Russia’s Culture of 20th century in the morals of Russians

[Olga]

1920s – Relative Cultural Pluralism.

After Civil war the difficult economic situation in Russia urged the Bolsheviks to more flexible economic policy - The New Economic Policy (NEP). The allowed by the Soviet government free privet enterprise started to form the new material and spiritual values and the new models of behavior in the life of Russians. There were ideological ambiguity, political instability and conflict of opposites in subject matter, genres and styles in the spiritual life of people, and it was the time of some pluralism of course at the Bolshevik culture’s dominance. So far as such social classes as nobility, merchants and so on were abolished by the new Soviet Government the people emphasized their proletarian, working or peasantry social origin, as a value, but pre-revolutionary elite experienced discrimination along with demand for their services in particular spheres of social life (for example as in education, medicine, sciences)   and as far as possible they tried to adjust themselves to a new political system, very often hiding their nobility origin, or immigrate from the country.

The position of the “new capitalists” that were named as NEPmen in a new Soviet society was not so enviable. In fact they were found themselves in a constant hostile environment, the official policy towards nepmen fluctuated from the forced by economic situation acceptance by the Soviet Government to the recurrent persecutions and robberies, and bureaucratic arbitrary rules. The nepmen did not have any political rights and such situation created feeling of instability and temporariness of their position and what was going on. All these exerted influence on the nepmen life style in general  - “if I am going to die, I want to do it in style”, there were continuous binges, grabbing, speculations and readiness for evading the law.

The democracy and dictatorship of the proletariat were understood by marginal mass that formed not less part of a new rule class – proletariat as permissiveness and impunity that leaded to rise of criminality.

[Olga]

Some extracts from the bibliographic novel “The Survivor’s notes” by Sergey Golitsyn.

(My apology in advance for English translation)

The beneficial influence of slackened reins of the New Economic Policy – NEP - had its impact on everything and everywhere. The Cheka was renamed in OGPU (the State Political Directorate). The Soviet rule’s oppression was eased at first; the arrests reduced and the most of arrest cases were criminals. It seemed the time of promised freedom came. The city dwellers decided that everyone could do what he wants: either to honestly work at the state institutions and enterprises and earn a salary for his work, or to become a private entrepreneur and organize his own privet business – to buy, to sell, to produce or recondition something, in one word to try to earn money as much as possible.

“Enrich yourself!” -  I repeat the Bukharin’s call again – and energetic, pushing, and, I would also add, unsuspecting people rushed to “Enrich themselves”… And Moscow began to boil.

The businesslike people were bringing to Moscow different kind of goods, and finally the peasants were delivering meat and dairy products, vegetables and firewood by their horses. People were bringing their goods for state and privet stores, but above all for selling in open markets, because the main selling was carried out through the market places in Moscow at that time.

All things that were existed since the Rurik’s time were under selling. Former nobility were selling the antique family crystal ware and porcelain, the ball dress and tailcoats of past centuries, the perfume bottles and even the boxes for perfume bottles, the shabby fur coats and hats… Standing in rows, talking in French with each other and recalling the past time the former nobility tried to sell the most expensive, cheapest, usable and not usable things.

The prices in the state stores of the Moscow Union of Consumer Cooperatives were lower than in the privet stores, so usually we were buying the food products in such stores, but there also were cases when we could get the tainted food and the sellers were often rude in the state stores.

The owners of privet stores and working for them sellers met us with greeting smiles, and they laid their goods so pictorially that it always drew attention.

You could meet the representatives of old merchant families among the owners of privet stores; for example a merchant Sveshnikov, an owner of a fur shop at the Okhotny Ryad.

But main mass of businesslike people, nepmen, was formed from new people, usually newcomers from different places of Russia, or former shop assistants, who were working at the merchant stores before the Revolution.

Nepmen sometimes got an astronomical profit from their businesses. One part of the profit was used for purchase of new goods and other part of the profit had to be realized as soon as possible, because the new soviet money – sovznaks were loosing its value every month, therefore to hold a surplus of money at home or put it in the Soviet banks was too risky.  So, in such case the former nobility that were trying to get some money selling its gold was again useful. At that time the secret black market of gold, jewels and pieces of virtu was in its blossom.

Some collectors, as Vishnevsky , like vampires got into home of needy old lady, a keeper of  her ancestors’ portraits, paintings, porcelain  and so on and gave her insignificant sums of sovznaks for her family treasures, taking it away with them  triumphantly.

Along with gold, jewels and pieces of virtu the new dealers preferred to lay in hard currency, first of all in dollars.  Year after year the foreigners – employees of the ARA (American Relieg Administrаtion), the Nansen mission and the Pope Pius XI mission, and also diplomats and businessmen started to come to Moscow more often and of course they understood very fast that it was more  profitable to sell dollars to the dealers of black market than to the Soviet banks according to the official rate.  

[Olga]

From the work by Professor Dr. Igor S. Kon

The sexual revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today.

Before the revolution Bolsheviks had no define policy in regard to sexuality. The "sex issue" was for them mainly economic and sociopolitical and essentially boiled down to the problem of emancipating women and overcoming gender inequality. Sexuality was mentioned only in passing, especially in relation to the family.

Soviet legislation and social policy on issues of marriage and procreation in the 1920s were the most daringly progressive in the world. As early as 1918, women were accorded full equal rights with men in all and privet areas, including marriage and family relations. Women had the right to choose their surname, place of residence, and social status. Their involvement in productive labor was supposed to ensure them economic independence of men. If they became pregnant, they were entitled to paid holidays. To relieve women of onerous "domestic servitude". the state began to set up a system of creches, nurseries, and communal food supplies. Medical service for mothers and children was expanded and improved and became entirely free.

Unfortunately, the realities of life that confronted the Bolsheviks immediately after revolution  were much more difficult than they had anticipated. Many of the splendid beginnings of equality were impossible to carry forward in the midst of economic ruin, poverty, and lack of culture; these plans had to be put on the back burner for time. And the costs associated with the subsequent breakdown in marriage and family patterns - unwanted pregnancies, fatherless children, prostitution, the spread of venereal diseases - were great and provoked mounting concern.

The disintegration of marriage and family had very serious social consequences. From 1912 to the 1920s, the number of divorces per thousand people increased sevenfold. Ecclesiastical marriage lost its moral and legal significance, and many people did not take civilly sanctioned marriages seriously. Some convinced Communists believed the institution of marriage was altogether unnecessary. The parents of a friend of mine, who had lived together happily and faithfully for more than 50 years - their entire lives - registered their marriage only in the mid-1980s, simultaneous with the marriage of a grandson (who has since had two divorces). And they did so only for practical reason.

But not all de facto marriages were so stable. As might be expected, women suffered the most. There was even a joke: in sexual relationships, the third correlate of liberty and equality was not fraternity but maternity.

Under the circumstances, the authorities had to do something. One such unpleasant but necessary measure was the legalization of induced abortion.

Ideologically, the Soviet state was oriented from the start on a pronatal policy, favoring a high birthrate, and it did all it could to protect the life and health of mother and child. Nevertheless, in 1920, the Soviet government was the first in Europe to legalize abortion.
Given the undeniable fact of impending economic ruin, the real choice was not between abortion or promotion of high birthrate, but bettween legal and relatively safe abortion and illegal and dangerous abortion - in Moscow in the 1020s, the risk of dying of infection as a result of an abortion was 60 to 120 times higher than the risk of death while giving birth.

Legalization of abortion was risky decision, yet it seemed to be the right one. Although the number of induced abortions sharply rose after their legalization - according to some figures, they tripled; if we are to credit the local medical statistics, in 1924 abortions amounted to half the total number of live births in Leningrad, and  to 43% in one Moscow clinic - the number of nonhospital abortions sharply fell. So the articulated goal had been archived

But the number of abortions continued to grow.

Another concern was the rise in the incidence of venereal disease and prostitution. According to a survey of patients carried out in 1925 at the Second Moscow Venerealogical Clinic, as many as 45% of the men and 81% of the women had no knowledge whatsoever of the nature of and treatment for sexually transmitted disease. What is more, the source of between 54% and 88% of all cases could be traced back to prostitution.

Premarital and extramarital sex was very common among young workers and students.  
Many of them were skeptical about marriage and the family, saying they did not believe in romantic love, and every tenth male student was in favor of “free love”

Ethical and aesthetic standards as seen in early mass Soviet literature were equally contradictory.
Bolshevism abolished, on the one hand, God, ecclesiastical marriage, and absolute moral values, and, on the other, the individual’s right to personal self-determination and love that might stand higher than all social duties. Now Bolshevism was helpless in the face of ethical relativism.

Ultimately, the Bolshevism had two alternative strategies in regard to sexuality: acceptance or suppression.

The first, more liberal, viewpoint was formulated by Alexandra Kollontay in her 1923 sensation-making article, “Make Way for Winged Eros!” Kollonty by no means dismissed or denounced the serious nature of love relationships. On the contrary, she opposed “sexual fetishism” and “hedonism”, contemptuously labeling the casual relations of the civil was period as merely manifestation of the sex instinct unworthy of a Bolshevik. Even this thoroughly moral viewpoint, however, provoked numerous attacks on her. Her viewpoint was too radical for the communists and more over contradictory the political suitability.

The second, more rigid, and dogmatic stance on sexuality was taken by Aron Zalkind, the author of the popular books “Youth and Revolution” (1924), Sexual Fetishism: A Review of Sex Questions” (1925), and “The Sex Issue in Soviet Social Conditions” (1926). Zalkind admitted the existence of a biological sexual drive in human beings and the harm of “sexual self-corking.” At the same time. However, he proposed wholesale subordination of sexuality to the proletariat’s class interests. What follows is summary of his “Twelve Sexual Commandments for the Revolutionary Proletariat”:

Sexual life is permissible only so far as it encourages the growth of collective feelings, class organization, creative endeavor in work and military activity… Because the proletariat and the laboring masses economically allied to it comprise the main bulk of the proletariat, revolutionary expedience is thereby the best biological expedience, the greatest biological blessing…

12. In the interest of revolutionary expedience, the class has the right to interfere in the sexual life of its members. The sexual must be subordinate in everything to the class, in no way hampering it, and serving it in all it does…
   Hence, all those elements of sexual life that harm the establishment of a healthy  revolutionary new generation, which rob class energy, let class joys rot, or spoil intra-class relations, must be mercilessly swept away from class practice.

[Olga]

From "Wedded Strangers: the challenges of Russian-American Marriages" by Lynn Visson.

In the 1920s and 1930s hundreds of American socialists, blacks seeking a society free from racism, Jews who had fled the tsarist pogroms, Russian immigrants and their children, ordinary workers and recent college graduates were fascinated by the Soviet experiment. Between 1920 and 1925 nearly 22,000 American and Canadian men, women and families moved to Russia intending to remain there (Paula Garb, "They Came to Stay: North Americans in the USSR"). These idealistic Americans who went off to the USSR to build the world of the future were quickly introduced to Russian reality - and to Russian romance.

A group of American workers, determined to help the USSR through the introduction of American industrial and management methods, founded Project Kuzbas, a Siberian economic colony administrated entirely by Americans. From 1921 to 1926 the group lived in the town of Kemerovo, and by August, 1922 twelve of the American men had married Siberian girls. (Ripp; see also J.P. Murray, Project Kuzbas: American Workers in Siberia 1921-26). Most of the marriages proved stable and the families stayed on in Russia, but the regime did not spare these idealists.

Read also American Workers in The Soviet Union Between the Two World Wars:From Dream to Disillusionment

[Olga]

Russians knew drugs before Bolsheviks. In such regions of Russia as Middle Asia, Far East, Caucasus and Siberia the drug consuming was traditional.  More over such cultural and economic centers of Russia as Moscow and Saint Petersburg always headed scientific and cultural progress: philosophical tendencies, new ideas, introduction of new medicine... In the 19th century there were morphinists, etheromanists and hashish smokers, in the early 1920s the drugs became a concomitant elements of modern culture in Russia, and in that time Russians got to know the cocaine.

October of 1917 radically changed not only the political life in Russia but democratizing the drug consuming also drug addicts, and the drug consuming became not only a "metropolitan illness" but started to spread in the rural areas of Russia. For a few years a drug addiction turned into everyday occurrence. To get a drug was very easy. Any Russian could buy it in the streets and at the open markets.  Usually drug sellers were the homeless boys and prostitutes. Of course the drugs were spread among criminals world, but the criminal authorities had contemptuous attitude towards drug addicts and the drugs usually were used as one of the crime means. 

Analysis of the Russian legislation of 1917-1921 shows that there was a law against illegal drug manufacture and selling, but the new Soviet Government was liberal towards the "heritage of damned past" as Bolsheviks called the drugs.

The drugs started to spread among the young workers (usually through the prostitutes), but the fact that in 1920 the Bolsheviks imposed a ban on vodka, a traditional part of worker's spare time, played also its role in the drug spreading. Of course such the fact disturbed the Bolsheviks. What they did? In 1925 they abolished the ban on vodka. 

 

[Olga]

1930s-beginning of 1950s. Totalitarian regime.

The new period (ideological definiteness, political stability, centralization of all social life spheres, regulation of genres, subject areas, styles, leader cult)-totalitarianism clear appeared in the first half of 1930s.   

During the process of USSR modernization and industrialization the people’s income considerably decreased, but soviet population being inspired with belief in socialistic future patiently bore all economic difficulties and  rationing system of goods  distribution. Under influence of the soviet propaganda that emphasized achievements and hided the facts of major setbacks, people were seized with enthusiasm that displayed itself in selfless, heroic labor and honest studies. The soviet government officially established new political holidays as 1st May International Worker’s Day and 7th November the Day of Prolitarian Revolution with obligatory participation in marches, professional holidays as the Day of Miners. All religious holidays (Christmas, Easter,   Epiphany) were forbidden, but the older generation celebrated it secretly. Christmas tree also was banned, and only in 1935 was allowed again as a New Year Tree. A red star in the top of the New Year tree was an indispensable decoration.

[Olga]

The ideological myth and leader cult embraced people’s life. Not only the streets, squares, official buildings and offices were decorated with the portraits of the soviet leaders, but also inhabited rooms. People proposed the toasts to comrade Stalin and communist during all celebrations, even simply home celebration as a birthday.

In the course of fighting against dissent it was very dangerous to tell political jokes. A person could be jailed for 10 years as enemy of the soviet nation.  The writes could not publish their works if they did not correspond to the soviet ideology and socialistic realism. The political regime contributed to families break up. People were afraid to keep their relation with a victim of political repression. Relatives of a victim of political repression could loose their jobs or become also the state criminals if they did not repudiate their relations with an “enemy of the soviet nation”.  The snitching (or informing) became a common occurrence. Some people did it because of fear, instinct of self-preservation, other because of their own selfish ends or because of conviction that they help the soviet government to unmask “enemy”. People avoided any conversation about arrests and mass repression, the “positive ignorance’ of such events became a widespread practice. In atmosphere of espionage the number of the foreigners visiting USSR decreased, the soviets try to avoid any contacts with people from West.

Soviet posters:

[Olga]

In one of three photos you can see a writing on the wall (in a music school) - Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood"

The parents of my grandmother were victims of Stalin's political regime. Her father was executed by shooting and mother died of galloping consumption after being held for several months in local prison. My grandmother and her two sisters as children of "enemies of soviet nation" were sent in a special boarding school. Whole her childhood they were cold and hungry. When my granny and I went pick up mushrooms in the woods she thought me what herbs and berries are edible and not, she knows it since time when she was 5 y.o.

Even after the Stalin's death and official mass rehabilitation of Stalin regime's victims she was afraid to talk about her parents for long time.

[Olga]

From Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel "The First Circle"

A woman touched Nadya's sleeve.
- Dear! It was easy to love in 19th century. Did the Decemberists' wives accomplish a feat? Really? Did a personnel office summon them to complete a questionnaire? Did they need to hide their marriage as a contagion not to be dismissed from their job and to loose five hundred rubles per months? Were they boycotted in a communal apartment? Did people near a water pump hissed at them that they were enemies of nation? Did their mothers and sisters urge them to have a common sense and divorce their husbands? Oh, quite the contrary! They were accompanied with a murmur of admiration from elite society. They graciously presented the legends about their feats to the poets. Leaving for Siberia in their expensive carriages they did not loose the pitiable nine square metres of their last dwelling place along with Moscow registration, and they did not think of such little nothings as the sullied employee records... a small boxroom, no any pot and no black bread either!...    

Anna Akhmatova
Requiem
http://curricula.voi...bid/497/Default.aspx

[Olga]

Controlling all the spheres of life the Soviet Government pursued a course of the strengthening of marriage and family by administrative command methods, denying and suppressing sexuality and fighting against prostitution.  The course had its own positive results: the family values became stronger in the consciousness of soviets, but along with that the political divorces were encouraged by the Soviet Government.

From the article "Ideologically restrained intimate life" by the Doctor of History Natalia Lebina

A turn towards sharp deerotization of the soviet society on the basis of  ideology began at the turn of 1920s and 1930s.  The maxims by a chief of the Women Department of The Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union P. Vinogradskaya, who insisted that unwarranted attention to the gender issue can weaken the fighting efficiency of the proletarian mass, were praised along with "12 commandments" by A. Zalkind (a doctor of a Communist party as he was named at that time) , who advocated the right of the ruling class to interfere in sexual life of its members.

In the middle of the 1930s the soviet people's intimate sexual life was proved to be politicized to the limit. The discussions about sexual problems despaired from the magazines’ pages.  It became a rare case to see a frivolously dressed woman on the streets and even a basically frivolously decorated shop window. Such stories as a story that happened in March of 1937 at the factory “Krasny Treugolnik” (“Red Triangle”) when the Komsomol Bureau (or organization of "Communist Union of Youth") expelled a young metalworker from its ranks because he had a relationship with two women, became a “norm of life”. The new socialistic asceticism was encouraged in every possible way by the power-holding and ideological structures. From 1937 the dramas of everyday life could be exaggerated to the “celebrated case” scale.  In 1938 the newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda” (Komsomol truth) reported that “the enemies of the Soviet nation did a lot cultivating the bourgeois views on love and marriage in young people demoralizing them politically.” Premarital sexual relations were considered “a unwholesome capitalistic way of life”. Even a fact of  official divorce put a mark of disgrace on a member of the Komsomol or Communist party (if it was not a political devorce).