Category: Russian Revolution

• 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.

• The "Sisson Documents"

  The Sisson Documents were a set of papers publicized in 1918 that purported to prove Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders were acting as paid agents of the German General Staff during World War I. The documents were obtained by Edgar Sisson, a representative of the U.S. Committee on Public Information, and circulated in the United States as evidence of a German-Bolshevik conspiracy. They were widely cited in anti-Bolshevik and anti-radical propaganda during the closing phase of the war and the early Red Scare. Later scholarly analysis, most notably George F. Kennan’s 1956 study, concluded that the documents were forgeries, though the wider historical question of German assistance to revolutionary actors in Russia remained separate from the authenticity of the documents themselves.