The Presidential Library marking the Day of Family, Love and Fidelity

On July 8, Russia celebrates the Day of Family, Love and Fidelity. This is a holiday dedicated to family values.

This is a young holiday and it received its official status only in 2022, when President of Russia Vladimir Putin signed the Decree On the Day of Family, Love and Fidelity. The text of the document says that the holiday is established "in order to preserve traditional family values and spiritual and moral education of children and youth".

At present, the Presidential Library is forming a major electronic collection "Family and traditional family values in Russia as the basis of Russian statehood". The collection will be presented on the institution’s portal at the end of August 2023, and users from anywhere in the world will be able to see it. The collection will include official documents, archival and visual materials, periodicals, monographs and abstracts of dissertations that spotlight the history of the development of the institution of the traditional family and state policy aimed at strengthening the family in Russia since the formation of the Old Russian state to the present.

Today, a lot of materials are available on the Presidential Library’s portal that tell about the meaning of the family, its role in society, methods of support and strengthening, and attitudes towards the concept of the family in different periods of time.

The union of the patrons of the family and marriage of the holy saints Peter and Fevronia of Murom is very significant. “They lived happily ever after and died on the same day”, - it is said about this holy couple. They gave their descendants an example of such mutual marital love and devotion that in 1547 they were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. Since that time, believers have been turning to them with requests for well-being in the family. The story of the life of Peter and Fevronia is illustrated in the rare edition of 1870 "New relations of the Murom legend about Peter and Fevronia and the saga of Ragnar Lodbrok", available in the Presidential Library.

The question of when and where the family came from has always concerned scientists. Back in the 5th century BC Chinese philosopher Confucius said that "the state is a big family, and the family is a small state, and it is based on love".

“The primary form of the family is considered to be “patriarchal” - the form in which the father is the head of the family and the origin is from him. In accordance with this view, the family in general was the first form of human unity, from which the rest developed only later, ”writes the famous economist, historian and publicist Karl Kautsky in his large-scale research work The Emergence of Marriage and the Family (1895).

With the formation of society and the state, laws and rules began to appear that regulate various aspects of the institution of marriage and the family. So, from Alexander Smirnov’s book Folk Ways of Marrying of 1878, we learn that one of the requirements for creating a family was the presence of public recognition: “Matrimonial cohabitation began to be defined in the popular mind as an ethical institution, and the relationship of spouses to strangers and to each other receive the nature of rights and obligations”.

Yakov Abramov's book Marriage and Family (1900) says what the personal relations of spouses should be according to civil law, while "the husband is obliged to love his wife as his own body, to excuse her shortcomings and alleviate her infirmities...The wife is obliged to obey her husband to his own, as the head of the family, to abide towards him in love, reverence and in unlimited obedience”.

After the revolution, views on the relationship between men and women changed dramatically. In 1926, Emelyan Yaroslavsky, in his report Morals and Life of the Proletariat in the Transitional Period, emphasizes that a new type of family is being born, where two comrades jointly participate in the socialist accumulation of moral values and are a cell of society on which the state rests, primarily in demographic terms.

Today, state policy is aimed at preserving, strengthening and promoting traditional family values. This is one of the goals of the Decree On Approving the Fundamentals of State Policy for the Preservation and Strengthening of Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values, which President of Russia Vladimir Putin signed on November 9, 2022.