private home. The notion of ‘private life’ (
The new emphasis on building private homes was one sign of this change in policy. All the major ministries had their own blocks of flats in Moscow, which they allocated to their leading officials. Bolshevik families who had led a relatively austere existence in the 1920s now enjoyed lives of relative luxury, as they were rewarded with new homes, privileged access to food shops, chauffered cars, dachas, holidays in special government resorts and sanitoria. For many of these families, the 1930s were a time when they first gained their own domestic space and autonomy. The granting of dachas to the Soviet elite – organized on a large scale from the 1930s on – was particularly important to the encouragement of private family life. At the dacha, safe from watchful eyes and listening ears, relatives could sit and talk in ways that were inconceivable in public places; moreover, the everyday routines of simple country life – swimming, hiking, mushroom-picking, reading, lounging in the yard – provided families some respite from the constraints of Soviet society.
Within the home the Stalinist regime promoted a return to traditional family relations. Marriage became glamorous. Registration offices were smartened up. Marriage certificates were issued on high-quality paper (from Vishlag) instead of on the wrapping paper used before. Wedding rings, which had been banned as Christian relics in 1928, reappeared in Soviet shops after 1936. A series of decrees aimed to strengthen the Soviet family: the divorce laws were tightened; fees for divorce were raised substantially, leading to a sudden fall in the divorce rate; child support was raised; homosexuality and abortion were outlawed. Among the Soviet elite there was a return to conventional and even rather prudish sexual attitudes. The good Stalinist was expected to be monogamous, and devoted to his family, as Stalin was himself, according to the propaganda of his cult.* The conduct of the Bolshevik in his intimate relations was closely scrutinized. It was not unusual for a Bolshevik to be expelled from the Party because he was judged to be a bad father or husband. The wives of Party members were expected to return to the traditional role of raising children in the home.
This ideological restoration of the family was closely tied to its promotion as the basic unit of the state. ‘The family is the primary cell of our society,’ wrote one educationalist in 1935, ‘and its duties in child-rearing derive from its obligations to cultivate good citizens.’ From the middle of the 1930s, the Stalinist regime increasingly portrayed itself through metaphors and symbols of the family – a value-system familiar to the population at a time when millions of people found themselves in a new and alien environment. The cult of Stalin, which took off in these years, portrayed the leader as the ‘father of the Soviet people’, just as Nicholas II had been the ‘father-tsar’ (
Children of the Soviet elite who grew up in these years recall them with nostalgia, particularly for the experience of ‘normal family life’. Marina Ivanova was born in 1928 to a family of senior Party officials. Her father was the Secretary of the Party in the town of Mga, 50 kilometres south-east of Leningrad, where the family had a spacious dacha, although they lived mostly in the Leningrad apartment of Marina’s grandfather, a former nobleman. ‘The apartment was luxurious,’ recalls Marina,
with ten large rooms where I could run as a child. The rooms had high ceilings and enormous windows looking out onto the gardens… Oil paintings [copies] by Repin and Levitan hung on the walls. A grand piano and a billiard table stood in the two reception rooms… This apartment is the place of my happiest childhood memories. I remember crowded parties, with family friends and relatives, and all their children, gathered in our home for the New Year. The children had on masquerade costumes, and Papa would dress up as Uncle Frost and appear with chocolates and gifts for everyone, which he would put around the New Year tree.25
Inna Gaister’s family moved to the prestigious block of flats reserved for senior Soviet officials (the ‘House on the Embankment’) opposite the Kremlin in Moscow after her father Aron became the head of the agricultural section of Gosplan in 1932. They had a large apartment with the latest Soviet furniture provided by the government, and a library with several thousand books. The family enjoyed a cultured Russian lifestyle, combining their Communist ideals with the privileges of the Soviet elite. They had a pass to the Imperial Box at the Bolshoi Theatre. There were frequent holidays to special Party resorts in the Crimea, and Astafevo, near Moscow. But Inna’s fondest memories are of summers at their family dacha at Nikolina Gora:
The settlement was located in a beautiful pine forest, on a high hill above a bend in the Moscow River. It was a place of magnificent beauty, one of the finest in the Moscow area… Our plot was right above the river, on a high bank. The dacha was a large two-storeyed house: my mother’s brother, Veniamin, with barely hidden envy used to call it her ‘villa’. There were three large rooms downstairs and three upstairs. And an enormous verandah. The rooms were usually full of people. There were always some of my parents’ many relatives – mostly my cousins – staying there. On weekends my mother’s and father’s friends would come from Moscow… and I had my own friends from the nearby dachas. We used to spend most of our time on the river. Papa had built a stairway from our dacha down to the river, to make it easier for my grandmother to get to the water. It was a winding stairway – the slope was very steep – with at least a hundred steps. Long after we left, people still called it Gaister’s stairway. At the bottom there was a little wooden pier for swimming. Since the water around our pier was very deep, I was only allowed to swim there with my father. My friends and I preferred the pier below the Kerzhentsev dacha, where the water was shallow and good for swimming.26
But such happy memories were not everyone’s lot. For many families, the 1930s were a time of growing strain. The restoration of traditional relations often created tensions between husbands and their wives. According to Trotsky, who wrote extensively on the Soviet family, the Stalinist regime had betrayed the commitment of the Bolshevik revolutionaries to liberate women from domestic slavery. His assertion is supported by statistics, which reveal how household tasks were divided within working-class families. In 1923–34, working women were spending three times longer than their husbands doing household chores, but by 1936 they were spending five times longer. For women nothing changed in the 1930s – they worked long hours at a factory and then did a second shift at home, cooking, cleaning, caring for the children on average for five hours every night – whereas men were liberated from most of their traditional domestic duties (chopping wood, carrying water, preparing the stove) by the modernization of workers’ housing, which increased the provision of running water, gas and electricity, leaving them more time for cultural pursuits and politics.27
But Trotsky also had in mind the sexual politics of families:
One of the dramatic chapters in the great book of the Soviets will be the tale of the disintegration and breaking up of those Soviet families where the husband as a Party member, trade unionist, military commander or
