From Russia with love

Fake news and the Bolshevik ‘socialisation of women’

Featured in

  • Published 20230207
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-80-1
  • Extent: 264pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

[A]LL GIRLS OF 18 and over are public property and are compelled to register in the free love department of the Bureau of Public Assistance…

That was how, on 20 July 1918, the Melbourne Age introduced to Australia a bizarre but wildly influential claim about the early Soviet Union: namely, that Bolshevism entailed the ‘socialisation of women’.

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

Into the swamp

Non-fictionSome versions of environmentalism understandably encourage an almost Swiftian misanthropy, with the ecological collapse framed as the inevitable response of nature to a pestiferous humanity, the only species that, by its very existence, destroys all that it touches. But maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t have to be that way.

More from this edition

Vaudeville

PoetryIf the magical colours aren’t even across the page, it’s a failure of art according to aesthetes. An obscenity of blues and reds, they say.

Outside, Mona Lisa

Non-fictionWhere bushwalking is concerned, Tasmanian maps are not an authentic picture of the landscape. They’re fine if you want to stick to well-known trails, but if the track has been assigned a T4 rating it won’t be on the map. Sometimes that’s because the route is so rough it would be misleading to mark it as a track, but sometimes it’s that for a range of management and environmental purposes, the PWS just doesn’t want many walkers going there.

The future is hackable

Non-fictionDeepfakes point to a future that is simultaneously euphoric and apocalyptic: philosophers have positioned them as ‘an epistemic threat to democracy’, journalists have called them ‘the place where truth goes to die’, futurists have portrayed them as the digital harbinger of a mass ‘reality apathy’ in which even video will be a lie.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.