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Conclusion: Stalin's oxymorons: Socialist state, law, and family

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2010

Wendy Z. Goldman
Wendy Z. Goldman
Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania
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Summary

We should not aspire to a highly stable family and look at marriage from that angle. Strengthening marriage and the family – making divorce more difficult – is not new, it is old: it is the same as bourgeois law.

Iakov Brandenburgskii, arguing before the VTsIK in 1925

These “theories” were reflected also in denial of the socialist character of Soviet law, in attempts to portray Soviet law as bourgeois law – as law resting on the same bourgeois principles and expressing the same social relationships inherent in the bourgeois order. These persons trod the well worn path of Trotskyite-Bukharinist perversions…

Andrei la. Vyshinskii, 1948

In the two decades between 1917 and 1936, the official Soviet view of the family underwent a complete reversal. Beginning with a fierce, libertarian commitment to individual freedom and “the withering away” of the family, the period ended with a policy based on a repressive strengthening of the family unit. Similar shifts occurred in the ideology of the state and the law as the Party systematically eliminated the libertarian currents in Bolshevik thought. A legal understanding of crime based on social causation and rehabilitation yielded to a new emphasis on personal culpability and punishment. Open intellectual exchange gave way to fearful caution, honest debate to a stiff, brittle mockery of discussion. By 1936, newspapers trumpeted support for a strong socialist family, elaborate legal codes, and a powerful state. The concepts of socialist family, law, and state, more reminiscent of Constantine Pobedonostsev than Marx, had become the new holy trinity of the Party.

Type
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Information
Women, the State and Revolution
Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936
 , pp. 337 - 344
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1993

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