![]() ![]() One emphasized the importance of obligation, the other of genuine feeling both assumed that a sincere engagement with marriage and family were integral parts of a Soviet man's life. What are we to make of this encounter? The Komsomol secretary wanted to defend “our Soviet women” against the “modern Don Juan” the young engineer protested that he was simply waiting to marry for love. 1 The secretary denounced this as insincere “theorizing about free love,” calling him an example of those “modern Don Juans” who must be “ respect for marriage and the family.” 2 But the engineer had not directly rejected the seriousness of marriage, and he justified his actions not with the argument that men had particular physical “needs” (more commonly reported in the 1920s), 3 but rather with this language of “true love.” The engineer claimed that he no longer loved her and could not possibly marry without love. After a relationship of several months with a female worker, he had broken up with her and refused their comrades’ advice to marry. As an example, he described the personal case of a new engineer, a young specialist recently arrived from Leningrad. ![]() At a 1959 youth conference in Sverdlovsk-45, a closed military-industrial town in the Ural Mountains, the Young Communist (Komsomol) secretary expressed particular concern about the “disorder in young families”-something he attributed to the “amoral behavior” of young men. ![]()
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