Social Cultural Transformation Flashcards
1
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Family Life
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- The Soviet urban marriage rate remained very high by both pre-war and contemporary European standards. However, the impact of radical policies - unregistered marriages, postcard divorces, and abortion - had noticeably weakened the family unit
- Soon after the 1917 revolution, secular marriages were enshrined in law as were de-facto relationships
Equal inheritance laws were also established, meaning that possession did not only pass to the son but the daughter too - The Soviet regime also outlawed practices common among some ethnic minorities such as polygamy and child-marriage
- Under the influence of women within the Communist Party such as Alexandra Kollontai, the state also built networks of free childcare centres and nurseries to ease the burdens of motherhood
- The Family Code (1936): Abortion was outlawed except where there was a threat to the woman’s life and health, and for women with hereditary diseases
- Divorce was made harder: both parties were required to attend divorce proceedings and the fee for registering a divorce was raised to 50 roubles for the first divorce, 150 for the second and 300 for any subsequent divorce
- Mothers with six children were to receive cash payments of 2000 roubles a year - a really substantial amount - for five years, with additional payments for each child up to 11th
- Around the same time laws were passed against prostitution and homosexuality, and having legitimate children was stigmatised
- Child support payments were fixed at a quarter of wages or salary for one child, a third for two, and 50-60% for three or more children
- The birth rate did rise from under 25% per 1000 in 1935 to 31% per 1000 in 1940. Newspapers reported prosecutions of doctors performing abortions and some women were imprisoned for having abortions, although the punishment for women in these circumstances was supposed to be public contempt rather than prosecution.
2
Q
Youth and Education
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- Juvenile crime was perceived as an increasing problem in the first half of the 1930s. For juvenile offenders, the law was relatively mild and rehabilitation was preferred.
- A Politburo decree in April 1935 allowed violent crimes committed by juveniles from twelve years of age punishable in the same way as those committed by adults
- Law ‘on the liquidation of child homelessness and lack of supervision’, which increased NKVD involvement in attempting to get children off the streets and into appropriate institutions.
- Komsomol - not necessarily compulsion to be apart
Stalinism produced major achievements in the Soviet education system during the 1930s. The education system was expanded and more people moved through school, colleges and universities. Not only was education seen as a right of the working classes, it was also a necessary requirement if the USSR was to become a more modern and technical society as Marxism envisaged - After the brief and limited war with Japan in 1939, the government also introduced compulsory military training for students in years 5-10
- The Soviet education system gave millions of young people opportunities of moving through the education system in relatively well-paid manual and technical jobs
Kosmosol was also a common way for younger Soviet citizens to become Communist party members. Many members of the Kosmosol moved into the Communist Party during the terror of 1936-38 as many older members were eliminated - Kosmosol tried to promote active and cultured living among Soviet youth and appears to have been very successful in this endeavour
- Funding for education in the USSR increased by 400% between 1932 and 1937
- By the end of the decade, there were 199 000 schools in the USSR and the number of school children increased from 12 million in 1928 to 31 million in 1940
- Literacy rates in the USSR reached 94% in urban populations and 86% in rural areas (for people between the ages of 9 and 49) by the end of the decade
3
Q
Religion and Art
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- Lenin followed Marx and Engels in believing that religion was outdated, dangerous and opposed to secular communism
- The first attack upon religious figures came about in the late 1920s with forced collectivisation - because priests were prominent community members, they were often targeted by police and security forces in confrontations with peasants during collectivisation. Thousands of priests were arrested during this period.
More churches and mosques were destroyed - the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow was demolished in 1931 on Stalin’s orders and the Kazan Cathedral in Leningrad was turned into the Museum of History and Religion and Atheism in 1932 - Anti religious propaganda rapidly proliferated
- In April 1929, the Soviet regime announced the Decree on Religious Associations. This tried to establish strict rules around how religious groups operate
- The major Islamic ritual of Hajj was outlawed for Soviet citizens in 1935
Another major wave of attacks against religious communities was unleashed during the terror of 1937-38. Thousands of church leaders were arrested and sent to the gulags or executed. - The Stalinist regime successfully eroded the political power of religions, especially the Orthodox Church, in the USSR for the short term (and this was only partially relieved during the Second World War). By destroying much religious infrastructure such as churches and mosques in the USSR, the regime also forced fundamental changes to the patterns of public religious activity
- In 1934, the newly founded Union of Writers proclaimed Socialist Realism to be the ‘definitive Soviet artistic method’. Stalin liked realism - art which could be easily understood by the masses and which told a story. It could be a good vehicle for propaganda.
- Socialist realism meant seeing life as it was becoming and ought to be, rather than as it was. Its subject
- Approximately 1% of churches remained active in the USSR by the end of 1939 and almost all Orthodox Christian Monasteries had been closed. There were 60, 000 active priests in 1925 and only about 6000 by the end of 1939
- The League of Militant Atheists was established in 1925 and reached a peak of 5.6 million members in the early 1930s - a time when the Communist Party membership was just over 1.7 million. The League also conducted anti-religious ‘agitation’ throughout the USSR in the 1930s e.g in a campaign against Easter, one of the League’s slogans read: ‘Anyone who is for Easter is against socialism’
- Attributable to Kosmosol activity and government propaganda, the 1937 census revealed that citizens between the ages of 16 and 29 were less likely to identify as religious than those 30 years old and above.
4
Q
Economic
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- 3 million peasants forced to work on new Soviet collective farms
Pay for collective farms was significantly lower than in most factories and was often distributed in form of food, resources, and a small amount of cash - Farms could be relatively unproductive because kulaks were often the best farmers. After so many were removed, villages lost crucial expertise, leadership and work ethic
- The Stalin regime implemented policies of ‘sedentarisation’, that forced nomads to live more settled around towns and cities. Nomadic cultures and ways of life had no place in socialist modernity
- In 1935 a coal miner, Alexei Stakhanov became a nationwide celebrity in the Soviet Union for digging 102 tons of coal in one shift - the Soviet press presented him as a national hero and an example of everything Soviet workers should aspire to be
- Pravda and other newspapers heralded Stakhanov’s achievements as evidence that a ‘New Soviet Man’ had developed as a result of the revolution
- A movement of model workers developed called ‘Stakhanovites’. They received better wages, access to government stores where clothes, food and luxuries could be purchased and were feted by the soviet media. Some Stakhanovites even met Stalin and were rewarded with the soviet medal of labour valour.
- In 1924 about 10% of the USSR’s working population could be classed as industrial, by 1939 this had grown to 34%
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