Soviet Family and Demographic Policy in Landmarks of Law in Great Patriotic War Period

Abstract

The appeal to the experience of the Soviet Union in solving the demographic problem that arose during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 due to the latest decisions of the Russian state: the approving the Fundamentals of State Policy for the Preservation and Strengthening of Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values, the restoration of the title “Mother Heroine” in the award system, the announcement of the Year of the Family. The purpose of the work is to assess the impact on society of legislative decisions taken to improve the demographic situation during the Great Patriotic War, from the standpoint of modern academic ideas about human needs. The objectives of the study are: description and characterization of new legal measures in the field of demography, establishing the impact of legislative decisions on family values in order to determine the prospects for their use at the present stage. The authors implement historical-legal, formal-dogmatic, statistical and comparative research methods. The measures taken to stimulate the birth rate are analyzed: a tax on childlessness; financial material support for families with many children and single mothers, the abolition of the right to claim to establish paternity; complicating the divorce procedure; moral encouragement of motherhood. It is concluded that the demographic policy was aimed at stimulating reproductive behavior by playing on the vital and role needs of a person. The issue of illegitimate pregnancy and the birth of an illegitimate child has become a problem for women and society as a whole, but not for the biological father. The developed legal strategy was an alternative to the legalization of polygamy and stimulated the plurality of actual family relationships. The need for self-development, the value of personal transfer of father’s experience to children within the framework of the chosen strategy turned out to be almost impossible to take into account. Soviet procreation policies can hardly be called familial one: the prohibition of paternity suit and other legal measures encouraged reproductive behavior, leading to an increase in the number of single-parent families and the placement of children in child care institutions. The change in public morality — the manifestation of tolerance towards men who are indifferent to the fate of their offspring, which led to the aggravation of the question of fatherlessness — was a “side effect” of the radical novelization of family law and changes in the norms on the social security of citizens.