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After the October Revolution, the transformation of gender relations was placed at the heart of the Bolshevik project to build socialism in Russia. New ways of organizing domestic life, the workforce and society as a whole would transform relations between men and women. In order for women to play the same part as men in the productive sphere and in social activities, it would be necessary to relieve them from housework, by transferring domestic tasks to collective services. What was the situation in reality? Data produced by the family time-budget surveys carried out in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s and then in the late 1960s-early 1970s provides information allowing us to compare the reality of gender relations with official discourse in Soviet Russia.