The introduction of legalized abortion produced additional tension. On the eve of NEP, the state reacted to a spate of illegal abortions by allowing doctors to terminate pregnancies in state hospitals without charge. This decision, although expedient, complicated the issue of building a new society. Indeed, according to prevailing wisdom among state officials, neither abortions nor the rights of the individual over society were being condoned. Rather, the argument ran, in the more prosperous times that lay in the future, once an adequate child-care system was in place, and when better-educated women achieved a higher socialist consciousness, Soviet female citizens would recognize the social obligation of child-bearing. This did not occur in the 1920s. By the middle of the decade, registered abortions climbed to more than 55 per 100 births. Evidence also indicates that in the countryside the travel and paperwork involved in a hospital abortion caused rural women to continue to rely on illegal practitioners and folk remedies.
The state, therefore, moderated some of its early enthusiasms with the Family Code of 1926. This new legislation addressed the issue of desertion by extending official sanction—and with it the right to alimony and child support—to unregistered unions, and it established joint ownership of property acquired during the marriage. But it also relaxed divorce requirements further by transferring jurisdiction from the courts to a simple procedure at a government office, with notification of the other spouse sometimes only by postcard. By the end of the 1920s the urban Soviet divorce rate was the highest in the world.
In the countryside the impact was less. Church weddings were sustained far more strongly in rural areas, where marriage and birth-rates remained high. Divorces, although more numerous than previously, never approached city levels; peasants proved less eager to dissolve marital unions than their urban counterparts. Also, when the reassertion of communal authority once again made the peasant household the predominant social unit, the prospect of dividing joint property was a legal nightmare. As a result, traditional rather than Soviet legality continued to prevail in the village.
Soviet youth, the citizens of the future, also occupied a central place in revolutionary thinking, and here the Bolsheviks faced an especially difficult situation: juvenile ‘hooliganism’ and homeless orphans had already emerged under tsarism, and the years of world war, revolution, and civil war had greatly exacerbated the problems. Thus the first years of NEP reduced the early Soviet declaration that ‘there will be no courts or prisons for children’ to a pious wish. By 1921 the besprizorniki had not only proliferated in numbers, but exhibited behaviour indicating that many were beyond the reach of any attempt to reintegrate them. As a result, in the 1920s far more besprizorniki encountered the criminal justice system than experimental rehabilitation programmes. Especially in the first half of the decade, homeless children became a fixture of the Soviet social landscape, wreaking havoc that caused all of society to demand action.
Concern for the young, however, was not limited to dealing with juvenile miscreants. Creating the ‘new Soviet man’ also demanded a revolution in education, seen as the engine of social change. Narkompros (the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment) was called upon simultaneously to expurgate the social residue of bourgeois society, produce proletarian citizens, and cope with a dearth of economic resources. Ideally, Soviet education would transcend the narrowness (deemed characteristic of the tsarist approach), enhance the substance of instruction, and also eradicate élitism by providing free public education for all. Innovators in Narkompros devised a new pedagogy, the ‘Complex Method’, which would not teach just academic subjects, but life itself. The Complex Method would integrate the study of nature, society, and labour in order to prepare graduates for successful entry into both the labour force and society. In addition, the new pedagogy would promote secularism by teaching materialist, scientific values.
There were successes as well as problems. The retention rate of girls enrolled in elementary schools in urban areas, but not total enrolment of girls, rose in the 1920s. Workers and peasants received increased access to higher education. A special institution for workers, the rabfak, provided an equivalent of secondary education; by 1928 rabfak graduates constituted a full third of entrants to institutions of higher learning. Night courses were added, and there was an aggressive national campaign to end illiteracy. Also, by 1921 the newly founded Communist Academy and the Institute of Red Professors were training Marxist scholars for careers in the social sciences.
But failure was also common. Shortages of funds plagued all facets of education, and schools were forced to supplement their meagre budgets by reintroducing student fees. In addition, Narkompros encountered sharp internal divisions over the wisdom of the Complex Method; resistance was even greater in the schools. Most experienced teachers ignored the new curriculum and continued to teach traditional subjects. Moreover, classroom instructors greeted secularism with little enthusiasm, especially in the numerous instances when rural teachers were also wives of priests. Finally, the preferential enrolment of more workers and peasants in universities—where males still outnumbered females by a margin of three to one—fostered a lowering of standards, and charges of faulty preparation also haunted the graduates of the Institute of Red Professors.
No Bolshevik assault on tradition could overlook religion. Existence, Marx taught, determines consciousness, and only knowledge derived from observed reality, without the intercession of any external force or mover, is valid. Therefore, if religion had been ‘the opiate of the masses’ under the old order, religious belief in the new world constituted superstition and, as such, an impediment to creating a progressive, scientific society. In 1918, therefore, the Soviet state decreed a separation of Church and state that nationalized church land and property without compensation. Outside the law, anti-religious militants desecrated churches and monasteries in the atmosphere of atrocity during the Russian civil war, and a significant number of bishops and priests died violently before 1921.
Given the party’s implacable hostility, it might appear incongruous to describe NEP as a period when the persecution of religion was relaxed, but compared to 1918–21, this was in fact the case. Not wanting to alienate the peasants further, the government softened its attack between 1921 and the onset of the forced collectivization of agriculture in 1929. Thus the state allowed both religious and anti-religious propaganda, and its Commission on Religious Questions advocated the eradication of religion only through agitation and education. The commission restrained rather than incited anti-religious violence and regularly ruled in favour of groups of believers against local officials. The Union of Militant Atheists did not hold its founding congress until 1925; it began serious work only following its second gathering three years later. Anti-religious propaganda was therefore the responsibility of all party organs, which in practice meant that it was conducted ad hoc and at most incorporated within its general advocacy of secularism. Even in national publications such as Bezbozhnik (The Godless), anti-religious tracts and caricatures of priests shared space with articles on popular science, public health, the eradication of illiteracy, the evils of anti-Semitism, and even the improvement of personal hygiene.
State and Church of course remained foes. In this regard, the Russian Orthodox Church was vulnerable, for it entered the revolutionary era divided and demoralized. Its leadership was ill-prepared to resist the surrender of sacrosanct valuables to the state, ostensibly for famine relief in 1921–2. The fact that liberal offshoots of the main Church were often more accommodating to state power undercut Orthodoxy further, as did the rising number of conversions to other denominations, especially the Baptist Church. Moreover, official disapproval by no means halted illegal assaults on churches and clergy; local soviets utilized existing laws to confiscate places of worship for use as workers’ clubs, cinemas, and libraries. Finally, as NEP came to an end, the state enacted a new law on religious associations in 1929 that restricted religious activity only to registered congregations, banned all religious instruction and proselytizing, and presaged the still more brutal assault on the Church soon to come.