Russian revolution. A very short introduction

to support families without the assistance of menfolk, deteriorated. For poor and vulnerable women, the stability provided by the family came to seem positively desirable and this was one factor behind the rise in the marriage rate during the 1920s: by 1926 the rate was over a third higher than in 1913. With NEP, cuts in state

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subsidy led to the closure of the public dining halls, creches, and communal laundries that had been a feature of War Communism, leaving women once again responsible for looking after children, cooking, cleaning, and sewing. These trends, together with the rise in female unemployment, shaped responses to the public debate on the new Family Code of 1926. This simplified divorce procedure, but introduced stricter rules on alimony, making men rather than the state responsible forthe upkeep of children. It signalled a shift in thinking towards a view that the family would have to serve as the basic institution of social welfare for a very long time. This chimed with a rising sense that the mounting problems of illegitimacy, abandoned children, hooliganism, and juvenile crime were linked to the breakdown of the family.

If the 1920s saw a strengthening of a more conservative attitude ? towards the family and marriage, one should not infer that the

g revolution had had little impact in this area. Within less than a decade,

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e European Russia had the highest divorce rate in the world, divorce being

jg widespread even in rural communities. Similarly, if there was a boom in

1 the birth rate from its nadir of 1922, the long-term trend was towards a

decline in the birth rate, especially in the towns, as levels of female

education and employment rose and as marriage was delayed. In 1920

Russia became the first country to legalize abortion, a measure

motivated by concern that in the prevailing conditions society could not

support children properly, rather than by recognition of a woman's right

to choose. By the late 1920s, the number of abortions in cities surpassed

the number of births, and the typical woman having a termination was

married with at least one child.

In the maelstrom of civil war sexual taboos were swept aside. A few in the party saw 'sexual revolution' as intrinsic to the wider social revolution. Kollontai, first Commissar of Social Welfare, demanded 'freedom for winged Eros', by which she meant that women should have the right to autonomy and fulfilment in personal relations. She was

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widely assumed, however, to be advocating sexual promiscuity. The mainstream of the party looked askance on such thinking, Lenin, in particular, deploring 'hypertrophy in sexual matters'. From the early 1920s exhortations to sublimate sexual energy into constructive activity came thick and fast. The 'psychoneurologist' A. B. Zalkind averred that the 'proletariat at the stage of socialist accumulation is a thrifty, niggardly class and it is not in its interests to allow creative energy to seep into sexual channels'. Such thinking, coloured by contemporary interest in eugenics, put sexuality at the heart of a strategy of social engineering designed to enhance the reproductive and productive capacity of the new society. By the late 1920s, the shift away from permissive attitudes was marked: by 1929 'hardened' prostitutes, once seen as social victims, were being sent to labour camps for wilfully refusing to play their role in production. This increasing emphasis on the danger of sexual anarchy reflected Bolshevik fear that their orderly project risked being engulfed by the libidinal energies of the body and the elemental forces of nature.

Youth: a wavering vanguard

In 1926 the under-twenties made up just over half the rural population. The Bolsheviks looked on children as bearers of the socialist future and concentrated scarce resources on their welfare and education. The notion of childhood as a time of innocence had taken root in late-imperial Russia, and the Bolsheviks built upon the optimism implicit in this idealization. The drastic fall in infant mortality - the scourge of ancien regime Russia - and the decline in family size, served to intensify the emotional investment of parents in their child. The Women's Bureau campaigned to improve childcare and discourage practices such as corporal punishment. New limitations on child labour, combined with the lengthening of schooling, delayed entry into adulthood. The Bolsheviks believed that children belonged first and foremost to society, but there was no consensus as to where the line should be drawn between parental and state responsibilities. Not all shared

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A. Coikhbarg's view that the state would 'provide vastly better results than the private, individual, unscientific, and irrational approach of individually 'loving' but ignorant parents'. Since the state did not have resources to take on the upbringing of children, parents continued to shoulder most of the responsibility, but their right to do so was conditional on performing their duties in accordance with the values of the revolution. 'If fathers persistently try to turn their children into narrow little property owners or mystics, then ... children have the ethical right to forsake them.'

One of the most horrendous problems facing the Bolsheviks was to deal with the mind-boggling number of orphaned and abandoned children who survived by begging, peddling, or stealing on city streets and in railway stations. The problem had emerged before the First World War, but escalated massively after 1914. By 1922, at least 7 million children, ? over three-quarters of them boys, had been abandoned. They formed a g distinct subculture with their gangs, hierarchies, turf, codes, rituals, and

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e slang. They were a major cause of the sharp rise in juvenile crime. The jg authorities looked sympathetically on young criminals as social victims, 1 court trials and custodial sentences for juveniles under 17 having been abolished in January 1918. Heroic efforts were made to settle abandoned children in homes and colonies, some of which were run as experimental labour communes based on 'self-government', and by the late 1920s, the number had fallen to around 200,000. By this stage, the failure of juvenile crime to disappear was causing the authorities to take a much less indulgent stance, leading jurists denouncing the 'putrid view that children should not be punished'.

By 1925 the Komsomol had 1.5 million members, which represented a mere 6% of eligible youngsters. From being an exclusively urban organization during the civil war, it struggled to build a rural base and by 1926, 60% of its members were peasants. In the countryside the Komsomol was very much associated with the clash between the generations, young men, and to a lesser extent young women, asserting

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themselves against their parents over such matters as church attendance. Parents bemoaned the conduct of their offspring: 'Kol'ka has stuck up a picture of Lenin in place of the icon and now goes to rallies, carrying banners and singing scurrilous songs.' In the towns, however, there is evidence that many Komsomol members disliked the ethos of NEP. During the civil war its members had exemplified the heroism, sacrifice, and combativitythat were the hallmarks of the time. Nowthe requisite qualities were 'smartness, discipline, training, and self-organization' and some youngsters appear to have had difficulty knuckling down to the prosaic tasks of economic and cultural construction. The tone of the Komsomol was very much set by young men, since their higher level of literacy, service in the army, experience of seasonal work, and their relative freedom from family obligations gave them a broader view of the world than that of most young women. The proportion of women in the Komsomol nevertheless