From its very inception, wracked by World War I and a bloody Civil War, the Soviet Union was an inauspicious stage for forging the communist utopia envisioned by Karl Marx. The improbable triumph of the Bolsheviks amidt the chaos of 1917 left the revolutionaries administering the largest contiguous state in the world armed with powerful Marxist critiques of capitalism but with little guidance on how to build a communist society in the future. Innumerable factors conspired against their success. The Soviet Union was isolated in a sea of capitalist powers antagonized first by the Bolsheviks' decision to take Russia out of World War I and then by their calls to workers of the world to dispense violently with their own capitalist masters. The new society lacked a trained workforce. Its industrial infrastructures and transportation networks were wholly inadequate for effective governance and economic development in the short term. Low literacy, a high proportion of land-starved peasants, and a dizzying array of ethnic groups and national minorities made this a poor laboratory for experiments in socialism.

Every facet of social, political, and economic life in the Russian empire was profoundly transformed by the seemingly ceaseless sequence of war and revolutions even before the Bolsheviks set out to construct a new society. Changes in gender roles and in power dynamics between the sexes followed paths unforeseen by either revolutionaries or defenders of the old order.