It’s interesting to read about the policy of the early Soviet state towards the family and to compare it with 
policies gaining increasing influence in the West today including in Ireland. They are rather too similar for comfort.
Essentially, both sets of policies have the effect of making the State far more powerful and the family far less autonomous.
For example, the 1918 Family Code of the newly established USSR introduced the concept of “the interests of the child”, just as we did last year, albeit with limited effect.
Leading communist theorist, Nikoloy Bukharin (pictured) wrote in his 1920 book The ABC of Communism, that the child belongs not to its parents, but “to society”.
He also rejected out-of-hand the notion that parents had a right to educate their own children. He writes: “From a Socialist point of view, this right is entirely and completely unfounded”.
The 1918 Family Code mentioned above, said that “[p]arental rights are exercised exclusively in the interests of the child, with courts invested with the right to deprive the parents thereof in case said rights are exercised improperly”.
Here in the West, parental rights are being increasingly overturned in the “interests” of children, but because it is the State deciding what it is a child’s “interests” it hands huge power over families to the State.
In addition, the ruling Communist party wanted all women to go out to work. Writing in 1919, Lenin said that “true liberation of women, true Communism come about only when and where the masses rise up…against…small scale households.”
Getting as many women as possible out to work is the consistent, declared policy of the European Union.
One of the very first things the new communist government did was to completely liberalise Russia’s divorce laws, permitting an unconditional right to divorce upon the decision of both spouses, or just one spouse.
Abortion-on-demand was also legalised. Sound familiar?
Bukharin also wrote: “In a communist society, when private property and oppression of women finally come to an end, so, too, will prostitution and marriage”. (Note the equation of the two).
In order to further undermine the traditional family, Soviet newspapers in the 1920s popularised “the critique of family roles for women, the family’s notorious lack of openness, and so on, together with propaganda [in favour] of occupation outside the family, of public education, the relaxation of morals, etc”. This sounds really familiar.
Obviously, the traditional family (and any other kind of family for that matter) can be oppressive, and it makes sense that both Western countries and the USSR would take steps to help people living in genuinely oppressive situations. However, it is nonetheless the case that beyond a certain point the State takes too much power to itself at the expense of the family.
That certainly happened in the Soviet Union and it is happening today in the West also.
The rhetoric of the modern Irish left in respect of parents, children and education is uncannily and unnervingly similar to the rhetoric employed in the USSR. They both have a ‘socialist’ view of children, in that children don’t really belong to the family, but to ‘society’ with the State acting as the proxy for society. They are ‘child-citizens’ in the words of one writer to The Irish Times.
The hostility towards women working at home on the part of the left here and in the USSR is also striking, and so is the determination to make the dissolution of the family as easy as possible through easy divorce, and the ‘dissolution’ of children through easy abortion.
The USSR was obviously at the extreme end of the socialist spectrum, but the ideology it espoused remains far stronger than many of us might think, in particular in the area of family policy.
(Note: This blog is drawn from ‘A Brief History of Family Policy in Russia, 1917-2013 which appears in the current issue of ‘The Family in America’. In turn the article draws heavily from ‘Family Sociology Textbook, edited by Professor A Antonov).