THE WITHERING AWAY AND THE RESURRECTION OF THE SOVIET FAMILY, 1917-1936 (USSR)

Soviet family law underwent three major changes between 1917 and 1936. The early Family Codes were marked by sweeping and innovative changes in the areas of marriage, divorce, property relations, and women\u27s rights. The 1918 and 1926 Family Codes, for example, granted divorce at the request of either spouse, abolished the juridical concept of illegitimacy, and gave the partners in de facto marriages the same rights as those in registered, civil marriages. Yet by 1936, social experimentation had given way to increasingly conservative solutions aimed at strengthening traditional family ties and women\u27s reproductive role. The purpose of this dissertation is to explain this broad, complex change. The study examines the shifts in family law in relation to the problems and realities of social life. It analyzes how family policy took shape amid the successive upheavals of revolution, Civil War, famine, economic reconstruction, collectivization, and rapid industrialization. It explores in empirical detail the relationship between law and social dislocation: family disintegration, divorce, female unemployment during the New Economic Policy, and besprizornost. The dissertation focuses on the practical application of family law to both urban working-class families and rural peasant households. It views the law not only from the perspective of highly educated jurists, Party activists, and officials, but from the vantage of workers and peasants as well. Combining both legal and social history, it explores the effect of early progressive legislation on women and the family, and the effect in turn of social conditions on the law