The communists removed the reference to God in their version in 1920, but kept the rest.
I call again here, Svetlana Voreskova, on your clearly greater base of knowledge: you mentioned you had read the first of Rybakov’s “Arbat” trilogy. You may or may not remember, that in the early chapters a young man had made his girlfriend pregnant. For reasons having to do both with his own career aspirations (he was seeking to practice law) and the political position of her family (her father was an Old Bolshevik intellectual who had formerly lived abroad, both of which traits were beginning then in 1934 to make association with him a political risk), he sought and found a dangerous midwives’ method of inducing abortion, and administered it on the young lady, which nearly killed her.
That story line has been by the middle of volume 2, “Fear”, mostly set aside, but there have been several references made by the author since to abortion in the 1930s USSR being not only illegal but harshly frowned-upon by both Party and state. One such, was a characterization of Stalin’s own inner thoughts, as he sort of reviewed some current political business in his mind one day.
He is shown by the author as fancying himself as something of an editor-in-chief over a whole nation, and has various projects going on such as new textbooks for high schools and micro-managing the output of several Party pundits who write for various journals, and the reference is a sort of Note to Self:
It must go on. On his initiative very important decisions were taken — “On the work of higher educational institutions”, “on the banning of abortions”, “on pedagogical perversions”.
A Rybakov, “Fear” c. 1992
Can you comment or clarify on the historicity of this?
Rybakov also goes on in the next paragraph, to have Comrade Stalin thinking:
The family cannot be destroyed by divorce. Children improperly brought up become deformed members of society, people without responsibility or care. There should not be any pedagogical experiments with children, studying children with the aid of meaningless, stupid, harmful charts and tests, turning them into guinea pigs for scientific charlatans.
Rybakov, and you, Lana, would know the history of your own country better than I, so is this a wild flight-of-fancy on his part here? Or was seminarian and erstwhile aspiring priest Djugashvili way more the puritanical moralist on the specifics of family life and its role in the society he sought to construct, than popular history now portrays him as?
I’m having to re-think a lot of what I thought I knew about Stalin and Stalinism as I read this. One clue to the seeming hypocrisy of it all, is that pages away is another story of a young NKVD interrogator (the one who had given his girlfriend the abortion) who is learning that one of his suspects in custody is hard to break because he has no family by which he can be threatened with harm to them.
Was Stalin’s own allegiance to a traditional family structure in the process of being perverted into a monstrosity, by which preserving the family became the handle by which his political terror could be wielded, using families as hostages? Or is it more complicated than that?
Or is Rybakov just a horse’s ass without a clue here?
