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I would like to thank Atina Grossmann, Carola Sachse, and Mary Nolan, as well as the anonymous reader for Central European History, for their comments and suggestions.
Soviet socialism shared with its utopian socialist predecessors a critique of the conventional family and its household economy.1 Marx and Engels asserted that women's emancipation would follow the abolition of private property, allowing the family to be a union of individuals within which relations between the sexes would be "a purely private affair."2 Building on this legacy, Lenin imagined a future when unpaid housework and child care would be replaced by communal dining rooms, nurseries, kindergartens, and other industries. The issue was so central to the revolutionary program that the Bolsheviks published decrees establishing civil marriage and divorce soon after the October Revolution, in December 1917. These first steps were intended to replace Russia's family laws with a new legal framework that would encourage more egalitarian sexual and social relations. A complete Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship was ratified by the Central Executive Committee a year later, in October 1918.3 The code established a radical new doctrine based on individual rights and gender equality, but it also preserved marriage registration, alimony, child support, and other transitional provisions thought to be unnecessary after the triumph of socialism. Soviet debates about the relative merits of unfettered sexuality and the protection of women and children thus resonated with long-standing tensions in the history of socialism.
By locating Soviet family life in the context of utopian notions about the liberation of sex from the household economy, this essay will explore Stalin-era family policy as the continuation of a radical revolutionary tradition. Following Nicholas Timasheff, many scholars have understood the Stalin years as a conservative "retreat" that drove utopian ideas about sexual equality out of official discourse, sometimes asserting sexual repression as a hallmark of totalitarianism.4 In her groundbreaking study of early Soviet family policy, Wendy Goldman has used the language of retreat to explain that the family was resurrected as a solution to child homelessness (bezprizornost') "because it was the one institution that could feed, clothe, and socialize a child at almost no cost to the state."