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In any global analysis of family dissolution in this century, a
comparative analysis of trends in the communist and non-communist becomes
necessary. Indeed, after decades of being
divided by the Iron Curtain into two completely different worlds, people on
both sides of the divide confirmed in the conviction that there were some very
similar tendencies of development in both the worlds. Quite clearly, these similarities can be noted in tendencies in
family and education. Since the
sixties, many have been worried by the fact that some of free societies have
enacted measures very similar to the communist reforms, whose consequences we
now know. But this comparison is for
you to make. I will limit myself to the
description of the situation of families under communist regime, as I
experienced it in the Czech part of former Czechoslovakia.
The Soviet occupation in 1968 can be viewed as a boundary between
two different stages of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia—the stages
differing in their basic characteristics as well as in their day-to-day civil
atmosphere.
The first stage (1948-1968) can be characterized by the
government’s initial drastic attacks—arrests, imprisonments, and executions—on
all people and institutions. This stage
represented an attack on family as well an attack which threatened the family
both from within and from without. The internal
attack can be further analyzed as direct and indirect.
The external attack was that of dividing families, whose members
were taken to prison, work, or military camps.
Some of them were even executed.
Further, we must remind ourselves of the coercive evictions, which
caused the loss of broader family relations and of cultural background: adult family members were persecuted in
employment: the youth was persecuted in
higher education.
Meanwhile, the internal attack proceeded by way of a systematic
ideological indoctrination in the communist spirit, with a strong component of
militarism and atheism. Values and
attitudes undergirding the family were not respected; children who dared to
protest against the views presented by school were put in the pillory and
punished.
The internal attack included a brutal pressure in the educational
style used with little children. Of all
non-Soviet countries, our country witnessed the highest degree of
collectivization of education. Crèches
were recommended for infants of six months; the advantages of all-week child
care were praised; day-care became the rule for all preschoolers. Every school had to offer after-school child
care into the evening (in practice, children were kept sitting in the classroom
all that time).
What was more substantial, however, was the indirect attack on
family integrity, an attack directed against the traditional bond between
family and property and against the autonomy of families generally. The abolition of private property was more
thoroughgoing in our country than in any other non-Soviet country. All agricultural land was
collectivized: in this way, the whole
traditional culture based upon the familial relationship to the hereditary
property was liquidated. All production
units were turned over to the state—from big enterprises to the last bakery or
shoe repair-shop. Not only did control
of all tenement houses pass to the state, but so also did the governance of all
institutions in education and culture (where these institutions were not simply
abolished). The state also took over
the whole health-care system.
The liquidation of private property led to an unprecedented
dependency of every human being on the state and to a debilitating of all
family bonds—both immediate and extended.
Families not only lost the opportunity to pass on their
life-achievement—both material and cultural one—to the next generation, but
family associations became limited to the narrowest family circle so that the
values acquired in the family became very difficult to apply in broader
enterprises or charitable activities.
But the communist regime also warred against the desire for privacy, and
some punishments of political misbehavior were directed against family privacy.
On the other hand, families realized, they could resist the
government’s ideological and economic pressures by broadening family
functions. Though it was not the only
activity of this sort, I would first stress education. Families trying to resist the regime
educated their children themselves or arranged for private tutoring.
I am convinced that it was through this broadening of family
activities that families succeeded in retaining basic elements of civilization
and culture. By virtue of this success,
the nation was able to adapt to the standards of the free world very quickly.
Family—it has long been a space for freedom: freedom understood not as a simple sum of
rights, but as a place of responsibility to neighbor, to tradition, to
God. This space for freedom and
responsibility was more clearly seen when the family had a background of
further natural institutions, especially church communities. A moral consensus, even when limited to a
certain group of people, was a strong help in providing family care for
children and youth.
To conclude I would point out an important relationship between
totalitary regimes and morality.
Communist ideologues were always speaking against the hypocritical
bourgeois morality. The content of this
bourgeois hypocrisy or—on the other hand—of the “new, socialist morality” which
was to replace it, changed with time under shifting political imperatives.
The whole development had an U-shape: the communists began by casting doubt upon all traditional norms,
starting with those fostering respect for private property and finishing with
those inculcating sexual discipline.
This strategy was abandoned very quickly, being replaced step-by-step by
a quasi-puritan industriousness and inconspicuousness, albeit on lacking any
interior inspiration. By the sixties,
though the regime had finally realized that to some degree casting doubt on
moral norms can be politically useful, because the spread of egotism and
ruthlessness makes it easier to coerce people.
Specific ideas as to what is correct (= new) or wrong (= old)
conduct changed, but morality as such remained an enemy. The popular liberal myth that
totalitarianism was a moral tyranny is wrong.
Morality was and remains an enemy for any totalitary regime, because
morality is primarily metapolitical.
This is why the reconstruction of freedom in our country must go
hand in hand with the reconstruction of morality and with the reconstruction of
space for family, which is the first and deepest source of mutual human
responsibility and, in this way, the source of mature citizenship. |
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