Marriage, Household, and Home in Modern Russia: From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin 9781350014473, 9781350014466, 9781350014503, 9781350014480

Table of contents :
Half Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
A Note on Dates and Names
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: The Petrine Revolution at Home
Chapter 2: The Culture of Sensibility: 1761–1855
Chapter 3: The Peasantry Until 1861
Chapter 4: The Reform Era
Chapter 5: The Politics of Personal Life: 1881–1914
Chapter 6: War, Revolution, and Postrevolutionary Change
Chapter 7: Revolution at Work; Counterrevolution at Home
Chapter 8: Defending the Home(land) World War II and After
Chapter 9: Seeking the Perfect Soviet Family
Chapter 10: The State Withdraws
Notes
Further Readings: Secondary Sources
Further Readings: Primary Sources
Index

Citation preview

Marriage, Household, and Home in Modern Russia

THE BLOOMSBURY HISTORY OF MODERN RUSSIA SERIES Series Editors: Jonathan D. Smele (Queen Mary, University of London, UK) and Michael Melancon (Auburn University, USA) This ambitious and unique series offers readers the latest views on aspects of the modern history of what has been and remains one of the most powerful and important countries in the world. In a series of books aimed at students, leading academics and experts from across the world portray, in a thematic manner, a broad variety of aspects of the Russian experience, over extended periods of time, from the reign of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century to the Putin era at the beginning of the twenty-first. Published: Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin: Accommodation, Survival, Resistance, Boris B. Gorshkov (2018) Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, Jonathan Daly (2018) Marx and Russia: The Fate of a Doctrine, James D. White (2018) A Modern History of Russian Childhood, Elizabeth White (2020) Marriage, Household, and Home in Modern Russia: From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, Barbara Alpern Engel (2021) Forthcoming: A History of Education in Modern Russia, Wayne Dowler (2021) Russian Populism: A History, Christopher Ely (2021)

Marriage, Household, and Home in Modern Russia From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin

Barbara Alpern Engel

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Barbara Alpern Engel, 2022 Barbara Alpern Engel has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permissions for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: PB: 978-1-3500-1446-6 HB: 978-1-3500-1447-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-1448-0 eBook: 978-1-3500-1449-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of Figures vi Preface vii Acknowledgments xi A Note on Dates and Names xii List of Abbreviations xiii

 1 The Petrine Revolution at Home  1  2 The Culture of Sensibility: 1761–1855  21  3 The Peasantry Until 1861  41  4 The Reform Era  63  5 The Politics of Personal Life: 1881–1914  83  6 War, Revolution, and Postrevolutionary Change  105  7 Revolution at Work; Counterrevolution at Home  127  8 Defending the Home(land): World War II and After  149  9 Seeking the Perfect Soviet Family  169 10 The State Withdraws  193

Notes 211 Further Readings: Secondary Sources 248 Further Readings: Primary Sources 257 Index 259

FIGURES

  1.1 The husband manufactures sandals while the wife spins thread  5   1.2 The family portrait of Peter the Great, 1720  12   2.1 Russian wedding  22   2.2 Nicholas I of Russia and wife Alexandra Feodorovna  32   2.3 Family portrait, 1937  36   3.1 Peasant engagement  49   3.2 Russian peasant wedding, 1865  50   4.1 Domestic interior  68   4.2 Domestic basket weavers  76   5.1 Peasant wedding, 1910  86   5.2 “Do you and your husband get along well?”  90   5.3 “Don’t scold me, my dear”  92   6.1 Abortion poster  110   6.2 What did the revolution grant laboring and peasant woman?  111   6.3 The enlightened spouse  119   8.1 Leaving for war  151   8.2 “Happy Housewarming”  159   9.1 “Oh, you’re having a wedding!”  173   9.2 “Pictures Without Words”  177   9.3 “The wife has been delayed”  179   9.4 “Cafes, dances . . . I’m sick of it all . . .”  183   9.5 “I’ll marry you next time!”  186 10.1 Wedding ceremony in Russia, January 2019  198

PREFACE

This book traces how Russians conducted their intimate lives over the course of more than three centuries and explores the broader circumstances— economic, cultural, religious, political, and more—that helped to shape their behavior. When the book begins, at the dawn of the eighteenth century, Russia was already a multiethnic empire, with household patterns and experiences of family life that differed according to the various ethno-cultural traditions.1 The book’s focus nevertheless remains the empire’s largely agrarian Russian core, which I define as the Russian-speaking, Christian Orthodox population of the central Russian provinces and Siberia. Despite various ethnic admixtures and vast differences in ways of life and social standing, these peoples display a cultural coherence; they also remained the primary focus of state policy and concern throughout the three-hundredyear period. When the book refers to “Russians,” it is mainly in that sense. The narrative concludes at the time of this writing. Even now, almost thirty years after the collapse of communism in 1991, many Russians, especially older Russians, still struggle to replace the values and way of life associated with that system. Perhaps ironically, as part of this struggle conservative nationalists now celebrate as a model for the present the marital and household order associated with the time this book begins, seemingly bringing the story full circle. The circumstances that gave rise to that older way of life, however, have long since vanished. The patriarchal household served as its foundation at all levels of Russia’s society of orders, comprised of those who served the church; those who performed service; and those who paid taxes (merchants included). With the exception of Russian Orthodox monks, their households consisted of people usually linked by marriage and kinship ties, who shared a dwelling and ate from a common pot. Households were then and are now often identical with “family”—so much so, indeed, that readers will sometimes find the terms “household” and “family” used interchangeably in the pages to follow— but households can be different from family, too (think of communes, for example). “Patriarchy,” on the other hand, is less timeless, at least as I use the term in this book. By patriarchy, I mean a system rather different from what contemporary feminists usually have in mind. In Russia’s patriarchal order of the early eighteenth century, custom and law endowed household heads with near-absolute power over other members of the household—

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male as well as female—an authority commensurate with the household head’s responsibility for social order as well as domestic discipline. “Have you sons? Discipline them and break them in from their earliest years,” instructs the Domostroi, a seventeenth-century household manual, quoting Ecclesiasticus. The Domostroi also accorded the household head’s wife enormous responsibility for and authority over an expansive domestic sphere. At the same time, however, it directed her to “obey her husband in everything. Whatever her husband orders, she must accept with love. She must fulfill his every command.”2 In the late seventeenth century, a time when literacy was very rare and probably nonexistent among Russia’s vast peasant population, the book might be found in the households of Orthodox priests (required to marry in Russia), of the upper echelons of those who served, including government officials, and even of the tax-paying population, chiefly merchants.3 With some exceptions, the patriarchal household served as the basis of production as well as reproduction. Even in towns most households grew food and kept domestic animals; they manufactured things for use or sale in addition to eating, sleeping, and conducting other activities of daily life in and around their dwellings. There existed no separation between work and home. Neither did most people enjoy much privacy or even nourish an expectation of it. Dwellings were usually crowded places. Often, the greater the number of working hands, the better, which is one reason why households in early modern Russia tended to be expansive. It is true that gentry servitors, whose households also engaged in production, appear to have nurtured an overwhelming preference for the nuclear family household, consisting of husband, wife, or widowed parent and offspring. But such households were probably a minority among other social groups.4 Rather than setting up households of their own, most newlyweds customarily joined the household of one of the spouses, remaining there for years if not for good. This practice facilitated early marriage and childbearing. Elderly parents lived in the household of a married child or children; among the peasantry, married brothers with families of their own might share a roof as well. Households with sufficient economic means might also shelter uncles, cousins, nephews, widows with children, and more. Historians usually entitle households with two or more married couples “complex” and those housing three generations but no more than one married couple as “extended” and when the sources permit it—and sometimes, they don’t—I use that terminology too. Despite vast differences in wealth and status, across the social spectrum marriage was largely determined by pragmatic—usually economic— concerns, much as was the case elsewhere in Europe at that time. The married couple formed the basic unit of production. Marriage linked two family networks as well as two individuals. The marriage bargain could provide access to economic resources and patronage connections as well as social standing and prestige. Among the tax-paying population, the

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married couple formed the basic unit of production. Its many benefits meant marriage was far too important a matter to be left to the young. In arranging first marriages, at least, kin played the primary role, although thoughtful ones surely kept the welfare of the young in mind. How couples actually experienced their marital and domestic lives in the period when this book begins is exceedingly difficult to ascertain. It is true that the church enjoined married couples to “love” one another—in a strictly asexual manner—and an unknowable number of couples no doubt developed genuine, even profound affection for one another. But there exists an almost total absence of sources that might shed light on the character of people’s intimate lives. Such sources become somewhat more abundant towards the end of the eighteenth century, partly because growing numbers of people—although for at least another century a still tiny minority— learned to read and write, while an ever-increasing variety of books and periodicals emerged to meet their tastes and educate their sensibilities. Initially, most of the literate derived from the upper crust of Russia’s hierarchical social order. At the same time, in the course of the eighteenth century administrative bodies became more adept at recordkeeping and, together with religious institutions, more prone to respond to individual appeals—sometimes presented orally; sometimes penned by literate scribes on behalf of the illiterate—and thus to become involved in domestic and family matters. As a result, administrative records provide information about the experiences of more humble people, too—although mostly about negative experiences, because such sources were usually the product of conflict. Copious by the second half of the nineteenth century, sources of both kinds enable me to explore in far greater depth the complexities of people’s lived experience of marriage, household, and home life. They make it easier to determine how the educated strata lived and reveal the complexities of the lives even of ordinary folk—most still illiterate—as well. Ironically perhaps, the absence of relevant primary sources again becomes a problem for the Stalinist period, because the boundaries of both permissible public discourse and intimate life itself grew ever narrower, while published personal accounts had to meet rigid requirements when they appeared at all. Secondary sources fill many gaps. Indeed, except for the chapters that draw on my own research—chiefly Chapters 4 and 5—secondary sources provide the basis for much of this book, affecting its scope and emphases in a variety of ways. The book examines the ways that the meanings and experiences of marriage, household, and home evolved in Russia over the course of three centuries of dramatic, sometimes wrenching cultural and economic change and how powerful institutions—church and state in the imperial period, the party-state in the Soviet period, and, now and once again, church and state— sought to shape all three according to particular priorities and visions of a proper social order. At the same time, this book explores how people acted

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within their historical circumstances to take advantage of opportunities or simply to survive in challenging times, sometimes adopting new ways of construing the self and intimate life, sometimes deploying long-standing practices and patterns, among them the mobilization of kinship connections and the capacity of the household to expand and contract. It suggests that throughout—through economic modernization, war, political and social upheaval, despite changing regimes and even in periods of rigid political ideology—policy and experience often remained in tension if not at odds.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am immensely grateful to Laura Engelstein who read and critiqued the entire manuscript, saving me from numerous errors and omissions large and small, and helping me to clarify key points. I also thank my colleagues— Laura Olson Osterman for conversations that have helped to stimulate and sharpen my thinking and for suggestions of pertinent resources; and Rimgaila Salys, who generously shared her extensive knowledge of Soviet film history in addition to offering useful books and references. For their very helpful critical readings of chapters of this manuscript, I thank Daniel Kaiser, Lynne Viola, and Diane Koenker. Victoria Bonnell once again graciously allowed me to reproduce a poster in this book. Tracy Dennison shared her knowledge of the peasantry with me in several helpful email exchanges. Christine VargaHarris, Lewis Siegelbaum, and John Etty responded helpfully to questions about Soviet-era illustrations. I thank the Interlibrary Loan Department of the University of Colorado for providing books and articles otherwise unavailable to me here in Boulder. During a week-long research visit, the staff of the Summer Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois assisted me in every way they could. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Janice Pilch, a person whom I’ve never met, who nevertheless responded thoroughly and diligently as I struggled to sort out vexed copyright issues for images from Krokodil and other Soviet-era publications I wanted to use in the chapters of the book treating the Soviet period.

A NOTE ON DATES AND NAMES

From the early eighteenth century until 1918, the Russian calendar conformed to the Julian calendar, then in use in much of the Western world. Its dates are usually thirteen or fourteen days earlier than the same dates of the Gregorian calendar, now in use in the modern West, and adopted by Russia in February 1918. I give dates according to the system in place at the time. For the names of the people and places well known to English readers, I use the form that will be most familiar to them. For the rest, I adopt a modified Library of Congress system (minus soft signs and diacriticals) for the text, retaining the Library of Congress system for footnotes.

ABBREVIATIONS

Archives GARF Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii RGIA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv TsGIA SPb Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv SanktPeterburga

Archival Citations op. d.

opis’: archival inventory delo: file

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1 The Petrine Revolution at Home

On a chilly January day in 1689, the seventeen-year-old Peter Alekseevich Romanov, co-ruler of Russia since 1682, wed Eudokia Lopukhina, three years his senior. Arranged by Peter’s mother, Natalia Naryshkina, the marriage served at least two strategic objectives—first, to demonstrate that Peter had become a man and, second, to ensure the production of a male heir before Peter’s older half-brother and co-ruler, Ivan, succeeded in siring one himself. Likewise strategic was the choice of Lopukhina. Deriving from a lesser gentry clan, she enabled the Naryshkins to minimize the rivalries among prominent families that usually attended the selection of a royal bride. There exists no evidence that the groom participated in his bride’s selection; he also appears to have developed no real attachment to her. Over the following years, he acquired a mistress in the German quarter of Moscow and became involved in numerous sexual liaisons while travelling abroad. The bridegroom—the future Peter the Great—nevertheless did his duty. Thirteen months after the wedding, Eudokia delivered a baby boy, Alexis, who became heir to the throne; twenty months later she delivered a second child, who died the following May.1 Although the stakes were very rarely so high or the groom so powerful, the first marriage of Peter the Great was nevertheless typical of his times in almost every other way, including the decisive role of elders, their pragmatism in selecting the spouse, and the youth of both bride and groom.

Marriage in Muscovy Marriage was virtually universal in Muscovite Russia, where popular belief held that everyone should wed, except perhaps people who suffered from a physical or mental disability so serious that it made laboring impossible. Marriage might serve a range of purposes. Behind the façade of Muscovite autocracy, for example, boiar clans deployed marriage in their maneuverings for power and patronage, with marriage into or kinship ties with the

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grand princely family the coveted prize.2 Some provincial gentry likewise deployed the marriage of daughters to gain access to higher social circles in Moscow. Although the majority of marriages united people from identical or comparable social and economic backgrounds, practical goals governed their marital arrangements, too.3 For the tax-paying population of the towns and countryside, marriage was first and foremost an economic necessity: it forged the working unit—husband and wife—upon which virtually every adult depended. But marriage was often advantageous in other ways as well. It generated alliances between kinship networks and encouraged their cooperation, thereby, for example, fostering the enterprises of merchants and townspeople and providing access to capital—the dowry. At a time when no banks existed and borrowing, although quite common, brought weighty personal obligations and sometimes crushing rates of interest, this was no minor matter.4 In the countryside, marriage linked gentry neighbor to gentry neighbor, consolidating not only parcels of land but also more broadly a sense of local community.5 Far from least, marriage furthered social stability. It harnessed the elemental power of human sexuality to the practical purpose of procreation and the transmission of property, and subjected potentially unruly women to the disciplinary control of a man.6 Among the purposes of marriage was, emphatically, not emotional or sexual pleasure, at least according to official morality. It is true that spouses were supposed to “love” one another. But this was an elevated kind of love, analogous to “to the spiritual love of the union between Christ and his church and between God and his children.” This feeling of love differed utterly from romantic love, a dangerous emotion best kept under strict control.7 Such strictures did not prevent at least some married couples from developing deep attachments to one another that might well be construed as “love.”8 And no doubt some people experienced passionate attraction and acted on that feeling. Criminal cases that reveal illicit relationships offer an occasional glimpse of individuals swept away by their passions. The love charms and spells against which the church regularly inveighed also suggest popular interest in earthly pleasures.9 But those pleasures were not supposed to be the point of marriage. The varied purposes marriage could serve meant that spousal choice remained far too important to be left to the whims or attractions of the couple most directly involved. This was especially true if the couple were young, the norm in most first marriages. At the onset of the eighteenth century, Russian girls became legally marriageable at age twelve; the age was raised to thirteen at the century’s end. True, most marriages occurred later than that—at the start of the century, men rarely married before the age of twenty; their brides were slightly younger. But then, toward the century’s end, men’s age of marriage dropped to seventeen or eighteen and women’s, to fifteen and a half.10 It is possible that Peter the Great’s household-based taxation and recruitment policies contributed to that decline. They encouraged both

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the consolidation of households and youthful unions in which newlyweds lived in the household of parents—usually the grooms’ but sometimes the brides’—for years following the marriage if not for good. In turn, living with parents or elders freed young couples of the need to obtain resources sufficient to establish their own household before marrying, as their Western European counterparts often had to do. Early marriages were also fruitful marriages, greatly valued by a society where agriculture provided the basis of almost everyone’s livelihood, and at a time of high infant mortality and short lifespans. Elders played a vital role at every stage of the marital arrangements of both men and women. Senior members of a suitor’s household identified potential partners with the aid of relatives, friends, or a matchmaker. Either by themselves or with the assistance of a go-between, elders looked over candidates’ households to establish their suitability and economic well-being and evaluated potential brides and their immediate kin. Then they made their choice. A go-between facilitated the all-important negotiations concerning the dowry and other financial and practical arrangements accompanying the match. Once the parties reached an agreement, they formalized it as a contract, with the two sides exchanging visits and gifts. As much a public as a personal matter, the engagement was almost as significant as the wedding itself: breaching the contract brought serious penalties.11 The wedding soon followed. It was an elaborate occasion—how elaborate depended on the wealth of the couples’ households—and it included days of feasting and celebrating. It also might be the first time that the bride laid eyes on her husband, especially if the couple belonged to social elites. Gathering together kin and community as witnesses and future support, the celebrations included the showing of the bloody bridal shirt, proof of the bride’s virginity. A Russian Orthodox priest consecrated the marriage, the key moment of the ceremony. Otherwise, however, the church played no direct role in the marriage celebration.12

Russian Orthodoxy and Marriage Nevertheless, the Russian Orthodox faith influenced marriage profoundly, and on multiple levels. For one thing, canon law disqualified potential spouses. Bride and groom could not be related too closely by blood or by marriage or be linked in “fictive kinship,” that is, have participated in the same christening. Officiating priests carefully investigated beforehand to ensure that couples conformed to these rules. If they failed to do so, the priest would refuse to consecrate the marriage and without that, a wedding lacked legal standing. For another, the religious calendar determined the timing of almost all weddings. Orthodoxy prohibited weddings during the four main fasts of the year and also on weekly fast days (every Wednesday and Friday). The vast majority of Muscovites honored these prohibitions.

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Judging at least by the timing of births, they also observed the prohibition on sexual activity that religion imposed during the Lenten period.13 Whether couples also abstained on weekly fast days, as their faith dictated, remains unknown. In addition, the church sought to limit the number of a person’s marriages to one, although in this it proved less successful. While acknowledging sexual appetites, Orthodox officials nevertheless disapproved of them, regarding chastity as preferable even for married couples. Only an elect few could manage chastity, however. Marriage was necessary for everyone else, a concession to the flesh and to the need for procreation. That necessity encompassed Russian Orthodox priests, whom the church required to marry. But because marriage established what was conceived to be an unbreakable bond not only on earth but also in the hereafter, officials regarded the first as the sole legitimate marriage. Thus, the church permitted priests to marry only once. With the additional marriages of everyone else, the Church struggled. Frowning upon divorce and regarding remarriage, even of widows and widowers, as a “regrettable necessity,” church officials worked hard to discourage second marriages; regarded third marriages with enormous suspicion; and forbade fourth marriages altogether. The marriage ritual differed for widows or widowers and they had to perform acts of penance and pay higher marriage fees. Nevertheless, given high mortality rates, appeals for permission for second, even third, marriages were commonplace. Recognizing church preferences, others who had lost a spouse sometimes sought to conceal their earlier unions in order to gain permission to marry again.14 They did so not only—or not even—because they required a sexual partner but because the roles of husband and wife were complementary and each depended so thoroughly on the other’s labor. As a result, households headed by widows, with or without children, were almost invariably very poor. Unless they held property, widows also found it difficult to find a new husband. Widowers, by contrast, remarried frequently.15

Husbands and Wives At every level of society, marriage entailed the cooperation of a man and a woman; among the tax-paying population, a viable household required the labor of both. In return for the wife’s dowry, custom obliged her husband to shelter her and provide her with food, drink, and clothing. In so doing, the husband gained the right to his wife’s reproductive capacity and labor, the latter almost always both varied and highly demanding. Households were economic units in towns as well as the countryside. Merchants and craftsmen, for instance, worked from home and their houses—often one- or two-room wooden cabins—were arranged to accommodate their trade.  Except, perhaps, for social elites, even in towns (including Moscow) almost every household was also a homestead (dvor, in Russian), a kind

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FIGURE 1.1  The husband manufactures sandals while the wife spins thread. Lubok. From Russkii lubok XVII-XIX vv (Moscow-Leningrad: IZOGIZ, 1962). © 19th century, public domain.

of small farm that usually included a kitchen garden, some fruit trees, and various domestic animals—fowl, cows, goats, pigs. If a household was too poor to keep a servant, the wife bore an immense burden: tending the kitchen garden and caring for the domestic animals in addition to other domestic responsibilities. Those responsibilities included hauling water, lighting the stove, preserving and preparing food, clothing the family, and bearing and looking after children. The first ordinarily arrived within a year of the wedding, the rest regularly thereafter—each time bringing risk to the mother’s life. Only a tiny fraction of infants survived.16 For wives, one of the benefits of living in a household that contained other adult women—mother, mother-in-law, sister(s)-in-law—was the additional pairs of female hands that might assume some of that burden, and for brides, the opportunity to refine the skills they had been acquiring since early childhood. Wealth did not free a wife from domestic responsibilities. Instead, her duty became overseeing the servants who did the work, to ensure that they maintained appropriately high standards.17 The duties of a rural gentlewoman were at least as extensive, especially when her husband was away performing service. In his absence, she ordinarily assumed management of the family estate, which meant overseeing the labor of field serfs in addition to her strictly domestic responsibilities. Rural gentlewomen apparently enjoyed considerable independence.18 Nevertheless, by custom and by law—and whatever her economic or social status and however extensive her duties—a wife remained subject to the authority of her husband and was supposed unquestioningly to obey his commands. In a weakly governed polity such as early modern Russia (like much of Europe at the time), social stability itself depended on proper

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governance of the household. To ensure social order, husbands and fathers were expected to exert control over potentially unruly women and the young. To that end, both custom and law empowered the men to employ violence when they deemed it necessary, while ideally exercising judicious restraint. The Domostroi put the matter bluntly: “If your wife does not live according to this teaching and instruction . . . then the husband should punish his wife. Beat her when you are alone together, then forgive her and remonstrate with her. But when you beat her, do not do it in hatred, do not lose control. A husband must never get angry with his wife.” On disciplining children, the Domostroi offered more harsh advice still.19 Short of murder, Muscovite law offered no punishment for “domestic violence” (a term Muscovites would never have used). Even in the case of murder, the law made sharp gender distinctions. The Law Code of 1649 reflected these distinctions. Among its many other purposes, the code represented the first effort by the Muscovite state to regulate intra-familial violence. The code stipulated that a husband who murdered his wife be flogged with the knout, just like other persons who committed a homicide. A wife who murdered her husband, by contrast, was subject to burial to the neck until death, whatever the circumstances that prompted her action. In practice, courts rarely imposed harsh punishments on men who murdered their wives, especially if courts deemed the death “accidental” and the wives, disobedient or adulterous—either of which gave the husband cause for imposing discipline. Short of murder, the code had nothing to say about violence visited on wives. And while kinfolk, parents especially, sometimes intervened on behalf of an abused wife, outsiders never did, although judging by the testimony of witnesses in cases of marital breakdown, they invariably knew exactly what was going on in the households of their acquaintances and neighbors. Intra-familial violence remained quite acceptable: most Muscovite husbands accused of beating their wives, for example, made no attempt to deny it, pointing instead to acts of wifely disobedience.20

The Patriarchal Household If a married couple shared a roof with others, lines of authority necessarily became more complicated. Most newlyweds began their married lives in the household of older kin—usually the household of the husband’s parents but occasionally of the wife’s, and sometimes of the husband’s uncle, or older brother or brothers. In the ten early eighteenth-century towns surveyed by Daniel H. Kaiser, households consisting of only a married couple, with or without children, comprised less than half of all households. Many of these very likely represented a later stage in the marriage, when parents or older kin had died, leaving a couple (or widow) on their own: over two-thirds of the heads of small households were over forty years of age.21

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Households containing two or more adult—that is, married—men tended to be better off economically; they were also better able to withstand the losses caused by periodic recruitment levies. Pooling economic resources and labor could yield significant benefits. Conversely, households with sufficient means had the capacity to provide for the needs of more people. They could shelter such kin as spinster sisters and/or widowed sisters-in-law and their children—no small matter when their fate otherwise might be an almshouse or poverty, the latter the condition of most households headed by single women or widows with children. In such complex households, the head, not a young husband, exercised near-absolute authority, a function of the head’s responsibility to the broader community for every member’s conduct. But the ladder of authority had many additional rungs. Junior members of a complex household were subject to others beside the male and female heads. Junior husbands were subject not only to their father (or father-in-law) but also to older brother(s); their wives not only to their husband, father-in-law, and mother-in-law but also to their senior brother(s) and sister(s)-in-law. Their elders’ guidance assisted the young, especially in acquiring the skills they needed. The head of the household might instruct a young husband in the elder’s craft or trade and assign responsibilities as the younger man attained mastery. Wives performed their duties under the guidance and supervision of the senior woman. If all went harmoniously—the ideal—cooperation ensured everyone’s welfare. However, such a hierarchical organization of authority also opened the door to abuses, although how frequently abuses occurred is impossible to know. Virtually the only documents that shed light on family relations in this period were generated when social norms were violated.22 While their language sometimes hints at those norms—“he lives with his wife illegally,” declared one stepfather concerning his highly abusive son-in-law, for example—they can tell us nothing whatever about how often people behaved “illegally” or about the texture of normal household life.23 But language nevertheless reveals. Although it remained very far from the norm, the most extreme abuse was the phenomenon of snokhachestvo, the sexual involvement of father-in-law and daughter-in-law. Deriving from the word for daughter-in-law—snokha—snokhachestvo proved a common enough phenomenon to merit a noun and a verb to denote it, although we cannot know how common it actually was. Usually attributed exclusively to the peasantry, in fact, it was more widespread.24 The church considered it incest and condemned it. Unlike snokhachestvo, familial violence—in which not only husbands but also other in-laws participated in abusing a wife— appears rather frequently in cases brought before church and state courts. Such cases suggest that while familial abuses of power may not have been “normal,” neither were they rare.25 When abuses occurred, neither the state nor the Russian Orthodox Church offered much in the way of remedies. A wife might flee, but she could be

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compelled to return should her husband desire it. Only if she entered a convent—which required a husband’s consent and provided one of the few grounds for divorce—could a wife remain outside her husband’s household.26 It is true that canon law, on which church officials based their deliberations, might treat beatings that endangered a woman’s life as attempted murder, another of the grounds for divorce. In 1683, one woman even obtained a divorce from a church court on this basis, even though she had engaged in adultery, yet another of the grounds for divorce.27 The woman’s victory was exceptional, however. Even if serious mistreatment could be demonstrated, confirmed by the parents of the victim, and the husband punished and his wife allowed a temporary separation, after that she had to return to his household.28

Marital Breakdown and Its Consequences When a marriage failed, it destroyed the working unit upon which most Muscovites depended. However, although this often brought hardship, estranged spouses faced enormous obstacles to the creation of a new working unit—that is, to marrying again, because of the difficulty of divorce. The Russian Orthodox Church permitted it only on limited grounds, most designed to ensure the legitimacy of offspring. Thus, the grounds for a husband to divorce his wife included her loss of virginity before marriage or her infidelity afterward or even her departure from home without his permission, tantamount to infidelity in this period. Grounds for a wife to divorce her husband included his infidelity, but only if accompanied by aggravated circumstances, or his deliberate damage to his wife’s sexual chastity or reputation—a measure of the enormous importance of both in Muscovite society.29 In addition, if a spouse took monastic vows the other spouse became free to remarry. An abused wife might find refuge in such vows. However, most evidence suggests that this provision, too, often favored the husband. Although church officials made assiduous efforts to ensure that the wife had freely chosen the veil and no physical coercion was involved, history offers numerous examples of wives compelled to enter a nunnery, among them the former Eudokia Lopukhina, first wife of Peter the Great.30 Perhaps the greatest obstacles to formal divorce were practical: the number of dioceses was limited, which meant that most people had to travel substantial distances to locate a bishop or a patriarch. And then, having gotten to town, they had to wait there for the duration of the trial and, because of the complexities of canon law, also to hire people to assist them through the process. All this was costly. Thus, in practice if not in theory, diocesan courts were inaccessible to almost everyone, although a few people, including poor people, did manage to resort to them and sometimes even successfully.31 Confronted with such obstacles, when both husband and wife wished to dissolve a marriage they sometimes adopted a less formal device: the divorce

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letter. Often a collaborative project between husband and wife, the letter stated the reasons for the marital dissolution and, sometimes, provided for the return of the wife’s dowry or for her future support. Submitted in 1721, one such agreement read as follows: Not having waited for my return from [military] service my wife married Ivan and had children by him. Because of her defilement, it is impossible for me to live as her spouse. Ivan and I have reconciled without going to interrogation. We decided that I, most humble, shall have nothing further to do with her, my wife Irina and their children. I give her, my wife, to him, the most humble soldier Ivan. I beg your imperial majesty to take this petition of mine and record it in the book. Although lacking legal standing, such contractual divorces appear to have been widely accepted for a time, and not only by local communities. Priests sometimes remarried women and men who divorced this way, and while higher church authorities regarded divorce letters dubiously, they ordinarily tolerated them, too, at least through the early eighteenth century. Toward its end, however, the church began actively to oppose them, commencing a long but eventually victorious struggle.32

Peter the Great A transformative period in numerous ways, the reign of Peter the Great (1689–1725) also affected the intimate lives of virtually every Russian subject. In his efforts to reshape society and advance Russia’s place in the world, Peter greatly enhanced the power of the state, extending its reach— or attempting to extend its reach—into spheres hitherto largely off-limits to state intervention or deemed irrelevant to state interests. Strongly influenced by his eighteen months of travel in Western Europe, he issued a virtual barrage of decrees after his return. They touched not only on dress and beards and the calendar but also on marriage and family life, and much, much more. Peter’s practice of deploying decrees to bring about change— including changes in marriage practices—would persist until the end of his life, despite his ceding to the Russian Orthodox Church control over the spiritual realm, which included marriage and divorce. Over the long term, church control would have far-reaching consequences for the ways people conducted their marital and personal lives. But so would several of the other changes Peter introduced, many of which—at least superficially—bore no relation to marriage. Peter’s creation of Russia’s first standing army and his intensification of serfdom profoundly affected the marital and family lives of the overwhelming majority of Russians— its peasants—and the impact was mainly negative (see Chapter 3). Petrine policies initially had a negative impact on the intimate lives of many people

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of wealth and/or privilege, too, but that negative impact was mostly shortlived. Over the long term, by contrast, Peter’s educational initiatives, redefinition of gentry status according to the Table of Ranks (1721), and efforts to transform elite culture along Western European lines conferred benefits on social elites and opened new avenues for mobility for those who aspired to that status. New models of personal behavior emerged, with significant social consequences. As literacy gradually spread and more people—although never more than a minority in the eighteenth century and even later—became exposed to the influences Peter fostered, meaningful cultural differences developed between Russia’s educated elites and everyone else, differences in which the conduct of personal relations loomed large. In the seventeenth century Orthodox Russians had arranged and celebrated their marriages according to the same rituals, and organized their households and conducted their domestic lives, even built their homes, according to much the same principles, whatever their status. With few exceptions, those who enjoyed wealth and power simply did everything more lavishly. Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, the principles by which elites approached their personal and domestic lives would begin slowly but steadily to diverge from those of everyone else, leaving only a shared Russian Orthodox religious faith to unify Russia’s subjects. And as the empire expanded, increasingly not even that.

Marriage As did most Orthodox Russians, Tsar Peter the Great regarded marriage as both a religious—sacramental—and mundane institution, and like others, he evidently saw no contradiction between the two. Thus Peter envisioned no need to challenge the church’s long-standing monopoly over marriage and divorce. Indeed, sharing its view of marriage as a sacrament belonging to the “spiritual domain,” Peter reaffirmed church control over marriage. On the other hand, Peter indisputably held his own ideas about the reasons for marriage and the purposes it should serve, ideas he sought to implement in practice. Thus, for example, in the belief that couples in satisfactory marriages would be more likely to procreate—population growth serving the good of the state—Peter sought to curtail the near-absolute power elders held over the marriages of the young. An edict of 1702 mandated a betrothal period of six weeks, to give the prospective bride and groom the chance to meet and get to know one another. Should they decide against marriage, all parties gained the right to terminate the match, the betrothed as well as their parents. Peter’s 1718 decree on assembly, which required elite women to leave their seclusion in order to socialize with men at European-style evening parties, served a similar purpose by expanding possible premarital personal contacts. Peter intended marital reform to encompass everyone.

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An edict of 1722 explicitly forbade forced marriages, including those arranged for “slaves” by their masters, and obliged both bride and groom to take an oath indicating that they consented freely to their union. Parents or superiors, nevertheless, retained absolute veto power over marital choice irrespective of the age of bride or groom according to an edict also issued in 1722.33 Peter’s edicts also touched on divorce. One issued in 1720 added new grounds to old, giving women whose husbands had been sentenced to a lifetime of penal servitude the right to divorce and remarry. Subsequently, Peter’s decree on monasticism closed off the ability of couples to end a marriage simply by entering monastic life. Henceforward, a divorce that enabled a spouse to become a monk or nun was permissible only after the couple had made “representation in detail concerning the divorce” to their bishop, who then forwarded the petition to the Holy Synod (established by Peter in 1721) for a final decision.34 Nowhere was Peter’s own approach to marriage more evident than when he wed for a second time. In 1699, he had forced his wife, Eudokia, to take the veil, freeing himself to marry again. Rather than choosing a woman deriving from a gentry clan—the choice of his predecessors, for political reasons—Peter selected his second bride to suit himself, thereby prioritizing his own individual needs. A foreign woman of common birth, the bride took the name Catherine when she converted to Orthodoxy. She had become his mistress around 1703–4; by the time of their wedding in 1712, Catherine had already borne him several children. The wedding celebration was conducted in the spirit of the new era and featured ladies wearing low-cut gowns and elaborate French wigs, with men garbed in naval uniforms.35 Peter loved his second wife, Catherine, passionately and deeply and made no secret of his feelings. This represented a significant departure from the Russian Orthodox morality of his time, which regarded sex enjoyed for its own sake as sinful. The marriage also offered a new vision of what it meant to be husband and wife—an affective conjugal ideal. It was disseminated in portraits of Peter, Catherine, and their children depicted individually and as a family group.36 Over time, this new ideal would come to reverberate ever more widely, augmented as it would be by cultural currents emanating from Western Europe (to which Peter had thrown Russia’s doors wide open). Never in the imperial period, however, did it become the norm for everyone. 

War and Disruption But that was the long term. In the short, what affected people’s personal lives the most was the perpetual warfare and related imperatives characteristic of Peter’s tumultuous rule. They tore apart couples and disrupted households across the social spectrum. The tax-paying population was hit the hardest. Peter’s new, semi-standing army relied on conscripts from among them:

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FIGURE 1.2  G. S. Musikiiskii, The Family Portrait of Peter the Great, 1720. © Courtesy of the Walters Art Museum, public domain.

serfs, state and church peasants, and townspeople. Recruit levies removed husbands and fathers from towns and villages for life and likely encouraged the consolidation of households. If the couple were serfs, the husband’s conscription transformed his wife into a free woman, while offering her no place to go (see Chapter 3). “What sort of tsar is this who destroys the peasants’ homes, takes our husbands for soldiers and leaves us orphaned with our children and forces us to weep for an age,” a peasant woman complained in Peter’s time.37 Gentry were scarcely better off. It is true that during the previous century, servitors were frequently away from home performing state service. But Peter made service mandatory and lifelong for all men of the gentry, beginning at age fifteen, when they were to be sent to study. Marriage itself hung in the balance or, at least, so Peter decreed. Only after they had completed their education and received their diploma were men permitted to wed: “and without such diplomas they are not to be allowed to marry or give pledges of betrothal.”38 Having wed, couples might be separated for years on end. In the first years after his marriage in 1711, for instance, the gentry servitor Ivan Nepliuev was almost never home. He travelled abroad and then, after six months’ service in St. Petersburg, was dispatched to Turkey as an ambassador. Six years passed before his wife, Feodosia Nepliueva, gained

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permission to join him. The couple spent only about half of the twenty-nine years of their married life together.39

Making Marriages There is little evidence that Peter’s edicts changed the way that marriages came about, at least in the short term. His decree requiring that both groom and bride consent to a marriage was often observed only in the most formal sense. In her study of the post-Petrine service elite, Brenda MeehanWaters emphasized the ways that marriage arrangements among the gentry remained pragmatic in purpose. “Marriage could augment family wealth (through a financially well-endowed daughter-in-law), cement political alliances, advance careers; and maintain or improve family status.” Against such considerations, the feelings of the betrothed mattered little, those of daughters especially, although not exclusively. Meehan-Waters offered the example of Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaia. Although Dolgurukaia was deeply in love with the brother of the Prussian ambassador, she submitted to the will of her father and in 1729 became engaged to the fifteen-year-old emperor, Peter II. She never ceased to regard her husband with distaste.40 The way people who stood on somewhat lower rungs of the ladder of privilege arranged their marriages also continued much as before. As previously, members of the provincial gentry usually wed people of comparable economic standing, often their neighbors—marriages surely arranged by their parents or guardians for the women, and likely for most of the men, too.41 To my knowledge, no accounts of gentry matchmaking survive from the seventeenth century. But the diary of Andrei Bolotov, a rare personal narrative, provides one for the mid-eighteenth—a vivid description not only of how a match might be made in his milieu but also of the considerations that weighed in the balance. When in 1744, her parents began to seek a husband for her, the future bride, the nineteen-year-old Praskovia (Andrei’s older sister), had little to offer a prospective suitor in the way of material resources. Indeed, her “exceedingly modest” dowry, consisting only of several serf families and several hundred rubles, led her mother, especially, to fear for the daughter’s future. But in this case at least, less tangible assets made Praskovia “an enviable catch,” nevertheless. One asset was the widespread esteem for her father, Timofei Bolotov, a captain of the guards assigned to the city of Pskov during the census there. So admirably did he fulfill his duties that within a brief period of time he earned the love and respect of gentry for miles around, enjoying friendships not only among them but also among all the “best people” of the district. The other asset was Praskovia herself, with her “fine manners, compliant (nesvoevol’noe) disposition, and respectable upbringing,” and not least, her competency in household management. Within six months of the family’s move to Pskov, suitors made their appearance.42

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Their very existence was likely a measure of change, one result of the new opportunities for sociability that followed from Peter’s 1718 decree on assemblies. The gentry’s requisite service to the state starting at age fifteen may have made a difference, too. Having left home when they entered service, young gentlemen were perhaps in a better position to exercise some choice, although by law their marriages still required parental approval as well as, now, that of their superior officer. One of those suitors was a wealthy young gentleman, Vasilii Nekliudov (age unspecified), then on leave from his regiment to attend to his neglected estate. It was his relatives who pressed for marriage and proposed Praskovia as the bride: although she was not wealthy, they averred, she was the daughter of fine parents and possessed an exemplary character. Most of all, they emphasized her ability to bring order to Nekliudov’s estate, in severe disarray due to his inexperience and lengthy absences on service. Convinced by their entreaties, Vasilii sought an occasion to have a look at Praskovia, and when he did, he liked what he saw. So much, in fact, that he asked for her hand almost immediately and offered to waive the dowry.43 Her father, Timofei Bolotov—not her mother or a female relative—oversaw every stage of the ensuing process. Delighted by Nekliudov’s wealth, the father, nevertheless, expressed some concerns. For one thing, the suitor’s service rank was low at a time when the performance of state service had already become something of the measure of a man from this milieu. Bolotov considered the issue, but then dismissed it as unimportant. More troubling were the rumors that reached Bolotov about Nekliudov’s youthful indiscretions, rumors Bolotov both believed and didn’t: “He knew that marriage negotiations (svatanie) never proceeded without some mudslinging.” And even if the rumors were true, how many youths remain pure? the father asked himself. Still, to ensure no further indiscretions, Bolotov required Vasilii to transfer to his future father-in-law’s regiment, where he could be kept under scrutiny.44 At no point, apparently, was Praskovia herself consulted. The marriage was arranged and the agreement (including the modest dowry) was sealed. The wedding was held in Pskov that very August. In his diary, Bolotov the son celebrates its success. “My father’s hopes were not disappointed,” he writes. “He obtained a worthy son-in law . . . . And my sister was happy in her marriage and got a husband who was not stupid, of good morals, with a decent livelihood and most important of all, who loved her as he was supposed to, so she had nothing to complain about.” It is impossible to know whether Timofei Bolotov, a bookish man, was typical in the weight he placed on his daughter’s future welfare, in addition to—or perhaps better, above and beyond—more practical considerations.45 But other parents and guardians likely also bore their offspring’s welfare in mind when arranging their conjugal future, even if their concern has left no trace in the historical record. And Bolotov was perfectly typical in assuming responsibility for his daughter’s marriage: that was precisely what the law required of parents.46

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Although no such detailed accounts exist for the marriage arrangements of people lower down on the social ladder, the evidence from other sources suggests that they proceeded much as in the previous century, and with little or no input from the young, male as well as female. In first marriages, at least, elders continued to oversee the fate of both parties, with family and economic interests uppermost. Judging by marital contracts from eighteenthcentury Moscow, tangible assets in the form of the dowry remained part of the deal across the social spectrum, even if in the case of the very poor (who seem to have comprised the majority of those who registered marriage agreements), the “dowry” consisted of an icon, some scraps of clothing, and perhaps a handful of rubles.47 For the wealthy or highly placed, on the other hand, dowering a bride could involve an enormous outlay—including not only holy icons; clothing; dishware of silver, brass, and wood; valuable jewelry; and thousands, even tens of thousands, of rubles often enumerated to the very last kopek; but even, in some cases an urban estate with all its buildings (i.e., a homestead), in addition to the requisite bedding, pillows, blankets, linens, and the like. Upon his sister Ekaterina’s marriage to a captain in the Astrakhan regiment in 1724, for instance, the merchant grandson Ivan Semyonov promised a dowry of clothing, beaded items, and diamond jewelry worth 2662 rubles and seventy kopeks (note the precision, a typical feature) plus another 1000 rubles to purchase a landed estate. In 1739, two sons of a wealthy merchant provided their niece, Maria Ilina, with six holy icons, diamonds, pearls, silver, clothing and linens, and other items worth 10,000 rubles at her marriage to an ensign in the elite Izmailovskii Guards regiment.48 Sometimes, when the list of dowry items became too lengthy, wealthier urban residents drew it up separately from the actual marriage agreement. Such lists might also include house serfs and cattle, in addition to these.49 Beyond indicating a modest social mobility between commercial elites and well-born state servitors, the two contracts mentioned also highlight the importance of kin as well as parents in ensuring the future of young and marriageable maidens. Kin played a role in the remarriage of widows as well.50 In roughly 28 percent of the fifty-four agreements for first marriages registered in the city of Moscow between the start of the eighteenth century and 1761, kin rather than a parent or parents (or in one case, a stepparent) dowered the bride. These kin included brothers and less often, sisters, a grandparent, uncles, cousins, and even in a couple of cases, a godparent.51 The role of kin was even more prominent when widows remarried. Signatories to the marriage agreements of widows might include not only her own blood kin but also rather often, and to my surprise, her late husband’s, too. Sometimes, those signatories provided another dowry; almost invariably, they formally freed the new spouse from responsibility for the late husband’s debts. Only in 1728 do we begin to find widows as signatories to their own marriage agreements, even in at least one instance, providing their own dowry.52

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The prominence of kin in marriage agreements underscores their significance in people’s lives at a time when human life was exceedingly fragile. As everywhere else in eighteenth-century Europe, mortality rates were high in Russia, where prolonged periods of warfare may well have compounded other hazards. The fragility of human life also enhanced the significance of the complex household, still commonplace in most towns and probably in Moscow, if not in the newly built city of St. Petersburg, where nuclear families predominated.53 If they had the means, complex households would shelter orphans, widowed sisters, even cousins. They thereby assumed responsibility for providing for the person’s future—including, in the case of a marriageable young woman (or sometimes, a youngish widow), dowering her and finding her a husband. What we now call blended families must also have been commonplace. Marriage agreements specified if the bride was a widow, as she was in slightly over a quarter of the marriage agreements discussed earlier. Although widowers were not identified as such, they were surely involved in an even larger proportion of marriage agreements, because widowers proved by far the more likely to remarry. This means that a substantial minority of the population undoubtedly grew up in a household with a stepfather or stepmother and stepsiblings. If blended families are nothing new, neither are the tensions they can generate, although these surface in the historical record relatively rarely. A document registering the separation of Sergei Evstratov from his father’s household offers one example: he wanted to separate, the document states, “because I, Sergei, no longer want to live with my father when his wife, my step-mother . . . is living in the household.”54 Another can be found in the last will and testament of Ivan Grigoriev, who in 1718 left his second wife their homestead and other valuable property (see also below). He then threatened with damnation his son, Mikhail, should the son contest his father’s testament.55

Conjugal life These same sources indicate that at least some people sought and found emotional gratification in marriage, in addition to its economic and social benefits. They likely also expressed their feelings more readily than people had done the previous century, thanks to the cultural changes in process around them. In his will, for instance, Ivan Grigoriev praised his second wife, Anna Feodorovna, “my light,” for “her genuine love towards me and firm constancy.” With the homestead, icons, and other goods that he willed her, she was free to do as she saw fit: to marry, to remain a widow, or to enter a nunnery. “I forbid her nothing,” reads the will, composed in 1718. Sergei Ivanov, a teacher at the Moscow garrison cipher school, expressed comparable affection for his wife Praskovia, with whom he had lived for

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twenty-eight years, as he emphasized in the will. In 1746, bequeathing to her several icons, his homestead with its outbuildings and a market stall, he thanked her for her “genuine love for me.” His relatives had no claim on his property, he stipulated; it was all entirely his, acquired together with his wife.56 Although such overt expressions of affection were lacking, the testaments of women who chose to settle their estate on husbands rather than on members of their natal families—the expected practice—provide evidence of conjugal affection, too. In 1729, Maria Osipova daughter of Nikitin, for example, made her husband her sole heir, granting him all the property she had inherited from her parents, cash included. In these cases, the affection between conjugal pairs overrode loyalty to kin and clan, even as law and custom still granted the latter priority.57 The portrait Bolotov offers of his parents’ marriage likewise suggests deep attachment (although the son never says that explicitly), but also the difficulties of maintaining a stable conjugal and family life given the realities of the lifelong state service Peter required of gentlemen. The Bolotovs clearly endeavored to maintain a life together. Mavra Bolotova often accompanied her husband on his assignments, but not always. The couple were living in Nezhin, in Ukraine, during the Turkish campaign of 1735–9 when she became pregnant with Andrei. In order to give birth in familiar surroundings, in 1738 she returned to their estate in Tula province, a distance of roughly 400 miles. Over a year passed before the father saw his son, during “the briefest visit” to his family at their estate. Bolotov then headed, alone, to St. Petersburg to spend the winter with his battalion, and thereafter was dispatched to the East. Returning in the fall of 1740, he was granted command of his own infantry regiment.58 Being in command must have made a difference. From that moment forward, Bolotov almost always kept his wife, his son, and his two daughters by his side as he moved with his regiment from place to place. They never remained long in any one location. Only when the young Andrei was five and war broke out with Sweden was his father “compelled,” as the son puts it, to let his family leave Estland, where he was then stationed, and return home to Tula.59 The married life of Vasilii Ivanovich Suvorov (1709–75) and Avdotia Fedoseevna Suvorova (the parents of Aleksandr Vasilievich Suvorov [1730–1800], later a national hero) followed a comparable pattern, and during roughly the same period.60 But we do not know how many other gentry undertook similar efforts to sustain a conjugal life. Given women’s significant role in estate management—a role that neither of these two women seems to have fulfilled—it appears likely that both couples were unusual. But it may also be that the affective ideal that Peter introduced, enhanced as it was by the literature of sentiment that had begun to trickle into Russia, increased what well-educated, bookish men such as Timofei Bolotov expected from conjugal life. Certainly, books to enhance such expectations

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were to be found in the Bolotov home. “From childhood,” Andrei Bolotov writes, “I had the opportunity to read poems and love stories that depicted love as tender, pure and uncorrupted.” By the time Andrei was a teenager, he nourished the most romantic conceptions.61 If this supposition is correct, then the lengthy separations also characteristic of the life of seventeenth-century servitors would likely have become more difficult to endure, contributing to pressures to shorten the duration of the gentry service requirement and finally, in Catherine’s time, to end that requirement altogether.

Marital Conflict Unfortunately, we can only catch glimpses of satisfactory unions. Much more frequently, we encounter unhappy ones, by far the more likely to leave traces in the historical record. Appeals concerning domestic violence, applications for divorce, suits concerning bigamy, and the like—all in greater abundance for the eighteenth century than for the seventeenth—reveal marriages at their worst and not their best. Still, however unrepresentative, such documents can shed light on popular expectations of marriage and offer insight into the role played by others, including the authorities, in enforcing conjugal norms. These records clearly indicate that what we would now call domestic violence remained commonplace, and as before was apparently regarded as normal at every level of society from top to bottom. To contextualize such violence, it is worth bearing in mind that corporal punishment was also the norm in these times, and again at every social level: the well-born would become legally immune from it only in 1785, when Catherine the Great issued the Charter of the Gentry. Officials resorted to flogging, branding, and other forms of physical chastisement routinely and for a range of transgressions.62 It would be surprising if male heads of households, still responsible for maintaining public and private order, refrained from exercising force to that end. So long as men kept that force within certain bounds, it remained acceptable. As a result, when wives complained to various authorities, they never referred simply to beatings but, rather, to beatings “without cause,” or beatings using “excessive force.”63 This was the case even among gentlefolk. For instance, in 1730, Anna Rzhevskaia, at a hearing with her husband, accused him of beating and tormenting her “for no reason” at all. Although he had squeezed her larynx so hard that it bled and torn out hunks of her hair, which lay scattered about the floor, Colonel Vasilii Rzhevskii responded that he beat her “in the usual fashion” and had done nothing life-threatening. Marfa Solntseva-Zasekina took refuge from her husband, Prince Solntsev-Zasekin, in a nunnery. Her skull was cracked in two places, and one of her right ribs was cracked as well; two of her teeth had been knocked out; and part of her tongue was damaged. Retired ensign Aleksander Minin constantly tormented and beat his wife, put out one of her eyes with his knife, and cracked her skull.64 It is

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true that murdering a wife was considered a crime and the perpetrator, no matter his rank, subjected to punishment: for military officers this meant being stripped of rank and forced to run the gauntlet. However, if it could be demonstrated that a wife’s death happened “accidentally,” the abuse that led to it might earn no punishment.65 However abusive a marriage, the authorities, including religious authorities, proved highly reluctant to intervene even when called upon to do so. Thus, the majority of women’s appeals for divorce between 1720 and 1760 cited extreme marital violence—violence that threatened the woman’s life or produced a miscarriage. But only under exceptional circumstances were clerical authorities prone to take such appeals seriously. If they found insufficient grounds for divorce, as in the majority of cases they did, they might subject an unusually abusive husband to penance and a flogging, but then exhort him to live with his wife peacefully and send her back to his household. If a husband’s violence was genuinely life-threatening, however, until the reign of Catherine the Great (1762–96), an abused woman might obtain a divorce, although often without the right to remarry. In addition, if the violence caused the wife to miscarry, civil authorities might permit the wife to live separately.66 Otherwise, an abused wife’s sole legal option was to petition the church to enter a convent, which if approved entailed divorce. Unsurprisingly, given the absence of legal recourse, abused wives often took matters into their own hands and simply fled. Gentlewomen found shelter with parents or other kin; peasant wives ran away from their villages; townswomen moved to a different quarter or another town. Their flight violated the law, which forbade wives to leave the household without their husband’s permission. Indeed, women’s departure even to visit a relative constituted one of the grounds for divorce. Thus, if the authorities tracked down a runaway wife, they almost invariably compelled her to return to her husband’s roof, although unknowable numbers of women surely eluded detection and succeeded in making a life somewhere else. And some unhappily married couples simply parted. “Self-divorces” persisted through the eighteenth century, approved by parish priests and registered by civil authorities, although the numbers likely declined due to the efforts of church authorities to quash them.67 A Synodal decree of 1730 explicitly prohibited self-divorces and forbade priests to validate divorce letters, threatening punishment if the priests disobeyed.68 “The Unauthorized ending of a marriage outside of a clerical court and by mutual agreement of the spouses is not allowed under any circumstances,” instructed the decree. “Also forbidden are any agreements between the spouses to live apart or any other actions that lead to the disruption of the marital union. Civil authorities must not confirm or witness acts of this sort. Priests and other church officials are also forbidden, under threat of trial and defrocking, to write divorce letters of any sort for anyone.” Popular practices, however, proved difficult to suppress completely. In 1767, the

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Synod reiterated the decree. It was reiterated again in 1819, again in 1850, and yet again in 1869.69 Even so, by the close of the eighteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church had largely succeeded in securing its monopoly over divorce and remarriage among its faithful, abetted by civil authorities who oversaw the enforcement of canon law. That monopoly would persist until the end of Romanov rule.70

Conclusion At the start of the eighteenth century, Russia was a society organized on patriarchal principles, where household needs, Russian Orthodox religious strictures, and community norms shaped the intimate lives and choices of individuals across the social spectrum. This often meant early and near-universal marriage, ordinarily arranged by others for practical and procreative purposes, and the expectation that individuals would subordinate their needs to the interests of household and clan. Recourse to violence, including what we nowadays call domestic violence, upheld political, social, and gender hierarchies. Reinforcing the authority of the church over marriage and family relations, Tsar Peter the Great also introduced change. In the short term, military conscription and almost perpetual warfare strained marriages and household economies. The long-term changes derived from Peter’s view of marriage as an individual rather than—or better, in addition to—a family matter, and his encouragement of cultural influences from the West and requirement that men of the gentry, at least, obtain the education requisite for absorbing them. Initially limited in impact, over time these would have important consequences for the marital and family lives of Russia’s social elites as well as for others who aspired to a cultivated lifestyle.

2 The Culture of Sensibility 1761–1855

Ivan Tolchenov was eighteen years old in 1773 when his father found him a bride. His parents’ sole surviving son, Ivan was the scion of a prosperous and prominent family that had engaged in commerce for well over a century in the provincial town of Dmitrov, Moscow (population roughly 3000), where the Tolchenovs occupied a large, two-story timber house. “With the approbation and inducement of my father,” Ivan wrote in the diary he began that year, “I decided to marry.” The proffered bride was the daughter of a merchant family from Moscow, portending a mutually beneficial business alliance between her family and Ivan’s. Father and son travelled to that city, where Ivan saw his intended match, the seventeen-year-old Anna, probably for the first time: “I viewed the young woman . . . who was determined by heavenly fate to be my spouse,” his diary observes.1 Although Ivan’s youth at the time of his marriage was unusual among merchant households, marriages such as his, arranged at the initiative of parents or guardians with economic and/or social considerations uppermost in mind, remained typical then and later. Less well-to-do townspeople tended to arrange their sons’ marriages similarly, that is, early, at least in part to obtain another pair of working hands, but members of the merchant estate ordinarily adopted a different strategy. Uniquely in the Russian estate (soslovie) system, the status of merchant—which brought access to privileges, including exemption from the head tax and conscription— depended on wealth. As a result, merchant fathers tended to marry off their sons only after the son had acquired enough assets to win a well-dowered or well-connected bride, thereby benefitting the family business and ensuring the preservation of the son’s status. Merchants preferred young brides (as did everyone else), so in this group, the age difference between spouses was often considerable.2

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Ivan’s wedding took place less than two weeks after the couple’s first meeting. So brief an engagement was nothing unusual—most engagements lasted only a month or so at most (Peter’s decree mandating six-week engagements notwithstanding). This meant that like Ivan and his future bride, engaged couples rarely enjoyed much opportunity to develop deep feelings for one another before they wed. The wedding ceremony, too, followed a well-established pattern. Not only a solemn occasion, consecrated in church, it was equally or more an opportunity for socializing, feasting, and drinking. Three days of celebration with in-laws and relatives in Moscow followed the church ceremony, after which ensued another week or so of socializing in Dmitrov together with Anna’s parents. Although Ivan does not mention it, the first day’s celebration likely included a bedding ceremony followed by the showing of the bloody bridal sheet, a ritual identical to the one observed by peasants and commonplace even among the gentry well into the early nineteenth century, although rarely referred to in memoirs and diaries because of the new preference for privacy.3 If Ivan Tolchenov’s diary is any indication—and historians have discovered no other diary remotely like it for this period—neither the arrangement of a marriage nor its pragmatic and public aspects created an obstacle to a couple’s deep attachment. Love could follow marriage rather than precede it, precisely as just about everyone but a relative handful of gentry elites believed. While Tolchenov never explicitly discusses his feelings for his wife, his diary makes it clear that he grew to respect and care deeply for her. He “clung to her and looked after her as strongly as if he had chosen her himself,” as historian David Ransel has put it.4

FIGURE 2.1  Russian Wedding. Lubok. © Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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The arrangement, celebration, and early years of Ivan and Anna Tolchenovs’ marriage followed well-established patterns; its subsequent course, however, proved less predictable. Their marriage coincided with a period of major cultural change. Tolchenov’s diary commences in 1777, just as the European Enlightenment and the culture of sensibility had begun to circulate more widely among Russia’s tiny but expanding literate public, bringing ideas that attached new significance to the self and its experiences and enabled a new kind of social mobility. Although only a relative few were in a position to refashion their lives accordingly then and later, the new ideas, nevertheless, reverberated more broadly—they may, indeed, have influenced not only Tolchenov’s decision to keep a diary, but also some of the experiences and sentiments he confided to its pages.  Certainly, the upsurge in memoir and letter writing and diary-keeping in this period—one result of the new intellectual currents—permits the historian to offer a far more detailed picture of individual expectations and experiences than was possible in the preceding chapter.

The Enlightenment in Russia Although Peter the Great initiated the process, it was in the reign of Catherine the Great (1762–96) that educated Russians began to experience Westernization’s full affect. Catherine sought to create a decisive break with the values and morals of Russia’s past, at least among its social elites, by transforming the ways that such people conceived of and conducted their lives.5 She did much to make the change happen. Authoring numerous works herself and strengthening ties with European intellectuals, she also encouraged the proliferation of literary journals. Her reign vastly increased the availability of foreign literature, in the original languages as well as in translation, and saw the growing popularity of theater, not only in major cities but also in the countryside, on the estates of wealthy magnates. Among the new ideas, those concerning intimate relations occupied a prominent place. Propounding the possibility of individual happiness on earth, the Enlightenment had rehabilitated the passions, including romantic love and sexual desire, as elements essential to such felicity. In the original (French, mainly) or in translation, literary works reflected the new trend. Portraying marriage as the means to happiness and romantic and sexual love as its sole justification, such works introduced the idea that the “force and extremity of feeling” offered the most compelling evidence of love. Love lyrics and poetry reinforced these ideas; so did the Enlightenment stage. In theatrical performances attended not only by gentry but also by merchants and townspeople, “enlightened” people agreed that a romantic union was the only basis for conjugal felicity. Portrayals of forced marriage, by contrast, represented violence and tyranny.6

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For gentry, at least, the new ideas coincided with greatly expanded opportunities to enjoy domestic pleasures and duties. For the first time since Peter the Great imposed his service requirement, Russian gentry with the means could spend extended periods at home and from a relatively early age. Peter III (1761–62) had freed them from compulsory service in 1762; after she ousted him, Catherine the Great confirmed that freedom. Thereafter, men were at liberty to retire from service when they chose if they had the desire and the economic wherewithal. The coincidence between ideas about domestic life and expanded opportunities to savor it was intentional, an element of Catherine’s efforts to refashion the Russian gentry. Men’s return to their rural estates would introduce more cultivated lifestyles to the countryside. Catherine expected the men to participate in the new provincial institutions she established; for their part, their wives would elevate the cultural and moral tone of their surroundings. The women would also inculcate in the next generation not only the requisite moral qualities—a maternal responsibility of long standing—but civic values as well. The abundant new literature on childrearing instructed mothers to guide the intellectual as well as moral development of their offspring, transforming motherhood into women’s primary role, at least in theory.7 Thus would the endeavors of gentry women and men alike extend into the provinces the reach of the throne and its Westernizing and civilizing mission.8 To ensure that girls were properly prepared for their new responsibilities, in 1764 Catherine founded the first school for women of the gentry in Russia, the Society for the Training of Well-Born Girls (better known as the Smolny Institute after the former monastery that housed it). Its purpose was to create enlightened daughters, wives, and future mothers.9 In order to insulate its charges from the vulgarities that might infect them in their parents’ home, Smolny admitted students at an early age and isolated them from their families during their twelve or more years of schooling. Instead, to provide alternative models for appropriate conduct, students were brought into contact with the court and high society. About 900 young women passed through Smolny during the years of Catherine’s reign. Other institutes soon sprang up, based on its model.10 As a result of these initiatives, the ways that social elites evaluated themselves and one another gradually changed. Whereas once, elite status had been determined almost solely by an individual’s position in the social hierarchy and/or proximity to the ruler, from Catherine’s reign onward, elite standing became contingent on a person’s behavior, values, ideals, and feelings, as well.11 Catherine’s reign thus opened the door to a new kind of social mobility and at a time when economic and other changes, including the expansion of education, fostered greater mobility, too. Though the vast majority of Russia’s population in the towns and the countryside remained entirely unaffected, the new cultural currents, nevertheless, also touched at least a few of those people.

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The Russian Orthodox Church Enlightenment ideas concerning the proper basis for marriage also influenced the Russian Orthodox Church, but in complex and seemingly contradictory ways. On the one hand, they prompted the church to liberalize its views to some degree. While continuing to condemn sexual desire as sinful, its prelates began to highlight the voluntary, contractual elements of marriage as opposed to its strictly procreative purposes, and to emphasize the importance of affective ties and sexual fidelity for both parties and not just the wife. The change represented a substantial departure from the church’s previous stance, with its emphasis on the patriarchal character of spousal relations. Instead, the new approach offered a model of conjugal relations based on mutual assistance and reciprocity. Elsewhere in Western Europe, more liberal views of conjugal relations prompted secular authorities to increase their control over divorce, while restricting that of the church.12 Not in Russia. There, even as the tsarist state curtailed the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church in other domains, it reaffirmed church control over the “spiritual” realm, which included marriage and the family. As a result, civil marriages enjoyed no legal status in Russia, even if the marriages had been performed legally abroad. Church control had consequences for the increasing number of the empire’s people who professed faiths other than Orthodoxy, such as Jews, Lutherans, Catholics, and Muslims, among others. After incorporation into the Russian empire, they, too, required sanctification from their respective religions for their marriages to enjoy legal standing. Orthodoxy, however, remained the privileged faith. While the Russian Orthodox Church had agreed to the legalization of mixed marriages in 1721, people of other faiths who married Orthodox Russians had to marry according to the rituals of Orthodoxy and agree to raise their offspring in the faith as well.13 Moreover, even as the views of the church grew more liberal in some respects, they became more inflexible in others. By the end of the eighteenth century the Church had developed a particularly rigid conception of marriage and divorce. Regarding marriage as a holy sacrament, church leaders allowed its dissolution only under exceptional circumstances and only by a clerical—not a civil—court. The newly strict grounds for divorce excluded cruel treatment, which earlier in the century had occasionally been admissible if it threatened the life of a wife.14 Grounds now included adultery (requiring several witnesses and not just the testimony of the parties involved); desertion (only after five years had elapsed and lengthy investigation had failed to locate the missing spouse); sexual incapacity (which had to antedate the marriage, have lasted at least three years, and be verified by an expert); and Siberian exile. Even then, the church acted with extreme reluctance, making divorce a cumbersome, expensive and humiliating process. Until 1904, the “guilty” party in a divorce on the grounds of adultery was forbidden to remarry.15

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Couples still got divorced, but only very rarely. Figures for the period between 1836 and1860 suggest an average of roughly fifty-eight divorces a year, the vast majority on the basis of Siberian exile or abandonment.16 Except in cases of bigamy, annulments were even further out of reach. Nor could couples simply legalize agreements to live separately: the law that required them to cohabit also strictly forbade any acts that might separate them unless sanctioned by the Catholic and subsequently, Evangelical Lutheran Church.17 Thereby, it prevented Orthodox subjects from obtaining the relief available to miserably married couples in Catholic countries. To be sure, unhappily married couples might still separate voluntarily. When gentry couples did so, the wife lived either apart from her husband with a family member or on the estates she brought to the marriage and that according to Russian law remained her separate property thereafter. Such arrangements were commonplace—so commonplace, in fact, that the gentry of Kolomenskii district, Moscow, requested that the Legislative Commission of 1767 issue legislation to regulate property settlements in such cases. But if the husband should want to restore cohabitation, the law was on his side.18 Overall, the result of church policy “was a marital order of a rigidity unknown elsewhere in Europe”—an order that would, over time, prove to be profoundly at odds with new conceptions of the individual and individual rights.19 By the close of Catherine’s reign, the church’s definition of marital and family obligations had become inscribed in law. It remained largely unaffected by the new ideas. Despite the more egalitarian—although very far from fully egalitarian—model espoused by sentimental ideas and reflected in some Orthodox literature, the law defined a wife’s obligations in terms of patriarchal authority, with scant attention to individual rights. “A wife is required to obey her husband as head of the household, to live with him in love, respect and unlimited obedience (emphasis mine) and as mistress of the household (khoziaika) render him every service and attachment,” declared a law of 1763. For his part, a law of 1782 now obliged a husband to “love his wife as his own body, to live with her in concord, to respect and defend her and to forgive her weaknesses and ease her infirmities.” He was also to provide her “with nourishment and support according to his status and capabilities.” However, his failure to fulfill these obligations incurred no legal remedies. The law also affirmed the absolute nature of parental power and its extension over the lifetime of offspring.20

The Impact of New Conjugal Ideals In 1763, a year after it became legally permissible, the twenty-five-year-old gentry landowner Andrei Bolotov retired from service and began his search for a bride. Everyone he knew urged him to wed. He himself was eager, too: his “best years” were slipping away, he confided to his diary. Still, not just

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any bride would do. She could not be poor—Bolotov rejected one prospect because her dowry consisted of but fifty serfs. But she also had to possess qualities other than wealth. He sought, in fact, a soul mate: “a comrade, whose every thought and feeling would accord with mine,” in his words. Friends and acquaintances searched far and wide on his behalf, but fruitlessly. Then a prospective bride appeared to him in a dream. The very next day, a matchmaker turned up at his door proposing a match with that very girl. Fate appeared to have spoken. Although Aleksandra, the girl in question, was only thirteen years old and when left alone with her suitor uttered not a word, he agreed to marry her. “Will my marriage be successful?” Bolotov wondered on the eve of his wedding. “Will it make me happier?”21 Bolotov was hardly unique in anticipating happiness in his marriage or in seeking from his bride more than a good dowry, a virtuous and submissive character, and competency in household management—that is, more than the very qualities (sans dowry) that had won his older sister Praskovia a well-to-do husband not many years before. Other educated men, too, now highlighted their sentimental approach to marriage in addition to, or more rarely, instead of, more pragmatic concerns. “Nourished on the literature of the age of sensibility,” as historian Isabel de Madariaga puts it, the Ukrainian nobleman Grigorii S. Vinskii (1752–?) begins his memoirs, written in 1811, by telling us that his father had wed his mother, then sixteen years old, on the basis of “heartfelt mutual attraction” when the father was twenty-one. Subsequently, the author himself made a love match at the age of twenty-six after pitched battles between “my head and my heart,” in which the heart triumphed. He chose as his bride an impoverished and illiterate German girl of fifteen.22 Likewise, the poet and statesman Gavriil Derzhavin (1743–1816), having initially married for love, after his wife’s death in 1794 married for love a second time, spurning “the many wealthy or highly placed [znatnye] women, both widows and maidens,” who made their interest in him clear.23 Influenced by the new intellectual currents, women, too, might not only anticipate conjugal felicity but also experience deep disappointment if they failed to obtain it. “Find me a husband like yours,” Derzhavin’s second wife, Daria Diakova, had jested to his first while she was still alive, “and I’ll marry him and hope to be happy.” The letters of both Ekaterina Rumiantseva (1724–79), and Daria Petrovna Saltykova (1739–1802), to husbands off performing service feature expressions of passionate attachment, although in Rumiantseva’s case, also expressions of profound unhappiness on account of her husband’s infidelity. “My unhappiness derives solely from my passionate love for you, and I am perishing from it,” Rumiantseva wrote to her husband in 1762. Saltykova’s marriage came closer to the new ideals: “Mon bon et tendre ami” (my dear and tender friend), she addressed her husband. “Yes, my friend,” she wrote to him in 1774, “I adore you as if you were my lover.”24 New courtship opportunities facilitated marriages based on sentiment by encouraging young women and men to develop emotional attachments

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before they wed rather than after. To find a bride, Bolotov had relied on friends, on visits to size up his various prospects, and finally, on a matchmaker. Two decades later, the growing popularity of balls and similar social occasions had transformed the marriage market for gentry of means. When his eldest daughter became marriageable at the age of sixteen or seventeen, Bolotov felt the need to travel with her to the provincial capital and even to Moscow, where balls had become frequent and where she might encounter a prospective suitor. To ensure that she (and her brother) could meet the requirements of the new sociability, Bolotov hired an instructor to teach them to dance.25 By the early nineteenth century, noble assemblies and gatherings where the young could court and dance had become commonplace. Unattached young people also socialized freely at home and in the cultured world of high society, flirted with words in domestic albums.26 Even when pragmatic considerations largely governed the making of a match, as pragmatic considerations often did, people might, nevertheless, adopt the language of sentiment and may well have conceived their lives according to its terms. Thus, for instance, in the 1830s, the gendarme officer Erastii Stogov chose his bride without even meeting her. Her dowry of a thousand male serfs and the sterling reputation of her family were enough to convince him of his future wife’s suitability. Still, sentiment figured, if obliquely. Although Stogov’s bride accepted his proposal solely to please her parents, Stogov assured her that she would eventually come to love him. Then he badgered her monthly as to whether she had begun to feel the desired emotion. Within a year of the marriage, she answered “yes.”27 Most marriages either joined together individuals and kinship networks of comparable social and economic standing or, like Stogov’s, served to enhance a suitor’s economic well-being and/or opportunities for career advancement.28 Nevertheless, husbands and wives were now “friends,” with friendship almost indissolubly linked with love. More: by the early nineteenth century, an “idealized domesticity” had come to serve as one of the foundations of provincial gentry life.29 In idealizing relations between husbands and wives—whatever the realities—sentimental ideas rendered domestic violence less acceptable among people who conceived of themselves as cultivated. Men’s abuses of domestic authority represented a kind of “despotism,” to quote Sofia Skalon in reference to a late eighteenth-century marriage, to be condemned as one might condemn abuses of political authority.30 By exempting gentry from corporal punishment and treating such punishment as a source of “dishonor,” the Charter to the Gentry (1785) contributed to the shift in attitude. Might not violence against a gentlewoman at home insult and “dishonor” her, too? Whether this change in attitude led to an actual reduction of domestic violence even among elites remains a question: “No one can forbid me to beat my wife,” claimed Major Kushev in 1828, for example, in response to his well-born wife’s accusations of abuse.31

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However, heightened expectations of masculine self-command among social elites surely provided one of the reasons for an upsurge in appeals to local authorities and, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, to the Synod and the Third Section from wives endeavoring to curtail their husbands’ abusive behavior. Complaining about her husband’s violent treatment in 1835, the gentlewoman Nadezhda Stakhovicheva, for one, explicitly linked marital violence with behaviors associated with her social inferiors. Her husband, she asserted, was guilty of the “kind of cruel treatment that would be reprehensible even in someone of the lower orders [i vo nizkom soslovii liudei].”32

New Wine, Older Bottles: A Merchant Household In 1779, the year his father died, the twenty-four-year-old Ivan Tolchenov ceased to be a junior member of the household and became its head as well as head of the family firm. His duties and those of his wife expanded accordingly. Anna became the household’s mistress (khoziaika), responsible for overseeing its affairs and supervising the work of domestic servants. Ivan, having worked under his father’s direction even after his marriage, now assumed responsibility for his own business decisions and for interacting on his own with civil authorities, although he continued to consult with an uncle, whom he turned into a kind of father-substitute. Being head of his household entailed other duties, too. Ivan now arranged the marriages of others, for example—of his servants, of his orphaned stepuncle Petr (younger than Ivan and his ward), and of his own stepmother, who two years after her husband’s death had found a suitor and summoned her stepson to deal with the complex financial arrangements that accompanied the negotiations.33 Still, the death of Ivan’s energetic and able father also freed the son to shape his life better to suit himself and in accordance with the new intellectual currents emanating from the throne. Ivan curtailed his travels in order to spend more time at home to enjoy the company of his wife and brought her along with him on business trips whenever possible. The couple also socialized together frequently, as did only a small minority of merchant couples of his or subsequent generations. At least until the middle of the nineteenth century if not later, many merchants and the overwhelming majority of townspeople led a very self-contained life, with married men socializing, if at all, in maleonly company.34 Ivan and Anna, by contrast, not only exchanged visits often with numerous kinfolk in Dmitrov, the town where they lived, and in Moscow, where Anna was born, but together they also attended the theater and parties. More unusually still for merchants, they dined at the homes of gentry whom Ivan was cultivating, or themselves entertained such people in their own home, combining business with sociability. All this encouraged Ivan’s interest in living more graciously and stylishly than had his forebears. His social betters set the example. In the final decades

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of the eighteenth century, well-born magnates with the wherewithal and inclination had begun building elegant mansions both in the countryside and in towns. Imitating the architectural styles, especially the English styles, which their owners had admired during travels abroad, these homes were intended to provide the setting for a cultivated way of life. Rarely did they include the private domestic spaces of English houses; instead, the Russian variants were designed for show, to impress their many visitors. Even in less ostentatious houses, privacy was limited: rooms opened onto one another rather than off a hallway, thus requiring doors to remain open.35 Tolchenov sought to follow this example, as did other wealthy merchants who aspired to an identity defined by tastes and lifestyle rather than or in addition to their ascribed social status. In 1785 he built a large new two-story home in Dmitrov. Constructed of brick with a masonry exterior, boasting high-ceilinged rooms and a large hand-carved wooden staircase leading from the first to the second floors, and with its own orangerie and gardens, Tolchenov’s new home was built in the style of the most luxurious gentry townhouses of his time. He also sought to prepare his first-born son, Pyotr, to continue along this path. When Pyotr reached the age of nine, Ivan took the rather unusual step of sending the child to an expensive private school that provided a liberal education far beyond what was needed for trade.36 His aspirations to a more cultivated way of life may have contributed to Ivan Tolchenov’s downfall. Russia’s volatile and uncertain business climate meant merchant fortunes were frequently made and then lost within a generation or two. His father Aleksei had tried to teach Ivan to discipline himself for the sake of the business—to travel away from home for lengthy periods, to restrict his personal expenditures. Remaining closer to home, spending lavishly on his new lifestyle, and devoting considerable time to his new, civic responsibilities as mayor of Dmitrov from 1788 through 1791, Ivan eventually fell into debt and bankruptcy. By transferring assets, he managed to preserve merchant status for his wife and children. However, pursued by his creditors, he lost that privileged status himself, while retaining his right to trade.37 The costs of Westernization increased economic pressures on the gentry, too, needless to say. But unlike merchants, landed gentry retained their privileged status even if impoverished, and were also eligible for various forms of assistance from the state.38

The Circulation of New Ideas By the early nineteenth century, at least some young people further down the social ladder had begun not only to enjoy new opportunities for courtship but also to adopt the language of sentiment, judging at least by the diary of Ivan I. Lapin, the son of a merchant and the owner of a dry goods shop in the town of Opochka (population under 6000 at the close of the

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nineteenth century) in provincial Pskov. Commencing in 1817, when Lapin was eighteen years old, the diary records his attendance at the theater and at various balls and social gatherings held frequently in public and private settings. Something of a reader (his diary mentions Madame de Genlis, author of moralistic literature as well as a collection of tales, witticisms, and poetry), Lapin presented himself as a cultivated individual and showed a taste for high-flown language. He was taken by a young lady’s “angelic smile” and enjoyed the companionship of “beautiful nymphs” and “lovely nymphets" as well as the “incomparable Aniuta,” one of a series of young women with whom he fell in and out of love. Other tradesmen, petty civil servants, and non-commissioned officers accompanied Lapin on his rounds of various pleasures.39 At the same time, Lapin’s diary also suggests that the new sociability and enhanced significance of sentiment might make long-standing practices more difficult to endure. Lapin’s adored Aniuta was “horribly compelled” into an engagement with another man and, at the celebration, shed “the most bitter tears.” The seventeen-year-old Nastia (Anastasia) was similarly forced into marriage, in her case with a man of forty. “How much compulsion and weeping!” the diarist exclaims. Lapin himself probably married unwillingly, although he does not say so. With none of his customary effusions, his diary concludes with his own marriage at the age of twenty-eight to a merchant’s daughter whose name appears in the diary for the first time.40 Still, for those few who took sentimental ideas to their logical conclusion, the right to marry on the basis of their feelings belonged to everyone, irrespective of social origins. In his imaginary rural idyll, penned in 1803, the landlord Aleksandr Bakunin envisioned himself preventing peasant patriarchs from forcing their daughters to wed: “If the bride announced to me that she is being married against her will, or wishes to marry another, then I, announcing this to the priest and the commune in church on Sunday, have the right to forbid the marriage (in the first case) or allow it (in the second).” Bakunin’s well-intentioned (imaginary) landlord reserves this authority for himself in the contract by which he emancipates his serfs.41

A Sentimental Scenario of Power After he ascended the throne in the wake of the Decembrist uprising, Tsar Nicholas I (1825–55) strove to appropriate the new sentimentalism for purposes of his own. He made conjugal love and the affective family key elements in his scenario of power, while also reinforcing the putative power of the father. To that end, publicists staged the ruler’s private life so as to portray him as a loving and devoted husband and caring father, while the empress provided a model of maternal love and tenderness. Their family idyll was widely disseminated in paintings and engravings. At the same time, the tsar responded to the trauma of the Decembrist uprising and its revelations

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FIGURE 2.2  Nicholas I of Russia and wife Alexandra Feodorovna, n.d. © Courtesy of Getty Images.

of profound discontent by attempting to mobilize the gentry family itself for political purposes.42  During Tsar Nicholas’s reign, the state’s interest in the internal dynamics of childhood and family life increased. “Let parents turn their entire attention to the moral education of their children,” Nicholas declared a year after ascending the throne. The Law Code of 1649 obliged parents to provide their offspring with food, clothing, and a moral upbringing appropriate to their social station. A law of 1826 enjoined parents to raise their offspring to “serve the aims of the state” as well.43 Educational institutions doubled down on their efforts to socialize young men and women to fit their designated social roles—women’s, the home; men’s, state service and public life—and to reinforce the now sentimentalized patriarchy. “Since woman is a delicate creature who is naturally dependent on others, her destiny is the family,” declared instructions issued to administrators of girls’ schools in 1852. “She should learn that her fate is to submit to her husband and not to command. She can only ensure her happiness and acquire the love and respect of others . . . by strictly fulfilling her family duties.” Universities endeavored to train their male students—mainly sons of lesser gentry, merchants, and priests, all of them still unwed—to be moral, well-mannered men, in command of the self, disciplined sexually, and respectful of women.44

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The Third Section took an interest in family life, too, although only when individuals appealed for its help and not on its own initiative. Established in 1826 and charged with censorship and ferreting out sedition wherever it might rear its head, this political police force was also tasked with “moral surveillance” over the empire, a responsibility that included serving as a guardian of “family morality and peace.”45 From its inception until its elimination in 1880, the Third Section acted on petitions—amounting to a mere handful a year until the 1850s—from unhappily married women, and less often, men, almost all of them of gentry status. Its officials, like the governors, and military governors, Marshalls of the Gentry, and other men in authority who acted on its behalf, appear to have been guided throughout by Nicholaevan family values. “Can a marriage be stable and happy when it is not based on feelings of mutual respect and the most tender love?” rhetorically inquired the governor of Nizhnii Novgorod province in 1828, for instance.46

An “Ordinary” Household If an “idealized domesticity” had come to provide one of the foundations of provincial gentry life by the first half of the nineteenth century, that way of life in other key respects remained largely unchanged. Agricultural and household economies still required diligent oversight; marriage brought repeated childbearing and everyday responsibilities for children. And if the nuclear family now constituted the idealized heart of the gentry household, that household rarely resembled a privileged, “private” space. The story of Natalia and Andrei Chikhachev may serve to illustrate these points. As depicted by historian Kate Pickering Antonova, the Chikhachevs’ story begins in 1820, the year of their wedding. Andrei was twenty-two at the time and already retired from military service, Natalia, twenty-one. Their marriage likely differed little from others in their milieu. As was usually the case, the parties derived from the same circle of gentry families, in this instance located in Vladimir province; the two had probably known each other most of their lives. Whatever sentiment the couple brought to their union—the sources are evidently silent on that subject—it held practical advantages: Natalia brought a dowry that consisted of substantial properties, including a small estate bordering the one on which she was raised. Together, the couple owned between 240 and 350 “souls,” divided fairly equally between husband and wife.47 This placed them in the category of gentry families of middling means, who comprised roughly 15 percent of the entire estate.48 The Chikhachevs arranged their lives as did others of their sort, although probably more frugally than most. Except for a few relatively brief visits to Moscow, they resided full-time on their rural estate. Their lifestyle was comfortable but far from lavish: almost everything their household consumed was produced

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on their estate, including clothing and food. Andrei eschewed ostentation, which the family could not in any case afford, indebted as they were for many years and fearful of debts thereafter. Their two small manor houses, both constructed of wood, while considerably larger than a peasant hut, were very far from grand. As khoziaika, that is, mistress of the household, Natalia Chikhacheva presided over this domain and managed it actively and competently. Although Russian celebrants of domesticity had begun to imagine a more circumscribed kind of “housekeeping” and to emphasize the importance of wifehood and, especially, moral motherhood, Natalia’s housekeeping involved much, much more than that. She allocated tasks to serfs and directed their labor in the fields and in the weaving workshop; she oversaw the sale of goods produced on their estates and purchased items for the household in addition to managing the finances and keeping the records that ensured income and expenditures remained in balance. Natalia managed not only her own estate but her husband’s, too. She also performed the work more conventionally associated with women. She watched over the kitchen and the larder, knit stockings, sewed clothing, and made lace. She also entertained their frequent guests, who brought additional responsibilities as well as the pleasures of company: their needs had to be attended to, menus overseen, and order maintained in a household that might shelter a dozen or more people. Natalia’s numerous responsibilities left her little time for the kind of active involvement in motherhood and moral education of children that sentimentalism had come to define as a woman’s proper role. The lack of attention to mothering children was not due to the absence of children to mother, however. Natalia was pregnant at least four times (and probably more); only two of the children who were born alive survived. Each time she became pregnant and bore a child, Natalia, like other women of her time and later, risked death. Although there are no data on the maternal death rate in Russia in this period, a study of peasant women in the second half of the nineteenth century found that one-seventeenth (close to fifty-nine per thousand) of the women married during the study’s twenty-year period died while giving birth.49 In 1850, Natalia and Andrei’s own daughter, Aleksandra, died from complications of childbirth at the age of twenty-one and after giving birth to her third child in as many years. Even when a woman survived, pregnancy and childbearing often exacted an enormous physical toll, as it did from Natalia. While children remained highly desired, pregnancy, and especially childbirth, could strike understandable fear in a woman’s heart. Childbirth aroused anxiety in husbands, too.50 The risk of death for infants and small children was even greater than for the mother. The historian Janet Hartley suggests that in the eighteenth century, 25 to 30 percent of infants perished before their first birthday and 57 to 58 percent died before the age of five, although she cites no source for this information.51 Even parents who could count themselves among

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the relatively wealthy and privileged endured staggering losses. General Petr Panin represents an extreme case: of Panin’s fourteen children, only one lived to adulthood. Ivan Tolchenov was the sole survivor of his parents’ nine children. Others fared somewhat better—six of Andrei Bolotov’s nine children survived, as did all but one of Aleksandr and Varvara Bakunin’s ten children, born in the early years of the nineteenth century. Natalia and Andrei Chikhachev were not among the more fortunate: only two, that is, no more than half, and probably fewer, of their offspring lived to adulthood and the life of one of those two, Aleksandra’s, was cut short by childbearing.52 Influenced by the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, some well-born women had begun to breastfeed their infants.53 Natalia Chikhacheva, however, was apparently not among them. Instead, soon after bearing a child she returned to her usual round of duties, leaving her infants to wet nurses and, as they grew older, to the care of a peasant nanny. Only when they got sick did she abandon her other duties to attend to her offspring. Evidently, she regarded providing for her children’s material needs as an important form of mothering.54 Natalia’s extensive responsibilities differed little from those that women of the rural gentry had fulfilled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries while their husbands were off performing service. The primary difference was this: her husband Andrei rarely left home. He too shouldered responsibilities for the estate, but only to a limited degree, certainly by comparison with those Natalia bore: he acted on his family’s behalf in property disputes; he took over when serf discontent threatened to get out of hand. He also oversaw the frequent construction and reconstruction that took place on their estate, and when the decision was made to replace their wooden manor house with a stone building, it was he who did the planning and saw the building to completion. It was also Andrei rather than Natalia who left evidence of the kind of emotional displays historians have associated with sentimental ideals of family life. The documents in Natalia’s hand portray her as affectionate but laconic; by contrast, in his diaries and other documents Andrei frequently expressed his feelings on a range of subjects, including his children’s illnesses. He penned a lengthy memorial at the death of a beloved grandson whom the couple had helped to raise during the child’s early years, and described his agonized grief following the death of his adult daughter, Aleksandra: “It is as if my heart and soul are burned by boiling water,” Andrei wrote six months afterward.55  Of the two parents it was also Andrei who assumed most responsibility for childrearing, in addition to his primary “work,” which consisted of reading, thinking, and writing numerous articles for publication—including articles on childrearing. Regarding childrearing as a masculine calling of immense importance, he spent time with his children and devoted himself to their moral education. In this, he consciously fulfilled a Catherinian ideal: by inculcating in a malleable young person such desirable characteristics as

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FIGURE 2.3  Apollon N. Mokritskii, Family Portrait, 1837. © Courtesy of Getty Images.

piety, thrift, and devotion to family and public duty, childrearing offered an avenue to contribute to social progress. Andrei gave considerable thought to teaching and prepared himself carefully to guide his children’s lessons. Devising games and exercise programs, instructing the two children himself, and supervising the work of the tutors the couple hired, Andrei devoted himself unstintingly to the task of molding the character of his offspring, of his son in particular.56 Finally, and idealized domesticity notwithstanding, like most households, and not only those of the gentry, the Chikhachev household was expansive. Whereas nowadays we tend to seek satisfaction for all our emotional needs in a single person, this was less common in the past. Bolotov, for instance, who initially felt quite disappointed in his bride, eventually found the intellectual companionship he sought in his mother-in-law, who joined their household. It was she—highly intelligent, a thoughtful reader, likewise interested in gardens—who became the longed-for “comrade,” with whom

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he could share his pleasures and who helped to alleviate his life’s cares, as Bolotov put it.57 The Chikhachevs’ household also included others beside the couple. Relatives often came to stay. Their children’s tutors and governesses shared their roof. Having retired from service in 1831 and residing nearby, Iakov Chernavin, Natalia’s brother and a bachelor, became a regular visitor to their home and an integral part of their everyday life. The couple also interacted with a socially diverse range of local people and entertained neighbors and friends at evening parties, especially vital in rural areas, where amusements apart from reading were few and visits from others an important diversion. And while their household sheltered no impoverished or elderly relations, orphans, or the offspring of poor relations, as other gentry (and wealthy merchant) households often did, their household, again like others of their milieu, included house serfs and encompassed village serfs, as well as the entire estate and its agricultural economy. If the Chikhachevs’ marriage is any indication, while sentimentalism may have gentled the exercise of patriarchal authority, it by no means eliminated it. However extensive Natalia’s role in their household, however complementary the couple’s spheres, and however sentimental the husband’s language, it was he rather than she who had the final say when the couple disagreed. Andrei himself implied this in the articles he wrote for publication. Lauding the role of the “khoziaika” and the significance of her good housekeeping to the stability of the patriarchal family, he, nevertheless, referred to her as the “chief of staff,” thereby putting the husband in command. This hierarchy of power reflected the reality of the couple’s life. Natalia made the small decisions; Andrei made the big ones. The biggest of all concerned the education of their son. In 1837, when Aleksei turned seven, his father decided it was time to send him away to school in Moscow, to establish a foundation for his future advancement in service. Natalia objected strongly; she did not want to be separated from her child. Andrei prevailed. At the age of seven, Aleksei began attending school in Moscow, to his mother’s intense grief.58

Plebeian Households If the new intellectual currents left the fundamentals of gentry life largely intact, so much more was this the case for most urban dwellers—still a fraction of Russia’s population, under 10 percent—who did not share the gentry’s privileges. It is true that some wealthy merchants, like the Tolchenovs, refashioned their lifestyle to more closely accord with the new values. But for most people who engaged in trade or worked with their hands, that is, the overwhelming majority of the urban population, little seems to have changed. Households remained units of production as well as reproduction. If they employed shop clerks or artisanal workers, those

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employees slept and took their meals under their employers’ roof. The more impoverished the household, the simpler it usually was. If the heads engaged in production, they utilized the labor of children and/or wives; otherwise, household members—including wives and children, and even the elderly— left home to labor on their household’s behalf.59 Nevertheless, although still very much a small minority themselves, the literate have left evidence that others besides social elites had become familiar with the language of sentiment and sometimes expressed themselves in its terms. Thus, in 1837 the merchant Mikhail M. Tiul’pin, resident in Tver province’s capital city, mourned the premature death of his niece at age twenty-two. Married for only three years, she had been miserably unhappy: “Her life was exceedingly unpleasant,” Tiul’pin wrote. “Amidst all that wealth it flowed by through golden tears. Her father-in-law and husband burdened her life: the first, with his severity (and the second, with his conduct).” In a diary entry of May 14, 1854, the Moscow merchant Petr V. Medvedev (born a peasant in the early 1820s) bemoaned the absence in his life of “heartfelt love” and family happiness, blaming the irritable character of the wife he had chosen, as well as the fractiousness of the domestic life the two shared with his sister-in-law and her children.60 For a few, love provided the motivation for marriage. Ivan Riabushinskii (1818–76), son of the successful Moscow merchant and Old Believer Mikhail Riabushinskii (1787–1858) “dared to choose a wife according to his own inclinations” and was cut off without a kopek, as was his father’s legal right.61 In the late 1830s, the merchant son Aleksandr Leikin married for love a young seamstress, born a house serf, having finally overcome the objections of his father, who conducted a precarious haberdashery trade at the Gostinyi Dvor in St. Petersburg. The newlyweds then settled in the household headed by his father and stepmother, where the husband’s unmarried brothers also dwelled.62 Thanks to the memoir of Leikin’s son, we can follow the course of the marriage. Its history, which offers an unusually close look at the workings of a household in precarious economic circumstances, might also serve as an object lesson in the need for a pragmatic approach to marriage. Satisfactory as the young couple’s match turned out to be emotionally, it gained the household neither the economic resources nor the kinship networks needed to shore up its head’s precarious finances. The bride contributed as she could, sewing christening shirts and caps that her husband then sold at their shop. The money thus earned helped cover basic necessities but fell far short of what was needed to maintain the family business, which had accrued debts and required an infusion of capital. After the father’s death, his three sons felt compelled to sell it.63 At that point, Aleksandr lost his status as a merchant and with it his privileges, reverting to the status of townsman, as had Tolchenov. For a time, Aleksandr earned good money working in the shop of a foreign merchant—foreigners, evidently, not only paying far better than Russians

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but also allowing their clerks to live where they chose. However, when he lost that position to his employer’s son, his household, now including his children as well as his wife, embarked on troubled times. Most Russian employers required their shop clerks to reside in the employer’s household, meaning clerks either had to remain single or leave their families in the village. Wanting to remain with his family, Aleksandr was unable to find work as a clerk. His household now consisted of his widowed stepmother, his wife and six children, an unmarried brother, and his wife’s sixteen-year-old sister, whose freedom from serfdom Leikin had helped to purchase during his salaried days. Together they suffered poverty, although never destitution. Aleksandr had no savings, only debts. Members of the household cut back on everything, everyone going about with holes in their shoes. The parents even considered withdrawing their son from a private school so as to put him to work as a “boy” in someone’s shop. As it was, the son managed to continue his studies during the household’s straitened circumstances thanks only to the support of one of his father’s former colleagues. Living crowded together in an apartment, these eleven people survived for a while on the money Leikin’s wife earned with her needle and what the unmarried brother contributed from his meager wages as a shop clerk. Only after Aleksandr succeeded in starting a wholesale business was he able to stand again on his own financial feet, and he managed this only because his stepmother—now elderly and senile—had hidden a substantial sum of money in her room and he finally managed to extract three thousand rubles from her.64

Conclusion Romanticizing rural life as idyllic in the articles he published, like other conservative authors of his time Andrei Chikhachev celebrated a seemingly timeless and stable patriarchal way of life—albeit a way of life that, in its emphasis on domestic virtues and family happiness, nevertheless reflected the influence of sentimental ideas, which transformed behavior, values, and feelings into a component of elite status.65 In so doing, they altered the ways that literate people wrote and—perhaps—even thought about themselves. Initially, the ideas affected mainly people of gentle birth and a small but growing group of professionally educated men, most but not all of whom occupied positions in the imperial bureaucracy. However, as more people gained literacy, at least some individuals from a more humble background experienced the impact, too. The numbers so affected surely remained quite small, however, and not only because illiteracy remained widespread. After all, as the story of Andrei and Natalia Chikhachev, or better, of Natalia, underscores, the economic realities and everyday labors of even the relatively privileged were hardly

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conducive to indulgence of the emotions. Commerce remained precarious for all but the most secure of merchant households. The vast majority of urbanites engaged in manual labor for miserly wages.66 Poor households required the labor of every able-bodied person, starting from an early age; to relieve households of an extra mouth to feed if not to bring in income, the young were sent out to work for others, as young Leikin almost was. Such circumstances do not preclude feelings of love and tenderness, but mostly, the attendant material deprivations and economic anxieties tended (and tend) to harden or, at least, toughen people. In fact, the little we know suggests that for most, attitudes toward marriage and domestic roles remained as pragmatic as ever. Nor would they alter that much in the decades to come, despite the otherwise profound cultural, economic, and social developments. Nevertheless, by making behavior, values, and feelings an aspect of elite status, the new ideas reshaped language, if not lives, while opening the door to a new form of social mobility and, at least for a few, new expectations.

3 The Peasantry Until 1861

“Without a wife and family, a peasant is not a peasant,” a popular saying went.1 Creating the very foundation of peasant life, marriage forged a labor team composed of husband and wife (the tiaglo), the fundamental unit of peasant agriculture. Marriage was also key to adulthood. Most peasants married at an early age, women between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, men between eighteen and twenty, while some wed even earlier. Age of marriage varied geographically. Brides and grooms were older in the northern, less fertile regions, and younger where agriculture was most productive. Still, Russian peasants everywhere married earlier than did their Western European counterparts.2 Early marriages were fruitful marriages, augmenting the supply of labor and ensuring a new generation to follow the old. Children were set to work early. Sons matured, wed, and had children of their own, guaranteeing the perpetuation of the peasant household. The significance of marriage meant that just about all Russian peasants wed by the time they reached their mid-twenties. Except among religious dissidents, spinsterhood and bachelorhood were rare; widowers of almost any age rarely stayed single for long. Neither did young widows. Only older widows remained unwed, the lucky ones finding shelter in the household of grown and married children or other kin. Regional geographic and economic conditions affected the ways that peasants organized their households and arranged their marriages. So did serfdom itself.3 Subjugating around half of Russia’s peasant population, it persisted until 1861 and its effects endured long after. Serfdom likely intensified the patriarchal character of the peasant household, with landlords relying on the head, the bol’shak—customarily the oldest male—to deploy the household’s human and economic resources for maximum productivity.

The Patriarchal Household At the very center of peasant life stood the household, known as the dvor. In rural as in urban settlements of the eighteenth century, the term dvor

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referred to a dwelling place, consisting of a farmstead, generally a one- or two-room cabin and the land immediately surrounding it, plus the buildings that stood on that land. But in peasant life, the dvor also represented far more. For those who owned serfs, the peasant dvor served as a dues-paying entity, responsible for providing the owner with a specified yearly amount of money or goods and produce. For the state, it constituted a unit of taxation and military recruitment. The dvor also formed a unit of production, although what this might entail varied geographically. In the Central Agricultural Region, where land was most fertile, the household’s able-bodied members grew the food that they consumed and manufactured much, if not all, of what they used—clothing, their cabins and furnishings, the woven birch sandals they wore on their feet, and more. In the northern, Central Industrial Region, where agriculture was often insufficiently productive and a labor market existed, household members also engaged in supplemental crafts and trade, or if their hands were not needed at home, temporarily went off to work elsewhere. Although peasants in the northern region were far more likely to purchase goods, even food, their households, too, almost invariably engaged in production—of food, of crafts, of animal products, and more.4 To its members, the dvor offered a kind of welfare. The productive labor of the able-bodied served not only to meet their household’s obligations— to their landlord (if serfs) and to the state—but also to provide for those who were either too young or too old to assume their full burden of work. The able-bodied did so in the expectation that if they reached old age, they would receive support in turn. Households also took in orphaned children, usually related by blood, but sometimes the offspring of other community members. If a mouth to feed in the present, an orphan promised labor power in the future. Last but not least, the household offered the intimate ties that we think of as “family.” Although in the northern region peasant households sometimes hired servants and laborers, there and elsewhere the core members were almost invariably blood relations.5 Among households fully or almost fully dependent on agriculture, the complex household—a “collectivity of married couples”—predominated, at least partly because land was allocated according to the number of adult (i.e., married) males. Most such households consisted of at least two and often several married couples and their children, and sometimes a collateral relative or two as well.6 Unless the bride’s household required an ablebodied male, newlyweds ordinarily joined that of the groom. They then shared household space with the groom’s parents, and perhaps his brothers and their wives and children, and in some cases his unmarried or widowed sisters, too. As children grew up and sons got married, they too sometimes remained in the household together with their wives. This meant that households in the Central Agricultural Region might become quite sizeable. Take, for instance, the household of Ivan Mikhailov. A sixty-five-year-old peasant on the estate of Mishimo, about 175 kilometers

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southeast of Moscow in the province of Riazan, in 1814 Ivan headed a household that included his wife, aged seventy, their son and daughter-inlaw, their grandson and grand-daughter-in-law and the grandson’s four young daughters—ten people in all. The household of Tikhon Ignat’ev was larger still. It included his wife, his two married sons and their wives and five grandchildren; a still unmarried teenage son, plus Tikhon’s younger brother and his wife, and their five children. Tikhon’s widowed sister-in-law, her married son and unmarried daughter lived there, too—that is, twenty-three people in all. Extended households also combined generations but tended to be smaller, for example, that of Sergei Vasil’ev, a fifty-four-year-old widower, whose household included his son and daughter-in-law and their three daughters.7 In the Vasil’ev household, the married son, the sole heir, would assume the status of household head at his father’s death. Although large households were also to be found in regions with a more mixed economy, they were far less prevalent there and almost never as large as that of Tikhon Ignat’ev. Large as some households might become, they did not expand indefinitely. At some point, ordinarily the death of the head, complex households fissured into smaller ones, accompanied by a division of household goods. For reasons of their own, both landlords and the peasant community strongly discouraged divisions before then (known as premortem divisions). At whatever point household divisions occurred, they were solemn occasions, conducted in the presence of family and community and introduced with a prayer from the village priest. The community’s elders presided, supervising the allocation of goods and land and ensuring that all adult males received a fair share, according to custom.8 The oldest married man commonly became the new head of the original household; his married younger brother or brothers, nephew or nephews would then establish separate households of their own. Where the complex household prevailed, a new head had often to wait a long time before assuming that position. In the village of Petrovskoe in Tambov province, historian Stephen Hoch found that most men succeeded to the position of household head between the ages of thirty-five and fortyfive, that is, decades after reaching adulthood. As Hoch puts it: “a 19-yearold male serf, recently married, who had a life expectancy at this age of thirty to thirty-five more years, could anticipate becoming the absolute head of his own household only after waiting twenty years.” By then, because of peasants’ early and near-universal marriage practices, the new head would likely be a grandfather himself. As a result, the new household that emerged from the division was often complex, too, consisting of three generations: the new head and his wife, his married son or sons, and grandchildren.9 Where complex households were less prevalent, by contrast, a man, while joining his parents’ household at marriage, might divide off and become head of his own household at an earlier age. In the village of Voshchazhnikovo in Iaroslavl’ province, for instance, about half of household heads had succeeded to that position by their early thirties.10

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Whatever their composition, peasant households were organized along strictly patriarchal principles: male or female, elders held near-absolute power over those younger than themselves, as did husbands over wives. The head of the household—ordinarily, the bol’shak, but if he failed in his duties or was absent, his wife, the bol’shukha—held the greatest authority. The bol’shak exercised his authority primarily over male members of the household, while the bol’shukha presided over her own sphere, the female portion of the household, which included daughtersin-law as well as daughters. Responsible for maintaining harmony among household members, the bol’shak also ensured that junior men conducted themselves properly inside and outside the home and labored to the limits of their ability at the tasks he assigned them. If a member of the household misbehaved, it was his right—indeed, his duty—to apply a heavy punitive hand or, if the miscreant was a daughter-in-law, to instruct his son to do so. Ruling with an iron hand, a bol’shak necessarily instilled fear in those subject to him. “Where fear is—there is piety, too,” declared Pyotr Petrovich, enserfed grandfather of Savva Purlevskii, one of the very few peasants who have left written accounts of their lives. A successful trader, literate, eloquent and wise, trusted by the peasants of his village community to serve as bailiff at the turn of the nineteenth century, Pyotr Petrovich imposed strict discipline on himself and everyone else in his household. “Even after he was married,” Purlevskii recalls of his own father, “he still tried to hold himself in hand in his father’s presence.” With a mere glance, Pyotr Petrovich could induce a shiver in a person who did something amiss.11 Complex patriarchal households held many advantages, especially for landlords and the peasant community, which did their best to foster them. Such households contained more able-bodied workers and therefore were more productive than simple households composed of a nuclear family—that is, of just parents and children. Their greater productivity meant complex households proved better able to pay their share of the community’s burden of taxes and dues, better able to produce enough to feed those unable to work, and better able to weather the death or military recruitment of an able-bodied member without plunging into poverty. However, for the complex household to function most effectively, the needs of the group—as determined by the bol’shak—had to take precedence over those of the individuals who comprised it. Sons who chafed at their father’s authority or developed hostile feelings toward their brothers would have to set those feelings aside. Some junior men found their situation difficult to endure: indeed, in Western Siberia, conflicts between brothers occasionally erupted in the form of physical violence.12 The greatest self-effacement, however, was required of the most junior daughter-in-law. Occupying the lowliest position in the household hierarchy, she was subordinate not only to her husband but to her in-laws as well.

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The Role of the Authorities Both the landlords and government officials who wielded authority over peasants strongly supported the patriarchal peasant order; indeed, in a sense the bol’shak served as their agent. If he wielded his power effectively and his household fulfilled its various obligations, landlords and officials had no need to interfere directly in peasant life. The bol’shak may well have also tried to protect the interests of his household. Still, from the perspective of the authorities, this did not matter so long as he fulfilled his primary role of ensuring agricultural productivity, the payment of dues and taxes, and the stability of the community.13 Those in authority likewise favored the complex household and might play an active role in fostering it. Thus, both serf owners and government officials sometimes endeavored to restrain “premature” divisions—that is, those that occurred before the death of the household head. At the estate of Petrovskoe, for instance, a bailiff wrote in 1834: “At the present time a family with only one working-age couple cannot carry out either its estate labor obligations or its own fieldwork, and such households will always be poverty-stricken. Because of this, it is strictly forbidden for the village elders to divide households at will without the permission of estate management.”14 Thus, while economic conditions affected the prevalence of the complex household, the determination of the serf owner made a difference, too: some owners (and likely, state officials) pushed harder or more effectively than others to prevent premature divisions.15 But even the peasant community favored the complex household. It is true that in Western Siberia, where serfdom was virtually absent and state officials relatively thin on the ground, divisions (and simple households) were likely more common than in the Central Agricultural Region. In Western Siberia, if conflicts between family members became sufficiently heated, peasant communities—largely unencumbered by the wishes of powerful outsiders—sometimes allowed households to divide even when the bol’shak was still living and even if he opposed the division. Nevertheless, even there, the preference of the peasant community itself was to resist such divisive pressures and uphold the complex household, largely because of its superior capacity to fulfill its share of the financial obligations that communities collectively owed the state.16

Forging Peasant Marriage Marriage was the central event in a peasant’s life. All peasants were expected to wed, not only the able-bodied but also, sometimes, even those with mental or physical disabilities. In the Central Agricultural Region, especially, they married at an early age. There, brides were sometimes as young as fifteen, the grooms no more than seventeen or, more rarely, even younger.

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Ordinarily couples were roughly the same age, with the man a year or two older.17 Early marriage encouraged the high fertility needed to ensure a household’s continuance at a time when fewer than half of infants survived into adulthood and many adults died young. Signifying adulthood and full membership in the community, marriage was of enormous importance not only for the marrying couple but also for everyone else. When people married, almost everyone benefitted. The household the couple joined obtained a new worker and additional resources because the creation of a new tiaglo (the labor team of husband and wife) entitled it to a further share of communal land. For this reason, the bol’shak sometimes arranged a marriage for his son as soon as he reached the legal age of sixteen, if his household required a pair of female hands or in order to obtain an additional land allotment sooner rather than later. In such cases, the bride might be older than the groom, even, although rarely, much older—by as many as seven to nine years.18 The peasant community as a whole benefitted from marriage, too, because the newlyweds (the new tiaglo) would assume a share of the collective burden of taxes and obligations. Peasant marriage also benefitted gentry landlords and state officials— so much so, in fact, that under certain circumstances they were prepared to take steps to ensure it. Their reasoning was not so different from that of the peasants themselves. State officials preferred that all peasants marry and marry young because the resulting tiaglo represented a new taxable unit, while early marriage promoted population growth, which eighteenthcentury rulers all over Europe regarded as a source of national strength. Landlords favored both, too, because high fertility meant an increase in the number of serfs they owned, adding not only to their labor force but also to the very basis of their wealth, which was measured in peasant (male) “souls.” Unsurprisingly, landlords preferred their serf women to marry men from their own estates when possible. As marriage was usually patrilocal—that is, wives joined their new husbands’ households—when women married offestate, serf owners lost the women’s labor. This prompted some landlords to levy a departure fee, often quite substantial, and others to arrange exchange policies with their neighbors.19 So important was marriage to state officials and landlords that some were prepared to exercise coercion if, for some reason, potential brides proved reluctant to wed or their parents unwilling to release them. In 1771, for example, the governor, D. I. Chicherin, surmised that in many Western Siberian villages “Large numbers of peasant males remain single and cannot find brides into their thirties, while girls remain single until the same age because their fathers keep them home for work.” Assuming that the threat of exile would convince unmarried women to wed, he ordered that all “wenches” above the age of twenty-five who remained single as of January 1, 1772, be sent off to Baraba, a factory village near the Ural Mountains, to be forcibly wed to male residents. In 1777, Prince V. G. Orlov required that all women on his estates at Sidorovskoe in Vladimir province marry

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by the age of twenty. When in 1779 his bailiff complained that widowed men were having difficulty finding new brides, Orlov ordered that brides be chosen and ordered to marry “without fail, any excuses from the women notwithstanding.” On the estates of Prince Usupov, unmarried girls older than fifteen were fined, as were widows younger than forty.20 Some serf owners apparently took pleasure in exerting their authority over human chattel. In the 1840s, Andrei Chikhachev routinely inspected prospective serf couples before granting them permission to wed. Marriageable men and women travelled from his scattered estates in order to appear before him, a process that lasted several days. “Looked at a groom, Stepka and a bride, Variukha,” Chikhachev recorded in his diary, “but they don’t suit each other.” Some landowners made peasants marry by lots and others forced peasants to move to other villages on their estates, where spouses could be found.21 Very often, however, it was peasants themselves who requested interventions from those in authority over them—almost invariably because men who needed brides were having difficulty obtaining them, whether due to the lack of available women locally, or to local women’s reluctance to wed. In such cases, the household head or prospective groom himself might solicit assistance in securing a bride: “I’ve been widowed for two years, I have five small children, I can’t get along without a wife to raise them and preserve their health, so make the thirty-year-old woman in Sokhtonka who lives dissolutely marry me,” reads one such letter. “I’m thirty-seven, I have two young children and a sixty-one-year old father. Without a wife I can’t manage my dues,” pleads another. If circumstances warranted it, owners might purchase brides for their serfs.22 Brides often had to be sought far afield, from villages as distant as ten kilometers or more from a prospective husband’s. Most landlords owned considerably less than one hundred male “souls,” as peasant serfs were reckoned in those days—too few to provide a sufficient pool of brides for every groom who sought one. Moreover, even if masters owned thousands, their serfs might well be scattered among different estates far away from one another. Seeking to hoard their female resources, some landlords refused to allow marriageable women to leave their estate and required their peasants to marry one another. Still, whatever the obstacles to marriage, at least in the more agriculturally fruitful regions the end result was ordinarily the same: there, by their mid- twenties, just about every Russian Orthodox peasant was wed. Recent research on parts of the Central Industrial Region, however, has found that surprising numbers of women remained single (see the following).23

Making a Marriage Elaborate rituals surrounded the making of a marriage. They began with the selection of a spouse. Where those in authority left the matter to peasants,

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as most seem to have done, the prospective groom’s parents or elders took the initiative either on their own, or more commonly, with the help of a matchmaker—usually an older, married female relative. The ideal female candidate was obedient and physically strong, with the capacity to work hard and bear many children. Elders also preferred that her household enjoy a good reputation and occupy a social and economic position comparable to theirs, because marriage linked not only individuals but also households. Once an appropriate candidate was identified, the matchmaker would visit her household, look things over and converse with the women, assessing their receptivity to a marriage proposal: “We’ve got a buyer, you’ve got the goods,” they might declare. Aspirants would have to marry the eldest daughter, however much a younger sister might appeal to a prospective groom and/or his family: peasant women married strictly according to birth order. If all went well and an offer was made, both the father (or the responsible elder) and the potential bride would then be consulted.24 The father might refuse an offer—because the potential groom’s household was too poor, for instance, or had a reputation for treating daughters-inlaw unusually harshly, or because the potential bride rejected the match for reasons of her own. If the two sides agreed to the match, they proceeded to the next stage: negotiating the terms of the marriage contract. Matchmakers and the bride’s parents (if living, or in some areas, both sets of parents, if living) took part. Among the matters subject to negotiation were the gifts the bride and groom would exchange, the share of the wedding costs each household would bear, the amount of the fine to be paid should one party renege on the arrangement, and most importantly, the amount of bride price and contents of the dowry. Provided by the groom’s household, bride price offered a form of compensation to the bride’s household for the loss of her labor and ability to reproduce. Subsequently, it might be used to “buy” a wife for a marriageable son. The dowry, by contrast, was provided by the bride’s household and brought property to the household of the new husband. Usually, that property consisted of a kind of trousseau, that is, linens and clothing and a trunk in which to store them, but it might also include a few domestic animals and some cash. By custom the dowry remained the wife’s property. This meant that if the husband died or the couple divorced—formally or by mutual agreement—a wife had the right to reclaim it. Dowries were most common in the northern region of Russia and in Ukraine, whereas bride price predominated in central and southeast Russia. Often, however, the dowry and bride price coexisted.25 Once the contract had been agreed upon, the proceedings entered a new and far more serious stage. The parties sealed the deal by clapping hands and toasting with vodka, marking the couple’s formal betrothal, a relationship almost as irrevocable as marriage in the eyes of the community, although after 1755, lacking legal standing. Soon thereafter, the future groom and

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his family visited his intended’s household for a ritual “inspection” of the bride, to ensure that she was healthy and able-bodied, and not pregnant. The couple met as fiancées for the first time. For the first time, too, the families encountered one another formally, as prospective kin. Everyone feasted and drank.26  Then preparations for the wedding commenced: brewing beer, preparing food, and thoroughly cleaning the groom’s cabin. The bride and her girlfriends sewed items for her trousseau and on the eve of the wedding, participated together in the devishnik, a ritual farewell to the bride’s maidenhood. They undid the bride’s single braid, that of a maiden; led her to the bathhouse for the ritual bath; then ceremonially plaited the single braid one final time, all the while bitterly lamenting the bride’s impending loss of maidenhood and freedom.27 Finally came the wedding itself. In the morning, the groom, having received his parents’ blessing with an icon, departed their household and set off for the bride’s in the company of his wedding party. When they arrived, her family staged a mock resistance, requiring that a groomsman buy them off before the groom could collect his bride. Having bid a ritual farewell to her parents, kin, and friends—lamenting all the while—the bride departed

FIGURE 3.1  Peasant Engagement, n. d. engraving by A Subchaninov. © Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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with the groom for the church. There the priest performed the actual wedding ceremony (venchanie), earning his modest fee. After the ceremony’s conclusion, as the newly married bride entered the home of the groom for the first time, her father handed the groom a ceremonial lash to symbolize the transfer of authority from father to husband. The feasting and drinking then commenced. Involving the entire village community, the wedding celebration ordinarily continued for three days. Strengthening community ties, it reaffirmed popular peasant culture at the same time. The first day’s festivities included the consummation of the marriage, as public as such a private act could be—a ritual they had shared with their elite counterparts at least until the early nineteenth century.28 Accompanied by ribald jokes and songs, the bride and groom were led away and placed in a nuptial bed that had been readied beforehand. While the feasting continued, they were left alone to have sex for the first time. Everyone awaited the showing of the bloodied bridal shirt, evidence that all was as it should be. If the outcome proved satisfactory, the groom would thank the bride’s parents for properly raising their daughter. The feasting and socializing would then continue for two more days, followed by visits to kin. If the outcome was unsatisfactory, the consequences were dire. The bride’s parents became subject to various public humiliations, while the groom might beat the bride, sometimes almost to death—he might even reject her and the marriage itself.29 Detailed as the above description may appear, it is actually highly abbreviated and schematic: although the stages of the marriage ritual were

FIGURE 3.2  Russian Peasant Wedding, 1865. Lubok. © Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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the same just about everywhere, their order and specifics varied considerably by locale. Whatever their variations, however, weddings ensured a collective experience of the continuity of life, in which marriage occupied the central place. The rituals also foreshadowed and prepared for what was to come: the bride’s separation from her natal household and her new life in that of her husband, to whom she was now subject (that lash!). Also, the ribald jokes and other behaviors that I have spared the reader served to highlight the bride’s future fecundity. 

The Russian Orthodox Church In all of the above, the Russian Orthodox Church nuptial ceremony (the venchanie), while essential to the legality of a marriage, occupied a surprisingly modest place—a comparatively brief ritual in celebrations that continued for days. On the other hand, the church played an important role in other respects. Its canons reduced the field of possible candidates to those whose kinship—symbolic or real—was sufficiently distant, while its emphasis on the spiritual significance of marriage served to radically narrow the grounds for divorce (see Chapter 2), thus ensuring that most marriages were for life. In addition, in combination with the agricultural calendar, the church governed the timing of peasant marriages if not most of the accompanying rituals. The Russian Orthodox Church forbade marriages during the main fasts of the year: St. Filipp’s fast, which extended from mid-November until Epiphany, and the Lenten and Assumption fast periods. Because no one had the time to spare for marriage-making during peak periods of agricultural labor in spring, summer, and early fall, the vast majority of peasant weddings took place either after the fall harvest, in October or November, or in January and February, although occasionally weddings were held in April and May.30

Two Men; Two Marriages Almost none of the rituals mentioned previously figure in the marriages depicted by the two peasant memoirs of this period available in English. Neither of their authors was a typical peasant. Both were fully literate at a time when even basic literacy, while marginally more common, remained highly unusual. More importantly in their case, with literacy apparently came familiarity with the language and likely, expectations of the new culture of sensibility, which color their accounts, that of Vasilii Mikhailovich Nikitenko in particular. Both writers were serfs, although here, too, hardly typical ones. For one thing, they belonged to wealthy magnates. For another, agricultural production played little to no role in their lives, which was not so unusual in the Central Industrial Region where the second memoirist

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grew up, but less common in the agricultural south, the homeland of the first. Still, they illustrate some of the broader patterns discussed earlier— thus even the first account, which features a suitor who defies his mother and flouts the usual practical considerations in order to marry the woman of his choice, suggests how prominently both parental authority and practical considerations usually figured. Set in the early nineteenth century, one depicts the marriage of the author’s parents, the other the author’s own. Of Ukrainian ethnicity, Vasilii Mikhailovich Nikitenko, the father of the first author, was born in Voronezh, in the Central Agricultural Region, the property of the almost obscenely wealthy Count Nikolai Petrovich Sheremetev, proprietor of a well-known serf theater.31 At the age of eleven or so, the young Vasilii was made a choirboy and sent to the Count’s school in Moscow, where he learned to read and write as well as to sing. There, he developed an omnivorous taste for books, which prompted him even to learn French and to acquire knowledge so far above his station in life that he became more or less unfit for it. The memoir’s author, Vasilii’s son, puts it this way: “The heroes of stories and novels inhabited father’s world. He valued only what he found in the lofty spheres of reality or in his fantastic and strange embellishment.”32 Then, having lost his voice at the tender age of eighteen, Vasilii was sent back to his native village, a sizeable settlement of 7000 people in a densely populated region, and assigned to the respectable and powerful position of his master’s chief clerk. His position and accomplishments made him an enticing match for the daughters of the most well-to-do of the local serfs— “aristocrats” and “townspeople” the author calls them—who had grown wealthy from pursuing skilled artisanship or trade and ceased to till the soil, and who through marriage sought to establish kinship ties with the returnee. Instead, the young man chose a poor girl, the daughter of a humble tailor who manufactured sheepskin coats. Encountering her for the first time while she was herding cows and sheep, he fell in love at once. Three days later, he announced his choice to his parents, in whose household he lived. His mother, herself the daughter of a parish priest, was aghast: considering herself a member of the village aristocracy, she had counted on a far better match for her son, preferably with the daughter “of some wealthy member of the village’s upper crust,” as her grandson puts it. She fought fiercely to stop her son from contracting this unequal marriage, but in the end failed to change his mind.33 Instead of sending matchmakers, Vasilii Mikhailovich approached the girl’s parents himself—another unorthodox step. Her parents, too, were dismayed by the disparity in status: “What kind of match would that be?” they wondered. “We are poor and simple folk and you are an educated fellow, a gentleman.” Moreover, their daughter lacked a dowry; she had only some clothes and handkerchiefs. When the suitor nevertheless persisted, using exalted (and to them incomprehensible) language, they summoned their daughter, Katrya, and asked her opinion. She would do whatever her

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parents desired, she responded. The wedding was held about three weeks later. Then as newlyweds customarily did, the couple moved into the household of Vasilii’s parents.34 His mother proceeded to make life miserable for the bride. Still not reconciled to the marriage, she took advantage of the powerful position of bol’shukha to vent her wrath on a daily basis, insulting and humiliating her new daughter-in-law. Earning a small salary, however, and free of the need to till the land, Vasilii was in a position to separate from his parents’ household. When life there became intolerable, the couple established a modest household of their own.35 Savva Purlevskii’s marriage, likewise at the age of eighteen, proceeded in a much more conventional manner, although he, too, hardly qualifies as a “typical” peasant serf. Born in 1800 in a village in Iaroslavl’ province where just about everyone was involved in trade or crafts, and to a father with his own small library, the young Savva learned his letters at the age of seven and developed a love of books. The family was very well off, thanks to his father’s commercial success and his mother’s domestic production—she spun fine yarn in winter and in the summer wove canvas and kerchiefs for sale. The couple kept two servants and owned the finest house in the village. Built of stone at a time when peasant cabins were commonly wooden, one and a half stories in height with five large windows on the front side, the house had two full rooms—one where the family received guests, the other where they slept: son, grandmother, and, until the father died when his son was eleven, Purlevskii’s father and mother.36 Not long after his father’s death, the son took up trading himself. When Savva turned eighteen, his mother began pressing him to marry. She made it clear that the choice was his. At the same time, and because they had been struggling economically since the father’s death, she urged him to choose a bride from a “good family,” so as to gain a useful connection. One candidate came quickly to mind. As a child, Savva had been attracted to and played with the daughter of an old friend of his father’s named Pyotr Ivanovich, also a peasant serf. There had been some talk then about the two families becoming “relatives with God’s blessing.” But the match was now unequal: Pyotr Ivanovich, wealthy and successful, was highly respected by everyone, whereas the Purlevskii’s economic and social status had substantially declined. “Now, in my present situation, I could hardly hope that her family would agree,” he remembered. “But still I hoped . . .”37 It was Pyotr Ivanovich who resolved the question during one of his infrequent visits to the village. He summoned Savva for a talk, having noticed the young man’s attraction and the shyness that prevented him from speaking on his own behalf, and having already talked things over with Savva’s mother. His offer was generous in the extreme, rendered in the name of the old friendship between the families. Offering his daughter to Savva in marriage, he would provide the generous sum of one thousand paper rubles to assist Savva in business, above and beyond the dowry. Strikingly,

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at no point in Purlevskii’s account do we learn either the name of the bride or her feelings about the forthcoming union. “So, with a cheerful feast, we celebrated our wedding,” he remarks.38 Marriage made Savva a man. Whether because of the money, his important new connection, or “just because when a person gets married he becomes independent and able to stand on his own feet,” he remembers feeling like a different person afterward.39

Old Belief Peasant Old Believers both conformed to the patterns discussed before and deviated from them. Arising in the 1660s in response to reforms in Russian Orthodox Church texts and ritual, by the eighteenth century Old Belief had fragmented into multiple sects with diverse marriage practices. Some of those sects (priestly Old Believers) shared the Orthodox view of marriage as a sacrament. Their members continued to marry, but with the ceremony performed according to books printed prior to the reforms and either by a priest who had converted to Old Belief or by an Orthodox priest bribed to perform the ceremony. Others (priestless Old Believers) initially rejected marriage (and sex) altogether as sinful. Some held fast to these ideas, but in the course of the eighteenth century the attitudes of others evolved away from this extreme stance, so that over time, growing numbers of priestless Old Believers chose to marry, but for the most part without employing a priest and according to common law.40 It is hard to know how numerous Old Believers were, because the government persecuted them all and consequently, many chose to conceal their faith. However, they represented a sizeable minority of the peasant population of the Volga basin. They were still more numerous in parts of Siberia, to which they fled to escape that persecution and where the reach of the Russian Orthodox Church was very limited and serfdom almost nonexistent. Old Believer marriage practices not only represented a challenge to the official church; among Old Believers who chose to marry, they also appear to have enhanced the ability of the young to select the person they wed. Thus, where Old Believers were numerous, such as areas north of Moscow and in Western Siberia, couples commonly married by elopement. Elopement meant the couples dispensed with most of the usual rituals; they also behaved in ways that sometimes contravened the law. For example, while the bride’s parents might have known of the elopement beforehand and/or approved of it post-facto, the parental blessing followed the marriage rather than preceding it as the law required. In Siberia, at least, some marriages apparently took place even in the face of parental disapproval. Even so, there as elsewhere, the newlyweds usually settled in the household of the groom. If such couples were priestless, they apparently encountered no

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difficulties in finding an Orthodox priest willing to perform the marriage service for a fee.41 The practice of elopement was contagious; Russian Orthodox neighbors adopted it, too. Whether eloping or not, others dispensed entirely with the church service. “Civil” or common law marriages (svodnye braki) were also commonplace in Siberia and recognized as valid by couples’ communities. Elders might arrange these matches, but very often in this case, too, the young chose their partners. Originating among Old Believers, the practice of common law, that is, unsanctified, marriage was also adopted by Siberian peasants’ Orthodox neighbors to the consternation of the Holy Synod. From the 1830s through to the 1850s, peasants who worked the land or labored in the mines concluded thousands of such marriages. Officials tolerated them until 1839 and then criminalized them, but this did not prevent peasants from entering into “civil” marriages.42 But some priestless Old Believer peasants—peasant women especially— continued to reject marriage altogether in the conviction that even married sex was sinful. Marriage-refusing women presented a different kind of problem, less to the church than to serf owners and government officials. Fairly numerous in the regions north of Moscow, such women disrupted the ordinary cycles of peasant and household life, which rested on early and near-universal marriage. If their parents endorsed their behavior, marriage-refusing women did not circulate in marriage, depriving needy grooms of potential brides. They did not reproduce, to the dismay of officials and/or landlords, who sometimes tried hard to force them to wed. But they also threatened the very survival of a household. If no newlyweds joined it then no babies were born, and no younger generation grew up to support the old and ensure the household’s persistence. Yet, like other Old Believer practices, this one, too, appears in some instances to have caught on with Orthodox neighbors. Reaching its peak in the late eighteenth century, female marriage refusal persisted at least until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 if not later.43 Religious in inspiration, it flew in the face of the very foundations of peasant life.

Marriage and Family Life Peasant agriculture—indeed, peasant life itself—depended on the complementary labors of husband and wife. Adult men performed the most physically demanding labor; they ploughed the fields and sowed the grains that provided the staple of peasant diet. Men also tended the household’s draft animals, while the women cared for small livestock and cattle. Men were responsible for construction and repair of the cabin and outbuildings. Women looked after the children, tended the kitchen garden and hemp field, and fetched water. They ground the grain, baked the bread, and prepared and preserved food. In winters, while men repaired equipment, women took up their spindle and distaff, and began the process of transforming

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raw hemp or wool into the cloth that would clothe their husband, children, and themselves. During the roughly six weeks of intense and physically exhausting labor required to bring in the harvest, women and men toiled side by side, men with their scythes, women with their sickles, both sleeping perhaps three to four hours a night.44 Peasant life also depended on the capacity of women to bear the children who would ensure new laboring hands, care in old age, and a household’s continuity into the future. Not surprisingly, then, among peasants, mother and worker constituted the predominant images of femininity.45 Worker almost invariably came first. The need for a woman’s physical labor did not cease when she became pregnant: she continued her arduous responsibilities right up to the moment her baby was born and resumed them no more than a few days later. Most peasant women delivered their first child within a year or so of marriage; if they survived repeated childbearing—and an unknown number, perhaps as high as 10 percent of them, did not—they would bear, on average, at least seven babies, judging by estimates from a later period. Less than half of those infants would survive to adulthood. Thus, for example, in the village of Petrovskoe in Tambov, as many as 450 of every 1000 infants born died before the age of five in the mid-nineteenth century—a mortality rate comparable to that of pre-industrial Europe and of the developing world today.46 Households did not, in fact could not, devote a great deal of time or attention to infants and small children. In warmer months, especially, their care necessarily took second or even third place to the work required of peasant women in the household, the kitchen garden, barnyard, and fields. If a mother’s labor was needed elsewhere, swaddled infants were left to be tended by an elderly woman or children as young as six, seven, or eight. And judging by a later period, because conceptions often took place during the relatively leisurely late fall and winter months, a disproportionate number of infants—considerably more than a third—were born during the fourmonth period when a household’s labor needs were at their peak: June, July, August, and September.47 More generally, too, peasants adopted an unsentimental attitude toward children, although that does not mean parents did not care about their offspring. Children were taught to work hard from a very early age. Fathers and other men in the household instructed the boys. At age five or six, boys learned to ride horses and to drive cattle to water; by ages seven to eight, they were already helping to plow, and by the time they were nine, they were feeding cattle, cleaning manure from the barn, and harvesting grain. Sons of household serfs, who lacked an allotment to till, began learning a skill or craft somewhat later, at age ten to twelve. In areas where crafts were practiced or peasants engaged in trading, sons were likewise taught their father’s skills.48 After factories began operating in rural areas in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, peasant children might work twelve-hour shifts there starting at age eight or nine.49

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Girls learned a woman’s skills from their mothers and from other women of the household. Around the age of six, girls began sitting at the spinning wheel, tending younger siblings and feeding fowl; by ten, they could ply a needle and look after the household while the adult women worked in the fields. If the women of the household were engaged in domestic production for sale, girls also learned those handicrafts. By the time they reached the age of fifteen, they had mastered all the skills of women, just as boys had mastered the skills of men—although neither of them were yet strong enough to work as hard as an adult could.50 Only a tiny minority of peasant children, mainly boys, learned to read and write, whether from a literate parent or from a village priest—or, in a few instances, from schools established by a progressive landlord.51 Peasants disciplined their children strictly. As children do everywhere, small children played with each other; they also learned early to respect, even to fear, their elders, their fathers in particular. It was the father who usually acted as the disciplinarian, especially of wayward sons. Mothers often found disciplining sons more difficult: widows on serf estates sometimes required the assistance of the bailiff.52 Whoever imposed the discipline, it was imperative that peasants learn early to submit to the will of their elders and subordinate themselves to household needs—imperative not only for economic reasons but also to reduce the familial conflicts that might tear a household apart.

Spousal Relations While it is easy enough to identify the economic, social, and demographic significance of peasant marriages, it is immensely difficult to gauge their emotional temperature: the sources are largely silent on that score, while most of those that do exist present a depressing picture, at least for the modern reader. For instance, many popular proverbs suggest, at best, an antagonistic relationship between husband and wife: “All the maidens are good, so where do evil wives come from?” “A dog is more intelligent than a peasant woman; it doesn’t bark at its master,” “The more you beat your wife, the tastier the cabbage soup.” “God has condemned us to death and a wife,” to cite just a few.53 Moreover, what would now be called domestic violence appears to have been routine in peasant households. As did urban dwellers, peasants held a husband responsible for his wife’s conduct and expected him to “instruct” her, with fists or whip if necessary, when he thought her behavior warranted it. Peasant husbands appear to have exercised this prerogative freely, often, and usually with impunity. This is hardly surprising in a milieu in which violence was routine—exercised by masters over peasant serfs and by their own communities over those deemed miscreants. In the post-emancipation period, the often extreme abuse that peasant husbands inflicted on their

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wives would appall educated observers and contribute to a perception of peasant “backwardness.”54 Western Siberia may have offered something of an exception to this rather grim picture; or it may be that it simply provided a different kind of evidence about peasant marriage, thanks to the operation of peasant courts. Court records show that Siberian communities took active part in regulating conjugal relations and held them to comparatively high standards. In 1741, for example, peasants in a Siberian village unanimously condemned one of their members for “living with his wife without love and beating her . . . prematurely and without cause.” In 1742, the fellow villagers of another denounced him to the authorities for beating his wife “for no good reason.”55 Western Siberian courts occasionally took the wife’s part if her husband abused his right to “instruct” her and treated her with manifest cruelty, ruling on the basis of customary law as peasant courts elsewhere in Russia would do after their establishment in 1864. Western Siberian courts might provide an informal divorce, and if the partners sought a more formal solution so as to remarry in church, issue a “divorce letter” for submission to clerical authorities, notwithstanding efforts by the church to eliminate the practice. Even so, those courts, too, mostly enforced the law that required married couples to cohabit. Enjoining an abusive husband to mend his ways, they would order his wife to return to his home.56 Still, it would be mistaken to conclude that peasant couples never found satisfaction in their marriages. An unknowable number no doubt developed enduring affection for one another, even if they left few expressions of it for the historian to find. “If you put up with the person long enough, you’ll come to love them” (sterpitsia-sliubitsia) a popular saying went. Others went: “It’s not terrible to be alone, but it’s merrier if there’s two of you”; “It’s cold beneath the blankets when you sleep alone.”57 Popular culture was very far from prudish. Peasants recognized female sexuality, even as they regarded it as dangerous and requiring masculine control. Bawdy songs, jokes, and sayings often referred to sexuality quite explicitly, and marriage rituals were saturated with erotic symbols and references to sexual activity. Eighteenth-century popular prints also suggest a “rough and ready equality and openness” about the relations between the sexes.58 A handful of documents left by literate peasants in Western Siberia offer examples of mutual tenderness and affection between married couples. In 1797, the peasant Ivan Khudiakov, working elsewhere, implored his wife Anna to “tell me as much as you can about your health, my dearest love.” Egor Tropin, likewise away at work, pined so painfully for his wife that he fled back to the village to visit her. A third requested his wife, Katerina, to heat up the bathhouse so that he could toast himself “there on your lap, like a little child, or rather like a great big child.”59 Such lavish expressions of affection were highly unusual, however, among a population not known for articulating tender feelings and boasting few who could even read and write.

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The testamentary behavior of a few peasants is telling in a different way, especially as peasants rarely composed wills. The wills indicate not only husbands’ considerable confidence in their wives’ abilities to manage property, but also and more significantly, the men’s valiant efforts to defend their wives’ interests against the claims of others—kin and community in particular—at a time when and in a region where customary practices still privileged the latter. Thus in 1868, the Tambov peasant, Alipii Peskov, bequeathed all his considerable property to his wife, Anna, “both the inherited property and that acquired by the two of us together,” insisting that “no one under any circumstances has any right to intervene.” Likewise, in 1870, the illiterate Zakhar Cherkazov, also of Tambov, willed all his property, both immovable and movable, to his wife Irina “for her to possess during her lifetime and bequeath as she chooses (vechnoe i potomstvennoe eia vladenie).” “None of my relatives have the right to interfere,” his will insisted.60 Deriving from the years shortly after emancipation, both testaments reflect marriages that began long before.

Soldiers and Their Wives Precarious as peasants’ lives often were, they grew more so with the reign of Tsar Peter the Great. Treating the peasantry essentially as a resource to be tapped, he imposed new fiscal burdens on peasant households, while at the same time undermining their ability to meet those obligations by siphoning off able-bodied men. His policies may well have prompted peasant families to pool their human and financial resources, thus encouraging the consolidation of households. Peter’s semi-standing army represented an enormous drain on peasant manpower. It relied on conscripts from among the tax-paying population—that is, peasants and townspeople. Until 1793, recruit levies took men away for life. That year, the term of service was reduced to twentyfive years, then in 1834, to twenty. While a soldier was fulfilling his term of service, Russia’s vast distances and high levels of illiteracy meant that his family was most unlikely even to get word of him and had no way of knowing where he was or whether he was alive or dead. If the recruit was married, as perhaps half of the recruits were, his conscription often brought dire consequences to both his household and his wife. Conscription deprived his household of a tiaglo and with it, an allotment of land, even as the household continued to bear his tax liability until the next census. Recruitment also “freed” a peasant soldier from serfdom, a freedom he was unable to enjoy so long as he remained a soldier. This put his wife in a kind of limbo. Russian women’s ascribed status derived from that of their husbands (gentlewomen were an exception), so the wife of a “freed” recruit became “free” as well: instead of a peasant woman, she became a soldatka, or soldier’s wife, a new social category. Especially if she had no sons, her husband’s household might well regard the soldatka as a

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burden, an extra mouth to feed. Nevertheless, the vast majority of soldatki, perhaps 80 percent, remained in their husband’s village.61 The numbers were likely considerable. By some calculations, recruitments between 1705 and 1713 removed about 11 percent of the men eligible to serve. Between 1719 and 1745, conscripts amounted to as much as 6 percent of the population of the empire.62 After his recruitment, it became unlikely for the wife ever to see her husband again. Although theoretically free to accompany their men, only a minority of wives did so in practice, mainly those without children. The women who did had to adjust to a new way of life. Soldiers’ families shared family rooms in the barracks, often without even a wooden screen to offer a bit of privacy, or they used their small living allowance to rent a corner of a room nearby. Soldatki often worked for the regiment—doing laundry, mending clothes, knitting socks, and the like—or found work nearby to supplement the family’s meager allowance. All the children they bore belonged to the jurisdiction of the army: soldiers’ sons were taught to be soldiers and called up to serve when they came of age. Dowryless soldiers’ daughters usually married soldiers.63 Soldatki, especially those who left their husband’s village, fuelled the church’s continuing struggle against bigamy. In a town or village where no one knew them, they could claim they were single or widowed and find another husband. Others entered “civil” marriages, that is, consensual unions, which they misrepresented as legitimate ones. Until evidence emerged to raise doubts, their communities often accepted the women at their word. Thus, to take one of many possible examples, the soldatka Fevronia Kudina claimed to be married to the peasant Kondrat Shadrov. The couple lived in a village in Iaroslavl’ province, rearing two sons. Neighbors accepted them as a legitimately married couple until 1841, when the first husband reappeared, raising doubts about the authenticity of Fevronia’s marriage to Kondrat. The church launched an investigation. Presented with no evidence that the couple had wed, it declared their children illegitimate. Fevronia was ordered to return to her first husband. Historian Pavel Shcherbinen proposes that villagers tended to regard such civil marriages with tolerance, especially if the soldatka had struggled to feed her children. Not the church, however. In 1812, the Synod explicitly forbade priests to perform marriages for soldiers’ “widows” unless the women could show official notice of their husbands’ death—not an easy thing to obtain. That same year, the State Senate, Russia’s version of the US Supreme Court, declared the marriages of soldiers’ widows illegal without such proof, and any resulting children, illegitimate.64

Married Peasants on the Move Soldatki who left the village formed part of a broader phenomenon: the appearance in both towns and cities of adult men and women, some of

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whom were married but usually without their spouses. Most came from peasant villages. Living on their own, soldatki represented an anomaly in a society that expected women to reside in households. Less anomalous were men living on their own or in the households of employers or in collectives (artels). Especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the numbers of such men grew steadily after the early eighteenth century. Most migrant peasant men derived from villages of the Central Industrial Region, where serfs usually paid their feudal dues with cash (obrok) rather than in kind. By the late eighteenth century, somewhere between 5 and 30 percent of the adult male population of the region was on the move, seeking, and often finding, employment, or peddling a variety of goods. Once factories began operating in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, female migrants (mainly spinsters and widows, in addition to soldatki) joined them, although male migrants always predominated. Migrants required the permission of their landlords and/or village authorities to obtain the internal passport that allowed them to leave their ascribed place of residence. (Married women also required the permission of their husbands.) Landlords and village authorities willingly granted permission: the money migrants earned and remitted home swelled their coffers.65 Female migrants rarely returned, but men usually left only temporarily and eventually came home. Even while absent, most men remained members of their village household, to which they transferred a significant portion of their earnings. Older men left wives and children behind; younger ones returned to the village to wed. Those who remained away for lengthy periods visited periodically, often in the summer, to take part in fieldwork at its height. Migrants were usually the most venturesome members of their community. Finding employment or, especially, starting a business could require initiative and sometimes capital—many Russian merchants, for example, originated as peasant serfs, usually with support from their masters. Nevertheless, even entrepreneurial peasants were not—or better, not only—individuals on their own. At least initially, most started an enterprise or left home as part of their household’s economic strategy and so as to take advantage of opportunities to sustain or improve their way of life.66

Conclusion The family household constituted the very heart of peasant life. A unit of production as well as reproduction, dependent on marriage and childbearing for its perpetuation, the household provided welfare for the elderly and socialization for the young, while sometimes excluding those, like childless soldiers’ wives, deemed burdensome or marginal. Everywhere, authorities preferred the complex household, which Peter the Great’s policies likely encouraged, too. Household composition, nevertheless, varied

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both regionally and according to how effectively authorities imposed their will. Similar variation existed in peasants’ demographic behavior, although everywhere—with certain Old Believer exceptions—marriage was early and nearly universal. Buttressed by law, custom, and the preferences of serf owners and the state, peasant households were hierarchical in organization, with the head— usually but not invariably the oldest male—enjoying near-absolute authority over the labor and life decisions of other household members. He (far more rarely, she) would retain that authority even after serfdom ended and the circumstances of peasant life began slowly but inexorably to change.

4 The Reform Era

Assuming power after his father’s death, Tsar Alexander II (1855–81) initiated the most far-reaching changes since Peter the Great, known collectively as the “Great Reforms.” They included the emancipation from servitude of almost half the peasant population of Russia; the restructuring of the court system along Western European lines, creating a basis for the rule of law; the introduction of limited elective local self-government (the zemstvo); and the reorganization of the army to include men from all social backgrounds, while limiting the term of active service to six years. Educational and employment opportunities expanded significantly; economic and industrial development accelerated. By encouraging market forces, facilitating greater social mobility, and raising hopes for still more far-reaching changes to come, the reforms posed new challenges to Russia’s patriarchal family and gender order. Its legal bases, however, remained almost entirely as before.

The Ferment of Ideas “A complete restructuring (perestroika) of society is impossible without the total alteration of its foundation: the family” (Mikhail Mikhailov, 1860).1 The “ideologization” of the family, that is, its interpretation as part of a broader sociopolitical agenda, was far from new to Russia.2 However, in the early years of Tsar Alexander II’s reign, as censorship eased and the more liberal members of the educated public sensed the birth of a new and better era, the family assumed fresh significance. Progressives—the name such liberals often applied to themselves—regarded the patriarchal family as the very cradle of authoritarian relations in every form, including the political. They thus subjected it to scathing critiques both in its own right, as an obstacle to progressive change, and as a substitute for the authoritarian political order still impossible to challenge in print. On the left, the literary critic Nikolai Dobroliubov led the charge. Writing for the journal, The Contemporary, in 1859 he referred to the

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family—ostensibly, the merchant family as depicted by the playwright Nikolai Ostrovsky—as a “realm of darkness,” where “despotism” reigned, constraining and distorting the dignity and personality (lichnost’) of everyone subject to it. Women, the most powerless family members, suffered the most. In Dobroliubov’s view, by warping individuals’ personalities, the authoritarian family retarded the growth of a healthy civil society. “People brought up under such a [despotic] system cannot develop a sense of moral duty or the true principles of honesty and justice,” Dobroliubov wrote.3 Concerned with family “despotism” and its negative impact on the young, critics also addressed the relations between husbands and wives. When “despotism, arbitrariness and coercion reign” in the family, “when wives are given over in slavery to their husbands . . . in such a family union it is impossible to hope to raise healthy members of society,” wrote the jurist Mikhail Filippov in 1861.4 The “woman question” became another of the burning issues of the day. It encompassed critiques of gender relations and women’s limited economic and intellectual opportunities, and in its more radical versions, the patriarchal family as well. The radical critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s enormously influential novel, What Is to Be Done? (1863), set forth these issues clearly. It also offered a model for egalitarian spousal relations that became a kind of blueprint for people who sought to construct a new society in the midst of the old. The book begins with the liberation of an oppressed young woman, Vera Pavlovna, from family despotism (wielded in this instance by her mother). Marriage to her brother’s tutor frees Vera from the mother’s efforts to force her into an unwanted but economically advantageous match. The newlyweds lead independent lives, occupying separate rooms, and respecting each other’s right to privacy and pursuit of their own interests—Vera organizes a sewing workshop that becomes a collective and then a commune. And when Vera falls in love with another man, the husband frees her to act on her feelings by removing himself from the scene without jealousy or recriminations. Chernyshevsky called his characters “new people”—a husband who consciously eschewed his legal authority over his wife, a wife who not only freely chose the man she loved but also organized her life rationally and for the greater good.5 Some progressives explicitly argued for the abolition of marriage and the family. “Everyone keeps talking about marriage, about husbands and wives,” Ekaterina Vodovozova quotes a contemporary as asserting in her vivid memoir of this era. “Meanwhile, the time has come when progressives must boldly shout: ‘Down with an outmoded institution such as marriage,’” which entailed women’s economic dependence on men and exchange of sexual favors for support. Whereas some wanted to reform childrearing methods—this period saw a substantial increase in the literature treating the subject—the more radical insisted that childrearing, too, must cease to be a family matter.6 Instead, it should be the responsibility of society: “Only when dull-witted parents are prevented from raising their children will

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the children begin to receive genuinely moral ideas and knowledge.”7 The underground proclamation, Young Russia, which appeared in 1862, echoed these sentiments. It demanded “the abolition of marriage, a phenomenon immoral in the highest degree . . . and . . . the abolition of the family.” Come the revolution, children would be raised socially, not privately.8 For most progressives, family reform offered a means, not an end in itself—that is, a way to transform politics and society, not to ensure the felicity of individual family members. Indeed, many harbored suspicions of the kind of idealized family life that had inspired the gentry “family nests” of the earlier period and that they also associated with the middle classes of industrializing Europe. To them, such a life appeared self-centered and hopelessly “bourgeois,” a term of opprobrium then and later. The novelist Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia spoke for them in a critical essay. “Family happiness,” she wrote, is the “vulgar happiness of locked up houses, tidy and orderly; they seem to smile a welcome at the stranger, but they give him nothing but that smug and stupid smile. These oases are simply individual egoism turned into family egoism. They are orderly, temperate and selfsatisfied—and totally self-involved.”9 The ideas of the 1860s gave rise to a new set of principles: the importance of love freely chosen; the complete equality of men and women in sexual unions, whether sanctified by marriage or not; and even the perception that a sexual union should serve society as well as the self. Part of a broader “cultural movement,” those principles would resonate far into the future.10

Ideas into Action Even as debates raged on the pages of “thick journals” and during evenings in smoke-filled urban salons, people had begun to take family matters into their own hands. Growing numbers of women, most from humble backgrounds, sought relief from abusive marriages. Some appealed to the newly opened Justice of the Peace Courts; others petitioned state officials. Requesting the separate internal passport that would enable them to live on their own, most described mistreatment of a most egregious sort. But in the appeals of a few— privileged, better educated—the rhetoric of the 1860s also reverberated. Such petitioners might denounce “despotism” on the part of husbands or inlaws, or complain of husbands who constrained their “freedom.” In leaving her husband, she had thrown off “the yoke of slavery, and my husband and his family’s tyranny,” declared one female petitioner in 1869.11 The ferment of the times also prompted young people to take action. Renouncing the “stagnant past and all tradition,” they fought with their parents, and sometimes fled their households, abandoning rural estates or provincial towns and heading for the major cities.12 Many of these young people were immediately recognizable on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Flouting conventional gender expectations, the young women

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cropped their hair, dispensed with crinolines, and simplified their dress. Their masculine counterparts allowed their hair to grow long and their beards to flourish, dressed carelessly, and were sometimes equally careless about personal hygiene. Their contemporaries called them “nihilists,” despite Chernyshevsky’s preference for the term “new people.” They devised a variety of alternative family forms. Many took up life in communes; a few formed ménages à trois. One such ménage involved Maria and Pyotr Bokov. Maria, born Obrucheva, was eager to study medicine and Bokov, then a medical student, agreed to tutor her. Subsequently, he offered to marry her to free her to pursue her studies, she accepted, and the two wed. When she then fell in love with the well-known physiologist, Ivan Sechenov, Bokov refused to stand in her way and the three lived amicably together. Nikolai Shelgunov, a publicist and literary critic, and his wife Liudmila came to a similar arrangement when Mikhail Mikhailov, another critic, fell deeply in love with Liudmila. Both ménages were well known in educated society.13 Unions such as that of the Bokovs (and of Chernyshevsky’s Vera Pavlovna and her first husband, modeled upon it) came to be known as “fictitious marriages.” They were contracted for the purpose of liberating a young woman from the authority of her parents so that she could pursue extra-familial goals. Taking advantage of the law that transferred to the husband at marriage the absolute authority of parents over daughters, a fictitious marriage provided a seemingly ideal solution to the predicament of a young woman who sought to escape the parental roof. Although intended, in theory, to remain unconsummated, fictitious marriages often became real ones, perhaps not surprisingly. This happened in the marriage of the Bokovs, among others.14 Over the following decade, family ferment also assumed an explicitly social and then political direction, as thousands, mostly young people—women as well as men—went “to the people,” that is, the peasantry, often severing ties with their parents in the process. Culminating in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on March 1, 1881, the populist movement won the sympathy, even support, of countless impressionable young people along the way. To the authorities, the movement suggested a crisis in the family. Political dissent appeared to infect the young “like a poisonous snake,” declaimed the prosecutor at the regicides’ trial. “Our fathers and mothers trembled and cried, and still tremble and cry for their young.”15

The Reverberations of Reform: Urban Russia The reform era greatly accelerated the pace of economic and social change. Undermining an agrarian way of life dependent on the labor of serfs, creating new job opportunities and broadening the ranks of professionals and the well-educated, the reforms also contributed to the spread of new norms of individual conduct. Sons became less likely to follow in their

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father’s footsteps, especially sons of landed gentry. Aleksei Chikhachev (born 1825), for instance, whose parents we met in a previous chapter, found employment with the railroad in Vladimir province; Vasilii Ragozin (born 1825), the Chikhachevs’ son-in-law, became justice of the peace in the district of Vladimir where once he had resolved the disputes of his own serfs.16 Opportunities for higher education expanded to meet a growing need for professional expertise, offering specialized training in medicine, law, engineering, and other professions to an increasingly diverse student body. Educational opportunities expanded for women, too, although to a far more limited extent.17

The Affective Family Educated and professional women and men sometimes embraced values that differed from those of their parents. Deriving their status from their education and the work that they did rather than—or in addition to—their social origins, they tended to judge themselves and each other not on the basis of birth but on that of educational and professional attainments and of personal qualities and lifestyle. For them, the men especially, marriage had become a personal matter. Earning their own livelihood and independent of their parents, they were in a position to choose a bride to suit themselves, rather than to foster family connections or social mobility. While material considerations might play a role in their choice, it was emotional inclination that was supposed to be definitive. Most married comparatively late, in their late twenties or early thirties, having waited until they earned enough money to establish their own household and support a wife and children. Their wives might be considerably younger, however, because of the widespread preference for young brides.18 Most embraced an affective and companionate ideal of marriage. Such couples were likely to conceive of their dwelling as a “home,” in the sense of a private space where the intimate relations of husbands and wives and parents and children might proceed, sheltered from the gaze of outsiders. If their household included a servant, as surely all of them did—some 47.9 percent of households in St. Petersburg in 1869 and 39.1 percent of households in Moscow in 1882 employed at least one servant— their privacy would be limited to some extent.19 Urban apartments often lacked servants’ quarters; servants bedded down in the kitchen, in the hallway, or sometimes in a garret with other servants. On the other hand, it is unclear whether people perceived servants’ presence as an intrusion: to their employers, evidence suggests, servants often seemed nearly invisible. In any case, households such as these most resembled the domestic arrangements that had become the norm among the middle classes in Western Europe and the United States. Such households consisted of a married couple, either by themselves or with their unmarried children

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(plus their servant[s]) occupying a privileged, private space. Embodying a patriarchal bourgeois domestic ideal, in the 1870s and 1880s they inspired the portraits of the Nizhnii Novgorod photographer A. O. Karelin.20 Whether or not such people constituted a genuine middle class—and the verdict is still out on that issue—their lifestyles resembled those of their middle-class counterparts in Western Europe and the United States, which their more radical counterparts dismissed as “bourgeois.”21  Still, in at least one key respect Russia’s domestic ideals differed from those then circulating elsewhere. The middle classes elsewhere believed that women belonged almost exclusively to the domestic sphere, whereas members of Russia’s professional and educated elites often supported the

FIGURE 4.1  A. I. Karelin, Domestic Interior. © Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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idea (and even the reality) of women’s, even married women’s, remunerative work—without, however, relieving wives of the domestic responsibilities that were assumed to be naturally theirs. Such acceptance of married women’s extra-domestic labor was among the legacies of the 1860s.22

Reforming Family Law From the 1860s onward, a companionate and affective ideal of marriage informed the efforts of moderates and liberals both within and outside the imperial administration to institute changes in family law. Unlike radicals such as Chernyshevsky, most reformers aspired only to greatly circumscribe rather than to abolish altogether the near-absolute legal authority of husband over wife. Nevertheless, these men, too, pursued broader social and political ends. Their efforts to curtail domestic violence—now, rightly or wrongly, widely associated with the “lower” estates—formed part of a domestic civilizing mission. At the same time, endeavoring to change the laws that upheld patriarchal authority, they also sought to expand the authority of the newly reformed courts—and thus of men like themselves—to adjudicate family conflicts, extending the rule of law into a domain over which the church still claimed a monopoly.23 One reform proposed in the early 1860s aimed to permit abused wives to appeal to civil courts for a legal separation, which the law forbade. Another would have revised penal law to empower police and judges to punish wifebeaters in the same way as assailants who battered a stranger. Neither initiative succeeded.24 Indeed, the only substantive change in family law in this period concerned the marriages of Old Believers. Hitherto criminalized and persecuted if performed outside the official, Orthodox Church, such marriages acquired civil status for the first time in 1874 so long as they were registered in special metrical books. Registration also conferred legitimacy on the children born from such unions, another first.25 If the laws governing marriage and family life remained otherwise unaltered, the legal reforms of 1864, nevertheless, opened the door to changes in how those laws were interpreted and applied. Especially important in this regard were the new Justice of the Peace Courts, designed to make justice accessible even to the most humble. Rather like small-claims courts in the United States, in which litigants pled their own case before an elected justice, they, for the first time, provided Russians with access to a legal system independent of the state, as did the reformed courts more generally. In 1871, a State Senate decision empowered such courts to condemn physically abusive husbands to a short stint in prison. Subsequently, State Senate decisions would expand the forms of relief available to abused wives in cases of marital breakdown. However, reforming jurists never gained the authority they sought to permit marital separation as an alternative to divorce, their every attempt thwarted by the Russian Orthodox Church with support from the throne.26

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The Expansive Household If households that conformed, more or less, to a “bourgeois” profile had grown in numbers, they still remained a small minority. On the basis of the census of 1897, Boris Mironov has calculated that slightly over a quarter of urban households were complex or extended, and that 45.6 percent of the urban population belonged to such households. The more agrarian the surrounding region, the more common were complex households in urban areas.27 Moscow and St. Petersburg, where such households had become a rarity, were the exception not the rule. Moreover, even simple households rarely occupied “homes” in the sense of a privileged private space. Whether the townhouse of a wealthy merchant or the dank basement apartment of a tailor, people’s residences often served as workplaces, too. Most artisans and people engaged in commerce or trade continued to work from their residence and if they hired others to assist them, their workers lived there, too. According to the census of 1882, for instance, some 15.6 percent of Moscow’s population lived as laborers—apprentices, journeymen, outworkers, shop clerks—in their employer’s household and ate their meals together with the family.28 The housing crunch in Moscow and St. Petersburg also brought strangers into people’s living space: a substantial number of apartments in both cities were subdivided into units—rooms, even corners of a room, and rented out. Residences where people labored or non-family members dwelled did not qualify as a “home,” according to the new domestic ideals. Still, those ideals and the “cultured” lifestyle associated with them might prove attractive to people whose living circumstances were otherwise, as the story of Maria and Nikolai Kharuzin (1831–80) attests. A Moscow merchant who had risen to the first guild by dint of his labors in the textile trade, Nikolai Kharuzin had married for love. He and his wife, Maria, aspired to a lifestyle different from that of most merchant households. They read books and visited the theater, museums, and exhibitions. The father spent his free time in the company of his children, reading them the Russian classics. The parents chose their children’s teachers and schools with great care. In 1873, they even moved away from the merchant quarter of Moscow and settled in an apartment in the Arbat, an area favored by nobles. Maria Kharuzina also strove to separate home from work, the very foundation of the new domesticity. Their clerks and apprentices had long lived under the Kharuzins’ roof and eaten at their table—the usual merchant pattern. Maria evicted them. “The young clerk Kapiton Efimovich soon disappeared from our household . . . . He was the last of the inhabitants of the room set aside for clerks,” Vera, their daughter, writes. Maria also entirely forbade the conduct of any work related to commerce in their home and required other labor—cleaning a room, for example—to be performed exclusively by servants. Still, their household fell somewhat short of the ideal. Even after shop clerks and apprentices had vanished, in addition to the couple and their three

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sons and two daughters (and numerous servants), Nikolai’s unmarried sister also dwelt under the Kharuzin roof. The strong-willed Maria Kharuzina and her sister-in-law nourished little affection for each other. But somehow they managed to get along: “In those times, people made the best of such complex lifestyles . . .” Vera remembered, contrasting the tolerance of her parents with the attitudes of her own, more self-assertive and individualistic generation.29

The Persistence of Patriarchy A degree of authoritarianism was almost unavoidable in households in which work overlapped with “home.” The household head carried enormous responsibility, along with the authority—economic as well as legal—that accompanied it. He directed everyone’s work, interacted with the outside world on his household’s behalf, and controlled the household’s economic resources, allocating money as he saw fit. If an enterprise was registered in his name—the usual pattern—then he (or far more rarely, she, ordinarily a widow) held the authority to disown a son who left the household without his permission or a son or daughter who married without it, as well as the right to decide when to divide the property among heirs.30 The wife of the head of the household exercised comparable authority over her own sphere, much as she had in the days of the Domostroi. And as then, her role complemented that of her husband. If the household was sizeable, as households of wealthy merchants and successful artisans often were, she bore a considerable workload, looking after the shop clerks and apprentices who lived under her roof, and overseeing the household’s provisioning. This entailed shopping for food, supervising its preparation, and presiding over such formidable tasks as the making of jam and preservation of the foodstuffs that would last year-round. In much of urban Russia, although likely not in St. Petersburg, the housewife (or her minions) grew at least some of her household’s food.31 The work performed by a wife, as essential as her husband’s, was emphatically women’s work. While a wife might assume responsibility for running a business or overseeing production—temporarily when her husband had to travel elsewhere, permanently in the event of his death—husbands almost never assumed the domestic responsibilities of their wives. Nor could they, if they had to earn a living. As a result, while older widows rarely remarried, whether by choice or not, widowed heads of households, especially households with children, still almost invariably found a new wife.32

A Tale of Two Households “Not a day passes when there isn’t some unpleasantness at home, and how bitter that is, and what can I do about it?” the deeply religious third guild

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merchant Pyotr Vasilievich Medvedev inquired rhetorically of his diary on May 14, 1854.33 Medvedev was a man of the “silent majority”—the kind of person from whom the historian rarely hears. Born a peasant in the 1820s, he had dragged himself up the social ladder. After toiling for years for other people, he had finally raised himself into the third guild—the lowest level— of the Moscow merchantry. That he kept a diary at all is unusual. Most diaries still derived from highly educated individuals and/or the nobility, whereas like most men of his background, Medvedev never received a formal education.34 Medvedev’s marriage was not a happy one, as the entries in his diary make abundantly clear. As marriages of the men of his milieu often were, his was based on calculation. Thirty years of age, no longer young and still a townsman, he had chosen as his bride the daughter of a wealthy merchant. Although in his diary he raged against his “senseless marriage,” the marriage was not, in fact, senseless: he hoped to use his bride’s dowry and her family connections to raise himself up the social ladder. But the dowry amounted to less than he had hoped, and he found himself, by his account at least, saddled with a wife who was neither educated nor intelligent nor kind, with poor taste, and stubborn— that is, who utterly lacked the “angelic” character so often celebrated in novels of the time, which had encouraged him to expect the same of his wife.35 Despite his humble origins, Medvedev, a reader, had come to share the sentimental view of marriage that had grown more common among his social superiors. His diary makes it clear that he longed for a romantic union of loving spouses, and for a home that served as a quiet, cozy refuge from everyday cares, governed by the spouses’ concern for one another’s and their children’s welfare.36 We know this because Medvedev’s marriage and household met none of these criteria, to his unending grief. Not only had he chosen his bride for the wrong reasons—calculation—but his household also proved anything but peaceful. For one thing, like the households of so many urbanites of his sort not only of his time but also subsequently, Medvedev’s household included others besides his nuclear family. In addition to himself and his wife, it consisted of his elderly but imperious mother and his widowed sister and her two sons. The household was rife with tensions. Mother and daughter-in-law got along so poorly that at times they came to blows. Husband and wife occasionally did, too, especially in the early years of their marriage. In the milieu in which Medvedev grew up, “instructing” a stubborn or obstreperous wife was regarded as a perfectly acceptable mode of behavior. Nevertheless, his own resort to violence upset the sentimental Medvedev—perhaps because his reading prompted him to expect better of himself—and it sometimes even sent him into a depression. In his diary, he complained frequently of the absence of sympathy and support at home, despite his very hard work on behalf of his household: “how bitter it is after all my labor and care, amidst the deprivations of our constrained circumstances, to encounter neither love nor gratitude, and in their place perpetual insults in word and in deed.”37

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Both husband and wife eventually sought solace with others. Two or three years after his wedding, having failed to find love in his marriage, Medvedev evidently felt himself free to indulge his “passions” elsewhere, if somewhat guiltily. What this entailed was engaging in casual sex with women, prostitutes mainly, and with working-class men—evidently not uncommon.38 To his diary, he confided the details of these adventures. At the same time, Medvedev continued to have regular sexual congress with his wife—essential, in his view, to ensuring her fidelity. He even took a certain pride in his sexual performance. His performance, nevertheless, failed to restrain his wife from becoming sexually involved with someone else: his own sister’s son, a member of their household. His wife’s sexual involvement not only constituted infidelity; in the eyes of the Russian Orthodox Church, it also amounted to incest.39 His wife’s sexual adventure might have provided Medvedev sufficient grounds for divorce, but the thought of divorce never seems to have entered his head. He certainly took no steps to explore the possibility, despite his perpetual complaints about his marital misery. Did he even know that divorce was possible? Perhaps not, as divorce remained exceedingly rare in Russian society, the result of efforts by the church to do everything possible to preserve rather than dissolve a marriage even when the circumstances fully met its limited criteria. But even had he known about divorce, Medvedev’s deep religiosity would very likely have restrained him from pursuing one. Because God, not mankind, governed human affairs, in Medvedev’s view his wife represented a “dreadful punishment” for his own sins and thus, a burden to be endured.40 While it is impossible to know whether Medvedev’s household was “typical,” in the harshness of its human relationships and in the frequent recourse to violence, it bears a striking resemblance to the picture Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) presents of his grandfather’s household, which Maxim joined after his father’s death. From the age of three until he turned ten and was sent out to earn his own living, the young Maxim and his widowed mother, Varvara, lived in the home of his grandfather, Vasilii Kashirin, a tradesman in the town of Nizhnii Novgorod. There, in his grandfather’s low, one-storied house, he and his mother, his grandmother, Akulina, Maxim’s uncles, an aunt and several children dwelled, together with servants, crowded into small, dark rooms. Workers bunked in the kitchen.41 Like Medvedev and so many other Russian tradesmen, Vasilii Kashirin had begun his life as a peasant, in his case as the child of a beggar woman and former serf. Working first as a barge-hauler, then as a foreman, he had gradually scraped together enough money to establish a dye workshop, located in the yard of his house, which he ran with the help of his sons. He fared very well at first, becoming a foreman of the dyer’s guild and a member of the city duma, although toward the end of the 1870s his fortunes went into sharp decline as nascent industrialization began to drive out small workshops such as his.42 Even at the zenith of his success, however,

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Kashirin retained the habits of his formative years: an unwillingness to spend his money, a pronounced lack of cultivation or refinement. Unlike the sentimental, if occasionally violent Medvedev, Kashirin appears as hard as nails. Thus, when the author’s mother, Varvara, defied him to marry the man she loved, Kashirin withheld her dowry and after she was widowed and joined his household, appears never quite to have forgiven her.43 Violence was pervasive in the Kashirin household: almost everyone abused those weaker than themselves. Disobedience was harshly punished. The grandfather beat his children and grandchildren; husbands thrashed their wives; indeed, one of Maxim’s uncles beat his wife to death—to his own great sorrow. Father and sons were almost literally at each other’s throats because the father, in whose name the business was registered, refused for years to divide it between the sons. The only household members to refrain from violence were the author’s saintly grandmother, and his mother and deceased father, a former upholsterer who had doubted the efficacy of beating a child.44 Gorky’s portrait of his grandfather’s household could well serve as a case study of the abusive plebeian domestic relations that so agitated members of the cultivated elite during the reform era and after—indeed, the portrait may well be tainted by Gorky’s retrospective adoption of their point of view. But whether or not the Kashirin household was “typical,” in its members’ peasant origins and its combination of work and home—if not in its violent relationships—it shared many features with the households of other plebeian urban dwellers, especially although not exclusively, those still close to their peasant pasts.

The Post-Emancipation Peasantry Emancipation and the Household The emancipation of the serfs in 1861, designed to ensure maximum social stability, had only a limited effect on household and family relations, at least in the short term. It is true that, thanks to its terms, over time roughly half the peasant population of Russia gained freedom from servitude to gentry landowners. But other peasant institutions not only remained as before; in key respects, the terms of the emancipation also reinforced them so as to minimize its economic and social repercussions. Thus, the emancipation upheld the authority of the bol’shak over his household, adding new responsibilities to existing ones. It also reaffirmed the collective—rather than individual—ownership of the land provided to former serfs. That land became the property of the community (obshchina), and in meetings of household heads (the skhod), it was to be allocated to households on a temporary basis as before, together with the attendant burden of taxation and redemption payments, for which peasants shared responsibility (krugovaia poruka). The bol’shak’s job was to ensure that his

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household fulfilled its fiscal and other obligations to the community and the state. Failing that, he might be replaced. As in the days of serfdom, his authority was commensurate with his responsibilities. The bol’shak determined the labor of household members— including the labor of the married sons who remained under his roof. He disciplined members of his household when he deemed necessary and endeavored to ensure that peace prevailed. If his efforts failed, his community or the new peasant-class courts, which began operations in 1864, imposed discipline for him, with flogging the punishment of preference for men (women were exempt from it). Household property, held collectively, was disposed of as he saw fit. This included the earnings of sons, even married sons, whose wages were supposed to become part of the common pot if they remained members of their father’s household. So long as he lived, household divisions were supposed to remain subject to the bol’shak’s approval, although this rule was often ignored, especially in the Central Industrial Region. After the emancipation, the bol’shak also held the authority to control the mobility of household members, an authority that noble landowners or their agents had also formerly exercised. To travel further than roughly twenty miles from their ascribed place of residence, Russian subjects—and not only peasants—required an internal passport, a document also necessary for obtaining work, renting a place to live, enrolling in school, and more. To obtain the document, junior members of a household required the head’s permission as well as that of the village elder. Married peasant women, like women of other social estates including the nobility, required the permission of their husband as well.45 Thus, it was up to the bol’shak to determine whether or not household members could work or live outside the village, and if they did, how much money they had to remit to the household in exchange. This authority came with obligations: the community expected the bol’shak to control the members of his household, serve as a diligent steward of its property, and uphold community norms. If he failed in his role as steward—if he drank too much and squandered property, neglected to pay the household’s dues and taxes, or to fulfill the household’s community obligations—village authorities might assign a guardian or replace him with a son, or in the absence of an adult son, temporarily with his wife, the bol’shukha. Fathers who sheltered married daughters in flight from their husband’s household might be chastised, even beaten. In response to complaints from neighbors or household members, the community, too, might intervene to restore a household’s harmony. Daughters-in-law were notably prominent among household members who complained.46

The Forces of Change If in reinforcing patriarchal household and village authority, the emancipation aimed to forestall change in peasant life, it failed to fully

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FIGURE 4.2  Domestic basket weavers. © Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

succeed. Change occurred, nonetheless, largely due to broader developments but also to the very terms of the emancipation. Peasants needed cash to fulfill the new fiscal demands it imposed; economic growth helped some to satisfy that need. Beginning after the emancipation, these developments would gain still greater momentum later, toward the century’s end. They were most pronounced in the northern regions, where agriculture had long been inadequate to sustain a household year-round and supplementary labor existed in many forms. There, growing numbers of peasants took up domestic production for sale and the products grew more diverse. Rural factories burgeoned, hiring local peasants as workers while also putting out some of their production to be completed by others at home. Both need and opportunity prompted growing numbers of peasants to seek income elsewhere.   Often, they joined the flood of migrants then inundating towns and cities. The first wave likely consisted of former house serfs—that is, mostly people with specialized skills—cooks, seamstresses, even domestic servants—who derived from peasant households that had never cultivated the land. Unlikely to return to their villages, such people enrolled in—or sought to enroll in—the estate of townspeople, swelling its ranks.47 Many more migrants, however, came for shorter stints and retained both their classification as peasants and their membership in a rural household. The overwhelming majority of short-term migrants were male. Although the presence of short-term migrants in urban areas represented nothing new, their numbers burgeoned after emancipation: by 1871, there were over 250,000 peasant migrants resident in Moscow,

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more than two-thirds of them male; by 1881, migrant peasants numbered over 350,000 in the city of St. Petersburg (exclusive of suburbs), more than 60 percent of them male.48 Between 1860–63 and 1880, the peasant population almost tripled in the towns and cities of Western Siberia. Driven from the village by the long-standing burden of taxation and for former serfs, the new one of redemption payments, peasant migrants were also responding to enhanced opportunities to earn their livelihood—in rapidly expanding industry, in petty commerce, in transport, domestic service, and more. Most led bifurcated lives, one foot in an urban setting, the other firmly planted in their village household. This was the case partly because the village called and severing ties was difficult not only emotionally but also because of collective responsibility and ownership. But in addition, towns and cities were inhospitable to plebeian family life. Urban life was expensive; most migrants earned very little. Housing, failing utterly to keep pace with the influx of newcomers, grew ever more crowded and costly. In the early postemancipation years, many industrial workers literally slept beneath their machinery; others lived cheek by jowl with strangers in factory dormitories. Still others rented a bed or a corner of a room in someone else’s apartment. Or they lived as artels, traditionally an association of peasants from the same community who sought work together, now adapted to the circumstances of urban life.49 Like a snapshot, the members of an exemplary and surely fictional, apartment offered in 1871 as guidance to the census takers of Moscow may serve to illustrate not only the housing arrangements of such migrants but also how plebeian households might deploy their human resources to best advantage. It also suggests how difficult it was for everyone but people with considerable wealth—the Kharuzins, for example—to separate their own domestic space from that of others. The actual renter of the exemplary apartment was the fifty-six-year-old Semyon Petrov, a townsman, who rented space both to temporary paying guests and to ongoing lodgers. His wife, Avdotia, fifty-four, a laundress, lived with him as did their son, Anton, aged twelve and already working in a silk weaving factory. The household kept a servant, a soldier’s widow. It also rented space to a Russian tailor (an unmarried peasant from Moscow province) and his Tatar apprentice (a married peasant from Simbirsk, without his wife); to a coachman (an unmarried peasant from Moscow province); and to an Armenian university student who derived from the merchant estate. The temporary paying guest was a married Jewish merchant from Vil’no, passing through town on business. Although the occupants of this imaginary apartment were hardly “typical” in their considerable ethnic and religious diversity, in other respects—and in particular, in the preponderance of migrant male peasants among the boarders, including a married peasant without his wife—the arrangement it described was perfectly realistic.50

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A Fractured Household? In the aftermath of emancipation, tensions in the peasant household became newly visible, evident in petitions to those with authority over peasant life and in conflicts that unfolded before the new peasant-class (cantonal) courts. Migration and the enhanced significance of cash were among the causes. Working and earning money away from home brought the migrant new experiences and, often enough, a new sense of independence. Especially if the migrant was young, as many were, and remained a member of his parents’ household, migration sometimes put a strain on their relations, with money frequently the primary source. How much of his earnings should the migrant remit to the village? How should that money be spent? Who had the right to decide? Although law and custom favored household heads and the larger peasant community, this did not always resolve the issue.51 If wives were involved, as was often the case, they added another layer of complexity. Roughly half of the men who departed the village temporarily left their wives behind. Parents often arranged marriages before their sons left for work or found them wives while they were away—couples would wed during a visit home—in part because the household needed wives’ labor to substitute for the migrants’, but also because marriage to a woman who remained in the village ensured migrants’ loyalty. Married migrants were more likely than single ones to skimp on their own expenses and to remit to the village a larger portion of their wages.52 The money did not necessarily prompt household members to treat daughters-in-law more gently, however. They remained outsiders in their inlaw’s household, occupying the lowest position in the household hierarchy. Even under the best of circumstances, their relations with other household members almost invariably remained difficult until everyone adjusted to the women’s presence.53 Without their husbands present to stand up for them, young wives became even more vulnerable to their in-laws’ abuse. Peasant court records dating from the late 1860s and early 1870s deriving from areas with high levels of male outmigration are peppered with cases reflecting the strain it imposed.54 At the same time, cash and the products it could buy might raise expectations in wives, too, or so suggests a letter written by one peasant wife to a migrant husband, a construction worker: If you’re thinking of coming to the village, then bring money for expenses, but if you are going to spend the winter in St. Petersburg, send even more money and the presents that I wrote you about before . . . . My dear husband, bring tea with you . . . . Our harness is all tattered, so we cannot use the horse. If there were money, we could have shoes made and in fact, one of the leather boots is falling apart and we need fur coats.”55

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It is true that tensions in peasant households were hardly new. Quarrels sometimes arose even when every household member worked the land or contributed their labor in other ways, such as in domestic craft production. A peasant couple without children, for example, might resent having to work so hard to support the children of a brother. Daughters-in-law frequently fought among themselves over who performed what work. But cash earned elsewhere exacerbated these fault lines by conferring a kind of independence. A migrant might come to resent having to surrender to the bol’shak his independently earned income. His wife might egg him on, or plead with him, to release her from her in-laws’ mistreatment, and he might agree to make her life easier by separating from the parental household. Or he might simply aspire to a household of his own, which would allow him to retain for the use of himself and his family whatever remained of his earnings after paying redemption fees and taxes and fulfilling other fiscal obligations.56 As a result, household divisions grew more frequent in the aftermath of emancipation, even before the death of the bol’shak, the usual prelude, and sometimes, even without the requisite permission of the skhod. Households had always experienced cycles, to be sure. If they grew too large, or if the bol’shak died, the adult male members ordinarily divided the goods equally and set up households of their own. But increasingly, rather than waiting for the bol’shak’s death to become head of their own household, peasants were initiating divisions during his lifetime. A son or sons might request their share of the household goods and, with or without the bol’shak’s permission, move out with their wives and children. Only one son usually remained, to look after the bol’shak until his death. Or the bol’shak himself might eject a son and his family from the household.57 As peasants from Nerekhta district, Kostroma, put it: “Few are submissive nowadays . . . . Fathers quarrel with sons, brothers with brothers.”58 Still, it would be mistaken to discount the forces that preserved many households from premortem division. One was the dependence of younger wives on a household’s older women—which is rather surprising, given how often household breakdown was blamed on conflicts between its women. The dependence was related to women’s childbearing, which began soon after marriage. Bearing, on average, six or seven children—just about at women’s physiological limit—peasant women lost well over a quarter of their infants before the age of one. Physicians attributed the carnage to popular methods of early infant-care and attempted to convert young peasant mothers to scientific approaches. In vain. Young birthing mothers rejected their advice and listened, instead, to the household’s older women, on whom they relied for advice and support.59 Household divisions involved other kinds of risk as well. If the children were too young to offer substantial assistance, the burden of sustaining the household would likely rest entirely on the married couple or if the man were working elsewhere, on the wife. The new household became much

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more vulnerable to disasters, among them the injury or death of husband or wife. Besides, if a man had patience and waited long enough, he could lay claim to the role of household head in the natural order of things, while his wife became the bol’shukha. Community pressures, the values with which peasants were raised—not to mention filial love and loyalty—surely played a role as well in keeping married sons under the parental roof. We can see some of these forces at play in the case of Iakov Stoliarov, a peasant from Voronezh province whose household made pottery to supplement agricultural production. After seven years of active military service, in 1878 Iakov returned to his young bride and their two children and took up residence in his father’s household, having learned while in service to read and write, saved a little money (which he kept for himself), and mastered the craft of shoemaking. He even possessed the requisite tools. He was thus in a position to carve out a path of his own. According to his son Ivan’s memoir, Iakov nourished no desire whatsoever to take up pottery making, a filthy and arduous trade and the work of his father’s household and of virtually every household in their village. Iakov had begun assisting in it around age seven or eight. He tried to convince his brothers that if he himself made shoes rather than pots, the entire household would benefit, because he would earn more money for everyone. But his brothers resisted: shoemaking, they argued, was much easier and cleaner work than making pots. As the son put it, “out of envy, they did not want him to live better.” The brothers told Iakov: “What we do, you must do, too.” Iakov submitted. He gave up shoemaking and resumed making pots. Subsequently, even after he had divided off his own household, he never again took up his craft.60

Litigious Daughters-in-Law In addition to contributing its modest share to household divisions, the discontent of peasant wives emerged as an issue in its own right in the decades following emancipation, made newly visible by the venues to which peasants could now appeal for relief, in particular the cantonal, or peasantclass court. Cases involving conflicts between the daughter-in-law and other household members appeared frequently, especially before courts located in the Central Industrial Region. Daughters-in-law complained of beatings by their mother-in-law, father in-law, or brother-in-law, and most commonly of all, by their husband; husbands or in-laws endeavored to reclaim wives or daughters-in-law who had fled their household.61 If such cases are in some ways reminiscent of those discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, they also show revealing differences. For one thing, it was the women themselves—rather than fathers, mothers, or other relatives— who most often brought suit on their own behalf, and some of those women emerge from the record as forceful, if largely unsuccessful, advocates on

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their own behalf. For another, they sometimes found the relief they sought. To be sure, in the deliberations of peasant judges, concern for the viability of a peasant household’s economy usually trumped the welfare of an individual woman, even in the not infrequent cases when a court found a wife’s complaints of abuse to be well founded. Thus, while a court might fine or punish an abusive in-law or husband (abusive husbands were most often flogged), it would then order the wife to return to the household and resume life “peacefully,” admonishing the perpetrator to treat his wife properly in the future—and sometimes, the wife to be submissive or hold her tongue. However, especially if the husband, too, had reached the end of his tether and no longer wished to live with his wife, the court might agree to allow the two to live separately—not so different from earlier times. “Divorce letters” might even be agreed upon, although now presumably without the right to remarry (peasants sometimes even used the word razvod, divorce in such cases).62 Opportunities for women to earn income made a difference here, enabling some wives to satisfy the needs of their husbands’ household with cash rather than their own labor. Although the vast majority of women migrants were widows or spinsters, especially in cases of marital breakdown, married women sometimes joined their ranks. Husbands who agreed to allow their wives to live and work elsewhere usually required in return a regular payment (popularly known as obrok—i.e., quitrent) to enable his household to hire a replacement worker. “I willingly, in aversion to our family discord, permit my wife to receive from the cantonal government a yearly passport to live where she wishes with the proviso that she pay me in the course of a year 12 rubles . . .” reads one such agreement. If she failed to remit the money, a husband might revoke his wife’s passport at will, even, in extreme cases, force her to return to the village in a convict convoy (po etapu), as household heads enjoyed the right to do with negligent sons. 63

Conclusion Although efforts to reform family and marital law bore no fruit, while the emancipation actually reinforced the authority of peasant household heads, other changes underway during the reign of Tsar Alexander II posed new challenges to Russia’s patriarchal family order. While the patriarchal household continued to be the norm, the reform era greatly expanded the number of educated and liberal-minded people, for whom more individualistic and “cultured” ways of being had become a marker of social status and who often embraced affective ideals of marriage and domesticity. At the same time, the increasing importance of cash fostered greater individualism among peasants, too, and not only among men but also among women, mainly although not exclusively in regions highly subject to market forces.

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Other developments in this period proved even more troubling to social conservatives and government officials: rebellious offspring, fictitious marriages, and other unconventional domestic arrangements among the privileged, as well as the spectacle of domestic violence, conjugal breakdown, and household division paraded before the new courts in towns and the countryside. To conservatives, the assassination of the tsar in 1881 seemed in some ways emblematic of family breakdown. In response, the new tsar, Alexander III (1881–94), and his supporters would do everything in their power to reinforce the patriarchal family, even as they unleashed far-reaching economic changes that were likely to erode its authority further. Their hope: that the patriarchal family would serve as a kind of dike, restraining the forces of social, cultural, and political change.

5 The Politics of Personal Life 1881–1914

In 1897, Aleksei Ryseev, a peasant in Viatka province, petitioned his bishop to request that the requirement of parental permission for marriage be waived in his case. “My parents want me to marry another girl,” he wrote in his own hand, “but she’s not the one I want. I want to marry Aleksandra Sheshukova, the girl I’ve chosen. I know her well.” Aleksandra was “a good worker and a submissive maiden,” he asserted, highlighting the qualities parents required of a daughter-in-law—but in vain. The bishop not only denied the request unequivocally but he also chastised Aleksei for submitting it in the first place, and in the harshest of terms. Stop wasting your money on “illegal requests,” he exhorted Aleksei. It was a sin to complain about one’s parent. “A sin! [Grekh!]” the bishop reiterated. No matter the age of the son, “a father’s authority [over him] ends only with the father’s death by natural causes.”1 In the decades before the outbreak of World War I, Tsars Alexander III (1881–94) and Nicholas II (1894–1917) pursued policies of industrialization and economic modernization that both accelerated and intensified the processes described in the preceding chapter. The middling classes expanded. Inundated by newcomers, towns and cities burgeoned, while still remaining islands in a sea of peasant villages. The marketplace flourished and a new consumer culture emerged, fostering greater individualism and concern for the self. Amplifying the cult of domesticity, the home and its trappings grew in significance as markers of social status. Romantic love became celebrated as never before. These developments prompted a new sense of the self and its dignity among expanding sectors of Russia’s population, even as both rulers preserved their monopoly on political power and, until 1905, denied their subjects fundamental civil and political rights.

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The consequences varied: most Russians either adapted existing practices to accord with the new developments or ignored those developments altogether. But the enhanced sense of self they encouraged might also upend old patterns and prompt new conflicts—between parents and children, between husbands and wives. Assuming a variety of forms, such conflicts also prompted a growing number of appeals for relief from the strictures of patriarchal law, Ryseev’s among them. They contributed, if only indirectly, to the crisis of Russia’s Old Regime.

New People, New Norms, New Practices Industrialization and economic modernization further amplified the social changes that commenced after 1861. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of peasants obtaining internal passports almost doubled. Millions inundated towns and cities seeking work in industry, in service, and in a range of other non-agricultural occupations. Urban populations exploded: for the first time, peasants became the predominant social group not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also in many provincial towns and cities.2 At the same time, commercial, educational and professional opportunities expanded still further, offering an avenue for upward mobility to increasing numbers of people, some from humble backgrounds. While remaining a mere fraction of the urban population, the social “middle” swelled.3 Expectations rose in tandem, encouraged by the burgeoning marketplace and proliferation of consumer goods. Increasing numbers of urbanites nourished aspirations to a status and lifestyle different from that of their parents. A flood of prescriptive literature facilitated their efforts to craft new social identities, while emphasizing the pleasures of personal life as a measure of individual well-being and achievement.4 Romantic love and personal choice became essential to a happy marriage. “A marriage must be only for love, and marriages concluded for reasons other than love are to the highest degree immoral,” intoned Marital Satisfactions, in typical fashion.5 Ideals of romantic love and personal choice resonated far beyond the milieu of the educated and/or privileged. Celebrated in fiction, on stage, and in song, they reverberated far into the provinces thanks to the expansion of railway networks, which enhanced individual mobility while transforming many of Russia’s provincial towns—once “tsarist outposts”—into genuine urban centers.6 Whether or not the “love marriage” had become a kind of normative ideal or “new cultural reality” in provincial towns as well as major cities by the late nineteenth century, as T. B. Kotlova has argued, the new ideals sometimes touched even people—still the vast majority of Russians—whose households remained units of production and whose way of life remained much as before.7

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Plebeian Urbanites If the new ideals touched such people, however, it was usually only lightly. Among artisans, petty tradespeople, and people whose livelihoods depended on hard manual labor—their ranks now continually swelled by migrants from the countryside—the economic dimensions of marriage simply remained too important to make way for such an ephemeral feeling as “love.” Most plebeian wives were expected to contribute directly or indirectly to the household economy. They substituted for trading husbands absent on business, or took their turn behind the counter, and/or tended to the needs of shop clerks and apprentices and journeymen. Artisans and craftspeople continued to operate as earlier, with finished goods often being sold directly from the home.8 Still, those who had achieved a modest level of material well-being—and their numbers were slowly growing—aspired to a different lifestyle. They began for the first time to divide up their domestic space according to usage: a front room, kitchen, and separate bedroom, where they slept in beds, thereby establishing a measure of privacy.9 But privacy remained scarce in impoverished households, still the majority. Household members—including the head of the household and his wife, their children, and their workmen and servants—still slept in the room where they worked, on shelves along the wall in summer, on the stove in winter.10 When in 1896 Natalia Shibanova complained to authorities about the “unnatural” sexual practices favored by her husband, a migrant peasant from Kaluga and proprietor of a painting workshop in Moscow, for instance, investigators queried Shibanov’s apprentices, whom they treated as privy to his most intimate acts.11 The overlapping of home and work persisted not only in provincial towns and the city of Moscow, where small-scale trade and production constituted a substantial sector of the economy; it continued even in the “modern” city of St. Petersburg. Apartment seventy-three at 14/2 Nizhegorodskaia Street, in the second quarter of Vyborg district, to take one example, contained a shoemaking workshop, and housed the master, his journeymen and their wives, plus several young apprentices throughout 1908 and 1909.12 Emblematic of the economic dimension of marriage, the dowry remained essential. “Even if it amounted to only fifty rubles, it had to be there!” declared Sergei Dmitriev, son of a shop clerk and a shop clerk himself, writing of turn of the city of Iaroslavl’. The significance of the dowry is evident in the role that others continued to play in providing it. If parents were deceased or unable to supply a dowry, brothers, uncles, or other relatives might step in, as earlier. In the 1880s, it was her employer/patroness who dowered the townswoman Natalia Bychkova, a needlewoman, providing two hundred rubles—“good money for those days.” Dowering a marriageable maiden even became an outlet for philanthropic impulses. In 1885, one wealthy merchant bequeathed to the textile town of Shuia the sum of twenty thousand rubles, intended to dower five impoverished townswomen a year

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FIGURE 5.1  Peasant Wedding, 1910. © Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

with one hundred rubles each. Other towns and cities received bequests earmarked for the same purpose, and in 1901, a mutual aid society was formed, with government approval, for the specific purpose of dowering prospective brides.13 Many plebeians also continued to employ matchmakers or informal go-betweens. Others, while marrying off their offspring early as before, nevertheless adapted to the new cultural currents by “arranging situations” so as to allow more scope for young people’s feelings while still retaining control. Permitting young men and women to associate more freely—at working bees among laborers, and at evening parties, dances, and the like among those further up the social ladder—such parents endeavored to monitor and limit the circle of potential partners to those who met their approval.14 Among the better-off, weddings grew both more elaborate and more exclusive. Merchants and townspeople of means held dances or balls as part of the wedding celebration, issuing invitations and limiting their guests to kin and close friends. The brides now often wore white, rather than the ornate, colorful dresses in which their mothers and grandmothers had wed. The white dress that Queen Victoria had worn at her wedding in 1840 was soon embraced by the British upper classes and then spread to the rest of Europe and Russia, where it appears to have trickled down. By the early twentieth century, some peasants had adopted it, too—note not only the bride’s white dress, but also the crown of flowers in her hair, replacing the traditional bridal crown.  Whatever the garb of the bride, further down the social ladder most people continued to celebrate in the old ways, and not very differently

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from their peasant forebears, except that in urban areas the church ceremony had come to play a more central role. Encompassing the broader community as well as kin and friends, their festivities often still included the showing of the bridal shirt. The famous singer Feodor Chaliapin, who attended such a wedding in the city of Kazan toward the end of the nineteenth century, left a vivid account. Late at night, the newlyweds were put to bed in a garret, while Chaliapin and his friends bedded down in a hayloft. In the morning, wild cries and a terrible din awakened them. The source, Chaliapin discovered, was half-clothed women, dancing about and raising a racket in the courtyard, while brandishing a white rag, speckled with blood. The smiling newlyweds observed the proceedings from their balcony.15

A Case Study Set in a well-to-do and cultivated, but in other respects traditional, household, the story of the arrangement of one marriage offers an unusually sustained look at how two young people in the late nineteenth century negotiated the tensions between romantic ideals and new courtship opportunities on the one hand, and parental authority and pragmatic considerations on the other. As related in the diary of Serafima Rakhmanova (born 1871), the story demonstrates not only how the language of “romance” might shape young people’s expectations but also, importantly, the limits to their volition, including limits that were self-imposed. Serafima, the author of the diary, was one of twelve children of the Moscow  merchant Feodor Semyonovich Rakhmanov, an hereditary honorary citizen, a wealthy trader in grain, and an important figure in the branch of Old Belief identified with the Rogozhskii cemetery. She appears to have been a thoroughly unexceptional young woman in almost every respect. Like all but a few of her peers, she aspired neither to advanced education nor to activity outside the home. Her parents, evidently enlightened people— her mother, for one, loved to read—nevertheless adhered to the Old Belief, usually viewed as more conservative in its family practices than Russian Orthodoxy. Still, the parents allowed Serafima considerable freedom, and she appears to have savored it. Soon after she began keeping the diary, sometime in the 1890s (the year is not provided), at one of the dances that enabled young people to meet and court she “fell in love” with Lev Ovsiannikov, the son of a merchant. The two were permitted to spend time alone together at her home, where Lev declared his romantic feelings and she responded in kind. The two even discussed their expectations of marriage—his, to “live with one’s beloved”; hers, “to bring the beloved happiness.”16 Even so, Serafima knew her limits and was prepared to take no risks on behalf of her feelings. When Lev left on a trip, the young couple agreed to

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refrain from corresponding, “from the fear that a letter would fall into the hands of the authorities [vlast’ imushchikh],” that is, her parents. And when practical obstacles arose, Serafima abandoned the field. Learning that Lev’s father, a merchant who had fallen on hard times, was trying to arrange his marriage into an enormously wealthy merchant family, she resolved to renounce him and encouraged him to redirect his attentions where his parents wished. “I looked at the matter from the practical point of view,” she confided to her diary. As for herself, while continuing to love Lev, she was prepared to “await a suitor with substantial means.”17 Her father soon presented her with another suitor, a man whom she had never met. In agreeing to meet him, she “passively fulfilled papa’s will,” as she put it. This was to be no old-fashioned “showing” [smotrenie] of the bride, however. The first and last encounter between the two took place at the Tretiakov art gallery. The suitor, awkward and shy, proved unable to conduct a conversation about art or any other subject in which his potential bride tried to engage him. “He’s no match for me,” Serafima boldly informed her father, who reluctantly acceded.18 Yet another suitor emerged, Ivan Vasilievich Shibaev, the son of a second guild merchant who, like Serafima’s father, figured prominently in Old Believer affairs. Another first encounter was arranged at an appropriately elevated setting, this time the Rumiantsev museum. Far more socially adept than the previous suitor, Ivan passed muster: he was tall, well-built and self-confident, and dressed in a black suit that became him. His face “breathed satisfaction with life while his gray eyes gazed affectionately” upon her, Serafima confided to her diary, although it is difficult for this reader to imagine how he could feel genuine affection for a young woman he was meeting for the first time. “I decided there would be no reason to be ashamed of such a husband,” she concluded.19 He knew how to conduct himself in society; he had travelled abroad. The match was on. Informing her mother that she liked Ivan, she also assured herself that she would have to marry somebody one day, such was “the force of circumstances.” The bargaining began. She would bring a dowry of 30,000 rubles and a trousseau, including furs, clothing, linens, furniture, and jewelry worth another 20,000. Only after the agreement had been finalized did Ivan actually propose, again at the Rumiantsev museum amidst discussions of art and theater: “Allow me to ask for your hand,” he said. “Perhaps you’re marrying because your parents want you to?” Serafima inquired. “I assure you, Serafima Feodorovna, that in our time such things never happen,” Ivan responded. (Alas, not true, at least in some cases). She accepted his proposal; he kissed her hand. Feeling “more happy than sad,” she made preparations for the wedding, which took place within a matter of weeks.20 Serafima’s marriage to Ivan was not a love match; but nor was it forced on her. An arranged marriage, it was very much a product of its time. Clearly very fond of their daughter, Serafima’s parents respected her

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feelings, if sometimes reluctantly. Herself no fool, Serafima knew perfectly well that her only real choice was among the suitors that they presented her. Her diary breaks off at the wedding, but photographs that accompany its publication suggest that the marriage was not an unhappy one—although, as I recently discovered to my surprise, at some unidentified point and for unidentified reasons, Serafima and Ivan divorced and she married another man, like Ivan an adherent of the Rogozhskii branch of Old Belief.21 Still, arranged marriages often succeed, especially when, as in Serafima’s case, the partners have some say in the matter. Countless couples whose marriages were arranged by others no doubt came to care for one another deeply, if not to love romantically, united by their efforts to sustain their household and raise their children, and by the years they spent together.

The Cult of Domesticity If the idea of the “love marriage,” however imperfectly realized in practice, appealed to a fairly broad audience, other dimensions of the new conjugal ideals surely spoke to far fewer people, but speak they did. Those ideals were reflected in a flood of prescriptive literature designed to instruct people who aspired to a higher status than the one into which they were born. Propounding new roles for wives that reflected the cult of domesticity then circulating in Europe and the United States, such literature also offered a more egalitarian conception of marriage than that inscribed in Russian law. Such literature brought “the angel in the home” to Russia. Advising wives of some means about their long-standing responsibilities—supervising the servant or servants, feeding and clothing themselves, their husband, and the children, obtaining and caring for household accoutrements, bearing and raising children—this literature also added a new one. Now a wife was also to fulfill a higher calling: to ensure that the home served as a refuge and retreat for the hard-working husband. The wife was the “soul” of the home, as one such advice book put it, establishing the special atmosphere that prevailed—the “miraculous calm that enables a man to call his home, his castle.” A wife’s duty was to sustain her husband’s “energy, spirits and fortitude,” to make the home “a place of joy, where he might find rest and relief.”22 Elevating the role of a wife to angelic heights, such literature also honed the rough edges of patriarchy. “Mutual relations between the sexes should always be distinguished by joy, indulgence, deep attachment and boundless respect,” advised Marital Satisfactions. A woman should defend her “rights” in marriage and make her husband regard her as a “friend and helper” in all facets of life, wrote V. Silov from an avowedly Christian standpoint. Such literature encouraged husbands to respect their wives and honor the women’s feelings, to exercise self-command, and avoid “despotism” in domestic relations, even, in some cases, to regard their wives as partners, rather

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FIGURE 5.2  “Do you and your husband get along well?” “Really well, I think. Others knock each other about every day, while we do that maybe three times a week, no more.” Strekoza, no. 21 (1895), M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library. © Public domain.

than as subordinates.23 Such literature made loving and respectful relations between the sexes one of the markers of the new gentility, distinguishing such people from those beneath them on the social ladder.  At the same time, and despite the enhanced cultural significance of domesticity and its accompanying ideology of separate spheres, married women who worked outside the home did not lose their claim to genteel status, as they seem to have done in much of Europe and the United States. It is true that many members of Russia’s “middling” classes arranged their domestic lives in ways that appear to conform to domestic precepts—that is, husbands went out to work while wives remained at home, dependent on their husband’s economic support. Nevertheless, among a substantial

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minority of married couples who certainly qualify as “middle class,” wives continued to engage in remunerative labor after marriage as before it.24 Such women earned their livelihood as teachers, physicians, midwives, pharmacists, and journalists, among a range of other occupations, surely with their husband’s permission as marital law required. Married women had come to constitute such a substantial proportion of women teachers in St. Petersburg that in 1897 the St. Petersburg commission on education barred them from the classroom.25 Of the 936 women engaged in pedagogical activity in Moscow in 1902, some 14 percent were married, as were well over a third of the 4747 women providing various medical services in that city.26 Married women constituted roughly 40 percent of the more than 700 female physicians practicing medicine in Russia in the early twentieth century.27 The spread of higher education for women, plus the continuing salience of the ideas of the 1860s—sometimes with a radical inflection—surely contributed to the relative commonality of married women’s employment. We can see such a combination in the marriage of the engineer Peter Palchinsky (b. 1875) and his wife, Nina. The child of divorced parents—still a rarity in tsarist Russia—Peter was raised by his socially prominent but not particularly wealthy mother, and graduated with honors from the Mining Institute in St. Petersburg in 1900. He frequently fell afoul of the authorities thanks to his radical political views, and endured imprisonment five or six times. After their marriage in 1899, his wife Nina continued to work outside the home. Teaching in special schools for workers, she not only helped her students gain literacy, but also instilled in them radical ideas. She had nothing good to say about the new domesticity. “What a purely bourgeois life they lead!” she wrote to her husband, disparaging a couple of their acquaintance. “When I read your letter about them, I felt simply suffocated, just as if my head was in a bag. How far their life is from the path upon which we are travelling, and, especially the one on which you are now going, leading toward anarchism. Our life is that of the broad world, all of humanity, and theirs is a narrow family life with petty-bourgeois interests.”28

Peasants and Proletarians Old Patterns, New Practices Scattered across the vast expanse of the Russian countryside, peasants—still the overwhelming majority of the population, some 80 to 85 percent—were also touched by economic, cultural, and other changes. The most easily measurable is in the age of marriage. The military reforms of 1874 reduced the period of active military service to six years, encouraging fathers to wait a little longer before marrying off a son. Thereafter, men’s average age of marriage rose by a couple of years; women’s by a little less.29

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FIGURE 5.3  “Don’t scold me, my dear” Lubok. From Russkii lubok XVII-XIX vv. (Moscow-Leningrad: IZOGIZ, 1962). © 19th century, public domain.

The rise in the age of marriage may in turn have facilitated other trends. Peasant-class court cases from the late 1860s and early 1870s already demonstrate parents heeding the wishes of their children, of their daughters in particular—if not to choose a spouse then at least to refuse one. They offer numerous examples of young women who rejected a prospective groom once they had gotten to know more about him and/ or his household, and of parents who acceded to the daughters’ wishes and declined the match even when those parents had to repay the costs incurred by the prospective grooms’ side in the preliminary rituals. In factory regions, young women occasionally did their own refusing.30 As the age of marriage rose after 1874, some young people began claiming a more active role in the choice of a partner, perhaps emboldened by cultural currents emanating from towns and cities—cruel romances in the earlier period, chastushki in the later one.  Chastushki were spontaneous, rhymed couplets that became immensely popular in towns and villages in the closing decades of the century. Attentive to individual feeling and impatient of the constraints that others imposed, the new songs depicted unmarried people who insisted on their right to choose rather than unhappily married people bemoaning their fate. Writes folklorist Robert Rothstein: “They spread subversive ideas like greater sexual equality, more independence for youth, or even the mistreatment of workers.” He compares their impact to that of sentimentalism and romanticism.31 Economic development also affected peasant life, although the extent varied a lot according to locale. Those living in the central and northern provinces, where agriculture had long been insufficient to support household

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needs, felt the impact most. There, the number of households engaged in domestic manufacturing increased massively, facilitated by improvements in transport and the rising demand for consumer goods. In their cabins or in small workshops, peasants produced an enormous variety of goods for sale. Some worked independently, others under contract with a middleman; still others completed one stage of a production process for a neighboring factory. For such people, perhaps even more than for peasants who continued to depend entirely on the land, the division between “work” and “home” held no meaning. Domestic production had no visible impact on the absolute authority wielded by the bol’shak over everyone else or the customary divisions of household labor; it only expanded the time women spent at work.32 The authority of the bol’shak also remained largely as before in households whose members found work at factories located nearby. Outside of major cities, many industrial workers actually lived a semi-rural existence. They labored in factory towns in the Central Industrial Region and in Siberia. In the Urals, workers could trace their roots back generations to a time when their ancestors were serfs. Especially if the workers were local, their households— often enough multigenerational households—lived quasi-peasant lives. They resided in wooden cabins, grew food as the seasons allowed, and kept domestic animals to supplement the earnings of their “breadwinner(s).”33 The enormous expansion of wage-earning opportunities away from home might prove more disruptive. It is true that peasants, especially from the central and northern regions, had long headed elsewhere to supplement household income. But the number of them doing so had grown massively by the century’s end. In the 1890s over six million peasants left their assigned place of residence every year to seek work elsewhere; by the early twentieth, peasant migrants numbered over seven and a half million. In the course of a year as many as a quarter, and in Moscow province, over a third, of villagers obtained the internal passport enabling them to leave their village.34 Initially, most migrants were male; however, the proportion of women grew steadily, if slowly, over time.35 Ordinarily, the men at least departed as part of a household economy—that is, with the goal of earning enough money to supplement their household’s income. At some point, they planned to return home, often rather soon. The turnover among migrant peasants was enormous—most stayed away from home for less than five years.36 In addition to the difficulty of finding wellpaying work, legal as well as emotional bonds—marriage among them— continued to attach migrants to their village household. Judging, at least, by the hundreds of thousands who headed to St. Petersburg and Moscow, by the late nineteenth century substantial numbers of men who migrated were married. Most did not live with their wives, however; instead, the women remained behind in the village. A village wife provided her migrant husband with a form of insurance, a home to which he could return in old age or during illness, or in times of unemployment. Moreover, if the couple belonged to a complex household, the bol’shak often

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insisted that the wife remain there, replacing the labor of her absent husband with her own. So might the husband if he himself were the household head: “I own my own house, have an allotment . . . two cows, a horse, sheep and other domestic animals and my farm is fully equipped,” complained a factory worker living full-time in Moscow in 1911. His wife had taken off for the city and he insisted she return home to help his mother with the farm work.37 Thus, for the most part, outmigration still resulted in a bifurcated household—with some members living and working elsewhere, and the remainder staying put. A migrant’s experience elsewhere and the infusion of cash in his household, nevertheless, brought changes, more marked now than in the earlier period because more people were going off to earn income, some of them bringing city ways back home with them. The trend was toward greater individualism, notable in matters of consumption. It became important for young people, at least, to be fashionable (modno) in villages with significant levels of outmigration, for example. Instead of wearing clothing made from homespun fabrics and the shoes that peasants wove from birchbark, marriageable women dressed in colorful wool or silk dresses and shoes manufactured elsewhere, at least on special occasions, while the men donned the pidzhak (pea jacket) and boots. In some areas, the dowry had come to include such items as silk dresses, even a fur. The expense of providing it mushroomed. Other consumption practices also changed. Peasants might rebuild or expand their homes, add windows, sleep on beds instead of benches; cover themselves with blankets rather than their own clothing; use pillows, featherbeds, even sheets and pillowcases.38 They might plane their log walls and decorate them with illustrations from popular magazines; cover their table with a cloth and sit on chairs rather than benches even as they continued to eat from a common pot. Only a minority of peasants enjoyed the new, if modest prosperity, it must be said. Poverty remained endemic in the countryside and when famine struck—as it did in 1891/2 and would do again a decade later—hundreds of thousands of peasants lost their lives. And modest prosperity might come at an emotional cost. When husbands found comparatively steady work elsewhere—in industry, in the construction trades, in sales, or in a range of other occupations and stayed away for years—it sometimes took a toll on the marriage. Wives might visit from time to time, and the husbands return temporarily to the village during holidays or slow seasons, but mostly, the couple led very different lives. While working elsewhere, the men enjoyed virtually no contact with women except as sexual conquests—an urban version of the womanizing that served as a marker of a bachelor’s masculinity in the village. Inhabiting a “largely homosocial world” at work, migrants also spent their leisure hours with other men, drinking heavily in taverns and bars.39 All this put a marriage under strain. “There was no intimacy” between his peasant mother and his migrant father, remembered the son of a worker

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at the Guzhon factory in Moscow. In the absence of a husband, her primary protector, a young wife became more vulnerable to abuse by her in-laws, including sexual abuse. For instance, while her husband was off working elsewhere, her father-in-law began to make sexual advances, Anna Prushina complained, and when she resisted, started treating her “coarsely” and, finally, withheld food. Infidelity, while still harshly condemned by peasants, became more common in villages where rates of migration were high. Some wives strayed.40 More often, their migrant husbands did. Rates of illegitimacy—tiny in villages, far higher in towns and cities, and one fourth of live births in turnof-the-century Moscow and St. Petersburg—serve as one indication. Some out-of-wedlock births were the product of casual affairs, but others of stable but unregistered unions. Such unions offered a “common means of coping with long separations of husbands and wife,” in the words of Joseph Bradley. Contemporaries who wrote about peasant life in this period observed the prevalence of such unions, too. The sheer frequency of unregistered unions would become an issue during World War I, when the state began providing support to soldiers’ wives, only to learn that over 10 percent of rank-andfile soldiers were in unregistered unions, many unable to wed their current “wives” because they were already married to someone else.41

The Urban Household Economy: The Laboring Classes Still, and the pull of the village notwithstanding, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the number of working-class families slowly but steadily increased, at least in Moscow and St. Petersburg, offering evidence of a “gradual trend towards an urban based family life.”42 The trend occurred despite living conditions that continued to be inhospitable—indeed, if anything, they had grown still less hospitable as the migrant population exploded, housing failed to keep pace, and rents skyrocketed. Some migrant men found brides among the growing number of female newcomers, while others—surely the majority—brought their wives from the village to join them. In 1900, roughly 44 percent of female migrants to St. Petersburg were married, for example; by 1910, wives comprised almost half of them. Some contemporaries interpreted the growing minority of working-class couples as a mark of “proletarianization,” that is, evidence that workers had set down roots where they worked and would not return to their village.43 Still, the working-class household, as such, remained very much a minority phenomenon, at least until 1905 and perhaps after. Just because a couple inhabited the same city did not mean that they shared a roof. The census of 1897—the only one to provide this kind of information—reported that in the city of Moscow a miniscule 3.7 percent of male workers were heads of households residing with their families. Working-class family life was

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only marginally more common in St. Petersburg, where 5.2 percent of male workers lived as heads of their households.44 This was despite the growing numbers of wives who resided in the same city as their migrant husbands. Some couples lived separately by choice to be sure. However, the force of circumstances—economic circumstances, above all—surely separated most working-class couples.45 Most importantly, few laboring men earned enough to support a family, with the result that the economic contribution of wives became, if anything, more vital than it was in the village. As the physician Natan Vigdorchik observed in 1914, “Marriage in the workers’ milieu not only fails to free a woman from the need to seek wages; it is one of the factors that impels her towards wage-earning.”46 However, many of the wage-earning opportunities available to women raised formidable obstacles to cohabitation. Domestic service, for example, made couples’ cohabitation virtually impossible, because servants almost invariably lived with their employer. Yet, in-turnof-the-century Moscow, at least, close to 30 percent of domestic servants were married.47 Moreover, industries that employed men were often located at opposite ends of the city from those hiring women, while urban transport was primitive and expensive. Then there was the dearth of housing. People employed in workshops often continued to live where they worked. In Moscow, many factory workers still resided in company housing. Some of it lacked family quarters entirely; where family housing existed, it was often limited and available only if both parties worked in the same factory and then, only after a wait. Until then, the wife would sleep in the women’s quarters, her husband in the men’s, and their “conjugal life” would consist of the occasional stolen night together beneath a cot in one of their dormitories, with a curtain drawn to establish a bit of privacy. A wife’s pregnancy might hasten things, as one woman discovered. She and her husband, a carpenter, had “taken their pleasure” on the shavings beneath his workbench in a Moscow factory before she became pregnant, and management at last allocated the couple a room.48 Pregnancy and the birth of children almost inevitably complicated the character of women’s economic contributions to the household budget. In Russia’s factories, maternity leave was almost nonexistent until 1912 and opportunities for mothers to nurse remained rare even after. Workdays might be as long as sixteen to eighteen hours before 1897, when factory legislation reduced them to eleven and a half hours, a rule that was often observed in the breach. And factory legislation did not apply to the heavily feminized trades of domestic service and tailoring.49 Couples sometimes sent their offspring to be cared for in the village at least for the first few years, ensuring better care than they were likely to receive from their mother if she remained employed full-time. Otherwise, infants and small children were left in the hands of elderly women, landladies, neighbors, older sisters or “nurses” scarcely older

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than themselves. Compounded by poverty and the miserable conditions in which most laboring-class people dwelled, these circumstances contributed to infant mortality rates in the major cities that were even higher than in peasant villages: in 1909, 300 of every thousand infants died before the age of one in Moscow; 250 of every thousand in St. Petersburg—rates twice as high as in many major European cities. In the households of laborers, just as in the village, children who survived were put to work as soon as possible.50 All this meant that if a couple could manage it, it made sense for the wife either to leave the full-time labor force after the birth of children or to remain technically unemployed after she arrived in the city. Ensuring cohabitation, this did not mean that the wife became completely dependent economically. Instead, she continued to contribute to the household economy, but in ways that eluded the census takers (and I suspect, the people who maintained the house administration books that recorded the occupation of apartment dwellers). The Onufriev family illustrates how this might work. In 1885, Pyotr Onufriev brought his wife, Olga, and their four children from the village to live in one room of a five-room apartment, a five-minute walk away from the Baltic Shipyards in St. Petersburg, where Onufriev was employed as a metalworker. Technically “dependent,” Olga Onufrieva hired out by the day, doing laundry and washing floors for wealthy families to supplement her husband’s wages, insufficient to support such a large family.51 The most common source of supplemental income was taking in boarders. A married couple would rent an apartment, then occupy one of the rooms or a corner of one of the rooms themselves while subletting the rest by the room, by the corner, or even by the bed to single workers or to other families. In return for the rent the family received from boarders, the landlady (khoziaika) assumed a substantial workload. She looked after the entire apartment, fetched the wood to heat it, brought in water, kept the kitchen in order, and heated the cook stove. For extra income, she might cook and clean for her boarders, too—and if her family needed additional income, she might take in sewing and washing or hire out to wash floors as well.52 We know about this only indirectly; neither census takers nor political activists at that time or later seem to have recognized such labor as “work.” Even when urban working-class families managed to occupy the same quarters, their family life almost never proceeded in a privileged, private space. Although the revolution of 1905 improved working-class wages and the living standards of an elite of workers, after 1905 as before, most couples shared their quarters with others, with rarely even a room to themselves. “You can’t even spit without everyone noticing it,” as one laboring-class woman put it. “All of life, down to its most intimate details,” took place before everyone’s eyes, remembered another.53 Cohabiting with their wives, nevertheless, improved laboring men’s lives in multiple ways. All observers agreed that by comparison with single workers, family men lived well. Family quarters were relatively clean and neat, even when the wife held a full-time job like her husband. “In the

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apartments of families, you can see aspirations to comfort. You come across pictures, mirrors, soft furniture, decent beds and blankets.”54 Why should a man have to leave a wife behind in the village or earn wages insufficient to support her and the children where he lived, some male workers began to wonder. Why were the men unable to enjoy a “normal” family life?

The Crisis Erupts? The Revolution of 1905 The question likely grew more pointed during and after the upheavals of 1905. Oppositional politics in Russia often had a personal dimension—a whiff or more of individual rebellion against ascribed authority in the name of a person’s right to dispose of herself or himself as she or he chose. That personal element was present in the radical politics of factory workers, as it was in the politics of the radical intelligentsia, who sometimes served as models for “conscious” workers. Long before he became involved in politics, for instance, the metalworker Semyon Kanatchikov, born and raised in a peasant village, had longed to “become independent and proud, to live in accordance with my own wishes and not by the caprice and will of my father,” or so he remembered later.55 Urban mass entertainments likely encouraged that tendency. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, pulp fiction, and music halls and pleasure gardens among other venues, celebrated romantic love, sexual freedom, and individual choice to a degree that was historically unprecedented. With cash in his pocket and the bol’shak far away, a peasant migrant—especially a migrant with a steady job—was in a better position to avoid the universal and early marriage requisite in peasant communities, as well as the requirement that he place the needs of the peasant household before his own. Some men— Semyon Kanatchikov among them—resisted efforts to marry them off to a village woman. In St. Petersburg if not in Moscow, men also postponed their marriages until a later age, which was harder to do in the village. And a sizeable minority—Kanatchikov again!—eschewed marriage altogether, almost impossible in village life. Some chose, instead, to commit themselves fully to the fraternity of brothers and the socialist revolution that would end patriarchy, as well as capitalism and autocracy, for good.56 As their sense of personal dignity and/or entitlement grew, married laboring men aspired to a more “normal” family life—that is, to cohabit with their wives and enjoy the benefits and services that customarily accompanied marriage and cohabitation. The husband of A. Komissarova, for one, insisted she live in the city and not the village because he needed someone to clean and do the wash for him. The loss of his wife’s household services prompted one fitter at a Moscow factory to lodge a complaint with peasant authorities in 1890. They had permitted his wife to live apart from him. He wanted her back. Due to her absence, he complained, he had suffered “various inconveniences, like having to spend too much on an apartment, on grub, and the like.” “I didn’t

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marry for the village, but for myself,” as one factory worker put it baldly, confronting his father over whether the son’s bride would stay in the village, as the father wished, or accompany the son to Moscow.57 Increasingly, workers either brought their wives to the city or chose their brides there. In some cases at least, such marriages represented a kind of declaration of independence from the village, weakening or severing village ties. The revolutionary upheavals of 1905 appear to have encouraged an unusual number of workers to risk such a serious step, in St. Petersburg at least—the mecca for “conscious” workers. There, as workers organized and acted to improve their circumstances, expand their rights at the workplace, and gain a political voice, they also wed in considerably greater numbers than in the previous years, judging by the rates of marriage in working-class districts. Marriage rates had averaged about 73 per 1000 inhabitants since the turn of the century in the second quarter of Vasilievskii Island, for example, where workers of both sexes constituted the majority of inhabitants, but in 1905, the number of marriages rose to 111 per 1000. In the third quarter of Vasilievskii Island and the first and second quarters of Vyborg, the increase was more modest but still considerable.58 The change was all the more noteworthy because everywhere else in Russia, both in rural areas and in towns and cities, the number of marriages declined significantly in 1905, whether because men were off fighting in the Russo-Japanese war, or because revolutionary unrest introduced too much uncertainty for so costly a matter as a wedding.59 Commencing in 1906, the Stolypin reforms also contributed to an increase in urban working-class households. On the one hand, the reforms made it easier for those worker peasants who wished to sever their ties to the village to do so, bringing wives and children to the city where they worked, or marrying there. On the other, by raising new obstacles for migrants to claim land, the reforms left many more migrants with no choice but to sever rural ties.60 The reforms are surely one of the reasons for the increased proportion of married women among migrants in St. Petersburg by 1910. Surviving house administration books from the post 1905 period suggest that substantial numbers of those couples were cohabiting. Most of the wives are registered as “dependent on their husband’s wages,” although many of them no doubt engaged in part-time (and therefore, unrecorded) labor, or would do so once they found their footing in the city.61 The prevalence of such (quasi) wifely dependence is not surprising. The evidence strongly suggests that urban worker husbands preferred that their wives remain out of the full-time, waged labor force, even if that meant sacrificing women’s full-time wages. This was true even before the revolution of 1905: the better paid the worker, the more likely his wife to depend upon him for economic support.62 After 1905, such aspirations seem to have intensified. As a report to the metalworkers union put it in 1909: “To the extent that the worker develops and becomes independent of his father’s family, his demands increase, especially if he settles down as a married man.” The more developed the worker, declared the report, the more likely he was

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to feel entitled to “the protection of his family hearth and the possibility of providing for the normal development and care of his children.” What this entailed was a “family wage”—that is, earnings sufficient to support a wife and children. Long a popular worker demand elsewhere in Europe, the concept of the family wage was relatively new to Russia and appears to have come into being during the upheavals of 1905.63 The “family wage” represented a significant modification of the gender division of labor in the village, including villages near rural factories, where so long as they remained close to home, women were able to engage in remunerative labor and at the same time, attend to their households and rear children, usually with the help of female family members. In a major urban setting, the extraordinary difficulty of combining full-time wageearning with running even a tiny household, let alone caring for a child or children, often led migrants to make a different choice if they could. As would become clear after 1917, however, while providing for “the normal care and development of . . . children” was very much a Bolshevik priority, male workers’ quest for a family wage—and still more, their desire to keep their wives at home to preserve the domestic hearth—was an aspiration that the party declined to embrace.

The Politics of Personal Life Marriages Under Strain In 1894, the townswoman Olga Ankudinova appealed to state authorities seeking freedom from her husband, Vasilii, a furniture maker and joiner employed by a factory in Perm province. Raised in the city of Kazan, Olga had wed Vasilii in 1886 at the age of sixteen. Then the couple took up life near his factory, where Olga found work as a domestic servant. All too soon Vasilii began to abuse Olga, beating her when she refused to transfer to him some of her wages. For a while, she tolerated the mistreatment, just as did many other working-class wives, for whom abuse was virtually routine, especially when the husband had been drinking. A “good and quiet woman,” in the words of the Ankudinovs’ neighbor and landlady, Olga “patiently bore her husband’s blows and tried to please him.” Then, four years after the wedding and the birth of a child, the couple having separated and reunited at least once, Olga left him again, this time, she hoped, for good. In a letter of 1893, she pleaded with Vasilii to grant her the internal passport she required to live on her own. Right now, I’m not willing to live with you when you treat me as you did and now, no doubt, it will be worse. Earlier, you felt no jealousy, but now you will undoubtedly be jealous. Then you made my every step and

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movement unpleasant. Then I had a quiet and subdued character and now I’ve become completely desperate (otchaianaia), so that I think if we live together something bad will happen. Vasia, I beg you to grant me a passport, the kind you gave me before. “You don’t love me,” she wrote, adding as did other wives long separated from husbands: “I’ve grown completely out of the habit of you (otvykla).”64 Ankudinova’s appeal, one of tens of thousands addressed to state officials by women from across the social spectrum, was a sign of the changing times. Even if contemporary observers had a propensity to exaggerate the extent, there can be no question that in the final decades of the nineteenth century marital breakdown grew far more common as well as more visible, and at every level of Russian society. The causes were myriad. The new consumer culture and the growing emphasis on the individual and individual satisfaction left people less willing to subordinate their own desires to those of others. The increase in individual mobility made it easier to leave an unsatisfactory relationship, while the expansion of employment opportunities, which fostered greater economic independence among men and women alike, enabled growing numbers of unhappily married women to survive without a husband, especially if they were childless or had only a child or two. The evidence of breakdown was everywhere. It can be seen in the deluge of petitions from wives such as Ankudinova, seeking the separate internal passport that would enable them to live and work away from their husband’s ascribed place of residence—and also, from husbands demanding the return of runaway wives. Such appeals inundated peasant authorities, townsmen’s authorities, and officials of the Imperial Chancellery for Receipt of Petitions, which in 1881 replaced the Third Section as a kind of court of last appeal. Breakdown was evident, too, in the steadily rising incidence of divorce in urban areas at least, most on the grounds of adultery: in 1880, the Holy Synod approved a mere forty divorces in the cities of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev combined; 73 were approved in 1890; 111 in 1900; and 663 in 1909. Successful divorces were invariably a mere fraction of the total applications. (In Synod archives, I counted over 200 divorce appeals on the grounds of adultery for just the first five months of 1899. Almost half derived from women.)65 As the rising number of divorces indicates, the Russian Orthodox Church began to ease, slightly, its rigid strictures in response to pressures from below. In addition, in 1904, for the first time church courts allowed the “guilty” party in a divorce on the grounds of adultery to remarry. Nevertheless, divorce remained a difficult, expensive, and, all too often, humiliating process, accessible only to a very few. And even after 1904, the “guilty” party would almost certainly lose custody of the children. It is impossible to know how many couples remained in unhappy marriages, deterred by this grim prospect.66

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The Legal Response The rising pressures from below encouraged liberal elites, jurists in particular, to push harder for legal change. They sought to expand women’s legal rights in marriage, both as a worthy goal in itself and because it served their larger political purposes. Although they nourished little hope of ending the clerical monopoly on divorce, if they could extend the rule of law to bring marital separation before civil courts, it would enable them to limit the arbitrary authority of the tsar as well as expand the realm in which they could apply their own professional expertise. Jurists’ growing activism is reflected in the behavior of the Civil Cassation Department of the State Senate. Starting in 1888, the Senate delivered a series of decisions that facilitated marital separation. They made it easier for abused and neglected peasant wives and, subsequently, townswomen to obtain a separate passport from local authorities; and they enhanced the ability of separated wives at all social levels to obtain child custody, child support, and alimony. When, in 1914, the law governing internal passports was revised to enable married women to obtain their own passport on request, these decisions became applicable. If separated—although not if cohabiting—a wife might then take a job or enroll in school without requiring her husband’s permission; she might also bring suit in court for child custody, child support, and alimony.67 Nevertheless, jurists never succeeded in revising family law or bringing divorce before secular courts. The church retained its control over both, thanks to the support of conservatives and the tsar himself. As a result, meaningful as the changes mentioned before were, both the letter of patriarchal family law and clerical control of marriage and divorce persisted until the very end. However much views of marriage and family life might have changed among sectors of the population, marital law continued to require “unconditional obedience” of wives to husbands and children to parents. Conservatives, too, regarded the law from a political perspective, albeit one diametrically opposed to that of liberals. In the conservative view, by fostering discipline and respect for authority, the patriarchal family would provide a bulwark against the forces of change threatening to engulf Russia’s ruling elites. Only in 1917 and thereafter, when the law had manifestly failed to fulfill this purpose, would patriarchal marital and family law finally change.

Conclusion Developments that began during the reform era accelerated after 1881, with disruptive consequences. The state intensified its pursuit of industrialization and economic modernization. Affecting an ever-larger public, new cultural currents fostered greater individualism and concern for the self, while

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elevating the significance of personal and domestic life, and celebrating romantic love as never before. Social mobility expanded across the social spectrum. Peasant migrants—a growing minority of them women— inundated towns and cities, where their experiences sometimes transformed their ways of being and strained relations with their village household. All these developments contributed to an upsurge of appeals for divorce and relief from marital breakdown, while bringing new dimensions to social discontent. While certainly not a direct cause, they added fuel to the explosive mix that eventually erupted in the crisis of Russia’s Old Regime.

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6 War, Revolution, and Postrevolutionary Change

The upheavals that commenced with Russia’s entry into the world’s first “total war” continued unabated for almost eight years. Their repercussions lasted even longer. The war brought catastrophic human loss and hardship, and profoundly unsettled domestic as well as public life. It contributed to the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in February 1917, and its continuation helped the Bolsheviks to seize power eight months later. Their coup brought further destabilization, as well as far-reaching attempts to mold a new kind of human being by recasting—indeed, some might argue, by eliminating— the boundary between public and private and transforming the relations between the sexes and the generations. These attempts unfolded amidst the most unpropitious conditions. The Civil War years brought millions more deaths, mostly of men. Households collapsed; cities emptied out. Millions of homeless children roamed the streets, orphaned or abandoned by parents. Such circumstances raised nearinsuperable obstacles to efforts to transform the family and liberate women. Facing widespread devastation, the leadership temporarily retreated on the economic front, while maintaining its utopian visions. Among them was a future in which family relations would be reconfigured or cease to matter and the domestic sphere as such disappear as society assumed its functions. This future failed to come about, however. At least in the short term, campaigns promoting the new way of life (byt) succeeded mainly in devaluing the home and the labor associated with it.

The War at Home In Russia as elsewhere in Europe, World War I transformed the households of countless ordinary people by removing able-bodied men, sometimes temporarily, all too often for good. In Russia, the demographic consequences

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were significant and enduring. Close to a million and a half men were already under arms when war broke out; an additional five million were called up by the end of 1914; over fifteen million by the war’s end. Peasants suffered the most. By 1917, conscription had absorbed from 36 to 45 percent of all able-bodied village men, leaving a significant minority of households—40 percent in Viatka province, by no means the hardest hit—without a male worker. For lack of men, marriage rates dropped—by over a third in Viatka province, less dramatically elsewhere. Birth rates dropped, too—by roughly 40 percent between 1914 and 1917.1 War thus profoundly disrupted the cycle of life on which peasant households depended. Adapting as best they could, many households struggled and some went under. Soldiers’ wives, once a minority of village women, became numerous if not the majority. Of necessity, women added men’s farm work to their own. In households formerly headed by the soldierhusband, his wife either took his place or, faced with the immense difficulty of farming without an able-bodied male, abandoned the village and sought work elsewhere. Other wives gave up their independence and rejoined their in-laws’ household, readjusting to the subordinate position of daughter-inlaw. The resulting tensions occasionally exploded in violence. Returning soldiers generated strains of their own. Empowered by their experiences, they challenged the authority of elders.2 High casualty rates compounded peasant hardship. Some two million soldiers were killed in battle, or died of their wounds or in captivity. Their deaths greatly increased the number of orphans, defined as children having lost one parent, as well as the number of households lacking a son and heir. By adapting long-standing strategies, including the absorption of orphans into existing households, peasants mostly weathered the strains of World War I. But by 1917 many households had almost reached breaking point. Civil War would push them over the edge.3 Life was no easier in urban areas, especially for members of the laboring classes. Mainly as a result of official incompetence, as the war dragged on urban households suffered from the growing scarcity of even such basic goods as bread, the staple of the working-class diet. The price of essential goods rose by 131 percent in Moscow and by more than 150 percent in Petrograd (formerly, St. Petersburg) in the first two years of war. By 1916, supplies had begun to run very low. The burden fell mainly on housewives. In subzero weather, women stood in line for hours in front of shops, only to find pathetic amounts of sugar and flour when they reached the counter. By early 1917, they might find nothing at all. “In Moscow there’s no bread, meat or sunflower oil,” the hydrologist Nikolai Shchapov recorded in his diary on February 2, 1917. “There are no reserves of flour; they bring it by the day and it disappears. . . . . In Moscow, people who have no spare cash starve.” Unable to feed her children, a mother of six had hung herself, or so rumor had it, he reported.4 To the dismay of physicians, more and more desperate urban women resorted to abortion, still illegal.5

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Wartime scarcity exacerbated social and political tensions. Well-to-do households could afford to send someone beside the master or mistress to stand for hours in line whatever the weather; or their members could buy what they wanted on the black market or bribe a shopkeeper to reserve scarce goods for them. People who had to stand in line themselves and whose families bore the brunt of high prices and scarcity, grew angry. They directed their anger not only at the government, which appeared to have failed in its most basic mission—protecting its own people and treating them fairly— but also at those more privileged than themselves. As early as December 1915 the Petrograd police had observed the effect: “All these women, freezing in twenty-degree weather for hours on end in order to receive two pounds of sugar or two to three pounds of flour, understandably seek the person responsible for their woes.” Among those they held responsible were “the ladies who are able to buy goods from the salesman at once, even if the goods cost a hundred rubles, thus contributing to the scarcity of goods.” Subsistence riots, quintessentially “maternal terrain,” peppered the war years. Thanks partly to feminist efforts, they also contributed to the downfall of the tsar.6 The war also enhanced the visibility of soldiers’ wives, their numbers now vastly increased. By removing the men who ordinarily conducted interactions between households and the larger community and officialdom, the war forced wives to stand up for themselves. Soldiers’ wives gained a new sense of entitlement as well, partly because of a 1912 law providing for the payment of a state subsistence allowance (paika) for soldiers’ wives and children and offering a range of other benefits. (If he provided their sole source of support, other members of the soldier’s household were entitled to the paika, too.) Newly entitled, soldiers’ wives turned to the state for redress. As prices rose, scarcity increased, and material hardship intensified, they mobilized to an unprecedented degree and made their voices heard in a variety of forums. They also complained in letters addressed to their husbands, fuelling discontent among troops at the front.7 During the eight months that followed the abdication of the tsar on 2 March, as the political authority of the new, Provisional Government eroded and popular unrest intensified, the economic welfare of the household and the family acquired still greater political significance. “Oh my God! Issues of household economics are creating history before our very eyes,” a middle-class urban housewife wrote in her diary that April.8 Encouraged by the new language of citizenship and equal rights, soldiers’ wives agitated vociferously for increases in their allowances as well as other benefits to offset their extreme material hardships—indeed, soldiers’ wives were among the most likely to turn for assistance to the soviets, those organs of popular democracy.9 Soldiers’ wives, it transpired, included a sizeable minority of women in civil rather than legal marriages, prompting a meaningful change. Whether because their husbands could not afford the cost of a wedding or were

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already married to someone else, the marriages of some 10 percent of soldiers’ wives enjoyed no legal standing. Initially excluded from the benefits of the 1912 law, these women bombarded the various authorities with requests that benefits be extended to them and their offspring. Husbands writing from the front, their officers, and local officials, all supported the women’s pleas. On June 22, such pressures from below led the Provisional Government to extend benefits to soldiers’ common law wives and children, at a soldier’s request and if he had supported them economically before taking up arms. By thus recognizing unions unsanctioned by religious or civil authorities, the Provisional Government set a significant precedent.10

The Bolsheviks Revolutionize the Family The Bolsheviks not only embraced but also vastly expanded this precedent. Their seizure of power in October 1917, brought a radical transformation of family law. In December, they abolished the authority of religious bodies over marriage and, while acknowledging already-existing marriages, offered recognition to new marriages only if registered with civil authorities. Among other changes, the decree eliminated the obstacles to marriage that confronted parties of different faiths in the prerevolutionary years: the requirement that one of the parties convert if the other was Orthodox. Divorce became available at the request of either spouse. Other policies aimed to better the lot of wives and mothers. In October 1918, women engaged in remunerative labor gained paid maternity leave before and after childbirth—eight weeks if they engaged in manual labor; six weeks for everyone else. (The benefit did not extend to peasant women who labored on behalf of their household and earned no wages, or to women agricultural laborers.) Issued that same month, the Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship revolutionized women’s and children’s status in the family, at least on paper, and in many respects offered the most radical vision of family relations the world had ever seen. At the same time, it made allowances for the exigencies of the particular moment, one of transition between the old world and—so it was envisioned—the new. The 1918 code struck at the very heart of the patriarchal family. Eliminating the legal requirement of “unconditional obedience” of wife to husband, it explicitly transformed marriage into a union of equals, and one requiring only the “mutual consent” of both parties. Thus, the new law freed couples who intended to marry from the prerevolutionary requirement that—whatever their age—they obtain permission from parents or if in state service, from superiors. Newlyweds might assume the surname of husband or wife—or both. The code affirmed the long-standing right of wives to control their own property, while abolishing the legal requirement that husbands support them. Like men, able-bodied women would support themselves, or so the expectation went. Only in cases of one spouse’s infirmity was support

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by the other required—and then from husband or wife. If one of the “married persons” changed their residence, declared the law in scrupulously genderneutral language, the other was not obliged to follow, thereby eliminating the previous requirement that wives must live with their husbands.11 The code ended patriarchal power over children, too. It abolished the near-absolute authority that prerevolutionary law bestowed on parents, replacing it with the rather vague “parental rights,” which were to be exercised jointly by mothers and fathers and solely for the benefit of the child. The code did away with the legal disabilities suffered by illegitimate children under tsarist law, even when the children had been born before the code was instituted.12 The law also made it far easier for unmarried mothers to obtain support from a child’s natural father: if he did not or could not contest the claim, the law obliged him to pay. Finally, the law put an end to adoption as potentially leading to the abuse of child labor. Unquestionably, the articles of the code with the most immediate and farreaching consequences were those concerning divorce. From a complicated and expensive procedure overseen by religious bodies, and for the Orthodox especially, offering little likelihood of success to those who sought it, divorce became easily available from civil authorities and at the request of either spouse—with no grounds needed. This was “no fault” divorce almost half a century before it became available elsewhere. Divorced parties might obtain alimony only in cases of infirmity and, again, irrespective of gender. Thousands of people, the overwhelming majority of them urban dwellers, rushed to avail themselves of the new opportunity to end unsatisfactory unions. In Moscow, divorce rates far outstripped rates of civil marriage for years after the code was promulgated.13 Even as it freed individuals from the constraints of patriarchy, the 1918 family code imposed new legal obligations on households and family members. As had the law in prerevolutionary times, the code required children to provide maintenance for needy parents if the parents were unable to support themselves and received no government assistance (Article 163). But in addition, the law obliged “wealthy” family members to support blood relatives who were indigent and unable to work, and lacked a spouse or a child to support them (Articles 172–4). A recognition of the new regime’s utter inability to care for its most vulnerable citizens and also very likely a response to the virtual disappearance of prerevolutionary charitable organizations, the new law formalized obligations—for needy relatives, in particular—that had hitherto been only customary. At least as far-reaching was the 1920 decree legalizing abortion if performed in a medical facility. Roughly half a century would pass before abortion became legal anywhere else. Although the 1920 decree referred to abortion as an “evil,” necessitated by the “moral survivals of the past and difficult economic conditions,” and although pronatalist images and advice circulated in both towns and the countryside in the 1920s and after, abortion very quickly became a commonplace method of birth control for

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FIGURE 6.1  “Abortions performed by a village midwife will not only cripple the woman but often cause her death,” reads the headline. In smaller print, top left: “At the village midwife” Top right: “The consequences of abortion” Bottom “Death from abortion” Far right: “Village midwives who perform abortions commit a crime”. © Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

urban women, although not yet for their peasant sisters. In cities and towns, women, the majority of them married and already mothers, resorted to it frequently. By the late 1920s, abortions had become so numerous in major cities that they considerably outnumbered births.14  

Shaping the Revolution’s Future As they launched their historically unprecedented efforts to transform marital, family, and sexual relations, Bolshevik leaders did not all work from the same blueprint—or for that matter, from any blueprint at all. It is true that they held many views in common. Everyone agreed that the patriarchal family and “bourgeois” marriage would have to go. The devil, however, lay in the details. Take, for example, marriage. In the socialist future, would marriage be an enduring, long-term arrangement, as Vladimir Lenin believed? Or would it disappear, to be replaced by consensual unions that lasted only so long as lovers loved, with children being raised communally? Should women be free to love as they choose, as Alexandra Kollontai proposed? “But when the wave of passion sweeps over her, she does not renounce the brilliant smile of life, she does not hypocritically wrap herself up in a faded cloak of female virtue. No, she holds out her hand to her

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chosen one, and goes away for several weeks to drink from the cup of love’s joy, however deep it is, and to satisfy herself,” Kollontai had earlier rhapsodized. “When the cup is empty, she throws it away without regret or bitterness.” Or did such behavior make sex akin to satisfying one’s thirst by drinking a glass of water already sullied by many lips, as Lenin contended?15 And what would become of domestic life? Everyone concurred that domestic functions would be socialized in the future. The onerous labor of shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundering, even childcare—labor “highly unproductive, most barbarous and most arduous” in Lenin’s words— would become a public, not a private responsibility.16 As promised in the poster below, infant and childcare centers would look after the young. Kitchens would become communal or meals would be prepared in

FIGURE 6.2  “What has the October Revolution granted the Laboring and Peasant Woman?” Items shown in the background include Homes for Mothers and Children, Day Care and Cafeterias. © Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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cafeterias, to be consumed on the spot or taken to one’s dwelling. Public facilities would do the laundry. All this and more would free women to enter the waged labor force on an equal basis with men—the essence of the Bolshevik vision of women’s liberation.   But what would happen then? Would the family “wither away,” or would it assume new forms? Where, to take one important question, would children sleep at night—in children’s homes or the domiciles of their parents? Indeed, what would a “home” even look like once its functions had been socialized? Would housing in the future contain apartments with individual kitchens or would kitchens be communal and cooking done in common? Or would kitchens disappear altogether, and people dine on professionally prepared food in cafeteria-style facilities? Might household and home assume new, revolutionary forms? Inspired by the revolution, for example, groups of young communists enthusiastically took up communal living, sharing not only living space and food and money but also all domestic tasks—an arrangement the new leadership approved of but never fully sanctioned.17 Such questions regarding marriage, household, and home had profoundly political implications. After all, the very future of the revolution depended on the development of new kinds of people—the new socialist man and woman—whose way of life (byt) would embody socialist and collective values. Rather like Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s heroes in What Is to Be done?, who served as inspiration, the new people would be rational and enlightened. They would devote themselves to public life and the common good. They would experience no conflict between their individual needs and those of the collective. How could such people emerge from homes where “backward” grandmothers or mothers reared the children, instilling in them outdated values? In that sense, at least, the domestic sphere represented a potential threat to the revolution. Indeed, hostility to that sphere was pervasive among Bolshevik adherents, including “conscious” workers and young male activists, who dismissed the domestic sphere as “backward.” Redolent of the past and tainted by its association with women, the home loomed as an obstacle to revolutionary dedication and the interests of the collective.18

Utopian Dreams, Dire Realities The initial revolutionary attempts to transform the family and everyday life unfolded amidst the most unpropitious circumstances imaginable. The Bolshevik takeover not only failed to ease the hardships that had contributed to their triumph; in most respects it exacerbated them. Civil War broke out in 1918 and raged for over three years. Millions more men disappeared into the maw of war. Factories shut down. In urban areas, food supplies vanished and fuel ran out. Starvation or cold took countless lives. Cities became sites of devastation. When Zinaida Zhemchuzhnaia returned to Moscow in the

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winter of 1921, what she saw horrified her: “The city resembled a hungry, shabby, dirty beggar. The houses, frozen stiff and topped by their dead chimneys, looked sullen. . . . Here and there stood gutted buildings that had been bombed, never finished or simply ruined by neglect. They were dying a slow, lingering death, being pulled apart log by log, brick by brick.”19 People with a place to go fled to the countryside, reversing the massive in-migration of the prerevolutionary years. By the end of the Civil War, the urban population of European Russia had declined by a third, overall; that of Moscow, by almost half; that of Petrograd, by over two-thirds. Most of those who remained in cities were women, which meant that they constituted the majority of the urban population for the first time ever. Left to fend for themselves in desperate circumstances, older women and their married, widowed, or divorced daughters pooled their resources, leading to a rise in the proportion of households in which the adults were primarily or exclusively female. Still other households collapsed under the strains, leaving tens of thousands of orphans and homeless children roaming the streets.20 The Civil War years brought immense hardship to the countryside, too. Once again, conscription hit peasants hard: they constituted some 80 percent of the almost 5.5 million soldiers comprising the Red Army in 1920.21 The loss of manpower over the course of seven years of warfare devastated peasant households, dependent on their able-bodied members. In rural Viatka, for one, virtually every household had lost at least one male member by the war’s end. And when men did return from war—and millions never did—they sometimes proved too damaged to resume the labor of farming. If a household had many working hands, it could survive the loss of one or two able-bodied people. Smaller households, however, were driven to the brink of crisis and beyond. In places where armies—Red or White— passed through or fought, pillaging intensified the hardship. Everywhere, the Bolshevik policy of forcible requisitioning of grain intensified it, too. Homes fell into disrepair: windows broken, roofs caving in. Some peasants simply abandoned their houses and sought food or work elsewhere.22 The revolution also introduced new tensions into peasant households or exacerbated existing ones. Revolutionary legal changes deprived household heads of the authority to control the mobility of junior members, male or female. Service in the Red Army left former soldiers more confident in their ideas, more restive, more prone to question authority. Inculcating its conscripts with the values of the new regime, the Red Army encouraged them to be agents of change in the village. Those soldiers who survived and returned to their village households after demobilization—that is, those who chose not to settle in towns—became less willing than ever to accept the authority of their elders. Quarrels between fathers and sons erupted more frequently, in many cases ending in household divisions before the death of the bol’shak and yielding new households headed by the relatively young. Marriages came apart as peasants, like urban dwellers, took advantage of the newly eased access to divorce, although not nearly to the same extent.23

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The tens of thousands of homeless children and orphans who roamed the countryside in the 1920s provided disturbing evidence of the profound stresses on village household economies. Homeless children also demonstrated the inability of the new leadership to cope with the consequences of its own policies. Before 1917, village households would have absorbed such children. It is unclear whether they could have done so to the extent needed by 1921, given the economic devastation, but in any case, the Family Code of 1918 banned adoption. So having forbade adoption, the state tried to take the children under its wing. With lots of goodwill but very limited resources, the new regime struggled as the numbers continued to mount: there were 75,000 children living in state-run children’s homes in 1918; and 540,000 in 1921. Countless more children roamed the streets. When famine struck in the spring of 1921, affecting roughly 25 million people in thirtyfour provinces, it killed almost all children under the age of three and about a third of older ones. Survivors poured into urban areas, overwhelming the state’s ability to cope, try as it might.24

“Peace for the Huts, War on the Palaces”25 In the very midst of these upheavals, the Bolsheviks quite literally brought their revolution home. The changes they introduced eliminated domestic privacy for just about every urban dweller who had once enjoyed it. A product of ideology—class warfare, hostility to “bourgeois” domesticity— their policies also emerged as a response to Russia’s severe shortage of urban housing. Not long after taking power, the Bolsheviks nationalized—that is, took from owners without compensation—all housing exceeding a particular value in all urban areas with a population over 10,000. Entitled “living space” in official documents—rather than housing or “homes”—the newly nationalized dwellings were distributed by housing commissions on the basis of a person’s status. Workers, the new privileged class, enjoyed priority; next in line came responsible Soviet employees and persons performing work of “public necessity.” “Non-working parasitical” elements were denied access entirely. Such “elements” were to be deprived of their former dwellings and expelled, at least from Moscow, the location of the Bolshevik leadership after 1918.26 For those who had once boasted a domestic space of their own—a small fraction of Russia’s urban population at the best of times—the home in the sense of a privileged private space entirely ceased to exist. Many such people were summarily evicted and, finding themselves quite literally homeless, either fled the country or tried to. Or they moved in with friends or relatives. Or they crowded into the miserable dwellings previously occupied by the urban poor. The more fortunate got to stay put, now forced to content themselves with living in just a few of the rooms they had once inhabited while sharing the rest with others: the norm was one room per former adult

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resident, and one for every two of their children. Large rooms were also partitioned off into smaller ones, creating tiny “living spaces.” Into the “extra” rooms a family once had occupied, strangers now settled—a process known as “densification” (uplotnenie). The hierarchy of privileges meant that the new residents were usually factory workers or important members of the Communist Party.27 Such shared, or communal, housing became the new normal even in smaller towns, although to a lesser extent than in big cities, replacing private homes and privately owned apartment buildings. Residents shared kitchens and bathrooms, where those existed. Living in such close quarters, no one, not even families of newly privileged workers, enjoyed the luxury of privacy. That luxury was reserved for the leaders of the new regime, who moved into the Kremlin or the grand hotels of prerevolutionary Russia.28 Communal quarters were rarely peaceful places. Formerly privileged individuals now lived cheek by jowl with those empowered by the new regime. The two groups derived from different worlds, held different values, and, frequently, felt nothing but contempt for one another. Often, newcomers also freely used and abused the former owner’s draperies, furniture, cutlery, and such like, which had also become public property. The hunger, cold, and material deprivations of the Civil War years exacerbated tensions. In communal kitchens, fights erupted, often “over trifles”—someone had inadvertently used someone else’s spoon; someone suspected someone else of pouring out his or her soup; and everyone envied and resented wives of communists, who enjoyed better rations than everyone else.29 Of course, for the vast majority of Russia’s laboring population, lack of privacy represented nothing new. And for families whose dwelling space had formerly been a cot or a corner, having a room of their own may well have represented a genuine improvement. In part due to the reverse migration of the Civil War years, by 1922 worker families nationwide enjoyed more living space than before the revolution: some 64 percent had more than one room; another 33 percent lived in a single room.30 Unfortunately, as migration to the cities resumed in the second half of the decade, their circumstances deteriorated rapidly: nationwide, per capita living space in 1926 averaged 5.85 square meters, with 2.71 people per room, whatever the official norms.31 The nationalization of housing fundamentally transformed the meaning of “home.” Except for a brief hiatus in the 1920s, when market relations were partially restored under the New Economic Policy, no longer would the location or quality of most urbanites’ dwellings be based on choice and economic means, nor could money buy privacy, as it had once. Everything now depended on the new authorities, who doled out “living space” according to their own criteria. Ironically, by the mid-1920s workers still enjoyed less personal space than white-collar workers and intellectuals, and less still than the new Soviet elites. For the latter, dwelling in their own (separate) apartment had become emblematic of their new, privileged

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status—privilege now based not on wealth but on one’s value as determined by the party-state.32

The New Economic Policy A Sexual Revolution? In 1927, the twenty-three-year-old Sofia Pavlova set up housekeeping with her “husband.” Raised in a family of railroad workers, and a member of the Communist Party since the age of eighteen, Pavlova was then a student at the Krupskaia Academy of Communist Education, named for Lenin’s wife. She and her partner did not trouble to register their union with ZAGS, the civil body charged with registering births, marriages, deaths, and divorces. “At that time, people paid no attention to that sort of thing,” Pavlova remembered.33 And when she subsequently fell in love with another man, she left her first “husband,” seemingly without a backward glance. Pavlova was one of many, mostly urban, young people who enjoyed the freedoms— among them sexual—bestowed by the revolution, as well as the benefits of campaigns to advance workers and women. A relaxation of sexual mores occurred in postwar Russia, especially among the urban young. It was comparable in many ways to developments elsewhere in postwar Europe and the United States (think the “Roaring Twenties”), but likely more extreme in Soviet Russia because of the ideological context. The revolution not only brought an assault on “bourgeois” values and the Russian Orthodox Church; it also privileged the young as an “elect group,” untainted by the “corruption” of prerevolutionary society and a force to revolutionize the family. The Russian experience may also have been more skewed by gender. Young men, less encumbered by family responsibilities to begin with and with no danger of becoming pregnant, could express their iconoclasm and contempt for existing norms in the form of sexual behavior. Some regarded sex as merely a matter of physiological satisfaction and changed partners frequently. Many more, men and women alike, while rejecting such “bourgeois” hypocrisies as marriage, nevertheless preferred more stable unions, even if, like Pavlova and her “husband,” some did not trouble to register them.34 But what was to replace the much-maligned “bourgeois morality?” And how were new family values and gender norms to be promulgated and enforced? The leadership enjoyed no consensus on these matters, as noted earlier. Nor was there an obvious way of restraining people who abused the new freedoms, some of whom—Communist Party officials, for example— the revolution had empowered.35 Most of the abusers were male. Some made a practice of becoming sexually involved with a woman and then abandoning her when she became

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pregnant. Others married and divorced at will, ridding themselves of wives not long after the wedding, and all too often in this case, too, as soon as they learned the women were pregnant. A few moved from woman to woman, marrying them, impregnating them, and then abandoning them in a kind of “serial polygamy.” This behavior occurred most often in large urban areas, but it might sometimes be found in rural villages, too.36 It differed from, but in its consequences for women left alone with children overlapped with, a far broader phenomenon: the spate of divorce and remarriage that followed the revolution.

Ideals Encounter Reality Young, childless, already literate, and an active supporter of the revolution from its early days, Sofia Pavlova was hardly a typical working-class woman. For the overwhelming majority of such women, especially if they were older and especially if they were already mothers—as were most of the older married women—eased access to divorce and efforts to revolutionize the family yielded few positive results and all-too-often negative ones, at least in the short term. This happened despite the leadership’s oft-stated commitment to women’s liberation, and despite initiatives to fling open educational doors to women, to recruit them into the party, and to mobilize them to act on their own behalf in the decade following the revolution. Women’s continuing economic vulnerability was the primary reason for the ill effects of legal change. Especially after the introduction of NEP in 1921, the proportion of women in the full-time labor force dropped, even as the overall number of workers grew, at least partly because the newly introduced protections for women—maternity leave, nursing breaks—made employers reluctant to hire women once they had to account for costs. In the 1920s, close to two-thirds of urban adult women did not have full-time jobs. To make matters worse, most of the supplementary trades by which such women earned income—such as washing floors and taking in laundry—had almost certainly vanished as a result of the emigration or poverty of the women’s former employers. The new elites, including NEPmen, remained too few in number to fill the gap. And if khoziaiki were renting out space and looking after boarders in the 1920s, no one has yet unearthed evidence of it.37 Only domestic service survived, but undoubtedly to a severely diminished extent for the reasons stated before, and because for workers to employ a servant might now arouse suspicion.38 Bereft of other ways to keep body and soul together, hundreds of thousands of women remained dependent on unemployment insurance, on peddling their bodies (prostitution skyrocketed in the twenties), or—the majority—on a breadwinner, almost invariably male unless a woman headed the household.39 Increasing the likelihood of women’s economic dependence was the fact that housework, instead of being socialized as the Bolsheviks promised,

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remained entirely women’s responsibility. The facilities supposed to assume women’s domestic burdens—no one asked men to share them—also became casualties of NEP economics. Cutbacks in childcare facilities meant mothers had nowhere to place their children. Public catering, a major source of provisioning during the Civil War, more or less ceased to exist during the twenties and while some housing provided cafeterias for residents, as did some workplaces, especially if women worked there, the majority of households continued to depend on women’s labor for shopping, food preparation, and cleaning up, as well as for a range of other domestic services, including lugging water and doing the laundry.40 This meant that if a woman was employed full-time, she could expect to perform five more hours of housework after she finished her eight-hour factory shift, leaving her almost no time for childcare and no time at all for anything else except sleep.41 It is no wonder, then, that urban married women were prominent among those taking advantage of access to abortion. And also no wonder that husbands preferred their wives to stay at home, especially if a couple had small children—exactly as before the revolution. Apart from access to abortion, if anything at all had changed in the lives of most working-class women, it was probably for the worse. For one thing, while domestic labor had never commanded much respect, at least in the literary culture, after the revolution its status deteriorated— except, perhaps, when it was performed for pay.42 Otherwise, domestic labor had become inextricably entangled with the now downgraded—by some almost vilified—sphere of everyday life (byt). Hostility to byt in turn contributed to the new leadership’s lack of commitment to socializing the domestic responsibilities that everyone assumed were women’s—indeed, the leadership’s almost outright contempt for such responsibilities in the first postrevolutionary decade. As Wendy Goldman has put it, rather than reevaluating its significance, Soviet theorists “spurned domestic labor as the mind-numbing progenitor of political backwardness.”43   Far more seriously, even as the revolution left the existing gender division of household labor fully intact, it also further eroded the foundation on which it rested—the male breadwinner. The Civil War, terror by Whites or Reds, famine, and other catastrophes precipitated by the Bolshevik takeover compounded the carnage of World War I. An estimated sixteen million people lost their lives, most of them men. By 1923, when the Red Army had been demobilized, Russian women far outnumbered men not only in the countryside but also in urban areas. The severe gender imbalance was at its worst among people of marriageable age: between the ages of twentyfive and twenty-nine, when most women would normally be married and bearing children, there were 4,437,195 women, but only 3,619,777 men, a difference of over 800,000.44 The disproportion between women and men greatly enhanced men’s sexual bargaining power while leaving women far more vulnerable. It contributed to the ease with which young men might abuse their new

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FIGURE 6.3  The Enlightened Spouse. Says the husband to his wife: “Understand, you fool: we must live in the new way, the new way! I’ll make you into a free woman, you miserable slave! I’m going to beat that into your head!” Artist Iu. Ganf. Krokodil 1927, no. 8, p. 4. © Courtesy of XXth Century Krokodil via Eastview.

freedoms, as discussed earlier. But it also created opportunities for men who were older, and whose lives had seemed more settled. Thus, taking advantage of the new divorce laws, numerous long-married men rid themselves of their wives. From 1923 until the end of the decade, divorce rates in Russia rose steadily: by the mid- 1920s, some 15 percent of all marriages had ended in divorce. Divorce became more common even in rural areas, although not nearly as common as in urban ones. Men were far more likely to seek divorce. In Leningrad, a survey conducted in 1928 found that men initiated some 70 percent of all divorces and women, only 2 percent (most of the rest were initiated by parents or arrived at by mutual consent).45 Divorced men were also far more likely to remarry than their ex-wives. After the Civil War ended, the overall marriage rate rose rapidly nationwide— from 8.2 per thousand in the prewar years, to a high of 11.4 per thousand

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in 1924. Those marriages offer evidence of renewed prosperity. They also helped to mend broken households and restore the population after the terrible demographic losses caused by war, famine, and disease: birth rates rose rapidly after 1920. At the same time, many of these new marriages also reflect a kind of “reshuffling,” as Gijs Kessler puts it, by which older men, having freed themselves of older wives, took advantage of the demographic imbalance to wed younger women. It is impossible to know how many of those husbands had earlier left their village, and were divorcing wives who had remained behind.46 Unlike the older men, former wives were unlikely to find new spouses. Nor did they have legal grounds to claim alimony from their former husbands, even if the wife held no regular job and thus had no income source of her own, and even if the couple had been married for decades before their divorce. Households reflected the impact. While some divorcees with children headed their own household, others found refuge in the household of their married children or other kin. The three-generation family households that constituted roughly 20 percent of all urban households in the midtwenties—a significant increase from prerevolutionary times—offer evidence of the trend. Including widows as well as divorcees, they are indicative mostly of women’s economic dependence rather than independence, and of the continuing importance of kinship ties rather than paid employment as a source of economic support. The change can hardly be counted as progress.47

The Limits of the Law By the mid-twenties, pressure to rethink the 1918 Family Code had become intense. Millions of homeless children roamed the streets, vivid evidence of family breakdown. The new courts faced appeals from countless women, some seduced and impregnated, then abandoned, others having lost their long-term breadwinner. Returning to the table, lawmakers revised the code, then circulated it for public discussion throughout the country in the fall of 1925.48 On March 1, 1926, the state reversed itself on adoption, allowing it once again.49 Then in January 1927, it promulgated a new Family Code, slightly revised in response to public debate. Far more than the original, idealistic code of 1918, the new code represented a compromise between revolutionary ideals and grim realities. In a nod to those ideals, the 1927 code further eased access to divorce. Now one spouse could divorce the other simply by requesting it, without the need for both to appear before a court—a procedure popularly known as the “post card divorce.” At the same time, the code now sought to address the vulnerability of women, children, and other individuals unable to provide for themselves in a society incapable of assuming responsibility for them.50 Thus, the law laid new responsibilities on the gainfully employed, and despite the use of scrupulously gender-neutral language, this meant in

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most cases, men. In the event of divorce, the code established alimony for a needy or unemployed “husband or wife,” although only for six months. In addition, while expressing a preference for registered marriages, the new code also recognized de facto or common law unions as carrying the same rights and obligations as registered ones. Thus, like registered husbands and wives, common law spouses gained the right to appeal for both child support and alimony.51 Finally, the 1926 code specified more precisely than its predecessor exactly which family members merited support from others, identifying as potential recipients grandparents and grandchildren as well as underage brothers and sisters. The law thus not only acknowledged the significance of the family/ household as a vital welfare institution as well as a web of emotional ties. It also transformed into a legal obligation what had once been a customary expectation, although how—or even whether—the obligation to family members other than spouses or children was enforced in practice remains a question. The legal change reflected the continuing, perhaps even enhanced, role of kinship and household in the conduct of everyday life during the 1920s as well as the leadership’s preparedness to retreat from its assault on the family if circumstances seemed to warrant it. At this point, however, the retreat was largely tactical. That the ideological commitment to the family’s “withering” remained undiminished is suggested by the fact that changes in law brought no positive reevaluation of the family, judging at least by the press, now controlled by the party-state. Observes Jeffrey Brooks: “Thousands of pages of newspapers from the 1920s contain hardly a single picture of a family or of a child with a parent.”52

The Peasant Village Under NEP Bolshevik policies brought change to the Russian countryside, too, although far less than in urban areas. Villages scattered over the vast countryside continued to be the home of some 82 percent of Russia’s population. Distances were immense, roads poor or nonexistent, and community norms still powerful, while the human resources needed to implement real change remained all too scarce. Besides, most peasant economies—units of production as well as reproduction still—remained ill-suited to a Bolshevik vision of emancipation that rested on individual wage earning and the socialization of household labor. And yet, villagers were not entirely immune to the effects of revolutionary change, which by bestowing new rights on the young and on women, sometimes destabilized existing patterns of household authority and older ways of being. Most important was the Land Code of 1922. In some respects inscribing and formalizing—as well as standardizing—peasants’ varied customary practices of household governance, organization, inheritance, and land usage, the code also strove to reduce or eliminate their patriarchal

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character. Thus, where once the right to participate in communal governance belonged only to male heads of households, the Code granted all adults (over age eighteen) the right to participate, while leaving decision-making in the hands of household heads, as before.53 Similarly, while affirming the bol’shak’s customary power to make decisions concerning the disposition of household property—land, buildings, implements, livestock—held in common by all household members, it also undermined that power in a variety of ways. It accomplished this by expanding the property rights of other household members, irrespective of their gender and, in some cases, their age. Where formerly access to communal land had largely been limited to adult (i.e., married) men, the Code granted all members of the household access to land, including the young and even women who had joined the household as brides. It also gave every peasant who reached the age of eighteen and contributed to the household economy—irrespective of gender—the right to request a division of that property so as to form a new household (otdel), as long as the new household was considered economically viable—and whether or not the bol’shak approved. In addition, individual household members who wished to depart gained the right to demand a division of movable goods (vydel) in kind or in cash, although not in land, again irrespective of gender. The law bestowed this right not only on daughters but also on in-marrying wives if they had lived in the household for two sowing cycles (roughly six years), making this the most radical innovation of all. (Hitherto, communities might oblige husbands to support wives with money or food in the rare cases couples separated with community approval.)54 One of the primary effects of the Code was further to encourage married sons to separate from their father’s household, and to establish a household of their own. Although the overall number of peasants declined as a result of the catastrophic losses of the war, because of household divisions the number of peasant households actually grew in the Central Industrial and northern regions after 1922, although not in the areas hardest hit by the famine of 1921/22. More numerous, households also became smaller. Nevertheless, the most successful households remained larger households, composed of three generations, or of married brothers and their wives. Enjoying larger land allotments than the average, as before complex households were most common in regions where households depended for their livelihoods mainly or exclusively on agricultural production and supplementary labor near home—forestry, fishing, and handicrafts, for example.55 The new laws governing marriage and the family also affected the village. While continuing to marry at a relatively early age, the young now enjoyed greater freedom in their choice of spouse. Among the peasant women interviewed by historian David Ransel in the 1990s, those who married in the 1920s and early 1930s often played a direct role in selecting their mates, having gotten to know them during the customary courtship rituals. “Father didn’t force any of us into marriage,” claimed one respondent, a woman with four sisters, for example. “All of us found our husbands on our own.” Irina

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Kniazeva, born in 1910 in a Siberian village, whose father actively disliked her by her telling, was, nevertheless, permitted her choice in the end. When she was eighteen, she fell in love with Feodor, her father’s farmhand. “Father did not want to give me to him in marriage, because Feodor had no roof of his own,” Kniazeva informed her interviewer in 1994. But all the same, the wedding came to pass and Feodor came to live in his father-in-law’s house.56 Otherwise, however, customary practices associated with marriage remained much as before. Even when individuals chose one another, the suitor’s family usually sent a matchmaker to visit and make the offer to his intended’s household, negotiate the amount of dowry, and decide on the share of the wedding expenses that each side would bear. Brides still spent the eve of their wedding with girlfriends and sang their laments, while the wedding itself remained both an expensive and protracted affair, involving the entire community and continuing for several days of feasting and celebration— although at least in some villages the bloody bridal sheet was no longer displayed to guests. Despite the hostility of the new government to everything associated with religion, the church ceremony remained a key component of the peasant wedding ritual, even as a small but growing number of peasants also registered their marriage in civil offices (the Selsovet or village council).57 Under the new circumstances, however, even church ceremonies and the increased freedom to choose failed to ensure marital stability. Peasants took advantage of the newly eased access to divorce with some frequency. As of 1926, the rural rate of divorce had risen to about one for every ten marriages, as compared to a rate of 2.1 divorces for every eleven marriages in towns and 3.6 for every thirteen in cities. As in urban areas, most rural applicants were young and had been married for a relatively brief period of time. Despite official claims to the contrary, most were surely male. Thanks to a gender ratio in rural areas that was even more skewed than in urban ones, men could pick and choose: in 1926, there were 129 women for every 100 men aged twenty-five to thirty-five.58 The consequences of divorce for women in the countryside were, if anything, even grimmer than for their urban sisters because the economic bases of peasant life remained unchanged. Household property, held collectively, made it difficult for divorced peasant women to obtain child support or, after 1926, alimony. Moreover, although the labor of women, including women who had married into a household, supposedly gave them the right to a share of household property after six years of marriage, most marriages that culminated in divorce ended much sooner. And even when unions had endured longer, other members of the husband’s household often fiercely resisted the division of household property requisite for satisfying the claims of a wife. Despite judges’ inclination to rule in women’s favor in contested cases, the relative poverty of most peasant households meant that even decisions in a divorced wife’s favor rarely provided her with means sufficient to live independently, especially if she had a small child (or children).59

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Adding to divorced women’s difficulties, wage-earning opportunities for them in rural areas remained far more limited than in urban ones, and those that existed, as farmhands, chiefly, paid very poorly and were often exploitative in other ways—not unlike the situation faced by women who fled their husbands’ households in the post-reform era. But in the 1920s, the number of women fending for themselves had become far greater and whereas earlier, women in that situation were often childless, now they were just as likely to have children. The lack of options helps to explain why Irina Kniazeva, seven months pregnant with her second child when her husband Feodor “up and left” with her best friend, not only remained in her father’s house—the refuge of unhappily married women in the prerevolutionary period, too—but came “crawling back,” in her words, time after time when her father threw her out.60 Perhaps nowhere was the inability of the new government to deliver on its promises more evident than in the realm of childbirth and childcare. And in perhaps no other realm were the long-term consequences more enduring. For lack of both commitment and means, postrevolutionary campaigns to lower Russia’s extraordinarily high rates of infant mortality in rural areas were mainly rhetorical: attacks on rural midwives and traditional ways of mothering as “dark” or “backward”; exhortations to mothers to adopt more healthful practices. By the end of the 1920s, only about 10 percent of village women enjoyed access to maternal medical services of any sort, or to daycare or infant care in the summer months when fieldwork was at its height. As a result, most rural infants were born at home without medical assistance and looked after much as before. Infant and child mortality rates barely budged.61 As in cities, the legalization of abortion represented one of the most important changes in the lives of rural women. It is true that rural medical providers remained few and far between in the 1920s, prompting women to resort to traditional methods. It is also true that by contrast with their urban counterparts, peasant women were often highly reluctant to avail themselves of abortion whatever their circumstances, primarily because religion—still very influential—held that abortion is a sin. One of the few women to acknowledge having an abortion suffered on that account: “This was sinful, sinful, sinful! I went to church. I prayed for forgiveness.” All the same, as a new generation of women came of age, the rural birth rate would drop, although at a far more gradual rate than in urban areas. Abortion was the primary reason.62 Otherwise, in the absence of state-sponsored institutions, mothers and mothers-in-law remained as important as ever in the lives of young women. They acted as midwives during childbirth. They helped out while new mothers recovered from childbirth, and taught them how to look after their infants and small children. Grandmothers also looked after children and helped to raise them while their mothers were working around the house and in the fields. As a result, and despite the leadership’s desire for the formation of “new people,” in rural areas it was most often grandmothers

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and not the state who shaped the worldview of small children at least until they went to school, and likely thereafter, too.63 The continuing importance of the grandmother helps to account for the tenacity of peasant rituals and belief systems, including religious beliefs, not only during the 1920s but also long after.

Conclusion Immensely costly in terms of human life, and profoundly unsettling Russia’s economic, social, and political stability, World War I set the stage for the upheavals that followed. At least for the duration of the Civil War, the Bolshevik takeover worsened people’s lives. Wars took the lives of millions of people, most of them male, skewing the gender ratio among those of reproductive age. The revolution set the propertyless against the propertied, while the nationalization of housing often forced them to live in close proximity. Long-standing beliefs, rituals, and practices came under attack, as did the patriarchal family and the domestic sphere itself. In this early period, however, changes in family law that freed individuals from unhappy marriages advantaged primarily men. The effects of revolutionary changes, palpable also in the countryside, were, nevertheless, modest there. But in large urban areas especially, the changes could be deeply unsettling, and not just to those who experienced them first-hand. The seemingly casual sexuality of the young, men in particular, offended the sensibilities of the new authorities; so did men who repeatedly married and divorced, leaving personal tragedies in their wake. By the mid-1920s, the negative consequences of revolutionary change had become troublingly visible. Millions of homeless children roamed the streets. Women seeking support from men deluged the courts, a deluge that intensified after 1926, when family law was again revised to give legal status to consensual unions. Illegitimacy was increasing; juvenile crime, too. Attributed to family breakdown, the new social ills inspired something of a backlash by the end of the decade. It became evident in a campaign against abortion, promiscuity, and casual divorce that presaged the dramatic retreat in family policy that would soon commence.64

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7 Revolution at Work; Counterrevolution at Home

The end of the 1920s brought changes so wide ranging and profound that they deserve to be called a “second revolution.” Overshadowing in many respects what had come before, these developments laid the foundations of the system that would persist until the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 and even after, albeit in a somewhat altered form, and leave an enduring mark on people’s intimate lives. NEP, with its relative freedoms, came to an end. The state initiated a campaign to collectivize agriculture and create the bases of a modern industrial society within a brief period of time. The aim: to build socialism in one country. Abolishing private enterprise in any form, the state assumed full ownership and control of the means of production and exchange and endeavored to plan the economy from top to bottom. The development of heavy industry set the agenda. In the allocation of limited resources, production became the first priority, while almost everything necessary to sustain and perpetuate human life—the entire realm of reproduction—came a distant second, if at all. Households came under enormous strain. Unemployment ended; women, including married women and mothers, were pressed into the labor force. However, because childcare facilities and other institutions intended to socialize domestic labor, while not forgotten, fell disastrously short of filling the gap, households—women, really—were forced somehow to take up the slack.1 At the same time, the standard of living dropped precipitously. Tens of millions of peasants left their homes, or were torn from them by the persecution of “kulaks,” supposedly wealthy peasants. Housing utterly failed to keep pace with the flood of in-migrants to city and factory settlements, with the result that overcrowded barracks, dormitories and—in the best of cases—communal apartments housed all but the most privileged. In response to the dire conditions, women exerted the only control that they could—over their own fertility. Between 1927 and 1935 the birth rate

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declined by close to a third, dropping from forty-five births per thousand people in 1927 to 30.1 in 1935—and as before, largely due to abortion.2 Confronting social instability and the risk of population decline, Soviet officials changed their tune. Attacks on the family as an institution, already abating in the late 1920s, ceased altogether. Instead, the leadership began celebrating family stability and motherhood, even fatherhood, although to a lesser extent. The domestic sphere and women’s responsibilities were redefined to suit the new needs. In 1936, abortion became illegal and divorce more difficult and expensive. In some respects a return to the prerevolutionary order—Nicholas Timasheff entitled the changes “the great retreat”—Stalinist family values were fully harnessed to the needs of the patriarchal state.3

Revolution in the Countryside Dekulakization and the Assault on the Peasant Household Commencing in the late 1920s, “dekulakization” and the collectivization of agriculture brought far more profound changes to village households than had the Bolshevik takeover in 1917 or the New Economic Policy. The sweep of the campaigns was immense and the cost—economic and human—even greater. Dekulakization targeted supposedly “kulak” households, often the most successful. Activists confiscated such households’ property, which became the property of the collective, and drove alleged kulaks from their homes. About a million households, some five to six million people, suffered dekulakization in some form. Often singling out the bol’shak for especially punitive treatment, the process tore apart systems of social and familial support. Sometimes entire households were exiled to distant and inhospitable regions in Siberia, the Far North, and Kazakhstan; sometimes, only the male head was taken away. The punishment of the bol’shak alone—and often for a limited period— seems to have been most common when a household underwent partial expropriation. Their property confiscated, such households were left to fend for themselves in communities where everyone, including their own kin, felt too frightened of the accusation of “harboring kulaks” to offer assistance. “I remember how mother went to her brother, to her own father and mother, to the very spot where she had been married, and even they couldn’t help her . . . ” recalled Anna Dubova, whose household suffered dekulakization.4 The children of kulak households shared in the suffering. Having nowhere to turn, countless women whose husbands had been arrested or exiled as kulaks abandoned their offspring; other children were left behind when both parents were taken away. Because small children, too, bore the

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kulak stigma, their relatives also often proved unwilling to adopt or care for them. Although the children sometimes found refuge in children’s homes, even children’s homes might be unwilling to accept the offspring of alleged kulaks. The number of homeless children once again swelled.5 Older kulak children were denied access to education, or entry to the Komsomol, or the right to reside in a city. Some members of kulak households, nevertheless, managed to flee to cities or industrial sites and start a new life, but they lived in terror of discovery. When Stepan Podlubnyi’s father was dekulakized and sent into three years of exile in 1929, the fifteen-year-old Stepan and his mother left their village in the Vinnitsa district of Ukraine and headed to Moscow, using forged documents that pronounced them of worker origin. His mother’s “past,” nevertheless, caught up with her: in 1937, she was arrested and then sentenced to eight years in a camp for “concealing her social origins.” So as to make their way in the world, some kulak children formally renounced their own parents, which supposedly freed them from the stigma.6

Collectivization: A War Against Elders? In fundamental ways, dekulakization and collectivization eroded the authority of older generations—senior men in particular—over younger ones. Indeed, in doing away with traditional peasant agriculture, collectivization represented a “direct attack” on the authority of male heads of households.7 By transforming most of the means of production—land, animals, and major implements—into collective property, and putting the collective farm chair in charge of organizing labor and disposing of the products, collectivization eliminated most of the economic foundation of the bol’shak’s authority. Thereafter, only his household’s movable and immovable property—the house and furnishings, small implements, the household plot—remained under his command.8 It is true that the collectivized household remained a unit of production, but on a considerably smaller scale than before and in a manner that enhanced the economic significance of women’s work. By the mid-1930s, households had obtained the right to cultivate a private plot, consisting of the land around their cabin, and to keep a cow and small domestic livestock, although not a horse. But it was mainly women who cultivated the plot and tended the animals, which quickly became the basis of household survival. The rules for allocating household plots also reduced the power of the male head by encouraging households to fission and become numerically smaller.9 Older peasants sometimes attributed the collectivization of agriculture to a conflict between older and younger men, and with some reason. Setting the young against the old was part of the leadership’s strategy as it sought to mobilize the younger generation on behalf of its vision of the socialist future. Thus, for example, it made a hero of Pavlik Morozov, one of a number of

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children held up as exemplars in 1931/2, based on a falsified story of his murder by kulaks for denouncing his own father to the authorities.10 And it is true that the young were more likely than their parents to embrace the new order. Civil War veterans, many of them soldiers conscripted from the countryside, provided leadership in the collectivization campaign. Rural Komsomol members—mostly male as in urban areas—sometimes determined who was to be selected to suffer dekulakization.11 No comparable tensions emerged between generations of women. While collectivization and the accompanying changes also affected older women’s household authority, they did so differently and to a far lesser extent. This was because while the leadership launched an all-out assault on peasants’ mode of production, their attack on the reproductive functions of the household was far milder, in execution if not in intent. The most significant change was in the socialization of older children. From 1930/31 onward, primary education became mandatory. By the end of the decade, peasant children were supposedly receiving at least seven years of schooling. (Peasants were taxed to pay for this education.) The vast expansion of the rural school system put official values in competition with those of peasant elders. It also opened doors to upward mobility, which some peasant children, daughters in particular, would prove eager to seize.12 However, other state efforts to assume the responsibilities associated with reproduction and childrearing fell far short of that objective. These efforts included the establishment of maternity facilities, where scientifically trained personnel were supposed to oversee childbirth and the teaching of mothercraft to new mothers. Aimed at reducing Russia’s high rates of infant mortality, such facilities fell woefully short of the stated goals in the prewar period at least, not only numerically but also, at least as importantly, qualitatively. Much the same story can be told about childcare facilities—day care centers and summer nurseries, and other facilities for tending to preschool children while their mothers were at work. When resources were scarce—as resources always seemed to be in this period—production took priority. As the chairman of a collective farm in the Saratov region told mothers who demanded a supervised playground: “You lived earlier without day nurseries and playgrounds, you can live this way now, too.”13 The failure to socialize reproductive labor meant that the muchreviled older peasant woman, embodying “backwardness” incarnate in the eyes of the leadership, usually remained in charge. Indeed, if anything, collectivization increased her authority by increasing her responsibilities. Especially in warmer weather, able-bodied rural women were hard at work, whether for the collective or, far more commonly, on their household’s plot. In the absence of infant and childcare facilities, the women’s mothers or mothers-in-law looked after their offspring—if the women were lucky. Otherwise, infants and small children would be left either in the care of young village girls in return for a modest payment, or to themselves.

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Despite incentives to fission, younger women’s need for older women’s assistance surely contributed to the persistence of the three-generation household, and along with it, the continuing authority of older women over the younger generation. As a result, the generation born after 1917, its female members in particular, usually preserved the “intra-family hierarchy of obedience,” to borrow the language of Laura Osterman and Svetlana Adonyeva.14 The continuing authority of older women meant that many customary peasant practices, including those involving marriage and family life, even religion, often retained their hold despite the leadership’s efforts to undermine or eliminate them.

New Freedoms/Old Practices Still, in some important respects, the generation that came of age in this period enjoyed greater scope for individual initiative and exercised more control over their personal choices, including marital choices, than had their parents before them. Rural people born after 1917 were likely to have received some education, and in state-run schools; the regime encouraged them to join the Komsomol. Moreover, the erosion of communal and kinship ties and the all-out assault on religion that accompanied collectivization undermined the power of tradition to shape youthful conduct. Perhaps in consequence, sexual mores appear to have eased. The easing is particularly noteworthy in the case of women, because “honor,” policed by kin and community, had formerly been so central to rural women’s reputation and marriageability, although how widespread this easing was is impossible to know. “In the villages girls are losing their honor at a young age” to boys who then disappear, complained a female collective member from the Western oblast’. Premarital sexual relations between committed couples became more prevalent in the countryside, as did unregistered unions.15 Still, while the young now chose their own mates, parental permission or approval continued to matter to many young people, and perhaps especially to young men, and for the same reasons as before. Even Stepan Podlubnyi, having escaped the village and established residence in Moscow, felt the need: “I wouldn’t dare think of getting married without having Mama approve my wife beforehand,” he confided to his diary. “I respect her a lot and I’d hate to hurt her feelings by getting married when she’s away.” His bride would have moved into the room that he shared with his mother, thereby joining their small household.16 Other customs persisted as well, modified, however, to suit the changed circumstances. The rituals that had long accompanied peasant marriages— the betrothal, the dowry agreement and handfast, the three-day wedding celebration—continued to govern the arrangements and the event itself, although in simplified form. The loss of resources resulting from

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collectivization meant that the dowry was often reduced to the trousseau— linens, mattresses, pillows, and towels displaying the bride’s handiwork. The wedding ritual, now foreshortened to reduce expenses, still lasted one or two days if not three, and while the festivities had become far less lavish than previously, they still involved the entire community.17 Religion also retained its ritual importance. To be sure, few couples wed in church. The violent anti-religious campaigns that accompanied collectivization closed countless rural churches, leaving entire regions bereft of one. It also made it difficult, even dangerous, for peasants to sanctify their marriages (or to baptize their children). Although the number of church weddings decreased drastically, some couples did manage to marry in church, nonetheless.18 People resisted state pressure in other ways, too. However strong the continuing hold of religion—and the belief, at least by some, that abortion was a sin—rural women availed themselves of abortion with considerable frequency, despite their lack of access to medical facilities. They learned to abort themselves or found others who would perform abortions for them. They continued to do so even after abortion was outlawed in 1936. In virtually every village lived a woman who performed illegal abortions. The results are evident in the birth rate. Whereas in the 1920s, rural women bore on average 5.37 children, by the end of the 1930s, that number had dropped to 4.4.19 That women continued to terminate their pregnancies despite the state’s pronatalist propaganda and their own belief in the sinful nature of abortion was partly due to rural poverty and lack of facilities, and to women’s heavy labor responsibilities. But younger women’s efforts to control their fertility also represented a new kind of individualism, fostered by Soviet promises of female advancement and the gradual expansion of the educational opportunities that made such advancement possible. Women had become well aware that if they wanted to live better lives than their mothers had, they would have to bear fewer children.20

Rural Marriage and Divorce Postrevolutionary changes introduced new instability into rural marriages; so did the skewed rural gender ratio. Between 1926 and 1939, about 18.5 to 23 million peasants left the countryside to take up residence in factory settlements or towns. Most were young men. Another 5.5 million peasants, also mostly young and male, worked elsewhere temporarily, creating bifurcated households much as in the prerevolutionary period. In the working population of late 1930s collectives, women outnumbered men by two to one. One consequence was heightened levels of peasant spinsterhood, and in communities where early and near-universal marriage had long been the norm. In addition, many formally “married” women were actually living

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a single life: as of 1939, there were 665 married women residents in Soviet Russian villages but only 518 married men.21 The shortage of men almost surely enhanced their leverage in sexual relations and, in combination with the erosion of community controls, contributed to the irresponsible behavior of some. Certainly, divorce became even more common in the countryside, although still far less common than in urban areas. Sometimes, the state promoted divorce. Even after it began touting family stability, propaganda continued to encourage rural women to free themselves from the patriarchal authority of fathers and husbands. “I defied my husband and began to work as a member of the rural Soviet and as soon as collective farms were announced, I joined the collective at once,” proudly proclaimed an exemplary peasant woman in the 1930s. “My husband became absolutely like a wild animal. I couldn’t live with him, I had to take action through the Soviet and divorced him.”22 However, it was mostly husbands, not wives, who formally ended marriages. Desertion grew more frequent, too, although unlike in cases of divorce, the numbers are impossible to track. Wives in bifurcated households became particularly vulnerable to both divorce and desertion. Even before 1917, a couple’s different ways of life—the husband working elsewhere for all or part of the year, his wife remaining home in the village—might strain a marriage. However, back then other forces worked to sustain most unions whatever the strains. Those forces included the power of the household head to command his son’s movement and a portion of his wages; the economic interdependency of husbands and wives; the uncertainty of the labor market; and the difficulty of divorce. In addition to making divorce more easily available—if less so after 1936—revolutionary changes eliminated the legal authority of the household head to command the movement and wages of the young and reduced the economic interdependency of husbands and wives. The industrialization drive not only did away with the uncertainty of the labor market; it also created multiple new opportunities to earn a livelihood outside the village and, for those with the proper background (poor peasant, worker), a chance at substantial upward mobility. The re-introduction of internal passports in 1932 failed to staunch the flow. One result was that many husbands simply left the village and failed to return, abandoning wives and children to their fate. Lacking the means to do so, the state was often unable to track the men down. In 1934, some 200,000 child support cases against “fugitive fathers”—that is, men who had vanished—were filed in the courts of the Russian Republic of the Soviet Union, although how many derived from rural areas is impossible to say. Courts often ruled in favor of mothers, but almost 40 percent of favorable decisions could not be carried out, usually because the father could not be found. Even when the authorities managed to locate a fugitive father, they found it difficult to make him pay the requisite support. Male industrial administrators would refuse to garnishee his wages, fearing the loss of a member of their workforce.23

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Judging by statements that appeared in the Soviet press, such developments prompted peasant women strongly to favor laws that would limit men’s freedom of action, even if those laws would also limit their own. “The level of libertinage has reached the point where a man begets five children with five women,” women from Dnepropetrovsk complained in a collective letter, composed in 1936. They requested that men’s military cards and internal passports record their children. During the month-long discussion that preceded the promulgation of the family law of 1936, peasant women who participated welcomed the changes that made divorce more difficult and progressively more expensive.24

A Great Retreat Those legal changes were, indeed, substantial. In the mid-1930s, official Soviet treatment of the family underwent a near total reversal—from a commitment to the family’s “withering away” to its enshrinement as the “primary cell” of society. Now labeled “the new Soviet family,” it was to serve as helpmate rather than rival to the state.25 In addition to the upheavals caused by state campaigns for collectivization and industrialization, the stimulus for change was also demographic: the birth rate was declining at a time when the Soviet Union sought an increase in population to meet the demands of industry and modern warfare. Between 1927 and 1935 the birth rate dropped steadily, from forty-five births per thousand people in 1927 to 30.1 in 1934 and 1935, largely because of abortion. To reverse the pattern, the leadership adopted explicitly pronatalist policies, as did other authoritarian European states in the interwar era, and sought to strengthen the family.26 The law was changed yet again to reflect the new priorities. In 1934, homosexual acts between consenting males—that is, non-procreative sex— had become a criminal offense for the first time since the revolution. The law did not outlaw female homosexuality, which was less publicly visible and did not attract police attention. In May 1936, the state circulated the draft of a new family law. The draft made divorce more complicated, difficult, and expensive, and required that people’s internal passports include marital status and names of children—a matter of particular concern to women angered by men who entered bigamous (or polygamous) marriages. The draft increased both the level of child support and the penalties for men who failed to pay it. At the same time, the draft law prohibited abortion except when a pregnancy threatened a woman’s life or health; it also included incentives, similar to those offered by Catholic countries and Nazi Germany, to encourage women to bear children. Women who bore more than six children would receive a 2,000 ruble annual bonus for each additional child and a 5,000 ruble bonus for each child after ten children.

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During the month-long discussion that followed the publication of the draft, the provisions affecting divorce aroused little opposition and much support among those who spoke out on the issue. On the other hand, the prohibition of abortion proved controversial. Opposition was particularly intense among urban women, who cited compelling reasons to control their fertility—often their difficult living conditions—while agreeing that, indeed, no woman would want to deny herself the joys of motherhood.27 The decree was, nevertheless, promulgated with only minor adjustments.28 At the same time, a secret order went out to withdraw contraceptives from sale, although it remains unclear how widely that order was implemented.29 Propaganda took up the pronatalist tune, with Stalin leading the chorus. “The Soviet woman has the same rights as the man, but that does not free her from a great and honorable duty which nature has given her: she is a mother, she gives life. This is certainly not a private affair but one of great social significance,” Stalin declared on the pages of the periodical Trud (Labor) in April 1936. Media began portraying having children as a natural part of women’s lives and a joyful experience no woman would want to miss. Bearing and raising children became a woman’s primary responsibility to society and the state.30 After 1936 the divorce rate plummeted, although whether this was because couples chose to stay together or because they simply separated informally remains unclear.31 But otherwise, legal and other changes failed to yield the desired results. The birth rate grew from 30.1 births per 1000 in 1935 to 39.7 in 1937; but thereafter, it resumed its decline. Illegal abortion, often under difficult, even dangerous circumstances, was likely responsible for much of that decline, which occurred not only in urban but also in rural areas, although to a lesser extent.32 Ironically, rising infant mortality rates undercut much of the demographic benefits of the abolition. Women forced to bear children sometimes proved unable or unwilling to care for them properly, especially in the squalid circumstances in which so many lived. The wave of arrests that swept the country between 1936 and 1938, depriving countless children of their parents, surely contributed its share to the demise of some as well. Whatever the cause, according to the People’s Commissariat of Health, infant mortality rates, having dropped steadily through the twenties, actually rose in the second half of the 1930s: from 146 per thousand births in 1935 to 162 in 1938—rates still far lower than in the imperial period.33

In Town The changes that the second revolution brought to urban areas were no less dramatic, and for many no less wrenching than in the countryside. The main difference was that in urban areas the state-initiated campaign to create the bases for socialism generated far more enthusiasm and support, especially

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among the young—although how much exactly still remains a subject of debate. New factories, mines, and construction projects—even new industrial cities such as Magnitogorsk, built from the ground up—ended urban unemployment and added some ten million women to the paid labor force, as well as drawing tens of millions of peasants from the countryside. The state committed virtually all of its resources to constructing an economic foundation for socialism, leading to immense material hardship for all but the most privileged sectors of the populace. Basic consumer goods vanished. Food rationing, a response to the agricultural crisis caused by collectivization, was introduced in the late 1920s and lasted until 1935. Real wages declined significantly, one of the reasons for the upsurge of women’s employment, even as the state fell far short of the goal of socializing the labor of housekeeping and childcare. Still “women’s work,” in the difficult conditions of the 1930s such labor, if anything, grew even more onerous.

The Urban “Home” From the 1930s onward, the “home,” in the sense of a refuge from the outside world, vanished almost entirely in most cities and towns. Its disappearance was both a byproduct of other changes and the result of conscious political decisions. Having assumed control of most existing private property in housing early on, the state then sorely neglected housing construction even as migrants inundated cities and factory settlements by the millions, seeking work.34 Everyone but the most privileged experienced the results. “Living space” shrank. Between 1926 and 1940, it declined from 5.85 square meters per person to 4.09, even as the average number of persons per room rose from 2.71 in 1926 to 3.91 in 1940.35 These aggregate numbers likely conceal important differences and not only between those who enjoyed privileges (and were legally entitled to somewhat more space) and those who did not. Impressionistic evidence suggests that in smaller towns, people might enjoy access to more living space, even to a small house of their own, usually made of wood and lacking all amenities.36 However, in new factory developments and in major cities such as Moscow and Leningrad, living space was extraordinarily tight, and overcrowding, even severe overcrowding, was the norm.  In such places, housing fell disastrously short in terms of need. Thus, while the state did construct a few “single-family” apartments in this period—some even included a kitchen and bath—they rarely remained “single-family” once occupied. Instead, several families ordinarily shared each room, thereby transforming the new constructions into communal apartments.37 In Moscow, where the norm was one family to a room, a “median” family might enjoy one sparsely furnished room at best, without running water. Washing hung in the unheated corridors. Baths were taken in public facilities once a week in winter, twice a week in summer.38 The situation

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of the millions of migrants from the countryside was almost invariably far worse. Ordinarily housed in dormitories, hostels, and barracks, they shared living space with as many as ten or fifteen other people, usually strangers. Everywhere, crowded conditions and utter lack of privacy, even for families, prevailed.39 By comparison, the communal apartment could seem a luxury, although often only by comparison. Personal accounts, deriving mainly from the educated and formerly privileged, are replete with complaints about daily life in a single room, where family members “ate, slept, did their schoolwork, received their own guests or relatives, and listened to the talks and quarrels of the neighbors on the other side of the partition walls.” Many struggled to recreate a modicum of domesticity in their diminished circumstances by cordoning off sections of their room with sheets or curtains for particular purposes—sleeping, eating, creating a children’s corner, and so on.40 Petty quarrels and rivalries between families erupted frequently, worsened by the spying and informing encouraged by the authorities.41 In Moscow and other desirable locations, “living space” could assume an outsized role in shaping people’s intimate choices. People spoke of marrying “a room,” or of divorcing “a room.” Numerous queries addressed to the Moscow journal Zhilishchnoe Khozaistvo (The Housing Economy) concerned married couples unable to cohabit because of housing, or divorced couples unable to part because one of the partners had nowhere else to go. The “fictitious marriage” resumed its importance, now for the sake of housing or the residency permit requisite to live in major cities.42

Stalinist Family Values Enduring Marriage Whatever the obstacles, Russians—or at least, Russian men—remained as likely to marry as ever and, as before, they wed at an early age. During the 1930s, Russians’ marriage rates remained higher than those of their European counterparts, and while their age of marriage had risen a bit, they still tended to marry earlier than other Europeans, too.43 As of 1937, some 91 percent of all Russian men aged thirty to thirty-nine were married (as compared to 90 percent in 1897). However, only 82 percent of women in that age group were wed (as compared to 88 percent in 1897). The disparity was a result not only of the continuing demographic imbalance but also of the frequency of divorce: divorced men remained far more likely to find a new spouse. The disparity meant that millions of households were headed by widowed or divorced women, working full-time and raising children on their own, with the help of their own resident mothers—the irreplaceable babushka—if they were lucky.44

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Many factors encouraged the continuation of Russians’ long-standing pattern of early and near-universal marriage. The urban young now enjoyed not only unprecedented freedom from parental control, but also unprecedented opportunities to meet and mate. From childhood onward, young men and women attended school together; they participated in the Komsomol and spent leisure hours in clubs together; they sat through endless meetings together; and they went off to distant places to construct the foundations of socialism together. Sometimes—but only rarely because of the utter lack of privacy—couples even managed to have sex together. Marriage made sex more accessible.45 And there existed no economic reasons to postpone marriage because—ideally at least—husbands had neither to acquire the economic wherewithal to support a wife and children nor to provide a roof over the family’s head. Women were expected to earn their own livelihood, while housing depended on the state wholly or in part. (The realities were sometimes different, but more about that later.) Moreover, the leadership now encouraged marriage (and procreation) with the means it had to hand. The 1936 law strengthened the family. The media, which had become completely subject to state control, celebrated a romantic (albeit a-sexual) version of love, one that culminated in a lasting union. People were now urged to “cultivate their ‘personal life,’” including love and intimacy, which had come to signify the progress of socialist culture more broadly. This love was enduring, not casual. Official discourse touted the triumph of the “love” marriage. “Marriage has ceased to be a matter of sell-and-buy,” boasted Pravda in 1936. “Nowadays a girl from a collective farm . . . will marry the man she loves.”46 In literary portrayals, love led to marriages that were stable and enduring. This was love without drama or conflict: lovers suffered no pangs of jealousy; spouses remained faithful to their partners; and under most circumstances, marriages proved satisfactory to both. Appeals addressed to the authorities or cases that came before the courts offered plenty of evidence of marital discord; fiction, however, did not portray it. And only the presence of children bore witness to sexual relations, which otherwise remained entirely hidden. What most distinguished this depiction of marriage from comparable portrayals in nineteenth-century Russian and contemporary Western fiction was the complete absence of a boundary between personal life, love and intimacy, and the larger, socialist collective.47 The absence reflected the ideology of the period, which treated the individual (and his/her family life) as part of an uninterrupted continuum with the larger collective. As the head of the Komsomol declared in 1934, “The stronger and more harmonious a family is, the better it serves the common cause.”48 This view had real-life consequences. Where once parents and close kin, and in rural areas, the peasant community, had assumed the prerogative to superintend intimate relationships—and sometimes still did— now the Communist Party and various officially designated bodies assumed that prerogative, too. The greater good required it.

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The Komsomol, to which most young people belonged, was especially active. Thus, when Mary Leder, US-born and living in Moscow in this period, became romantically involved with a young man of dubious reputation, she was summoned before the Komsomol and informed by its secretary that her lover was “politically unreliable,” drank, and was an “individualist who ignored the needs of the collective.” The Komsomol secretary in the city of Komsomolsk, then in the process of construction on the Amur River, expressed similar concerns about the marriage of two young people in his purview. “Intelligent and experienced,” however, he decided not to interfere. Still, while the newlyweds were given a room, a decision was also made “not to let them out of sight.”49 Also subject to scrutiny were members of the Communist Party, those in prominent positions in particular. If divorce ended a member’s first marriage, the party would overlook it, perhaps in recognition that the upward mobility so characteristic of communists in the 1930s could sour a relationship when the spouse failed to change. The party also ignored its members’ occasional infidelity. However, a party member who divorced more than once might be reprimanded, even expelled from the organization.50 Non-party members— mostly men—might also find themselves called to account as a result of their wives’ or lovers’ (or neighbors’) appeals to various state organs. In response to letters from readers and after an investigation, the Soviet press also regularly shamed individuals deemed to be in violation of socialist family values.51

Fatherhood Stalinist family values now encompassed responsible fatherhood as well as husbandhood.52 Much of that responsibility remained financial. The 1936 family law established stringent provisions for child support in cases of divorce or separation: one-fourth of the defendant’s wages for one child, one-third for two, and half for three or more. For non-payment of courtordered child support, a person might suffer two years’ imprisonment. By contrast with the gender-neutral language of earlier family legislation, the new requirements governing child support aimed squarely at men. The trade union newspaper Trud was particularly vocal in identifying erring men who neglected their children.53 But fatherhood now entailed more than financial support. For the first time, fatherhood was presented as an important social role—that of child rearer—a role now harnessed to the needs of the state: good citizenship required good fatherhood, too. “In the Soviet land, the father is a respected calling,” Pravda declared in its introduction to the 1936 family law. The newspaper exhorted men to be active, not passive, fathers. [H]e who sees the fulfillment of his paternal duties in the punctual payment of alimony [meaning child support] cannot walk with proudly

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lifted head and call himself a worthy Soviet citizen . . . . A Soviet child has a right to a real father, an educator and friend. A father who abandons his children is guilty both before them and before the socialist state which has entrusted the children to his care. In the “new Soviet family” both mother and father “must care for the child and educate it in the same measure . . . both parents must look after them,” must rear them “into conscious and active workers for socialist society, fighters for the revolutionary work of the proletariat.”54 Indeed, so central had fatherhood become, in propaganda if not in reality, that in Pravda during 1936, photographs of fathers with young children actually appeared more frequently than photographs of mothers. “My dream?” half-seriously responded Valery Chkalov, the famous Soviet aviator, who “loved children with all his heart”: “To have a pile of kids. Best have six. Not less.” The model was Stalin himself. Often depicted in propaganda posters surrounded by beaming and grateful children, Stalin figured as the biggest and best father of all, the one to whom ultimate loyalty was due. Thus did the state seek to appropriate the “personal” or the “private” for purposes of its own, opening up the domestic realm for colonization by the interests of the collective in general and the cult of Stalin in particular.55

Domesticity A significant ideological shift accompanied this colonization. Domesticity— in the sense of the responsibilities associated with maintaining household and home—had since 1917 been dismissed as “backward” or “petty bourgeois.” Now, that very domesticity became celebrated—retrieved from the dustbin of history, dusted off, and mobilized to serve the state. The wife-activist movement epitomized the shift. Beginning in 1936 and winding down by 1939, the movement invited full-time housewives, almost by definition married to high-earning men, to contribute their unpaid labor to the creation of the new society. At its height, the movement mobilized tens of thousands of wives, who contributed to a variety of cultural projects such as organizing kindergartens and children’s camps, thereby providing social services that planners neglected. In that way, women were encouraged to place their life “small as it may be” on the “altar of our fatherland,” as Galina Shtange, a wife-activist, put it in her diary.56 But the sweep was broader. All women—including working-class women—now held the potential to contribute to the construction of socialism at home by facilitating their husbands’ achievements at the workplace. Take, for example, the oath of the housewife N. Zaitseva to her husband, which

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appeared in 1934 in an issue of Rabotnitsa, a magazine aimed at workingclass women. I promise to create comfort and coziness in our apartment, prepare meals on time, keep your work clothes in order, and I require in turn that you do not lose a minute in your shock work and that there are no lapses in your work discipline and that you pass your technical examinations with your worker brigade with the highest marks.57 The wives of exemplary workers—that is, Stakhanovites—who spoke at a conference with regional party leaders held in 1936 amplified Zaitseva’s message. “Now I work in production and also take care of my husband,” declared A. M. Poliakova, wife of a blacksmith, a woman who held a fulltime job herself. “In my free time, I try to do all I can for him.”58 Now firmly linked to the collective, the home itself acquired a new legitimacy, too. And this really was a home, self-contained, with doors that could be shut to outsiders—and consequently, distinguished from the “living space” where most people dwelled. Presented as a gift from the state, the home was “a reward for those who held the most responsibility and did the most work,” as Lynne Attwood puts it succinctly.59 Architectural norms shifted accordingly. In the early 1930s, the singlefamily apartment, complete with kitchen and bath, became the new ideal, at least as presented by the media. Although in reality most were quickly transformed into communal apartments—see earlier—the image served as a harbinger of the radiant socialist future. Only a tiny fraction of the population could enjoy such a “home,” mostly high- and middle-ranking officials and professionals, usually male heads of households, but it might sometimes reward an exemplary worker, too. In Magnitogorsk, for example, a coveted three-room apartment became one of the perks conferred on the Stakhanovite worker Vladimir Shevchuk.60 The regime’s ability to reward those deemed deserving in this fashion had its punitive underside. What was given might be taken away. Deprivation of housing figured among the punishments imposed on so-called “exploiters” during the campaign against them that lasted from 1926 to 1936 and also during the Terror against alleged “enemies.”61

The Real-Life Household Whatever ideological purposes the new celebration of domesticity served, it also both recognized and reinforced existing gender divisions of labor. The full-time urban housewife was hardly a “rare creature” at the end of the 1930s, despite the claims of many historians, including me, concerning the universality of fully employed wives.62 It is true that the proportion of

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women of all ages who were gainfully employed in Soviet Russia was far higher than the proportion in Europe or the United States. Nevertheless, while almost all adult urban men in Russia held paying jobs in the late 1930s, only about two-thirds of urban women engaged in remunerative labor even when women’s workforce participation was at its height, between ages twenty and twenty-four.63 Several circumstances, alone or in combination, contributed to the existence of millions of full-time housewives despite the state’s deployment of every means at its disposal to “use” women’s labor to build socialist industry, including reducing real wages so that most households required every kopek a woman could earn.64 Perhaps the most important factor that kept women at home in the prewar period was the sheer difficulty of everyday housekeeping. Even in Moscow, the Soviet Union’s “showcase” city, only half of the population enjoyed running water or sewerage. Elsewhere, conditions were far worse. People had also to struggle daily to obtain scarce commodities, including food, then elbow for space in the communal kitchen, then keep a watch over their pot to prevent theft while food was cooking. They had to mend clothing and shoes because obtaining new items was just about impossible. Most had to haul wood for stoves and water from the pump or well, also on a daily basis, and perhaps up several flights of stairs. Doing laundry and keeping spaces clean under such circumstances became Sisyphean tasks. Children required attention, too. There were never enough places in daycare. Indeed, access to childcare might become yet another privilege available only to elite workers.65 With the exception of wood-hauling and shoe-mending, the responsibility for performing most daily household tasks fell squarely on women’s shoulders. This was true even of childcare, the sole realm in which the leadership encouraged men to do their share. The assumption that domestic labor was women’s work not only persisted through the 1930s. The new emphasis on a wife’s responsibility for her husband’s productivity at work, even when she herself worked full-time outside the home, is also likely to have reinforced it. Women’s responsibility for doing housework seemed as natural as breathing. “Why should you wash the floors and do your own laundry and cooking when a wife could do that for you?” wondered the male friends of the upwardly mobile but still unwed young activist Stepan Podliubnyi in the mid-1930s.66 Many households with the means—and perhaps even some without it—might lighten a housewife’s burdens by hiring a domestic worker. The authorities had made their peace with a housewife’s need for assistance, given the insufficiency of collective facilities, the enhanced importance of a “cultured” lifestyle to beneficiaries of upward mobility (“cultured” meaning, among other things, cleanliness and domestic order), and the necessity of a restful home life so that workers could perform maximally on the job. For people who became domestic laborers—invariably women, refugees from the collectivized village—domestic servitude provided a roof over their head

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(virtually all lived with employers) as well as a way station en route to an industrial job if not a permanent halting place.67 Impressionistic evidence suggests that the people who employed servants mostly belonged to the relatively privileged strata of the population— professionals as well as party members and high-ranking military officers and the like—the very same people who were also likely to enjoy somewhat more living space and, ironically enough, a wife at home. Servants also figured among the rewards supposedly enjoyed by exemplary workers. Most working-class households, however, lacked the economic wherewithal and perhaps the space—a separate kitchen, or a hallway—where a domestic worker might sleep. The full burden of looking after the household thus descended on most housewives’ shoulders, whether or not they held a full-time job. Time budget studies of working-class households conducted in 1936 indicate the toll this took on gainfully employed women. They spent roughly four times as many hours as the men of their household on household labor, and devoted less time than the men to personal care, to study, even to rest, sleeping roughly one hour a day less than men. (It is unclear whether these budget studies included working women who headed urban households, and who comprised some 21.6 percent of household heads in 1939.) Fulltime housewives, by comparison, spent almost twice as much time as employed women on housework and got slightly more sleep than men. They no doubt made the lives of their husbands more comfortable than those of men whose wives worked full-time. However, the women themselves may have been less interesting than their gainfully employed sisters: notably, fulltime housewives appear to have spent less time studying, engaging in social and political work, even taking care of their person than did women who held paying jobs.68 All the same, many men who could manage it seemed to have preferred a boring wife to an overworked one, even if this meant that the men themselves had to work harder to support the household. Anecdotal evidence suggests the diversity of such men’s economic circumstances. For example, when, shortly after their marriage in 1936, one wife asked her husband, a brick worker, for permission to continue working in a sewing machine factory, he said “no.” “There will be a baby,” he informed her. “It is better to stay at home. A nursemaid cannot raise it so well. It is better for a mother to raise it.” The wife of a former bookkeeper from Novosibirsk remained home caring for their two children, too. So did the mother of Galina Kosterina, who raised four children in the provincial city of Iaroslavl’. She began working for pay only after war broke out. “She hadn’t worked before,” her daughter remembered. “She hadn’t needed to because my dad [employed as a chauffeur for a powerful party official] provided for us very well.” “Notions of propriety and status” certainly kept some married women at home. Others, however, remained at home to provide proper care for their children.69

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Enter the babushka. A mother or mother-in-law in residence might make all the difference to whether a wife and mother remained gainfully employed, and how a household fared if she was. In personal accounts of this period, resident babushki make frequent appearances. “Grandparents, especially grandmothers, had a useful function,” remembered Mary Leder. “They took care of the children, stood in lines to buy necessities, and in general, kept house.” A grandmother might be a rescuer, too. As the Terror of 1936–8 swept up countless parents, grandmothers, somehow immune to arrest, frequently stepped in to assume responsibility for children who might otherwise be consigned to an orphanage.70 Babushki also played a vital role in the households of factory workers, where they contributed to maintaining rural values in an urban setting. “Traditionally dressed peasant grandmothers were among the most prominent features at the workers barracks at Ostankino,” remembered Liudmila Alexeyeva of the early 1930s. The barracks housed young laborers, most in their twenties, who having left their villages and found work and housing in Moscow, “brought over their mothers to take care of the children.”71 The extended household, usually consisting of an older mother, a married child, and one or more grandchildren, remained commonplace in urban Russia during the 1930s, although somewhat less so than in the previous decade. On the basis of the 1939 census, Gijs Kessler has estimated that 14 to 16 percent of all urban households were extended, a drop from the 20 percent of 1926.72 His figures very likely understate the presence of the care-giving babushka, however. While there is no way of knowing how many nonresident grandmothers contributed to housework and childcare, memoirs, oral histories, and other personal testimonies leave no doubt that many did.73 In addition, countless urban workers continued the long-standing practice of sending infants and small children to be cared for by their grandparents in the village until they became old enough to attend school and/or during summer holidays.74

Surviving Difficult Times Even as law and propaganda sought to promote the stability of marriages, other official priorities and policies eroded it. Registering a marriage, for instance, often changed remarkably little in the lives of young newlyweds. It is true that registration granted license to have sex and for the husband, especially, signified adulthood and a measure of personal stability in the eyes of authorities. If the marriage failed, registration also enabled the wife to claim support for any children born of the union. But it brought few of the other changes then associated with marriage in industrialized nations. Most notably, it rarely ensured access to conjugal privacy. This was mostly the result of the extreme housing scarcity, but also due to the arbitrariness

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built into the system of housing allocation. Thus, a married couple who applied to the authorities seeking a room of their own—even if they had children—enjoyed no guarantee that their application would succeed even after 1936, when the laws governing marriage grew stricter. Access depended not on one’s marital status but on one’s position in the hierarchy of privilege or on whom one knew personally. “My husband had the power to allocate living space,” remembered Anna Dubova. “He allocated space to my sister who lived with us, so she had a little room.”75 Seriously committed but unmarried couples with good connections might obtain the room they applied for; couples that registered their marriage but stood low on the status ladder might not. “One of our girls got married but had no place to meet with her husband,” remembered a student interviewed in the Harvard émigré project. “She continued to live with us and he lived in the boys’ dormitory.”76 The sheer difficulty of obtaining living space often meant that one of the partners—now with his or her new spouse—continued to live with his or her parents for years if not for good, and even after the birth of children. The arrangement took its toll on conjugal intimacy. Parents and married children “often had to live in the same room, at best separated by a screen,” remembered Mary Leder. “Practically all our private life took place before the eyes of our relatives,” recalled another woman who came of age in this period.77 And these people enjoyed relative privilege. Privacy was virtually impossible for the millions who flooded in from elsewhere seeking new job opportunities and who lived in overcrowded barracks—at best—cheek by jowl with strangers. In Magnitogorsk, where housing was exceedingly scarce, entire worker families shared large common rooms, obtaining privacy by hanging a cloth or a sheet; circumstances were no better, and sometimes worse, elsewhere.78 The Stakhanovites awarded an apartment of their own were privileged indeed. Other official policies also served to attenuate conjugal ties. Having been educated at state expense, students of higher education were obliged to accept jobs wherever the state wished to send them after graduation. While formally registering their marriage improved student couples’ odds of being sent to the same location, it failed to guarantee it.79 Husbands or wives who held responsible positions were frequently dispatched to work elsewhere for varying periods of time (the komandirovka), almost never together. After work, meetings absorbed people’s “free” time, and the more responsible the person, the busier they were likely to be. Even vacations—to the extent that they existed—were often separate, provided by the workplace. This meant that many husbands and wives (and children) vacationed separately when they vacationed at all.80  In a category all its own were the periodic campaigns against “enemies,” especially the Terror of 1936–8, which tore apart marriages and families. During those horrific years, state agents treated intimate ties to family

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members as directly in competition with the requisite loyalty to an embattled socialist collective.81 How could wives or close relatives have been unaware of a loved one’s traitorous behavior? Why did they not report that person to the authorities? Such questions meant that the family members of people accused of political misconduct often became subject to suspicion themselves. Wives and children suffered the most. Of the millions of people arrested in the Terror, the vast majority were men. But some wives became subject to arrest themselves: in 1937 so many women were arrested as “wives” that special camps had to be created to hold them. Those wives who escaped arrest suffered other consequences of their husband’s alleged crimes. Employees of the state like everyone else, they often lost their jobs and their housing; friends and relatives ostracized them for fear of being contaminated. Children’s fate was often even worse unless a relative dared to claim them. Dispatched to children’s homes, their names often changed and past effaced, countless children perished. To preserve themselves and their children, an unknown number of wives renounced and divorced arrested husbands. For the same reasons, kin severed ties with the immediate families of arrestees, seriously fraying Russians’ still strong and extensive kinship networks.82 Smaller fry—the majority of victims—suffered as much as, or more than, bigger fish. Having lost their main wage earner, worker or peasant households faced destitution. The arrest of collective farmer Ivan Diutchkov, for instance, left nine children and their mother alone in the village. In a state of nervous shock, she was unable to nurse her newborn baby boy, who died.83 The Terror thus added its share to two important demographic phenomena of this period: the decline in birth rates and the increase in female-headed households, and likely contributed to a third—rising infant mortality. And yet, despite the material hardships, the uncertain, even threatening, circumstances and external demands on family time, and despite the virtual disappearance of a space to call one’s own, many people felt their family ties had grown stronger rather than weaker in this period, as households drew together for solace and self-protection. Or, at least, so discovered the people who interviewed Soviet emigres during the 1940s and raised the question. They found that the large majority of urban respondents—although manual laborers rather less than people who performed intellectual labor—thought that their families had grown closer or remained the same under Soviet circumstances. Peasant respondents reported less family cohesion, surely reflecting the trauma they had recently endured. Even they, however, were more likely to give positive rather than negative answers.84

Conclusion By the 1930s, the Soviet leadership had abandoned efforts to foster the family’s “withering away.” Instead, law and propaganda transformed marriage and family into essential building blocks of socialism, Stalinist-

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style—but only when properly harnessed to the needs of the state. Marriage, the first step of family formation, now signified personal stability and fostered—or was supposed to foster—the childbearing requisite for the socialist future. Ideological assaults on domesticity also ceased. Although only the most privileged enjoyed a home in the sense of a genuinely private space, the home was resurrected too, as a reward for exemplary service to the socialist collective in the present, and a promise to all in the radiant future. Gender roles were reconfigured accordingly: official propaganda now placed responsibility for performing domestic and emotional labor squarely on the shoulders of women, who were forced to compensate for a range of shortfalls in state services whether or not they held full-time jobs themselves. Ironically, perhaps, one of the consequences of this failure to eliminate or fundamentally reshape family life was that “new people” were often being raised by old ones, older women especially, who helped to compensate for the shortfalls in state services while instilling in the young their own values and beliefs. To survive, household members often had to pull together. An unknown and unknowable number of people found solace in marriage and the ties of family, and regarded the home—such as it was—as a meaningful place of refuge. During the Terror, these ties often became a source of suspicion, evidence of intimate allegiances in conflict with loyalty to the collective and, above all, to Stalin. When war broke out, officials would endeavor to appropriate those very allegiances, too.

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8 Defending the Home(land) World War II and After

World War II was a struggle for the Soviet Union’s very existence. As difficult as life might have been for most people during the 1930s, after war broke out life became almost unimaginably more difficult still. To mobilize its people for the immense sacrifices the war effort required, the leadership strove to broaden and deepen its appeal—to reach beyond those who embraced its world view to encompass those unaffected or even alienated by it. Without ceasing, repression eased. And while coercion not only remained the norm throughout but in some respects intensified, the outreach was, nevertheless, genuine. Attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church and other religious institutions ceased; the media tried and, to a considerable extent, succeeded in speaking in the voice of the people (rather than the party), at least during the first, most desperate years. Alongside patriotism, Russian patriotism especially, “private” values gained new prominence, now infused with profound emotional significance. As enemy forces destroyed towns by the thousands and homes by the millions, as families were torn apart, and intimate relationships strained by lengthy separations and the almost unbearable stresses of war-related upheavals and deprivations, as combat decimated the male population, a new, personalized, indeed, individualized language of sentiment emerged in wartime culture. Motherhood, family, hearth, and home became essential components of Soviet patriotism—a primary motivation to defend Soviet territory even at the cost of one’s life. In a modified form, these themes continued across a range of media even after the battle of Stalingrad, when victory appeared possible and Stalin resumed his position at the center of political imagery. In the postwar period, amidst widespread devastation, and as survivors shouldered the arduous task of rebuilding, the themes of motherhood,

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family, hearth, and home persisted, now clothed in a somewhat different garb, alongside an official family policy more draconian than ever. In 1944, catastrophic material and human losses and an acute demographic imbalance prompted yet another iteration of Family Law, one that further restricted the ability of individuals to shape their own intimate lives. The new law narrowed the definition of marriage, severely restricted divorce, and, for the first time, stigmatized children born out of wedlock, while instituting additional incentives for childbearing. This effort to ensure marital stability and replenish a devastated population brought the state directly into millions of postwar households and made it an arbiter of family affairs. At the same time, officially approved images of hearth, of home, of personal and family happiness contributed to people’s expectations of the good life and of long-postponed rewards for limitless sacrifice, even as people struggled to recover from the traumas of war, to rebuild shattered homes and lives, and to mend, or even end, damaged relationships, whatever the restrictions on divorce.

World War II The “Private” and the “Public” Catching both citizens and leadership largely unprepared, the Nazi forces’ surprise attacks along three separate fronts proved stunningly effective. They easily overran Soviet defenses. Vast portions of the borderlands, home to some eighty million citizens and including the Belorussian and Ukrainian republics (now Belorus and Ukraine), the latter the Soviet Union’s breadbasket, fell quickly to the invading forces, with catastrophic consequences for the resident populations. By September 8, the invaders had surrounded and besieged the city of Leningrad. In early October, they closed in on Moscow. Near chaos ensued in the months following the attack. Millions of refugees and evacuees snarled transport. Frantic efforts to disassemble and transfer thousands of industrial enterprises and some twenty-five million workers and their families from West to East, beyond the Urals and out of reach of the invaders, pushed the system to its limits. Until the victory at Stalingrad early in 1943, the regime’s ability to survive was far from obvious, even to Joseph Stalin. The threat compelled the leadership to alter its relationship to its people, if only temporarily. Intellectual and creative controls loosened, granting writers, artists, and journalists greater freedom than they had enjoyed for years. They exercised it to appeal to the public. Using the word “I,” and altering the meanings of the word “we,” writers and artists spoke in the voice of ordinary rather than exemplary people for the first time in many years. In place of the usual exhortations, they adopted a personal, intimate,

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FIGURE 8.1  Leaving for war. © Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

and individualized language, not only identifying people—soldiers, mothers, sweethearts—by name but also publishing their “personal” letters to one another or to the press. In these early years, the media highlighted the most primary of loyalties as motivating heroic action—that is, loyalty to hearth and home, mothers and wives, children and other family members, in addition to or even more than the revolution, the party and Comrade Stalin.1  Mothers, previously represented rarely despite the new pronatalism, now figured often in various media. Sometimes, most notably in the work of poster artists, they appeared as victims. In wartime posters, mothers cowered together with infants and small children, terrified and helpless before fascist bayonets, challenging Soviet soldiers to defend them. However, now depicted as powerful and stoic, mothers also symbolized the Motherland, the words mother and motherland semantically connected in Russian. The well-known poster “The Motherland [literally, Rodina-mat’ or Motherland-mother] Calls” is only the most famous example. Finally, as the very personification of selfless love, mothers served as models for female behavior more generally—like, for example, the nurse who cared for patients “just as a mother cares for her family.” In such depictions, the primary motivation for women’s diverse and absolutely vital wartime work became emotional and relational, the “women’s steadfast devotion to their families and the men they loved.”2 As presented in the wartime press, the motivations of fighting men were in key respects not so different, although they, unlike women, had only one duty: to defend hearth, home, family, and Motherland, even if it cost

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their lives. During the war, male heroism and men’s personal life became fully and positively linked: the self-sacrificing hero was also a father, a son, a husband, or a lover, who risked his life on the battlefield for the sake of those he loved. When the press depicted soldiers leaving for war, it was often women—wife, mother, sweetheart—who sent them off. A son’s willingness to fight for the Soviet state might also be rendered as a personal obligation to his own father, who fought, even died, in the Civil War. Thus, emotional and personal ties became the primary reason for fulfilling duties imposed by the state.3 Underscoring the connection, the media became a kind of go-between, offering sanitized versions of intimate relations for public consumption. Seeking to ease the strain of wartime separation, for instance, newspapers published letters from men who worried that their wives and sweethearts would fail to wait for them, and from women reassuring men of their loyalty. As if to counter men’s fears, wartime films, journalism, poetry, and prose portrayed women as exemplars of loyalty, chastity, endurance, and self-sacrifice. Such imagery helped to make the love poem, Wait for me, beloved by millions: Just wait for me and I’ll return. Wait and I will come Wait when you are drowned by grief In floods of yellow rain Wait when the wind piles up the snow, Wait in summer’s heat Wait when others cease to wait For those too soon forgot.4 The poem was patriotic “in the best sense of the word,” remembered Ludmilla Alekseyeva, whose father mailed a copy to his family from the front. Soldiers might keep the poem folded up, next to their heart. It inspired a film with the same name (Wait for Me, 1943), written by Konstantin Simonov, author of the poem. The film’s heroine conforms perfectly to the wartime stereotype of chaste and loyal wife. Her rectitude is accentuated by the behavior of her opposite, a woman disloyal to her man at the front, who—the film strongly implies—dies in consequence.5 Even after the victory at Stalingrad early in 1943, public and private motivations continued to complement one another on the pages of the wartime press, only now depersonalized and subordinate to loyalty to Stalin. And motherhood grew more prominent still as troops regained formerly occupied territory, the extent of wartime devastation and population loss became clearer, and demographic anxieties moved to the fore. Depictions of mothers and motherhood, now portrayed as women’s highest aspiration, served to reinforce the pronatalist law of 1944 (see later).6

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The War at Home World War II brought extreme hardship to virtually everyone in the Soviet Union, wherever they happened to be. There existed no Soviet “home front” strictly speaking—no place untouched by warfare, one way or another, no ordinary person who avoided mobilization or, with the exception of the most privileged, remained immune to suffering and loss. In the course of the war, about twenty-five million people became homeless, their towns and villages occupied or destroyed, their houses burned to the ground. The Belorussian, Ukrainian and Russian Republics were the most directly affected. In besieged Leningrad, over a million people, mostly women, children, and the elderly, died of starvation or starvation-related disease. The evacuation of millions, which saved countless lives, nevertheless brought the evacuees extreme hardship—insufficient food, difficulty finding work, crowded and primitive housing, and worse.7 Everywhere, people went hungry. The government reintroduced rationing in 1941. During the first years of war, Soviet citizens ate about two-thirds less food than they had in 1940. Life became especially grim in 1941/2, when the sight of men and women falling dead of starvation on Moscow streets became too commonplace even to attract crowds. The mobilization of tens of millions of men of working age often removed the primary wage earner, further impoverishing households. Having promised those households assistance, officials sometimes proved unable or, in some cases, unwilling to deliver. Delivery of assistance was especially problematic in occupied areas or areas in the path of invading or retreating forces, where the need was enormous and the resources stretched pitifully thin. Moreover, as almost always in the Soviet Union, the stick accompanied the carrot. Material support—such as it was—was withheld from the households of captured soldiers, assumed to have betrayed their country. Other households might suffer even worse: Order no. 270, signed by Stalin in August 1941, made the families of “pernicious” deserters also liable to arrest.8 Throughout the war, the responsibility for keeping the country going was borne by its female citizens. To replace the labor of men called into service, the Soviet government ordered full labor mobilization in 1941, incorporating into the labor force the “nonworking” population of villages and towns. By 1945, women came to comprise 56 percent of the industrial labor force. Shifts were long, eleven hours each, day and night, and days off rare to nonexistent. Women comprised an even higher proportion of the agricultural labor force: 91.7 percent. With horses called up for the army and tractor factories producing tanks, women might have to pull a plow themselves. Everywhere, women worked too hard and ate far too little. They aged. By the end of the war, their faces lifeless and drained by fatigue, most bore scant resemblance to the women that fighting men had left behind years earlier, the image of whom remained in men’s minds during the long separation. “You won’t know us at all if the war goes on much longer,”

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wrote Natalia Taranicheva to her officer husband in October 1944. “It’s a pity that you have become so remote from us.”9 The war placed immense strains on human relationships. During its course, some thirty-four million men and roughly one million women left behind their towns, cities, and villages to join the fighting forces. It was hard to stay in touch with those at home. Leaves were rare to nonexistent. The post, a vital lifeline between loved ones, was a lifeline that often enough failed. Troops moved constantly as the front shifted or they might be out of reach behind enemy lines. Abram Leder, an officer in the Red Army, wrote letters filled with anxiety when he failed to receive news from his wife. “I don’t know what to think. I haven’t heard from you. I don’t know whether you arrived safely or what has happened to you.” People in besieged Leningrad were cut off entirely from the outside world. “Write me something about Mama,” a young soldier begged his godmother in February 1944. “There’s been no news of her since September, 1941,” when she occupied her flat in Leningrad.10 The wholesale movement of populations generated other kinds of strains. During the course of the war, some 16.5 million people from areas close to the Soviet Union’s western border were evacuated to Siberia, the Caucasus, or Central Asia. Millions more were drafted for work that took them far from home, often for lengthy periods. Teenagers aged fourteen or older were mobilized into the State Labor Reserves, removed from their families, and sent to live in factory barracks. Children on holiday in pioneer camps when war broke out might lose contact with their parents: tens of thousands of others ended up evacuated on their own.11

Love and War Despite the pledges of love and loyalty that featured so prominently in the various media, the war strained intimate relations to, and sometimes beyond, their breaking point. This is not the place to revisit the extraordinary hardships endured by the Soviet Union’s fighting forces, some of those hardships avoidable. But people at the front found it impossible to write home frankly about their experiences. Censorship was one reason, the horror of their experiences, another, the desire to conceal their conduct, sometimes a third. As millions faced death on a daily basis, constraints on behavior—including sexual behavior—often fell away, and at the very time that expectations of female chastity and purity not only persisted but also deepened, especially among the fighting men, encouraged by the media.12 Sexual liaisons were commonplace at the front, irrespective of the partners’ marital status. Most often such liaisons were fleeting, occurring between rank-and-file soldiers and civilian women hungry for a man or willing to trade sex for food. Reluctant female recruits might also seek out such encounters to become pregnant, which would entitle them to be

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sent home. Other liaisons, however, became serious or at least relatively stable, facilitated by the presence of about a million women mobilized for the war effort. Everywhere outnumbered by men, they were ever-present during the fighting, performing both combatant and non-combatant duties. Some 800,000 fought in the armed forces and partisan units by the war’s end. Tens of thousands of others served as physicians, medics and nurses, typists, radio operators, and more, both at the front and in the rear.13 Everywhere, such women confronted sexual pressures and if they chose, sexual opportunities. Sexual access to female subordinates had been one of the perks of power at least since the 1920s; sexual harassment was far from uncommon in prewar Soviet Russia. During the war, such constraints as still existed appear to have fallen away. Commanding officers exercised enormous authority and although most were married men, many—how many it is impossible to say—abused that authority to gain sexual access to women. “Some generals quickly came to regard all nurses, waitresses and women typists and radio operators as fair game,” remembered Lev Kopelev, who served at the front. As for Kopelev himself, when the attractive Lyuba was assigned to work with him, he informed her that since the two of them would be working together day and night, “we couldn’t avoid sleeping together so why put it off?” Both had spouses. Officers could pick and choose among the women assigned to their command. So as to fend off the advances of other men, some women chose a single “protector.” Others found themselves helpless to refuse a sexual encounter in a situation of life and death.14 Enduring for months, even years, front line relationships could become serious, irrespective of the marital status of one or both partners. Many of the long-term relationships involved officers, not ordinary soldiers. They were often referred to as “marriages,” with the woman involved serving as a kind of “wife.” Men in powerful positions, including Marshall Georgii Zhukov himself, acquired “trophy wives.” More common was the term “P. P. Zh,” an acronym meaning field campaign wife and a derogatory play on the initials of a sub-machine gun. If both parties were unattached and managed to survive, wartime liaisons could eventuate in marriage once the war ended. “The happiest marriages were those made at the front,” remembered a former soldier. “Those were the happiest couples.” Often enough, however, sexual liaisons involving married men led to the creation of second families that might compete with the first for the love and loyalty of the husband.15 Marital fidelity became almost as relaxed among some civilians. In wartime Moscow, remembered Mary Leder, there were many “romances.” It was not uncommon for men and women to become involved in liaisons, “some of which were very serious,” even as those same men experienced concern about their evacuated wives and children and sent them parcels of food and clothing when they could. For their part, wives involved with other men deprived themselves to send goodies to their husbands at the front.16

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The images of female chastity that dominated the media notwithstanding, pangs of jealousy could be difficult to avoid, especially among married men at the front. Having seen civilian women eagerly engage in casual sex, married soldiers began to wonder about their wives. Rumors reached the front; so did scores of “dear John” letters. Although the wartime divorce rate remained steady, the proportion of divorces occurring less than a year after the wedding grew, perhaps because in July 1941 many couples married in haste, before the men went off to war.17

Restoring a Decimated Population: The Family Law of 1944 No one knows for certain the cost of World War II in terms of human lives. Estimates currently are that some 26.6 million people perished, some 76.6 percent of those people male. In addition, during wartime the population failed to replenish itself. Marriage rates dropped sharply after the first spate of marriages in the summer of 1941. In Siberia, for instance, marriages declined from 4.7 per thousand people in 1941 to less than half of that by 1943. Moreover, with young men at the front, people also married at much later ages. The birth rate dropped precipitously: in all, wartime Russia experienced roughly half of the number of births that might have been expected had peace prevailed.18 Even as war raged, the Soviet state took such measures as it could to fend off the looming demographic catastrophe. Less than six months after the invasion, a decree issued by the Supreme Soviet levied a tax on bachelors, single people of childbearing age and those without children, excepting only those in military service.19 As the leadership grew more confident of the Soviet Union’s survival, Stalin and his aides grew still more preoccupied with the birth rate. How might it be increased when peace came, given the magnitude of male casualties, which left women of childbearing age outnumbering men in record numbers? The state began ramping up its pronatalist policies, which took a variety of forms. The newspaper Komsomol’skaia Pravda, which had featured mothers throughout the war, for example, began focusing more extensively on young mothers and on women’s motherly efforts to reconstruct war-damaged families. In August 1943, coeducation, one of the achievements of the revolution, was abolished, replaced by separate schooling for boys and girls as of September 1 of that year. The rationale was to give proper attention to “the different requirements of their [boys’ and girls’] vocational training, practical activities, [and] preparation for military service,” and to prepare girls for future wifehood and motherhood. The decree declared: “It is essential to introduce in girls’ schools such additional subjects as pedagogics, needlework, courses in domestic science, personal hygiene and care of children.” Separate

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schooling persisted until 1954, a year after Stalin’s death, when parental opposition contributed to its demise.20 Yet another iteration of Family Law addressed the issue of population growth explicitly. Promulgated on July 8, 1944, after a “phony national discussion,” the decree was explicitly pronatalist in orientation.21 It greatly increased the rewards for mothers of many children, now irrespective of their marital status, while changing the definition of “many.” The law of 1936 had entitled to state assistance women who bore seven or more children; after 1944, the number at which mothers merited assistance dropped to three. A third child brought a one-time payment. With each subsequent child, the size of the one-time payment increased, supplemented by a monthly stipend beginning in the child’s second year and continuing until the child turned five. The decree also extended maternity leave and added provisions to protect pregnant women at the workplace and augment their food ration. Finally, it established a system of “Motherhood Medals,” to be awarded to mothers with five or more children and an “Order of Motherhood Glory,” granted to those bearing seven or more. Motherhood awards brought privileges, among them the right to a reduction of rent of up to 50 percent. Linking motherhood with duty to the motherland, in 1944 the press began publishing lists of women who won “Order of Motherhood Glory” awards in addition to lists of citizens awarded military orders, thereby implicitly equating the two.22 The 1944 Family Law also aimed at strengthening the institution of marriage. Obtaining a divorce became far more expensive and complicated. A person who sought one had first to apply to the local People’s Court, at a cost of 100 rubles, and then at his or her own expense, to place an advertisement in a local newspaper announcing his or her intent to divorce— often a complicated, frustrating process. Both spouses then had to appear in court, where the judge would attempt at reconciliation. Reconciliation failing, the plaintiff would have to appeal to yet another court, where the decision whether or not to grant the divorce rested with the judge. The law itself established no specific grounds, but courts were advised to reject “irresponsible” divorce petitions. If the judge, nevertheless, decided in favor of divorce, s/he levied a fee, which ranged from 500 to 2000 rubles, hefty sums at a time (1944) when the average industrial worker earned 484 rubles per month and the average collective farm worker, 205 rubles. Finally, to prevent men from contracting multiple marriages, a new column was introduced into the requisite internal passport: “family status.” It included the spouse’s name and date of birth, and the time and place of marriage.23 Endeavoring to strengthen registered marriage, the law at the same time stripped unregistered unions of legal protections. For the first time since the Family Law of 1918, the law drew a clear distinction between couples in registered unions and those in unregistered ones, and stigmatized as illegitimate children born to the latter. Only a couple that had registered

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their marriage gained access to state-owned housing. Only a woman in a registered marriage enjoyed the right to bring a paternity suit or appeal to the courts for child support.24 Children born to women outside of a registered marriage would bear their mother’s surname and have a line through their birth certificate where the father’s name should be—a source of considerable shame for children when they started attending school. The change affected substantial numbers of people: as of 1939, some 15 to 20 percent of “married” couples were in unregistered unions. One of the consequences of the 1944 law was a “rush to the registrar’s office by long established couples,” remembered Mary Leder. Among them she saw a white-haired couple that had met in Siberian exile before the revolution and already had grandchildren. “He just made an honest woman of me,” the bride informed Leder, who encountered the couple returning from the registry office.25 Others followed their example, contributing to a rise in rates of marriage that began in 1944 and continued for years thereafter (see later). The law thus promoted a marital and family order that in its restrictions on divorce and treatment of de facto marriage and out-of-wedlock children bore more than a passing resemblance to that which the Bolsheviks had overturned after 1917. But the law combined those echoes of the past with elements that were radically new, chiefly a punitive pronatalism. Taxes on those who failed to reproduce were now extended to women and men who had less than three children; only the birth of a third child freed them from taxation. Children fathered by men outside of their registered marriage did not count toward the men’s quota. Exemptions existed: military men on active duty and their wives, people younger than age twenty-five and attending school full-time, and people who had lost children during the war.26 Everyone else had to pay. That financial burden notwithstanding, the new law clearly privileged men. By relieving men of financial responsibility for children born to unregistered unions, however enduring, it brought an end to the paternity and child support suits that had flooded the courts during the 1930s. The law shifted men’s responsibility to the state, which now substituted for the absent father symbolically, if less so in real life. Initially, the amount of state support for women raising children on their own was to be equivalent to the sum required of delinquent fathers under the family law of 1936. Lacking the means, however, the state, instead, provided a mere pittance—a fraction of what a male wage earner was likely to contribute.27 As a result, in the postwar period most unmarried mothers faced poverty. The state also reneged on its promises to create childcare institutions to ease the burdens of motherhood for married and unmarried women alike, despite the fact that the vast majority of women worked outside the home as well as in it. As of 1950, women constituted 47 percent of the labor force.28 Absent a resident caregiver, their preschool children spent their days unsupervised, on the street.

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The Postwar Family Restoring Hearth and Home “Everywhere the frontline soldiers are welcomed with excitement and joy, with open arms . . . they are returning home to peaceful labor, to their own families, with their sense of patriotic duty fulfilled,” proclaimed Pravda in 1945. Emotional ties to hearth and home, to mothers, wives, and children—indeed, personal life in a variety of forms—remained central in the media even after the war had ended, but now as a reward for the hard-won victory. The pathos, pain, and longing that had characterized the war years were mostly gone. The poster “Happy Housewarming” illustrates the new, almost unrelentingly upbeat tone. Issued in 1946, at a time when some twenty-five million people remained homeless, it depicts a smiling young woman welcoming the viewer into her sparkling new home. Evidently unmarried (note the maidenly single braid), her face and figure bear no sign of the trauma, deprivation, and suffering that virtually no one escaped during wartime.29 

FIGURE 8.2  “Happy Housewarming.” © Courtesy of Victoria Bonnell.

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Romantic love, individual and family happiness—domestic life in general—not only persisted as themes, but they grew even more pronounced in the postwar era. As elsewhere in combatant countries, they had become aspects of the longed-for “good life” that was supposed to accompany peace. Thus, the home served as a major locus of the literature aimed at a middlebrow audience. Such literature dwelt lovingly on domestic comforts— sparkling white tablecloths, rosy pink lampshades, and a multiplicity of decorative objects. The popular press presented images of families in appealing domestic settings. New magazines intended for women offered advice on beautifying the home, housekeeping, gardening, and cooking. The home also became a site of healing, where men, wounded or damaged by the war, might regain self-esteem and faith in their own manhood through the agency of their wives.30 Romantic love assumed still greater prominence, too. In literature, the “love plot” was now often central, with love enhancing both the heroes’ public life and the welfare of the larger collective.31 Films, intended for a mass audience and ordinarily overtly ideological, reflected the same trend. The most popular postwar film, Kubanskie Kazaki [Cossacks of the Kuban] (1949), for instance, ostensibly deals with the economic rivalry of two collective farm chairs but actually gives more screen time to its lovers, who wish to marry. One of the collective chairs opposes the marriage because the woman, a hero of socialist labor on his collective, would move to her new husband’s collective afterward, depriving the chair of her exemplary work. The film contains the following exchange: “This is a political matter,” states the collective farm chair. “This is a personal matter,” responds the regional leader, adding that the marriage of two high achievers will benefit the entire country. If the “family theme” had become central across a range of media, so too had the relationship between children and parents—and not only mothers but, now, also fathers. The postwar Soviet man was a family man, and the demobilized soldier first and foremost a father. In the postwar literature, positive heroes never abandoned their families. Popular magazines even began publishing photographs of fathers assuming their domestic and paternal responsibilities and interacting pleasurably with their children: teaching them to play the piano, to ski, and the like. To be sure, the number of such images remained small, far overshadowed by representations of the bond between mother and child. Representations of fathers were also counterbalanced by images of bereaved families or those in which a father’s photograph replaced the father lost to war— visual imagery being the sole format in which such losses figured. Into the breach left by absent fathers moved Stalin’s personality cult, endowing the cult itself with a domestic dimension for the first time. Prominently displayed in domestic settings where children were present and fathers absent, portraits or photographs of Stalin served visually as a stand-in for fathers lost to the war.32

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The emphasis on restoring hearth and home likely derived from writers’ and artists’ own longing for postwar “normalcy.” But it clearly addressed official priorities, too—in particular, stabilizing the family and replenishing the population. Given the tightness of censorship and the need for official approval of every word and image, such themes otherwise would never have been allowed into public space. Whether or not postwar changes meant that “the state ‘harnessed’ the hearth, brought it under state ownership and control and leased it out to individuals for use,” as Victor Buchli has contended, the hearth’s newly central place in official ideology and representations of the “good life” had come to stay.33

Love Among the Ruins Perhaps never was the gap between image and reality greater than in the postwar Soviet Union. The war left the country in a state of utter devastation. Agricultural production was at about 50 per cent of its prewar level; about a third of capital stock had been destroyed, as had hundreds of towns, and tens of thousands of villages. Rendered homeless at the war’s end, millions of households lived in dugouts, cellars, or other unsuitable quarters, and many continued to do so for years thereafter. Evacuees or those who had been moved eastward together with their factories might find themselves unable to return to their previous dwellings, sometimes because those dwellings had been destroyed or appropriated by someone else, sometimes because aspiring returnees lacked the requisite documents. Even for those with their own roof, living conditions were often harsh: many homes lacked heat, running water, indoor toilets, and the like.34 Wartime rationing continued until 1947. During 1946/7, millions went hungry, not only in cities but also in the countryside, because agriculture attained only around half of its prewar level of production and the government took from collective farmers literally everything they could grow. Extreme poverty prompted tens of thousands of parents to abandon their children to fend for themselves, not only in the countryside but in Moscow, too. The children presented themselves as orphans so as to receive state assistance; they also begged on the streets. Infant mortality rates rose again. Deaths from starvation became common. There was an explosion of what came to be called “women’s crime,” that is, women stealing from shops in order to feed their starving children. Some 53,000 people were prosecuted for stealing bread in the fall of 1946 alone.35 The war also left millions of women with no hope of finding a permanent male partner. Even before the war broke out, there existed a substantial gender imbalance between men and women of reproductive age—37.6 million women between the ages of twenty and forty-four as compared to 34.8 million men in the USSR as a whole as of 1940. The war raised this imbalance to catastrophic levels: of the roughly twenty-seven million people

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who died due to the war, some twenty million were men. As a result, among the twenty- to forty-four-year olds in the immediate postwar years, women exceeded men by close to thirteen million. The imbalance was most extreme in rural areas, where there were only twenty-eight men for every one hundred women between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine. This was not only because conscription had hit rural areas the hardest but also because, rather than returning to the countryside, demobilized soldiers had headed for major industrial cities.36 But even in urban areas, a man who had survived or avoided the war and who had lost his wife or remained single could usually pick and choose among potential partners. He often opted for youth. One result, substantial age differences between husbands and wives—of twelve, fourteen, even seventeen years— are evident among some parents of the “Baby Boomer” Russians interviewed by Donald Raleigh.37 However, the Family Law of 1944 forestalled the kind of marital “reshuffling” that occurred in the 1920s. Men who wed before World War II found it difficult to impossible to divorce older wives in order to marry younger women, as older men had done earlier thanks to postrevolutionary legislation. As a result, after World War II, relatively few war widows, even young war widows, found a new husband.38 So while the end of the war brought an upsurge of registered marriages—not surprisingly after the severe decline of the war years and the pressure of the Family Law of 1944 to legalize de facto unions—the number of marriages began to drop again as early as 1947, a year before the armed forces were fully demobilized.39 And while the law could not prevent marital breakdown and the formation of new unions, it could—and did—deprive most of them of legal standing. Innumerable marriages faltered or collapsed due to the strains of the war years. Hardship toughened wives; their wartime experiences forever changed many of the husbands fortunate enough to survive. “I got married in 1939,” explained a member of the Communist Party who abandoned his wife in 1943 to marry another woman. “The war soon began, I was on the front, and my feelings towards my wife cooled off.” Iurii Fleisher, a military physician dispatched to Sverdlovsk on the eve of the war, never resumed living with his wife Vera and their children. Sent to the Far East at the end of the war, he merely visited his wife and two sons from time to time, so his wife, a teacher, raised her sons alone. The peasant father-in-law of Aleksandra Chistiakova returned home after the war, but then moved away again soon after. He remained out of touch for the next fifteen years. Gavriil Kiselev, a collective farmer, also never returned home to his wife and two children. When his wife finally tracked him down, she found he had “married” two other women. One of them had borne a daughter, the other, a son. Countless other men took advantage of the wartime chaos simply to disappear and find another wife.40 Reunions, joyous and unproblematic as portrayed in propaganda— although somewhat less so in literary representations—often brought

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rude awakenings and difficult readjustments in actuality. Some marriages endured, but at a considerable cost. Catherine Merridale relates the story of a woman named Valentina and her husband, married just before the war and enjoying scant time together before he left for the front. During the war, she supervised a production line at an evacuated munitions factory, working shifts of ten or even twelve hours a day. He wrote home regularly, loving letters brimming with longing that continued while he was stationed in Soviet-occupied Berlin after the war had ended. But when he finally returned home in 1946, Valentina somehow learned the truth: while in Berlin, he lived with a German woman, whom he left the day after she bore his child. Valentina felt a “murderous” rage and did not want him back. Nevertheless, practicality kept her in the marriage. Housing was difficult to obtain. Married couples, and especially the families of veterans, enjoyed priority. The two lived together until his death in 2001.41 Valentina’s husband’s liaison with a foreign woman was not uncommon. Romances between Soviet forces occupying postwar Central and Eastern Europe and citizens of those occupied countries became frequent enough that the state chose to act to deter their formalization. In February 1947, a decree was issued that forbade marriage between foreign and Soviet citizens—a sign of the Soviet Union’s growing isolationism as well.42 It was repealed only after Stalin’s death. Divorce applications provide a hint—but only a hint—of the extent of marital breakdown, because many of the unhappily married never even bothered to apply. Notably, divorce figures in none of the instances of marital breakdown described before, except, perhaps, that of the party member. Still, applications for divorce are telling in their own way. Unsurprisingly, men made up the majority of applicants for divorce; also unsurprisingly, men who had started a new family during or soon after the war represented a significant proportion. Unsurprisingly, too, given the cost of divorce, applicants were often men of some means. In Moscow oblast’, for which figures are available, male divorce applicants tended to occupy military or white-collar positions, to be between the ages of thirty and forty, and to seek to end marriages that had lasted between five and ten years. The most common reason men gave for applying for divorce was their desire to legalize a second family. The second most common reason—a wife’s alleged infidelity—in some cases at least served as a mere cover for the first.43 Most applicants failed to obtain the divorce for which they applied. However, over time the number of successful divorce applications increased while never reaching the heights of the mid-1930s. Surely atypical, Moscow, for which figures are available, gives some sense of the trajectory. There, some 10,000 to 12,000 divorces occurred yearly before the war; in 1945, divorces numbered exactly 679. The numbers steadily increased thereafter—to 4000–5000 a year in 1947/8, and 7000–8000 by 1949/50. Although rates likely rose faster in Moscow than elsewhere, everywhere they were on the upswing, including in rural areas where divorce had been

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rare before the war and where, often, the community still disapproved of it. In 1949, rising numbers in the USSR as a whole prompted the Supreme Court of the USSR to decide that lower courts had grown too liberal in granting divorce and to urge greater restraint. Neither “the will of the spouses to end a marriage,” nor a husband’s establishment of a de facto relationship with another woman provided adequate grounds for divorce, declared the court.44 The sheer expense and difficulty of obtaining a formal divorce meant that many divorces simply went “underground,” to adopt the language of historical demographer Anatolii Vishnevskii—that is, couples simply separated without formally divorcing. Then one or both of the spouses forged new unions that also remained unregistered, meaning that marriage, too, went “underground.” Consequently, even after legal recognition had been ripped away, “de facto” marriage remained very common indeed. How common is impossible to say, however, as, having done away with legal recognition, agents of the state had no means—and probably, no desire—to record the numbers.45 So once more, anecdotal evidence must suffice. Thus Gavriil Kiselev’s wife, Evgeniia, having tried and failed to win back her husband and still married to him according to the law, eventually “married” again, as she put it—twice. Ksenia Ch., born in a village in Volodga region, actually boasted to post-Soviet interviewers about “marrying” a married man just after the war, having stolen him away from the woman he had married seven years earlier and to whom he was still legally bound. That “de facto” relationship endured for forty years. Having married during the war a man who already had a wife, Aleksandra Chistiakova “married” again, but this time without registering, and remained with her husband and in her in-laws’ household for years despite their abusive behavior.46 Suggesting a profound shift in values, all of these people were rural, not urban, dwellers. Needless to say, de facto unions existed among urbanites, too. One of Donald Raleigh’s interviewees, Tatyana Arzhanova, grew up in the Saratov household of her mother and grandmother, but also had an unofficial “stepfather” who lived with the family for several years. The mother of another found herself a Kazakh “husband,” a man apparently married to someone else. Ordered to return to his first wife while still in the army, he refused and was discharged. “Single” women hospitalized after illegal abortions often claimed to be in “de facto” unions, citing as the reason for their abortions that the “husband has a second family or lives with another wife,” or “marriage is not registered.”47 That de facto unions remained common does not necessarily mean that other people—members of workplace collectives, neighbors, fellow party members, and the like—approved of them. During the 1930s, the leadership had fostered a puritanical sexual morality along with its increased emphasis on family stability. Reinforced by imagery of chaste and faithful wives and self-sacrificing and nurturing mothers, that prudery persisted during the

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war and into the postwar period together with a sexual double standard. Both are evident in the treatment of women who fought at the front, who sometimes encountered slurs on their sexual reputation whatever their actual conduct may have been.48 Given their demographic disadvantage, however, innumerable women regarded a de facto union as nevertheless preferable to the alternative: celibacy and childlessness in a culture that celebrated motherhood as a woman’s greatest joy. But the absence of legal protection now left the female partner in such unions vulnerable economically as well as emotionally. Raising children after the war was enormously expensive: just one child required close to half of the average woman’s wages. The modest government subsidies paid to single mothers offered little help.49 At the same time, the 1944 law encouraged male irresponsibility. It is true that many of the husbands who left their wives to “marry” another woman, whether de facto or in an act of bigamy, felt committed to their new relationship and hoped to obtain a divorce on the basis of their fait accompli.50 But it is also the case that many others—Kiselev, with his three wives, was surely one of them— took flagrant advantage of the 1944 law. Liberated from liability for any children born to an unregistered union, men cheated on their wives, engaged in short-term liaisons, or initiated what the women assumed to be a “marriage” only to abandon the women as soon as they became pregnant or bore a child. Still legally married to her first husband, for example, Anna Dubova lived for four years with a man she met during the war “as if we had gotten married,” as she put it. “We trusted each other and we lived together.” Nevertheless, seven months after their son was born, the man walked out. “I cried and cried,” she remembered,” and that was the end of it.51 Enormous numbers of children grew up in households lacking a father— unless one counts Stalin—and headed by a woman. Such female-headed households were particularly prevalent in rural areas.52 Many resulted from wartime losses or husbands’ postwar abandonment. But in urban areas especially, some were the consequence of postwar liaisons. After the war ended, illegitimacy rates rose and in key cities, they skyrocketed: some 15 to 20 percent of births in the Soviet Union as a whole occurred outside of registered marriage. Children born to unmarried mothers constituted 43.8 percent of all births in Leningrad in 1945, 29 percent in Moscow in 1946, and 28 percent in Kiev that same year. Soviet data for the period between 1945 and 1955 indicate 8.7 million “fatherless” children—that is, children with a blank left in the space for the father’s name. Fatherless children were so numerous that so-called “Parents’ Days” at Pioneer camps in the late 1940s and early 1950s more closely resembled “Mother and Grandmother Days.”53 Some of the gap left by absent fathers—although only some—was filled by an increasingly paternalistic state, to which desperate women appealed for assistance in an escalating battle between the sexes.54

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Marriage and the Postwar Household The strains of wartime notwithstanding, countless marriages endured and millions of couples resumed cohabitation and relatively normal family lives after the war’s end. Joseph Brodsky, born 1940, remembers growing up in such a “typical Russian family of the time.” He was one of the lucky ones: his father returned from the war physically and psychologically intact. His parents “took everything as a matter of course [ . . . ] they simply tried to make the best of everything: to keep food on the table [ . . . ] to make ends meet.” Most of the time that they spent at home they were busy “cooking, washing, circulating between the communal kitchen of our apartment and our room and a half.”55 Millions more married after the war, either formalizing preexisting, de facto relationships to meet the terms of the 1944 law, or marrying for the first time and, even in rural areas, on the basis of love.56 Given the hardships of the postwar years, their weddings were usually humble affairs. “I met my husband in Iaroslavl’ in 1947 at a dance,” remembered Galina Kosterina, aged nineteen and employed as an accountant at the time. The couple walked out together every evening for about a year before he proposed. After he finished technical school a year later, they wed. She brought no dowry to the marriage, as evidently was still expected. Nor did the couple have money for a wedding celebration; the bridegroom couldn’t even afford new shoes. The two simply registered their marriage in the local ZAGS. “They just wrote down our names in their registration book, asked me which family name I wanted, and then declared us husband and wife.”57 Of necessity, simplicity prevailed in the countryside, too. “He returned from the war and I married him,” remembered a peasant woman from Vologda province of the man who had courted her for years. Asked whether she had a proper wedding, the woman responded: “A dog led a dog and put it to bed [ . . .] During those years, what kind of wedding could we have? We ate moss.”58 Settling in the household of her husband’s widowed mother, the couple remained even after the birth of four children, a pattern often found in urban areas, too, thanks in part to the severe postwar housing shortage. Although there is no way of knowing exactly how common resident grandmothers were in the postwar period, judging by later figures—as well as the phrase “Mother and Grandmother Days” at Pioneer camps, as noted earlier—they were very common indeed. As before, a resident grandparent, a grandmother especially, could assist a woman with the time-consuming burdens of housework and childcare, which everyone still assumed to be “women’s work.” Almost all able-bodied adult women were now fully employed outside the home; public childcare facilities continued to fall woefully short of the need. As a result, small children made a grandmother’s household contribution especially important and all the more so if their mother was single, widowed, or divorced.59 And sharing a household with an adult child was often the best recourse for elderly people unable to live on their wholly inadequate pension.

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Child-rearing grandparents figure in numerous personal accounts: three of the eight “baby boomers” interviewed by Donald Raleigh in the city of Saratov, for example, spoke of one. Natasha Belovolova, born in 1950, was raised in a household containing four generations of women: her greatgrandmother, her grandmother, her mother, and herself. Her classmate Olga Kamaiurova was raised by her paternal grandmother, “God Bless her soul.” Their classmate Genadii Ivanov’s grandmother, a gynecologist with whom his parents lived, retired early in order to care for him and free his mother to work in her own specialty.60 Without such assistance, children, even very small children, might be left without oversight, or to an older sibling’s care, or to the care of an older woman prepared to look after them for a pittance or out of kindness. A mother’s need for assistance was surely most acute in rural areas. In the countryside, childcare facilities did not appear in any number until the 1960s or 1970s. Village support structures, weakened by collectivization, had collapsed during the war, while the burden of labor remained as heavy as ever afterward. As they struggled to restore agricultural production—1946 and 1947 were famine years—those in charge of collectives denied mothers time off from work to tend to their children. Remembered Irina Kniazeva, “after the war . . . hard work, day and night. In the daytime we would reap— there were only us women to do it—and at night, when we had already cut the rye, we would drive home the threshing machine. We had to do the threshing at night on the threshing floor ’cause we had to get them the grain fast.” Raising three children alone, she begged to be freed from night work, only to be told: “The kids aren’t going anywhere. Get on with it, work.”61 Rural women’s difficult circumstances may well have contributed to their frequent recourse to abortion, despite its illegality. While continuing to regard abortion as a sin, village women risked one again and again, if necessary defying husbands who opposed it. They resorted to a village abortionist or paid a doctor under the table, or performed the procedure on themselves. Women had other reasons for abortion, too: to escape the perpetual childbearing of their mothers and resist the state’s efforts to transform them into baby machines as well as workhorses.62 Single or married, urban women also resorted to abortion as a means of birth control. Partly as a result, the postwar birth rate never regained the level of the prewar period, dashing official expectations. Henceforward, most urban families and even rural ones had no more than two children and often, only one.63

Conclusion In the aftermath of invasion, as the very existence of the Soviet Union appeared endangered, an emphasis on emotional ties to hearth, home, and family became prevalent across a variety of media for the first time

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since the revolution. Even replacing Stalin for a brief period, they served as motivations to continue fighting under the most desperate of circumstances. The new emphasis persisted even after Stalin moved again to the fore. Once war was over, “private” experiences—romantic love, individual and family happiness, domestic felicity—formed part of the imagined “good life” that peace was supposed to bring. For many, maybe even most, the realities could not have differed more—disrupted, even broken, relationships; homelessness; the severe demographic imbalance that rendered “family happiness” out of reach for tens of millions of women, who now headed a substantial minority of Russian households, especially in rural areas. The state tried to step into the breach. However, the draconian Family Law of 1944, aimed at stabilizing the family and encouraging procreation, failed to accomplish either. It only further restricted people’s ability to shape their intimate lives, while bringing official organs into innumerable postwar households as arbiters of family affairs.

9 Seeking the Perfect Soviet Family

A friend says to a friend, “I have just written a book.” “What about?” “Boy meets girl.” “Ah, a story!” “They fall in love.” “A romance!” “They get married and find an apartment.” “Ah, a fable!” —ANEKDOT (Funny Story), Circa 19561 Until she turned five, Masha L. (born 1960) lived with her parents in a room in a communal apartment in the city of Perm (population roughly a million) near the Ural Mountains. Then her parents divorced. Mother and daughter had to vacate the room, which was allocated to the husband. Lacking entitlement to other housing in the city, they moved to Kharkov (in what is now Ukraine) more than 1200 miles away, where relatives were willing to take them in. For nearly a year they shared an eleven square meter (118.4 square feet) room in a communal apartment with Masha’s great grandmother and Masha’s aunt. They left only after Masha’s mother secured a job with the Ministry of Railroads in Moscow and was “awarded” a room there in a communal apartment. Then their circumstances changed again. In 1975, when Masha was fifteen, her mother remarried, this time happily. The new husband moved into their room—“a little embarrassing for me,” as Masha put it—until, thanks to the mother’s influential boss, Masha was given a room of her own down the corridor of that same communal apartment. When Masha married at age twenty-four, her new husband joined her there. But Masha’s mother disliked the new husband, and relations between mother and daughter deteriorated. “Violent scenes” erupted between mother and daughter, compounding the many other tensions of communal life. It was all too much for the new

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marriage. Two and half years after their wedding, the young couple divorced and the husband moved out.2 Masha’s story extends over roughly a quarter of a century of Soviet history. It begins under Nikita Khrushchev, who assumed power after Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953. Everyday life remained exceedingly difficult in those days. While heavy industrial production—steel, coal, oil, and the like—had not only regained but exceeded prewar levels by then, the production of consumer goods, housing included, lagged far behind. After Stalin’s death, the leadership shifted gears. Initiating a major change in economic priorities—from production to consumption—they began to place the satisfaction of human needs at the forefront of official priorities. Masha’s story ends after Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in 1985. During those years, the leadership committed itself as never before to creating the conditions for the “perfect Soviet family.” Yet, and despite these efforts, like the proverbial “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” as Catriona Kelly has colorfully put it, even as it appeared to become ever more accessible “the perfect Soviet family” kept receding from view.3

After Stalin: Shifting Priorities The death of Stalin, and the ascension to power of Nikita Khrushchev brought a dramatic move away from the highly centralized and coercive policies of late Stalinism and toward a more democratic and humanistic vision of the relationship between the socialist state and its people—a change that had important consequences for the ways people experienced their everyday lives. Foreshadowing subsequent developments, in November 1955, abortion, illegal since 1944, became legal again if performed in a medical facility. As the decree put it, the aim of legalization was to “grant women the opportunity to decide by themselves the question of motherhood.”4 Three months later, Khrushchev explicitly repudiated terror as a method of rule in his “Secret Speech” to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party. Since Stalin’s death, perhaps a million prisoners had already been released from concentration camps. Incentives and material rewards assumed even greater importance as motivating forces, once the state abandoned coercion. Satisfying the human needs of everyone, and not just the exemplary workers and the cultural and political elites as under Stalin, became the priority. And among those human needs, domestic felicity now figured prominently: the “struggle for happiness” has become one of the main tasks of the day, as Khrushchev declared in 1961.5 It is worth remembering that socialism promised material abundance sufficient to satisfy the needs of ordinary people so long as they avoided succumbing to the blandishments of consumerism and remained mindful of the welfare of the collective. Constructed in the Stalin years and

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reconstructed after wartime devastation, Khrushchev declared socialism to be fully achieved in 1959. The changing dynamics of the Cold War also contributed to the new priorities. Despite the everyday hardships, these were optimistic times in the Soviet Union. In 1957, the launching of Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite, became a source of anxiety for the US government and of pride to Soviet citizens, who viewed it as evidence of their country’s achievements. In 1961, the Soviets sent the first manned craft in history into outer space, transforming the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into a national hero. Two years later, Valentina Tereshkova became the first female cosmonaut. Surely a country that could attain such scientific heights could also provide for the consumer needs of its citizens—all the more important because the quality of everyday life had become fodder for the competition between the US and the USSR.6 Demographic concerns contributed as well. Divorce rates were rising despite the rigid Family Law of 1944, while the birth rate remained stubbornly below what the leadership thought necessary. A younger cohort—people born in 1930 or after—was just coming of age, and with a ratio of men to women that had normalized. New housing, better and more consumer goods, the promise of domestic felicity more generally, all aimed to secure older marriages and encourage new and fruitful ones, especially among an urban population that had overtaken the rural for the first time in Russian history.7

“The Struggle for Happiness” Creative intellectuals seized the new opportunities. Encouraged to seek subject matter in personal and family life, filmmakers turned their attention to the ordinary individual and for the first time since the 1920s, produced films that offered nuanced and realistic portrayals of people’s emotions, lives, and personal dilemmas. Romantic love became a particularly popular subject. In some ways a continuation of earlier developments, after Stalin’s death, its significance grew: romantic love rose in the hierarchy of official values and became even more central to contemporary literature and film. It was also portrayed in more complex ways than hitherto, sometimes even competing in its relevance with service to the larger social cause.8 People needed to create their own happiness, films suggested, even if a parent or official—although not a betrayed spouse—disapproved of their choices. At the same time, official Soviet culture remained rigidly puritanical: while romantic love was celebrated, sexuality remained hidden from view— not so very different from US culture of that time.9 Still, writers, who enjoyed considerably greater leeway than filmmakers, pushed the limits of personal choice further, even touching on sexual issues without highlighting them. For the first time since the 1920s, they offered positive literary heroes who sometimes engaged in adultery and portrayed negatively the authorities’ efforts to interfere.10

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Love and Marriage Among the cohort that came of age in the fifties was Mikhail Gorbachev, born in 1931, future leader of the Soviet Union and already a candidate member of the Communist Party. He was a twenty-year-old student at Moscow State University when he fell in love at first sight with his future wife, Raisa, also a student and one year younger than he. Their love was romantic and deep, but also, quite typically, chaste. Although the two spent almost every day together for a year and a half, their physical intimacy consisted of little more than holding hands. Soviet mass media unceasingly promoted the idea of “maidenly honor.” For their generation of educated young, chaste conduct was supposedly the norm, although it must be said that in 1959, 14 percent of births in Russia occurred outside of marriage— the highest proportion in Europe.11 Gorbachev’s wedding was as special an occasion as he could manage. In the summer of 1953, he travelled back to his native village and, working together with his father, so far exceeded their quota for harvesting grain that he earned enough to stage an elaborate celebration. Returning to Moscow with 1000 rubles—the equivalent of a year’s wage—he bought a fancy dress for Raisa and a handsome suit for himself (although he had to borrow shoes). Then the couple registered their union in ZAGS, still a dreary and cursory procedure completed in a matter of minutes. Their real celebration occurred afterward, in the cafeteria of their student dormitory, where they and their friends drank lots of champagne and wine and sang and danced.12 In aspiring to have a meaningful wedding ceremony, the Gorbachevs were far from alone. Many people shared that aspiration, reflecting, perhaps, the enhanced importance of the love marriage as well as a growing if still modest material prosperity. They often found registering in ZAGS deeply unsatisfying. “I’d no more marry in ZAGs than in a garage!” asserted one young woman, meaning that she would have her real marriage ceremony in a church. Indeed, church weddings grew far more common after the war in both urban and rural areas without ever becoming the norm. Like the Gorbachevs, other couples staged newly elaborate but secular celebrations.13 Secular or religious, these more elaborate weddings suggest a popular desire to recover some of the social and cultural significance that the revolution had stripped from marriage. The postrevolutionary assault on the church and church weddings, the recognition of de facto marriage, the sexual upheavals of the war and postwar period—all of it had drained marriage of meaning. Official efforts to restore its legal weight by means of the law of 1944 made little difference—think of Aleksandra Chistiakova, who “married” again and again after the war, without ever divorcing. Inviting family and friends to celebrate the occasion enhanced not only the significance of the wedding ceremony but, likely, also of the marriage itself—made the ceremony a genuine transition rather than a mundane bureaucratic procedure, although to some, big (and expensive) weddings

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also smacked of the “petty bourgeois” values that revolutionaries had once condemned.14

The Wedding Palace Enter the “Wedding Palace,” a place where weddings might be celebrated in style. Vividly illustrating the new centrality of “family happiness” (not to mention socialist consumerism), such palaces also opened a new front in the ongoing competition with the church. Originally entitled the “Palace of Happiness,” the first opened in November 1959 in Leningrad; two years later, a second began operating in Moscow. Subsequently, palaces appeared in other major cities, and eventually, in more remote areas, too. Restricted to first marriages and retaining an assembly line-type quality, a wedding at a

FIGURE 9.1  “Oh, you’re having a wedding! Well, then everything is as it should be…” Artist A. Tsvetkov. Krokodil 1973, no. 24, p. 5. © Courtesy of XXth Century Krokodil via Eastview.

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Wedding Palace was, nevertheless, formal and elaborate by comparison with registration at ZAGS. In a ceremony introduced and concluded with music, the couple—specially attired for the occasion—exchanged wedding vows and rings in the presence of friends and kin. A photographer snapped photos. The newlyweds signed a marriage registry rather than a mere piece of paper.15 Around marriage palaces emerged an entire marriage industry: stateprovided wedding automobiles to convey couples to the ceremony, clothing particular to the occasion—a white or pink dress with a veil for the bride, suit and tie for the groom, very like clothing worn by their counterparts in Europe and the United States. Marriage in a wedding palace brought privileges. Couples who booked a wedding received vouchers to special stores that sold wedding dresses, enabling them to jump the queue; rings, flowers, and more were rented or sold as well. After the wedding, the couple proceeded to a celebratory dinner, either at a restaurant—where, again, a voucher enabled them to jump the queue—or more commonly, in someone’s home. In the mid1970s, special catering services for wedding banquets began operating. By that time, according to official statistics, the vast majority of marriages took place in wedding palaces, with an average of twenty to thirty guests in attendance.16  Available courtesy of the state, the ceremony at a wedding palace gestured at the wedding’s broader social significance. Enjoining the newlyweds to love and care for one another, it emphasized the fact that they had now become “a family.” “Soviet law takes care of the family, helps to strengthen it,” the officiating party would remind the couple. “Having concluded a family tie [emphasis mine], the newlyweds are taking on not only new civil rights, but also new great civil responsibilities, including assuring a worthy upbringing for your future children.”17

Reconstructing the Domestic Sphere If the struggle for happiness began at home, conditions when Khrushchev assumed power could hardly have been less propitious. The effects of wartime devastation still crippled the economy, despite the restoration of heavy industry. At the time of Stalin’s death, “living space” had grown more crowded than ever, while millions of people still dwelled in places unfit for human habitation, such as mud huts, sheds, bathhouses, and train cars. The majority of urban dwellers, including those inhabiting communal apartments or dormitories, lacked the most basic amenities. Even in Moscow, the Soviet Union’s showcase city, hot water remained an almost unimaginable luxury.18 Living conditions weighed on marital and personal life. The lack of amenities required hours of additional labor from women, most of whom also held full-time jobs. Privacy remained unattainable, except for the most privileged. Seeking a room of their own, newlyweds added their names to the waitlist for housing, joining tens of thousands of others. Years, even decades, might pass before they obtained their own space. Many never did.

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Instead, they remained where they were, raising their own child or children in the room or rooms in which they themselves had been raised. And as the story of Masha that introduces this chapter reminds us, divorce engendered its own set of housing problems. Overcrowded housing, the huge backlog of demand, and explosive domestic tensions offered vivid proof of the yawning gap between existing conditions and the family happiness and socialist modernity toward which the leadership now strove. Housing thus figured among Khrushchev’s top priorities. This was to be housing on new principles: a separate apartment for every family household, complete with kitchen, bath, and modern amenities. Powerful party members and artistic elites, among others, had enjoyed such apartments since the late 1930s. Now everyone, or at least every married couple, would also enjoy one, even if on a far more modest scale. The emphasis was on the family. As promised in 1961 in the Communist Party’s Third Program, within two decades, “Every family, including newly-weds, will have a comfortable flat conforming to the requirements of hygiene and cultured living.” In fact, it would remain virtually impossible for a childless couple to obtain a separate apartment from the authorities (and absolutely impossible for a childless single person). Nevertheless, the promise made having one’s own apartment part of the definition of a “normal life.” It also seemed to signal official acceptance of peoples’ need for “privacy” and a place for “psychological rest”—needs formerly associated with the bourgeois world for which Soviet socialism offered a superior alternative.19 Although the goal of a home for every family household was never realized, as the story of Masha also reminds us, the failure was not for lack of trying. Launched with great fanfare, the 1958–65 Seven-Year Plan for the first time prioritized mass housing construction. Built in haste and as cheaply as possible, using standardized components and floor plans, the resulting apartments had low ceilings and small rooms, usually only one or two. Except for the kitchen and bath, rooms had to serve multiple purposes, so there could be no “bedroom” or a room of one’s own for any household member. New residents discovered many other shortcomings— hallways too narrow, faucets that failed to work, numbing uniformity and construction so shoddy that people soon labeled the new apartment buildings “khrushchoby,” a combination of Khrushchev’s name and the Russian word for slum. These shortcomings and more figured in the contemporary press, in cartoons, and in countless letters of complaint to the authorities.20 Standardized as they were, the new apartments failed to accommodate large families (those with more than the two children that designers appeared to consider normal and that usually were); or to allow for changes in family composition. People got divorced and remarried. They grew old and their children grew up and eventually wanted to marry and have children of their own, but had to continue to live with their parents because the waiting list remained so long that a lifetime might not suffice for a couple to obtain their own apartment. The result was that a Khrushchev-era apartment,

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designed for a couple with children, could over the years become occupied by several generations of the same family and end up being as cramped as any communal apartment, albeit by family members rather than strangers.21 All the same, the results were impressive and not only numerically. Estimates are that between 1956 and 1965, more than thirteen million apartments were built in the Russian Federation of the Soviet Union, improving the housing conditions of some sixty-five million people. To move from a communal to a private flat was “a major lifetime event for a Soviet family.” “It was cause for real celebration. People fought to get this,” remembered Alexander Trubnikov, raised in the closed city of Saratov. Interviewed decades later, Valentina, a retired seamstress, recalled the joy she felt on receiving an apartment from her late husband’s workplace. “In the 1960s, before we got our own apartment, we cooked on a kerosene stove. We didn’t have central heat or water. I had to shop everyday because we had no refrigerator. We shared a small house with two other families . . . . When the factory gave us the apartment, we were so happy . . . for us it was miraculous to have sanitation and two rooms of our own.” The boom in construction extended to rural areas, too, where housing was mostly individual already. By the 1960s, most rural houses had electricity, although rarely much else in the way of amenities.22 The housing campaign moved the domestic hearth and its satisfactions to the center of public policy. In the media, the “happy housewarming” became a common theme, with the separate apartment celebrated as a fulfillment of the revolution’s promises. Media extolled its new domestic conveniences and devoted attention to its decoration and upkeep, encouraging a new kind of consumerism, although one that was highly standardized: choice was limited in the extreme, and furniture, basic and functional. Still, satires that ridiculed apartments’ shortcomings and the frequent letters of complaint to newspapers on similar themes suggest the extent to which people felt entitled by the rhetoric to demand decent and dignified living conditions as part of a “normal” life.23  Thus, on many levels the shifts occurring after Stalin’s death raised popular expectations. Elevating romantic love in the hierarchy of official values; promoting the family apartment and “happy housewarming” as one of the revolution’s achievements; enhancing the significance of domestic space as a site of “cultured” consumption; and trying to ascertain what people actually wanted (as opposed to what the state thought was good for them) among other initiatives, officials now encouraged hopes for a future in which people would live more comfortably and enjoy greater access to consumer goods as well as the most basic necessities, thereby taking pleasure in their domestic life.24

Enter the Collective None of this should be equated with US-style individualism, however. The ideal Soviet person remained very much part of the collective. As the title

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FIGURE 9.2  “Pictures Without Words” (The sign above the desk, top left and bottom right, reads “Permits issued for living space”). Artist N. Semenov. Krokodil 1956, no. 2, p. 5. © Courtesy of XXth Century Krokodil via Eastview.

of a brochure providing guidance for Communist Party activists succinctly proclaimed, everyday life was not a “private matter.”25 The family household, after all, remained the primary site for the reproduction and rearing of the next generation and thus held the potential to shape the future character of socialist society. So home and family did not exist in isolation from the collective but, rather, represented points on an uninterrupted continuum with it. Consequently, even as people were encouraged to develop “fully,”

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with the meaning of “fully” now broader, deeper, and more complex than before, their personal conduct was expected to conform to collective norms and mesh seamlessly with collective needs. Ideally, there existed no conflict between the individual and the collective. However, in reality their harmonious merger might require considerable outside assistance, at least in the flawed present when “vestiges of capitalism” stubbornly persisted. To facilitate the merger, the leadership revived, indeed intensified, efforts to shape people’s everyday conduct. Eschewing coercion and terror as methods of enforcement, however, it would rely, instead, on various forms of exhortation and on popular initiative, which entailed mobilizing citizens and empowering them to instruct, persuade, and discipline each other under official guidance. To this end, long-dormant voluntary organizations such as comrades’ courts and housing committees were reactivated and new ones created, such as citizens’ patrols (1959), whose role was to educate people in the spirit of communism. At the same time, experts of various sorts endeavored to shape people’s intimate conduct in a flood of publications devoted to home-making, childrearing, the family, and everyday life.26 In the struggle to defend collective values, the new apartments drew special attention. Officials often reminded the fortunate recipients that their new home was “not a castle”—that is, it offered no retreat from the collective vision or the lifestyle and personal conduct appropriate to it. Tenants were urged to act in collective fashion, for example, by befriending their neighbors and joining with them in the upkeep of common areas, and creating spaces that everyone might share, like children’s playgrounds. Neighbors were also encouraged to intervene if others’ “private” behavior fell short of communist morality’s lofty ideals, as sadly it so often did. Housing committees, citizen activists, and other volunteers were prepared to call out people for inappropriate lifestyle or conduct—if, for instance, they became drunk and disorderly, or let their children run wild, or failed to maintain their new apartments properly, which were after all a gift from the state and not their private property.27 Efforts were made to enforce proper behavior in more intimate realms, too, relying mainly on exhortation and shaming. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Komsomol organization of Moscow routinely disciplined its members for such misdemeanors as “frivolous attitudes towards women and family,” unwillingness to register de facto marriages, and various forms of “amoral behavior,” including adultery. The Communist Party became more prepared to reprimand party members for conduct that earlier it might have overlooked, such as adultery or child abandonment. Comrades’ courts (revived in 1959) entertained complaints of men’s “undignified attitudes” toward women, excessive drinking, wife beating, and other domestic misdemeanors. Newspapers proved eager to expose sexual misconduct, naming names. “Hooliganism,” hitherto a public crime, became an intimate one, too, as the rubric expanded to include domestic violence. As earlier,

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FIGURE 9.3  “The Wife Has Been Delayed” the title explains. “Mama!” reads the caption. Artist V. Chizhikov. Krokodil 1964, no. 5, cover. © Courtesy of XXth Century Krokodil via Eastview.

interventions from above often came in response to complaints from below, that is, from wives, official or de facto. Women tended to treat official bodies as potential allies in their struggle with men they deemed feckless or abusive, rather than as intruders into a “private” domain.28 Now a paramount concern, childrearing drew special scrutiny, with the expectation that the family would collaborate closely with the state.29 While the focus remained primarily on mothers, now fathers also became responsible for their offspring, culminating a trend that began decades earlier. A flood of new pedagogical literature as well as officially recognized organizations deemed it a father’s duty to impose discipline, develop and stimulate a child’s intellect, and inculcate in his child the appropriate cultural

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values. Images of fathers interacting with children proliferated across a range of media. In the early 1960s, local authorities introduced meetings of fathers in some provincial cities, with the best fathers receiving honorary certificates comparable to those awarded in production competitions. When problems arose, fathers, too, might be held responsible for them. Men were thus encouraged to be “family men,” even to help their wives by assuming a share of other domestic chores—these new roles, like men’s public ones, intended to promote the further construction of socialism as defined by the party-state.30 

A Limited Space of Freedom? Concerning how much this new intrusiveness shaped people’s everyday conduct in the Khrushchev era, historians disagree. Whatever their many shortcomings, whatever the efforts to counteract the temptation to withdraw, the new apartments did permit greater privacy. Residents could shut their door and arrange their domestic lives more or less as they chose— associate with friends, even manage to make the physical space “their own” despite the homogeneity of Soviet consumer items and the identical layout of domestic construction.31 Emphasis on collective norms also failed to stop people, including Communist Party members, from acting according to their own perceived personal needs. Although most intimate behavior eludes the historian’s eye, the evidence offered by a declining birth rate and increasing marital instability suggests that in altering intimate behavior at least, the new methods were no more effective than the old. This was the case even though women’s fertility and marital stability were matters of pressing concern to the leadership under Khrushchev and figured among the motivations for the new family and marriage-friendly policies. After the war, birth rates never approached their prewar levels. In the early years of Khrushchev’s leadership, they rose slightly, then resumed their decline. By 1965, the birth rate in the Russian Republic was less than half of what it had been before the war—15.7 births per thousand people that year, as compared to thirty-three births in 1940. Some of the drop resulted from the postwar demographic imbalance—so many women, so few men—and the smaller population of reproductive age. Some of it, however, was due to the shrinking of the family, a demographic process that usually accompanies economic development and urbanization, now well underway in Soviet Russia. Most women were bearing no more than two children and some were bearing only one.32 In the absence of effective contraception, women limited their fertility by resorting to abortion. Although discouraged by the government for health and other reasons, abortion had become legal again in 1955. In Khrushchev’s time, abortions far outnumbered births. In 1965 (the year after Khrushchev’s

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fall), when abortion rates reached their peak, there were 169 abortions for every 100 births in the USSR as a whole. The Russian Republic had the highest abortion rate. Abortion had become the sole method of family planning: most of the women who resorted to it were married, not single.33 Divorce rates offer another index of the authorities’ inability to control intimate behavior. The party inveighed against “frivolous and rash divorces,” and under Khrushchev the legal grounds for divorce remained extremely limited. Nevertheless, when judges were allowed far greater flexibility in the law’s application after Stalin’s death, the number of divorces rose dramatically. Between 1953 and 1965, the divorce rate almost quadrupled in Moscow, for instance, with judges denying only a tiny fraction of applications.34 As would become clear after access to divorce eased, the rising number of divorces in this period represented but the tip of the iceberg of marital instability.

After Khrushchev At least until economic growth began to stagnate in the early 1970s, the men who succeeded Khrushchev maintained, indeed, in many respects intensified, efforts to address popular needs. The construction of new apartments not only continued, but designs grew more varied and rooms more spacious than before. These apartments became still more “homey”: they allowed for greater comfort and included a kitchen now large enough to accommodate a small table. Between 1970 and 1985, some 40 percent of the Soviet population moved into new apartments.35 The number and variety of consumer goods increased as well, including domestic technology. It became easier, although never exactly easy, to find shoes and clothing, cookware and baby carriages, refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and televisions—the proliferation of which fed the growing tendency of people to retreat into their own personal space.36 Residents of Moscow enjoyed the easiest access. People who lived in rural areas or smaller towns might have to make long trips there to obtain what they wanted. Nevertheless, by the mid-1970s, when economic growth began to falter, about half of Soviet families owned a refrigerator and two-thirds owned a washing machine. Easing the burden on mothers, the number of preschool institutions also increased, providing spaces for about 51 percent of urban children by the 1970s, although for only 12 percent of rural ones.37 However, popular expectations of the “good life,” now often including domestic felicity, more than kept pace. Expectations were fueled by the promises that Khrushchev had made, by rising levels of education, and by the continuing expansion of the urban population, which in the Russian Republic had reached 62 percent of the total in 1962. Urban couples were especially likely to regard the family as a primary source of intimacy and emotional satisfaction.38 Growing awareness of Western standards of living

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contributed to rising expectation, in Moscow and Leningrad especially, but to some extent in other cities, too. Expectations were especially high among the young. The generation born in the postwar years was the first to have escaped the horrors of the war, the deprivations of the postwar period, or the terrors of the Stalin era. Sexual conduct reflected the desire for personal gratification. By the early 1960s, urban young people had begun to flout existing sexual strictures much as their counterparts would soon do in the West. However they managed it—meeting in parks, in stairwells, at apartments when parents were gone on holiday—couples were having sex before they married. In December 1963, close to a quarter of the babies born to married couples in Leningrad were conceived before the wedding; the percentage was only slightly lower in the city of Perm.39 Young people also often expected more from life than their parents and few felt the kind of ardor for the building or defense of communism that had motivated earlier generations to sacrifice their own self-interest.40 This left them less patient with the shortcomings of the system and the intrusiveness of the state.  At the same time, the leadership reduced their emphasis on the collective and ceded greater control to Soviet citizens over their personal lives and choices. The change became evident almost immediately after Khrushchev’s ouster, in respect to divorce. Divorce reform had been on the agenda since Stalin’s death. At professional meetings and on the pages of specialized journals, advocates of divorce reform—many of them female—criticized the 1944 law as betraying the principle of women’s equality, sacrificing the rights of children born out of wedlock, and violating the voluntary character of family relations. As the architect of the 1944 law, however, Khrushchev had thrown his weight behind the law’s conservative supporters (apparently, all male).41 Khrushchev now removed from office, in December 1965 the divorce law was reformed, easing access to divorce and reducing its cost. Three years later, a new Family Law made divorce still more accessible by introducing a form of “no fault” divorce in uncomplicated cases. If a couple had no underage children and both wanted the divorce, all they had to do was register it (at a ZAGS in urban areas; at the sel’sovet or village soviet in rural ones) and pay a fee. In more complicated cases—for example, if one spouse wished to preserve the marriage—the couple had to present their case to a judge. S/he was charged with attempting reconciliation and failing that, resolving contentious issues such as child custody (almost invariably resolved in favor of the mother) and the division of property.42 The 1968 divorce law offered new protections to mothers and infants. It became illegal for a man to divorce his wife without her consent while she was pregnant or caring for a child under the age of one. The law also reopened the door to paternity suits, although on relatively narrow grounds, and enabled the mother to eliminate the blank space on the birth certificate of a child born outside of marriage. There the protections ceased, however. To the dismay of some who hoped for more liberal provisions, the law

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FIGURE 9.4  “Cafes, Dances… I’m sick of it all…” “You’re thinking we should head for the registry office and get married…?” Artist V. Goriaev. Krokodil 1972, no. 8. © Courtesy of XXth Century Krokodil via Eastview.

neither offered recognition to de facto marriages nor restored the earlier favorable treatment of paternity suits. Yet, de facto marriages were becoming ever more common. They left the female partner more vulnerable than the male. Recording de facto as well as registered marriages, for instance, the Soviet census of 1970 revealed that some 1.3 million more women than men considered themselves “married.” This discrepancy was at least partly a result of men and women’s different understandings of the seriousness of their unregistered union.43 Individuals gained more leeway in other realms, too. While “a stern emphasis on duty to the collective” remained a feature of advice literature until the Soviet Union’s collapse, for instance, it vied with the “live and let live” attitude that by the 1970s had become ubiquitous.44 The idea that the home might become a person’s “castle,” disparaged under Khrushchev, grew increasingly acceptable. Having ceased to be a problem to be overcome, the separation of domestic space from the collective was now treated as

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a valuable, indeed, unique aspect of the home. Writers and tastemakers imagined the home as a comforting and emotional space, where intimate relations were fostered and people’s highest needs met, a view reflected in advice on home decoration. This marked a major shift: the Soviet state had finally abandoned its longstanding efforts to shape people’s mentality by exerting control over their home life.45 The shift surely reflected popular expectations and experience as well as helping to shape them. Kitchen tables quickly became a gathering place for friends and family. The rapid spread of television sets also encouraged private pleasures and a retreat into everyday home life, even as television shows also promoted the virtues of the collective and enabled the state to penetrate domestic space. By 1970, a majority of Soviet citizens owned a television; by 1981, over 80 percent of urban residents could watch it in a home of their own. The heightened importance of family was evident in other ways, too, in particular, people’s growing desire to enjoy their holidays with family members rather than apart from them, still the norm. In 1966, 45 percent of respondents in a poll said they preferred a family holiday, a preference that the state, in its lumbering fashion, attempted to satisfy.46 Brezhnev-era cinema also highlights the new centrality of consumption, private pleasures, love, and personal happiness; it also helped to legitimize them within a system that still formally extolled collective values. The enormously popular “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1980),” while far from typical, suggests the extent of change. Its heroine is an upwardly mobile working-class girl, an unwed mother raising a daughter alone. She, nevertheless, manages to ascend the career ladder to become director of an enterprise. She owns a car and has a well-furnished apartment and all the accoutrements of a professionally successful life. Initially involved sexually with a married man— men’s marital infidelity was no big deal in late Soviet cinema—in the course of the film she finds true love with a factory worker. This particular worker is willing to don an apron, fix dinner, and devote himself to the happiness of his beloved and her child, quite a contrast to the worker heroes of Stalin-era films with their devotion to the building of socialism. He is all the more remarkable in a public culture that still offered few models of such devotion on the part of men of any social background. But private pleasures had become the new normal. As Alexander Prokhorov and Elena Prokhorova have put it, in late Soviet cinema, “The happy couple exchanged the cause of building the universal ‘bright future’ for private happiness in the present.”47 The apron was still something of an outlier, however. Even as domestic space gained significance as meaningful in its own right, responsibility for it remained primarily that of women. Advice literature, television, and a range of other media, all portrayed women’s devotion to housekeeping, family maintenance, and motherhood as a function of women’s very nature. The new domesticity emblematic of “late socialism” thus not only legitimated but in some ways also celebrated conventional gender arrangements. Few seemed to question them, the exhortations of advice literature notwithstanding.

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“Of course, my husband has more free time,” explained a woman engineer, married to an engineer and the mother of a child. “After dinner, when I’m busy with the baby and other things, he sits and reads and rests. But we never argue about that. Since I have to take care of the baby, I might as well do other chores as well.”48 The double burden on women became a public issue in 1969, when the pioneering journal Novyi Mir published Natalia Baranskaya’s novella, A Week Like Any Other. The novella offered a realistic—and scathing—depiction of a week in the life of a wife and mother, a professional woman with a fulltime job. Forever on the run and with no help from her husband, she juggles the responsibilities of work, motherhood, and housekeeping in a society where the most basic everyday tasks remained fraught with difficulties.49 Thereafter, the issue of women’s double burden became a preoccupation of sociologists, journalists, and others, primarily, although not exclusively, for its negative effect on women’s willingness to bear children. Suggestions that men take a more active role in the life of the household appear to have borne little fruit. Men’s marginality in the household would contribute to a perceived crisis of masculinity in the late Soviet era, for which women would again be held responsible.

The Fragile Marriage “I have four children. There isn’t a day when we do not have a fight in the house. My husband drinks away all wages, all bonuses. I went to the place where my husband works but to no result. There are many families like ours in the village.” Letter from L. Bukareva, Tula Region, to The Woman Worker (Rabotnitsa), 1965.50 Despite genuine advances in the provision of consumer goods and major improvements in everyday life, and despite—or, perhaps, also because of—the enhanced significance of domestic space and personal happiness, marriages became less stable, rather than more. Divorce rates tell the tale. They rose dramatically after the legal reform of 1968: from 1.8 divorces per thousand marriages in 1965 to three per thousand in 1970, and to 4.2 per thousand by 1980.51 By 1978, a third of all marriages, and half of all those in Moscow and Leningrad, ended in divorce. In rural areas, where the community still regarded marriage more seriously, took a dim view of divorce, and exerted pressure to keep couples together, divorce rates were lower. Nevertheless, there, too, rates were rising and more rapidly than in cities.52 Indeed, in the late Soviet era the only country in the world with higher rates of divorce was the United States. In both places, divorce signaled both more casual attitudes toward marriage and rising expectations of the satisfactions marriage should bring.  In the Soviet Union at least, it was women’s expectations that appeared to rise more sharply. By the late 1960s, women, not men, initiated most

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FIGURE 9.5  “I’ll marry you next time!” Artist E. Shabel’nik. Krokodil 1982, no. 8. © Courtesy of XXth Century Krokodil via Eastview.

divorces, a contrast with the pattern since 1917. Some of the change reflected the improved demographic balance, which meant that divorcées might remarry should they choose. But in addition, improved educational opportunities and the growing individualism and emphasis on personal happiness left women less willing to tolerate circumstances that their mothers might have endured, such as chronic infidelity, excessive drinking, domestic violence, and other forms of abusive behavior. Masculinity itself appeared to be part of the problem. So many men had grown up without fathers, while Soviet culture offered few positive models of domesticated masculinity or of good husbands. More generally, the absence of a “culture

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of conjugal relations,” as T. A. Gurko has put it, likely also contributed to marital instability. Men still “served the Motherland,” not the family53 Tensions in the extended or multifamily household sometimes contributed to marital instability, too. Such households remained common, at least in part because however many new apartments were built, they never kept pace with demand. As a result, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, newlyweds’ wait for a home of their own could extend for years or even decades unless they enjoyed special connections, had inherited housing from parents or relatives, or resorted to a system of exchange too elaborate and varied to be described here.54 In the late 1950s close to 20 percent of all urban households in Russia qualified as extended or multifamily; that proportion increased slightly by 1970, while the proportion of single-family households declined. Rural households were even more likely to be extended.55 So young couples lived with parents or relatives—almost 40 percent of young couples as of 1979, in both urban and rural areas.56 Some, workingclass couples especially, actually favored such arrangements. As before, they brought benefits, especially if the couple had an infant or small children. However, the presence of the older generation could also serve as a source of stress. Young women had become less willing than previously to subordinate themselves to their mothers-in-law in rural areas, and less patient with fractious in-laws in urban settings.57 But while it is true that women’s expectations of marriage had risen, that rise was relatively modest. Thus, a Russian woman was far less likely than her contemporary US counterpart to apply for divorce because she had ceased to love her husband, or on account of his infidelity. Men were often less tolerant, but Russian women tended to regard a spouse’s occasional extramarital fling as no big deal: “I know that there’s hardly a man who can manage to be faithful,” as one twenty-two-year-old female law student in Moscow told an interviewer in 1978. “That goes for my husband as well. It would be a serious problem only if he really fell in love with someone else. But if it isn’t a tragedy for the other woman and doesn’t mean anything to him, I can very well forgive him.” Casual infidelity was especially common during a vacation. Despite people’s increasing desire for a “family holiday,” married couples (and their children), ordinarily, still took their vacations separately.58 The relative youth of newlyweds also contributed to marital instability. By contrast with much of the West, where women increasingly tended to postpone marriage until their mid-to-late twenties, in Russia women’s age at first marriage actually declined in the postwar period—from an average of 26 right after the war to 22.3 in the years between 1971 and 1985 (men’s age at marriage declined, too, but more slowly).59 Before the revolution, Russia’s peasants, the majority of the population, had married comparatively early; now the leadership encouraged early marriage for pronatalist reasons. But early marriages tend to be less stable, and not just in Russia. The most common reason women gave for seeking divorce was their husband’s excessive drinking. A serious matter, especially among blue-collar

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workers, alcohol abuse had grown dramatically since the war. Between the 1940s and the 1980s, reported rates quadrupled. Alcohol abuse would subsequently be identified as a major factor in the reduced life expectancy of men, a decline that began in the mid-1960s.60 The steadily rising rate of divorce deeply troubled the leadership. The social and demographic consequences were many, none positive. Despite the improved gender balance, divorced women remained far less likely than divorced men to remarry (and bear children), while divorced fathers— almost never awarded custody in contested cases—rarely sustained contact with their offspring once a marriage ended. Divorce thus contributed to an increase in the proportion of woman-headed urban households, as did the growing numbers of women unwilling or unable to marry who decided to bear a child on their own. From 11.9 percent of households in 1959, when war widows still swelled the numbers, the proportion of woman-headed households grew to 12.5 percent in 1979. Such households tended to be poorer than those headed by a man, despite the state’s child support and other welfare programs. Labeling woman-headed households “incomplete,” experts expressed great concern about the millions of children growing up without sustained contact with an adult male. They faulted such households for almost all of society’s ills, including juvenile delinquency.61 At least as troubling to officials was the perceived “demographic crisis,” for which they held marital instability at least partially responsible. The fertility of Russia’s peasant women had once made Russia’s birth rates the highest in Europe: in the late 1870s, women bore close to seven babies each on average. Thereafter, the rates slowly but steadily declined. By the late Soviet period, most Russian women bore one or two children at most, demographic behavior resembling that of other modern societies but new for Russians and insufficient to replace the population.62 All the more troubling was the fact that in this period, the Central Asian Republics, traditionally Muslim and more culturally conservative, experienced a “population explosion,” prompting anxieties among the leadership about future labor resources and military manpower—and among some ordinary Russians, about being overwhelmed by the ethnic “other.”63 Officials adopted such measures as they could to stabilize marriages. The Communist Party offered some sanctions when members divorced, for instance, while marital stability represented an important qualification for people who aimed to get ahead, whether in the party apparatus or in state enterprises. Having a stable family life was even more important for people who sought permission to travel abroad; it insured their return. Offering models, officials promoted a “family lifestyle” and the ideological ideal of the “happy Soviet family.” They introduced “family weeks,” encouraged films that conveyed images of happy and “complete” families (i.e., with resident fathers), promoted family vacations, and more.64 Prescriptive literature and the popular press explored the reasons for family “weakness” and offered advice on strengthening the family. Often, this entailed

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the resurrection of traditional gender roles. Family consultation centers, first established in 1970, offered help to families in crisis and counseling for those intending to wed.65 In addition, having resisted the idea of dating services through much of the 1970s, by the end of the decade the authorities had begun to allow matrimonial ads in newspapers as well as such public initiatives as “over thirty clubs” at which mature singles might meet.66 Officials also undertook more straightforward efforts to raise the birth rate. Pronatalist propaganda intensified. Books and articles designed for a popular audience insisted that maternity was not only a woman’s most important role but also essential to her very nature. Financial and other incentives increased. In addition to relatively modest child allowances aimed at poorer households and more substantial payments for children born out of wedlock, the leadership tried to make caring for infants and small children easier by extending maternity leave. In 1981, they introduced a partially paid leave until a child reached the age of one, in addition to the already existing, fully paid leave of fifty-six days before and after giving birth. The decree offered women (but not men) the option of taking an additional six months of unpaid leave with no loss of position or job status. Women also gained a lump sum payment of fifty rubles for their first child, with double that amount for the second and third. With three children, a woman qualified as a “mother of many children,” which entitled her to a range of benefits. Preschool and nursery options continued to grow, although never sufficiently to meet the demand, with the greatest shortfall in the countryside. Waiting lists for places remained long.67 None of the pronatalist measures yielded the desired increase. Instead, they appear to have contributed to men’s perception of being extraneous to the family.68 There were other reasons for that perception, too, mostly connected to state support for the family. While domestic responsibilities remained very far from being socialized, the late Soviet state offered either for free or relatively cheaply services that elsewhere—in the United States, especially—could be quite costly, and that directly or indirectly benefitted the family. These included free medical care and education, inexpensive preschool institutions, summer camps for children, maternity leave without fear of job loss if often with loss of seniority, and even, toward the end, family holidays. Some benefits were channeled through the workplace, most notably housing, but also consumer goods, day care, holidays, and more. State-sponsored organizations such as Pioneers, which enrolled children starting at age ten, the Komsomol (starting at age fifteen), and various circles and clubs relieved pressure on the family—this meant primarily women, needless to say—to supervise children and the young after school. Men sometimes felt displaced by the state as a result. While a husband’s economic contribution invariably made a positive difference to his household’s material welfare, the difference was considerably less than in contemporary capitalist economies. His contribution mattered because state allowances, even at their height, never amounted to all that much and while

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almost all women worked, they usually earned somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of what men did.69 Thus, if the husband contributed his wages rather than, say, drinking them up, households containing a male earner were almost invariably better off financially than households lacking one, even when the latter received state assistance. And men’s ability to provide gained them the respect of other family members. Still, money itself was not as meaningful in the Soviet system as in capitalist societies. Money certainly did not bring power. In the Soviet Union, the cash you had on hand might—or might not—bring access to scarce goods and services. Instead, access might depend as much or more on who you knew, where you worked, where you lived (with Moscow and Leningrad and certain closed scientific enclaves at the top, and remote villages at the very bottom), where you stood on the official hierarchy, whether or not you could travel abroad, plus a variety of other nonfinancial factors. So money, while it certainly mattered, in key respects did not function quite the same way as money did elsewhere, undercutting the importance of a (male) “breadwinner,” even when he was well paid and brought his wages home. Furthermore, the idea that a husband should be a breadwinner was never part of Soviet ideology or culture. Having abolished the prerevolutionary legal obligation that a man support his wife in the family law of 1918, Soviet leadership never restored it thereafter, whatever the twists and turns of family policy. It could not: not only was women’s economic independence central to ideology, but, more importantly, the waged labor of women also remained absolutely vital to the economy. It is true that late Soviet media often bewailed the “feminization” of men, a result of their “loss of the title of family breadwinner.” Some even promoted women’s return to the home through part-time work, which would increase their economic dependence on men—a change for which at least some women expressed a preference. But state-owned enterprises failed to introduce part-time labor. And while encouraging men to be “family men,” official ideology never succeeded in devising compelling alternative family roles for men, except perhaps as fathers.70

Women to the Rescue? The signifying of masculinity as primarily a public role—“the heroic worker”—had become especially problematic by the late 1970s. By then, the ideologically based call for people to participate in collective activities—in voluntary organizations, at work, at meetings, in parades and demonstrations, etc.—rang increasingly hollow, and to young people most of all.71 The vacuum left by collective satisfactions was filled mostly by the private pleasures of domestic and family life, or so film and fiction suggested. Economic circumstances also amplified the family’s importance. While rural households had never ceased to be economic units, that is, they produced

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much of the food they consumed, increasingly, urban households began assuming economic functions, too. Like money, consumption, one of the primary functions of the modern urban household, operated differently in the Soviet Union than in the modern capitalist world. Most ordinary urban households, that is, those without privileged access to scarce goods, relied to a quite remarkable degree on the skills of women to compensate for the many deficiencies of the Soviet marketplace. Husbands might undertake “heroic shopping,” or grill the shashlik at the dacha (a modest vacation home).72 But it was wives who ordinarily cultivated the personal and other contacts that provided access to scarce goods or stood in long lines to obtain them; who transformed unappealing products into tasty meals; who stockpiled non-perishables in times of scarcity. As the dacha became a mass phenomenon, urban women assumed a productive role as well, growing fruits and vegetables and preserving them for winter consumption, much as their rural counterparts had always done.73 All this was in addition to bearing and raising children, doing the laundry, and cleaning the home while holding a full-time job. By the late 1970s, those efforts had become more necessary than ever. Agricultural crises occurred more frequently: starting in 1979, the need to feed people forced the leadership to import grain as well as other agricultural products in ever-increasing quantities. As economic growth slowed, then stopped, and more and more goods, including food and clothing, became scarce (defitsitnyi), money grew even less important to ensuring access. The state could do little. What proved crucial, instead, were the personal and family networks on which women had long relied for information, and women’s ability to pull strings to obtain what they needed. Still more people turned to farming, endeavoring to grow what they could not buy. Family members exchanged whatever goods they had access to. As the “boundaries of private life widened,” as Elena Stiazhkova has put it, women’s household responsibilities expanded to fill the vacuum left by the state. At the same time, husbands and male partners remained peripheral at best, their earnings, like money itself, ever less relevant to most households’ welfare.74 The strain on women became immense. In the late 1970s to mid-1980s, for instance, miners’ wives spent an average of three hours a day standing in line to buy food and manufactured goods. When they weren’t at work, by contrast, their husbands were free to lounge on the couch—a pervasive male stereotype in this period—or go drinking with their workmates.75 But the strain on men was in important ways worse, or if not worse, more deadly, because their most essential household role, that of economic provider, had lost virtually all its remaining meaning and at the very time when their longvaunted public roles had ceased to matter, too. The hollowing out of men’s roles, along with a concomitant rise in alcohol abuse, exacted an enormous physical toll, evident in changes in men’s life expectancy at birth. The life expectancy of both men and women declined in this period, but that of men declined far more dramatically, so that the difference between the

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two—always quite substantial in post-war Russia—grew larger still. From an average of 63.8 years in the period between 1965 and 1970, men’s life expectancy dropped to 61.5 years between 1980 and 1985, that is, a loss of over two years. Women’s life expectancy declined as well, but far less compared to men: from an average of 73.4 years between 1965 and 1970 to 72.9 between 1980 and 1985, that is, a loss of under six months.76

Conclusion By the mid-1980s, Soviet policy towards the family and the domestic sphere had in important respects come full circle. The family and the domestic sphere had not “withered away.” Instead, they had gained greater significance as sites not only of reproduction and early socialization of the young, but also of intimacy and emotional satisfaction. Perhaps in recognition, the Soviet leadership ceased most efforts to shape domestic life, except—importantly—its efforts to raise the birth rate. Moreover, the state still offered families various forms of support and not unimportant ones, and in this way remained a significant factor in people’s everyday lives. Yet, dissatisfaction was growing, less with the intrusion of the state than with the shortcomings of what the state provided. In letters to newspapers and to various authorities, late Soviet citizens complained endlessly about long waits and goods and services of uneven, if not downright poor, quality. Their complaints reflected not only genuine problems, but also expectations of personal and material well-being that had been rising at least since the Khrushchev era, and which late Soviet culture encouraged but the economy proved unable to meet. Such expectations were particularly widespread among urbanites born after the end of World War II, people whose knowledge of past achievements and traumas was second-hand, and who regarded the state as a provider of material benefits.77 Understandably enough, some people blamed their problems on the system. Ceasing to look to the state for answers, they relied on their own efforts, on personal networks and family, and on an expanding shadow economy that the authorities largely ignored. In so doing, people engaged in a kind of end run around the planned economy. And even as home and family grew more important in both rhetoric and reality, ideology grew less so. For very different reasons, expressions of official values—what the state stood for, the importance of public life and the collective, the forward movement toward communism—became ever more rote and ever less compelling, especially to the young.78 Still, even in this time of hardship and growing cynicism concerning official values, what most critics wanted was to improve the way the system operated, not to replace it with an entirely different one. Not quite a crisis, the resulting situation was, nevertheless, dire. It would move the Soviet Union’s next and last leader to enact fundamental reforms that, in turn, would worsen the crisis and contribute to the system’s collapse.

10 The State Withdraws

When the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev assumed leadership of the Soviet Union in March 1985, he was not only young by comparison with his predecessors and better educated and more cosmopolitan in outlook. He was also openly devoted to his wife, Raisa, herself an independent and articulate professional. Like the man, their relationship offered something new. After Lenin’s death, the wives of Soviet leaders had remained completely out of the limelight, as if to underscore the serious (and patriarchal) nature of governance. The Soviet Union boasted no such title as “First Lady.” Nor did a husband’s devotion to his wife constitute part of Soviet public culture or its constructions of masculinity, despite efforts to encourage such behavior in men. Nevertheless, Gorbachev did nothing to conceal his feeling: he often appeared in public with his wife and she accompanied him abroad on his travels. Judging by my Russian friends, this behavior did nothing to endear him to the public—if anything, it had the opposite effect. Who was she to bask in his power? people wondered. Gorbachev’s assumption of power signaled other changes, too, some of which ultimately helped to undermine the system. A believer in the fundamental correctness of Soviet socialism, he proved ready to initiate substantive reforms aimed at ending economic stagnation and easing or eliminating the threat of a nuclear holocaust. However, his policies of glasnost’ (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), which enormously increased openness to the capitalist world—its goods, its cultural products, and its people—also generated new kinds of difficulties. Vastly easing censorship, glasnost’ eventually enabled critics to go far beyond the “permitted dissidence” that, at least since the Khrushchev era, had allowed problems to be aired publicly so long as solutions existed or were already in progress.1 The result was hard-hitting discussions of the Soviet system’s numerous shortcomings, even failures both past and present, and challenges to longstanding verities. At the same time, the state loosened without relinquishing control of the top-down economy. The partial market reforms brought

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by perestroika, however, violated long-standing norms and destabilized the economy, and at the very time that the new openness to the outside world, at least in major cities, encouraged unrealistic expectations of what a “normal” life might look like. A range of basic consumer goods, including food, disappeared from the shelves; lines lengthened for whatever there was; rationing was eventually reinstituted for essential items such as sugar and butter. Political upheavals brought the system to an end six years later, prompting Gorbachev to resign from his position as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR on December 25, 1991. The events that followed, that is, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the Russian Federation as an independent state, and the marketization of the Russian economy, had profound and mixed effects on the ways that Russians led their intimate lives. Most state support for women and the family came to an end. Money, hitherto only one of many factors that ensured a household’s welfare, became all-important. A virtual revolution in public values and systems led to years of turmoil and uncertainty, and took a tremendous physical and psychological toll. Accustomed to relative stability, households both urban and rural endured debilitating economic stress, if not outright devastation. The toll was evident in the further declining birth rates and the rising rates not only of divorce but also of mortality, men’s mortality in particular. Only recently has the crisis receded and a new kind of stability set in. Those who came of age after the collapse of the Soviet system have learned to make their way in the new order, the well-educated among them especially. In most respects, they, or at least the urbanites, conduct their intimate lives much as do their counterparts in the rest of the developed capitalist world. Yet, aspects of the previous system linger on, in housing arrangements, in government efforts to raise the birth rate, in the ongoing significance of the household and women’s centrality to it, and perhaps most of all, in the troubled relationship of many men to home and family. At the same time, and with the encouragement of conservatives in the Russian Orthodox Church, aspects of prerevolutionary Russian patriarchy have returned, at least for now.

Gorbachev and the Family During Gorbachev’s six years in power, many long-standing verities became subject to challenge. Among them was a foundation stone of the Soviet gender order, the importance for women’s liberation of their labor outside the home. But at the same time, another foundation stone remained firmly in place: women’s association with and responsibility for everyday life (byt) and the domestic sphere. Gorbachev himself reaffirmed the association. He wrote in his book, Perestroika, published in 1987, that because of their fulltime engagement in the workforce “Women no longer have enough time

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to perform their everyday duties at home—housework, the upbringing of children, and the creation of a good family atmosphere.” This was about to change, however. Experts, Gorbachev continued, were now debating how to return women to “their purely womanly mission,” that is, to home and family.2 Conservatives took up the cry. In the 1970s, they had begun to argue that women’s participation in the workforce was too extensive. Now, they seized the initiative. A “back to the home” movement emerged and gained momentum. In 1989, in the first contested elections since 1917, male candidates for the Supreme Soviet repeatedly called for the “emancipation” of women from the double burden of paid and unpaid labor by returning them to the home. Many ordinary men and women agreed. Mothers of young children, in particular, welcomed the idea of “choice.” They regarded as liberating the opportunity to spend more time at home, freeing them of the double burden and enabling them to provide more care for their children. Husbands were more eager still, according to public opinion polls conducted at the end of the 1980s. “What’s it like for us men?” one man complained. “We come home from work tired and hungry and there’s no one at home—the wife is at work or queuing for food . . . . Everything’s empty—both your home and your heart. I think that only a family where there’s a strong man supported by the angelic generosity of a woman, his wife, the mother of his children, can form the foundation of our country’s power.” Men wanted to feel “like men” again, which for many meant having their wife waiting to greet them at day’s end.3 Pressure in the direction of more traditional household arrangements took other forms as well. As part of the struggle against high divorce rates, the “complete” family—that is, a family with a resident husband and father—became idealized as a source of happiness and well-being. By the same token, the “incomplete” family—meaning one-parent households— attracted considerable negative attention. Their proportion had slowly but steadily increased in urban areas. By the late 1980s, one-parent households constituted close to 16 percent of the total. Women headed virtually all of them, due not only to the steadily rising rates of extramarital births but also to the high rates of divorce and the propensity of judges to award custody to mothers in almost all cases. Glasnost’-era media dwelled on such sociological problems as adolescent drug addiction, prostitution, and urban crime, attributing them to single mothers who failed to raise their children properly.4 Yet, rather than reducing the strains on marriages and households, the changes that came with partial marketization ended up intensifying them. To existing pressures, they added financial ones. Having shifted to cost accounting, industries were expected to cover their own expenses without help from the state. As of 1987, those expenses included the newly extended, fully paid maternity leave of seventy days after childbirth as well as the fourteen days of paid leave to care for a child. As enterprises trimmed

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their workforce to meet the demands of the new economy, they often let mothers with young children go first. Some enterprises simply shut down. Long accustomed to full employment and occupational stability, people who lost their jobs had difficulty finding new ones. Demoralization and strain took its toll on marriages. “Life drove a wedge between us. More precisely, perestroika did,” remembered Olga Kamaiurova, a resident of the then closed city of Saratov. Her husband lost his job. She became the main breadwinner, while also assuming “the Soviet woman’s double burden at home,” as she put it. The cracks that already existed in their twenty-fouryear-old marriage deepened and the couple divorced.5 Villagers were less affected by these economic perturbations; indeed, some at least experienced the Gorbachev era as positive. To be sure, the shortfall in consumer goods, which affected rural even more than urban areas and left shelves empty in village shops, hit villagers very hard. Rural areas were also far less well served by the state on a variety of fronts. Nevertheless, their household plots buffered many village households during the food crises of the late Gorbachev years and allowed some, at least, to benefit in modest ways. Most villagers already lived in their own houses. In the Gorbachev years, some built new ones or repaired and renovated existing ones, usually old, wooden, and lacking modern amenities except for electricity. Rural households also purchased television sets and refrigerators; by the late 1980s, a quarter of them even owned a vacuum cleaner, although such consumer goods remained far more common in urban households. Access to pediatric facilities and maternity wards improved and day care grew more available as the state sought to deliver on its promises.6 None of this, however, helped to resolve the crisis in agriculture or to staunch the outflow from the countryside of young people, of young women with secondary education, in particular. They left behind dying villages consisting entirely of old people, especially in the northern regions. In villages where better paying jobs prompted young men, at least, to remain, a much publicized “bride problem” emerged. In May 1987, the journal Krest’ianka [Peasant Woman] mounted a campaign to attract women back to the countryside, emphasizing the availability of marriageable men and the paucity of suitably aged women. The campaign aimed partly to encourage new family formation, but to foster the development of family farming as well. A new law that allowed people to lease land, equipment, and livestock from collective farms and to farm on their own as individuals, households, or groups facilitated this “return to the past.” The goal was to restore people’s connection to the land and contribute to a rise in agricultural productivity.7 At least in the short term—which was all that Gorbachev had—none of these measures achieved their aims. Instead of increasing, productivity declined. At the same time, popular dissatisfaction, difficult to measure in earlier years, became more obvious than ever, if not more prevalent, thanks to the new openness. People’s intimate behavior appeared to mirror the shift in popular mood from the guarded optimism of the early years to deep

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pessimism about the future: rates of marriage rose slightly between 1985 and 1987, then began to decline steadily; the birth rate followed exactly the same trajectory.8

Post-Soviet Russia: Marketization, Household, and Home in the 1990s The disintegration of the Soviet Union left the Russian Federation as an independent state. It also put an end to Russia’s status as head of the world’s second superpower and to the pride that accompanied it. The economy was almost entirely transformed. Guided by foreign advisers, the new leadership under Boris Yeltsin used “shock therapy” to convert the state-owned and -managed socialist economy into a quasi-market system. State assets were sold to well-connected “businessmen” at bargain basement prices; employees received small shares, called vouchers. The property of collective farms, including land, implements, and livestock, was likewise transferred away from state ownership, hastily and without much prior planning. Rural elites were the main beneficiaries.9 Housing became private property, too, leaving some 20 percent of Russian families, mostly young families, still waiting in line for an apartment, with another 25 percent simply hoping to be added to the waitlist.10 It is almost impossible to exaggerate the resulting psychological shock, especially for people who came of age in Soviet times. Indeed, some people have not come to terms with the changes to this very day.11 This was a revolution, in its way as thoroughgoing as those that occurred in 1917, but like Stalin’s revolution it began at the top rather than on the streets. Other developments intensified the impact. Some of the values of the capitalist marketplace, including consumerist individualism and the pursuit of personal pleasure, were already on the rise. Now they totally displaced serving the collective good and a cause greater than the self. Where once puritanism had reigned, now sex (and violence) saturated the media, culminating a process that began under Gorbachev. The press, which had rarely reported violent crime, became replete with accounts of it, convincing people that danger lurked everywhere, at least in major cities. The collapse of communism also left a gaping moral vacuum, and many turned to religion to fill it. For this reason as well as others, church marriages grew commonplace.  Other changes compounded the devastating economic effects of marketization on most households. Although low-paying state-supported jobs remained, those paying decent wages mostly disappeared, having proved too costly under the changed circumstances. Scientific institutes and militaryrelated industries were particularly hard hit. Millions of people, including well-educated and highly skilled professionals, became unemployed in a society where previously they had always found jobs. Others who remained

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FIGURE 10.1  Wedding ceremony in Russia, January 2019. © Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

formally employed were put on indefinite, unpaid or poorly paid leave; still others continued to work but failed to receive wages for months on end. In rural areas, jobs evaporated. Everywhere, wages remained low when they were paid at all. At the same time, the state ceased controlling the foreign exchange value of the ruble and prices skyrocketed. By March 1995, the average Russian salary was worth a third less than a year before. Just when money started really to matter, most people enjoyed far too little of it. So at the very time when a range of consumer goods, including food, became available in abundance for the first time, the overwhelming majority of Russians could not afford to buy most of it. Significant social differences, long prevalent in Russia despite claims of egalitarianism, became both more profound and more glaring. The relative few who benefitted from the changed circumstances became fabulously rich and often flaunted their wealth; many, many more, including those who had enjoyed a Soviet version of a “middle class” lifestyle like the professionals mentioned earlier, experienced a catastrophic decline in their standard of living and endured poverty or near-poverty. The retreat of the state intensified the pressure on households and raised new obstacles to marriage and childbearing. Under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin (1991–99), the state curtailed or ceased altogether the numerous ways it had once supported the family. After 1991, large-scale enterprises stopped offering low-cost day care. State support for childcare institutions declined as well. Between 1987 and 1995, the number of urban children in day care dropped by well over a third. Rural areas were hit harder still: from roughly 56 percent of children in preschool institutions at the start of the

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1990s, the proportion had dropped to 26 percent by 1998. At the same time, the cost of existing places escalated. As of May 1993, a mother who could actually find a place in a kindergarten or day care center paid over a quarter of the average wage.12 If men earned enough to support the household—as very few did—their wives now often stayed home, at least until the children were old enough to attend school. If both partners held decent paying jobs, they hired nursemaids to look after the children while they worked. People further curtailed the number of their offspring. At the same time, households provided important mechanisms for coping with the new economic circumstances. Husbands and wives might share the risks of changing jobs, for example—one partner, usually the wife, retaining low-paying state employment with the prospect of a pension as insurance, while the husband entered, or tried to enter, the new market economy. People might work from home, or start household-based enterprises. Teenagers took jobs in the summertime when school was out, in order to contribute to the family pot. Households also continued the self-provisioning that had begun in Gorbachev’s time.13 The increased economic significance of households encouraged people to consolidate resources. Starting in the late 1980s, the proportion of complex or extended households in urban areas grew steadily, rising from about 17 percent of households in 1989 to close to a quarter by 2002. Such households usually included an elderly parent, or parents or other kin. Young couples might move in with parents and rent out their apartment to bring in income. Retired people’s savings and pensions, now severely diminished by inflation, nevertheless added to the household coffers. Grandmothers (far less often, grandfathers) and other retired female relatives could care for preschool children and look after older ones once school was out, helping to fill the gap left by the absent state.14 The home itself assumed a new psychological significance. As the networks that once linked people together—the Communist Party, work collectives, and voluntary organizations—diminished in importance or disintegrated and the outside world became a threatening place, the home provided a sense of permanence, comfort, and safety. In the 1990s, many apartments began to literally resemble a kind of fortress, with newly installed fortified doors, at least in major cities. People nested. Households saved up to invest in durable goods like refrigerators, and those with the means began renovating their apartments: “Eurostyle” bathrooms and kitchens replaced crumbling Soviet-era facilities.15 The enhanced importance of “home” worsened the situation of those stuck in communal arrangements or overcrowded apartments, because there was nowhere to escape the strain of ongoing upheavals or find emotional relief. There were many millions of such people. Construction ground virtually to a halt after privatization, as the state slashed investment in housing and devolved responsibility for construction to municipal authorities that lacked the wherewithal to cover the costs. The waiting list to obtain an apartment,

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while continuing to exist, ceased to move. So the millions waiting in line found themselves out of luck if they lacked the money to buy an apartment or rent one, or to join one of the new building cooperatives. Mainly young families, they, instead, remained living in dormitories, crowded communal quarters, or, very commonly, under their parents’ roof.16

Marriage and Household The collapse of the planned economy and the new importance of cash tended to reinforce the more traditional aspects of marital relations. The idea that a man should serve as “breadwinner” made a comeback. Appeals to women to “return to the home” intensified and became almost all-pervasive. Convinced that their own role was to devote themselves to the family while their husband’s was to support them, many women might have liked to comply. But, in fact, very few women were in a position to remain at home even if that’s what they wanted. Although employed men continued to earn more than employed women, substantial numbers of men weren’t being paid or had lost their jobs. Moreover, what a husband could earn rarely sufficed to support a wife and children. The demilitarization of the economy hit men particularly hard. These were the years when men with advanced degrees might be seen peddling items on the street. Women peddled, too, elderly women especially. Despite the dubious prospects, the pressure on husbands to pull their economic weight often grew intense. “When life became more intolerable,” remembered an engineer in his late thirties, “I started to look for alternative ways of getting money. I was ready to do anything. I was in complete despair. I understood that money is not everything in life; but when a man has none of it, and he is neither disabled nor ill, you feel just totally humiliated.” The pressure on men was all the more intense because, except for their role as provider, most husbands remained peripheral to the household. If they were successful providers, they earned respect; if they failed to provide, they became largely irrelevant.17 And success in the new economy no longer entailed a relatively easy job with clearly defined hours. Now to earn decent money, employed people had to put in long, exhausting days or hold several jobs. The resulting strain on men is evident in the exploding rates of male alcoholism and the dramatic decline in their life expectancy. “Lots of men were broken by hopelessness,” as one woman put it. “They were ready to earn but no one gave them jobs; and not everyone could sell in the market.”18 Men’s life expectancy, having risen in the early years of Gorbachev’s rule, thanks in part to his anti-alcohol campaign, declined from an average of age 64 in 1989 to 58 in 1994 and then rose slightly, to 59.8, in 1999. The number of alcohol-related deaths tripled in this period. Women, whose responsibilities for the domestic sphere were not just exhausting but

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sustaining as well, and which also left them less time to drink, again fared considerably better. While their life expectancy also declined in those years, the decline was far less dramatic—from a high of 74 in 1989 to a low of 72.2 in 1999.19 Yet, the strains on marriages and households received very little discussion in the press. So important had the family become that it “lost the right to fail” as Olga Shevchenko has put it.20 The relative silence also reflected the withdrawal of the state from domestic life after the collapse of communism. That withdrawal was evident in other realms as well. Respect for a family’s right to “privacy,” for example, was the reason police usually offered for their failure to respond to appeals from female victims of domestic violence, by all indications dramatically on the rise. Interviewed in the 1990s, some 26 percent of Moscow wives spoke of some kind of physical abuse. Husbands murdered about 14,000 wives yearly. However, because the government does not maintain aggregate statistics on the incidence of domestic violence, there is no way to know for sure how common it was and still is.21 Information about the causes of divorce or even which partner initiated it also became unavailable after a 1995 revision of the law. Studies of marital breakdown, the focus of considerable sociological attention in the late Soviet period, likewise ground to a halt. Yet, marriages and households unquestionably came under tremendous pressure. The strain is evident in the divorce rates, which rose through the mid-90s, by which time roughly two of every three marriages ended in divorce.22 At the same time, fewer people were getting married in the first place. The cessation of government oversight over personal life, including the insistence on marriage as a sign of personal stability and reliability, left people freer to make their own choices. And many chose to avoid or postpone marriage. New laws protecting private property made the economic consequences of marriage far more serious, at the same time as people’s economic prospects became less certain than ever. Men, now expected (and, often enough, expecting themselves) to be the breadwinner, were likely to be particularly mindful of the new economic realities. But everyone with eyes could see that marriage had become a risky business: marriages were failing all around them. Forced to consider the economic consequences of marriage and other daunting circumstances, many young couples chose to marry later or not at all. A variety of alternative arrangements emerged. Instead of marriage, some people entered de facto unions, which came with fewer complications. De facto marriages became especially common among people who had already married and divorced. They often felt reluctant to get entangled and risk failure once again, especially as private property now made the consequences of divorce more serious. Others, while sexually active at increasingly early ages, simply postponed marriage. Still, although their age of marriage steadily rose, as a group, Russians continued to get married at earlier ages than couples in most of Europe and the United States. The

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experience of Anzhela V., resident of a small town near Novosibirsk, may be taken to reflect the new sociosexual realities in all their complexity. Raised in a household headed by a single mother, she began living with her boyfriend as a schoolgirl, in the early 1990s, when she was fifteen. The couple slept in the kitchen, and her mother and grandmother, in the apartment’s other room. When the boyfriend found a job four years later, the two registered their union as a marriage and moved into the apartment he had inherited from a relative.23 Not surprisingly given the dire economic circumstances and the loss or erosion of state-sponsored incentives, birth rates continued to drop. Most women, if asked, claimed to want two children; however, in urban areas especially, most were having one or none at all. And increasing numbers of them were giving birth without being married. In the mid1990s, unmarried women accounted for almost 20 percent of live births in Russia; the proportion rose steadily thereafter. Although out-of-wedlock birth rates never approached the levels found in other Northern European countries (almost half of births in Sweden in 1990) or the United States (26.6 percent in 1990, 33.2 percent in 2000), in Russia, unlike in these other settings, well over half of unwed mothers were not in stable consensual unions, either.24 Instead, together with divorce and the upsurge of male mortality, rising rates of out-of-wedlock births contributed to an overall increase not only of female-headed but also of complex or extended households. Almost invariably poor in Soviet times, households headed by a woman had grown still poorer because of post-Soviet developments. Government benefits to single mothers, miserly as they had increasingly become, stopped altogether after 1991, while non-resident fathers almost never provided child support. The situation of divorced women with children—which meant most divorcées—worsened as well, because they could no longer rely on stateowned enterprises to garnishee their former husband’s wages and they lacked other means to obtain child support even if ordered by a court. And all this in the new economy, where gendered differences in earning power had grown far more pronounced, with most women earning considerably less than most men. For this reason, and because it was very difficult to raise a child alone without state support, single and divorced mothers often joined the households of their own parent or parents, or their mothers joined theirs.25 In turn, the availability of a mother’s support, especially, prompted growing numbers of women to choose to remain single, a relatively new phenomenon, and even to bear and raise children on their own. Complicated as mother–daughter relations sometimes were, in Russia they were, often, also quite close, indeed often closer than ties between husbands and wives given the absence of a culture of conjugal relations. Certainly, mothers almost invariably proved more reliable than husbands or lovers. Remaining unattached was also women’s response to the perceived absence of desirable

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men: “the ones who are not alcoholics, abusers or unfaithful,” unattached women contended, already had a wife.26 Such comments echo the negative discourse concerning men that emerged in the late Soviet era and only intensified after the collapse. Men as well as women embraced ideas about men’s rampant alcoholism, propensity for domestic violence, chronic infidelity, and, overall, unwillingness to assume responsibility for others, including their children. These behaviors were often all too real, a product, at least in part, of the difficulties experienced by men in coping with the devastating changes that followed the end of the Soviet system. Confronted with the expectation that they take up the slack left by the withdrawal of the state and become for the first time real breadwinners, and in the new and highly challenging circumstances, many men simply gave up. Instead of providing care, they felt a need for care themselves.27

The Post-Soviet Village As difficult as the transition to a market economy was in urban areas, it was more painful still in the countryside. There, the rapid marketization of agriculture brought an end to a way of life that was, whatever its numerous shortcomings, the only one people knew. Collective farms were ordered to be dismantled and instructed to privatize their land within a brief period of time. As in urban areas, elites took advantage of their situation to seize assets that were supposedly the property of all. Instead of dissolving, most collectives were renamed and reclassified as “private” enterprises of various kinds. The new owners, usually collective farm directors, restricted the supply of land available for redistribution and denied villagers the ability to access what had supposedly become theirs. The owners also retained the machinery and implements. The result was the further impoverishment of most former collective farm workers, who continued to work for the repurposed collective, to live in their old houses, and to work their household plots, but often without the benefits that collectives once provided, such as they were. In no position to bargain, they were at the mercy of their new bosses. By the mid-1990s, over half of rural households had sunk beneath the official poverty level. To survive these catastrophic circumstances, in rural areas, too, people pooled their resources. In the 1990s, the tendency toward nuclear households reversed and the proportion of complex and extended households began rising once again, although as in cities, nuclear households still remained the most prevalent.28 Rural households, too, experienced immense strain, which told on the relations between husbands and wives. Alcoholism became rampant; deaths from alcohol poisoning rose to 56,240 in 1994, a peak year; most of the deceased were able-bodied men. The incidence of domestic violence, already more prevalent in rural areas, also reached new highs. Rates of divorce

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also rose, despite rural prejudices against it and the fact that the economic consequences of divorce had now become more dire: the divorcing partner was entitled to demand a portion of the household property, land included. Whereas there was roughly one divorce for every four rural marriages in 1990, by 1995 the rate had increased to one divorce for every 2.5 marriages, still below urban rates, but not by much.29 The absence of economic prospects also prompted people to postpone marriage or avoid it altogether, the latter another substantial break with the past. No less than urban dwellers, young people in rural areas were fully aware of their inability to establish a family or provide for a child. Instead, they, too, entered consensual unions, which carried no obligations. Hitherto, such unions, while they existed, had been comparatively rare in rural areas because of the close community scrutiny to which people remained subject and the relative conservatism of sexual mores. However, according to the census of 1994, the first to record de facto unions, such unions had actually become more common in rural areas than in urban ones—eighty-eight per thousand people in rural areas; fifty-seven per thousand in cities and towns, albeit with significant regional variations. The popularity of de facto unions only increased in the following years, evidence, no doubt, of a growing individualism among the young or at least among young men. Together with casual sexual liaisons, such unions also led to a rise in rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy: from 17.3 percent of births in 1991 to close to 30 percent in 2000, even as the birth rate itself declined dramatically.30 In fact, children had become a luxury that ever fewer rural people could afford. It took every ounce of strength they had simply to keep their heads above water. Children were expensive, while state efforts to ease the burden had more or less ceased. Only single mothers continued to receive a pittance. “I have five children,” wrote M. M. Evdokimova from a Kursk village to the leadership in the early 1990s. “Winter comes—they lack shoes to walk to school. Where did everything go? Before, they increased your wages when you had children. Now I get 150 rubles and a jacket costs a thousand. How are we supposed to live?” Russian rural dwellers postponed childbearing, or chose to have two children rather than three or more, or one rather than two, or, increasingly, none at all.31 The new circumstances affected children in other ways, too. The now-allconsuming labor of scratching a living from household plots, with mainly primitive implements and no resources except for their own bodies, left adults no time for childcare. Soviet-era institutions designed for children— day care and kindergarten, after-school activities, clubs, and so on—melted away. Children might be put to work, forced to miss school. Or they were left to their own devices or, worse, abandoned altogether. The number of homeless children, some abandoned, others having fled dysfunctional families, increased to levels unseen since the end of World War II. Among adolescents, drinking and drug addiction became widespread.32

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Into the Twenty-first Century In the early twenty-first century, the ways that urban Russians organize their personal lives have come to resemble more closely the practices of their counterparts elsewhere in the developed world. This is especially true of younger people born after the collapse of communism, who have no personal experience of Soviet times or the crises their parents endured. The market economy has become the norm. Thanks to the rapid rise in the price of oil, the first decade of the twenty-first century became a time of real prosperity for many Russians, while also enhancing the popularity of Vladimir Putin, who assumed power at the end of 1999. Until the world-wide recession of 2008 began putting a halt to growth, wages and pensions increased while poverty declined. Not all boats rose to the same extent. Post-Soviet Russia remained perhaps the most unequal society on the planet: a super-wealthy strata—roughly ten per cent of the population—owned over 80 per cent of the wealth. Still, in this period a new middle class emerged, concentrated in cities and towns, and with significant regional variations. While poverty persisted, it was now mostly concentrated in rural areas.33 Although the oil boom is over, the figures on life expectancy suggest that the severe crisis of the 1990s has passed, at least for now. Men and women alike are living longer than they did in those terrible times, though men’s life expectancy (up to 66.5 as of 2016) is still ten years behind women’s. The varying levels of economic development produce an unusually diverse range of family forms. Access to the internet and an array of international media have also vastly expanded people’s menu of possible lifestyle choices, at least in theory. The limits on choice are especially evident in the realm of same-sex relations, still condemned by the state and subject to harsh penalties. Nevertheless, while economic circumstances play a decisive role in shaping personal possibilities as they do in most contemporary Western societies, so too do certain legacies of the Soviet era.34 Take, for example, attitudes toward the “home.” Since the late Soviet era, having a home of one’s own has been an essential component of people’s aspirations for a “normal life.” However, where once that meant an apartment for every nuclear family, now the aspirational home takes multiple, and often more elaborate, forms, largely under the influence of foreign media and advertising, and television programs devoted to home décor and renovation. For those with the economic wherewithal—primarily the new, educated middle class—“normal” now means an apartment with a room for every child, a separate bedroom for a married couple or adult, and perhaps even a room to spare. Truly wealthy Russians require even more. They construct or purchase “cottages” [kottadzhi], large, modern detached homes in the suburbs of cities, or they buy luxury apartments with numerous rooms. Those wealthy households are generally composed of a working husband, a wife who stays

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at home, and at least two children. (Like large houses, many children have come to signify wealth, although many children are also a cause of poverty.) Whatever its dimensions, people now conceive of home as a place where they can rest and recover from a stressful workaday world and escape the gaze of others. They also seek comfort and, having been denied “privacy” for so many decades, they aspire to as much as they can afford.35 While they too may desire greater privacy, the “home” of their less welloff counterparts has changed very little. At least through the first decade of the twenty-first century, even their own apartment remained a distant dream for many. Privatization did nothing to resolve the problem of access. Where once obtaining an apartment usually depended on party membership, or where you worked and whom you knew, after 1991 it depended on how much money you had unless you were fortunate enough to inherit an apartment from a relative. And most people had too little money and remained reluctant to borrow. As of 2009, about half of urban Russians aged twenty-one to forty still lived in complex or extended households, although the vast majority would have preferred it otherwise. “Of course I am not satisfied,” declared Ludmila, an accountant living with her husband and child in her mother’s apartment in the provincial city of Kaluga. “But we have no realistic alternative. Every year things are getting worse.” Due to lack of means, only half of forty-year-olds lived in apartments of their own.36 Partly because of the housing situation but for other reasons as well, grandmothers and/or fathers, and extended kin more generally, remain a more important part of people’s lives than is the case in much of Europe and the United States. Most vital of all is still the grandmother and for much the same reasons as before: the overwhelming majority of women with children continue to be gainfully employed, just as in the Soviet era. As of 2017, women composed some 48.6 percent of the Russian workforce and their earnings, however modest, remain essential to the welfare of all but the wealthiest households.37 Affordable and accessible day care is difficult to find. Although growing numbers employ nannies, many cannot afford this. At the same time, again thanks in part to the influence of foreign media and increased consumerism, expectations of children’s needs continue to rise. One result is that even young couples that aspire to live on their own also want to live near enough to at least one set of in-laws, for help with the children.38 The willingness of their own mother to lend a hand remains especially vital to single mothers, who continue to head a significant minority of households—24.1 percent of those with children as of 2010. Such households are a product of high rates of divorce, the low life expectancy of men, and high levels of out-of wedlock childbirths. Since the late Soviet era, the proportion of women, older women especially, who have chosen to bear children alone has grown steadily, while the discourse concerning single mothers has changed. Woman-headed households with children are no

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longer “incomplete” but now regarded as entirely normal, at least in urban areas. Because they believe good men are hard to find—echoing critiques of male behavior of the late Soviet and immediate post-Soviet periods—many single mothers prefer living without a man, despite the hard work of single parenting and the fact that their households are almost invariably poorer than households with a male wage earner. As earlier, a significant proportion of women raising children alone depend on the help of their own mothers— resident or not—to make things work.39 Whether rural women share their urban counterparts’ preference for singlehood remains a question. Rural women face far more limited job opportunities, the backbreaking labor of maintaining a household on their own, and less tolerance for single motherhood in their communities. Preference or not, however, as of 2012, single mothers bore roughly half of all first babies born in rural areas. In cities, the proportion was even higher, close to 60 percent.40 Other trends since the end of the turbulent 1990s indicate a break with Soviet-era patterns. The high level of relationship- and marital breakdown has accustomed the younger generation of urban dwellers, women and men alike, to approach marriage more rationally than formerly and to enter it a later age. The era of student marriages has ended. Cohabitation has become widespread. Knowing that relationships may not last, people test out sexual relationships before they make a legal commitment. For those who approach sexual relations seriously, serial monogamy, rather than entering a lifelong marriage or consensual union, has become the new normal, whether or not a child is involved.41 There is evidence, too, that Russia’s gender relations may be slowly changing, despite the persistence of negative stereotypes of masculinity and the realities on which they rest. Younger women expect and at least sometimes achieve more egalitarian relations with men than their own mothers enjoyed; they have also grown less tolerant of male infidelity. Some young men have become willing to share at least some of the housework, especially care of children and the elderly. A few even remain at home while wives work, despite continuing prejudice against such arrangements. So far as can be ascertained, this is an entirely urban phenomenon: in rural areas the division of labor is as gendered as ever.42 Although the state has largely withdrawn from the Russian household, its support for motherhood persists, if in more limited ways than before. This is for pragmatic reasons: the birth rate remains inadequate to replace the population lost to death. In rural areas especially, Russia has become dependent on immigration to replenish its population.43 As a result, under President Vladimir Putin, procreation has been recast as a patriotic duty. Russia’s maternity leave is now among the most generous in the world: 140 days at full wages, paid by the employer, plus a government subsidized payment of 40 percent of wages if the mother remains at home for three years, plus a lump sum payment for every child after the first. (One of the

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ironic consequences is that employers often force women workers to work off the books to avoid paying for all this).44 To encourage two or more children, in 2006 Putin also introduced the idea of maternal capital. He promised a large sum, equivalent to $10,000, when a second child reached the age of three, to be invested in housing, the mother’s pension, or education for the child.45 Soon after, Russia’s Ministry of Health did away with most of the criteria for obtaining abortions in the second trimester of pregnancy, making them far more difficult to obtain.46 As Anna Rotkirch, Anna Temkina, and Elena Zdravomyslova have pointed out, the promise of “maternal capital” addressed only the mother. Putin’s policy made no mention of a child’s father or of any man—or, for that matter, of grandparents or other relatives. It referred only to the mother.47 Still, if the father remained unmentioned, the policy appears to have encouraged more men to assume at least some paternal responsibility. While the number of out-of-wedlock pregnancies continues to rise, since 2005 it has fallen as a proportion of all births because of the increase in births to couples in registered marriages. Also on the rise is the proportion of extramarital births in which the male partner takes responsibility by registering along with the mother.48 Sadly, because of the dramatic drop in birth rates in the 1990s, there soon will be fewer young people available to marry and reproduce. There also may be fewer babushki to lend a hand: women who have come of age in a more individualistic and consumerist era are likely to be less willing to quit their jobs or eschew personal pleasures so as to devote themselves to looking after grandchildren. Even as Russian practices involving marriage, household, and home grow to resemble more closely those of their Western European counterparts, other forces push in the opposite direction. President Vladimir Putin espouses “traditional family values.” Presenting himself as a father figure and forceful patriarchal leader—strong, self-disciplined, and prepared to defend the nation—he offers a sharp contrast to the degraded masculinity of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet years.49 Conservative nationalists press for raising the cost of divorce, for the condemnation of non-marital births, and for new limits on abortion. They explicitly seek to reverse current trends and return to the prerevolutionary Russian past. This would entail increasing the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the formulation of family law, encouraging the formation of complex patriarchal households containing multiple generations, and adopting a more actively pronatalist stance. At the same time, conservatives seek to establish a minimum level of child support, irrespective of the father’s income—perhaps in response to the widespread practice among divorced fathers of concealing or misrepresenting what they earn.50 Conservatives have found an occasional ally in Putin. They scored their biggest success thus far in 2017, when lawmakers decriminalized some forms of domestic violence, amending the criminal code to treat conviction for domestic battery—hitherto punishable by up to two years in jail—as an

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administrative offense. “A man beating his wife is less offensive than when a man is humiliated,” declared Yelena Mizulina, the lawmaker who led the decriminalization effort. The law now reserves criminal charges for abuses involving concussions or broken bones, or repeated offenses in a family setting. While domestic violence is probably no more common in Russia than elsewhere in the developed world, as a result of this legal change the police have become far less likely to respond to women’s calls for help, while the courts have become more likely to punish women who use violence to defend themselves.51 Framed by conservatives in terms of “Western liberal values” versus Russian traditions, the fight over domestic violence is also a struggle over the interpretation of Russia’s past and the shape of its future. As is true of Putin’s other policies touching on family life—and, indeed, of the history told in these pages—people’s personal lives and domestic arrangements carry a significance far beyond themselves, whether or not they realize it.

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NOTES

Preface 1 Secondary accounts include Heidi W. Whelan, Adapting to Modernity: Family, Caste, and Capitalism in the World of the Nineteenth Century Baltic German Nobility (Cologne: Bohlau, 1999); ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2002); Robert Crews, “Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” The American Historical Review, 108, no. 1 (2003): 50–83. In addition, some studies of family life on Russian territory include other ethnic groups—Tatars and Jews, most notably—in addition to other Slavs such as Belorussians and Ukrainians. See, for example, Iurii Goncharov, Gorodskaia sem’ia Sibiri vtoroi poloviny XIX-nachala XX v. (Barnaul: Izdatel’stvo Altaiskogo Gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2002); A. N. Zorin, et al., Ocherkie gorodskogo byta dorevoliutsionnogo Povolzh’ia (Ulianovsk: Izdatel’stvo Srednevolzhskogo nauchnogo tsentra, 2000); N. A. Aralovets, Gorodskaia sem’ia v Rossii, 1927-1959 gg. (Tula: Grif i K, 2009); and O. M. Verbitskaia, Sel’skaia sem’ia na etape sotsial’noekonomicheskikh transformatsii 1985-2002 gg. (Moscow-Sankt-Peterburg: Tsentr Gumanitarnykh Initsiativ, 2017). 2 The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible, ed. and trans. Carolyn Johnston Pouncy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 129. 3 Ibid., 45-7. 4 Valerie Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).

Chapter 1 1 Lindsay Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 393. 2 Russell Martin, A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-shows and Marriage Politics in Early Modern Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2012). 3 Valerie Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), chapter 3. For the range of possible alliances among

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urban dwellers, see A. B. Kamenskii, Povsednevnost’ russkikh gorodskikh obyvatelei (Moscow: RGGU, 2006), 60, 77–8. 4 Liudmila Timoshina, “Une famille d’entrepreneurs: Les Pankrat’ev (milieu du XVIe-milieu du XVIIIe siècle),” Cahiers du Monde Russe, 57, no. 2–3 (2016): 391. For what borrowing money might entail, see Anna Joukovskaia and Evgenii Akelev, “Iz kazakov vo dvoriane: Shagarovy, mikroistorii social’noi mobil’nosti v Rossii, XVII–XVIII v.,” Cahiers du Monde Russe, 57, no. 2–3 (2016): 472–3. 5 Kivelson, Autocracy, 98–9. 6 Nancy Shields Kollman, “‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’: Changing Models of Masculinity in Muscovite and Petrine Russia,” in Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 18. 7 Ibid. 18–19. 8 Daniel Kaiser, “Gender, Property and Testamentary Behavior: Eighteenth Century Moscow Wills,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 28, no. 1–4 (2006): 511– 20. While most of Kaiser’s documents date from later in the century, a few predate Peter the Great’s marital innovations. Also: D. Kaizer (Daniel Kaiser), “Razvod, ser’eznaia bolezn’ i supruzheskaia liubov’ v Rossii v XVII v.,” Ot drevnei Rusi k novoi Rossii, ed. A. N. Sakharov (Moscow: Palomnicheskii tsentr Moskovskogo Patriarkhata, 2005), 260–7. 9 Kollman, “‘What’s Love,’” 17–18. 10 D. Kaizer (Daniel Kaiser), “Vozrast pri braka i raznitsa v vozraste suprugov v gorodakh Rossii v nachale XVIII v.,” in Sosloviia i gosudarstvennaia vlast’ v Rossii. XV-seredina XIX vv., ed. N. V. Karlov, Lev Vladimirovich Cherepnin, and N. A. Gorskaia, 2 parts (Moscow: Institut Rossiiskoi Istorii, 1994), pt. 2, 225–37. 11 M. G. Rabinovich, Ocherki etnografii russkogo feodal’nogo goroda (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), 217–30; Daniel H. Kaiser, “Quotidian Orthodoxy: Domestic Life in Early Modern Russia,” in Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars and Beyond, ed. Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 182–3. 12 Hughes, Russia, 260–2. See also the descriptions of wedding rituals in The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible, ed. and trans. Carolyn Johnston Pouncy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 204–37. 13 Kaiser, “Quotidian Orthodoxy,” 180–7; Daniel H. Kaiser, “Church Control of Marriage in Seventeenth Century Russia,” The Russian Review, 65, no. 4 (2006): 567–85. 14 Daniel H. Kaiser, “‘Whose Wife Will She Be at the Resurrection?’ Marriage and Remarriage in Early Modern Russia,” Slavic Review, 62, no. 2 (2003): 302–23. 15 Kamenskii, Povsednevnost’, 66. 16 A. N. Zorin, Zastroika i ekologiia malykh gorodov. Opyt regional’nogo istoriko-etnograficheskii ocherk (Kazan: Izdatel’stvo Kazanskogo Universiteta,

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1990), 26; Rabinovich, Ocherki, 59–63. On childbearing and infant mortality, see Kamenskii, Povsednevnost’, 63–4, 70–1. 17 For a description, see the The Domostroi. 18 Kivelson, Autocracy, 98. 19 The Domostroi, 93, 143. 20 Nancy S. Kollman, “The Extremes of Patriarchy: Spousal Abuse and Murder in Early Modern Russia,” Russian History, 25, no. 1–2 (1998): 133–40; Marianna Muravyeva, “‘Till Death Us Do Part’: Spousal Homicide in Early Modern Russia,” The History of the Family, 18, no. 3 (2013): 306–30. 21 Daniel H. Kaiser, “Urban Household Composition in Early Modern Russia,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23, no. 1 (1992): 39–71; Kaizer, “Vozrast,” 233. In the town of Bezhets, not included in Kaiser’s survey, marriage into the wife’s household was far from unusual. Kamenskii, Povsednevnost’, 57, 282. 22 Kamenskii, Povsednevnost’, 272. 23 Nancy Shields Kollman, “Women’s Honor in Early Modern Russia,” in Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 70. 24 Mariana Murav’eva, “Povsednevnye praktiki nasiliia: supruzheskoe nasilie v russkikh sem’iakh XVIII v.,” in Bytovoe nasilie v istorii rossiiskoi povsednevnosti (XI-XXI vv.), ed. M. G. Murav’eva and N. Pushkareva (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeikskogo Universiteta v Sankt-Peterburg, 2012), 94–7. 25 Kollman, “The Extremes of Patriarchy”; Kaiser, “Invading the ‘Private.’” 26 Anna Joukovskaia, “A Living Law: Divorce Contracts in Early Modern Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 18, no. 4 (2017): 667. 27 Kollman, “Women’s Honor,” 71. 28 Joukovskaia, “A Living Law,” 667. 29 Ibid. 666–7; Kollman, “Women’s Honor,” 60–73. 30 Hughes, Russia, 198. 31 Joukovskaia, “A Living Law,” 668–9. 32 Contract from Robin Bisha, “Marriage, Church and Community in 18thCentury St. Petersburg,” in Women and Gender in 18th-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 227; Joukovskaia, “A Living Law,” 669–76. 33 Hughes, Russia, 196–7. Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (St. Petersburg, 1857), v. 10, pt. 1, article 6, 2. 34 Ol’ga Kosheleva, Liudi Sankt-Peterburgskogo ostrova Petrovskogo Vremeni (St. Petersburg: OGI, 2004), 189. Quote from Brenda Meehan-Waters, Autocracy and Aristocracy: The Russian Service Elite of 1830 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982), 123.

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35 Lindsay Hughes, “Peter the Great’s Two Weddings: Changing Images of Women in a Transitional Age,” in Women in Russia and Ukraine, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 31–44. 36 Kollman, “‘What’s Love’” 15–32. 37 Hughes, Russia, 196. 38 Ibid. 306. 39 Olga E. Glagoleva, “Dream and Reality of Russian Provincial Young Ladies, 1700-1850,” The Carl Beck Papers, no. 1405, 19–20. 40 Meehan-Waters, Autocracy, 111. 41 Olga E. Glagoleva, “Semeinye Raspri: Konflikty vokrug sobstvennosti v srede provintsial’nogo dvorianstvo v Rossii XVIII v. i ikh rol’ v funktsionirovanii sem’i i roda,” Cahiers du Monde Russe, 57, no. 2–3 (2016): 602–3. 42 A. T. Bolotov, Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia Andreia Bolotova opisannye samim im dlia svoikh potomkov, 3 vols. (Moscow: Terra, 1993), v. 1, 15–6, 18. 43 Ibid. 16–17. 44 Ibid. 17. 45 Ibid. 17–18. 46 Svod zakonov, v. 10, pt. 1, article 174, 35. 47 For examples, see Gorodskaia sem’ia XVIII veka: Semeino-pravovoe akty kuptsov i raznochintsev Moskvy, ed. N. V. Kozlova (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 2002), documents no. 248, 249, 250, 253, 285, 286. 48 Ibid. no. 226, 278. See also 273, 276. 49 Rabinovich, Etnografiia, 222–3. 50 On modest social mobility, see Kosheleva, Liudi, 160–4; Kamenskii, Povsednevnost’, 78. 51 For godparents, see Kozlova, no. 227, 231. 52 Kozlova, no. 256, 262. See no. 283 for the widow who dowered herself. 53 Kosheleva, Liudi, 179–82. 54 Kozlova, no. 371. 55 Ibid. no. 137. 56 Daniel H. Kaiser, “Gender,” 511–20; Kozlova, no. 137. 57 Kaiser, “Gender,” 512–17. 58 Bolotov, v. I, 8–12. 59 Ibid, 12. 60 Aleksandr Vasil’ievich Suvorov, in Russkie memuary: izbrannye stranitsy XVIII veka, ed. I. I. Podol’skaia (Moscow: Izd-vo Pravda, 1988), 90–1. 61 Bolotov, v. I, 367. 62 Abby M. Schrader, Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002). 63 In St. Petersburg, at least, excessive resort to violence could prompt outsiders to intervene. Robin Bisha, “Marriage, Church and Community,” 227–42.

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64 Murav’eva, “Povsednevnye praktiki nasiliia,” 79–81. Violence among the urban and rural lower orders also occurred frequently. 65 Ibid, 98–9; Bisha, “Marriage, Church and Community,” 230. 66 Murav’eva, “Povsednevnye praktiki nasiliia,” 71, 76, 78. 67 Joukovskaia, 279–80. 68 Murav’eva, 84–5; Joukovskaia, 674. 69 Joukovskaia, 679–81; Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (St. Petersburg, 1891), v. 10, pt. 1, article 46. 70 Joukovskaia, 680–1; Gregory L. Freeze, “Bringing Order to the Russian Family: Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, 1760-1860,” The Journal of Modern History, 62 no. 4 (1990): 709–46.

Chapter 2 1 David L. Ransel, A Russian Merchant’s Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchenov, Based on His Diary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 20. 2 Ibid. 20. 3 For its prevalence among gentry, see Dmitrii Ivanovich Rostislavov, Provincial Russia in the Age of Enlightenment: The Memoir of a Priest’s Son, ed. and trans. Alexander M. Martin (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), 92; for a pained description of the ritual as one newlywed gentleman endured it, A. T. Bolotov, Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia Andreia Bolotova, opisannye samim im dlia svoikh potomkov, 3 vols. (Moscow: Terra, 1993), v. 2, 299. 4 Ransel, A Russian, 100. 5 “Introduction,” in The Europeanized Elite in Russia: 1762-1825, ed. Andreas Schönle, Andrei Zorin, and Alexei Evstratov (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), 4–5. 6 Cissie Fairchilds, “Women and the Family,” in French Women and the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Samia I. Spencer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 98–9; “Introduction,” The Europeanized Elite, 4–5; Liubov Artem’eva, “Videnie vliublennogo: liubov’ i brak v kul’ture russkogo sentimentalizma,” Adam i Eva 2 (2001): 267–8; Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theatre (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 56, 156; Andrei L. Zorin, Poiavlenie geroia: iz istorii russkoi emotsional’noi kul’tury kontsa XVIII-nachala XIX veka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2016), 68–80. 7 Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 207–11; Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 50–3. 8 John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).

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9 Ibid. 33–39. 10 J. L. Black, “Educating Women in Eighteenth Century Russia: Myths and Realities,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, 20, no. 1 (1978): 25–43. 11 Andreas Schönle, “The Scare of Self: Sentimentalism, Privacy and Private Life in Russian Culture, 1780-1825,” Slavic Review, 57, no. 4 (1998): 729; A. L. Zorin, Poiavlenie, 62. 12 Gregory L. Freeze, “Bringing Order to the Russian Family: Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, 1760-1860,” Journal of Modern History, 62, no. 4 (1990): 720–21; William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 71, 74–6. 13 Paul W. Werth, “Empire, Religious Freedom, and the Legal Regulation of ‘Mixed Marriage,’” The Journal of Modern History, 80, no. 2 (2008): 296–331. 14 Marianna Murav’eva, “Povsednevnye praktiki nasiliia: supruzheskoe nasilie v russkikh sem’iakh XVIII v.,” in Bytovoe nasilie v istorii rossiiskoi povsednevnosti, ed. M. G. Murav’eva and N. L. Pushkareva (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet, 2012), 71. 15 Sergei P. Grigorovskii, ed. Sbornik tserkovnykh i grazhdanskikh zakonov o brake i razvode, uzakonenii, usynovlenii i vnebrachnyia deti: s polozheniimi i raziasneniami po tsirkuliarnym i separatnym ukazam Sviatleishego Synoda, 6th ed. (St. Petersburg: Trud, 1904), 154–209; Wagner, Marriage, 71. 16 Freeze, “Bringing Order,” 733. For two examples, see Rasskazy babushki: iz vospominanii piati pokolenii zapisannye i sobrannye ee vnukom D. Blagovo (Leningrad: Nauka, 1989), 333, 362. 17 Wagner, 71. 18 Michelle Lamarche Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 97–9. 19 Freeze, “Bringing Order,” 711. 20 Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1857), vol. 10, pt. I, articles 106–108; Wagner, Marriage, 62. 21 Bolotov, Zhizn’, v. 3, 246–7; 262–3; 283, 287. 22 I. de Madariaga, “Introduction,” G. S. Vinsky, Moe vremia, zapiski (St. Petersburg, 1914, republished Cambridge: Oriental Research Partners, 1974), n. p. 64–5. 23 Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin, in Russkie memuary: izbrannye stranitsy, XVIII vek, ed. I. I. Podol’skaia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Pravda, 1988), 163. 24 Russkie memuary, 163; Michelle Lamarche Marrese, “Performing Womanhood in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Cultural Identity in the Letters of Ekaterina Rumiantseva and Dar’ia Saltykova,” in The Europeanized Elite, 95–7. 25 Bolotov, Zhizn’, v. 3, 360–3. 26 F. F. Vigel, Zapiski (Cambridge: Oriental Research Partners, [1928]1974), 117; Gitta Hammarberg, “Flirting with Words: Domestic Albums, 17701840,” in Russia. Women. Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 297–320.

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27 “Zapiski Evrastii I. Stogova,” Russkaia Starina 115 (March, 1903): 51–3. 28 Ibid. 29 Mary Wells Cavender, Nests of the Gentry: Family, Estate and Local Loyalties in Provincial Russia (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 36; N. V. Zanegina, “Osobennosti otnoshenii muzha i zheny v dvoianskikh sem’iakh Rossii kontsa XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX v. (na materialakh Tverskoi gubernii),” in Rod i sem’ia v kontekste tverskoi istorii: sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Tver: Tverskoi Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 2007), 64–79. 30 Sofia Vasil’evna Skalon, in Podol’skaia, ed. Russkie memuary, 474, 483. 31 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF), Tret’e otdelenie sobstvennoi ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantseliarii, 1826-1880, fond 109, 2-aia ekspeditsiia, op. 58, d. 119, 8. 32 GARF, fond 109, 2-aia ekspeditsiia, op. 1835, d. 504, 16. For the upsurge of appeals, see N. L. Pushkareva, Chastnaia zhizn’ russkoi zhenshchiny: Nevesta, zhena, liubovnitsa: X-nachalo XIX v. (Moscow: Ladomir, 1997), 243. 33 Ibid. 88, 89, 157. 34 O. E. Nilova, Moskovskoe kupechestvo kontsa XVIII-pervoi chetverti XIX veka. Sotsial’nye aspekty mirovospriiatia i samosoznaniia (Moscow: RAN, 2002), 40; I. G. Kusova, Riazanskoe kupechestvo. Ocherki istorii XVI-nachala XX veka (Riazan: Mart, 1996), 112. For townspeople, see A. N. Zorin et al., Ocherki gorodskogo byta dorevoliutsionnogo Povolzh’ia (Izdatel’stvo Srednevolzhskogo nauchnogo tsentra, 2000), 240–8. 35 Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 56, 167. 36 Ransel, A Russian Merchant’s, 103, 107–16. Other merchants built homes in similar style. N. A. Minenko et al., Povsednevnaia zhizn’ uralskogo goroda (Moscow: Nauka, 2006), 128–33; Kusova, Riazanskoe, 112–3. 37 Ransel, A Russian Merchant’s, 181–2. 38 Arcadius Kahan, “The Costs of ‘Westernization’ in Russia: The Gentry and the Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” Slavic Review, 25, no. 1 (1966): 40–66. 39 I. I. Lapin, “Dnevnik,” in Kupecheskie dnevniki i memuary kontsa XVIIIpervoi poloviny XIX veka, ed. A. V. Semenova (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007), 92, 93, 99, 100, 101, 108, 110, 115, 122. 40 Ibid. 106, 119. 41 Randolph, The House, 78. 42 Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, 2000), v. 1, 261; Randolph, The House, 127, 142. 43 Ibid. 127; for the law, see Polnyi svod zakonov, article 173. 44 E. O. Likhacheva, Materialy dlia istorii zhenskogo obrazovanniia v Rossii, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1899–1901), v. 3, p. 9; Rebecca Friedman, “From Boys to Men: Manhood in the Nicholaevan University,” in Russian Masculinities in

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History and Culture, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 33–50. 45 I. M. Troitskii, Tret’e otdelenie pri Nikolae I (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vsesoiuznogo obshchestva politkatorzhan i ssylno-poselentsev, 1930), 5; V. A. Veremenko, “’Litso s vidom na zhitel’stvo’ (gendernyi aspekt pasportnoi sistemy Rossii kontsa XIX-nachala XX veka,” Adam i Eva, 7 (2004): 221–6. 46 GARF, fond 109, 2-aia ekspeditsiia, 1828, op. 58, d. 199, 1–19. 47 Antonova, An Ordinary, 8–13. 48 Kahan, “The Costs,” 64. 49 David Ransel, Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 28. 50 Randolph, The House, 102, 115–6; Cavender, 47; Antonova, An Ordinary, 122–4, 131. For one husband’s anxiety, see Bolotov, Zhizn’, v. 2, 502. 51 Janet M. Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire, 1650-1825 (New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman, 1999), 202. 52 Ransel, A Russian Merchant, 122–3; the fate of Bolotov’s offspring calculated from the index, Bolotov, Zhizn’, v. 3, 584–5; for the Bakunins, see Randolph, The House, 102. 53 Cavender, Nests, 49. 54 Antonova, An Ordinary, 86, 151. 55 Ibid. 132. 56 Ibid. 175. See also Cavender, Nests, 49; Randolph, The House, 103–5. 57 Bolotov, Zhizn’, v. 2, 283–5; 302–4. 58 Antonova, An Ordinary, 138, chap. 8. 59 Martin, Enlightened, 234, 254–6. 60 Tiul’pin, in Russkie memuary, 358; P. V. Medvedev, “Iz dnevnika za 18541861 gg.,” Moskovskii arkhiv, vyp. 2 (Moscow, 2000), 19. 61 V. N. Kulik, “Zhenshchiny dinastii Riabushinskikh,” in Rod i sem’ia, 180. 62 N. A. Leikin, “Moi vospominanii,” in Peterburgskoe kupechestvo v XIX veke, ed. Andrei Konechnyi (St. Petersburg: Giperion, 2003), 126. 63 Ibid, 127. 64 Ibid, 126, 130–1, 181. 65 Kelly, Refining, 124. 66 Boris Mironov, Russkii gorod v 1740-1860e gody (Leningrad: Nauka, 1990). Mironov’s figures suggest that roughly 40 percent of urban dwellers were townspeople, with peasants comprising a substantial minority, 30 percent, 82–3.

Chapter 3 1 Christine D. Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the PostEmancipation Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 119.

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2 John Bushnell, Russian Peasant Women Who Refused to Marry: Spasovite Old Believers in the 18th-19th Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 38, 42; David Moon, The Russian Peasantry 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made (Harlow, UK: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), 165–6. 3 Bushnell, Russian Peasant Women; T. K. Dennison, “Serfdom and Household Structure,” Continuity and Change, 18, no. 3 (2003): 395–429. 4 Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 156; T. K. Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 84–5. 5 Ibid. 69. 6 Bushnell, Russian Peasant Women, 116. 7 Peter Czap, “A Large Family: The Peasants’ Greatest Wealth,” in Family in Historic Europe, ed. R. Wall, J. Robin and Peter Laslett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 122–33, as cited in Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 161. 8 Cathy Frierson, “Razdel: The Peasant Family Divided,” in Russian Peasant Women, ed. Lynne Viola and Beatrice Farnsworth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 77. 9 Steven Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia; Petrovskoe: A Village in Tambov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 84–7; Peter Czap, “The Perennial Multiple Family Household: Mishino, Russia, 1782-1858,” Journal of Family History, 7, no. 1 (1982): 13. 10 Dennison, “Serfdom,” 417–8. 11 Savva Purlevskii, The Memoirs of Savva Dmitrievich Purlevskii, 1800-1868, ed. and trans. Boris B. Gorshkov (Budapest: Central European University, 2005), 47. 12 Czap, “The Perennial,” 25; N. A. Minenko, Russkaia krest’ianskaia sem’ia v zapadnoi Sibirii (XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX v.) (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1979), 291–2. 13 Hoch, Serfdom, chap. 3. 14 Ibid. 87–8. 15 Dennison, “Serfdom,” 395–429. 16 Minenko, Russkaia krest’ianskaia, 292. 17 Bushnell, Russian Peasant Women, 38, 42. 18 Czap, “Perennial,” 13. 19 Bushnell, Russian Peasant Women, chap. 1. 20 Nina Minenko, “Vsepreliubeznaia nasha sozhitel’nitsa . . .’” Rodina 7 (1994): 105; John Bushnell, “Did Serf Owners Control Serf Marriage?” Slavic Review 52, no. 3 (1993): 424–6. 21 Kate Pickering Antonova, An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 58; Janet Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire (London: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), 204–5.

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22 Bushnell, Russian Peasant Women, 66; Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 167–9. 23 Dennison, The Institutional Framework, chap. 3. 24 Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 186–7. 25 Ibid. 188. 26 Ibid. 188. 27 Minenko, Russkaia krest’ianskaia, 237–9; Worobec, Peasant Russia, 159–61. 28 One has to seek hard to find mention of it, however, because of the preference for privacy that accompanied the spread of the culture of sensibility. See A. T. Bolotov, Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia Andreia Bolotova, opisannye samim im dlia svoikh potomkov, 3 vols. (Moscow: Terra, 1993), v. 2, 299. For the broader picture, see Dmitrii Ivanovich Rostislavov, Provincial Russia in the Age of Enlightenment: The Memoir of a Priest’s Son, ed. and trans. Alexander M. Martin (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), 92. 29 Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 188–9; B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003), v. 1, 239. 30 Daniel H. Kaiser, “Quotidian Orthodoxy: Domestic Life in Early Modern Russia,” in Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars, ed. Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 179–92; Worobec, Peasant Russia, 151, 153. 31 On Sheremetev, see Douglas Smith, The Pearl: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great’s Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 32 Aleksandr Nikitenko, Up from Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia, trans. Helen Saltz Jacobson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 6–7, 12. 33 Ibid. 5–7, 10–13. 34 Ibid. 14. 35 Ibid. 18. 36 Purlevskii, The Memoirs, 54–9. 37 Ibid. 72–3. 38 Ibid. 73–4. 39 Ibid, 73–4. 40 Irina Paert, “Regulating Old Believer Marriage: Ritual, Legality and Conversion in Nicholas I’s Russia,” Slavic Review, 63, no. 3 (2004): 558–60. 41 Bushnell, Russian Peasant Women, 128, 212–4; Minenko, Russkaia krest’ianskaia, 203–8. 42 Minenko, Russkaia krest’ianskaia, 202, 207–8; Paert, “Regulating Old Believer Marriage,” 555–75. For examples of Old Believer common law marriages after 1839, see Trudy kommissii po preobrazovaniiu volostnykh sudov, 7 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1873), v. 2, 152–4, 158. 43 Bushnell, Russian Peasant Women. 44 Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 119; Worobec, Peasant Russia, 179–80. 45 T. G. Leont’eva, “Sel’skie zatvornitsy: zhenshchiny i baby v dorevoliutsionnom derevne,” in Iz arkhiva tverskikh istorikov 3 (2003): 110. 46 Hoch, Serfdom, 68–9.

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47 See, for example, Statisticheskii vremennik Rossiiskoi imperii. Dvizhenie naseleniia v Evropeiskoi Rossii za 1883 god (St. Petersburg, 1887), 78, 96. 48 Hoch, Serfdom, 135; Minenko, Russkaia krest’ianskaia, 118–20. 49 Trudy kommissii, v. 2, 1, 27, 30, 127, 140, 154. 50 Minenko, Russkaia krest’ianskaia, 120. 51 Literacy was required of bailiffs drawn from the peasantry. 52 Hoch, Serfdom, 161–2. 53 Poslovitsy russkogo naroda: Sbornik V. Dalia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1984), v. 1, 274–5, 281. 54 Barbara Alpern Engel, Breaking the Ties that Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 101–9. 55 Minenko, “Vsepreliubeznaia,” 108–10. 56 Minenko, Russkaia krest’ianskaia, 286–91. 57 Poslovitsy, v. 1, 282. 58 Dianne Ecklund Farrell, “Medieval Popular Humor in Russian Eighteenth Century Lubki,” Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (1991): 559. 59 Minenko, “Vsepreliubeznaia,” 108–10. 60 This analysis is inspired by Daniel H. Kaiser, “Gender, Property, and Testamentary Behavior: Eighteenth-Century Moscow Wills,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 28, no. 1–4 (2006): 511–20; Trudy Komissii, v. 1, 640, 673. 61 P. P. Shcherbinen, Voennyi faktor v povsednevnoi zhizni russkoi zhenshchiny v XVIII-nachale XX veka (Tambov: Izdatel’stvo Iulis, 2004), 49; Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, “Social Misfits: Veterans and Soldiers’ Families in Servile Russia,” Journal of Military History, 59, no. 2 (1995): 228–30. 62 David Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 21. 63 Shcherbinen, Voennyi faktor, 38–44. 64 Shcherbinen, Voennyi faktor, 61–6. 65 Boris B. Gorshkov, “Serfs on the Move: Peasant Migration in Pre-Reform Russia, 1800-61,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 4 (2000): 627–56. 66 Ibid; Edgar Melton, “Proto-industrialization, Serf Agriculture and Agrarian Social Structure: Two Estates in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies, 115 (1987): 69–79; Reginald Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 18551870 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971), 49–52.

Chapter 4 1 Mikhail Mikhailov, “Zhenshchiny, ikh vospitanie i znachenie v sem’e i obshchestve,” Sovremennik, v. LXXX (1860): 473.

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2 I borrow the phrase from Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 119. 3 N. Dobroliubov, “Temnoe tsarstvo,” in Izbrannye sochineniia, ed. A. Lavretskii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literature, 1947), 126–7. 4 Quoted in William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 106. 5 Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? Tales about New People, trans. Benjamin Tucker, revised by Liudmilla B. Turkevich (New York: Vintage, 1961). 6 For some of the literature on childrearing, see Barbara Alpern Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 51–3. 7 E. N. Vodovozova, Na zare zhizni. Memuarnye ocherki i portrety, 2 v. (n.p.: Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1964), v. 2, 119–20. 8 Quoted in Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 117. 9 Quoted in Engel, Mothers, 54. 10 Sherry Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power and the Acting Subject (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 11. 11 Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [hereafter, GARF], fond 109, 3-oe otdelenie, 2aia ekspeditsiia, op. 1869, d. 1; op. 1873, d. 577; op. 1876, d. 1006, 1, 17. From a mere handful in the pre-reform period, appeals from women to the Third Section grew to over a thousand a year by the end of the 1870s. 12 Quote from Engel, Mothers, 113. 13 Stites, Women’s Liberation Movement, 91. 14 For other examples, see Engel, Mothers, 83, 92, 120–1. 15 V. V. Razbegaeva, ed., Sud nad tsareubiitsami. Delo 1-go marta 1881 goda, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo imeni N. I. Novikova, 2014), v. 1, 220. 16 Kate Pickering Antonova, An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 227. 17 Christine Johanson, Women’s Struggle for Higher Education in Russia, 18551900 (Kingston, CA: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987). 18 Iurii M. Goncharov, Gorodskaia sem’ia Sibiri vtoroi poloviny XIX-nachala XX v. (Barnaul: Izdatel’stvo Altaiskogo Gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2002), 180–90. 19 David L. Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 165, n. 41. 20 Catherine Evtuhov, “A. O. Karelin and Provincial Bourgeois Photography,” in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, ed. Valerie Kivelson and Joan Neuberger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 113–8.

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21 William G. Wagner, “Ideology, Identity, and the Emergence of a Middle Class,” in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 149–63. 22 Barbara Alpern Engel, Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 133–7; Laurie Manchester, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), 22. 23 Abby Schrader, Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: University of Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), 30, 164–7; Wagner, Marriage, chap. 3. 24 Wagner, Marriage, 139–43; Schrader, Languages, 164. 25 Paul Werth, “Empire, Religious Freedom and the Legal Regulation of ‘Mixed’ Marriages in Russia,” The Journal of Modern History 80, no. 2 (2008): 301–2; Irena Paert, “Regulating Old Believer Marriage: Ritual, Legality and Conversion in Nicholas I’s Russia,” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (2004): 555–76. 26 Joan Neuberger, “Popular Legal Cultures: The St. Petersburg Mirovoi Sud,” in Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855-1881, ed. Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 239; Wagner, Marriage, 16; Engel, Breaking, 105–7. 27 Boris H. Mironov, Sotial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX v.). Genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem’i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i pravovogo gosudarstva, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003), v. 1, 235–6; Goncharov, Gorodskaia, 155–74, 368–72; A. N. Zorin et al., Ocherki gorodskogo byta dorevoliutsionnogo Povol’zhia (Ul’ianovsk: Izdatel’stvo Srednevolzhskogo nauchnogo tsentra, 2000), 78–88. 28 Joseph Bradley, “From Big Village to Metropolis,” in The City in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Michael F. Hamm (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), 19; Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 217. 29 V. N. Kharuzina, Proshloe. Vospominaniia detskikh i otrocheskikh let (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999), 21, 33, 146, 157. 30 Goncharov, Gorodskaia, 66, 213, 236. 31 Kharuzina, Proshloe 156, 158; Nikolai Varentsov, Slyshannoe. Vidennoe. Peredumannoe, Perezhitoe (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999), 591–2; Goncharov, Gorodskaia, 236. 32 Goncharov, Gorodskaia, 178–9. 33 P. V. Medvedev, “Iz dnevnika za 1854-1861 gg.,” Moskovskii arkhiv, vyp. 2 (Moscow, 2000): 19. 34 A. I. Kupreianov, “Pagubnaia strast’ Moskovskogo kuptsa,” Kazus: Individual’noe i unikal’noe v istorii (Moscow, 1997), 88–93. 35 Medvedev, “Iz dnevnika,” 29, 38; Kupreianov, “Pagubnaia,” 92. 36 Kupreianov, “Pagubnaia,” 98.

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37 Ibid, 93; Medvedev, “Iz dnevnika,” 19, 21. 38 On homosexual relations in this period and later in Russia, drawing in part on Medvedev’s diary, see Dan Healey, “Masculine Purity and ‘Gentlemen’s Mischief’: Sexual Exchange and Prostitution between Russian Men, 18611941,” Slavic Review, 60, no. 2 (2001): 233–65. 39 Kupreianov, “Pagubnaia,” 92–9. 40 Ibid, 96. 41 Maxim Gorky, The Autobiography of Maxim Gorky (Collier Books: New York, 1962). 42 Tova Yedlin, Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography (Westport: Praeger Press, 1999), 2. 43 Gorky, The Autobiography, 160–5. 44 Ibid. 45 Engel, Breaking, 16–8. 46 Anna Kushkova, Krest’ianskaia ssora. Opyt izucheniia dereveneskoi povsednevnosti: po materialam evropeiskoi chasti Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX-nachala XX veka (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2016); Christine Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 47 Alison K. Smith, For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being: Social Estates in Imperial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 127–33; Goncharov, Gorodskaia, 215. 48 Moskovskii stolichnyi i gubernskii statisticheskii komitet, Statisticheskie svedeniia o zhitel’iakh g. Moskvy po perepisi 12 dekabria 1871 goda (Moscow, 1874), otdelenie III, 78; Sankt-Petrburg po perepisi 1881 goda (St. Petersburg, 1883-4), t. 1, ch. 1, 245–6; Goncharov, Gorodskaia, 355, 357. 49 Reginald Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855-1870 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 233–6; Bradley, Muzhik, 209; A. N. Zorin et al., Ocherki, 64. 50 Statisticheskie svedeniia, predislovie, XXI. 51 Jeffrey Burds, Peasant Dreams and Market Politics: Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861-1905 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998). 52 Reginald Zelnik, ed., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Kanatchikov (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 19. 53 Kushkova, Krest’ianskaia ssora, 53–108. 54 Trudy kommissii po preobrazovaniiu volostnykh sudov, 7 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1873–1874), v. 3, 95, 98, 101, 255, 290, 340, 384, 385, 393, 401. 55 Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 42. 56 Frierson, “Razdel.” 57 Ibid.; Kushkova, Krest’ianskaia ssora, 77. Judging by peasant comments to investigators concerning their own customary practices, the prevalence

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of premature household divisions varied widely, and not only by region (agricultural/industrial) but also according to a variety of other factors. Nevertheless, divisions were more common overall, and households smaller, in the Central Industrial Region. See Trudy kommissii. 58 Trudy kommissii, v. 3, 380. 59 Engel, Between the Fields, 47–9; Nancy M. Frieden, “Child Care: Medical Reform in a Traditionalist Culture,” in The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research, ed. David Ransel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 249–51. 60 Ivan Stoliarov, “Zapiski russkogo krest’ianina,” in Zapiski ochevidtsa: Vospominaniia, dnevniki, pis’ma, ed. Mikhail Bostryshev (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989), 343–4. 61 Kushkova, Krest’ianskaia ssora, 53–108; Beatrice Farnsworth, “The Litigious Daughter-in-Law: Family Relations in Rural Russia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Russian Peasant Women, ed. Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 89–106. 62 Kushkova, Krest’ianskaia ssora, 95–108. Trudy kommissii, v. 3, 303. 63 Quoted, with slight modifications, from Farnsworth, “Litigious,” 102; Engel, Between the Fields, 92–5.

Chapter 5 1 Russkii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv (Hereafter RGIA), fond 796, op. 177, II stol, IV otdelenie, d. 3798, 1–5, 6. 2 B. V. Tikhonov, Pereseleniia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1978). 3 Barbara Alpern Engel, Breaking the Ties that Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 7–9. 4 Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society and Civilization in Nineteenth Century Nizhnii Novgorod (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 113–7. Engel, Breaking; Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 5 Engel, Breaking, 62–3. 6 Daniel R. Brower, The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity, 18501900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 7 T. B. Kotlova, Rossiiskaia zhenshchina v provintsial’nom gorode na rubezhe XIX-XX vekov (Ivanovo: Izdatel’stvo Ivanovskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, 2003), 41. 8 Iu. M. Goncharov, Gorodskaia sem’ia Sibiri vtoroi poloviny XIX-nachala XX v. (Barnaul: Izdatel’stvo Altaiskogo Gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2002), 211–5; A. N. Zorin et al., Ocherki gorodskogo byta dorevoliutsionnogo Povol’zhia (Ul’ianovsk: Srednevolzhskii nauchnii tsentr, 2000), 64.

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9 A. N. Zorin, Zastroika i ekologiia malykh gorodov. Opyt regional’nogo istoriko-etnograficheskogo issledovaniia (Kazan, 1990), 113–27; N. A. Minenko, S. V. Golikova and E. Iu. Apkarimova, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ ural’skogo goroda v XVIII-nachale XX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 2006), 147. 10 Ibid. 11 Engel, Breaking, 209. 12 Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga (hereafter Ts GIA SPb), fond 1026, op. 1, d. 347. 13 S. V. Dmitriev, Vospominaniia (Iaroslavl’: Aleksandr Rutman, 1999), 199; N. A. Bychkova, “Kak zhili vashi babushki i prababushki,” Russkii arkhiv 11 (2001): 437–8; Engel, Breaking, 60. 14 A. N. Zorin et al., Ocherki, 95–7; Goncharov, Gorodskaia sem’ia, 278. 15 Zorin et al., Ocherki, 113–40. 16 “Iz istorii odnoi liubvi,” Moskovskii zhurnal, no. 11–12 (1992): 24–6, 30. 17 Ibid, 69. 18 “Iz istorii odnoi liubvi,” Moskovskii zhurnal, no. 4 (1993): 35, 57. For a similarly elevated smotrenie, see also E. A. Andreeva-Balmont, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Sabashnikovykh, 1997), 234. 19 “Iz istorii odnoi liubvi,” Moskovskii zhurnal, no. 6 (1993): 53. 20 Ibid. 21 https​:/​/ww​​w​.gen​​i​.com​​/p​eop​​le/Се​рафим​а-Фед​оровн​а/600​00000​42189​15762​5#. (Accessed 2/25/2020). 22 Engel, Breaking, 160–6. 23 Ibid, 165–71. 24 See, for example, St. Petersburg housing books, which detail domestic arrangements. Ts GIA SPb, fond 1026, op. 1. 25 Christine Ruane, “The Vestal Virgins of St. Petersburg: Schoolteachers and the 1897 Marriage Ban,” The Russian Review, 50, no. 2 (1991): 163–92. 26 Perepis Moskvy 1902 goda (Moscow, 1904), ch. 1, 14–15. 27 Based on Rossiiskii meditsinskii spisok: spiski vrachei, veterinarov, зubnykh vrachei, farmatsevtov i aptek (SPb: Tip. M-va Vnutrennykh Del, 1904), 416–31. I counted women as married when a woman’s husband’s surname was indicated separately, when a different surname for the woman was provided in parentheses and when women’s surname was hyphenated. 28 Loren Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4–19, for quotes 18–19. For comparable statements, see also Engel, Breaking, 218–20. 29 Worobec, Peasant Russia, 127–8. 30 Trudy komissii po preobrazovaniiu volostnykh sudov, 7 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1873–4), v. I, 314, 315, 495, 500-501, 502, 509, 535, 567, 665, 673, 819, v. III, 268, 372, 376, v. V, 12, 37, 208, 225, 252, 255, 380, 416. For refusals by the woman herself, see v. II, 20, 58, 149, 174.

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31 Robert Rothstein, “The Death of the Folk Song?” in Cultures in Flux: LowerClass Values, Practices and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 120. 32 Rose L. Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 18801914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 38–52; Evtuhov, Portrait, chaps. 4 and 5. 33 Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chap. 4; V. Iu. Krupianskaia and N. S. Polishchuk, Kul’tura i byt rabochikh gornozavodskogo Urala kontsa XIX-nachala XX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1971). 34 Jeffrey Burds, Peasant Dreams and Market Politics: Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861-1905 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 22–3. For migration more generally, see Tikhonov, Pereseleniia. 35 Engel, Between the Fields, 129–30. 36 Burds, Peasant Dreams, 60–1; Robert Eugene Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 43–7; Johnson, “Mothers and Daughters in Urban Russia: A Research Note,” Canadian Slavonic Papers XXX, no. 3 (1988): 376. 37 Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv goroda Moskvy, fond 62, op. 1, d. 4204, 3. 38 Engel, Between the Fields, 41–2; 45–50; A. N. Zorin, Zastroika, 126; Christine Worobec, “Russian Women’s Culture: Three Voices,” in Women in Nineteenth Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2012), 59–60. 39 S. A. Smith, “Masculinity in Transition: Peasant Migrants to Late-Imperial St. Petersburg,” in Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman and Dan Healey (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 96–101. 40 Engel, Between the Fields, 154–61. 41 Ibid; Bradley, Muzhik, 226–7; L. A. Bulgakova, “Nevenchannye soldatki: bor’ba za priznanie grazhdanskikh brakov v gody Pervoi Mirovoi Voiny,” in Vlast’, Obshchestvo i reformy v Rossii v XIX i nachale XX veka: issledovaniia, istoriografiia, istochnikovedenie (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2009), 183–214; Liudmila Bulgakova, “The Phenomenon of the Liberated Soldier’s Wife,” in Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914-1922, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution, ed. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read and Peter Waldron (Bloomington: Slavica, 2016), 317. 42 Johnson, “Mothers and Daughters,” 370. 43 In European Russia as a whole, by contrast, close to twenty per cent of male workers lived as head of their household. Chislennost’ i sostav rabochikh v Rossii na osnovanii dannykh vseobshchei perepisi naselenii Rossiiskoi Imperii 1897 g., T. 1, ed. N. A. Troinitskii (St. Petersburg: Ministerstvo Finansov, Torgovli i Promyshlennosti, 1906), 2-3; 46-7; 66-7.

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44 Engel, Between the Fields, 201. 45 Ibid., 135. 46 Quoted in Engel, Between the Fields, 202. 47 The St. Petersburg census does not permit a comparable marital profile. Engel, Between the Fields, 202–5. 48 Ibid. 49 As hard as life was for the married mother, it was far harder still for women who headed their own household—a mere 1.7 percent of women workers in St. Petersburg but 6.8 percent nationwide. Bernshtein-Kogan, Chislennost’, 53. On the hardships, see Glickman, Russian Factory Woman, 6, 123–7. 50 Engel, Between the Fields, 216; Goncharov, Gorodskaia sem’ia, 230–3; Krupianskaia and Polishchuk, Kul’tura i byt, 26. 51 Engel, Between the Fields, 223–4. 52 Ibid, 225–7. For a unique glimpse of the correlation between resident married couples and the subletting of space, see S-Peterburg po perepisi 1881 goda, T. 2, ch. 1, vyp. 2–3, especially Alexander-Nevskii II and III; Vasilievskii Ostrov II and III; Vyborg I and II. 53 Engel, Between the Fields, 230–1. 54 Ibid, 207–11. 55 A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov, ed. and trans. Reginald Zelnik (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 8. 56 Smith, “Masculinity.” On Moscow, see Robert Johnson, “Family Relations and the Rural-Urban Nexus: Patterns in the Hinterland of Moscow, 1880-1900,” in The Family, ed. Ransel, 263–79. 57 Engel, Between the Fields, 206, 212–3. 58 Ibid, 129. Metal workers, the best paid of all industrial workers, were particularly numerous in those districts, judging by the census of 1900, as were textile workers, many of whom were female. 59 Statistika Rossiiskoi imperii za 1906. Dvizhenie naseleniia v Evropeiskoi Rossii. vyp. 85 (SPb, 1914). 60 Corinne Gaudin, Ruling Peasants: Village and State in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb: (Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), ch. 5. 61 Johnson, “Mothers and Daughters,” 200; Engel, Between the Fields, 221–2. 62 S. Bernshtein-Kogan, Chislennost’ i sostav Peterburgskikh rabochikh: opyt statisticheskogo issledovaniia (St. Petersburg: S-Peterburgskii Politekhnicheskii Institut), 52–5. 63 Ibid, 199. 64 Engel, Breaking, 149. 65 Ibid; William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 99; RGIA, fond 796, op. 180, d. 1899, 386–435.

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66 For one instance, see Richard G. Robbins, Overtaken by the Night: One Russian’s Journey Through Peace, War, Revolution and Terror (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), 51–2, 55–6. 67 Wagner, Marriage, 62–9; 138–223; I. V. Gessen, Raz’delnoe zhitel’stvo suprugov. Zakon 12 marta 1914 goda o nekotorykh izmeneniiakh i dopolneniiakh (St. Petersburg: Pravo, 1914).

Chapter 6 1 Aaron Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914-1922 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 46; O. M. Verbitskaia, Rossiiskaia sel’skaia sem’ia v 1897-1959 gg. (Moscow-Tula, Grif i K, 2009), 117; Elizabeth Brainerd, “Marriage and Divorce in Revolutionary Russia: A Demographic Analysis,” in Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914-1922, Book 3: National Disintegration, ed. Christopher Read, Peter Waldron, and Adele Lindenmeyr (Bloomington: Slavica, 2018), 217. 2 Retish, Russia’s Peasants, 46–53. 3 Ibid, 54–5. 4 N. M. Shchapov, Ia veril v Rossiiu . . . (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1998), 263–4. 5 Verbitskaia, Sel’skaia, 90. 6 Barbara Alpern Engel, “Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I,” Journal of Modern History 69, no. 4 (1997): 696–721; Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 219–20. 7 Joshua Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905-1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 107; Liudmila Bulgakova, “The Phenomenon of the Liberated Soldier’s Wife,” in Russia’s Home Front, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution, ed. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron (Bloomington: Slavica, 2016), 301–26. 8 “‘Nu polno, mne zagadyvat’ o khode istorii . . .’ (Iz dnevnika materi-khoziaiki v gody revoliutsionnoi Rossii),” Otechestvennaia istoriia 3 (1997): 97. 9 Retish, Russia’s Peasants, 155. 10 Bulgakova, “The Phenomenon”; Sarah Badcock, “Women, Protest and Revolution: Soldiers’ Wives in Russia in 1917,” International Review of Social History 49, no. 1 (2004): 47–70. 11 Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, The State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1935 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 48–57. For the code: http:​/​/sov​​iethi​​story​​.msu.​​edu​/1​​917​-2​​/the-​​new​-w​​ oman/​​the​-n​​ew​-wo​​man​-t​​exts/​​code-​​of​-la​​ws​-co​​ncern​​ing​-t​​he​-ci​​vil​-r​​egist​​ratio​​n​-o​ f-​​death​​s​-bir​​ths​-a​​nd​-ma​​rriag​​es/ (Accessed 12/19/2019).

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12 On the disabilities, see Bernice Madison, “Russia’s Illegitimate Children,” Slavic Review 22, no. 1 (1963): 82–95. 13 Goldman, Women, 104–5. 14 Ibid, 264–80. 15 Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 73–4. For the range of views, see Goldman, Women, 3–8; Lynne Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010), 28–31. 16 The Woman Question: Selections from the Writings of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin (New York: International Publishers, 1951), 52. 17 Deirdre Ruscitti Harshman, “Cooking up a New Everyday: Communal Kitchens in the Revolutionary Era, 1890-1935,” Revolutionary Russia 29, no. 2 (2016): 211–33; Andy Willimott, Living the Revolution: Urban Communes and Soviet Socialism, 1917-1932 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 18 Willimott, Living; Anne Gorsuch, “‘A Woman is Not a Man’: The Culture of Gender and Generation in Soviet Russia, 1921-1928,” Slavic Review 55, no. 3 (1996): 636–60. 19 In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 106. 20 Gijs Kessler, “A Population Under Pressure: Household Responses to Demographic and Economic Shock in the Interwar Soviet Union,” in A Dream Deferred: New Studies in Russian and Soviet Labour History, ed. Donald Filtzer, Wendy Z. Goldman, Gijs Kessler, and Simon Pirani (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), 318–9; Alan M. Ball, And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 21 Orlando Figes, “The Red Army and Mass Mobilization during the Russian Civil War 1918-1920,” Past and Present 129 (November 1990): 183–4. 22 Retish, Russia’s Peasants, 259–60. 23 Ibid. 260–2; Verbitskaia, Sel’skaia sem’ia, 71–3. 24 Goldman, Women, 59–77. 25 In the Shadow, 65. 26 Attwood, Gender, 31–6. 27 N. B. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ Sovetskogo goroda: normy i anomalii 1920-1930 gody (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo-torgovyi dom Letnii Sad, 1999), 179–80. 28 Attwood, Gender, 32–4. 29 See, for example, In the Shadow, 109. 30 Attwood, Gender, 34–5. 31 S. A. Smith, Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890-1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 326; H. Kent Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 206.

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32 Smith, Russia in Revolution, 326; Timothy Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 168–9. 33 Sofia Nikandrovna Pavlova, “Taking Advantage of New Opportunities,” in A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History, ed. Barbara Alpern Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 65. 34 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Sex and Revolution,” in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 65–90. 35 See, for example, Paraskeva Ivanova, “Why I Do Not Belong in the Party,” In the Shadow, 213–9. 36 Gorsuch, “A Woman,” 105; Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’, 273–5; Brainerd, “Marriage and Divorce,” 214. 37 My thanks to Deirdre Ruscitti Harshman for her willingness to help me try. 38 Alissa Klots, “The Kitchen Maid as Revolutionary Symbol: Paid Domestic Labour and the Emancipation of Soviet Women, 1917-1941,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Women and Gender in Twentieth Century Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Melanie Ilic (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 83–100. 39 Goldman, Women, 112–4; Kessler, “A Population,” 323–5. 40 Harshman, “Cooking,” 222–3; more broadly, Goldman, Women, 130–1. 41 Kessler, “A Population,” 325–30. For differences in time spent, see E. Kabo, Ocherki rabochego byta: opyt monograficheskogo issledovaniia domashnego rabochego byta (Moscow: V.TS. S.P.S, 1928), 206. To complicate matters, standards for domestic labor had risen, at least in theory. Tricia Starks, “A Revolutionary Home: Housekeeping and Social Duty in the 1920s,” Revolutionary Russia 17, no. 1 (2004): 69–104. 42 Klots, “The Kitchen Maid.” 43 Goldman, Women, 11. 44 Kessler, “A Population,” 318; Brainerd, “Marriage and Divorce.” My warm thanks to Elizabeth Brainerd for the population numbers, which reflect residents of the RSFSR. 45 Kessler, “A Population,” 318; Brainerd, “Marriage and Divorce,” 218–20. 46 Kessler, “A Population,” 321; Brainerd, “Marriage and Divorce,” 218–23, 227, 230; Goldman, Women, 106–7. 47 Kessler, “A Population,” 322. 48 For a taste of the discussion, see Rudolph Schlesinger, ed., Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia: The Family in the U. S. S. R. Documents and Readings (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, 1949), 81–153. 49 Laurie Bernstein, “The Evolution of Soviet Adoption Law,” Journal of Family History 22, no. 2 (1997): 204–27. 50 Goldman, Women, chap. 5. 51 Ibid, 249; for the 1926 Family Code, see Schlesinger, Changing Attitudes, 156–7, 163–4. 52 Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from the Revolution to the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 25.

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53 Schlesinger, Changing Attitudes, 41–2; V. P. Danilov, Rural Russia Under the New Regime, trans. and intro. by Orlando Figes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 206–7, 232. 54 Goldman, Women, 152–6. 55 Danilov, Rural Russia, 206–9, 230, 238; Verbitskaia, Sel’skaia, 122–3, 176. 56 David Ransel, Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 85–7; Irina Kniazeva, “A Life in a Peasant Village,” in A Revolution of Their Own, 121; Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva, The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 96–7; Verbitskaia, Sel’skaia, 210–2. 57 Ransel, Village Mothers, 85–6; Olson and Adonyeva, The Worlds, 87–8, 96–7. Interviews with women in Vologda collected by Svetlana Adonyeva suggest that the practice of viewing the bridal shirt may have persisted in more remote villages. 58 Goldman, Women, 108; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 25; Verbitskaia, Sel’skaia, 145, 211. 59 Goldman, Women, chap. 4. 60 Beatrice Farnsworth, “Village Women Experience the Revolution,” in Russian Peasant Women, ed. Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynn Viola (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 145–66; A Revolution of Their Own, 121–2. 61 Ransel, Village Mothers, 48, 103–5; Verbitskaia, Sel’skaia, 101–2; Elizabeth Waters, “The Modernization of Motherhood, 1917-1937,” Soviet Studies 44, no. 1 (1992): 123–35. 62 Ransel, Village Mothers, 103–5; Verbitskaia, Sel’skaia, 103–4. 63 David Ransel, Village Mothers, 42–3, 54. 64 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 142.

Chapter 7 1 Wendy Z. Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 2 Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 288–95. 3 Nicholas Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1946). 4 Anna Dubova, “Living Someone Else’s Life,” in A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History, eds. Barbara Alpern Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 28. See also Аleksandra Chistiakova, “Ne mnogo li odnoi,” 1998, https://www​.litmir​.me​/ br/​?b​=183890​&p​=1-2 (Accessed 2/8/19).

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5 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance & Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 218–30; Maria Belskaia, “Arina’s Children,” in In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War, eds. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 219–34. 6 Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s, eds. Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, Carol Flath, trans. (New York: New Press, 1995), 291–330; A Revolution of Their Own, 164–5. 7 David Ransel, Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 98. 8 O. M. Verbitskaia, Rossiiskaia sel’skaia sem’ia v 1897-1959 gg. (MoscowTula: Grif i K, 2009), 262. 9 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 112–3. 10 Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing up in Russia, 1890-1991 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 78–80. 11 Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva, The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise (Madison: University of Wisconsin, Press, 2012), 57. 12 Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 224–6. 13 Ransel, Village Mothers, 72–7; Roberta Manning, “Women in the Soviet Countryside on the Eve of World War II,” in Russian Peasant Women, eds. Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 209. 14 Ransel, Village Mothers, 177; Osterman and Adonyeva, The Worlds, 84. 15 Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 223; Verbitskaia, Rossiiskaia sel’skaia, 186–7. 16 Osterman and Adonyeva, The Worlds, 96–7; Intimacy and Terror, 299. 17 Osterman and Adonyeva, The Worlds, 96–7; Ransel, Village Mothers, 85–7. 18 N. A. Aralovets, Gorodskaia sem’ia v Rossii, 1927-1959 (Tula: Grif i K, 2009), 36. 19 Osterman and Adonyeva, The Worlds, 81–3; Ransel, Village Mothers, 88–91, 103–5; Verbitskaia, Rossiiskaia Sel’skaia, 199. 20 Ransel, Village Mothers, 72, 110–6. 21 Manning, “Women,” 210; Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 218; Aralovets, Gorodskaia sem’ia, 38. 22 Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 222. 23 Manning, “Women,” 210–1. 24 Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov, eds., Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 199–200; Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 224. 25 Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 115. 26 Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution, 290. On pronatalism, see David Hoffman, “Mothers in the Motherland: Pronatalism in its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 1 (2000): 35–53.

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27 Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 152–5. For examples, see Rudolf Schlesinger, ed., The Family in the U. S. S. R.: Documents and Readings (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1949), 254–66. 28 For the 1936 decree, see Schlesinger, The Family, 269–79. 29 For references to the availability of contraceptives thereafter, see HP1158: 36, https​:/​/ii​​if​.li​​b​.har​​vard.​​edu​/m​​anife​​sts​/v​​iew​​/d​​rs​:5596364$36i; and HP1725:30, https​:/​/ii​​if​.li​​b​.har​​vard.​​edu​/m​​anife​​sts​/v​​iew​​/d​​rs​:5596366$30i (Accessed 2/18/19). 30 Quoted in Choi Chatterjee, “Soviet Heroines and Public Identity, 1930-1939,” The Carl Beck Papers, no. 1402 (1999), 13. 31 Anatolii Vishnevskii, Demograficheskaia modernizatsiia Rossii, 1900-2000 (Moscow: Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2006), 130–1. 32 Verbitskaia, Rossiiskaia Sel’skaia, 199. 33 Alexandre Avdeev, Alain Blum, and Irina Troitskaja, “Histoire de statistique de l’avortement en Russie et en URSS jusqu’en 1991” http:​/​/www​​.pers​​ee​.fr​​/doc/​​ pop​_0​​032​-4​​663​_1​​994​_n​​um​_49​​_4​_42​​47​#po​​p​_003​​2​-4663​_1​994​_num​_49​_4​ _T1​_0916​_0000 (Accessed 12/24/2017). For infant mortality rates, see http:​/​/ sov​​iethi​​story​​.msu.​​edu​/1​​936​-2​​/abol​​ition​​-of​-l​​eg​al-​​abort​​ion/ (Accessed 12/18/17); Aralovets, Gorodskaia sem’ia, 93–4. 34 Lynne Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1988), 93–6. 35 H. Kent Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 206. 36 See, for example, A Revolution of Their Own, 95, 181. 37 Attwood, Gender and Housing, 110–13. 38 Timothy Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 342. 39 Colton, Moscow, 343; Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 171; Attwood, Gender and Housing, 123. 40 Victoria Semenova, “Equality in Poverty: The Symbolic Meaning of Kommunalki in the 1930s-50s,” in Living Through Soviet Russia, eds. Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson, and Anna Rotkirch, (London: Routledge, 2004), 60; Mary M. Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia: An American Woman Looks Back, ed. Laurie Bernstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 165. 41 Paola Messana, ed. Soviet Communal Living: An Oral History of the Kommunalka (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 42 Attwood, Gender and Housing, 130; Fitzpatrick, Ordinary Stalinism, 47; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 166. 43 Aralovets, Gorodskaia sem’ia, 43. 44 Ibid. 43, 70, 96–7; Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 140. For rates in 1897, see Robert Eugene Johnson, “Family Relations and the Rural-Urban Nexus: Patterns in the Hinterland of Moscow, 1880-1900,” in The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research, ed.David Ransel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 268.

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45 On premarital sex, see HP 644, 51 https​:/​/ii​​if​.li​​b​.har​​vard.​​edu​/m​​anife​​sts​/v​​iew​​/d​​ rs​:5453301$51i (Accessed 12/24/2017); Leder, My Life, 58; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 195. 46 Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 88; Schlesinger, The Family, 253. 47 Xenia Gasiorowska, “Two Decades of Love and Marriage in Soviet Fiction,” The Russian Review 34, no. 1 (1975): 10–21. 48 Quote from David Hoffman, “Mothers in the Motherland,” 45. 49 Leder, My Life, 57; In the Shadow, 280. 50 Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 121; On adultery and communists, see Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 147. 51 Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 143–50. 52 Mie Nakachi, “Population, Politics and Reproduction: Late Stalinism and its Legacy,” in Late Stalinist Russia: Society Between Reconstruction and Reinvention, ed. Juliane Furst (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), 25; Lauren Kamensky, “Utopian Visions of Family Life in the Stalin-Era Soviet Union,” Central European History 44, no. 1 (2011): 72. 53 Kamensky, “Utopian Visions,” 72; Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 145. 54 Schlesinger, The Family, 267–9. Claire E. McCallum, The Father of the New Soviet Man: Representing and Reconstructing Masculinity in Soviet Visual Culture, 1945-1965 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), 132–3. 55 James von Geldern and Richard Stites, eds. Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays and Folklore, 1917-1953 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 262; Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You Comrade Stalin!: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 93. 56 Intimacy and Terror, 172, 186; Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia: 1700-2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 182–3. 57 Quoted in Buchli, Archaeology, 61. 58 In the Shadow, 362. 59 Attwood, Gender and Housing, 115. 60 Colton, Moscow, 336–7; Semenova, “Equality,” 56; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 210. 61 Golfo Alexopoulas, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 62 Engel, Women in Russia, 181. 63 Gijs Kessler, “A Population Under Pressure: Household Responses to Demographic and Economic Shock in the Interwar Soviet Union,” in A Dream Deferred: New Studies in Russian and Soviet Labor History, eds. Donald Filtzer, Wendy Z. Goldman, Gijs Kessler, and Simon Pirani, (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2008), 336–8; Aralovets, Gorodskaia sem’ia, 99–100. 64 Goldman, Women at the Gates.

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65 Donald Filtzer, “Standard of Living versus Quality of Life: Struggling with the Urban Environment in Russia During the Early Years of Post-War Reconstruction,” in Furst, Late Stalinist Russia, 85; Buchli, Archaeology, 36. 66 Intimacy and Terror, 299. 67 Alissa Klots, “The Kitchen Maid as Revolutionary Symbol: Paid Domestic Labour and the Emancipation of Soviet Women, 1917-1941,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Melanie Ilic, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 92–4. 68 Kessler, “A Population,” 338. 69 HP213B: 36; HP66B: 11; also HP288B: 5; HP519: 45 (Accessed 12/24/2017). Melanie Ilic, Life Stories of Soviet Women: The Interwar Generation (London: Routledge, 2013), 37. On notions of propriety, see Buchli, Archaeology, 33. 70 Leder, My Life, 169; Kessler, “A Population,” 340. On the Terror and children, and grandmothers as rescuers, see Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 828–9. 71 Liudmila Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Boston: Little Brown, 1990), 11. 72 Kessler, “A Population,” 340. 73 See Intimacy and Terror, 189; Elena Bonner, Mothers and Daughters (New York: Vintage, 1993). 74 Elena Kozhina, Through the Burning Steppe: A Wartime Memoir (New York: Riverhead Books, 2000), 107; Victoria Semenova and Paul Thompson, “Family Models and Transgenerational Influences: Grandparents, Parents and Children in Moscow and Leningrad from the Soviet to the Market Era,” in Living Through Soviet Russia, 128–9; T. S. Volkova, Chastnaia zhizn’ naseleniia priural’ia v 20-30 gg. XX veka. Sem’ia (Perm: Izdatel’skii Dom ORION, 2014), 67–70. 75 A Revolution, 42. 76 Attwood, Gender and Housing, 123; Leder, My Life, 139, 148, 165, 180. Quote from HP 644: 49. 77 Leder, My Life, 169; Anna Rotkirch, “What Kind of Sex Can You Talk About?: Acquiring Sexual Knowledge in Three Soviet Generations,” in On Living Through Soviet Russia, 96. 78 Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 171; Colton, Moscow, 342–4. 79 See, for example, In the Shadow of Revolution, 273. 80 Diane Koenker, “Whose Right to Rest? Contesting the Family Vacation in the Postwar Soviet Union,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5, no. 2 (2009): 401–25. 81 Cynthia Hooper, “Terror of Intimacy: Family Politics in the 1930s Soviet Union,” in Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, eds. Christina Kaier and Eric Naiman, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 61–91; Alexander Vatlin, Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and

NOTES

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Extraordinary Violence in Stalin’s Secret Police, ed. and trans. Seth Bernstein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), 82. 82 Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 382–3; Hooper, “Terror of Intimacy,” 77; Foteeva, “Coping,” 77. 83 Vatlin, Agents, 132–3. 84 Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 140.

Chapter 8 1 Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You Comrade Stalin: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 168–9; Lisa Kirschenbaum, “’Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families: Local Loyalties and Private Life in World War II Propaganda,” Slavic Review 59, no. 4 (2000): 825–47. 2 Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 261; Kirschenbaum, “Our City,” 841–5. 3 Kirschenbaum, “Our City.” 4 Ibid, 832, 842. Translated by Barbara Engel. 5 Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post Stalin Era (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1990), 24; Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (New York: Picador, 2006), 193. 6 Kirschenbaum, “Our City,” 844–6. 7 Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Elena Kozhina, Through the Burning Steppe: A Wartime Memoir (New York: Riverhead Books, 2000). 8 Merridale, Ivan’s War, 113, 234–5; John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 1941-1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London: Longman, 1991), 91. 9 John Erickson, “Soviet Women at War,” in World War 2 and the Soviet People: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate 1990, John and Carol Garrard, eds. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 53–5; Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 52–3; quote from Merridale, Ivan’s War, 316. 10 Mary M. Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia: An American Woman Looks Back, Laurie Bernstein, ed. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001), 191; Merridale, Ivan’s War, 234. 11 Barber and Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 90–1; Manley, To the Tashkent, 185–91; Julie K. deGraffenried, Sacrificing Childhood: Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014). 12 Merridale, Ivan’s War, 318.

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13 Roger D. Markwick and Euridice Charon Cardona, Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia: 1700-2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 213–7. 14 Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever, Anthony Austin, ed. and trans. (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott Company, 1977), 30; Mie Nakachi, “A Postwar Sexual Liberation: the Gendered experience of the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 52, no. 2/3 (April–September 2011): 429; Oleg Budnitskii, “Muzhchiny i zhenshchiny v Krasnoi Armii (19411945),” Cahiers du Monde Russe 52, no. 2/3 (April–September 2011): 407. 15 Kopelev, To Be Preserved, 30; Svetlana Aleksievich, U voiny ne zhenskoe litso: poslednie svideteli [in English translation, The Unwomanly Face of War] (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1988), 78. 16 Leder, My Life, 219, 235–6. 17 Merridale, Ivan’s War, 314–9; Barber and Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 91. 18 Barber and Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 91–2; Mie Nakachi, “Population, Politics and Reproduction: Late Stalinism and Its Legacy,” in Late Stalinist Russia: Society Between Reconstruction and Reinvention, Juliane Fürst, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 27. See also N. A. Aralovets, Gorodskaia sem’ia Rossii, 1927-1959 (Tula: Grif i K, 2009), 111–2, 127–9. 19 S. N. Shapovalov and Ia. A. Shapovalova, Gosudarstvennoe regulirovanie semeino-brachnykh otnoshenii v 1945-1969 gg: na materialakh Krasnodarskogo kraia (Krasnodar: Izdatel’skii dom “KhORS”, 2015), 86–7. 20 Kirschenbaum, “Our City,” 845; Rudolf Schlesinger, ed., The Family in the U. S. S. R.: Documents and Readings (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, 1949), 363–4; E. Thomas Ewing, Separate Schools: Gender, Policy and Practice in Postwar Soviet Education (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). 21 Quote from Raisa Orlova, Memoirs, Samuel Cioran, trans. (New York: Random House, 1983). 22 Schlesinger, The Family, 373–4; Kirschenbaum, “Our City,” 842; Shapovalov and Shapovalova, Gosudarstvennoe, 14. Some of these privileges, including the reduction of rent, were subsequently revoked. 23 Mie Nakachi, “Gender, Marriage, and Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union,” in Writing the Stalin Era: Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet Historiography, Golfo Alexopoulos, Julie Hessler, and Kiril Tomoff, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 107; Schlesinger, The Family, 367–77; Shapovalov and Shapovalova, Gosudarstvennoe, 87–9. See also Deborah A. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 71–2. 24 Schlesinger, The Family, 274–5. 25 Nakachi, “Population, Politics and Reproduction,” 35; Leder, My Life, 256. 26 Schlesinger, The Family, 372–3. 27 Nakachi, “Gender, Marriage and Reproduction.”

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28 Ibid; Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 166. 29 Claire E. McCallum, “The Return: Postwar Masculinity and the Domestic Space in Stalinist Visual Culture, 1945-53,” The Russian Review 74, no. 1 (2015): 117–43, quote on p. 125; Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments, 1945-1957, Hugh Ragsdale, ed. and trans. (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 35. 30 Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 41–59; 220–4; Claire E. McCallum, The Fate of the New Man: Representing and Reconstructing Masculinity in Soviet Visual Culture, 1945-1965 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), 151–2; Anna Krylova, “Healers of Wounded Souls: The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet Literature, 1944-1946,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 2 (2001): 324–6. 31 Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 206. 32 Ibid., 206; Dunham, In Stalin’s Time, 91; McCallum, The Fate, 144–59. 33 Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 97. 34 Rebecca Manley, “‘Where Should We Resettle the Comrades Next? The Adjudication of Housing Claims and the Construction of Post War Order,” and Donald Filtzer, “Standard of Living Versus Quality of Life: Struggling with the Urban Environment in Russia during the Early Years of Post-war Reconstruction,” in Furst, Late Stalinist Russia, 85–93, 233–46. Conditions weren’t much better in postwar France, however. See Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Post-War France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 3–4. 35 Zubkova, Russia, 49. E. Iu. Zubkova, “Deti voiny: polozhenie i strategii vyzhivaniia bezprizornykh i beznadzornykh detei v SSSR 1942-1948,” Rossiiskaia Istoriia, no. 6 (2016): 52–66. 36 Nakachi, “Population, Politics,” 23; Aralovets, Gorodskaia, 137. 37 O. M. Verbitskaia, Rossiiskaia sel’skaia sem’ia v 1897-1959 gg. (MoscowTula: Grif i K, 2009), 193; Donald Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 24–5. 38 Sergey Afontsev, Gijs Kessler, Andrei Markevich, Victoria Tyazhelnikova, and Timur Valetov, “The Urban Household in Russia and the Soviet Union, 19002000: Patterns of Family Formation in a Turbulent Century,” The History of the Family 13, no. 2 (2008): 187–8. 39 Liubov Denisova, Rural Women in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia, Irina Mukhina, ed. and trans. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 77; Anatolii Vishnevskii, Demograficheskaia modernizatsiia Rossii: 1900-2000 (Moscow: Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2006), 98–9. 40 Edward D. Cohn, “Sex and the Married Communist: Family Troubles, Marital Infidelity, and Party Discipline in Postwar Russia, 1945-1964,” in The Russian

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Review 68, no. 3 (July 2009): 433–4; A Revolution, 94–6; Anna Rotkirch, “‘Coming to Stand on Firm Ground’: The Making of a Soviet Working Mother,” in Bertaux, On Living Through, 155; Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 122–3. See also Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers, 26. 41 Merridale, Ivan’s War, 368–70. 42 Shapovalov and Shapovalova, Gosudarstvennoe, 92. 43 Nakachi, “Postwar,” 435. 44 Nakachi, “Gender, Marriage,” 106–7. For rates elsewhere in urban Soviet Russia, see Aralovets, Gorodskaia sem’ia, 206–7. On rural divorce, see Ransel, Village Mothers, 88; Denisova, Rural Women, 94. 45 Vishnevskii, Demograficheskaia modernizatsiia, 91–3. 46 Paperno, Stories, 127–8; Olson and Adonyeva, The Worlds, 117; Aleksandra Chistiakova, “Ne mnogo li dlia odnoi,” https://www​.litmir​.me​/br/​?b​=183890​ &p​=5-6 (Accessed 2/26/19). 47 Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers, 25–6; Nakachi, “A Postwar Sexual,” 435. 48 Engel, Women in Russia, 224. 49 Shapovalov and Shapovalova, Gosudarstvennoe, 14. 50 Cohn, “Sex,” 434. 51 Nakachi, “Gender, Marriage,” 37; A Revolution, 43. 52 Verbitskaia, Rossiiskaia, 252, 258–9. 53 Nakachi, “Population, Politics,” 37; Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 386. 54 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks: Identity and Imposture in TwentiethCentury Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 260. 55 Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 449–50. 56 Vishnevskii, Demograficheskaia modernizatsiia, 97; Verbitskaia, Rossiiskaiaa sel’skaia, 193. 57 Ilic, Life Stories, 42–3. 58 Olson and Adonyeva, The Worlds, 83. 59 Aralovets, Gorodskaia sem’ia, 186. 60 Donald Raleigh, Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk about Their Lives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 157, 190, 255. 61 Ransel, Village Mothers, 212–6; A Revolution, 128. 62 Ransel, Village Mothers, 115–6. 63 Aralovets, Gorodskaia, 193–4; Verbitskaia, Rossiiskaia, 202, 205.

Chapter 9 1 Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life During the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 210.

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2 Paola Messana, Soviet Communal Living: An Oral History of the Kommunalka (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 115–9. 3 Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 339. 4 http:​/​/sov​​iethi​​story​​.msu.​​edu​/1​​956​-2​​/repe​​aling​​-the-​​ban​-o​​n​-abo​​rtion​​/repe​​aling​​ -the-​​ban​-o​​n​-abo​​​rtion​​-text​​s​/103​​57​-2/​ (Accessed 2/10/2018). 5 Quoted in Susan E. Reid, “Happy Housewarming!: Moving into KhrushchevEra Apartments,” in Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style, Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds. (New York: Anthem Press, 2009), 139. 6 Susan Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (2002): 211–52. 7 Alexander Avdeev and Alain Monnier, “Marriage in Russia: A Complex Phenomenon Poorly Understood,” in Population: An English Selection 12 (2000): 20. 8 N. M. Zorkaia, Istoriia Sovetskogo kino (St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2005), 293–7; Alexander Prokhorov and Elena Prokhorova, Film and Television Genres of the Late Soviet Era (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 108, 153; Vladimir Shlapentokh, Love, Marriage and Friendship in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1984), 40–1; Deborah Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 42. 9 Zorkaia, Istoriia, 296; Julian Graffy, “‘But Where Is Your Happiness, Alevtina Ivanovna?’ New Debates About Happiness in the Soviet Films of 1956,” in Petrified Utopia, 223. 10 Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Literature, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 215–6. 11 William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2017), 63; Anna Rotkirch, “‘What Kind of Sex Can You Talk about?’: Acquiring Sexual Knowledge in Three Soviet Generations,” in On Living Through Soviet Russia, Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson, and Anna Rotkirch, eds. (London: Routledge, 2004), 93–119. 12 Taubman, Gorbachev, 67–71. 13 Melanie Ilic, Life Stories of Soviet Women: The Interwar Generation (London: Routledge, 2013), 117; David and Vera Mace, The Soviet Family (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 148–50; David Ransel, Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 90–1. 14 I. Prelovskaya, Komsomol’skaia Pravda, Dec. 27, 1959. My thanks to Diane Koenker for this reference. Ilic, Life Stories, 131. 15 Wesley Andrew Fisher, The Soviet Marriage Market: Mate Selection in the USSR (New York: Praeger, 1980), 57–9; S. N. Shapovalov and Ia. A. Shapovalova, Gosudarstvennoe regulirovanie semeino-brachnykh otnoshenii v 1945-1969 gg.: na materialakh Krasnodarskogo kraia (Krasnodar: Izdatel’skii dom “KhORS,” 2015), 102–10. 16 Fisher, Soviet Marriage, 57–60; Shapovalov and Shapovalova, Gosudarstvennoe.

242

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17 Fisher, Soviet Marriage, 58. 18 Steven E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 90–117; Timothy Colton, Moscow: Governing the Soviet Metropolis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 488. 19 Quoted in Susan E. Reid, “Women in the Home,” in Women in the Khrushchev Era, Melanie Ilic, Susan E. Reid, and Lynne Attwood, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 163; Jane R. Zavisca, Housing the New Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 4–5. 20 Harris, Communism; Varga-Harris, Stories. 21 Lynne Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010), 155–8. 22 Varga-Harris, Stories, 2; Donald J. Raleigh, ed. and trans. Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk about their Lives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 224; Zavisca, Housing, 3–4. 23 Reid, “Happy Housewarming.” 24 Ibid, 137. 25 Ibid, 147. 26 Reid, “Women,” 155–6; Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 298. 27 Varga-Harris, Stories; Reid, “Happy Housewarming,” 154. 28 Field, Private Life, 55; Edward Cohn, “Sex and the Married Communist: Family Troubles, Marital Infidelity, and Party Discipline in the Post-War USSR, 1945-64,” The Russian Review 68, no. 3 (July 2009): 440–1; Elena Zhidkova, “Family, Divorce and Comrades’ Courts: Soviet Family and Public Organizations during the Thaw,” in And They Lived Happily Ever After: Norms and Everyday Practices of Family and Parenthood in Russia and Eastern Europe, Helene Carlbäck, Yulia Gradskova, and Zhanna Kravchenko, eds. (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012), 57; Brian LePierre, “Private Matters or Public Crimes: The Emergence of Domestic Hooliganism in the Soviet Union, 1939-1966,” in Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia, Lewis H. Siegelbaum, ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 191–207. 29 Deborah A. Field, “Mothers and Fathers and the Problem of Selfishness in the Khrushchev Period,” in Women in the Khrushchev Era, 96–113. 30 Ibid; Zhidkova, “Family, Divorce and Comrades’ Courts,” 57; Claire E. McCallum, The Fate of the New Man: Representing and Reconstructing Masculinity in Soviet Visual Culture, 1945-1965 (DeKalb: University of Northern Illinois Press, 2018), chap. 5; Amy E. Randall, “Soviet and Russian Masculinities: Rethinking Soviet Fatherhood after Stalin and Renewing Virility in the Russian Nation under Putin,” The Journal of Modern History 92, no. 4 (December 2020): 859-898. 31 Reid, “Happy Homecoming,” 158; Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 150–7.

NOTES

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32 Jo Peers, “Workers by Hand and Womb: Soviet Women and the Demographic Crisis,” in Soviet Sisterhood, Barbara Holland, ed. (London: Fourth Estate, 1985), 126–7. 33 Christopher Williams, “Abortion and Women’s Health in Russia and the Soviet Union,” in Women in Russia and Ukraine, Rosalind Marsh, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 131–55; Amy Randall, “‘Abortion Will Deprive You of Happiness!’: Soviet Reproductive Politics in the Post-Stalin Era,” Journal of Women’s History 23, no. 3 (2011): 13–38. 34 Field, Private Life, 74–5; N. A. Aralovets, Gorodskaia sem’ia v Rossii, 19271959 (Tula: Grif i K, 2009), 206–8. 35 Attwood, Gender and Housing, 181; Zavisca, Housing, 33. 36 Kristin Roth-Ey, “Finding a Home for Television in the USSR, 1950-70,” Slavic Review 66, no. 2 (2007): 278–306. 37 Alix Holt, “Domestic Labor and Soviet Society,” in Home, School and Leisure in the Soviet Union, Jennie Brine, Maureen Perrie, and Andrew Sutton, eds. (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1980), 32; Susan Bridger, Women in the Soviet Countryside: Women’s Roles in Rural Development in the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 114–5. 38 Shlapentokh, Love, Marriage and Friendship, 69–73; Diane Koenker, “Whose Right to Rest? Contesting the Family Vacation in the Postwar Soviet Union,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 2 (April 2009): 417–8. 39 Aralovets, Gorodskaia sem’ia, 153; Avdeev and Monnier, “Marriage in Russia,” 24–5. 40 Siegelbaum, “Introduction,” Borders of Socialism, 3. 41 Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 238–9. 42 Ibid, 239–40. 43 Ibid, 251; Andrea Stevenson Sanjian, “Social Problems, Political Issues: Marriage and Divorce in the USSR,” Soviet Studies 43, no. 4 (1991): 642. 44 Kelly, Refining Russia, 330. 45 Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (New York: Routledge, 2013), 163–9; Anna Alekseyeva, “Constructing Soviet Domesticity and Managing Everyday Life from Khrushchev to Collapse,” in Material Culture in Russia and the USSR: Things, Values, Identities, Graham H. Roberts, ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 59–66. 46 Roth-Ey, “Finding a Home”; Koenker, “Whose Right,” 417–8. 47 Shlapentokh, Love, Marriage and Friendship, 158; Prokhorov and Prokhorova, Film and Television, 146, 186–8. 48 Carola Hansson and Karin Liden, eds., Moscow Women (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 76; Anastasia Lakhtikova, Angela Brintlinger, and Irina Glushchenko, eds., Seasoned Socialism: Gender and Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019). 49 Natalia Baranskaya, A Week Like Any Other: Novellas and Stories, Pieta Monks, trans. (Seattle: The Seal Press, 1989).

244

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50 Liubov Denisova, Rural Women in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia, Irina Mukhina ed. and trans. (London: Routledge, 2010), 97. 51 Avdeev and Monnier, “Marriage in Russia,” 17. 52 Denisova, Rural Women, 95–7; Bridger, Women, 141. 53 T. A. Gurko, Brak i roditel’stvo v Rossii (Moscow: Institut Sotsiologii RAN, 2008), 55. 54 For an example, see Moscow Women, 141–2. 55 Sergey Afontsev, Gijs Kessler, Andrei Markevich, Victoria Tyazhelnikova, and Timur Valetov, “The Urban Household in Russia and the Soviet Union, 19002000: Patterns of Family Formation in a Turbulent Century,” The History of the Family 13 (2008): 182. 56 James W. Maddock et al., eds. Families Before and After Perestroika: Russian and U. S. Perspectives (New York: The Guilford Press, 1994), 138, 143. 57 Victoria Semenova and Paul Thompson, “Family Models and Transgenerational Influences: Grandparents, Parents and Children in Moscow and Leningrad from the Soviet to the Market Era,” in On Living Through Soviet Russia, 128–30; Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva, The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 86–8; Jennifer Utrata, Women Without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 32–3. 58 Moscow Women, 171; Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers, 206; Diane Koenker, Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 202–3. 59 Avdeev and Monnier, “Marriage in Russia,” 12–15. 60 Shlapentokh, Love, Marriage and Friendship, 118, 180–4. 61 Ibid., 138. 62 Anatolii Vishnevskii, Demograficheskaia modernizatsiia Rossii, 1900-2000 (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2006), 178–81. 63 Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society, 296–8. 64 Gurko, Brak, 53; Koenker, “Whose Right?.” 65 Lynne Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialization in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 66 Shlapentokh, Love, Marriage and Friendship, 151–69. 67 Peers, “Workers by Hand,” 136–8. Kelly, Children’s World, 344–5. For rural areas, see Bridger, Women, 114–7. 68 Elena Zdravomyslova and Anna Temkina, “The Crisis of Masculinity in Late Soviet Discourse,” Russian Studies in History 51, no. 2 (2012): 12–34. See also Sergei Kukhterin, “Fathers and Patriarchs in Communist and Post-Communist Russia,” in Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, Sarah Ashwin, ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), 71–89. 69 Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society, 190–4. 70 Attwood, The New Soviet Man.

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71 Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). See also Shlapentokh, Love, Marriage and Friendship. 72 Seasoned Socialism. 73 Stephen Lovell, Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 197–200; Elena Stiazhkova, “The ‘PettyBourgeois Woman’ and the ‘Soulless Philistine,’” Russian Studies in History 51, no. 2 (2012): 63–97. 74 Stiazhkova, “The ‘Petty Bourgeois Woman,’” 78, 81. 75 Ibid, 88. 76 Source: United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision, http://esa​.un​.org​/unpd​/wpp​/index​.htm (Accessed 3/23/19). 77 Chernysheva, Soviet Consumer Culture, 128–9. 78 Yurchak, Everything.

Chapter 10 1 Dina Rome Spechler, Permitted Dissent in the USSR: Novyi Mir and the Soviet Regime (New York: Praeger, 1982). 2 Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 117. 3 Quoted in Sue Bridger, Rebecca Kay, and Kathryn Pinnick, No More Heroines? Russia, Women and the Market (New York: Routledge, 1996), 34. 4 Anatoly G. Vishnevsky, Russia’s Demographic “Crisis,” Julie DaVanzo and Gwen Farnsworth, eds. (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1996). https​:/​/ww​​w​.ran​​d​.org​​/pubs​​/conf​​_proc​​eedin​​gs​/​CF​​124​.h​​tml (Accessed 9/9/18); T. A. Gurko, Brak i roditel’stvo v Rossii (Moscow: Institut sotsiologii RAN, 2008), 2011. 5 Donald J. Raleigh, Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk about Their Lives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 201. 6 O. M. Verbitskaia, Sel’skaia sem’ia na etape sotsial’no-ekonomicheskikh transformatskii 1985-2002 gg. (Moscow-St. Petersburg: Tsentr gumanitarnykh initsiativ, 2017), 362–4; Liubov Denisova, Rural Women in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia, Irina Mukhina, ed. and trans. (London: Routledge, 2010), 158. 7 Sue Bridger, “Women and Agricultural Reform,” Perestroika and Soviet Women, Mary Buckley, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 39–53. 8 Vishnevsky, in Russia’s Demographic Crisis, argues that these changes show that Russia was finally undergoing the demographic transition associated with modernization. 9 Verbitskaia, Sel’skaia, 62–78.

246

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10 Jane R. Zavisca, Housing the New Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 47–8. 11 Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Bela Shayevich, trans. (New York: Random House, 2016). 12 Verbitskaia, Sel’skaia, 226; Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 17002000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 258–9. 13 Olga Shevchenko, Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Dana Vannoy et al., Marriages in Russia: Couples during the Economic Transition (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 11. 14 Sergey Afontsev et al., “The Urban Household in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1900-2000: Patterns of Family Formation in a Turbulent Century,” The History of the Family 13, no. 2 (2008): 182; Shevchenko, Crisis. 15 Larissa Shpakovskaia, “‘Moi dom—moia krepost.’ Obustroistvo zhil’ia novogo srednego klassa,” in Novyi byt v sovremennoi Rossii: gendernye issledovaniia povsednevnosti, Elena Zdravomyslova, Anna Rotkirch, and Anna Temkina, eds. (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet v Sankt-Peterburge, 2009), 222–62; Shevchenko, Crisis, 128. 16 Vannoy, Marriage, 2; Zavisca, Housing. 17 Vannoy, Marriage, 52; Shevchenko, Crisis, 95. 18 Vannoy, Marriage, 130. 19 Sarah Ashwin and Tatyana Lytkina, “Men in Crisis in Russia: The Role of Domestic Marginalization,” Gender and History 18, no. 2 (April 2004): 189–206. 20 Shevchenko, Crisis, 176. 21 Vannoy, Marriage, 145. 22 Rebecca Kay, Men in Contemporary Russia: The Fallen Heroes of Post-Soviet Change (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 151. 23 Vishnevskii, Demograficheskaia, 100–1, 110–23, 127; personal communication. 24 Vishnevskii, Demograficheskaia, 104; Verbitskaia, Sel’skaia, 179. 25 Jennifer Utrata, Women without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 26 Ibid., 106. 27 Kay, Men. 28 Verbitskaia, Sel’skaia, 85–90, 196–7, 259–60. 29 Ibid., 170–1. 30 Ibid., 163–4, 217. 31 Ibid., 222, 238. Birth rates vary regionally. 32 Gurko, Brak, 229–31, 235, 239. 33 Juoko Nikula and Mikhail Chernysh, eds. Social Distinctions in Contemporary Russia: Waiting for the Middle Class (New York: Routledge: 2020).

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34 Ibid., 59–69. 35 Ibid,. 57; Zavisca, Housing, 106–7, 115–17; Shpakovskaia, “Moi dom.” 36 Zavisca, Housing, 5, 106–7. 37 https​:/​/da​​ta​.wo​​rldba​​nk​.or​​g​/ind​​icato​​r​/SL.​​TLF​​.T​​OTL​.F​​E​.ZS (Accessed 9/3/2018). 38 Gurko, Brak, 130–1, 199–200. 39 Utrata, Women. 40 Utrata, Women; Gurko, Brak, 215. 41 Gurko, Brak, 188–93. For remarriage of divorced people, see https​:/​/ww​​w​.hse​​ .ru​/m​​irror​​/pubs​​/lib/​​data/​​acces​​s​/ram​​/tick​​et​/48​​/1536​​07886​​91ae4​​b30ec​​72c5c​​ 128b4​​40db3​​4fc66​​957​/N​​ASELE​​NIE​_R​​​OSSII​​2012_​​glava​​2​_fin​​.pdf (Accessed 9/4/18). 42 Svetlana Iaroshenko, “Bednye liudi: mir liubvi i seksual’nosti,” in Novyi byt, 373–404; Stephen K. Wegren et al., “Gender Inequality in Russia’s Informal Rural Economy,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 50 (2017): 87–98. 43 Verbitskaia, Sel’skaia. 44 Anne Garrels, Putin Country: A Journey in the Real Russia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 58–9. 45 Zavisca, Housing, 69–85. 46 Michelle Rivkin-Fish, “Pronatalism, Gender Politics and the Renewal of Family Support in Russia: Towards a Feminist Anthropology of ‘Maternity Capital,’” Slavic Review 69, no. 3 (2010): 721. 47 Anna Rotkirch, Anna Temkina, and Elena Zdravomyslova, “Who Helps the Degraded Housewife?” European Journal of Women’s Studies 14, no. 4 (2007): 353. 48 https://iq​.hse​.ru​/en​/news​/177666403​.html (Accessed 9/4/18). 49 Amy Randall, “Soviet and Russian Masculinities: Rethinking Soviet Fatherhood after Stalin and Renewing Virility in the Russian Nation under Putin,” The Journal of Modern History, 92, no. 4 (2020): 895–8. 50 https​:/​/ww​​w​.hse​​.ru​/m​​irror​​/pubs​​/lib/​​data/​​acces​​s​/ram​​/tick​​et​/48​​/1536​​07886​​91ae4​​ b30ec​​72c5c​​128b4​​40db3​​4fc66​​957​/N​​ASELE​​NIE​_R​​​OSSII​​2012_​​glava​​2​_fin​​.pdf, p. 84 (Accessed 9/4/18). 51 https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​017​/0​​1​/25/​​world​​/euro​​pe​/ru​​ssia-​​domes​​tic​-v​​iolen​​ce​ .ht​​ml​?ac​​tion=​​click​​&modu​​le​=Re​​lated​​Cover​​age​&p​​​gtype​​=Arti​​cle​&r​​egion​​=Foot​​ er, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​018​/0​​9​/08/​​world​​/euro​​pe​/ru​​ssia-​​domes​​tic​-a​​buse.​​ html?​​rref=​​colle​​ction​​%2Fis​​sueco​​llect​​ion​%2​​Ftoda​​ys​-ne​​w​-yor​​k​-tim​​es​&ac​​tion=​​ click​​&cont​​entCo​​llect​​ion​=t​​odays​​paper​​®i​​on​=ra​​nk​&mo​​dule=​​packa​​ge​&ve​​ rsion​​​=high​​light​​s​&con​​tentP​​lacem​​ent​=5​​&pgty​​pe​=co​​llect​​ion (Accessed 9/9/18).

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INDEX

abortion  125 as birth control  109–10, 124, 128, 132, 134, 167, 180–1 illegal  132, 135, 164, 167 legalization of  109, 124, 170, 180 limitations on  208 married women and  110, 118, 132, 181 prohibition of  128, 134–5 rates of  110, 180–1 adoption, see children; legal system adultery  27 Communist party and  139, 178 as grounds for divorce  8, 25, 73 as grounds for murder  6 representation of  171 World War II  154–5 Alexander II, tsar  63, 82 Alexander III, tsar  82, 83 alimony  102, 109, 120, 121, 123 Ankudinova, Olga  100–1 bachelorhood, see singlehood Bakunin, Aleksandr  31, 35 Baranskaya, Natalia, A Week Like Any Other (1969)  185 betrothal  3, 10, 22, 48 bigamy  26, 60, 157, 165 birthrate  171, 188, 197, 207 decline of  106, 127–8, 132, 134, 135, 145, 156, 180, 188, 194, 201 increase in  120, 135 post-World War II and  156, 167, 180 Bokov, Pyotr and Maria  66 Bolotov, Andrei  18, 26–8, 35, 36 Bolotov, Timofei and Mavra  13–14, 17

Bolotova, Praskovia  13–14, 27 bride price  48 brides, see also weddings age of  21, 46, 48, 67 costume of  86 ideals of  48, 52, 53, 83 inspection of  49, 88 lamentations of  49, 123 reluctance of  46, 48, 55 virginity of  50, 131 Catherine II (the Great), empress  19, 23, 24 Catholics  25, 26 Central Asia  188 Charter to the Gentry  28 chastity  3, 4, 152, 156, 164–5, 172 significance of  8 chastushki  92 Chernavin, Iakov  37 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai (What Is to Be Done?)  64, 66, 69, 112 Chikhachev, Aleksei  37, 67 Chikhachev, Andrei and Natalia  33– 7, 39, 47 childbearing incentives for  134, 150, 156 medical assistance in  124, 130, 196 risks of  5, 34, 56 childcare cost of  199, 206 personal responsibility for  5, 56, 96–7, 111, 112, 118, 127, 130, 136, 140, 142–4, 158, 166–7, 199, 207 public facilities for  118, 124, 127, 130, 142, 158, 181, 189, 196, 199, 204, 206

260

childhood state concern with  32, 140 childrearing, see also fathers; grandmothers; mothers advice about  24, 64 expense of  165 practices  57, 70 as public duty  24, 36, 140, 177, 179 responsibility for  24, 35–6, 56, 64–5, 100, 109, 124, 130, 137, 140, 166–7, 179–80, 192 children abandonment of  178, 204 adoption of  109, 161 attitudes towards  56, 204, 206 custody of  101, 102, 182, 188, 195 education of  57 expense of  206 homeless  105, 113–14, 120, 125, 129, 204 homes for  114 illegitimate  60, 109, 150, 157–8, 165, 182, 206 of “kulak” households  128–9 labor of  41, 56–7, 97, 204 law and  109 orphaned  42, 106, 113–14 representations of  151 terror and  135 World War II and  154 child support  101, 109, 121, 123, 144, 158 amount of  208 non-resident fathers and  139, 208 penalties for payment failure  134, 139 Soviet state and  188, 189 cinema  160, 171, 184, 188, 190 citizen’s patrols  178 Civil War  112–14, 125 demographic consequences of  118, 125 and peasants  113 and urban population  112–13 Cold War  171 collectivism  176–80, 182–4, 190, 192, 197

Index

collectivization, see households; peasants communal apartments  114–15, 136–7, 141, see also housing residents of  114–15 tensions in  114–15, 169–70 communes  66, 112 comrades’ courts  178 consumer culture  83, 101, 176, 184 consumer goods access to  176, 181, 189–91, 196, 198 availability of  106, 136, 142, 181, 185, 191, 194, 196, 198 depictions of  159, 192 peasants and  94–5, 196 contraceptives  135, 180 convents  8, 19 courtship opportunities for  27–8, 30–1, 85, 87, 122, 138, 189 dachas  191 Derzhavin, Gavriil  27 despotism, familial  28 Diakova, Daria  27 divorce  163, 201. see also alimony; child support; husbands; marital separation; marriage; self-divorce; wives access to  8, 108, 117, 120, 128, 133, 134, 158, 163 and Communist Party members  139, 188 cost of  8–9, 101, 157, 163, 208 economic consequences of  48, 120, 123–4, 201, 204 grounds for  8, 11, 19, 25, 72, 101, 109, 157, 164, 181, 187–8 housing and  137 law and  109, 120, 134–5, 150, 157, 158, 182 peasants and  113, 123–4, 133, 163–4, 185, 203–4 rate of  26, 109, 119, 123, 135, 156, 163–4, 171, 181, 185, 194, 201, 206 remarriage and  101, 118–20, 137, 188

Index

repeated  125 Russian Orthodox Church and  101, 102 state responses to  188 terror and  146 divorce letters, see self-divorce Dobroliubov, Nikolai  63–4 Dolgorukaia, Ekaterina, Princess  13 domestic albums  28 domestic labor attitudes towards  105, 111, 118, 140 difficulty of  142, 174 education for  156 responsibility for  89, 118, 136, 147, 166, 174, 184, 191, 194–5, 199, 207 socialization of  111, 117–18, 121, 127, 189 domestic privacy  180, see also family life attitudes towards  29, 67, 147, 175, 182, 184, 205, 206 and domestic violence  201 as ideal  67, 141, 184, 205, 206 lack of  30, 60, 70, 77, 85, 97, 114–15, 136–7, 144–5, 199 domestic roles of women, see also domestic labor; domestic sphere expectations of  34 gender norms and  141, 142, 184, 194–5 as service to the state  140–1 domestic servants  67, 96, 117, 142–3 employers of  143 nannies  35, 199, 206 domestic sphere, see also domestic roles of women expectations of  81, 89, 97–8, 100, 143, 199 gender norms and  68, 141, 184, 194–5 and the “good life”  161, 168, 176, 181 hostility toward  91, 112, 116 ideals of  28, 33, 70, 72, 84, 176 plebeian  97–8 representations of  150–1, 160, 183–4, 190

 261

and the Soviet state  161, 176–80, 192, 201 domestic violence  7, 20, 74, 82, 100, 201, see also spousal murder attitudes towards  6, 7, 18–19, 28, 57, 69, 72, 74, 81, 178, 209 gentry and  18 information about  201 law and  5–6, 69, 178, 208–9 peasants and  50, 57–8, 81, 203 punishment for  19, 81 Domostroi  ix, 6, 71 dowry  2–4, 14, 27, 123 contents of  13, 15, 28, 33, 48, 88, 94, 132 divorce and  8–9 importance of  2, 15, 72, 85 providers of  15, 16, 48, 85–6 Dubova, Anna  165 education of children  130, 131 gender roles and  32, 156–7 opportunities for  24, 67, 94 women and  90–1, 117, 132 elopement  54–5 engagement, see betrothal Enlightenment ideas, see sentimentalism family consultation centers  189 family despotism  63–5 family life, see also domestic privacy; domestic sphere; households; husbands; wives alternatives to  66 cohesion of  146 and the collective  138–40, 177 “complete”  195 depictions of  121, 128, 150, 160, 170, 190, 192 hostility towards  65, 128, 134 “ideologization” of  63–5, 110–12 “normal”  176, 206 “perfect Soviet”  170 plebeian  77, 95–100 popular expectations of  181, 184, 192

262

and the state  32, 33, 66, 82, 134, 140, 146–7, 168, 184, 188, 192, 194 family wage  100 famine  94, 114, 122 fatherhood as men’s domestic role  35–6, 180 and the Soviet state  128, 139–40, 180 fathers authority of  83 after divorce  188, 202, 208 “fugitive”  133 representations of  31, 139, 140, 151–2, 160, 179–80 responsibilities of  35–6, 57, 139, 151–2, 158, 179–80, 208 Stalin as stand-in for  160 state as substitute for  158, 165 fictitious marriage  66, 82, 137 film, see cinema Fleisher, Iurii and Vera  162 gentry  ix, 2, 5–6, 12, 13, 18, 23 as agents of throne  24 domestic life of  33–4 lifestyle of  24, 26, 28, 30, 33–4 go-betweens  3, 27, 28, 48, 86, 123 Gorbachev, Mikhail  172, 193–7 Gorky, Maxim  73–4 grandfathers  199, 202, 206 grandmothers  208 representations of  112 responsibilities of  112, 124, 130, 137, 144, 166, 199, 202, 206–7 as transmitters of traditional values  112, 124, 144, 147 Great Reforms  64, 91 Holy Synod  11, 19–20, 29, 55, 60, 101 home, see communal apartment; domestic privacy; domestic sphere; housing homosexuality  73, 134 households, see also childcare; domestic labor; domestic manufacturing; domestic

Index

privacy; family Life; husbands; peasants; widows; wives “bourgeois”  67–8 complex  ix, 5–8, 16, 42–4, 61, 70, 72–4, 79–80, 122, 131, 187, 199, 202, 203, 206, 208 conscription and  59–60, 106, 107, 113, 153 consumption and  191 division of  43, 45, 53, 75, 79, 82, 113, 122, 129 economic importance of  4, 40, 77, 194, 199 expansiveness of  3, 36–7, 114 extended  ix, 120, 131, 144, 187, 202, 203, 206 and family  viii, 42, 71 and family conflict  7, 44, 45, 53, 57, 65–6, 72–4, 78–82, 106, 113, 129–30, 187 female-headed  4, 71, 106, 120, 137, 143, 145, 165, 188, 195, 202, 206–7 governance of  5–7, 18, 37, 41, 44, 57, 75, 121–2 industrialization drive and  142 “kulak”  128–9 legal obligations of  109 migration and  42, 61, 76–81, 93–4, 103, 132 patriarchy and  6, 41, 44, 71, 102, 208 perpetuation of  41, 55, 56 plebeian  74, 77, 85–6 production in  5, 33–4, 37–8, 42, 44, 70, 71, 74, 76, 85, 92–3, 129, 190, 196, 199 terror and  141 welfare functions of  7, 16, 41, 42, 120, 121 of workers  95–8, 143, 144 World War I and  106, 107 World War II and  153, 161 housework, see domestic labor housing, see also communal apartments; domestic privacy access to  115, 144–5, 157–8, 163, 174, 199–200

Index

allocation of  96, 114, 115, 138, 145 artel  77 barrack  127, 137, 144, 145, 189 and the collective  178 communal apartments  114–15, 125, 127, 136–7, 141, 169, 199–200 depictions of  158, 175, 176 deprivation of  114, 141 destruction of  161 divorce and  137 dormitory  77, 96, 127, 137, 200 as gift from state  141, 178 living space in  136, 137, 174 nationalization of  114–15 post-Soviet  197, 205–6 renovation of  196 rural  176, 196, 199 separate apartments  115, 141, 175–6, 181 shortage of  77, 95, 96, 127, 174, 175 single-family apartments  136, 175, 176, 205 and socialist modernity  175, 176 housing committees  178 husbands authority of  5–6, 43, 44, 50, 81 as “breadwinner”  67, 90, 98, 100, 117, 118, 143, 190, 199–202, 205–6 in complex household  43 desertion by  133, 162, 165 as family men  160, 180, 184–6, 190 as friends  27, 28 heavy drinking of  191, 200, 203 ideals of  88, 185–8, 195 infidelity of  73, 95, 155, 165, 184 as initiators of divorce  8, 119–20, 133, 163 life expectancy of  191–2, 194, 200, 205, 206 migrant  78, 93–5, 98–9 representations of  31, 139, 151–2, 191, 193, 202–3, 207 responsibilities of  4, 26, 29, 35, 37, 55–7, 67, 70, 108, 138,

 263

151–2, 185, 189–91, 199, 200 self-command and  29, 89 unemployment and  196, 197, 200 wives’ remunerative labor and  99–100, 118, 138, 143, 189–90, 195 illegitimacy  69, see also under children rates of  95, 125, 165, 172, 204, 208 industrial workers  93, 95–8, 115 infant mortality  3, 5, 34, 130 rates of  34–5, 56, 79, 97, 124, 135, 145, 161 internal passports  61, 75, 134, 157 women and  61, 65, 81, 100–2 Jews  25 Justice of the Peace Courts  69 Kanatchikov, Semyon  98 Kashirin, Vasilii  73–4 Kharuzin, Nikolai and Maria  70–1 Khrushchev, Nikita  170 and divorce  181, 182 and family life  170 and housing  175–6 Khvoshchinskaia, Nadezhda  65 Kiselev, Gavriil and Evgenia  162, 164 Kniazeva, Irina  123, 124, 167 Kollontai, Alexandra  110–11 Komsomol  129–31, 138, 189 and personal conduct  139, 178 Kopelev, Lev  155 Kudina, Fevronia  60 kulaks, see under peasants Lapin, Ivan  30–1 Leder, Abram and Mary  139 legal system abortion and  109–10, 124, 128, 134–5, 170, 180 adoption and  109, 114, 120 Bolsheviks and  108 code of 1649  6, 32 divorce and  11, 109, 134–5, 157, 171

264

domestic violence and  69, 178, 208–9 efforts to reform  69, 102 and family  102 Family Code of 1918  108–9, 114, 122, 190 Family Code of 1926  120–2, 125 Family Code of 1936  134, 138, 139, 157 Family Code of 1944  150, 156–8, 162, 165, 168, 171, 172, 182 Family Code of 1968  182–3 Land Code of 1922  121–2 and marriage  26, 102, 157–8, 162, 163, 166 and parental authority  26, 54, 102, 108, 109 and parental obligations  14, 32 State Senate decisions and  69 Leikin, Aleksandr  38–9 Lenin, Vladimir  110, 111 literacy  x, 10 Lopukhina, Eudokia  1, 8, 11 Lutherans  25, 26 marital separation  19, 26, 69, 100, 102, 164 marriage, see also bigamy; divorce; dowry; family life; gentry; husbands; legal system; marital separation; Russian Orthodox Church; sentimentalism; Terror; weddings; wives affective ideal of  11, 23, 25, 33, 69, 81 age differences in  21, 46, 67, 162 age of  2–3, 21, 33, 41, 45–6, 53, 67, 92, 98, 137, 138, 156, 187, 201–2, 207 arrangement of  13–15, 21–2, 47, 87–9 avoidance of  98, 116, 201, 204, 206, 207 breakdown of  8–9, 81, 82, 101, 103, 133, 162, 163, 185, 201 civil (pre-1918)  25, 54–5, 60, 62, 69, 95, 108 cohabitation requirement  58, 109

Index

community involvement in  58 companionate ideal of  67, 69 critiques of  64–5 egalitarian ideals of  64, 89, 108 Enlightenment ideas and  23–8 expectations of  16–18, 27, 33, 38, 87, 185, 195 fictitious  66, 82, 137 forced  23, 31, 46–6 ideology and  110 interfaith  25, 108 love and  2, 11, 16–17, 22, 27–8, 31, 38, 72, 84, 89, 138, 166, 172 migration and  93–5 Old Believers  54–5, 69 patrilocal  46, 51, 53, 54 Peter the Great and  9–12 purposes of  1–2, 13, 15, 21, 23, 28, 38, 40, 41, 46, 52, 53, 65, 72, 78, 85, 88, 98–9, 137, 138, 144, 160, 174 rate of  99, 106, 109, 119, 137, 156, 158, 162, 201 registration of  144, 157–8, 162, 166, 172, 197 remarriage  11, 119–20, 162 role of elders in  3, 10, 13–15, 46, 48, 53–4, 83, 85 role of kin in  15, 29 Russian Orthodox Church and  3–4, 25–6, 51, 69, 102, 108, 131 secularization of  108 serfdom and  46, 47 and social adulthood  41, 46, 54, 144, 201 spousal choice in  11, 27, 52, 54–5, 65, 67, 84, 89, 92, 98–9, 122, 131, 138 state encouragement of  46, 138, 171 strains on  94, 101, 145, 153, 196, 201, 203 unregistered (post-1917)  116, 120, 125, 131, 157–8, 162, 164–5, 183, 201, 204 wartime  155 marriage contracts  15–16, 48

Index

masculinity marriage and  186, 193 as public role  190, 208 self-command and  29, 32 matchmakers, see go-betweens maternal capital  208 maternity leave  96, 108, 117, 157, 189, 195–6, 207 Medvedev, Pyotr  38, 71–3 merchants  4, 21–3, 61 lifestyle of  29–30, 37, 70 marriages of  21, 86 Morozov, Pavlik  129–30 motherhood medals  157 and patriotism  157, 207 representations of  34, 135, 149–50, 165, 184, 189 state concern with  128, 135, 156–7, 207–8 mothers and “choice”  105 divorced  124 as educators  24, 34 firing of  196 incentives for  134, 157, 189 legal protection of  182 representations of  31, 56, 112, 140, 150–1, 164 responsibilities of  24, 34, 35, 56, 57, 112 single  158, 165, 195, 202, 204, 206–7 state support for  158, 165, 202, 204, 207–8 theft by  161 Muslims  25 nannies, see domestic servants Naryshkina, Natalia  1 Nekliudov, Vasilii  14–15 Nepliuev, Ivan and Feodosia  12–13 New Economic Policy (NEP)  115, 127 and housework  117–18 and women’s remunerative labor  117–18 Nicholas I, tsar  31–2 Nicholas II, tsar  83

 265

nihilists  65–6 Nikitenko, Vasilii  51–3 nunneries, see convents Old Believers  54–5, 69, 87–9 Onufriev, Pavel and Olga  97 orphans, see children Palchinsky, Peter and Nina  91 paternity suits  158, 182–3 patriarchy, see under households; peasants Pavlova, Sofia  116, 117, 154 peasants, see also betrothal; brides; children; dowry; go-betweens; households; husbands; industrial workers; legal systems; marriage; marriage contracts; Old Believers; Russian Orthodox Church; weddings; wives abortion and  124, 132, 135, 167 age of marriage  41, 45–6, 91–2, 122 birth rate of  7 children  56–7 civil war and  106, 112–14 collectivization and  127–30 conscription and  59, 106, 113 consumption and  94–5, 196 dekulakization  128–9 divorce and  113, 123, 133, 163–4, 185, 203–4 domestic production and  76, 92–3 domestic violence and  57–8, 203 and female sexuality  58, 131 gender imbalance among  123, 132–3 as household heads  44, 45, 50, 62, 75, 81, 113, 122 households (dvor)  41–4, 61 “kulaks”  127, 128 Land Code of 1922 and  121–2 market reforms and  203–4 marriage and  41, 42, 45–54, 122–3, 131 migration of  61, 76–8, 84, 93–5, 99, 103, 132–3

266

obligations of  44, 45 patriarchy and  44, 45, 50, 74–5, 93, 121–2, 129, 133 proverbs of  57, 58 serfdom and  41, 42, 44–7 serf emancipation and  63, 74–5, 81 sexual conduct of  131, 133 soldiers’ wives  12, 59–60 spinsterhood  55, 132 spousal relations of  57–9 and the state  42, 44, 45 testamentary behavior of  59 wedding rituals  49–51, 86, 123, 131–2, 166 World War I and  106 Peter I (the Great), tsar  1, 2, 9–10, 12, 23, 59 edicts of  10–11, 14 and marriage  10–11, 20 Peter II, tsar  13 Peter III, tsar  24 Pioneers  189 Podlubnyi, Stepan  129, 131, 142 Populism  66 pregnancy  56 as cause for abandonment  116– 17 protection of  157 and relief from front-line service  155 prescriptive literature  24, 89, 178, 179, 184, 188–9 pronatalism  187, 208 law and  134, 157, 158 propaganda and  109, 132, 135, 156, 189 prostitution  117 Provisional Government  107, 108 Purlevskii, Pyotr  44 Purlevskii, Savva  53–4 Putin, Vladimir  207–8 Ragozin, Vasilii  67 Rakhmanova, Serafima  87–9 Red Army  113 Revolution of 1905  98–9 Riabushinskii, Ivan  38 romantic love  2, 84, 87

Index

depictions of  98, 103, 138, 160, 168, 171, 176 and the Enlightenment  23 and freedom of choice  98 marriage and  11, 27, 160 Rumiantseva, Ekaterina  27 Russian Orthodox Church  9, 20, 208 and divorce  8–10, 20, 25, 51, 73, 101, 102 and domestic violence  8, 19 and the Enlightenment  25–6 and legal reform  102 and marriage  3–4, 10, 25–6, 51, 69, 108 and patriarchy  194 and remarriage  20 and self-divorce  9, 19 and sexual relations  4, 11, 25, 72 Soviet hostility to  131, 132 and weddings  4, 51, 172, 173, 197 Saltykova, Daria  27 self-divorces  9, 19–20 divorce letters  9, 19–20, 58, 81 sentimentalism  17, 23, 30–1, 38, 92, see also Russian Orthodox Church and family life  35 and marriage  26–9, 38, 72, 81 and patriarchal authority  37 peasants and  51 political uses of  31–3 and social status  39, 40, 67–8, 81 serfdom  41, 58, see also peasants serf emancipation, see peasants sexual freedom  110, 116 gender disparities in  116–17, 118, 125 sexual harassment  155 sexuality attitudes towards  25, 138, 164–5, 171, 197 sexual relations, see also adultery equality in  65 pre-marital  131, 182 Russian Orthodox Church and  25 serial monogamy in  207

Index

Shelgunov, Nikola and Maria  66 Shibaev, Ivan  88 shopclerks  39, 70 Simonov, Konstantin, “Wait for Me”  152 singlehood  41, 156, see also peasants as a choice  98, 202 Smolny Institute  24 snokhachestvo  7 socialism  170–1 soldiers’ wives  59–61 in civil marriages  60, 107–8 mobilization of  107, 108 state assistance to  95, 107 World War I and  106, 107 Spinsterhood, see singlehood spousal murder  6, 19, 201, see also domestic violence Stalin, Joseph  127, 140, 147, 149, 151, 156, 170 as father figure  160 State Senate  102 stepfamilies  16, 29, 38, 39 Stogov, Erastii  28 Stoliarov, Iakov  80 Stolypin reforms  99 subsistence riots  107 Suvorov, Vasilii and Avdotia  17 television  181, 184 Terror of 1936–1938  135, 145 and children  135, 144, 146 housing and  141 and kinship ties  145, 147 and wives  146 Third Section  29, 33, 101 Tiul’pin, Mikhail  38 Tolchenov, Ivan and Anna  21–3, 29–30, 35 townspeople  23, 76 lifestyle of  29 marriages of  21, 86 vacations  189 family  184, 187–9 separate  145, 187 Vinskii, Grigorii  27 virginity, see chastity

 267

weddings, see also peasants bedding ceremony  3, 22, 50, 87, 123 celebration of  3, 10, 11, 22, 50, 86–7, 123, 131–2, 166, 172–3 clothing for  86, 172, 173–4 community role in  3, 50, 87, 123, 132, 172–3 rituals  48–51, 86, 123, 173 role of Russian Orthodox priests in  3, 50, 54, 87 Russian Orthodox Church and  3, 51, 123, 132, 172, 197 timing of  3 wedding palaces  172–4 widowers remarriage of  4, 16, 41, 71 widows as household heads  4, 71, 137 as household members  120 migration of  81 remarriage of  4, 15, 16, 29, 41, 47, 60, 71, 162 wife-activist movement  140 wives, see also childbearing; divorce; domestic violence; legal systems; mothers; snokhachestvo; soldiers’ wives abortion and  110, 118, 167, 180–1 authority of  71 in complex households  7, 44, 75, 78–9, 93–5, 106, 123, 187 desertion of  123, 133 domestic ideals and  68, 72, 89, 195 economic dependence of  99, 117, 142, 143, 199, 200 economic independence of  101, 120, 190, 205–6 effect of divorce on  119, 120, 123, 133, 137, 202 expectations of marriage  187 flight of  8, 19, 80, 100 as friends  28 infidelity of  73, 95, 155 as initiators of divorce  8, 185–8 as landladies  97

268

litigious  65, 80–1, 125, 179 men’s migration and  78, 94, 133 migration of  81, 95, 99 obedience of  6, 26, 44, 81, 102 property rights of  26, 108, 122 remunerative labor of  38–9, 53, 60, 69, 81, 91, 96, 97, 100, 127, 141–2, 190, 195, 199, 206 representations of  152, 164 responsibilities of  4–6, 17, 26, 29, 33, 34, 37, 55–6, 69, 71, 85, 89, 93, 100, 118, 129, 140–3, 153, 160, 184, 185, 191 separate residency of  26, 102 sexual abuse of  95 of Soviet leaders  193 terror and  146 unemployment of  197 World War II and  153 workers, see industrial workers World War I  125 birth rates and  106

Index

demographic consequences of  105–6, 118, 125 marriage rates and  106 and peasants  106 and political tensions  107 and social divisions  106 World War II demographic consequences of  156, 161–2 devastation brought by  161 images of home and family and  149–52, 167–8 marriages and  153–4, 156, 162–3 sexual liaisons and  154–6 women’s labor and  153 writers and  150–2 Yeltsin, Boris  198–9 Young Russia (1862)  65 ZAGS (local bureaus of statistics)  116, 166, 172 dissatisfaction with  172, 173–4

 269

270

 271

272

 273

274