Marriage, Household, and Home in Modern Russia: From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin

289 Pages·2021·21.451 MB·English

by  Barbara Alpern Engel

Marriage,
Household, and
Home in Modern
Russia
THE BLOOMSBURY HISTORY OF MODERN RUSSIA SERIES
Series Editors: Jonathan D. Smele (Queen Mary, University of London,
UK) and Michael Melancon (Auburn University, USA)
This ambitious and unique series offers readers the latest views on
aspects of the modern history of what has been and remains one of the
most powerful and important countries in the world. In a series of books
aimed at students, leading academics and experts from across the world
portray, in a thematic manner, a broad variety of aspects of the Russian
experience, over extended periods of time, from the reign of Peter the
Great in the early eighteenth century to the Putin era at the beginning of
the twenty-first.
Published:
Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin: Accommodation, Survival,
Resistance, Boris B. Gorshkov (2018)
Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the
Great to Vladimir Putin, Jonathan Daly (2018)
Marx and Russia: The Fate of a Doctrine, James D. White (2018)
A Modern History of Russian Childhood, Elizabeth White (2020)
Marriage, Household, and Home in Modern Russia: From Peter the Great
to Vladimir Putin, Barbara Alpern Engel (2021)
Forthcoming:
A History of Education in Modern Russia, Wayne Dowler (2021)
Russian Populism: A History, Christopher Ely (2021)
Marriage,
Household, and
Home in Modern
Russia
From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin
Barbara Alpern Engel
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2022
Copyright © Barbara Alpern Engel, 2022
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CONTENTS
List of Figures vi
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
A Note on Dates and Names xii
List of Abbreviations xiii
1 The Petrine Revolution at Home 1
2 The Culture of Sensibility: 1761–1855 21
3 The Peasantry Until 1861 41
4 The Reform Era 63
5 The Politics of Personal Life: 1881–1914 83
6 War, Revolution, and Postrevolutionary Change 105
7 Revolution at Work; Counterrevolution at Home 127
8 Defending the Home(land): World War II and After 149
9 Seeking the Perfect Soviet Family 169
10 The State Withdraws 193
Notes 211
Further Readings: Secondary Sources 248
Further Readings: Primary Sources 257
Index 259
FIGURES
1.1 The husband manufactures sandals while the wife spins thread 5
1.2 The family portrait of Peter the Great, 1720 12
2.1 Russian wedding 22
2.2 Nicholas I of Russia and wife Alexandra Feodorovna 32
2.3 Family portrait, 1937 36
3.1 Peasant engagement 49
3.2 Russian peasant wedding, 1865 50
4.1 Domestic interior 68
4.2 Domestic basket weavers 76
5.1 Peasant wedding, 1910 86
5.2 “Do you and your husband get along well?” 90
5.3 “Don’t scold me, my dear” 92
6.1 Abortion poster 110
6.2 What did the revolution grant laboring and peasant woman? 111
6.3 The enlightened spouse 119
8.1 Leaving for war 151
8.2 “Happy Housewarming” 159
9.1 “Oh, you’re having a wedding!” 173
9.2 “Pictures Without Words” 177
9.3 “The wife has been delayed” 179
9.4 “Cafes, dances . . . I’m sick of it all . . .” 183
9.5 “I’ll marry you next time!” 186
10.1 Wedding ceremony in Russia, January 2019 198
PREFACE
This book traces how Russians conducted their intimate lives over the course
of more than three centuries and explores the broader circumstances—
economic, cultural, religious, political, and more—that helped to shape
their behavior. When the book begins, at the dawn of the eighteenth century,
Russia was already a multiethnic empire, with household patterns and
experiences of family life that differed according to the various ethno-cultural
traditions.1 The book’s focus nevertheless remains the empire’s largely
agrarian Russian core, which I define as the Russian-speaking, Christian
Orthodox population of the central Russian provinces and Siberia. Despite
various ethnic admixtures and vast differences in ways of life and social
standing, these peoples display a cultural coherence; they also remained the
primary focus of state policy and concern throughout the three-hundred-
year period. When the book refers to “Russians,” it is mainly in that sense.
The narrative concludes at the time of this writing. Even now, almost
thirty years after the collapse of communism in 1991, many Russians,
especially older Russians, still struggle to replace the values and way of
life associated with that system. Perhaps ironically, as part of this struggle
conservative nationalists now celebrate as a model for the present the marital
and household order associated with the time this book begins, seemingly
bringing the story full circle. The circumstances that gave rise to that older
way of life, however, have long since vanished.
The patriarchal household served as its foundation at all levels of Russia’s
society of orders, comprised of those who served the church; those who
performed service; and those who paid taxes (merchants included). With the
exception of Russian Orthodox monks, their households consisted of people
usually linked by marriage and kinship ties, who shared a dwelling and ate
from a common pot. Households were then and are now often identical with
“family”—so much so, indeed, that readers will sometimes find the terms
“household” and “family” used interchangeably in the pages to follow—
but households can be different from family, too (think of communes, for
example).
“Patriarchy,” on the other hand, is less timeless, at least as I use the term
in this book. By patriarchy, I mean a system rather different from what
contemporary feminists usually have in mind. In Russia’s patriarchal
order of the early eighteenth century, custom and law endowed household
heads with near-absolute power over other members of the household—
viii PREFACE
male as well as female—an authority commensurate with the household
head’s responsibility for social order as well as domestic discipline. “Have
you sons? Discipline them and break them in from their earliest years,”
instructs the Domostroi, a seventeenth-century household manual, quoting
Ecclesiasticus. The Domostroi also accorded the household head’s wife
enormous responsibility for and authority over an expansive domestic
sphere. At the same time, however, it directed her to “obey her husband in
everything. Whatever her husband orders, she must accept with love. She
must fulfill his every command.”2 In the late seventeenth century, a time
when literacy was very rare and probably nonexistent among Russia’s
vast peasant population, the book might be found in the households of
Orthodox priests (required to marry in Russia), of the upper echelons of
those who served, including government officials, and even of the tax-paying
population, chiefly merchants.3
With some exceptions, the patriarchal household served as the basis of
production as well as reproduction. Even in towns most households grew
food and kept domestic animals; they manufactured things for use or sale
in addition to eating, sleeping, and conducting other activities of daily life
in and around their dwellings. There existed no separation between work
and home. Neither did most people enjoy much privacy or even nourish an
expectation of it. Dwellings were usually crowded places.
Often, the greater the number of working hands, the better, which is one
reason why households in early modern Russia tended to be expansive. It
is true that gentry servitors, whose households also engaged in production,
appear to have nurtured an overwhelming preference for the nuclear family
household, consisting of husband, wife, or widowed parent and offspring.
But such households were probably a minority among other social groups.4
Rather than setting up households of their own, most newlyweds customarily
joined the household of one of the spouses, remaining there for years if not
for good. This practice facilitated early marriage and childbearing. Elderly
parents lived in the household of a married child or children; among the
peasantry, married brothers with families of their own might share a roof as
well. Households with sufficient economic means might also shelter uncles,
cousins, nephews, widows with children, and more. Historians usually
entitle households with two or more married couples “complex” and
those housing three generations but no more than one married couple as
“extended” and when the sources permit it—and sometimes, they don’t—I
use that terminology too.
Despite vast differences in wealth and status, across the social spectrum
marriage was largely determined by pragmatic—usually economic—
concerns, much as was the case elsewhere in Europe at that time. The
married couple formed the basic unit of production. Marriage linked two
family networks as well as two individuals. The marriage bargain could
provide access to economic resources and patronage connections as well
as social standing and prestige. Among the tax-paying population, the
PREFACE ix
married couple formed the basic unit of production. Its many benefits meant
marriage was far too important a matter to be left to the young. In arranging
first marriages, at least, kin played the primary role, although thoughtful
ones surely kept the welfare of the young in mind.
How couples actually experienced their marital and domestic lives in
the period when this book begins is exceedingly difficult to ascertain. It is
true that the church enjoined married couples to “love” one another—in a
strictly asexual manner—and an unknowable number of couples no doubt
developed genuine, even profound affection for one another. But there exists
an almost total absence of sources that might shed light on the character
of people’s intimate lives. Such sources become somewhat more abundant
towards the end of the eighteenth century, partly because growing numbers
of people—although for at least another century a still tiny minority—
learned to read and write, while an ever-increasing variety of books and
periodicals emerged to meet their tastes and educate their sensibilities.
Initially, most of the literate derived from the upper crust of Russia’s
hierarchical social order. At the same time, in the course of the eighteenth
century administrative bodies became more adept at recordkeeping and,
together with religious institutions, more prone to respond to individual
appeals—sometimes presented orally; sometimes penned by literate scribes
on behalf of the illiterate—and thus to become involved in domestic and
family matters. As a result, administrative records provide information
about the experiences of more humble people, too—although mostly about
negative experiences, because such sources were usually the product of
conflict.
Copious by the second half of the nineteenth century, sources of both
kinds enable me to explore in far greater depth the complexities of people’s
lived experience of marriage, household, and home life. They make it easier
to determine how the educated strata lived and reveal the complexities
of the lives even of ordinary folk—most still illiterate—as well. Ironically
perhaps, the absence of relevant primary sources again becomes a problem
for the Stalinist period, because the boundaries of both permissible public
discourse and intimate life itself grew ever narrower, while published
personal accounts had to meet rigid requirements when they appeared at
all. Secondary sources fill many gaps. Indeed, except for the chapters that
draw on my own research—chiefly Chapters 4 and 5—secondary sources
provide the basis for much of this book, affecting its scope and emphases in
a variety of ways.
The book examines the ways that the meanings and experiences of
marriage, household, and home evolved in Russia over the course of three
centuries of dramatic, sometimes wrenching cultural and economic change
and how powerful institutions—church and state in the imperial period, the
party-state in the Soviet period, and, now and once again, church and state—
sought to shape all three according to particular priorities and visions of a
proper social order. At the same time, this book explores how people acted