Dorothy Thompson

Buffalo News/February 18, 1928

Moral Chaos Reveals Extremes of Brutal Sadism and Chilly Puritanism—Cupid Publicly Disgraced

In the matter of sexual morality, Russia is in a state of chaos. Part of the people—and among them many leading Bolshevists—are as puritan as the Pilgrim Fathers. The other side of the picture is libertinism unchecked and legally admissible.

Marriages can be contracted by the signing of a registry book by both parties, and common-law marriages are recognized on an equal footing with registered marriages. Divorces can be arranged by the signing of a registry book by one party.

Love, until it involves property and children, is completely free under the law. Yet, the marriage law has its own little jokers for Don Juans, and some of them would make gay youths of other countries break into a cold sweat if confronted with them.

Cupid Publicly Disgraced

Out of this chaos, the Soviet state—growing more conservative, as institutions in power usually do—is trying to bring some order in the form of a new, proletarian, Communist morality, based upon the welfare of the class and the state. But so far Russia’s leaders have not been very successful in imposing new regulations for old.

Not only have the moral codes of the old state and of the church been swept away, but the god of romantic love, one Cupid, has been publicly disgraced and branded as “bourjui.” Communism has sympathy for only one kind of love: love for the class, for the fellow proletarian.

The love of a woman for one man and of a man for one woman is too likely to bring with it the longing for home, for property, for settling down, for “all the philistine coziness of the bourgeoisie,” as one revolutionist has put it.

Romantic Extremes

The result of the Communist program and theory is the growth of cynicism toward love, which in the irresponsible manifests itself in a brutal sexuality, and in the fanatical Bolshevists is a chilly Puritanism. Somewhere between these two extremes, of course, the majority of people love, quarrel, suffer, separate, cling together, and make their own morality according to their individual instincts, inhibitions, and temperaments.

And despite all the attempts of Bolshevist theorists to get the population to treat love as a matter entirely secondary to work and the progress of the revolution, more people commit suicide in Russia every year from love than from any other cause, and, almost imperceptibly, in the literature of the youngest writers, love is beginning again to be treated as a romantic, emotional matter; foreign love stories are read with enthusiasm, and, especially among women, there is a very strong reaction away from the attitude that sex is something to be treated with rather less consideration than daily bread and butter.

The visitor to Russia notices one thing immediately. That is a freedom from sex-consciousness, exceptional candor between men and women, and the absence of any tendency to play with sex questions.

No Attempt at Segregation

In Russia, as everywhere in Europe, sleeping care are arranged in coupes, for two persons, with an upper and a lower berth. Elsewhere, these coupes are assorted into compartments for men and women. In Russia, one buys a ticket and a berth. The sex of the traveler is not considered. A woman is lodged with a man if it happens to come out that way. Men and women go swimming in the same lake or river, without bathing suits. They select different parts of the bank for undressing and dressing, and leave each other alone.

Less often,it seemed to me, in the streets of Moscow than in most cities is a woman accosted by a man. The bedroom farce and the sex novel simply do not exist in Russia. This ubiquitous theme, which has reduced much of the literature and drama of the West to syrupy sentimentality or hypocritically veiled licentiousness, is barred out in Russia, not for reasons of morality but because this sort of treatment of the domestic problem is not considered interesting.

Subject for Child Debate

And yet marriage, love—the whole question of the relations between men and women—interest Russia profoundly. No one is satisfied with the present state of things. When the Soviet government drafted a new marriage code some months ago, basing it on very radical principles, it awakened a storm of protest in the country and was passed in modified form and is not now considered to be final or indeed to be more than a makeshift.

Given an opportunity, any intelligent young Russian will talk for hours on the subject, asking innumerable questions about the attitude of the rest of the world. Discussion is so general that the newspaper Pravda, recently reporting a meeting called to discuss modern marriage, stated “the meeting did not arrive at any definite conclusion, but this is perhaps not so lamentable, considering that the average age of the participants was nine years!”

The housing situation is partly to blame for moral laxity. People live in a terrible state of overcrowding. Children sharing the most intimate life of adults, awake earlier to a knowledge of life, nor is there the same pressure of public opinion against frank and early knowledge and experience in Russia as in other countries. And no penalties in the way of disgrace.

War Reaction Blamed

That Russia has gone through an orgy of freedom in sexual relations is certainly partly due to the revolutionary philosophy, which swept away at once the traditional ethical basis for sexual morality by denying that there was anything intrinsically wrong in any form of sexual expression. But if one takes a high moral tone in talking with Russians they are likely to retort: “Well, we have the impression, from reading your books, magazines, and newspapers, that the morals of young Americans are causing their elders much concern.”

In Russia, as in the United States, England, Germany, and France, people talk with sighs about the degeneracy of the post-war period and blame much moral laxity on the war and the civil wars which followed when, with death imminent and life doubly sweet, men and women took what they could from the passing moment.

The emancipation of women has had the most far-reaching effects upon home life. Russian women before the revolution were economically and legally subject to their fathers and husbands. No law today compels them to remain with their husbands. The peasant woman holds the land jointly with her husband; if the marriage dissolves, she takes her share. And this fact operates probably as much to keep marriages firm as to dissolve them, because the division of a farm is a serious thing, whatever the attitude may be toward a division of the family.

No Birth Control Advocacy

Economically women are free to work on precisely the same basis as men. Equal pay for equal work is the rule. If a woman becomes a mother, the child is legitimate under whatever circumstances. It constitutes a marriage as much as registry does, which is the only form of marriage ceremony legally recognized.

If a working woman is about to become a mother she cannot be dismissed for this cause, but must be granted a vacation before and after her confinement. If she is about to have a child and does not want it she can avoid it legally, and if the state considers her reasons adequate in a free clinic.

It is, however, the theory of the state that children are desirable; birth control is not advocated, and the Russian birth rate is growing faster than that of any European country.

Of course this complete change in the status of women affects the attitude toward sexual morality. Marriages which held through the subjection of women tended to dissolve.

Free Love Championed

Very forcible and material checks upon profligacy resulting in children are placed upon men and women, and especially upon men, by the marriage code. The original Communist theory that the state should be responsible for children has been abandoned along with many other theories. It is still held by such champions of free love as Alexandra Kollontai. She was former ambassador to Mexico, and now, again minister to Norway, but the law has other views.

A woman expecting a child can file with the People’s court three months before its birth the name of the father. If he does not protest, it is taken for granted that he is the father, and he is held, equally with the mother, responsible for the child’s support. If he is not married, according to the registry books, the fact of the child constitutes a marriage.

But if he is married already—if he has a registered wife—the position of the unmarried mother is exactly as good as that of the married one. He must support all his children, up to two-thirds of his income. If the mother is ill or unemployed, he must maintain her.

Courts Making Laws

The handling of domestic cases in the People’s courts is very interesting, and for a foreigner, amazing. The marriage law in Russia is very brief. For the time being, and until a new Communist morality has been worked out to form the basis of the law, the courts themselves are making the law, largely on the basis of common sense, plus the class-conscious viewpoint which all Soviet courts hold, and in the interests of the children, where children are concerned. 

The judge in one of these courts—he was recently a dock hand in America—told me the following: “I had a case just the other day—a girl, very pretty and young, who had a child. She said its father was J—-, a man who earns 600 rubles a month. J—- maintained he wasn’t the father, and there really wasn’t any proof, but the way we figured it was this: this man J—- was a Don Juan, anyway; he was always involved in a love affair, and we thought it would be a good thing for him to have some responsibility. He could perfectly well afford to support the child in comfort, feed and clothe it well, so this settlement would be a good thing for the child. And if this particular child wasn’t his, well. He probably had several others somewhere. So we made him responsible for its support.”

Women in Revolt

Of course, the result of this sort of justice is the development of a new class of gold-diggers. A woman doesn’t lose her job, nor her reputation, and actually, she can add to her income.

But it is significant that the attempt to crystallize this practice into law has awakened vehement opposition, especially among women! Men’s wives—registered wives—object strenuously to the claims of these other women and their children.

Their attitude is: All this is nonsense. Women should behave themselves and keep their hands off married men. If they don’t, let them take the consequences themselves. We aren’t going to work and slave, trying to build up a home with our husbands, and then have their money go to support some other family.

The tendency among women is certainly toward the recognition of only the registered marriage and not the de facto marriage.

It is impossible to get reliable figures on divorce for the reason that registry at present does not constitute a marriage. Cohabitation and marital relationships make a marriage. De facto marriages if they come into the courts—over property disputes or the custody of children—are recognized. But since such marriages can be made and dissolved without the registry offices it is impossible to estimate the divorce rate.