History, Part I

We think it's important to speak from a broad perspective as to why there are so many orphaned children in Russia and why their circumstances are so dire. So, to add a little bit of historical perspective to the current dilemma, here goes...


The Marxist philosophy of politics and economics, to which Lenin and his comrades adhered at least in the beginning, extended to family life. Under Marxism, gender roles are considered hypocritical. Tasks that were put on women's shoulders in Imperial Russia were, in an ideal socialist society, given over to the public. So things like cleaning, cooking, and childcare would be carried out as a sort of co-op.



What happened in the Soviet Union as a result of applying this bit of Marxism really caused some trouble. According to Marx, marriage and family are unnecessary and so divorce becomes very easy. A piece of Soviet legislation called the Family Code of 1926 attempted to make these practices into law. Civil marriage replaced religious marriage and a divorce could be obtained simply by informing the other partner. As a result, during the 1920s divorce was on the rise in the Soviet Union. By 1926 the divorce rate was at about 50 percent.



The impact of this sharp rise in broken families meant that the state had to look after the children who were abandoned by these dissolved marriages. In the first two decades of the Soviet Union's existence the streets of cities and towns throughout the country were flushed with hundreds of thousands of orphaned and abandoned children.



The sudden appearance of so many orphaned children cannot solely be blamed on the Family Code of 1926; most of the responsibility should be shared by the civil war (1918-1921) and the forced collectivization of farms that took place under Stalin in the 1930s. These two events devastated the population through death by war, disease, and starvation. Some of the children living on the streets were taken into state-run orphanages, most of which were poorly provisioned. Others became the foster children of farming families where they worked as agricultural laborers--an exploitative situation for most kids, no doubt.


For further reading, I would suggest Geoffrey Hosking's Russia and the Russians: A History

Check back later for Part II...