Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936.

This pathbreaking study reminds us, at a time when such Russian and Western scholars as Dimitrii Volkogonov and Richard Pipes are vilifying Lenin and the Bolsheviks for creating a monolithic party that laid the foundations for the repressive Stalinist regime, that the 1920s witnessed governmental experimentation with socialist principles and lively debates on marriage, the family, sexual relations, child care and rearing, as well as women's place in a socialist society. Taking a social historian's perspective, Goldman tests the ways in which revolutionary laws aimed ultimately at the withering away of marriage and family came into conflict with social reality in a country whose population consisted overwhelmingly of peasants and whose economy had been devastated by war, revolution, and civil war. Her study traces discussions concerning policy and law as well as the population's response to progressive laws on marriage, divorce, alimony, illegitimacy, abortion, and de facto marital unions. Goldman demonstrates Stalin and the Communist Party's complete reversal on these issues in 1936 as they restored the traditional family unit as the primary social institution. This turnabout victimized jurists and activists such as Alexander Goikhbarg, Aron Sol'ts, Evgenii Pashukanis, and Aleksei Kiselev who were purged in the 1930s after drafting libertarian family legislation or debating it in 1918, 1925 and 1926. Even more tragically, Goldman points out, the casualties also included Soviet women who came to equate socialism and hence their liberation with a state that reneged on its promises to socialize household labor and foster equality between men and women in all areas of life. This same government falsely stressed a continuity between the revolutionary legislation of 1918 and the 1920s and its repressive variants of 1936 and 1944.

Beginning with a discussion of Bolshevik ideas on free union, women's emancipation through wage labor, socialization of housework, and the withering away of the family, Goldman succinctly sets their historical context. These principles were founded on diverse traditions, ranging from discussion of free union in the Middle Ages to the scientific socialist views of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and August Bebel and contemporaneous notions about women and the family among nineteenth century Russian revolutionaries. They culminated in the Soviet state's first Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship in October 1918 that, according to Goldman, represented the world's most advanced legislation on the family. While catching up with the West by making marriage a civil institution, the code surpassed legislation in Europe and the U.S. in guaranteeing women's equality. Its extremely lax divorce policy required no grounds whatsoever and extended similar guarantees of alimony to both men and women. Furthermore, the 1918 code abolished illegitimacy and adoption. The social engineers behind the new law envisioned it as part of the transition from capitalism to socialism, i.e., an initial step towards the destruction of the family and marriage. The civil war and ensuring economic collapse tested these visionaries' ideas as the needs of women and children overwhelmed social services. A tension developed between libertarian principles and greater state involvement in what had been family responsibilities.

The next three chapters, containing some of the best writing in the book, analyze the ways in which social reality clashed with Bolshevik theory. Goldman presents individual case studies of women and children to humanize the aggregate data on hundreds of thousands of homeless children, juvenile delinquency, and alimony defaults. She also shows the dramatic rise in women's unemployment and prostitution during the civil war and the subsequent years of the New Economic Policy in which the Bolshevik state restored some capitalist elements to rebuild a shattered economy. Contrary to socialist ideals, women became more rather than less dependent on their families to make ends meet. Mothers, deserted by husbands and hampered by a paucity of job opportunities, discriminatory hiring practices, lack of skills, insufficient day care and low wages, sometimes had little choice but to abandon their children to the streets. As juvenile crime increased and the state found itself strapped to house these waifs, the government turned back to the family as the primary institution for bringing up children at little cost to society as a whole. Overburdened with increasing numbers of homeless children, the Central Executive Committee and Sovnarkom (Soviet of Peoples Commissariat) in 1926 also reversed the 1918 Family Code's abolition of adoption. Women increasingly complained to the courts about their former husbands' disinclination or inability to pay alimony. The 1918 Family Code, with its libertarian view of personal freedom, clashed in the countryside with the Land Code of 1922 which reaffirmed the patriarchal household as the main unit of production even though it recognized women's right to land and property. The increase in divorce pitted peasant women against their menfolk, "forcing the courts and the land commissions to adjudicate in practice what was irresolvable in principle."(163)

Yet, in spite of the tensions between individual and social needs and debates pitting libertarian opinions against protectionist ideas, jurists in the Commissariat of Justice legislated a New Family Code in 1926 that went further than the 1918 code in realizing the socialist dream of free union. It extended the right of marriage to persons in de facto unions, transferred divorce from the courts to the registry offices, and reduced the legal obligations of family members. The law included measures to "protect the weak and vulnerable," but in the end, according to Goldman, failed to accept the fact that libertinism favored men at the expense of women.(213) The protectionists, too, were hampered by ideological commitments to build socialism in an underdeveloped country.

Abortion remained the one area where women took matters in their own hands. While abortion was legalized in November 1920, it did not become readily available to all women, resulting in an upsurge in illegal as well as legal abortions. Contrary to official opinion that the unemployed, unmarried, or very young would seek abortions, it was the most progressive women, urban wage earners or wives of workers with one or two children, who turned to abortion as a means of contraception. The 1936 law, which once again outlawed abortions, did not have the desired effect of raising the birthrate. Women continued to control their fertility through illegal abortions and paid the consequences, often with their lives.

The 1936 law also sought to address the problems that divorce, defaults in alimony payments, family instability and homeless children caused by renouncing the libertarian and utopian ideas of the 1918 and 1926 family law codes. In so doing, it attempted to strengthen the family. As repressive measures substituted prison camps for rehabilitative policies vis-a-vis abandoned children and juvenile delinquents, they also charged families with responsibility for their children. The 1936 law offered women effective action against delinquent ex-spouses and limited divorce as well, but at a price: women were to assume the double burdens of work and motherhood. Necessary to the state in terms of labor and reproducing society, women nevertheless had to be satisfied with the state's refusal to take on greater social responsibilities or work for gender equality within the home.

While Goldman does a superb job chronicling the various points of view within the Bolshevik Party and the population at large on family matters and testing laws against reality during the first two decades of Soviet rule, she is less successful in explaining the reversal of the 1930s. She views the economic misery of an underdeveloped country as partly responsible for the 1936 change of heart, but concludes that it was "essentially political, not economic or material in nature," mirroring "Stalinist policy in other areas."(341) If this is indeed the case, Goldman may have underestimated the nonlibertarian and nonlibertine arguments within the Communist Party in the 1920s and should have elaborated on the political rationale for change. Transitions between chapters linking disparate materials would also have clarified her thought. While Goldman might have distinguished libertine from libertarian views and acknowledged the existence of peasant inheritance systems, her study is an important contribution to the fields of Soviet and women's history. It should be read by scholars and students alike.

Christine D. Worobec Kent State University