* FAMILY

Generally, a loner, tramp, hobo, and people without families were considered punished by fate and God. Having a family and children was as necessary as an integral and natural as to work.
    The most significant moral authority together holds the family. This authority usually belongs to the traditional head of the family. However, the combination of leadership and moral authority is optional. Sometimes, such power was granted to the grandfather, one of the sons, or the "big one" (wife), while the formal rule has always belonged to the man, husband, father, and parent.
     Kindness, tolerance, and mutual forgiveness of wrongs develop in a good family into mutual love despite the diversity of the family. Curses, envy, and selfishness were not only considered a sin. They were personally disadvantageous for any family member. Love and harmony among family members initiated loving relationships beyond home limits. It is in vain to expect respect for others, neighbours in the village, the township or the county from a man who does not like and does not respect his own family.
 Even inter-ethnic friendship has its source of love for family and kinship. To expect the baby to be ready to love, for example, his uncle or aunt, is absurd; his love does not extend beyond the mother initially. The moral sphere expands with the physical expansion of the scope of knowledge.
The child gradually starts to pity the mother and father, sisters and brothers, grandmother and grandfather; finally, the family feeling becomes more vigorous than it can apply to aunts and uncles. Then, a direct blood relationship indirectly becomes the foundation for kinship because a quarrelsome, not respecting their daughter's old woman cannot be a good mother-in-law, as a coarse daughter will never become a good sister-in-law.
Compassion and love for relatives by blood are prerequisites, if not for love, then at least for deep respect for distant relatives. Just on this boundary line originate the springs of altruism flowing beyond the home. A contentious and quarrelsome disposition as a character's property is considered a punishment of fate and evokes pity for their carriers. Active response to such manifestations of nature did not bring the family any good. Giving in, forgetting the insult, answering well, or remaining silent was necessary.
The formal hierarchy in a traditional Russian family, as in the village and township, does not always coincide with morals, even though there was a desire for such. Therefore, the children respected and obeyed even a weak father; even a not-very-lucky husband enjoyed the wife's confidence.
    When the time came, the father would give away tacit, self-evident seniority to even a not-so-bright son. The strictness of family relationships was based on traditional moral principles, not the tyranny which excludes tenderness toward children and care for the elderly.
 For centuries, gender relations evolved in the peasant family, for example, between a wife and her husband and between sisters and brothers. Particularly evident are these relationships appear at work. The woman rolling onto the cart a colossal log or waving a hammer in the foundry was as absurd as a spinning yard blacksmith or milking a cowman.
    Widows usually picked up a hatchet only because of the great need, and the man (too often widowed) sat down with the pail under the cow.
All the executive power in the household held a "big one" - woman, wife and mother. She was in charge, as they say, with the keys to the whole house; she kept track of hay, straw, flour and other food. All the cattle and all domestic livestock, except horses, were under a "big one" supervision. Under her watchful control was all that was associated with family meals: fasting, baking bread and cakes, a festive table and the daily table, handling laundry and clothing repair, textile, and bathhouse.
 Of course, she needed to do more of this work. Children who barely learned to stroll, along with the game, began to do something useful. "Big-one" was not shy regarding rewards and punishments in the household. Over the years, the title "big-one" quietly passed management to the son's wife.
`The host, the head of home and family, was primarily a mediator in the relationship of the farmstead and the land society, the family and the powers that be. He was responsible for significant agricultural activity, plowing, sowing, construction, logging and firewood. He and his older sons carried all the physical burden of peasant labour on his shoulders. The grandfather (the owner's father) often had not only advisory but the casting vote in all these cases.
    Apropos, in a respectable family, any crucial matters were decided at the family councils and openly in the presence of children. Only distant relatives (or infirm paupers, living in the house until their death) wisely did not participate in these councils.
The Peasant family has evolved over the centuries; the people selected its most necessary "dimensions" and properties. Thus, it could be destroyed or provided to be inferior if the family needed to be more complete. The same happened with the sizeable superfluous number when, for example, two or three sons got married. In the latter case, the family becomes, to put it in a modern way, "unmanageable," so a married son, if he had brothers, sought to secede from his father's household. The parish would cut him a piece of land from a public fund, and the house was built with help from all the family. Daughters, growing up, too, left their father's house. Moreover, each was trying not to marry before her elder sister. "You do not thresh each other sheaf,» - said about the unwritten law of this priority.
     Children in the family are considered to be the subject of general worship. The unloved child was a rarity in the Russian peasant life. With age, people who have not experienced parental and family love as a child become miserable. Widowhood and orphanhood have been considered tremendous and irreparable sorrow since ancient times. Offending an orphan or widow meant to make one of the most grievous sins. Growing up and standing on their feet, orphans would become ordinary people, but the wounds of the orphanage did not heal in the hearts of each of them.