They envisioned a society in which communal dining halls, daycare centers, and public laundries would replace the unpaid labor of women in the home. Yet by 1936 legislation designed to liberate women from their legal and economic dependence had given way to increasingly conservative solutions aimed at strengthening traditional family ties and women's reproductive role. This book explains the reversal, focusing on how women, peasants, and orphans responded to Bolshevik attempts to remake the family, and how their opinions and experiences in turn were used by the state to meet its own needs.

    This is the final volume in his magisterial history of the Russian Revolution, covering the period from the outbreak of the Civil War in 1918 to Lenin's death in 1924.

    Moira Donald argues that the chief theoretician of German Marxism, Karl Kautsky, was a primary influence on Lenin and the Russian Social Democratic Party, and that only the revolution of 1917 severed the Bolsheviks from mainstream orthodox Marxism. Donald contends that Lenin's thought was neither original nor especially significant in the development of Marxism, but that his ability lay in adapting his ideas to fit his revolutionary strategy. She places Lenin's writings in their historical context, showing that they were written as individual pieces, each with a specific aim and often directed within the Party. Lenin was a tactician rather than a thinker, says Donald, and even those areas of his thought that seem most original—the party, the rule of the intelligentsia, and imperialism—reveal his significant debt to Kautsky. According to Donald, Lenin was not the only Russian Marxist to borrow ideas from Kautsky: Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, which was to prove crucial when it was taken up by the Bolsheviks in 1917, was also influenced by Kautsky's thought. Kautsky's relationship with the Russian Social Democratic Party has been widely underestimated because of the later split between them. Using a wide range of published and unpublished sources, Donald reveals how important Kautsky's role was in formulating the ideology of the Bolsheviks—the only effective revolutionary party in the socialist movement.