Document 71
Collective letter from women of Dnepropetrovsk Oblast to TsK VKP(b) on alimony and libertinism, 1936
GARF, f. 3316, op. 41, d. 82, ll.13-15. Original manuscript.
. . . . About alimony and libertinism, which is at a high level in our country, it is wrong that the law Constitution says one-quarter [of the earnings] are used for the first child and one-third for two, because this has led to the point where they only judge everywhere about alimony, i.e. they let men change wives, after all divorce is expensive, so men do not get a divorce or do not register--they just get together and then break up, but they bring orphans into the world, and they are given the shameful name of "bastard," in order to destroy this libertinism and the shameful name of bastard for a child we submit this suggestion:
1. If a girl gives birth from an unmarried man (the marriage is unregistered)--she gets fifty percent of his wages "so there are no snickers at women." If he does the same thing with another one, the second one gets one-quarter for her child (so she knows that he has a child and so his wife doesn't get any ideas that he left one girl but not me, he won't leave me, and this will make men settle down). But if he does it with a third one, then the child is to be placed in a foundling hospital, and he and she are to pay the hospital three hundred rubles apiece, plus they must both do forced labor for three months.
2. If a widow or a girl begets a child with a family man, it is the same thing--he does three months and four hundred rubles, and she does three months and three hundred rubles for child rearing. When men paid one-third of their wages for alimony, men settled down a little, but when it became one-quarter, the level of libertinism rose by fifty percent--"men were given freedom"--we demand a stop to it. For an abortion a woman should get three months in prison, since abortions have now become very common and the strangulation of the newborn is continuing. We ask especially that the unmarried men be hit, what is going on is unbearable, they have five children apiece. The level of libertinism has reached the point where a man begets five children with five women. . . .