Portal:Communism/Selected quote/43

“ If one understands by “family” a compulsory union based on marriage contract, the blessing of the church, property rights, and the single passport, then Bolshevism has destroyed this policed family from the roots up.

If one understands by “family” the unbounded domination of parents over children, and absence of legal rights for the wife, then Bolshevism has, unfortunately, not yet completely destroyed this carry over of society’s old barbarism.

If one understands by “family” ideal monogamy, not in the legal but in the actual sense, then the Bolsheviks could not destroy what never was nor is on earth, barring fortunate exceptions.

There is absolutely no foundation for the statement that the Soviet law on marriage has been an incentive to polygamy and polyandry. Statistics of marriage relations, actual ones are not available, and cannot be. But even without columns of figures one can be sure that the Moscow index numbers of adulteries and shipwrecked marriages are not much different from the corresponding data for New York City, London, or Paris—and who knows?—are perhaps even lower.

Against prostitution there has been a strenuous and fairly successful struggle. This proves that the Soviets have no intention of tolerating that unbridled promiscuity which finds its most destructive and poisonous expression in prostitution.

A long and permanent marriage, based on mutual love and cooperation—that is the ideal standard. To this the influences of the school, of literature, and of public opinion in the Soviets tend. Freed from the chains of police and clergy, later also from those of economic necessity, the tie between man and woman will find its own way, determined by physiology, psychology, and care for the welfare of the race. The Soviet regime is still far from the solution of this as of other basic problems, but it has created serious prerequisites for their solution. In any case the problem of marriage has ceased to be a matter of uncritical tradition and the blind force of circumstance; it has been posed as a task of collective reason.

” — Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
Family Relations Under the Soviets , 1932