Sex and the Early Soviet Union

One of the earliest fruits of the Communist Revolution in Russia was the so-called "emancipation of women".

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/59/emancipation.html

The above link (from the Fourth Internationalist Communist League) discusses the early changes in Soviet law, from a Trotskyite perspective.  According to our article:

"Just over a month after the revolution, two decrees established civil marriage and allowed for divorce at the request of either partner, accomplishing far more than the pre-revolutionary Ministry of Justice, progressive journalists, feminists and the Duma had ever even attempted. Divorces soared in the following period. A complete Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship, ratified in October 1918 by the state governing body, the Central Executive Committee (CEC), swept away centuries of patriarchal and ecclesiastical power, and established a new doctrine based on individual rights and the equality of the sexes."

But wait, there is more.  The adoption of contract marriage, no-fault divorce and civil marriage (thereby removing the Orthodox Church and replacing it with the totalitarian State) was not the only innovation after the Communist revolution:

"The Bolsheviks also abolished all laws against homosexual acts and other consensual sexual activity. The Bolshevik position was explained in a pamphlet by Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, The Sexual Revolution in Russia (1923):

Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle:

It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured, and no one’s interests are encroached upon.

—quoted in John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935) (New York: Times Change Press, 1974)" 

Communism, as initially manifest in the revolution, involved an exchange of economic freedoms, and the embrace of a totalitarian, centralizing state, but promised its citizens a total sexual freedom, provided no one is injured, and freed citizens from the tyranny of traditional religious organizations in the domain of marriage and sexuality.

After the liberation came the demands.  Because of inequalities between men and women, the Soviet civil code began requiring alimony for disabled ex-spouses.  According to the Fourth International, although these laws were on their face neutral, in application jurists favored the women and children. "In one case, a judge split child support three ways, because the mother had been sleeping with three different men."

These legal innovations were insufficient for the "social justice warriors" of their time, who celebrated the socialist ideal of Free Love, a society based on impermanent, random hook-ups, where love and commitment were forever abandoned to history.  Some criticized compulsory monogamy, and called for the abolition of marriage altogether.  This faction ultimately lost due to the need to provide support for women and children.  However, even the promulgators of this Code agreed with the sentiments of Free Love, and looked forward to a time when the State was sufficient to support all, and marriage could be finally abandoned, once and for all.  Then, every person would be completely free to manifest their sexuality however they chose.

But no-fault divorce, alimony, and legalization of homosexuality were not enough for our revolutionary reformers.  The 1918 Labor code provided for paid 30-minute breaks every three hours so that nursing mothers could breast feed.  The new Soviet laws also provided for fully paid maternity leave for eight weeks, nursing breaks, and factory rest facilities, free pre- and post-natal care, and cash allowances.  Women were often commonly accorded menstrual leave.

In 1920, more Communist progress transpired, in the form of free abortion on demand.  Unfortunately, the promise of this law was limited by the amount of State resources available to furnish this need.  Many women in the countryside suffered from unsafe and unsanitary abortion care.  Although contraception was lawfully available, access to rubber supplies were limited, so abortion became the primary form of contraception in this New Order of Humanity.

Today, we don't associate Communism with these kinds of sexual liberty.  In fact, all these reforms were for the most part reversed by Stalin by 1936.  Divorce was restricted.  Homosexuality outlawed.  Motherhood celebrated, and large families encouraged, but on Stalin's terms, not on the basis of tradition or Orthodox Christianity.  Cynically, we might say that sexual liberation is a tool of the totalitarian state used to destroy the power of the family and organized religion, which might provide a nexus of resistance against it.  Harness the power of sexual passion, and the resentments of women, in order to destroy those elements of society which might oppose the State.  However, there are other, pragmatic, explanations.  These policies caused a demographic slide in the population, which threatened Stalin's plans for militarization and centralization of Soviet economy.  There can be no territory without boots on the ground to occupy it.  Likewise, increasing numbers of orphaned children, falling into dependence on the State (essentially post-natal abortions) provided an economic burden that the developing Soviet Union could not afford.  A government intent on building a war machine will revert to a focus on industrial production and the virtues of motherhood out of necessity.
 

I find it interesting that there is a lack of curiosity in the West about the Communist system, which supported the ideals of Free Love and atheism.  These Bolsheviks of the 1920's would have a favored place at the table in today's contemporary discussions of divorce, marriage, abortion, and the role of religion in society.  Moreover, Eastern Europe underwent a decades long experiment to create a new man, a new citizen that had thrown off the yoke of tradition and religion and replaced it with a faith in reason and centralized planning.  While the West's focus on Communism has mostly been directed at Socialist economics, a new Socialist culture was emerging in places like the USSR.  While our own economic system no way resembles Communism, our own cultural system increasingly models itself on doctrines and ideas derivative from these early Communist revolutionaries.  As we Americans boldly construct our New Person, one free of ancient traditions and socially constructed notions of gender, perhaps we should look more closely at the historical effect of these policies in the former Communist block, specifically at impacts on demographics and public health?  Do we have any reason to believe that the long-term consequences will be any different here?

Many in the West regard the conservative attitudes of the former Eastern Block as backwards, yet the Eastern Block was atheistic and steeped in modern egalitarian rhetoric generations before the West.  The social justice warriors landed in Moscow in 1917, and began reconstructing the cultural order.  In contrast, the West had to wait to the 1960's for our liberation, when Western Academics began indoctrinating our youth with the Cultural Marxist agenda of the Frankfurt School.  Gay rights, liberal feminism, political correctness, ethnic supremacy for minority groups, these ideas all descended on the West through the works of intellectuals like Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer, and Fromm.  Is it possible that the East is not in fact behind us but ahead of us?  Having witnessed the demographic and public health disaster that decades of atheism and "social liberalism" creates, is it possible that the East rejects these ideas for a good reason?