# Snokhachestvo

Traditional practice until the beginning of the XX century 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. Finally as “snokhachestvo” it was formed after Christianization and as such it became especially widespread in the Russian Empire in the XVIII-XIX 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. Sexual intercourse between the head of a peasant family and his daughter-in-law was in fact a common aspect of life in a patriarchal family. “Nowhere, it seems, except in Russia,” wrote V.D. Nabokov, ”is there at least one kind of incest which has acquired the character of an almost normal domestic phenomenon. Although this form of incest was condemned by enlightened society, it was not considered a serious offense by the peasants.
The reasons for cohabitation varied from early marriages and simple sexual attraction of the father-in-law to the daughter-in-law to economic reasons (seasonal work of the married son, when the daughter-in-law was unprotected and forced to cohabit with her father-in-law). But the main sources of this phenomenon were the unrestricted power of the and the almost complete powerless position of women in the family.
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.
Russian ethnographer and fiction writer S. 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. Ethnographer M. N. Kharuzin wrote a large work devoted to various aspects of life of the Don Cossacks, including attention to snokhachestvo: Among the Don Cossacks, marriages were often arranged at the will of the parents. According to the ethnographer, in some cases (usually when the bride was “20 years old or older” and the groom much younger), the fathers of the grooms chose a bride “of course, one that they themselves liked”, and after the wedding began to take care of her: “The attention of the master and the complete freedom given by him flatter of the daughter-in-law”.
In a large peasant family, as a rule, there were several families of different generations, and the head of the family, the Bolshak, usually had great power over all the households. Many researchers consider snokhachestvo to be an ingrained folk custom with historical roots, when they were looking for a wife for their son not for a wife for a son, but, first of all, for a free worker. Peasants, when marrying off their daughters, were guided more by economic motives than by emotions: only those who were mature enough and possessed physical strength could cope with heavy field work, caring for livestock, and many household trades.
In the Russian countryside in the second half of the 19th century, snokhachestvo was quite common and was not considered a crime against peace by customary law, snokhachestvo was interpreted by peasants, first of all, as a sin. While according to Russian law, snokhachestvo as a form of adultery was a criminal offense, equated to incest and punishable by “exile” to Tomsk or Tobolsk provinces, or consignment to correctional detention wards”. In European Russia, snokhachestvo led to serious crimes. The Russian ethnographer-belletrist S. V. Maximov 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. It is an immoral phenomenon that gives rise to new immoral actions - new adulteries. Snokhachestvo led to serious consequences: quarrels, difficult life of the wife in the family, divorce (which was quite rare in the village), division of movable and immovable property. And moreover, snogging led to serious crimes: rape, incest, abortion and even murder. Historian and ethnographer N. A. Kostrov claimed that in Tomsk province during 25 years (1836-1861) “there were 103 cases of murder of a husband by his wife or wife by her husband before the courts; consequently, for every year there are 4 cases”. By the time of Kharuzin's research, i.e. in the 1880s, it often happened that a newlywed woman, faced with the molestations of her father-in-law, or wishing to stop living together with a husband imposed by her parents, was ready to fight back and, threatening her father-in-law with criminal responsibility, left the new family. “Not infrequently, snokhachestvo served as a pretext for the murder of the snokhach, committed either by his wife or by his own son.” The quieter wives preferred not to notice their husbands' snobbery, because “you cannot help grief by swearing and shouting”.
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.
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."
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." 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."
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." With the transition to a nuclear family and the growing self-consciousness of peasant women. This form of sexual slavery became obsolete. In the absence of means of protection, the birth rate in the village fairly objectively reflected the periods when peasants, in accordance with the requirements of the Orthodox Church, abstained from sexual intimacy. Prostitution did not exist in the village, but in every village there were a few women of available behavior. It should not be forgotten that the prostitutes who prostituted in the cities were mostly yesterday's peasant women. Sexual inversions were not widespread in the rural environment due to the prohibition contained in church and civil law, as well as due to the negative attitude of public opinion in the village of the village public opinion.

## Snokhachestvo in the arts

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.