Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival 1900-1950 review

'. Photograph: Rex Features

In 1933 Joseph Goebbels quarrelled with the mother of Horst Wessel. SA-Sturmfhrer Wessel, murdered three years previously, was the hero of a Nazi cult. His mother wanted a place in the ceremonies commemorating his martyrdom. Goebbels found her arrogance intolerable. Our dead belong to the nation, he wrote.

So, supposedly, did the living. Theonly people who still have aprivate life in Germany are those whoare asleep, boasted a Nazi official. As Paul Ginsborg points out in this original and illuminating book, this was wrong on two counts: for one thing, even while sleeping, people went on dreaming about the regime; for another, private life, the life of the family, was never entirely extinguished.

The government could suck children out of their homes, recruiting them forthe Hitlerjugend or the League of German Girls. It could redefine the marriage bed as a breeding ground for German soldiers. It could stir up sons against their fathers. (Hitler said: When an opponent tells me I will not come over to your side, I calmly reply, Your child belongs to me already.) But families, as each of the six dictatorships covered in this book would discover, are protean and ultimately indispensable entities. Their relationships with the state, under the revolutionary or dictatorial regimes here examined, were troubled in diverse and often lethal ways, but even in the Soviet Gulag, as Ginsborg reminds us, people found partners and had children. True, those children who survived weresent to state orphanages at the age of two, but their mothers fought bitterly to keep them. Even when the establishment of a family was cruelly prohibited, the yearning for one wasineradicable.

This would have surprised Alexandra Kollontai. Ginsborg, adept at bringing the general to life by zooming in on the particular, chooses a prominent but sidelined individual (Marinetti, the frontman of Futurism, for fascist Italy; female journalists Halide Edib for Kemalist Turkey, the nation created byMustafa Kemal; and Margarita Nelken for civil war Spain) as a way into writing about his chosen countries in crisis. Kollontai, the only woman onLenins Council of Commissars, comes first.

For Kollontai, bourgeois marriage was an oppressive institution and romantic love dangerous and devouring. In 1893, at the age of 21, she rebelled against her family of origin, marrying against her parents wishes. Five years later she abandoned her new family. Visiting a textile factory, she had seen that for its 12,000 workershome life meant a squalid existence, without comfort or privacy, in vast, foul-smelling dormitories. Thenceforward, she declared, she would dedicate herself to the working class and to womens rights. To that end she left her husband (permanently) and her little son, Misha (for more than a year).

By 1917, in common with many of her fellow Bolsheviks, Kollontai looked forward to a time when the family would wither into obsolescence, and communal living would become the norm. Cooking, mending and laundry would be collectivised. Monogamous marriage would be replaced by the rule of winged Eros, under whose aegis awoman holds out her hand to her chosen one and goes away for several weeks to drink from the cup of loves joy ... When the cup is empty she throws it away without regret and bitterness. And again to work. Sexual and familial ties would be secondary: everyones first loyalty would be to the collective. Even parental love would become communal. The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine ... there are only our children, the children of Russias communist workers.

The vision was never realised. Certainly, in the years following the revolution, Russian families were destroyed by war, famine and terror but the consequences were not emancipating, but terrible. Ginsborg quotes the recollections of an official who heard, on a railway station at night, during the famine of 1921, a thin, weak, remote wailing emanating froma great mass of grey rags. He realised that he was looking at some 3,000 children, homeless and starving, too weak to move. The promised free childcare and education, the welfare for those unable to work, were neverforthcoming.

Under the Bolsheviks, what Ginsborg calls the hyperactive public sphere encroached brutally on what had once been the private realm, but families stubbornly, in defiance of dogma continued to exist.

Ginsborg, a subtle thinker alive to nuance, declares himself suspicious ofthe term totalitarianism, which suggestsevery tyranny resembles every other one. Eschewing Eurocentrism, he takes as one of his case studies Kemalist Turkey. There, in contrast to Russian collectivism, the nuclear family was protected and praised as the site of modernity and emancipation. For women whose mothers had been obliged to tolerate their husbands polygamy, to submit patiently to orders from their mothers-in-law, and to leave the patriarchal home only seldom, and veiled, the nuclear bourgeois family of which the Young Turks approved seemed exhilaratingly liberated. They bared their heads, if shyly.

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Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival 1900-1950 review