Barbara Alpern Engel - Marriage, household and home in modern Russia from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin

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Marriage, Household, and Home in Modern Russia

The Bloomsbury History of Modern Russia Series

Series Editors: Jonathan D. Smele (Queen Mary, University of London, UK) and Michael Melancon (Auburn University, USA)

This ambitious and unique series offers readers the latest views on aspects of the modern history of what has been and remains one of the most powerful and important countries in the world. In a series of books aimed at students, leading academics and experts from across the world portray, in a thematic manner, a broad variety of aspects of the Russian experience, over extended periods of time, from the reign of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century to the Putin era at the beginning of the twenty-first.

Published:

Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin: Accommodation, Survival, Resistance, Boris B. Gorshkov (2018)

Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, Jonathan Daly (2018)

Marx and Russia: The Fate of a Doctrine , James D. White (2018)

A Modern History of Russian Childhood, Elizabeth White (2020)

Marriage, Household, and Home in Modern Russia: From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, Barbara Alpern Engel (2021)

Forthcoming:

A History of Education in Modern Russia , Wayne Dowler (2021)

Russian Populism: A History , Christopher Ely (2021)

Marriage, Household, and Home in Modern Russia

From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin

Barbara Alpern Engel

Contents

The husband manufactures sandals while the wife spins thread

The family portrait of Peter the Great, 1720

Russian wedding

Nicholas I of Russia and wife Alexandra Feodorovna

Family portrait, 1937

Peasant engagement

Russian peasant wedding, 1865

Domestic interior

Domestic basket weavers

Peasant wedding, 1910

Do you and your husband get along well?

Dont scold me, my dear

Abortion poster

What did the revolution grant laboring and peasant woman?

The enlightened spouse

Leaving for war

Happy Housewarming

Oh, youre having a wedding!

Pictures Without Words

The wife has been delayed

Cafes, dances... Im sick of it all...

Ill marry you next time!

Wedding ceremony in Russia, January 2019

This book traces how Russians conducted their intimate lives over the course of more than three centuries and explores the broader circumstanceseconomic, cultural, religious, political, and morethat helped to shape their behavior. When the book begins, at the dawn of the eighteenth century, Russia was already a multiethnic empire, with household patterns and experiences of family life that differed according to the various ethno-cultural traditions. The books focus nevertheless remains the empires largely agrarian Russian core, which I define as the Russian-speaking, Christian Orthodox population of the central Russian provinces and Siberia. Despite various ethnic admixtures and vast differences in ways of life and social standing, these peoples display a cultural coherence; they also remained the primary focus of state policy and concern throughout the three-hundred-year period. When the book refers to Russians, it is mainly in that sense.

The narrative concludes at the time of this writing. Even now, almost thirty years after the collapse of communism in 1991, many Russians, especially older Russians, still struggle to replace the values and way of life associated with that system. Perhaps ironically, as part of this struggle conservative nationalists now celebrate as a model for the present the marital and household order associated with the time this book begins, seemingly bringing the story full circle. The circumstances that gave rise to that older way of life, however, have long since vanished.

The patriarchal household served as its foundation at all levels of Russias society of orders, comprised of those who served the church; those who performed service; and those who paid taxes (merchants included). With the exception of Russian Orthodox monks, their households consisted of people usually linked by marriage and kinship ties, who shared a dwelling and ate from a common pot. Households were then and are now often identical with familyso much so, indeed, that readers will sometimes find the terms household and family used interchangeably in the pages to followbut households can be different from family, too (think of communes, for example).

Patriarchy, on the other hand, is less timeless, at least as I use the term in this book. By patriarchy, I mean a system rather different from what contemporary feminists usually have in mind. In Russias patriarchal order of the early eighteenth century, custom and law endowed household heads with near-absolute power over other members of the household

With some exceptions, the patriarchal household served as the basis of production as well as reproduction. Even in towns most households grew food and kept domestic animals; they manufactured things for use or sale in addition to eating, sleeping, and conducting other activities of daily life in and around their dwellings. There existed no separation between work and home. Neither did most people enjoy much privacy or even nourish an expectation of it. Dwellings were usually crowded places.

Often, the greater the number of working hands, the better, which is one reason why households in early modern Russia tended to be expansive. It is true that gentry servitors, whose households also engaged in production, appear to have nurtured an overwhelming preference for the nuclear family household, consisting of husband, wife, or widowed parent and offspring. But such households were probably a minority among other social groups. Rather than setting up households of their own, most newlyweds customarily joined the household of one of the spouses, remaining there for years if not for good. This practice facilitated early marriage and childbearing. Elderly parents lived in the household of a married child or children; among the peasantry, married brothers with families of their own might share a roof as well. Households with sufficient economic means might also shelter uncles, cousins, nephews, widows with children, and more. Historians usually entitle households with two or more married couples complex and those housing three generations but no more than one married couple as extended and when the sources permit itand sometimes, they dontI use that terminology too.

Despite vast diff erences in wealth and status, across the social spectrum marriage was largely determined by pragmaticusually economicconcerns, much as was the case elsewhere in Europe at that time. The married couple formed the basic unit of production. Marriage linked two family networks as well as two individuals. The marriage bargain could provide access to economic resources and patronage connections as well as social standing and prestige. Among the tax-paying population, the married couple formed the basic unit of production. Its many benefits meant marriage was far too important a matter to be left to the young. In arranging first marriages, at least, kin played the primary role, although thoughtful ones surely kept the welfare of the young in mind.

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