THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL REALITY OF THE 20’S OF THE 20TH CENTURY ON PERSONAL RELATIONS IN UKRAINIAN FAMILIES

Abstract

Based on literature, periodicals, and archival sources, the author highlights manifestations of the influence of such phenomena as the anti-religious campaign, the famine of 1921-1923, the new economic policy, the authorities’ experiments in building new family relations on personal relations in Ukrainian families in the 1920s. The paper emphasizes that the notion of family relations, considered the most respected for centuries in Ukraine, were constantly attacked by the authorities. They believed that relations between family members should have not family but class sentiments in the first place. The highest level of belonging to the class was the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The family had to give way to the state and its policy in the rank of human values. The views on the dominance of class relations over the family ones were insistently imposed on society by the state destroying deep family foundations. The author notes that social reality of the 1920s significantly influenced relations in Ukrainian families. Those years were a period when a certain ‘romanticism’ of the Bolshevik elite’s theories about the family and family relations gave rise to a casual attitude to both creating the family and its breakdown. Due to the fact that the new authorities’ attempts to embody their ideals in family relations were opposed by the older generation, a policy of separating young people from their parents began. Well-known party theorists emphasized that the breakdown of the old family was inevitable and that children did not belong to their parents but primarily to society meaning the state. It was the state, not parents that had to raise them. That point of view influenced young people, which reduced parental authority in the family and, consequently, affected personal relations in the family. The authority of the state took place of the parental authority. The circumstances of the new economic policy also contributed to the spread of a casual attitude towards family values, especially among the urban youth. Extramarital affairs were justified. But in the Ukrainian village, the old traditions of honouring marital fidelity and other age-old foundations of the family were generally preserved. At the same time, there were relations that proved obedience of women in many families.