Never has the Soviet Union known such inequality as now, almost two decades after the October revolution. Wages of 100 rubles a month for some, and of 800 to 1,000 for others. Some live in barracks and their shoes are worn out; others ride in luxurious cars and live in magnificent apartments. Some struggle to feed themselves and their families; others, besides their cars, have servants, a dacha near Moscow, a villa in the Caucasus, and so on.24
This accurate assessment did not provent Trotsky from continuing to say that since factories and land were nationalized in the Soviet Union, the working class was still exercising its dictatorship, although it had no rights and lived a miserable existence.
The Marxist Bukharin totally disagreed with the Marxist Trotsky. Bu- kharin claimed that the Soviet government, the dictatorship of the proletariat, was
entering a stage of very fast growth for proletarian democracy. Countless forms of mass initiative are developing, with the most varied systems for the selection of the best, the leaders, the shock workers, the Stakhanovites, the heroes of Soviet labor; the barriers that derived from a different array of
social forces are now falling. This is the consistent and logical development
of Soviet democracy itself.25
Bukharin spoke of two tremendous conquests of "genuine democracy, not the falsified bourgeois version," the All-Union Conference of Stakha- novites and the Congress of Kolkhoz Shock Workers.26 It was in the same vein that kolkhoz shock worker Evdokiya Fedotova, after chairing one of the sessions of the congress and having the honor of being noticed by Stalin, wrote in Pravda, "I ran down the stairs like a young girl, full of joy and pride that he had seen how I worked and had liked it."
Some barriers had indeed fallen, as Bukharin mentioned. In 1935 the children of lishentsy were admitted to schools without further restrictions. In May 1936 it was forbidden any longer to deny jobs to people on the grounds of bourgeois origin. Other new restrictions appeared, however. On April 8, 1935, a special law extended all penalties under the criminal code, including capital punishment, to children of twelve and older. It was at this point that Stalin began to have his picture taken with children in his arms.
The "law on children" pursued several aims at once. It was one of a series of measures geared to strengthening the family and parental authority. The head of the family became the representative of the state within the household. In a sense this law was also a supplement to the law on treason to the fatherland passed in 1934, in that twelve year olds would be held responsible from then on for failure to denounce treason on the part of parents. Thus, the children were included in the system of collective responsibility. The law on children seemed so typically Soviet that when the Nazis adopted a similar law in 1944, Himmler felt obliged to justify it in the following terms: "We are instituting absolute responsibility on the part of all members of the clan. ... And let no one say that this is bolshevism. ... It is a return to the most ancient traditions of our ancestors."27 There were other practical objectives behind the new law. It made a final solution possible to the problem of the homeless children, and it handed investigators a splendid tool for putting pressure on defendants.
The process of transforming the Soviet family into a fully "socialist" one seemed to move in two contradictory directions. On the one hand, all earlier theories of the family were pronounced bourgeois prejudices or undertakings of the enemy. On the other hand, Pravda insisted: 'The family is the most serious thing in life."28 In 1936 a new marriage and family code was adopted. It made divorce much more difficult, which was logical, since in a country stripped of rights, free divorce seemed sacrilegious. Abortion, which had been legalized for the benefit of women since November 18, 1920, was banned again on June 27, 1936, with the justification that "only under socialism, where the exploitation of some by others no longer exists and where women are full members of society,... can the struggle against abortion be seriously posed." Many years later, on November 23, 1955, the right to abortion would be restored "owing to the uninterrupted growth of women's level of consciousness and culture."
Stepping forward as the new apostle of the socialist family was Maka- renko, an educator who had worked in the correction colonies of the GPU and NKVD for many years. He proposed that his experience in training young criminals and delinquents be made the universal pedagogical method in the Soviet Union. He also recommended two institutions as the model context for training children: the corrective labor colony and the army.
Makarenko's theory became the official theory of Soviet education. The child should be educated as a member of a collective organized along semimilitary lines and should be instilled with respect for the authority of the collective and of the person chosen to lead it. Postrevolutionary pedagogy had stated that punishment taught people to be slaves. Makarenko objected: "Punishment may produce slaves but it may also produce those who are good and free and proud."29 Makarenko's theory could not have been more appropriate for this time, when all of society was being punished for "indiscipline." In 1937 he wrote The Parents9 Book, in which he applied his general ideas to the family. The family, he said, is also a collective, and the interests of the collective are primary. They are expressed, of course, by the person in authority, who represents the family. Thus a nicely finished system of education was worked out: the child is raised in an authoritarian family, a microcosm of the state, then in an authoritarian school, the same kind of microcosm, and at last enters adult life—in the authoritarian state itself.
The subordination of the family to the interests of the state was a constant theme in literature, the cinema, and every form of art. The family is an important form of the collective, so the argument ran, but the state is an incomparably more important one. That is why, in the 1936 movie Party Card, the wife denounces the husband to the security organs. That is why the hero of Soviet children was twelve-year-old Pavlik Morozov, who had turned in his father, a "kulak." Gorky called on Soviet writers to glorify this adolescent who, "by overcoming blood kinship, discovered spiritual kinship."30 In the novel Skutarevsky, Leonid Leonov portrayed a great scientist, one of the old intelligentsia, nobly betraying his own son. This call for the betrayal of one's kin was directed to all family members without distinction; in that respect full equality reigned.
"STALINIST AND DEMOCRATIC"
The year 1936 was marked by two events, the adoption of the constitution and the publication of official "comments" by Stalin, Kirov, and Zhdanov on a proposed textbook of Soviet history. The two events might not seem of equal importance, but to the historian they were factors of equal weight in the formation of the socialist state. The constitution institutionalized the new society; the "comments" announced the "nationalization" of history, the social memory.
The decision to modify the Soviet constitution was taken "on the initiative of Comrade Stalin" at the Seventh Congress of Soviets on February 6, 1935, only a few weeks after the Kirov assassination. Bukharin, during his trip to Paris in early 1936, told Boris Nicolaevsky that he had written virtually the entire constitution. He was very proud of it, because it introduced not only universal and equal suffrage but also the equality of all citizens before the law. He thought it would lay the basis for a transition from the dictatorship of a single party to a genuine people's democracy.31