Political structures and traditional family structures

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European-oriented people, especially from amongst the rich, seemed to have European-style families. Or urban people in the west of Russia.

Are there many Russian novels which depict, in a sociological sense, a typical peasant family? Maxim Gorky wrote about the “working classes.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if Turkic or Mongol-oriented people had different family structures.

My mixed Polish-Russian family part was urban, which probably contributed to it being more Western-style.

Trying to research historical peasant family structures, I found
https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/ ... russia.pdf
that gave more ideas about geographical differences.

Russian households are depicted as indeed either permanently multi-unit or alternating between multi-unit and single-unit, the latter growing in numbers after abolishing serfdom.

https://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-de ... age-53.htm
This gave me an idea of where the geographical line between single-unit (nuclear family, notably to this research: with servants) and multi-unit ("communal") family prevalence was drawn.
It was exactly Poland-Lithuania, with "Ruthenian" parts having indeed more communal family structure.

It looks like the geographical transition from "Western style" to "Asian style" households was diffused and spanned roughly from Western Poland to Western Russia - though, in East Poland-Lithiania (today Belarus and Ukraine), nuclear families still constitued around half of peasant households.

The data in the research on Poland-Lithuania shows an interesting thing about traditional Western-style households: nuclear families very often had servants, resulting in several adults sharing a single house in a strict hierarchy - only outside of blood relations.

I believe communism might have forced the existence of more “nuclear” type families, at least in urban areas, owing to the placement of families within small flats in big apartment buildings.

I think industrialisation generally pushed towards nuclear families, everywhere.

Note that pre-industrial nuclear families regularily hired servants, which makes them something different than today's nuclear families.

The more I read it, the more evidence I see for family structure being something much more flexible and capable of evolving than the OP articles would suggest - i.e. in the article I'm reading right now, they claim a shift from nuclear to communal households in Belarus happened between 16th and 18th centuries. So it's entirely possible political realities influence family structure not any less than vice versa.