Suchergebnisse

Golfo Alexopoulos begins her first chapter by analyzing a 1917 Soviet poster titled "Autocratic Structure." At the top of a stratified pyramid is Russia's tsar, whose fur-trimmed cloak is draped around four layers of oppressors: the priests; the judges and bureaucrats; the police; and the landowning and bourgeois elite. Holding everyone up with their toil at the bottom of the pyramid are the workers and peasants. All but that last stratum were expected to disappear under the proletarian dictatorship because members of the exploiting classes, the former people, would stand outside the embrace of revolutionary society. The 1918 constitution of the Russian Republic codified their outsider status, specifying that they could not vote, receive public assistance, or work in the civil service or military. They also languished on the lowest rung of the Soviet ladder when it came to securing housing, jobs, and ration cards, and, by the decade's end, became candidates for exile and forced labor. Through her examination of Stalin's outcasts, Alexopoulos demonstrates that the meanings of social class and, by extension, citizenship, shifted in response to policies and historical circumstances. In other words, notions of what constituted a Soviet citizen evolved in tandem with the changing definitions of who was to be excluded from the polity.

This essay traces foster care policies in the SovietUnion, concentrating on the first half of Soviet rule when, due to chaos in the wake of wars, revolutions, and famine, Bolshevikle aders retreated from their original commitment to rearing orphans in public institutions. Although the Bolsheviks considered Russian peasants unsuited for raising socialist citizens, they wound up farming out parentless children to the countryside, if only to relieve pressure on Soviet orphanages. The government made a virtue of this retreat in the 1920s but ceased its propaganda campaign on behalf of foster carewhen reports of child abuse became impossible to ignore. Foster care as a practice persisted, at first because Soviet authorities still needed to wefind places for orphans, but ultimately because they recognized that, as a rule, families provided better homes than institutions. This concession paralleledWestern attitudes to foster care.

This article traces the evolution of legislation affecting adoptive relationships in the USSR from the promulgation of adoption law in 1926 until its reform in 1968. The author argues that reforms in adoption law and legal practice mirrored political and ideological developments in Soviet history. Outlawed in 1918, adoption was reintroduced in 1926 as a stopgap response to the overwhelming problem of child homelessness, with the law taking shape in a climate hostile to the family. Consequently, adoption law did not even attempt to replicate biological relationships. Attitudes toward adoption changed in response to post-1936 profa mily policies, as well as in response to problems created by World War II. By the time Soviet lawmakers revised the law in 1968, adoptive and biological families had been given legal equality.