[jtbayly]

Haga has a flagged comment pointing out the purpose of this policy, and I can't figure out why it is flagged, so I'll just quote what the article says:

"It encouraged workers to vacation with groups of relative strangers as opposed to their friends and families. They were all part of a collective and that umbrella united them. In the Soviet Union, after all, the collective—not the family—was the most important social unit."

Yes, the purpose of the policy was to dismantle the commitment to the family and establish commitment to "the collective." This is also why the children were sent elsewhere.

[lnsru]

Sure. And couple unknowns were KGB agents. So people learned very early what to say to strangers and what to keep for themselves.

[gdy]

That's just sovietophobic fiction.

I remember the slogan "Family is the unit of society" and childless people had to pay a special tax. Also infidelity in marriage was frowned upon and could negatively affect the career.

[aslfjiasf]

This has changed from early Soviet Union to late Soviet Union.

Early Soviet Union was much more radical and utopian, with ideas almost like in Plato's republic with the goal to getting to the point where the state rather than the parents would be raising children.

This was later abolished in the 30's and 40's and more traditional family values were encouraged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_in_the_Soviet_Union

https://www.jstor.org/stable/351982

[silversmith]

From the "I remember" I assume you lived through it. Were you per chance from "proper" soviet union, aka Moscow / Petrograd area? Because allegiance to the state and nothing else was the ideal in the "less correct" regions such as Baltics. It "got better" as time wore on, but especially after the occupation, every attempt was made to erode anything and everything else people might gather around. Forced ethnic mixing with deportations to faraway regions to dillute national identity. Pioneer movement and schoolwork that taught you to think of the union first, family second. Heck, even open encouragement to rat out your parents for "un-soviet" behavior.

It might be sovietophobic in the sense we would rather not have it repeat, to put mildly. But for the occupied regions, it was far from fiction.

[sangnoir]

> Forced ethnic mixing with deportations to faraway regions to dillute national identity.

Did you mean "to dilute regional/ethnic identity"? National identity cuts across regions and ethnicities.

[ido]

I guess they meant the national identities like Ukranian, Georgian, Uzbek, etc.

[thriftwy]

This is what gets peddled across the world, but for the most part, Soviet Union eas busy creating those national identities. Sometimes it took a break when it became too inconvenient, only to resume it later. Soviet Union is who created these national states in the first place. There were no Georgia and no Uzbekistan before the USSR. In both cases there were a bunch of unaligned tribes or much smaller principalities with no real national identity.

[gdy]

You are right about national policy of the early Soviet Union which was promoting national identities of people of former Russian Empire [0] but you are definitely wrong about Georgia [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Georgia

[orbital-decay]

Unaligned tribes? That's... quite a thing to claim, especially about Georgia which had unified national monarchy and long dynasties since Middle Ages, only falling to endless external conquests due to being located between several large parts of the world.

[gdy]

"Forced ethnic mixing"

Yeah, I've heard you prefer not to mix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Estonia#Eston...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Latvia#Arajs_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Lithuania#Par...

[badpun]

> That's just sovietophobic fiction.

From what I've read, the dismantling of families was really implemented in the 1920s and perhaps 1930s. That's when a kid [1] who ratted on his own father (likely sent him to Gulags) was glorified as a huge Hero of Socialism. After that period though, Communism was gradually less about implementing its distopian ideology and more about naked power of people on top, so the destruction of families was abandoned.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov

[gdy]

Civil wars split families, yes.

[HideousKojima]

>That's just sovietophobic fiction.

Or it's just believing Marx when he wrote this in the Communist Manifesto:

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.