direction of Soviet policies remained consistent through the 1920s, albeit not without controversy and dissent even within the party, with these policies being embodied in the family codes of 1922 and 1926.
The severe social disruptions, strain on resources, and deterioration of already limited social services caused by the collectivization of agriculture, the rapid development of industry, the abolition of private trade, and the reconstruction of the economy between the late 1920s and the outbreak of war in 1941, however, led to a fundamental shift in Soviet policies with respect to marriage and the family. With its priorities now being economic growth and social stabilization, the Soviet state idealized the socialist family (which in essence closely resembled the family ideal of prerevolutionary liberal and feminist reformers), which was proclaimed to be part of the essential foundation of a socialist
MARRIAGE AND FAMILY LIFE
Following Soviet tradition, a wedding party walks to Red Square to have pictures taken. © PETER TURNLEY/CORBIS society. A series of laws and new codes enacted between 1936 and 1944 therefore attempted both to strengthen marriage and the family and to encourage women to give birth more frequently: Divorce was severely restricted, children born out of wedlock were deprived of any rights with respect to their father, thus reestablishing illegitimacy of birth, abortion was outlawed, and a schedule of rewards for mothers who bore additional children was established. Although the goals of women’s liberation and sexual equality remained official policy, they were redefined to accommodate a married woman’s dual burden of employment outside the home and primary responsibility for domestic work. Economic necessity in fact compelled most women to enter the workforce, regardless of their marital status, with only the wives of the party-state elite being able to choose not to do so. Despite the changes in normative ideals and the law, however, the effects of Soviet social and economic policies in general and of the difficult material conditions resulting from them were a further reduction in average family size and decline in the birth rate and the disruption especially of peasant households, as family members were arrested, migrated to cities in massive numbers, or died as a result of persecution or famine. The huge losses sustained by the Soviet population during World War II gave further impetus to these trends and, by creating a significant imbalance between men and women in the marriage-age population, considerably reduced the rate of marriage and complicated the formation of families for several decades after the war.
The relaxation of political controls on the discussion of public policy by relevant specialists after the death of Josef Stalin in 1953 contributed to another shift in Soviet policies toward marriage and the family during the mid- 1960s. Divorce again became more accessible, fathers could be required to provide financial support for their children born out of wedlock, and abortion was re-legalized and, given the scarcity of reliable alternatives, quickly became the most common form of birth control practiced by Russian women. Partly as a result of these measures, the divorce rate within the RusMARTOV, YULI OSIPOVICH sian population rose steadily after the mid-1960s, with more than 40 percent of all marriages ending in divorce by the 1980s, and the birth rate continued to decline. But these trends also gained impetus from the growth of the percentage of the Russian population, women as well as men, receiving secondary and tertiary education, from the nearly universal participation of women in the workforce, from the continued shift of the population from the countryside to cities (the Russian population became predominantly urban only after the late 1950s), and from the limited availability of adequate housing and social services in a context in which women continued to bear the chief responsibilities for child-rearing and domestic work. These latter problems contributed to the reemergence in the urban population of a modified form of the multigenerational family, as the practices of a young couple living with the parents of one partner while waiting for their own apartment and of a single parent living especially with his or usually her mother appear to have increased. In the countryside, the improvement in the living conditions of the rural population following Stalin’s death, their inclusion in the social welfare system, yet the continued out-migration especially of young males seeking a better life in the city also led to a decline in family size, as well as to a disproportionately female and aging population, which affected both the structure of rural families and the rate of their formation. Nonetheless, the ideals of the nuclear family, marriage, and natural motherhood remained firmly in place, both in official policy and among the population. See also: ABORTION POLICY; FAMILY CODE OF 1926; FAMILY CODE ON MARRIAGE, THE FAMILY, AND GUARDIANSHIP; FAMILY EDICT OF 1944; FAMILY LAWS OF 1936; FEMINISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clements, Barbara Evans; Engel, Barbara Alpern; and Worobec, Christine D., eds. (1991). Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Engel, Barbara Alpern. (1994). Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work, and Family in Russia, 1861-1914. New York: Cambridge University Press. Freeze, ChaeRan Y. (2002). Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press. Goldman, Wendy Z. (1993). Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hubbs, Joanna. (1988). Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lapidus, Gail Warshofsky. (1978). Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levin, Eve. (1989). Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Marrese, Michelle Lamarche. (2002). A Woman’s Kingdom. Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700-1861. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mironov, Boris N., with Eklof, Ben. (2000). The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700- 1917. 2 vols. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Pouncy, Carolyn J., ed. and tr. (1994). The “Domostroi”: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ransel, David L., ed. (1978). The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ransel, David L. (2000). Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schlesinger, Rudolf, comp. (1949). Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia: The Family in the USSR. London: Rout-ledge and Paul. Wagner, William G. (1994). Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Worobec, Christine D. (1991). Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post- Emancipation Period. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
WILLIAM G. WAGNER
(1873-1923), founder of Russian social democracy, later leader of the Menshevik party.
Born Yuli Osipovich Tsederbaum to a middle- class Jewish family in Constantinople, Yuli Martov established the St. Petersburg Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class with Lenin in 1895. The following year, Martov was sentenced to three years’ exile in Siberia. After serving his term, he joined Lenin in Switzerland where they launched the revolutionary Marxist newspaper Iskra. Martov broke with Lenin at the Russian Social Democratic Party’s Second Congress in Brussels in 1903, when he opposed his erstwhile comrade’s bid for leadership of the party and his demand for a narrow,
highly centralized party of professional revolutionaries, instead calling for a broad-based party with mass membership. Lenin labelled Martov’s supporters the Menshevik (minority) faction; his own followers constituted the Bolsheviks (majority). While Lenin proclaimed that socialists should respond to a successful bourgeois revolution by taking immediate steps to prepare for their own takeover of government, Martov advocated abstention from power and a strategy of militant opposition rooted in democratic institutions such as workers’ soviets, trades unions, cooperatives, or town and village councils. These “organs of revolutionary self-government” would impel the bourgeois government to implement political and economic reform, which would, in time, bring about conditions favorable to a successful, peaceful, proletarian revolution. After the outbreak of war, Martov was a founder of the Zimmerwald movement, which stood for internationalism and “peace without victory” against both the “defensism” of some socialist leaders and Lenin’s ambition to transform the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war. Martov returned to Russia in mid-May 1917. His internationalist position and advocacy of militant opposition to bourgeois government brought him into open conflict with Menshevik leaders such as Irakly Tsereteli, who proclaimed “revolutionary defensism” and had days earlier entered a coalition with the Provisional Government’s liberal ministers. The collapse of the first coalition ministry in early July prompted Martov to declare that the time was now ripe for the formation of a democratic government of socialist forces. On repeated occasions in subsequent months, however, his new strategy was rejected both by coalitionist Mensheviks and by Bolsheviks intent on seizing power for themselves. After November 1917, Martov remained a courageous and outspoken opponent of Lenin’s political
