A Revolutionary Response: The 1926 Marriage Law of the R.S.F.S.R

Abstract

This thesis challenges the conventional (Western) scholarly view that has focused on the Bolsheviks' 1926 Marriage Law as part of a doctrinaire Marxist vision to abolish the bourgeois family. A detailed examination of the debates in 1925 and 1926 in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and exchanges in the press and periodicals of the time, show that - the central authorities' Marxist rhetoric notwithstanding - the law was not an assault on the family, but a pragmatic and reformist policy to extend alimony and other protections to women by recognising both de jure and de facto marriages.

Moreover, the debates of 1925 and 1926, occurring at the height of the New Economic Policy and at a time when the Bolsheviks had decided that a tactical alliance between the urban proletariat and peasantry was necessary, marked a resurgence of traditionalist and conservative rhetoric about the family's role and women's role in society. This social conservatism was a sign of things to come under Stalin's moral conservatism. The recognition of de facto marriages in the Soviet Union was to be short-lived: the 1944 Family Law abolished it.

The thesis also examines the contribution to the debate made by Alexandra Kollontai, a noted Russian feminist author and politician, the first female People's Commissar and the first female Ambassador of the Soviet Union (to Norway). Kollontai used the debate to propose ideas which appear socially progressive viewed through a modern lense but were derided as utopian in the post-revolutionary conditions of the 1920s: a mandatory, income-based levy to fund support for single mothers and children, and the conclusion of marital contracts recognising the economic value of women's work in the household. Show more