Snokhachestvo

Traditional practice^[1] until the beginning of the 20th century^[2] in the Russian Empire, snokhachestvo (Russian: снохачество) referred to sexual relations between a pater familias (bolshak) of a Russian peasant household (dvor) and his daughter-in-law (snokha) during the minority or absence of his son.

Presumably this practice was originally (before Christianization) a polyandrous union in which one woman had two husbands, with one of these husbands being the son of the second.^[3] Finally as “snokhachestvo" it was formed after Christianization^[4] and as such it became especially widespread in the Russian Empire in the 18th–19th centuries, due to a whole set of circumstances, including the conscription of young peasants and the withdrawal, when young people went to work in the cities and left their wives at home in the village. Some historians have argued that sexual relations between the head of a peasant household and his daughter-in-law were not an exceptional occurrence within the patriarchal extended family.

Ethnographer P. M. Bogaevsky describes snokhachestvo as uncommon among Sarapul peasants and not regarded as a typical or widespread practice, noting that it was only occasionally justified by reference to the Bible.^[5]

With a view to attracting additional workers to the household, marriages in rural Russia were frequently contracted when the groom was six or seven years old. During her husband's minority, the bride often had to tolerate advances of her assertive father-in-law. For example, in the middle of the 19th century in Tambov Governorate, 12–13-year-old boys were often married to 16–17-year-old girls. The boys' fathers used to arrange such marriages to take advantage of their sons' lack of experience. Snokhachestvo entailed conflicts in the family and put moral pressure on the mother-in-law, who usually treated her son's wife as a rival for her own husband's affections.

Sergey V. Maksimov comes to the conclusion that "incest" (including in-laws) is common among the peasant class, but especially strong among former military villagers and Don Cossacks.^[6]

Ethnographer M. N. Kharuzin devoted a substantial study to various aspects of Don Cossack life, including the practice of snokhachestvo. Among the Don Cossacks, marriages were often arranged by the parents. Kharuzin noted that among Old Believer Don Cossacks, fathers sometimes married their sons at a very young age to women aged about twenty or older, ostensibly to bring a worker into the household. In such cases, the bride was chosen “of course, one that he himself liked” and after the wedding began paying her court. “The attention of the head of the household and the full freedom he granted would flatter the daughter-in-law’s vanity.” By the 1880s, ethnographic accounts suggest that attitudes toward such practices were changing: ethnographer M. N. Kharuzin recorded complaints from older Cossack men who claimed that young brides sometimes invoked accusations of improper conduct by a father-in-law in order to leave an arranged marriage. According to their account, a bride who wished to depart shortly after the wedding might allege harassment, even where none had occurred. As men from the Chernyshevskaya stanitsa reportedly told Kharuzin: “A girl might fall for someone else before the wedding, and three days after it, she leaves. And then the only excuse the women give is, ‘The father-in-law has been making advances,’ even though he may not have done anything.” In some cases, snokhachestvo led to the murder of the father-in-law, committed either by his wife or by his own son. According to Cossack informants, more submissive wives, noticing their husband's illicit conduct toward the daughter-in-law, sometimes pretended not to see anything, believing that “grief cannot be helped by swearing and shouting.”^[7]

According to historian S. G. Fedorov, one of the explanations of snokhachestvo is connected with the structure of the traditional peasant household. In large peasant families, several nuclear families of different generations usually lived together under the authority of the bolshak, the head of the household. He notes that some researchers interpret snokhachestvo as a customary practice with historical roots, arguing that in certain cases a bride was sought not only as a wife for the son but also as an additional worker for the household.^[8]

Natalia Pushkareva, by contrast, links the phenomenon more specifically to demographic factors. She argues that peasant marriages were often arranged primarily for economic reasons and that significant age disparities between spouses were not uncommon. Such asymmetries, she suggests, could contribute to the spread of snokhachestvo, though they did not automatically result in it.^[9]

The Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary notes that peasants generally regarded snokhachestvo as a crime, though not a particularly serious one, as reflected in volost court decisions; however, under Russian law it was classified as a criminal offense, equated with incest and punishable by exile to the Tomsk or Tobolsk governorates or by confinement in correctional detention wards.^[10] In European Russia, snokhachestvo led to serious crimes. Sergey V. Maksimov comes to the conclusion that snokhachestvo in its essence is not only a criminal act for which one is exiled to Siberia, it is an immoral phenomenon that gives rise to new immoral actions – new adulteries.^[11] Ethnographer N. A. Kostrov notes that in the Tomsk Governorate only seven court cases of snokhachestvo were recorded between 1836 and 1861, all involving coercion, suggesting that the practice was relatively rare or often concealed.^[12]

There is still a debate in historical scholarship as to whether peasant lynching was a norm of customary law, or whether it was an extraordinary measure that went beyond this law. In any case, peasant vigilante justice was very often bypassed by snokhachestvo due to the dominance of the large patriarchal family in the village, which was the economic and spiritual core of the rural world.^[11]

Snokhachestvo was considered incestuous by the Russian Orthodox Church and unseemly by the obshchina, the rural community. Legally it was considered a form of rape and was punished with fifteen to twenty lashes. Understandably, cases of snokhachestvo were not publicized and the crime remained latent, making it difficult to assess its true extent in the Russian Empire.

One of the first Russian writers to decry snokhachestvo, describing it as a form of "sexual debasement", was Alexander Radishchev, who saw it as an outgrowth of Russian serfdom. In the 19th century, its resurgence was fueled by obligatory conscription and "the seasonal departure of young men for work outside the village."^[13]

Snokhachestvo remained relatively widespread even after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, a jurist, resented the fact that "nowhere it seems, except Russia, has at least one form of incest assumed the character of an almost normal everyday occurrence, designated by the appropriate technical term."^[13] The Narodnik writer Gleb Uspensky, while deploring the plight of young peasant women, sympathized with "the emotional and physical needs of the mature peasant man."^[14]

The condescending attitude of the villagers to snokhachestvo was due to the legacy of patriarchal life and the authority of the Bolshak in the peasant family. In the provinces, for example, "in the Oryol province the attitude towards daughter-in-law relations was tolerant." In the villages of Konevka and Melovoe, peasants even said that this "has been the practice for a long time, not by them, but by their elders." As the patriarchal peasant household continued to disintegrate and land divisions became more common, snokhachestvo—already a vestigial phenomenon by the late 19th century—began to disappear altogether. The small, nuclear family became predominant in the village, with married sons and their parents living separately, and under such conditions, snokhachestvo no longer had any place.^[15][16]

There are sexual connotations in the relationship between Katerina and her father-in-law in Shostakovich's 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, but not in the 1865 story it is based upon.

In 1927, Olga Preobrazhenskaia, "the leading woman director of [Soviet] fiction films in the twenties", and her co-director, Ivan Pravov, released a film condemning snokhachestvo. Titled The Peasant Women of Ryazan (in Russian, Baby ryazanskie), the silent film is about the rape and pregnancy of a woman whose husband is away in World War I. The rapist is her father-in-law, and the woman, overcome by shame, drowns herself when her husband returns from battle.^[17]

• Baby ryazanskie at IMDb