Abstract
Dalia Leinartė's book stands out from the stream of Soviet studies on sexuality and the family as it offers readers insight not into the problems of Russia (which is usually perceived as representing the whole of the USSR), but into the situation in one of the republics in the western part of the USSR—Lithuania. Although one might consider the differences between Lithuania and Russia less pronounced than in the Asian part of the Soviet Union, this is not the case. Lithuania was occupied by the USSR in 1940, and a coherent and continuous Sovietization of family and gender policies did not begin until the second half of 1944, almost three decades after the Soviet system had taken hold in Russia. Thus, Lithuania did not experience the radical experiments of the 1920s in the Soviet family sphere.
Before the occupation, Catholic Lithuanian society was very conservative. The majority of the population was rural, there was no civil registration, and divorce was not legalized. Therefore, even the conservative Stalinist family policy of the 1930s in Lithuania seemed liberal and even revolutionary. While the book does not address the question of whether the Soviet system succeeded in equating the societies of the later occupied countries with those that were under USSR rule for a longer period of time, statistical data would show that it did not. Lithuania had fewer abortions and a higher birth rate than Russia in the 1980s, although divorce rates became as high as in Russia in the 1970s. This shows that even after four decades of Soviet family policy, conservative tendencies remained quite strong in Lithuanian society, despite rapid modernization and urbanization.
Leinartė's book is mainly devoted to women's positions in the family in Soviet Lithuania, and thus also discusses the emancipatory policy of the Soviet system toward women, which is the subject of the first chapter of the book, “Soviet Family Policy.” This policy was most pronounced in the first decade of the Soviet occupation. The author discusses the propaganda and ideological measures used to achieve this policy as well as the Soviet state's more general social policy toward women. Particularly noteworthy is the analysis of the postwar financial aid to large families and single mothers, which gives insight into the financial side of the social policy of the USSR, underscoring both its advantages and disadvantages.
Alongside the positive aspects of this policy, the book shows how promises of emancipation were manipulated, revealing how women's emancipatory energies were channeled into purely political and propagandist tasks for the state. Women were encouraged to become political activists and their unpaid labor was used to achieve various political goals of the state, which were in no way related to the position of women. For example, women activists were recruited to become security agents, to report on anti-Soviet resistance, and to take an active part in forced collectivization. This state policy threatened the lives of women involved in such policies.
At the same time, the book makes it clear that Soviet policy during the first decade of the Soviet occupation managed to awaken and strengthen the emancipatory self-awareness of some women. The archival data presented shows that women resented the patriarchal attitude of men toward them and saw the Soviet regime as an opportunity to change this situation. This allows for a slightly different perspective on the process of Soviet occupation and the Sovietization of society, analyzing not only the political but also the gendered reasons for supporting the Soviet system. It remains unclear, however, to what extent such pro-Soviet women's views, as recorded in official documents, can be trusted, and which types of women and what percentage of them were affected by such propaganda.
The author's observation that the Soviet policy of gender equality applied only to women is important. One of the features of Soviet women's emancipation, and perhaps one of the reasons for its failure, was that Soviet propaganda did little to work with men in changing their attitudes toward women. The constant propagandistic talk about the examples of equality that had already been achieved, the need to “respect” and “help” women, as well as the emphasis on the link between women and motherhood, only served to reinforce traditional gender roles. Although the claim, taken from historiography, that patriarchal gender stereotypes were not fought at all in the USSR seems too categorical, the author herself states elsewhere that there was a debate in the press about the need to change gender stereotypes.
The claim that women who were not officially employed became associated with prostitutes in the post-Stalin period is also questionable. Data from the 1959 Lithuanian census show that a large proportion of women in urban areas were not in any formal employment. In fact, the historiography's frequent emphasis on the obligation to work did not apply as strictly to women as to men. The campaign against social parasites that began in the early 1960s did not actually touch on married women—the nonworking wife, mother, and housewife were not included in this category. Nor could women who were married be associated with prostitution, since the existence of this phenomenon in the USSR could not be discussed in public, or even in internal militia documents. The link between the increase in the percentage of working women and the fight against social parasites is also not convincing. The economic reasons for such involvement in the labor market, when a man's salary was simply not enough to support a family, seem far more important. Also not discussed in the book is the influence of Soviet propaganda in shaping the link between Soviet-emancipated women's self-esteem and work, which was another way of bringing women into the labor market.
The sections on divorce in Chapter 2, “Marriage and Divorce,” are particularly interesting. For example, the author reveals how even after the war, marriage was still understood in the countryside in a completely traditional way, as a financial transaction between families, with dowry being a crucial part of the transaction. Leinartė's research also shows how after the war, a spouse's alcoholism was not considered a reason for divorce. Overall, the data on divorce cases presented in the book show the deeply entrenched patriarchalism in Lithuanian society. Thus, the courts were often unfavorable to women and children in divorce. That such legal practice was not accidental is shown by the fact that in the 1960s, 88.8% of men did not pay alimony after divorce. This data, like many other figures presented in the book, simply begs to be compared with the situation in the USSR, which would allow for a broader interpretation. The author draws on the work of various Sovietologists, but Lithuania is still rather isolated from the USSR in this book, with only the most general similarities discussed.
The image of rational, puritanical Soviet love as the only Soviet model of love, which is extensively discussed in Chapter 2, is not convincing. There have been many debates about love in the post-Stalinist Lithuanian press, with a wide range of contradictory opinions, and it does not seem that any particular image of love is supported by the state. Moreover, in the 1960s, a highly romanticized and unrealistic conception of love—in fact opposing the rational model of it—begins to take root in the press and later takes hold in the 1970s. The text of the book under discussion indirectly confirms this change: the predominance of a rational understanding of love and the family is based mainly on examples from the 1950s and 1960s. Unexpectedly, the author only mentions in the book that in the 1980s, the fight against passion and sexuality was already over. She also states that “the banning of sexual freedom led to a drastically decreasing marital age and it artificially increased the number of ‘shotgun’ marriages” (72). It remains unclear what the change was, when it started, and why the end of the fight against passion did not affect such trends.
Chapter 3, “Parents and their Children,” focuses on childcare and public policies that address reconciling work and family, extracurricular activities for children's leisure time, and the children of working parents’ daily routines. Unsurprisingly, there was insufficient state support for working parents, which meant that children spent much of their time unsupervised. An interesting observation is that parents were very strict in their parenting, as they were forced to leave their children alone at home. This would raise the question of whether the concept of the child as a young adult was partly restored during the Soviet period, especially as there are studies showing that the value of the child in Soviet Lithuania was measured in terms of their contributions to the family's household hores and income.
Chapter 4, “Household,” focuses on the living standards of families. The aesthetics of the home are also discussed, but for some reason only the mainstream aesthetics during Khrushchev's time, even though the stagnation period and its effects on household aesthetics lasted longer. There is also a lot of attention to lodging complaints. While it is true that this was a way of improving the family living conditions, it seems too distant from the subject of the study.
The author's attempts to present a clear and coherent picture of family and gender policy in Soviet Lithuania sometimes turn into an overgeneralization. Two periods—the Stalinist and the post-Stalinist—are distinguished, with the latter focusing mostly on Khrushchev's era. However, this is a way of blurring the various nuances and constant change that took place—the Soviet system was not so static. In the various discussions of gender, family, and sexuality in the press, one can see a rather marked change, if not a break, at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. It is then that the press sees an increase in the number of articles that explicitly seek to change patriarchal images by talking about the need for men and women to equally share the household chores. But the previous discourse, which claimed women's exclusivity and inseparable link with the household and child-rearing, continued to exist alongside them. Nevertheless, public attitudes were changing, as evidenced by studies of Lithuanian sociologists showing that in the second half of the 1980s, men spent more time on household chores than in the previous decade, even though parity was not achieved.
The picture of the Soviet era presented in the book has its roots in a totalitarian paradigm. Even the post-Stalin USSR is seen as a totalitarian state: “Repression, constant material shortages and everyday fears inevitably inflamed aggression, alcoholism and violence in the family” (88). However, in the post-Stalin period, the vast majority of ordinary people were no longer threatened by repressions and everyday fears, and such causality therefore is not convincing. The model of the rational family, already discussed, also fits in very well with the presumed aims of the totalitarian state: to penetrate the family and subordinate it to its policies. However, the diversity of opinions in the post-Stalinist Lithuanian press and the growing process of alienation of the family and its private space from the state do not fit with this picture.
The totalitarian attitude toward the Soviet Union also means that all opinions published in the public press are considered to be manifestations of Soviet propaganda. However, there are many examples where society itself sought solutions. For example, in the debates of the 1970s on the declining age of marriage, the public was often more radical than the state policy—they suggested following the example of Poland, where marriage was only allowed from the age of 20 (in Lithuania it was allowed from 18). The example of younger marriages in general raises the question of what the state policy was: the press was negative towards this process, but in Leinartė's opinion, Soviet family policy contributed to the drastic reduction in marital age.
The Soviet press is extremely difficult to analyze because it is often unclear where the authors are using official clichés to reinforce their position, and where they are used to express their own opinion. For example, the book retells an opinion of Soviet psychologists who argued that one should not close oneself off inside his family, since most of the needs of husbands and wives can only be met by society, and that overly intimate relationships infringe on individual freedom. The author sees in such statements the manifestations of a state policy that promotes a rational model of the family as an open collective. But maybe the statement about sociability contradict the psychologist's emphasis on individualism as the most important value. Sociality can also be understood as an ideological cover for individualism. The book itself gives examples of how ideological arguments have been used to win the court over in divorce cases.
The emphasis on the impact of ideology and propaganda sometimes overlooks the social and economic reasons for the changes that have taken place. The book argues that the impact of the idea of the family as an open collective led to a drastic increase in unhappy marriages and divorce. However, in the capitalist countries of the West, the divorce rate in the second half of the twentieth century also rose steadily and drastically, even though the idea of an open collective was not introduced by states. Were similar processes of urbanization, the entrenchment of romanticized conception of love, the growth of women's education, and employment not more important?
Despite the restrictive totalitarian view, the monograph provides a lot of new and valuable information about the situation of families and women in Soviet Lithuania, and the state's policy efforts in these areas. The fact that the analysis focuses on a rather distinct part of the USSR contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the Soviet Union as a whole. The broad range of topics presented and the attempt to cover the whole of Soviet Lithuanian history, albeit with a greater focus on the Stalin and thaw periods, gives an overall picture of the subject.