Updated 2019 04 25, to add more links to related articles.
Orphans in the USSR
Do not be surprised at the prevalence of abortions in communist- vs. feminist-dominated nations. Both live by the same doctrines: the abolition of marriage and women’s liberation as to the burden of child bearing and child raising.
That means, if unwanted children will be aborted, then through that deadly process of elimination, ostensibly, every child carried to term is a wanted child, but nothing is perfect.
That goes one step farther, and the solution to the perceived problem applies equally in feminist as in communist regimes. If children are born outside of wedlock, they are illegitimate children. We cannot have illegitimate children in either a class-less or egalitarian society, because their very existence would be discriminatory. It is not the fault of the children that they are born with that label. It is the fault of a system that labels anything outside of moral norms or standards either illegal, objectionable or illegitimate. The solution to that is to abolish the moral or social standards that cause such illegitimacy to come about. The best way to achieve that is to bring about the abolition of marriage.
Therefore, in the minds of communist and feminist social engineers alike (remember that both use the same “bible”) it is merely necessary to bring about the abolition of marriage, and all illegitimate children will have vanished. Both factions of social engineers promptly called for that and set out to bring it about.
That had unintended consequences in the USSR, under Lenin.
It also had unintended consequences in the “free” West, under feminism. More about that at the end of this posting.
Consequences of the Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage
I do not have statistics that summarize the orphan problem in the USSR, either in total or as a trend over time. There were millions of orphans.
Already under Lenin, the USSR suffered serious consequences on account of the policies of “free love” (a.k.a. “sexual freedom”) that Marx and Engels had called for. Later, under the quota system of eliminating unwanted sectors of the population, orphans were sent in large numbers to Siberia; and they were even executed by the tens of thousands (provided they were of the age of 14 or older). [You can find more about that in “The Soviet Story“, a DVD obtainable through amazon.com.]
Igor Shafarevich states in “The Socialist Phenomenon”:
At the end of the preceding chapter we sketched the “ideal” socialist society as it appears in the classical writings of socialism. Of the features enumerated, we shall consider only one: state upbringing of children from infancy so that they do not know their parents. It is natural to begin with this aspect of the socialist ideal, if only because it would be the first thing that an individual born into this society would face. This measure is suggested with striking consistency from Plato to Liadov, a leading Soviet theoretician of the 1920s. In the 1970s, the Japanese police arrested members of the “Red Army,” a Trotskyite organization, which was responsible for a number of murders. Although this group numbered only a few dozen people, it had all the attributes of a real socialist party–theoreticians, a split on the question of whether revolution should occur in one country or in the entire world at once, terror against dissidents. The group established itself in a lonely mountain region. And the same trait surfaced here: they took newborn children away from their mothers, entrusted them to other women for upbringing and fed them on powdered milk, despite difficulties in obtaining it.
Let us quote from a book by the modern ethologist Eibl-Eibesfeldt, which will help us evaluate the biological significance of this measure:
“It is especially in the second half of the first year of life that a child establishes personal ties with its mother or a person substituting for her (a nurse, a matron). This contact is the precondition for the development of “primary trust” (E. H. Erikson), the basis for the attitude toward oneself and the world. The child learns to trust his partner, and this positive basic orientation is the foundation of a healthy personality. If these contacts are broken, “primary distrust” develops. A prolonged stay in the hospital during the child’s second year may, for example, lead to such results. Though the child will try even there to establish close contact with a mother substitute, no nurse will be able to devote herself intensively enough to an infant for a close personal tie to be established. Nurses constantly change, and so the contacts that arise are constantly broken. The child, deceived in his expectations of contact, falls into a state of apathy after a brief outburst of protest. During the first month of his stay in the hospital he whines and clings to anyone available. During the second month he usually cries and loses weight. During the third month such children only weep quietly and finally become thoroughly apathetic. If after three to four months’ separation they are taken home, they return to normal. But if they stay in the hospital longer, the trauma becomes irreversible.. ..In one orphanage where R. Spitz studied ninety-one children who had been separated from their mothers in the third month of their lives, thirty-four died before they reached the age of two. The level of development of the survivors was only 45 percent of normal and the children were almost like idiots. Many of them could neither walk nor stand nor speak at age four. (148: p.234) ”
[Source: “The Socialist Phenomenon”, by Igor Shafarevich, pp. 270, 271, http://robertlstephens.com
/essays/shafarevich/001Soc ialistPhenomenon.html ]
The following contains more information on orphans in the USSR, but that document is not in text form and cannot be searched. Quoting text from it is too laborious.
“Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years:
A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence”
By J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rittersporn and Victor N. Zemskow
http://sovietinfo.tripod.c
No spectacle in Soviet cities more troubled Russian and foreign observers during the first postrevolutionary decade than the millions of orphaned and abandoned children known as besprizornye.[1] Whether portrayed as pitiable victims of war and famine or as devious wolf-children preying on the surrounding population to support cocaine and gambling habits, they haunted the works of journalists, travelers, and Party members alike. “Every visitor sees it first,” noted an American correspondent, and is so shocked by the sight that the most widely known Russian youth are the “homeless children flapping along the main streets of cities and the main routes of travel like ragged flocks of animated scarecrows.”[2] Averell Harriman recalled them as “a particular tragedy of the time, begging or stealing and living as wild animals unconnected with the normal community life.”[3] The very fact that no one could remain indifferent to their travail made them tempting ammunition in the ideological charges and countercharges exchanged in these years. On one side of the battle lines, critics of the Bolsheviks featured the children as “proof” that the new regime had failed even to care for its own young. In reply, Soviet officials pointed to the problem’s origin in disasters largely beyond their control and insisted that the Party had assigned far higher priority to rehabilitating homeless juveniles than bourgeois governments allocated to the care of their own downtrodden….
We will focus primarily on youths who spent all, or at least most, of their time in the street. Our gaze thus takes in juveniles who drifted out of families, as well as the more obvious millions orphaned, discarded, or otherwise separated involuntarily from parents. Those who remained at home will not be included, regardless of the abuse or neglect they may have experienced there….
The homeless wave crested during the famine of 1921–1922, with estimates ranging typically from four to seven and a half million orphaned and forsaken youths.[69]
Source: Ball, Alan M. And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/
Do a “Find in Page” at that URL for terms such as “orphan”, “children”, “deported” or “execution”.
There is another source of information on orphans in the USSR, that is “The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr I Solzhenitsyn, http://www.amazon.ca/s?_en
I read the volumes of “The Gulag Archipelago” and and should have copies but can’t find them. I do recall orphans being mentioned. I don’t know where those books went. Maybe they got lent out, but I seem to recall some numbers and a subject index relating to orphans.
In one of the volumes there was a chapter that described the problem of orphans in the labour camps. If I remember right, Solzhenitsyn considered the orphans to be one of the biggest problems faced by the other inmates, as the orphans had no rules or standards to live by. They had no civility.
Free love, as the early communists called it, is today called sexual freedom.
See The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1926 (See also a more exhaustive history of the evolution and destructive social impact of Soviet divorce laws) [More at https://blog.fathersforlife.org/2010/09/06/dont-marry ]
Semi-orphans, a big part of the absurd legacy of feminism
For the best part of thirty years we have been conducting a vast experiment with the family, and now the results are in: the decline of the two-parent, married-couple family has resulted in poverty, ill-health, educational failure, unhappiness, anti-social behaviour, isolation and social exclusion for thousands of women, men and children.
— Rebecca O’Neill
Experiments in Living: The Fatherless Family
By Rebecca O’Neill; Sept. 2002, CIVITAS
See also:
- Humane Society for the Unborn
- Family courts solve divorce applications backlog
- Divorce causes population decline
- Abortion – Death or life? You decide.
- Flawless flawed — What about children?
- Don’t Marry!?
- Consequences of Divorce : Longlasting effects on children
- Many elderly – too few children to care for them
- Divorce hurts Children, a million more in the U.S. a year
- Divorce affects children negatively — Youth criminality
- Infanticide — a euphemism for child murder
