The Bolshevik bourgeoisie

     "In between their epic labors at the great construction site of socialism, residents of the House of Government 'were settling into their new apartments and setting up house in familiar ways,' unable to transcend the 'hen-and-rooster problems' of marriage and domestic life.  Many of them expressed unease at sinking into the traditional bonds of kinship and procreation.  'I am afraid I might turn into a bourgeois,' worried the writer Alexsandr Serafimovich (Apt. 82) to a friend.  'In order to resist such a transformation, I have been spitting into all the corners and onto the floor, blowing my nose, and lying in bed with my shoes on and hair uncombed.  It seems to be helping.'
     "But it wasn't.  No one really knew what a communist family should be, or how to transform relations between parents and children, or how to harness erotic attachments to the requirements of revolution.  Bolsheviks were known to give their children names such as 'Vladlen' (Vladimir Lenin), 'Mezhenda' (International Women's Day), and 'Vsemir' (worldwide revolution).  But naming was easy compared to living.  The Soviet state went to great lengths to inculcate revolutionary values in schools and workplaces, but not at home.  It never devised resonant rituals to mark birth, marriage, and death.  The party ideologist Aron Solts (Apt. 393) claimed that 'the family of a Communist must be a prototype of a small Communist cell . . . , a collectivity of comrades in which one lives in the family the same way as outside the family.'
     "In that case, why bother with familes at all?  Neither Solts nor anyone else had a convincing answer.  Sects, Slezkine notes, 'are about brotherhood (and, as an afterthought, sisterhood), not about parents and children.  This is why most end-of-the-world scenarios promise "all these things" within one generation. . . , and all millenarian sects, in their militant phase, attempt to reform marriage or abolish it altogether (by decreeing celibacy or promiscuity).'
     "Unable or unwilling to abolish the family, Bolsheviks proved incapable of reproducing themselves [qua Bolsheviks].  For Slezkine, this is cause for celebrating the resilience of family ties under the onslaught of Stalin's social engineering.  It's worth asking, though, why the same Bolsheviks who willingly deported or exterminated millions of class enemies as remnants of capitalism balked at similarly radical measures against the bourgeois institution of the family.  Could it be that they, especially the men among them, realized that by doing so they stood to lose much more than their chains?
     "Whatever the case, the children they raised in the House of Government became loyal Soviet citizens but not millenarians.  Their deepest ties were to their parents (many of whom, as Slezkine shows with novelistic detail, were seized from their apartments and shot during the Great Terror) and to Pushkin and Tolstoy—not to Marx and Lenin.  Instead of devouring its children, he concludes, the Russian Revolution was devoured by the children of the revolutionaries.  As Tolstoy's friend Nikolai Strakhov wrote about the character Bazarov, the proto-Bolshevik at the heart of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (another work about the family), 'The love affair takes place against his iron will; life, which he had thought he would rule, catches him in its huge wave.'"

     Benjamin Nathans, "Bolshevism's new believers," a review of The house of government:  a saga of the Russian Revolution, by Yuri Slezkine, The New York review of books 64, no. 18 (November 23, 2017):  21 (18-21).