A friend in the Netherlands is a little crazy and is now head of a household (the term is still vaguely sensible there) with four pre-K children. Here’s his report:
Things are going surprisingly well. It’s actually possible to have a ton of kids running around just like our forebears did. The neighbor’s kid shows up everyday to help out.
Me: “Just for a few hours? What do you pay for that, out of curiosity? Here I don’t think you can get anyone decent for less than $25/hr and probably $30/hr if you wanted to lure a high school kid away from obsessive college prep. How old is your helper?”
we pay E10 per hour. She’s still in high school. We don’t need more than a few hours. In the morning, they all go to the child care which is a few minutes walk from here and they come back at 6pm. She’s very young, though. I think 15 or something.
Me: 15 isn’t young. Stalin’s girlfriend when he was 35 and in Siberian exile was 14. Maybe she was 13.
I directed his attention to “Stalin and his lover aged 13” (The Standard, 2010):
In March 1914 Josef Stalin – a Georgian cobbler’s son known to friends as Soso and comrades as Koba – was sentenced for his revolutionary activities by the Tsar to exile close to the Arctic Circle in a tiny hamlet named Kureika.
The place was a freezing hellhole, an isolated twilight world cut off from humanity in winter by the daylong darkness.
In Kureika, only the reindeer, snowfoxes and Tungus indigenous tribesmen could really function in deep midwinter. Everyone wore reindeer fur.
The hamlet contained 67 villagers – 38 men and 29 women – all packed into just eight ramshackle izbas or wooden peasant shacks.
Among them were seven orphans from the same family – the Pereprygins – of whom the youngest was 13-year-old Lidia.
She immediately noticed Stalin, not just because of his good looks but also because he was hopelessly underdressed with only a light coat.
Before long, he was sporting the full local outfit – from boots to hat – of reindeer fur, all of it provided by Lidia Pereprygina.
Stalin in those days was slim, attractive, charming, an accomplished poet and educated in the priesthood, but also a pitiless Marxist terrorist and brutal gangster boss – a Red Godfather who had funded Lenin’s Bolsheviks with a series of audaciously bloody acts of bank robbery, piracy and racketeering.
Some time in the early summer of 1914, the 35-year-old Stalin embarked on an affair with Lidia.
While not admitting to anything explicit in her memoirs, we catch a glimpse in them of Stalin and Lidia together staggering from drinking bout to drinking bout, because she writes of their drunken dancing and singsongs: “In his spare time, Stalin like to go to evening dances – he could be very jolly too. He loved to sing and dance.”
Separately, today is the anniversary of Josef Stalin’s death in 1953. Imagine the disappointment of people who were alive 72 years ago and thought that they’d seen the last of Stalin-style dictatorship reading the today’s New York Times and learning that an even worse dictator has seized control of the U.S.
Circling back to the Netherlands and my friend, I think that all of the doom stories coming out of Europe still leave room for us to admit that most European countries provide a lot more support for the traditional nuclear family. Marrying the government in Europe leads to a much crummier lifestyle than here (admittedly, working at the median wage in Europe does too!). All of the family court profiteering that works so well here (e.g., having sex with an already-married high-income person, divorcing a medium-income spouse, etc.) leads to just a subsistence income there. The U.S. provides economic incentives for parents of young children to split up (or never get together to begin with) while Europe mostly provides economic incentives for parents of young children to stay together and, as a consequence, the traditional two-biological-parent household is more common in Europe (some stats). At this point, most of Europe is a terrible place to make money, obviously, (the whole continent will be worth less than NVIDIA if present trends continue?) but for someone who already has money and wants to spend a summer over there with a 10 Euro/hour helper maybe it makes sense?
Wake me up when our dashing Mars conquerors and baby boom champions enact at least a paid maternity leave.
As for Stalin, rather than rehashing apocrypha, I recommend visiting Russia and checking out state-run kindergartens that were set up during that monster’s rule. Compare them to the most expensive ones in the USA and weep.