FAILURE OF FAMILY COMMUNISM

FAILURES OF COMMUNISM on the FAMILY

     The Bolsheviks who seized power in Russia in 1917 had as a primary goal the abolition of the family. The state, they believed, could better socialize young Russians than could benighted patriarchal families, particularly those of the brutish peasants. Thanks to years of war, famine, and revolution, millions of orphaned and abandoned children presented the Bolsheviks with the perfect opportunity to put theory into practice. Outlawing adoption and ignoring foster care, the Bolshevik Family Code of 1918 sought to just that.  Utopia--dystopia, as it turned out--was at hand. Yet within five years, the Russian communists had discarded plans for collectivizing the upbringing of orphans and returned to tsarist-era foster care policies because "they recognized that, as a rule, families provided better homes than institutions."

     Writing in the Journal of Family History, Laurie Bernstein of Rutgers University examines the history of foster care in Bolshevik Russia.  The theory, at first, was that "Soviet power would assume full responsibility for dependent children, raising them in social institutions designed to transform them into steadfast communists." This task was to be entrusted to state-run orphanages, in which mortality rates ran from 25 to 50 percent. They were overcrowded, disease-ridden, and fatal places, so by the early 1920s, "[d]esperate to save lives, local authorities... resurrected the tsarist policy of placing orphaned infants and dependent children with families that would in turn receive various forms of compensation," specifically: land, cash, and tax breaks. This policy was formally adopted in 1926 as patronirovanie, and it signaled "an enormous retreat for the Communist Party," namely: "an admission that communist dreams about eliminating the family were unlikely to materialize."

     These orphans were most often placed in peasant families, despite the widespread peasant hostility to Bolshevism. Although Stalin was later to shift the emphasis from foster care to the placement of children in collective farms, by the Second World War patronirovanie was again the official policy. For the Soviets, Bernstein concludes, decades of "rule, experience, and accumulated wisdom had effected a grudging appreciation of families and familial relationships."