Restoring the Patronymic

Moscow is facing up to family problems. Russia's rulers have never quite been able to decide what role the family should play in their master plan for the ideal state. Marx defined the family as "antiquated" and predicted that it would vanish along with capitalism; the Bolshevik coup in 1917 thus brought casual mating and divorce, and a brief fling at free love. The man who stopped it was that formidable patriarch Joseph Stalin, who proclaimed that the family was "the basic cell of society" and put himself on the side of old-fashioned peasant virtue. But even Stalin was not above endorsing a bit of pragmatic promiscuity when the times dictated. In 1944, with the population decimated by war, Stalin wanted to boost the birth rate and decreed that men would no longer be obliged either to admit paternity or provide any financial support for children born out of wedlock.

But times have changed again in Russia. After four years of study, the Supreme Soviet is about to enact a new Family, Code, the object of daily dissection in Izvestia over the past six months. One of its main provisions removes the burden of shame that was the inevitable legacy to illegitimate children of Stalin's wartime mating call. It not only provides for financial support when paternity can be established but, more important, permits unwed mothers to make up a father's name to put on their child's birth certificate and other documents. In Russia that is vital, for a Russian takes his father's first name as his middle name and is commonly addressed by his own first name plus the patronymic. Thus Premier Kosygin is known as Aleksei Nikolaevich (son of Nikolai). The absence of such a patronymic exposes a child to humiliation in what remains essentially a prudish society. The illegitimate child is usually given his mother's last name, but sometimes the mother refuses to register him rather than let the infamous "blank space" for the father's name haunt the child all his life.

Forces of Erosion. While reaffirming the family's importance, the new legal code makes only a modest start toward protecting marriage from the forces that are eroding it, among them crowded housing, low pay and a divorce rate that has risen above the U.S. rate (2.8 divorces for every 1,000 people v. an estimated 2.7 for the U.S.). Divorce is forbidden when the wife is pregnant and until her child reaches its first birthday. The code calls on judges in the People's Courts to reconcile couples seeking divorce. It also provides for a waiting period of one month, instead of the usual two weeks, between the time a couple applies for a license and the marriage, in order to discourage hasty unions. That is hardly likely to take hold everywhere in the Soviet Union, as is illustrated by one local problem brought out in recent press discussions: the government has so far been unable to suppress the mating habits of males in the Caucasus region, who woo their brides by abducting and raping them.

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