3.7 Social institutions: the family, the church, and the schools

The revolution was fought not only for social equality but also for the equality of the sexes. In the social order of imperial Russia women were second-class citizens, dependent on men. Perhaps for that reason, women played an extraordinarily significant role in the revolutionary movement. Like all socialists, the Bolsheviks in theory were committed to bringing about equality of the sexes. After coming to power, the new government introduced an enlightened set of laws that greatly eased divorce, allowed abortion, and made marriage a civil affair. While some feminists wanted the government to play a more active role, the leading Bolsheviks were content to leave the establishment of genuine equality to the arrival of a classless society.

Although proportionately fewer of them died, the years of war, revolution, and civil war were hard for women. A demographic imbalance began that lasted for most of the rest of the century: Russia had many more women than men. The First World War forced a large number of women to take jobs in factories; between 1913 and 1920 the percentage of women in the urban labor force doubled. Then, as a result of chronic unemployment, many women were fired, and at the end of the NEP period the percentage of women in industrial labor was practically the same as before the First World War. During the war, when men were away in the army, women had to do their work and were left alone to take care of the children. When the peasants distributed the land of the landlords in 1917, women also benefited; however, as soldiers returned from the front and the communes redistributed the land, women often lost what they had acquired.

Bolshevik emancipatory attempts found little sympathy among women, especially in the countryside. What most women wanted was not easier divorce, but protection of the family in difficult times. Paradoxically, while utopian Bolshevik leaders talked about the disappearance of the family, in fact the opposite happened: men and women craved personal security and married in record numbers. The large number of marriages can only partially be explained by the fact that young people during the war had postponed weddings. After all, in the rest of Europe presumably the same phenomenon obtained, yet in 1919 Russia had the highest marriage rate in the world.

The great industrial transformation that was taking place in Russia before the revolution started breaking down the traditional patriarchal family. The revolutionary events accelerated the process. The Russians gradually moved toward the pattern of living in nuclear families. It is difficult to say to what extent governmental policies furthered this development. The Bolsheviks regarded the family as a bulwark of conservatism in which women were inevitably exploited, and so were hostile to it. Moreover, they wanted women to participate in the life of society, and it seemed to them that the family was a competitor, something that took the energies of women away from socially useful work.

In the villages the patriarchal family, in which several generations lived together, was disappearing. At first young people found it advantageous to establish their own households and claim land from the commune; later, when the government showed great hostility to the kulaks, it often became beneficial for the extended family to divide its wealth. For the women, in most instances getting away from their parents-in-law was a benefit, but there is no reason to think that the traditional relationship between males and females in the countryside changed a great deal. In urban families, where the nuclear family pattern was already the rule, the changes were even less significant. Time budget studies show that even in instances where women worked, all the household chores fell on them also. Men had more free time.

Contemporaries saw the changes around them more clearly than the continuities. For the first time divorces were legal, and some 20 percent of marriages ended in divorce. After the deaths of millions of men, there were a large number of single females. The country also had a distressing number of orphans, many of them simply left to their own devices. This experience, coupled with some radical theories of free love, gave the impression to many that the family structure, and the stability associated with it, was breaking down. In fact a much more profound change in the position of women in society and in the structure of the family was to come, with the introduction of Stalinist industrialization.

The Bolsheviks considered the church, just as they considered the family, a bulwark of conservatism. Obviously, there could be no amicable relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Bolshevik Party – the two world views were bound to clash. The church had a history of unthinking and uncritical support for the tsarist regime; at the time of the civil war the church did not even pretend to be neutral but acted as a propaganda arm of the White movement. Lenin, a master politician, immediately understood that a frontal attack on the church would backfire. The Bolsheviks in Moscow were circumspect in their relationship with the priests. In the rest of the country, however, instructions from the center were not always carried out, and as a result many priests suffered martyrdom at the hands of local Bolsheviks. As Lenin foresaw, in almost every instance the persecution of priests created hostility toward the new regime.

After the civil war antireligious agitation intensified. The Bolsheviks found the ideological competition with the Church intolerable. Theorists debated the best means of confronting this particular enemy. Some activists argued that religion was a class phenomenon and that therefore active struggle against it was necessary. This tendency was best reflected in the Komsomol, which carried out antireligious campaigns and organized anti-Christmases and “Komsomol Easters.” These events occasioned the crudest form of atheistic propaganda. All available evidence shows that such methods created hostility and convinced few. Other communist leaders argued that religion would wither away because its class basis was disappearing. According to this point of view no special effort against Christian belief was necessary. After the obvious failures of radical Komsomol efforts, the party came to support a compromise position that called for “scientific atheist education” but repudiated crude forms of propaganda that offended believers. The regime created a “voluntary” society with the task of combating the religious worldview. In the late 1920s the society had approximately a half-million members.

It is difficult to say how successful the regime was in undermining the faith of the people. Whatever success was achieved was probably among the young and in the cities. The great majority of the peasants continued to have the same relationship to church and God as they had before. We have a great deal of evidence showing that priests in the 1920s continued to enjoy the respect of the villagers, and therefore continued to possess considerable power. On one occasion, for example, the communist authorities tried to persuade the peasants to attend schools for literacy without success. Then they turned to the village priest for help, and on the following day hundreds appeared.

The Bolsheviks saw the power of the church as a characteristic feature of a backward society. Lenin in particular was keenly aware of the backwardness of his country and repeatedly described it as “Asiatic.” In his last years he was preoccupied with the problem of how to overcome backwardness and make Russians into civilized Europeans. Indeed, imperial Russia left an unenviable legacy. Tsarist bureaucrats before 1900 had taken a cautious if not hostile stance toward mass education, fearing its political consequences. The developing industrial society needed trained and educated people, but the government did little to provide for the industrial transformation. Only in the last decades of the empire did this attitude change, but by then it was too late. At the time of the revolution, approximately 60 percent of the people were illiterate. Overall figures, however, might be misleading, for illiteracy was unevenly distributed. Urban dwellers, the young, and males were far more likely to be able to read and write, so revolutionary agitators could always reach their target audiences with the written word.

The gap between the extraordinary ambitions of the new revolutionary regime and the miserable realities was enormous. The Bolsheviks believed that the success of their revolution depended on education, and therefore set themselves difficult tasks. They wanted to bring enlightenment to the entire people, to bring them up to the cultural level of Western Europeans. They wanted to train new cadres to replace the old intelligentsia they had always distrusted. The regime needed party functionaries who understood at least the rudiments of Marxism, and therefore the government heavily invested in political education. The Bolsheviks were determined to use education for the purpose of spreading their ideology. The notion that education should stand above politics they considered dangerous nonsense.

At the outset, the Bolsheviks did away with those characteristics of the old educational system they found most distasteful. The church, which had played an important role in elementary education, was immediately excluded. Tsarist Russia had had three tracks of schools: an elementary school system, largely maintained by the church, for peasant children; vocational schools in the cities for the middle and lower-middle classes; and gymnasia, which trained students to enter the universities. It was difficult to move from one track to another, as each track was almost autonomous. This was a self-consciously elitist system, based on the assumption that people should get the education appropriate to their class standing.

The problems facing the Bolshevik educational program were formidable. The most significant was material poverty. School buildings had been destroyed, and even such simple things as pencils and paper were scarce. The introduction of the NEP necessitated economizing; per-student expenditure remained well below pre-war standards until the end of the decade. Another major problem was the availability and political reliability of teachers. Village teachers had been traditionally attracted to the political ideology of the Socialist Revolutionaries. From the Bolshevik point of view this political orientation represented a great danger. In the early years many teachers simply refused to cooperate with the new authorities. Since the government was unable to make major investments in education, it shifted the burden to local budgets, and teachers were grossly underpaid. At a time when workers and peasants had more or less caught up with their pre-war earnings, teachers were receiving no more than 45 percent of their pre-war real income. Not surprisingly, in these circumstances, many village teachers wanted to leave the profession.

Given the poverty of the country and the shortage of competent teachers, it is understandable that the educational plans of the government largely remained on paper. The new government did establish a single type of school, to be attended theoretically for nine years. In reality, however, there were not enough schools in the villages for even one or two years of instruction. Talk about a single type of school remained meaningless at a time when the villages were so much worse off than the cities. At the end of the NEP period, in the 1928–29 school year, only about three-quarters of the peasant school-age children received any education at all. Each year approximately one million illiterate adolescents entered the population. While about half of the graduates from city elementary schools went on to middle schools, only one in thirty from the villages did so.

The utopian leaders in the commissariat of enlightenment wanted to introduce decentralized education. They were impressed by the principles of progressive, child-centered education and wanted to combine education with work experience. In the face of the teachers’ resistance, however, their schemes remained largely unrealized.

The regime’s accomplishments in education remained limited at least partially because the government chose to use its scarce resources outside the regular school system. The party organized an extraordinarily ambitious literacy and adult education drive. A “voluntary” society, Down with Illiteracy, was created to help illiterates learn and to agitate for attending literacy schools. The drive was thoroughly politicized. Approximately eight million adults attended literacy schools in the course of the decade. Some contemporary observers recommended that the government maintain a small system of adult education for those eager to learn, but use most of its money to expand the regular school system. The government rejected this recommendation – which would have overcome illiteracy most quickly – because it was determined to use education for the indoctrination of the politically crucial adult population.

The government also financed an entire political educational system that on a small scale mirrored the regular system. These schools trained agitators and middle-level party and state functionaries. It opened workers’ schools, enabling workers to improve their qualifications. The drop-out rate was extremely high: few workers had the determination to attend classes after exhausting hours of work. Nevertheless, these schools did contribute to the training of a new intelligentsia and encouraged further social mobility.

Prev 🔺 Next