Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism

by Ed West

Britain was quite late catching on with this whole ‘sex’ business, the Russians having got there forty-five years earlier in 1918. Among the first communist decrees were ‘On the abolition of marriage’ and ‘On civil partnership, children and ownership’, removing the differences between legitimate and illegitimate children, downgrading marriage and encouraging sexual freedom. There were ‘anti-shame’ demonstrations involving a mixture of exhibitionists and people whose main focus was intense hatred of Christian traditionalists. Young men loved it, obviously, and within a short space of time the country had three hundred thousand bezprizorni, homeless children abandoned by parents and forced to live in Russian state institutions – which, you’ll be surprised to learn, weren’t huge fun.16 Eventually, however, the Soviets decided to turn the clock back, sexual shame returned, homosexuality was recriminalised in 1934 and abortion banned again two years later.