Abstract
This paper examines the experience of the Soviet Union just after the Revolution of 1917 when there were official, although ambiguous and inconsistent, efforts to open up lifestyle options. These efforts were based in Marxian theory, especially Engels' work,The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), but most of the revolutionary Bolsheviks were not enthusiastic about activism in this area. The views of Marx and Engels, Lenin, and Aleksandra Kollontai (the leading Bolshevik exponent of lifestyle freedom), and the implications of their own lifestyles, are discussed in this paper as they interacted to form early Soviet family policy. The utopian vision of Kollontai was ousted from the official sphere with the ascendancy of Stalin in the USSR, and the discussion of the fate of these efforts provides the basis for delineating six dilemmas in developing ideology and policy in the area of the family and alternative lifestyles.
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