That's just sovietophobic fiction.
I remember the slogan "Family is the unit of society" and childless people had to pay a special tax. Also infidelity in marriage was frowned upon and could negatively affect the career.
I remember the slogan "Family is the unit of society" and childless people had to pay a special tax. Also infidelity in marriage was frowned upon and could negatively affect the career.
Early Soviet Union was much more radical and utopian, with ideas almost like in Plato's republic with the goal to getting to the point where the state rather than the parents would be raising children.
This was later abolished in the 30's and 40's and more traditional family values were encouraged.
It might be sovietophobic in the sense we would rather not have it repeat, to put mildly. But for the occupied regions, it was far from fiction.
Did you mean "to dilute regional/ethnic identity"? National identity cuts across regions and ethnicities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Mingrelia
But the actual maps show a mosaic of principalities in place or Georgia.
I am just pointing out that Soviet Union has encouraged large ethnicities to coalesce, collect their shared history and culture (often inventing large portions in process) and build a nation state on top of that. This is not something you should take for granted, but that's what you've got under Soviet rule.
Not everybody got that privilege, of course. Ethnic Russians, but also Jews and Germans, did not get to have their own nation state in USSR. Technically, Jews had one but it was a joke[1]; Germans briefly had one[2]; Russians hoped to have one after WW2, with capital in Leningrad, but were derailed (Leningrad affair[3]). RSFSR was like a one huge Washington DC in that regard, with glistering Moscow and Leningrad but it was more like Puerto Rico as you descended into Nechernozem'ye[4]. No statehood.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_German_Autonomous_Soviet... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_affair 4. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Нечерноземье
Yeah, I've heard you prefer not to mix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Estonia#Eston...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Latvia#Arajs_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Lithuania#Par...
From what I've read, the dismantling of families was really implemented in the 1920s and perhaps 1930s. That's when a kid [1] who ratted on his own father (likely sent him to Gulags) was glorified as a huge Hero of Socialism. After that period though, Communism was gradually less about implementing its distopian ideology and more about naked power of people on top, so the destruction of families was abandoned.
Or it's just believing Marx when he wrote this in the Communist Manifesto:
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.