Five Ways Lenin’s Propaganda Destroyed Marriage And The Family In Russia
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‘The success of a revolution,” V.I. Lenin declared at the first all-Russian conference of working women in 1918, “depends on how much women take part in it.”
And based on his writings, there was little doubt he believed this. Problem was, most Russian women weren’t interested.
Unlike what was going on elsewhere in Europe, where the suffrage movement was under way and the Industrial Revolution had drawn many women into the workforce, industry in Russia was in its infancy and the female population was mostly rural and illiterate.
The focus was on family, not what Marxism could do for the working class. But unlike economic classes such as Kulaks or aristocrats who had fallen into his disfavor, women couldn’t be liquidated. Their favored institutions could, however, and that’s why Lenin specifically targeted marriage and family in his effort to build a “New Soviet Man.”
Five elements stand out in how Lenin and his Bolsheviks used propaganda to get women to support his revolution.
• Equating marriage with slavery. Lenin and his feminist lieutenants, particularly Alexandra Kollontai, the first female commissar in the Soviet government, considered much of what the suffragettes were fighting for, including voting rights and equal protection under the law, “bourgeois convention.”
What they had in mind was something far more radical: An all-out war on “old and outdated” institutions like marriage and family so dominance of the state could be achieved. Instead of marriage, there would be more disposable “unions of affection and comradeship.”
The first salvo in the “liberation” of the family was easy divorce, established almost immediately by the Bolsheviks. Abortion on demand — until then illegal in every country in the world — came in 1920.
“The family is ceasing to be necessary either to its members or to the nation,” Kollontai wrote that year. But capitalists, she said, “are well aware that the old type of family, where a woman is a slave and where the husband is responsible for the well-being of his wife and children, is the best weapon in the struggle to stifle the desire of the working class for freedom and to weaken the revolutionary spirit of the working man and working woman.
The Bolsheviks also allowed women to own land and vote. But these rights were rendered moot when the one-party state took over. The right to equal wages was also instituted, but largely ignored. And as women were ghettoized into state-chosen professions, their wages went down.
The idea behind breaking down the family was that women without husbands could be socialized more easily. In practical terms, this meant men were free to leave their wives and abandon their responsibilities, making women wards of the state.
During the Russian civil war, 90% of the female-dominated population of Petrograd (St. Petersburg), the capital of the Russian empire, was dependent on state handouts.
• Vive la sameness. Lenin’s Bolsheviks saw men and women as equal, but not in terms of opportunity. Instead, the imagery in their propaganda made modern Soviet women look like men — with thick necks, brawny shoulders, burly arms and army boots that blurred the lines between the sexes. The less distinguishable men and women were, the easier to manipulate them.
• It takes a village. The Bolsheviks believed communism would eliminate the need for families. The country, after all, would become “one whole family.” Hearth and home were viewed as potentially subversive.
Those who just wanted to look out for their own children were “selfish,” Kollontai wrote. Women should see all children as their own with duties shared. This made it easier to force wives and mothers into factories and gave rise to day-care centers, communal meals, even community laundries and clothing repair centers.
The idea was to sever natural ties between mother and child so the state could forge a New Soviet Man.
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