Book

The Soviet family

Doubleday and Company • Garden City, N.Y • Published In 1963 • Pages:

By: Mace, D. R. (David Robert), Mace, Vera.

Abstract

The Soviet government aggressively pursued a series of communist policies, including organizing individual families into large-scale collectives. In addition to jointly owning land and other productive assets, members of each collective lived in crowded, government-planned apartment complexes with shared kitchens and nurseries, among other facilities. This book discusses the effects of these interventions on the structure and functions of the Soviet family. The authors underscore the dedication of hard-core communist leaders and young party functionaries to a radical transformation of family life, including domestic chores, gender roles and socialization practices. They nevertheless also note important continuities in the everyday lives of and emotional ties between family members. Soviet families they interviewed struggled with broadly similar crises of divorce, abortion, sexual offenses, and gender inequality that pre-revolutionary families endured. Data informing the discussion were collected through a journey by car that the authors made to camping sites and large cities within the Soviet Union at a time when the Communist regime very rarely permitted access to Western researchers; it is seldom made apparent whether or not the individuals interviewed were ethnically Russian.

Region

Europe

Sub Region

Eastern Europe

Document Type

Book

Evaluation

Creator Type

Sociologist

Document Rating

4: Excellent Secondary Data

5: Excellent Primary Data

Analyst

Teferi Abate Adem ; 2019

Field Date

1960-1961

Coverage Date

1917-1962

Coverage Place

Soviet Union (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan)

Notes

David and Vera Mace

Includes bibliographical references

LCCN

63011212

LCSH

Families--Soviet Union