In October 1918, barely a year after the Bolsheviks had come to power, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet (VTsIK), the highest legislative body, ratified a complete Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship. The Code captured in law a revolutionary vision of social relations based on women's equality and the “withering away” (otmiranie) of the family. According to Alexander Goikhbarg, the young, idealistic author of the new Family Code, it prepared the way for a time when “the fetters of husband and wife” would become “obsolete.” The Code was accordingly constructed with its own obsolescence in mind. Goikhbarg wrote, “Proletarian power constructs its codes and all of its laws dialectically, so that every day of their existence undermines the need for their existence.” In short, the aim of law was “to make law superfluous.”

Goikhbarg and his fellow revolutionaries fully expected not only marriage and the family to wither away, but the law and the state as well. Lenin had carefully analyzed the future of the state in his famous essay, The State and Revolution, completed in September 1917, merely a month before the Bolsheviks took power.