Moscow, the 1920s. After the civil war Lenin's New Economic Policy lets traders and small shops back, and the cafés fill with the new rich the party calls Nepmen. A divorce takes a form at the registry office; the other spouse can be told by postcard. Abortion is legal, the first such law anywhere. Mayakovsky writes slogans for the state shops, and Eisenstein films the battleship Potemkin.
The pressure
The Bolsheviks inherit a country where most peasants cannot read and the church ran marriage, wrecked by a civil war. NEP is a retreat to keep the cities fed. The family laws are an attack on the old household, which the party expects to wither away.
Which future
Lenin treats NEP as a breathing space. Alexandra Kollontai, the first woman in a Soviet government, argues for free unions and communal kitchens; artists set out to make a new person with posters and film. Literacy campaigners want every adult reading by the revolution's tenth birthday.
What survived
Stalin ends NEP in 1928 for collectivisation and the Five-Year Plan. In 1934 socialist realism becomes the only permitted style; in 1936 abortion is banned again and divorce made hard and costly. The reading stays: by 1939 most Soviet citizens can read, and read what the censor allows.
Whose story
Were the 1920s a freer road that Stalin closed, or the same dictatorship in a looser coat? Richard Stites found real experiments in living, from communes to new names for children; others point out that the secret police never left the room.