for the support
and upbringing of their children. During and after the war, when many families
face more considerable material difficulties, a further extension of state aid
measures is necessary."52 With the experience of total war and the passage of
this law, the Soviet experiment with paternal responsibility was pushed aside in
favor of a restoration of the nuclear family more in line with popular family values.
The family law of 1944 curtailed the responsibilities of fathers while promising
that the state would step in to provide the support no longer required of men. To
afford this expansion of the social support provided by the state, the 1944 law also
instituted "Taxes on Bachelors, Single Citizens, and Citizens of the U.S.S.R. with
Small Families."53 To some degree, if only symbolically, this tax meant that every
bachelor and every woman with less than three children paid for the illegitimate
children of the Soviet Union. In her study of pronatalist policies that aimed to
replace the dead in the postwar Soviet Union, Mie Nakachi has argued that
the 1944 law was introduced to counteract the population shortage and gender
imbalance perpetuated by high death rates and low birthrates during the war.
What changed with the 1944 family law, drafted in 1943 by Ukrainian party
leader Nikita Khrushchev, was a shift in focus away from very large peasant-
style families to focus on "the pragmatic task of convincing small families, the
vast majority, to have just one more" child.54 By broadening the category of
mothers eligible for state support to include not only unregistered wives but

52"Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. on increase of State aid to preg-
nant women, mothers with many children, and unmarried mothers; on strengthening measures for the
protection of motherhood and childhood; on the establishment of the title 'Heroine Mother'; and on
the institution of the order 'Motherhood Glory' and the 'Motherhood Medal,'" in Changing Attitudes
in Soviet Russia, ed. Schlesinger, 367.
The tax applied to childless men (ages twenty to fifty) and women (ages twenty to forty-five), as
well as citizens with one or two children. Exempt from this new tax were service men, service officers,
wives of service men, women receiving assistance or pensions from the state for the support of children,
citizens whose children perished or disappeared on the fronts of the patriotic war, students of secondary
or higher educational institutions (limited to men and women under twenty-five years of age), and
invalids. According to the terminology used in the law, every unmarried man was legally childless,
and an "unmarried" man was one who had never been married. Section IV, articles 16-18, and
section V, article 19. Ibid., 372-3.
54 To encourage all women to have more than two children, government aid for mothers began
with a one-time subsidy upon the birth of a third child, and monthly subsidies were provided for
five years following the third child's second birthday. Mie Nakachi, "N. S. Khrushchev and the
1944 Soviet Family Law: Politics, Reproduction, and Language," East European Politics and Societies
20, no. 1 (2006): 46-50.

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 UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FAMILY LIFE 85

also war widows (whose marriages may or may not have been registered), the
architects of this law prevented women without legal husbands from suing
other women's husbands for alimony. The ramifications of this law can be seen
most dramatically from the perspective of these single women, many of whom
had long-term sexual partners but whose liaisons were not registered and who
were therefore no longer considered legally married after 1944. This new
policy eliminated the threat of the "alimony hunter" to those in registered mar-
riages, but it also rendered single mothers more vulnerable than they had been
since the revolution. Their children suddenly illegitimate, bearing all of the pre-
revolutionary stigmas that illegitimacy implied, unmarried women found them-
selves reliant on state aid for the assistance that had previously been the
responsibility of their children's fathers.
The 1944 law also required couples to establish serious grounds for divorce, and
its effect on the divorce rate was profound. Postwar legal opinions were inclined
not to consider adultery alone grounds for divorce, but as Sheila Fitzpatrick has
argued, they "were inclined to grant divorces if the unfaithful partner had actually
set up a new de facto partnership and if a child had been born to it."55 Thus, while
temporary infidelity was inadequate cause for divorce, the existence of another
unregistered union was grounds to dissolve a registered marriage, revealing
both anxiety about the stability of registered marriage and fears of polygamy
after the war. The immediate postwar years witnessed divorce cases involving
relatively young spouses, workers, or servicemen in their 20s and 30s who sur-
vived the fighting at the front and the German occupation but whose marriages
were in many cases casualties of war. In a number of divorce cases, one spouse
established a second family (built on an unregistered marriage) as a result of sep-
aration and consequential infidelity during the evacuation.56 On the other end of
the age spectrum, divorce cases brought by older, long-married spouses were
given priority in some areas, because it was assumed that a significant number
of these cases were brought by spouses already in other factual marriages.57 By
prioritizing these cases where unregistered marriages were thought to exist simul-
taneously with registered marriages, Soviet courts expressed concern about the
possibilities for polygamy allowed by the abrupt shift in Soviet family law on
the one hand, and the tumult of war on the other. Although the 1944 law
attempted to delegitimize unregistered unions, in a way some courts implicitly

55The average number of divorces in Moscow just before the war was around 10-12,000 each year.
During the war, the number of divorces dropped to just less than 4,000 per year in 1943 and 1944, but
in 1945, after the new law went into effect, the number of divorces dropped to 679. Although the war
certainly contributed to the plummeting divorce rate, the disconnect between the sharp drop in the
number of divorces in the same year that evacuees and soldiers began to return home demonstrates the
efficacy of the restrictions on divorce introduced in 1944. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! Identity
and Imposture in Twentieth- Century Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 256-8.
3öSee, for example, GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d.491, 1.57.
57See, for example, GARF f. 9492, op. 1, d.491, 1.126.

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 86 LAUREN KAMINSKY

privileged them by referring to them as new marriages that therefore necessitated

the dissolution of the first union, even though the first was a supposedly more
legitimate registered marriage.
While this backhanded recognition of unregistered unions in divorce cases
could be understood as an exceptional necessity of postwar disorder, Soviet au-
thorities continued to recognize unregistered unions as marriages a full decade
after 1944. Party Control Commission (KPK) reports of investigations into the
personal lives of party members were littered with references to unregistered mar-
riages into the mid-1950s. Letters of denunciation and other documents that
sparked KPK investigations of Party members' personal lives frequently cited
"amoral behavior," "an unworthy way of life," "behaving improperly in life,"
and a failure to achieve "normal family relations." These reports rarely noted
any punishment for improper or amoral behavior, evidence of the distinction
between a criminal act and a moral violation. Whereas criminal activity was
tried in courts and punished by the KPK, moral or familial infractions were
rarely a violation of any law. Nevertheless, un-party-like behavior was mentioned
alongside the criminal accusations to implicate the accused (framing him as
someone who lacked discipline as a way of being rather than presenting him as
a good party member who may or may not have committed an infraction).
The KPK thereby serves as an excellent source for evidence of cultural and
moral norms as separate from legal norms. Above and beyond that which was
codified in law, the moral wrongdoings detailed in KPK reports illustrate the
practices that shaped Soviet culture in the postwar period.
In his work on postwar party discipline, Ed Cohn has shown that the 1944 law
led to greater party intrusion in the personal lives of party communists. "Between
1945 and 1953, the proportion of expulsions appealed to the KPK that dealt with
family issues rose from 2.78% to 7.88%, reaching a high of 9.22% in 1951." In
1948 and 1949 in particular, at least forty percent of appeals of what Cohn calls
"morals cases" explicitly mentioned the 1944 family law, and most of these
cases involved a man who violated Soviet legislation on the family in one way
or another.58 In many cases, KPK reports described unregistered unions simply
as marriages, without specifying which marriages were registered and which
were "factual," until the paragraph where the party member was scolded for
neglecting to register a particular marriage.59 One example of this tacit acknowl-
edgment of unregistered marriages in the postwar era can be seen in the case of

58 Cohn interprets as related to family misconduct any case involving "unworthy conduct in every-
day life" ora "violation of the law on marriage and the family." Edward Cohn, "Disciplining the Party:
The Expulsion and Censure of Communists in the Post- War Soviet Union, 1945-1961" (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Chicago, 2007), 382-4, n. 34.
For examples of unregistered marriages cited as evidence in Komissiia partiinogo kontrol'ia (here-
after KPK) investigations, see Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkiv noveishei istorii (hereafter RGANI) f.6,
op.6, d.1599, 1. 41.

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 UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FAMILY LIFE 87

Comrade Ivanov. In January 1951, the KPK received an anonymous letter accus-
ing Ivanov, the party secretary of the Rostov regional committee of the
Communist Party, of "behaving improperly in life." Characterizing Ivanov as a
drunk who abandoned his wife and two children, the letter accused him of mar-
rying another woman, a doctor who stayed in occupied German territory during
the war and "led an unworthy way of life." The denunciation prompted a KPK
investigation, which revealed that Ivanov's bad behavior involved "breaking
established normal family relations" and marrying three times. The memo sum-
marizing the investigation noted that all three marriages were unregistered.60
In 1930, Ivanov went to Moscow to study, leaving his first wife in the prov-
inces, ending a marriage that was never registered. Then, in 1933, while he
was working in the Black Sea region, Ivanov married Comrade Radchenko,
with whom he lived for ten years, during which time she bore and raised a son
and a daughter. The investigator noted that Radchenko considered the break-
up of the family to be caused by Ivanov's light-minded attitudes toward
women, whereas Ivanov's son (also a party member) laid the blame for the
break-up of the family on Radchenko and not Ivanov. Then, in 1943, the year
that Radchenko gave birth to their daughter, Ivanov married Valentina
Titenko, whose husband was thought to be missing in action. In 1945, when
Valentina's husband returned from the front, she refused to live with him and
remained married to Ivanov. The KPK investigation corroborated the claim
that Titenko remained in Rostov during the German occupation of 1942-43,
adding that she worked as a doctor in a children's poly clinic. The memo summa-
rizing the investigation concluded by adding that the secretary of the party orga-
nization of the Rostov regional committee and other members of the party did not
confirm his supposed drunkenness and characterized him as a reliable comrade. As
a consequence of the investigation, no disciplinary action was taken.61
A gendered difference of opinion can be seen in the KPK report between the
men involved in the case (Ivanov's son, his boss, and his fellow party members)
who sided with Ivanov, and the women - namely, Radchenko. As the woman
married to Ivanov longest and the only one with whom he had children,
Radchenko was the woman in his life who had the most to lose. Radchenko 's
testimony was suspiciously close to the claims made in the initial denunciation,
suggesting that she may in fact have been the anonymous letter writer.
Furthermore, Radchenko's anger over the fact that Ivanov left her with a
newborn baby for Titenko may explain why the denunciation of Ivanov insinu-
ates that his new bride behaved shamefully during the war - a common trope in a
period rife with fears that those who survived the German occupation were guilty
of appeasement at best and treason at worst. The wide gap separating

ÀRGANI f.6, op.6, d.1599, 11. 7-8.

61 Ibid.

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 88 LAUREN KAMINSKY

Radchenko's story from that of Ivanov's male defenders - and the fact that the
investigation concluded by siding with the male interpretation that Ivanov did
nothing wrong - suggests gendered disagreement about what constituted
"improper behavior" in private life. Female relatives of prominent party
members (especially wives) were frequently the source of denunciation letters
sent to the KPK complaining of the behavior of (usually male) party members.
Even in cases where the denunciation was anonymous, as in the example of
Ivanov, the testimonies of female relatives tended to figure prominently in the
investigations that followed.
Like the letters written to the editors of Rabotnitsa, women's voices in KPK
investigations of impropriety was evidence of anxiety about the instability of mar-
riage and the family in the Soviet Union. Before the war, the women speaking
out against Soviet alimony law wanted to communicate their belief that registered
marriages (and the children they produced) were more legitimate, and therefore
more deserving of scarce resources, than unregistered unions (and the children
they produced). After the war, KPK investigations frequently provided a forum
for women to voice their fears about the instability of all marriages, registered
and unregistered. Rather than having the effect of girding the family against
the encroachments of unregistered unions, the 1944 law eliminating the legal
legitimacy of unregistered marriages therefore seems to have had little effect on
the social acceptability and cultural currency of factual marriages. Like the
letters opposing Soviet alimony law, denunciations sent to the KPK about a
party member's personal life employed official language to talk about deeply per-
sonal subjects such as sex, infidelity, and abandonment. And like the women who
sent letters to Rabotnitsa, the women who participated in KPK investigations
invited Soviet officials into their most personal lives, fulfilling Bolshevik dreams
of Utopian transparency even as they opposed the idea of complete equality
under communism.

Utopian Transparency and Soviet Family Values

The Utopian impulse in the Soviet Union outlived Lenin and, as Richard Stites
has observed, "survived as vestigial idealism all the way through the bitter
Stalinist years, even in the camps, even in the hearts of some of Stalin's
victims."62 One significant aspect of this Utopian project was the recognition of
factual marriage, which emerged not only as a practical legal solution to the
problem of single motherhood and neglected children, but also an attempt by
an activist state to make social and sexual relations more equal. Perhaps the
most radical effect of giving a legal name to "casual connections" was to

62 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 4, 9.

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 UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FAMILY LIFE 89

encourage public discourse about the subtle differences between casual, semi-
casual, and un-casual sex.63 The creation of a legal category and its attendant
rights publicly to accommodate an otherwise personal arrangement between
two people stemmed from a Utopian impulse to merge personal and public life
seamlessly into one transparent whole. As James C. Scott has argued, "seeing
like a state" involves making simplifications rather like abridged maps. State sim-
plifications for the sake of legibility "did not successfully represent the actual
activity of the society they depicted, nor were they intended to ... they were
maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality
they depicted to be remade."64 Visibility figured prominently in Soviet ideology
and popular culture, which associated transparency with moral purity, openness,
and democracy, even finding literal expression in the material environment in the
form of glass architecture.65 Thus, the Stalin-era attempt to extend the rights of
marriage to unregistered couples - and in so doing creating a public name for for-
merly nameless private sexual unions - can be seen not only as a way of making
illegible reality legible, but also as a blueprint of the yet-to-be-realized Utopian
future.

In seeking on one hand the equality of all citizens regardless of sex, and on the
other hand striving to erode the separation between society and the state, early
Soviet leaders embarked on a dual Utopian project that was sustained for much
of the Stalin era. Bolshevik leaders understood the equality of women to
require a new definition of family, one that was divorced from questions of prop-
erty, illegitimacy, and sexual double standards. The one way in which unregis-
tered unions were recognized by the first Soviet family code of 1918 was in
connection with children, since children's rights were based on the fact of parent-
hood and therefore safeguarded regardless of whether the marriage was registered.
By replacing old notions of family that centered on registered marriage with a new
definition of family that privileged biological, blood relation, early Soviet leaders
opened the door for the recognition of unregistered unions after the revolution.
The subsequent 1926 code was notable for being the last major Soviet family law
introduced to protect women as a distinct population; from that point forward, the
Soviet state focused its energies on the protection of families. By the mid- 1930s,
women were no longer understood as disadvantaged individuals reliant on the
assistance of a paternalistic state. Instead, women became embodiments of
issues and anxieties related to the family, and as such their needs were increasingly
seen as inextricably bound with those of children and families. Thus the Utopian

63 "Casual connections" (sluchainye sviazi) was a dismissive euphemism used to describe unregistered,
factual marriages. See, for example, GARF f. 9491, op. 1, d. 404, 1. 142.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed,
Yale Agrarian Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 3.
Julia Bekman Chadaga, "Light in Captivity: Spectacular Glass and Soviet Power in the 1920s and
1930s," Slavic Review 66, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 84.

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 90 LAUREN KAMINSKY

project of radical sexual and social equality took the form of opening the category
of marriage rather than eschewing marriage entirely, finding ways to adapt some
of the ethos of free love to the socioeconomic demands of poor mothers and
homeless children.
These changes in Soviet marriage, divorce, and alimony policy highlighted
tensions between morality and the law, contributing to the synthesis of an infor-
mal family values system. Born in the context of early Soviet political culture,
Soviet family values privileged those citizens deemed to be useful to the Soviet
project of building socialism. This differential system of valuation according to
economic and social productiveness flew in the face of the democratic claims
of homogeneous citizenship. Embedded in Soviet family values were conserva-
tive impulses that resisted radical change, but both were channeled through the
party-state itself. "Many women were eager to have the party intervene in
their personal lives," Fitzpatrick has argued, suggesting that the use of denuncia-
tion in "marital warfare" was characteristically a weapon of women and an inno-
vation of the postwar period, when women expected Soviet party-state support in
conflicts with "absconding husbands and lovers."66 While some scholars of
popular opinion in the Stalin era have suggested that women were less likely
than men to voice dissident political opinions because their attention was
focused more on the family, this essay has argued that women's writing protested
laws governing their domestic lives, participating in Soviet political discourse.67
Much of this writing, including the letters cited above, has not been published,
perhaps explaining this gap in the historical record. By studying these archival
materials and by broadening the focus to include the prewar period, this essay
has demonstrated the ways in which women's opinions about alimony in the
Stalin era echoed controversies about unregistered marriage that dated back to
the first Soviet family law of 1918.
Thus, the success of one Utopian vision of family life - in which the separation
between state and society led to greater transparency and state involvement in the
personal lives of its citizens - was implicated in the failure of the other Utopian
dream of radical sexual and social equality. As Michael Warner has argued, "mar-
riage sanctifies some couples at the expense of others . . . Marriage, in short, dis-
criminates."68 In the attempt to render single mothers eligible for alimony
payments from their children's fathers, Soviet authorities opened up the category
of marriage to those who had not registered their unions. Unregistered marriage
in the Soviet Union threatened the exclusivity of those in normative marriages in
a way that appeared to destabilize the family. The anxiety generated by this threat

^Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks!, 260.

See, for example, Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent,
Í934-194Í (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
68 Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free
Press, 1999), 82.

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 UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FAMILY LIFE 91

was evident in prewar letters of protest from women opposing Soviet alimony
law, as well as in women speaking out against the bad behavior of party
members in the postwar period. In a society of scarcity, women were keenly
aware of the fact that the impossible task of making ends meet would fall to
them. Without adequate dining rooms, nurseries, kindergartens, and other
public industries, housework and child care remained, by and large, the individ-
ual, unpaid work of women. When state measures fell short, women relied on an
ancient system for mutual aid: the family, a highly contested category shaped by
the citizens whose letters of protest contributed to Soviet legal culture in the
Stalin era.

This essay has shown that opposing ideas about sex and the family synthesized
in the Stalin era, and it will conclude by suggesting that this process influenced the
formation of gender politics in the Soviet sphere of influence after 1945.
Substantial changes in Soviet family policy in 1918, 1926, 1936, and 1944
demonstrated that the new role of the family under socialism was subject to
debate in the form of public discussions that engaged citizens across the Soviet
Union. By 1944, as the Red Army moved west, setting the stage for the political
transformation of postwar eastern Europe, the definition of family was changing
dramatically on the home front in ways that would persist long after Stalin's death.
As Deborah Field has argued, the Khrushchev period ascribed even greater
importance to notions of communist morality originally forged in the Stalin
years.69 Furthermore, the system of family values endorsed by the Soviet
Union contributed to the legal culture of the new socialist republics, as women
throughout the eastern bloc became a special object of state policy.70 Donna
Harsch has argued that women's domestic interests "contributed significantly
to the fall of Communism in the GDR [German Democratic Republic],"
demonstrating that "domestic structures - the family's material and emotional
labors, gender relations, consumption needs, and private desires - shape society
and economic relations as fundamentally as vice versa."71 The official and unof-
ficial attitudes toward sex, gender, and the family central to state socialism in
central and eastern Europe had their roots in the tension between the Utopian
sexuality and conservative morality that shaped family life in the Stalin-era
Soviet Union.

New York University

69Deborah A. Field, "Irreconcilable Differences: Divorce and Conceptions of Private Life in the
Khrushchev Era," Russian Review 57 (1998): 601.
Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5.
Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German
Democratic Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 2, 10-11.

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