Soviet Rural Family in Foreign Historiography: Lines of Research and Interpretation Approaches

Abstract

This review article analyses approaches to the study of the rural family of the Soviet period that have taken shape in foreign (mainly Western) historiography between the 1960s and the present. The rural family was in the focus of social and political transformations of the twentieth century, suffered a severe deformation as a result of world and civil wars, as well as the urbanisation process, which took on a forced character under the influence of state policy measures. The article is intended to help bring together the methodological and thematic positions of Russian and foreign researchers in considering the phenomenon of the rural family. The study of the Soviet rural family, usually in a wider thematic context, began in line with the “anthropological” turn at the turn of the 1970s. At the suggestion of T. Shanin, family households entered the focus of the emerging peasant studies. Methodological preferences, as well as the relatively small number of available primary statistics, determined the limited interest of Western authors in the historical and demographic study of the Soviet rural family. In the 1980s and 1990s, within the framework of the revisionist paradigm, the rural family was studied mainly as an object of influence from the authorities (radical projects of the 1920s, collectivisation, and measures to strengthen the family in the 1930s). “Feminist” historiography was especially active in this field. In the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s, time came for balanced characteristics, quite free from politicised assessments. There was an opportunity to consider the Soviet family and family policy in a global context. The post-war period in the development of the rural family is represented in foreign works rather poorly. In general, Western authors managed to capture the directions of evolution and the new quality of the rural family, which have become apparent in the later Soviet decades.