Category: Gender Panic

• The "Free Love" Communalism

  The "Free Love" Communalism theory was a cluster of anti-Bolshevik claims alleging that the Russian Revolution aimed not only to overthrow the old state but to abolish the family by "nationalizing" women and children, legalizing indiscriminate sexual access, and transferring child-rearing to collective institutions. These stories circulated widely in the United States and Europe after 1917, often through hostile press coverage, political hearings, refugee testimony, and anti-radical literature. The rumors drew some of their plausibility from real early Soviet family-law reforms involving civil marriage, easier divorce, equal status for children born outside marriage, and experiments in communal services. However, the more sensational claims about compulsory sexual sharing, "Bureaus of Free Love," and the formal state ownership of women and children became part of the mythology of anti-Bolshevik propaganda rather than established Soviet law.