The Presidential Library’s collection tells about family values in Russia

The Presidential Library features the collection Family and traditional family values in Russia as the basis of Russian statehood. The history of the development of the family institution in Russia from the times of Ancient Rus' to the present is based on materials from the library's collections. Considerable attention is paid to state policy to preserve and strengthen family values in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. Separately highlighted are the stories of providing assistance to the families of military and government employees. The collection also reveals the peculiarities of family relations of various peoples of Russia and issues of raising children.

This collection was formed in accordance with Decree of the President of Russia № 809 “About the approval of the Fundamentals of State Policy for the Preservation and Strengthening of Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values” which text was published on the library’s portal. Traditional values include not only life, dignity, human rights and freedoms, patriotism, but also “high moral ideals, strong family and creative work...”.

The Presidential Library’s portal features rare publications that tell about how marriages were concluded in Rus' and what customs are associated with it. For example, for residents of Arkhangelsk Region, the period of wedding preparations began in autumn. This is how Vasily Gladyshev describes it in his book Wedding Customs of Onezhans Before and Now (1913).

Alexander Famintsyn devoted an entire study to representatives of secular music in Russia in his book Skomorokhs in Rus' (1889).

However, in addition to wedding dances and games, during the matchmaking ritual among the peasants, as researcher Konstantin Lavrov writes in the manuscript “Ritual side of a common Russian wedding” (1899): “the bride necessarily treated everyone sitting around the table, bowed, and went to the stove behind the curtain and cried, considering herself doomed to separation from her former life...”

Absolutely exceptional ritual material was collected by the Russian ethnographer Alexander Tereshchenko in the book Way of life of the Russian People (1848), the second part of which is called “Weddings”. It spotlights the royal and grand-ducal weddings of the 17th–19th centuries, as well as the peculiarities of weddings by provinces: Vologda, Kostroma, Pskov.

Ivan Sakharov talks about the study of folk traditions in his book “Tales of the Russian People about the Family Life of Their Ancestors” (1857), which is avaialble in the electronic reading room. The author traveled through the Tula, Kaluga, Oryol, Ryazan and Moscow provinces, studying the traditions and life of the local residents.

The collection is based on research, journalistic materials, periodicals, archival documents, and visual sources. It includes three sections: “Family and traditional family values in modern Russia”, “History of family and traditional family values in Russia”, “Family photo portrait in Russian history”.