The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

Right after the 1917 Revolution, marriage was abandoned and the family was willed to wither away. Less than twenty years later, the family was officially redeemed and even consecrated as the “nucleus of Soviet society.”7 In the years immediately following the Revolution, homosexuality was tolerated (but, contrary to myth, not celebrated or even really accepted), but in 1934 it was recriminalized.8 As the pendulum swung back, divorce was made prohibitively difficult, and abortion, legal and common in the 1920s, was outlawed.9 Faced with a crisis of depopulation after the Second World War, the Soviet Union first made divorce even more difficult and then reversed direction, taking measures, instead, to encourage single motherhood by legitimizing, in effect, multiple relationships.10 In the mid-1950s, however, abortion was again legalized.