Family and the State in Soviet Lithuania

Gender, Law and Society

Dalia Leinarte

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350136113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

If the home remained a safe space for families during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, why is it that the memories of women's domestic lives in Soviet Lithuania are so fragmented? In Family and the State in Soviet Lithuania, Dalia Leinarte deftly challenges the commonplace 'kitchen culture' idea that the home was a site of silent resistance where traditional Lithuanian values continued to be nurtured. Instead, this fascinating book reveals how the totalitarian state gradually abolished the private lives of Lithuanian families altogether. Based on over 100 interviews and an array of archival sources, this book analyses how family policy formed the everyday life of men and women and considers how the internalisation of Soviet ideology took place in the private sphere. From a well-developed after-school activity program for children to strict rules regarding the working hours of men and women, ultimately the family could not remain isolated from the regime. Family and the State in Soviet Lithuania is the first book to explore family policy in the Soviet Baltic states and is therefore a vital resource for scholars of Soviet and gender history.

1

Soviet family policy

The beginnings of gender equality

After surviving the 1940 annexation of Lithuania and the Second World War, the people of Lithuania soon faced a second Soviet occupation and post-war upheaval. Many once again experienced coercion, exile, loss of loved ones, and every one without exception became the target of Soviet propaganda. Women were in an especially sensitive situation because the regime expected their prompt affiliation and transformation of their customary way of life. In pre-war independent Lithuania, it had been rare for mothers raising children to work full time beyond the confines of the family home, but the Soviet state demanded that all men and women work and conform to the image of a socially engaged citizen. The first communication – that henceforth women would be required to do work useful to the state – was disseminated immediately after annexation. On 15 August 1940, the newspaper Vyriausybės žinios (Government News) announced the Lithuanian Marriage Law, which was lifted wholesale from the USSR. In the section on divorce, the law required minor children to be financially supported by both parents. In the case of the parents’ inability to come to terms, the court would decide on the amount of child support to be paid.¹ Thus women were required to find gainful employment if they wanted to maintain custody rights after divorce.

The period 1951–2 saw the liberalization of Stalinist labour laws that rendered it illegal to leave one’s job without government permission; however, by April 1956, independently initiated leaving of one’s job was no longer considered a criminal offense by the Criminal Code.² But, in place of this law, the Lithuanian Republic’s Criminal Code criminalized unemployment without justification and in this way enforced women’s employment. Unemployed men and women were designated with a special term: individuals, avoiding work useful to society and living anti-socially as parasites. In 1952, Criminal Code Articles 155 and 73/2 added prostitutes to the category of parasites and vermin. The law however targeted only those women in prostitution who did not hold an official job and who made their living exclusively from sex work.³ Eventually, women who had nothing to do with prostitution but who nevertheless did not hold official jobs began to be associated with prostitutes. If women and girls frequented a given restaurant without male chaperones, and if their attire and make-up were flashier than that of the typical Soviet woman, they would inevitably expect to be questioned by the militsiya as possible prostitutes. And if the woman in question spoke a foreign language, she would be hard-pressed to avoid the attention of the KGB.⁴ Moreover, in 1958, the Presidium of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (LSSR) Supreme Soviet⁵ approved a resolution regarding the 10 April 1957 decree On Criminal Liability for Petty Speculation. The resolution mentions women charged with speculation arrested for repeated offenses of selling food products and clothing by which they secured a living for themselves.⁶ In 1966, criminal responsibility for speculation of individuals aged 16 years or older was made more severe.⁷ The criminalization of speculation as an informal economic activity also diminished opportunities for avoiding work in a state-run industry.

Cheap labour, which Lithuanian women provided, was essential for rebuilding the war-ravaged agricultural sector and for speeding up collectivization. The universal employment of women in Soviet Lithuania was implemented with the help of the Criminal Code and propaganda campaigns to encourage women to work as much and as effectively as possible.⁸ Propaganda played a role in achieving gender equality in this case. After the 1917 Socialist Revolution in Russia, the Bolsheviks pursued universal employment using the slogan of gender equality to fight against women’s ‘backwardness and illiteracy’. After the Second World War in Soviet Lithuania, the universal employment of women was carried out within the battle against the bourgeois family, which had ostensibly imprisoned women in the home. The rhetoric of Soviet gender equality was also used to promote women’s liberation from the slavery imposed by the bourgeois family. The Soviet government planned to transform the traditional family so that it could serve the socialist state by quickly mobilizing women in the rebuilding of the agricultural sector and implementing collectivization as well as spreading Soviet propaganda. On 20 March 1948, the LSSR Council of Ministers adopted the resolution On Establishing Collective Farms in the Republic, which marked the beginning of the creation of collective farms in the republic. In early 1949, 4 per cent of landholding and landless farmers from independent Lithuania had joined collectives, but by the end of the year, the percentage had reached 62.4 per cent. The rapidly expanding collective farms needed additional labour.

Nevertheless, pre-war stereotypes about ‘communist polygamists’ and homo sovieticus in neighbouring Russia hindered the large-scale incorporation of Lithuanian women into the new Soviet way of life and prevented active participation in the party and professional activities. Women in post-war Lithuania were convinced that members of the Bolshevik Party were inevitably drunkards and polygamists; they automatically associated these stereotypes with the state and party apparatus being established in Lithuania. In the towns, women spread rumours that ‘as a rule, almost every second communist has 2–3 wives. This is a fact.’⁹ The women worried that the amoral work environment would negatively affect their Catholic upbringing. When M. Kaunaitė, one of the first Soviet women activists, travelled throughout Lithuania giving lectures promoting gender equality, her lectures angered and even frightened her listeners. The women were afraid that after several such lectures by Kaunaitė, they might be transformed into ‘great Bolsheviks and atheists’.¹⁰ Disdain for the new regime was evident. The Lithuanian Communist Party Central Committee (LCP(b) CC) instructor in her letter to LCP(b) CC First Secretary Antanas Sniečkus wrote that in one collective farm, the director himself had turned one of their ‘Red Corners’ into a cattle shed, that is ‘he had provided lodging there to someone who had sectioned off a corner for himself, and in the rest of the barn, he kept a goat and chickens; above them on the wall, he had hung up portraits of “our leaders” along with other propaganda posters’.¹¹

Despite the widespread enmity, the propaganda on gender equality and the New Soviet woman was intense and disseminated across all of Lithuania. Every month, ever larger groups of women were forced to participate in the agitprop meetings and seminars and to listen for many long hours to the propositions of the new politics. The invasion of the new ideology unavoidably influenced women’s behaviour and world-view. Even communist activists were surprised when in the middle of the winter of 1947, at 6.00 am, as voting began for local workers’ deputee committees, they noticed a mother holding a 3-month-old baby in her arms outside. The woman explained that she kept seeing a poster depicting a mother with her baby in her arms standing next to the ballot boxes, and she wanted to look like her.¹² Indeed, the Soviet government used visual as well as verbal propaganda to indoctrinate Lithuanian women, dedicating financial and human resources, as well as the already established structures for implementing gender politics. The following section examines how this functioned and what results it achieved.

The LCP(b) CC establishes the Work Among Women Division

The Work Among Women Division was created in August 1945 by the LCP(b) CC. The department was charged with realizing Soviet gender equality policies in the Soviet republic. Shortly thereafter, local Work Among Women Divisions were founded in every one of Lithuania’s twenty-three counties, and women-organizer positions were established in its 365 rural districts. In the central Work Among Women Division, three positions, namely one supervisor position and two instructor positions, were paid with state budget funds. The county-level departments were allocated one full-time director’s position and one instructor’s position. Kaunaitė was appointed director of the Work Among Women Division’s central office. In 1950, after they had completed the administrative and territorial distribution reforms in Lithuania, the LCP(b) CC approved the new Work Among Women Division positions. After the 1950 reforms eliminated Lithuania’s counties and rural districts, four regional Work Among Women Division departments were created, each with a director and instructor position. In addition, Work Among Women Division positions were created within the Ministry of Agriculture, as well as in district and town executive committees and automobile and tractor stations (ATS).

By 1950, all the necessary positions in the Work Among Women Division had been filled, of which 216 were financed by the state budget:¹³

• Two positions within the LCP(b) Central Committee

• Eight positions in the four LCP(b) regional committees

• Four positions in the four LCP(b) city committees

• Eighty-seven director positions within the eighty-seven LCP(b) regional executive committees

• 113 positions within the political departments of the 113 ATS

• Two directors’ assistant positions within the political department of the Ministry of Agriculture charged with issues pertaining to women

Nevertheless, the most significant category of the Work Among Women Division was composed not of full-time public servants, but of the so-called women-delegates, whose work was voluntary and unpaid. According to reports filed by Kaunaitė, there were sixty-two directors and instructors in the Work Among Women Division regional departments in 1948, whereas there were over 11,000 unpaid women-delegates throughout the republic.¹⁴ In 1950, that number was close to 20,000.¹⁵ It was this army of women that was meant to affirm that gender equality policy was successfully being implemented in Lithuania and had mobilized thousands of activists.

One of the greatest impediments to the activism of the Work Among Women Division departments in the provinces was the poor education of its staff. Before the 1950 administrative reforms, three workers of the Alytus county department had only a fourth-grade elementary school education, one had not completed elementary school and only one had a high school diploma.¹⁶ The departmental staff in the provinces also complained that they had not been instructed on the goals and tasks of the Work Among Women Division. The departmental directors were regularly sending the central office director, Kaunaitė, written requests for instructors or permission to go to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, themselves in order to clarify the...