14. Women, the Great Patriotic War and ‘Post-Stalinism’

1939-89

14.1 Introduction

The October Revolution generated colossal progressive and dynamic forces, gaining such huge historical credit that despite its excesses, its parasitic social nature, its monstrous waste and misdirection, the bureaucracy was able to present itself as playing a progressive role for two generations. Based on a nationalised and planned economy, the Soviet working class attained incontestable and incredible successes despite the Stalinist regime, but for which Stalin took the credit just as he claimed the credit for October.

The Eighteenth Party Congress (March 1939) confirmed the First and Second FYPs had massively increased productive capacity, but it was becoming clear that bureaucratic constraints meant the utilisation of this capacity was not increasing as it should. Malenkov reported, for example, that in the previous three years the productive capacity of all cement plants rose from 6.7 million tons to 8.2 million tons, but over the same period the utilisation factor dropped from 0.88 to 0.64. In other words, the actual amount of cement used fell from 5.9 million tons to 5.2 million tons. Here, in terms of the most important of modern building materials, we see how the hold of the bureaucracy was strangling the Soviet economy. Malenkov blamed this under-performance on directors of enterprises making deals between themselves for parts and raw materials and, as later reported in Pravda, lining their own pockets.^[1] This was important because the bureaucracy was admitting that it was, in an essential area of the economy, becoming an absolute rather than a relative brake on progress.

Nevertheless, in 1940, legislation was passed to further consolidate the privileges of the bureaucrats, granting new immunities and perks which included exempting the possessors of medals, orders, and decorations from income tax. Surprisingly, given that directors were being accused of fiddling the books on a grand scale, they were invested with “sole and indivisible authority” within their enterprises.^[2] At the same time to quit one’s job, or even arriving late to work was a criminal offence, “converting workers into industrial serfs bound to the factory”.^[3]

14.2 The Great Patriotic War

Stalin’s attempted accommodation with Hitler proved worse than useless. It encouraged Hitler’s eastward expansion. Right up until the moment of the actual invasion in June 1941, Nazi Germany was receiving vast amounts of valuable raw materials from the Stalin regime that would be used in the coming attack on the Soviet Union. In a defensive move to secure its Western borders, the Soviet Union moved to incorporate Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, but it failed to take Finland. A disastrous campaign revealed to Hitler how much the Red Army had been weakened by the Great Terror. This dismal failure was followed by yet another purge, which the July 1941 issue of Fourth International described as:

… completing … the devastation of (the Party’s) ranks. The incumbent bureaucracy now largely consists of callow recruits. Among them are many sons and daughters of the former ruling classes, the progeny of former landlords, former capitalists, bourgeois intellectuals, Czarist generals, functionaries, etc. … Fewest are those with proletarian background and origin.^[4]

At the Eighteenth Party Conference (February-March 1941), the membership figures indicated that nearly half of party members had joined in the previous year, and of these Pravda reported 70 per cent were government employees, with fewer than 20 per cent workers. Even in the giant factory complex of Magnitogorsk, workers constituted only 35 per cent of those accepted into the party. The party was being stocked with elements whose loyalty was to themselves and their families. This would eat like acid into the fabric of the party and society. However, the Nazi invasion created a sense of national purpose and unity. Victory in World War Two (WW2) decisively strengthened the bureaucracy, enabling it to last another forty-five years.

According to Khrushchev, when Stalin received reports that the fascist armies were invading Soviet territory (22 June 1941), he panicked, and for days would see no one. The Red Army was paralysed, unable to retreat, regroup or counter-attack. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were captured. The Red Air Force was destroyed on the ground. The road was opened for the Wehrmacht to march deep into the Soviet Union, rapidly occupying the Ukraine, north Caucasus, and the Don basin. Harvests were devastated, industrial centres were over-run, total production was halved, and oil supplies were hard hit. The Soviet government began the evacuation of human and material resources on a gigantic scale, uprooting and physically removing entire enterprises from threatened areas and transferring them east of the Urals. This was an incredible feat, unequalled in history. By March 1942, despite continuing defeats and retreats, production began a steady upward trend. Faced with the prospect of imminent defeat and overthrow, Stalin reluctantly replaced his talentless and incompetent stooges with other more able commanders, with many released from the Gulags for the purpose. Specialists from the labour camps were released to work in the war industries, to assist in the production of vast quantities of well-designed military equipment.

This spectacular turnaround was the key to victory in the titanic duel between the USSR and Nazi Germany, an outstanding confirmation of the inherent strength and superiority of a nationalised planned economy over capitalist anarchy. Not that events unfolded smoothly; the rapid advance of the German armies meant some 20-25 million Soviet citizens fled or were evacuated to the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia, fleeing from territory threatened with occupation.

Trotsky explained that the main external danger to the nationalised planned economy was not so much military defeat, as the cheap consumer goods that would arrive in the baggage train of an imperialist army. But Hitler’s armies brought not cheap commodities, but gas chambers, dispossession, and slave labour. As a result, not just the working class, but the peasants fought like lions to defend the Soviet Union. Victory in World War Two and the extension of nationalised property forms to Eastern Europe, and later China and Vietnam had a profound effect on the consciousness of the masses and the bureaucracy, which looked to the future with great optimism, confident of maintaining its privileges. Generally, living standards remained low with significant material hardships, particularly in housing but there was widespread optimism. Economic policy continued to concentrate on developing heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods, and despite the corruption, mismanagement, bungling and waste, so long as the productive forces were being developed, there was a general sense that society was moving forward as it recovered from WW2.

At the start of the war, women constituted 39 per cent of the Soviet civilian labour force. Over the next five years the number of women workers rose from 13 to 16 million. Most were employed in industry, transport, and agriculture. Another half million women served in the Soviet Armed Forces, most as medical personnel: 40 per cent of paramedics, 43 per cent of surgeons, 46 per cent of doctors, 57 per cent of medical assistants, and 100 per cent of nurses. Of the estimated 26,000 Soviet partisans, about one quarter were women, and included the youngest Hero of the Soviet Union, resistance fighter, Zinaida Portnova.^[5]

On the eve of the war, the Soviet army stood at almost 3 million, by the end of the war, more than 20 million men had been called up. Over the same period between 1940-45, the total number of male wage and salary earners outside of the armed forces dropped from 21 to 13 million, the number of men of working age on the collective farms fell from 17 million to below 5 million. Naturally, women assumed jobs traditionally held by men. So much so that the bureaucracy officially announced: “There are no longer so-called ‘male’ professions. Soviet women have shown that no profession is beyond them”.^[6] No profession might have been beyond them, but the conservative nature of the bureaucracy showed through when, in 1943, co-education in urban schools was abolished:

… the program of education and the curriculum for boys’ schools and girls’ schools can be and must be differentiated. It is essential to introduce in girls’ schools such additional subjects as needlework, courses in domestic science, personal hygiene, and the care of children. In boys’ schools, training in handicrafts must become a part of the curriculum. At the end of their school career, those who attend boys’ schools must have acquired practical habits, they must be able to cope with simple repairs to electrical installations and heating systems, and with the repair of household objects.^[7]

The following year male and female political detainees would be differentiated by sex and incarcerated in separate camps.

As the Red Army advanced, millions of Soviet soldiers whose appreciation of the world had been formed by the stories carried in the Stalinist press now experienced the realities of the capitalist world. They discovered that even under conditions of war, living standards were higher than in the USSR, with food and clothing relatively more plentiful. For revolutionists, this confirmed that backward Russia could not build socialism by itself; it needed the aid of more advanced countries. However, many in the bureaucracy, for whom extending the Revolution was a dead letter, opened their eyes to quite a different perspective. The September 1945 issue of Bolshevik, the theoretical organ of the AUCP(B), felt the need to address this issue, stating “vestiges of capitalism in the consciousness of a certain part of the people … could not help but be revived”.^[8] This would be a growing trend within the bureaucracy, fed by the inequalities that were deliberately fostered by the regime itself.

14.3 The 1944 Family Law

By 1944, it was clear that the immediate danger from the German armies was over, and without some catastrophic and unforeseen event, the war was won. Of course, there were major contradictions in the process due to the conflicting needs of the bureaucracy and the actual situation. Women were necessary to maintain armament production, but the social chaos due to the war enhanced the need for the family as a stabilising element. There was also considerable pressure to begin increasing the birth rate to replace the 27 million Russians killed in the war. The Family Law of 1944 was passed to strengthen the family and promote having large numbers of children.

The 1944 Family Law was a conscious attempt to negate any remaining traces of the radicalism of the 1920s. It was intended to impose some order on the numerous informal and transient relationships formed during the war, many resulting in children. From 1944 onwards, the only legal families were those based on a registered marriage, fatherhood outside wedlock no longer gave rights nor obligations, and this new law restored the distinction between children born in and out of wedlock that had been abolished by the Soviet Family Code of 1918. An ‘illegitimate’ child could no longer claim the surname, the support, or the inheritance of their father. Importantly, the new law prevented women from suing other women’s husbands for alimony, removing a threat to ‘legitimate’ marriages.^[9] By withdrawing recognition of de facto marriages, unless formally registered, the Law sought to re-impose marriage and reinforce the nuclear family. The bureaucracy was strengthening the petty-bourgeois nature of the ‘Soviet family’ as a conservative base for itself in society.

A series of measures were introduced – for giving birth, women could earn an ascending order of awards, beginning with the ‘second-class’ Motherhood Medal for five children, to Heroine Mother and a certificate from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for ten. The decree permitted women to take five weeks off work before birth and seven after, an increase, in total, of two weeks. In cases of difficult births, leave after birth could be extended to eight weeks. Provision was also made to reduce kindergarten and créche fees for families with large numbers of children.

By the end of WW2, women outnumbered men by almost 25,000,000, so the new law attempted to stabilise the family by deterring divorce. Article 27 raised the cost of obtaining a certificate of dissolution of marriage from a couple of hundred roubles to between 500 to 2,000. There had to be serious grounds for divorce – adultery alone was not enough. The unfaithful partner had to set up a new de facto partnership with at least one child born into it. Women, if pregnant or with a baby under one year of age, could not divorce their husbands without their consent. The effect on the divorce rate was profound. In Moscow, for example, the pre-war divorce rate was over 10,000 a year, and in 1945 it was less than 1,000.

Measures to compel spouses to live together continued until 1969 when a new family code re-opened the possibility of obtaining a registry office (ZAGS) divorce for couples without children or who had adult children and did not have any property disputes. All other cases had to be brought before a court which would grant approval for a divorce only if its investigation found an irrevocable breakup of family life.^[10]

The 1944 law strictly limited the responsibilities that could be placed on fathers by single mothers within the context of a vast increase in the number of the latter. Simultaneously, the state was keen to increase the birth rate and encouraged unmarried women to reproduce so it introduced measures whereby single women could choose to rear their children with the help of a small state allowance or, alternatively, place their offspring in a children’s home without financial cost to themselves. They also enjoyed the right to remove the child from state care at any time and resume their upbringing.^[11] Article 20 promised that the state would provide financial support for children born out of wedlock, and to meet these costs new taxes were introduced on “single citizens, and citizens of the U.S.S.R. with small families.” The new taxes were framed to be a financial incentive to having children; citizens with no children paid 6 per cent of their income in tax, citizens with one child paid 1 per cent of their earnings, and those with two or more children paid 0.5 per cent.^[12]

The legislation of 1936 and 1944 affecting marriage, divorce and abortion was enacted in a quite different spirit from that of 1918, 1920 and 1926. The earlier decrees were concerned to free women from the shackles and restrictions of the past, so that women themselves had the freedom to choose whether to have children, to marry, to divorce, and so on. The emphasis of the later laws was for women to accept their double burden, live within the constraints of the ‘socialist family’ while working to fulfil the current FYP. Many western academics attempt to hide this fundamental change by magnifying common continuous features, such as the uninterrupted provision of a range of maternity benefits.^[13] This is not to deny these provisions, but simply to point out that as the bureaucracy enforced its grip on society so did the limits imposed on women’s freedom.

The bigger the upheaval, the more a stable family was a priority for the bureaucracy, and Stalin now advocated the novel and anti-Marxist argument that the family grew stronger as socialism progressed, servicing and supporting the hard life demanded by the regime. The stable family was highly desirable to the state for numerous reasons, including increasing birth rates and reversing the revolutionary direction taken in the 1920s. The growing violence of husbands towards their wives reflected the patriarchal form the family had taken. During this time, local law enforcement officials received instructions to curb their intervention in family disputes so that between 1929 and 1935, the number charged and convicted for assault on a spouse fell by a factor of nearly 20.^[14]

Men and women were proclaimed equal, but practically they were subject to traditional ideals of submissive and passive femininity, affirmed by a refusal to prosecute in cases of domestic violence. From this time, violence against wives ceased to be a topic of public discussion – the media observed a virtual silence, research in this area practically ceased, no surveys were conducted, and no statistics were published.^[15] Official policy was to strengthen the patriarchal family while formally trumpeting gender equality. To admit that many women were being beaten or killed by their husbands would have meant admitting a fundamental contradiction between the two. Simultaneously, and for obvious reasons, the ‘Soviet family’ became more private and less open to public scrutiny.^[16] Quite different from the attitude of Lenin who, for example, was for the socialization of housework, removing both partners from “unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery”, allowing both to play a role in public life.^[17]

All social features contain their own contradictions and antitheses. The ‘Soviet family’ was no exception. The family gave a degree of stability, but in doing so it intertwined its own reactionary features with those of Soviet society and strengthened the most backward elements in the bureaucracy. Trotsky had pointed out that the ‘Soviet family’ mirrored the bourgeois family, and that the bureaucracy was bourgeois detritus in the workers’ state;^[18] the two naturally meshed and amplified all the conservative trends in Soviet society.

During 1946, the Soviet Union was hit by a wave of ‘women’s crimes’. The shortage of labour on the land because of the call-up for the army, and the dwindling number of tractors due to the priority given to military vehicles, meant the amount of grain harvested fell as the war progressed. Then, in the spring and summer of 1946, a sudden and severe drought hit. The similarities with 1931-32 were obvious but the bureaucracy had learned nothing. The state refused to reduce grain quotas, which meant that by January 1947 there was famine in the Ukraine, Belarus, and Southwestern Russia in which several hundred thousand died of malnutrition. Because women and their children were the majority of the workers on the collective farms, they were the hardest hit. Unable to buy food, many of these women and their children, took to stealing foodstuffs – mainly bread – causing a sudden spike in cases of theft. In the autumn of 1946, nearly 20,000 women with young children were found guilty of such crimes. When mothers were sentenced to prison, and even sent to Siberia, their young children accompanied them.^[19]

14.4 Women in Soviet Society Post-Stalin

After WW2, there was a campaign in the major imperialist countries for working women to return to being ‘happy’ housewives in order to make way for demobbed soldiers. Suddenly, jobs which had been done successfully by women became men-only. The media and politicians no longer demanded women leave the home to join the war effort, in a two-faced manner, they now called on women to stay at home. In the Soviet Union, on the contrary, women in the labour force steadily increased from 16 million in 1945, to 23 million in 1955, and from the mid-1960s onwards women comprised, more or less, a steady 51 per cent of employees in the national economy.^[20] The vital role of women in reconstruction, combined with Soviet laws which formally committed the state to equality of the sexes, were cited as proof of the existence of equality; that the double oppression of women as it existed under capitalism had been done away with. The propaganda message was: “one of the outstanding achievements of the Great October Socialist Revolution is the complete liberation of women”.^[21]

The Stalinist state had formally retained the protection of the rights of women in marriage and divorce, and needed to enforce them in support of its industrialisation policy. At the dissolution of a marriage, all property was divided equally, with the mother invariably awarded custody of the children. The state automatically deducted child support payments from the father’s wages and transferred them to the mother. Women could rely on the state for their own pensions and additional social support once their husbands had died. Younger women and girls had access to education and many career opportunities, meaning there were few economic incentives to engage in prostitution.

Armand, Lenin, and Trotsky all argued that the success of socialism depended on changing women’s lives, especially family life.^[22] Calls to this effect, recognising the mutual interplay between women’s personal liberation and the success of socialism were implicitly critical of the ‘socialist family’, and disappeared from the bookshops of the Soviet Union.

But the state could not completely close its eyes to the realities of the ‘socialist family’. Attempting to ameliorate the worst aspects of married life in a patriarchal USSR, the Soviet media advised that healthy marriages and satisfying personal relations could result only from equality between male and female partners. Lenin had put his finger on the mechanisms by which the double oppression continued in the Soviet Union and had pointed out the corrective measures needed to end it. But a free discussion on the role of the family in oppressing women would have been a threat to an important pillar of support for the bureaucracy, so no such discussion took place. The ways in which the ‘Soviet family’ discriminated against women and subordinated them to men were ideological non-topics.^[23]

14.4.1 Women, Labour Participation and Childcare

A central problem facing the Stalinist, so-called ‘state socialist’, countries was the double burden on women. The Stalinists proposed one solution after another, without ever touching on the one real solution: the replacement of the bureaucracy by Soviet, or workers’, democracy with directly elected delegates, a restoration of the right of criticism, genuinely free elections and delegates subject to immediate recall.

A short story describing the life of a working woman with two children, A Week Like Any Other, by Natalya Baranskaya, was published in the November 1969 issue of Novi Mir. This story, which became a smash hit, laid bare the shortcomings of the Soviet system regarding the needs of working mothers and was a major factor in re-opening the ‘Woman Question’. Legal equality had been established immediately after the Revolution, but actual equality still had to be achieved and women were increasingly questioning the obvious distinction between formal legal equality and genuine equal rights.^[24]

The ‘state socialist’ countries consistently boasted some of the highest participation rates in the world of women in the labour force. Historical figures show that in 1950, 51 per cent of women in the Soviet Union were employed compared to about 28 per cent in North America and 30 per cent in Western Europe. By 1980, the percentages were 65, 50, and 45, respectively. The retirement ages of women also differed; in the Soviet Union they could retire on a full pension (which for low paid women could be as much as their pay) at age fifty-five, whereas women in the UK and USA were expected to work for a further five years.

Too often the higher figure for Soviet women engaged in paid employment is presented by Western academics as due to a man not earning enough for his family to survive, forcing women into work, while in the USA it was a matter of a woman’s choice. Not only does this argument imply women do not want to go out to work, but it is also ludicrous when we discover that in the USA at that time about a fifth of the population, nearly 40 million, lived below the official poverty line.^[25] It also ignores the volumes of survey evidence which show the great majority of women are significantly happier if they work outside the home, and happiest when the employer offers a secure job, childcare facilities and long periods of paid maternity leave.

Equal pay for equal work was practised in the Soviet Union but, on average, in 1980 women’s wages were 70 per cent that of men, due largely to the sex segregation that existed in employment. In the USA at that time the ratio was about 65 per cent.^[26] Soviet women were often funnelled into agriculture, light industry and, especially, white-collar professions such as teaching, medicine, law, tourism, and accounting. Even in areas where they dominated numerically, the proportion of women decreased the further up the seniority scale one went, both in the USA and the Soviet Union. The gender pay gap was offset in the Soviet Union, but not in the USA, by the social policies of the state; employed women had access to housing, education, healthcare, paid vacations, access to enterprise-owned hotels and holiday camps, kindergartens, personal credit plans through workplace co-operative savings, and their own independent pensions. We note that in the USA it was not until 1974, with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, that married women were able to have a credit card in their name.

The provision of childcare by the state had a hugely positive impact on Soviet women. It was widely available, though the quality varied, but it was subsidised with, typically, parents paying about 25 per cent of the cost. Enrolment in 1930 was about 1 million, compared to about 75,000 in the USA. In the 1960s there were about 5 million subsidised places in the Soviet Union, and the poorest paid nothing. In the USA the Kennedy administration introduced tax relief for childcare costs. In the 1980s in the USSR there were places available for over 90 per cent of those seeking them – about 16 million in all – while in the USA, the Reagan administration cut support for low-income families while doubling the allowance given to middle-class families to offset childcare costs; this boosted for-profit childcare provision, and put it beyond the reach of many working-class families.

Crèches were available for babies from ages one to three, but many women stayed at home with their children for the duration of the lengthy maternity leave. The social acceptance of mothers leaving their children at kindergarten and having paid employment was extremely important for the social wellbeing and self-image of women. After East and West Germany were reunified in 1990, a flood of East Germans sought work in West Germany. To the outrage of the women, crèche and kindergarten facilities hardly existed. The resulting campaigns forced the government to provide kindergartens for “all children” between the ages of three and six.

In the USSR, after-school care was provided for over 5 million children, but these tended to be full cost. With each party Congress there were renewed commitments to improve job opportunities for women with children, to better combine motherhood with paid employment, through longer periods of maternity leave, greater flexibility in employment patterns, increased provision of rest homes for family vacations and ever more kindergarten places. One result was that two-thirds of city homes had a washing machine by 1968, which, of course, highlighted the contradiction between attempting to minimise housework while maintaining the bourgeois family.^[27] All of these measures were welcome but doomed to failure because all had the aim of strengthening the ‘Soviet family’, not removing women’s double burden.

Education was viewed as a fundamental prerequisite for employment and participation in political life. At the start of WW2, two-thirds of children were completing school education and this rose close to 100 per cent in the late 1950s. From 1954, the school system returned to being co-educational and comprehensive, and heavily biased towards science and technology. In 1987, the claimed literacy rate in the Soviet Union was 98 per cent. We cannot compare with literacy rates in the USA since, after it was found that illiteracy rates in the USA were higher than in Cuba, the USA adopted a method of assessing literacy that is not compatible with the UNESCO system. However, the Washington Post has reported that as many as 32 million American adults (5 per cent) are unable to read.^[28]

The accelerating and extensive progress made by the planned economy meant women were in ever greater demand as workers. Between the end of the civil war and 1928, the number of women employed in the main branches of industry in the USSR almost doubled. The Soviet state had inherited from the October Revolution equal rights for women in education, in pay and in a job. These imposed on the planned economy, slowly at first but with increasing rapidity, provisions to meet women’s special needs such as free childcare and extensive maternity leave on a scale not seen anywhere else in the world even today. The bureaucracy, with its pro-family policies, placed de facto limits on women’s opportunities, but by the mid-1970s women made up about half of students in higher education and were well represented in science and technology. By 1980, more than one in three engineering undergraduates were women compared to a mere 5 per cent in the USA. In the prestigious Academy of Sciences, 20 per cent of Academicians were women compared to fewer than 100 of the 1,500 members of the American Academy of Sciences.

As more women thrived in careers in science, mathematics, medicine, and engineering, more girls pursued studies in those fields. The high percentage of women in the technology sector today in the former ‘state socialist’ countries is a direct result of policies that both encouraged women to enter male-dominated fields and provided social support services. Olympiada Kozlova, Director of the Engineering-Economic Institute, attended a peace conference in the USA at Bryn Mawr in the mid-1960s and was shocked at the content of the chatter during the breaks, particularly by American attendees. She is reported as commenting “… in the Soviet Union when we women get together, we talk about what we are doing, not what our husbands are doing”.^[29]

14.4.2 Maternity Leave and Allowances

Maternity leave in the Soviet Union was sixteen weeks on full pay, with the option of an additional fifty-two weeks without pay, though the entire period counted towards the woman’s pension entitlement and her job was retained for her. Employer discrimination against pregnant and nursing women was prohibited, as was the dismissal of pregnant women or women with children under the age of three. Mothers with small children had the right to nursing breaks, could refuse overtime and could return to work part-time. With such provisions, as many as 92 per cent of women were employed at least part-time.^[30] Even today in the United States only firms of fifty or more employees are required to allow a woman up to twelve weeks maternity leave (four weeks less than the minimum recommended by the WHO). This leave is unpaid and makes no contribution to the mother’s pension entitlement, unless the employer requests it be taken as part or all of their holiday entitlement.

Mothers were eligible for a one-off maternity grant equal to three times the minimum wage. For children up to eighteen months old there was an automatic additional monthly child allowance equal to 80 per cent of the minimum wage, which could be supplemented by a childcare allowance, set at one-third of the minimum wage, to compensate for earnings lost while caring for the child. For children aged between eighteen months and three years, an allowance of up to one-third of the minimum wage was payable to their mothers if they wished to stay home. The grant and allowances were restricted to women who were in employment and had worked for at least twelve months.^[31] Single mothers and those who received no child support from the father of their child could obtain an additional 45 per cent of the minimum wage up to the child’s sixth birthday; this figure was then increased to 50 per cent and remained effective until the child was between sixteen and eighteen if the child was still at school. In addition, during the Soviet era additional benefits such as subsidised milk and an allowance for the purchase of a school uniform when a child started school were provided to workers on low incomes by the enterprises in which they worked.

14.4.3 Abortion Rights

After WW2, there was a drive to make up the population to compensate for the millions killed. Literature underwent a profound shift; the independent woman who becomes chairperson of the collective farm, the successful partisan leader, the revolutionary heroine, were replaced by a woman whose ambition was to see her husband succeed while caring for her children. If the family was to be given priority and the woman was to keep her day job, then professional advancement and equality had to be downgraded. Acute strains between hope, expectations and reality resulted. These were managed by Soviet women limiting the size of their families.^[32]

In 1954, the Presidium repealed without comment or discussion that part of the 1936 Decree which penalised women who had abortions, but increased penalties for lay persons who performed abortions. In 1955, again without public explanation, the Minister of Health, Maria Kovrigina, a medical doctor, announced ‘The Abolition of the Prohibition Against Abortion’. This decree closely resembled the original 1920 legislation, it made clear that the state did not approve of abortion and that preventing the procedure by non-legal means remained a key goal, but it recognised a woman’s right to control her reproduction subject to certain conditions. After its re-legalisation, abortion returned as the primary method of birth control and remained so until at least the late 1980s.^[33]

A considerable amount of research by American academics into the condition of women in Soviet society was conducted during the cold war in conditions which were much less free than today. Academics were not promoted to professorships by praising the condition of women in the Soviet Union, publicising the wealth of childcare provision, the greater equality with men in pay, access to a free health service, and so on. Thus, while the major texts of the day gave considerable and accurate data, they avoided detailing the relative conditions of women in Russia and the USA, instead they emphasised all that was unequal between Russian men and women. Gail Lapidus, in Women in Soviet Society – hailed as a defining classic in the studies of Soviet women – is careful to avoid comparison between the USA and USSR on women’s freedom of choice regarding abortion. She fails to mention the 1955 decree, ‘The Abolition of the Prohibition Against Abortion’, that recognised a woman’s right to control her reproduction, but does mention the Family Law of June 1968 which formally legalised abortion; possibly to imply that the Soviet Union was not so far ahead of the USA where the 1973 Supreme Court decision on Roe v Wade opened the door to women’s choice.^[34] This is a doubly false parallel since not only were there almost 50 years between the November 1920 decree and Roe vs Wade, but also the Soviet decision was integral to a socialist system whereas Roe v Wade was a victory by women over and against the capitalist system.

Irrespective of the wishes of the bureaucracy, women took as much control as possible over their own lives. The contradictions in their roles as paid employee, housewife and childcarer, revealed themselves very clearly in declining birth rates. Having abandoned restrictions on abortion as largely ineffective, a propaganda campaign was launched portraying women as kind, gentle, supportive, nurturing, with motherhood the natural pursuit for women, along the lines of pregnancy and birth are necessary for the female organism, and repeating the same old claims that women who have many children usually look younger than their age and younger than those without children.

The racism of the nomenklatura was on open display when framing policy on child allowances designed to increase birth rates. Within the national average there were wide discrepancies in birth rates between, for example, the industrial centres of Russia and the collective farms of Central Asia where the rate was more than double that of the USSR as a whole. State policy was biased in such a way as to forestall any substantial flow of additional resources to Central Asia. There, the bureaucracy proposed the resources be allocated to publicising methods of contraception.^[35]

14.4.4 Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev

After WW2, women continued to be the great army of labour consistent with a policy of ongoing rapid industrialisation, while the family remained a protective bulwark for the bureaucracy. At the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961, Nikita Khrushchev,^[36] insisted on the centrality of the family in the transition to Communism, while declaring the “remnants of inequality in the position of women in everyday life must be completely eliminated”. He decried the fact that women comprised nearly 20 per cent of party members and only 4 per cent of the CC, but there was no resulting change in the relative proportion of CC members. Longer maternity leave was granted, and more household appliances and public dining rooms were called for. Officially, the ‘Woman Question’ remained ‘solved’, but it was becoming increasingly accepted that women’s double burden detracted from their fertility, economic productivity, retraining, and political activity, and enhanced absenteeism and divorce rates, all which had tremendous implications for the economy, society and politics.^[37]

Soviet society was increasingly polarised. At one pole there existed a privileged minority of bureaucrats, a social formation who determined the methods of distribution. Trotsky had noted that the bureaucracy’s concern for the family had not “fallen from the clouds”, but arose from a very real drive by sections of the nomenklatura to pass their privileges to their children. Khrushchev viewed this tendency with concern, as a possible destabilising element that could threaten the bureaucracy as a whole, and took measures to weaken the influence elite families were exerting on the education and job placement of their children.

Khrushchev simultaneously attempted to curb the allocation of resources to the nomenklatura. For example, transport by private car disappeared for all but the most senior. Higher, middle and junior level bureaucrats did not welcome these measures; Khrushchev’s efforts were short-lived. His replacement, Leonid Brezhnev,^[38] had a quite different perspective, and declared in the Tenth FYP between 1976-81, that a greater proportion of resources would be channelled into private pockets. Whose pockets were indicated by the parallel introduction of hire-purchase schemes for cars, credit to fund the building of dachas, and to allow the private provision of, for example, healthcare to supplement the increasingly creaky state system. The results could only be a greater social and gender differentiation. For the nomenklatura, the typical family was mother, father and one child. The tops (almost all male) tended to be in households with “two-person careers”, where the wives worked but sacrificed their own careers for the professional advancement of the husbands.^[39]

It was during the 1970s that sociologists began to carefully touch upon the problem of gender inequality in the family, making connections between women’s double burden and the contradictions with official declarations of gender equality, as leading to dissatisfaction and conflicts within the ‘Soviet family’. Analysis of domestic abuse against women was systematically avoided, blame was placed on hooligan elements that were a hangover from capitalism and the unsettled conditions of WW2. This provided a simple explanation of domestic violence and allowed the state to argue for greater law and order as the solution to the problem, rather than socialising domestic labour, improving living arrangements, and tackling alcoholism.

Mikhail Gorbachev^[40] introduced various reforms such as glasnost and perestroika, and he understood that the limited democratisation and restructuring he proposed for the Soviet Union needed the active support of women.^[41] At the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress (Feb-March 1986), he revived Women’s Councils (Zhensovetys) under the direction of a Soviet Women’s Committee. By diktat, Gorbachev created 240,000 Zhensovetys across the country within a year, and a year later would claim women constituted over 50 per cent of elected local government officials. Simultaneously, however, there was a reduction in the quota of women deputies in the Supreme Soviet. The proportion fell from 33 per cent to only 15.6 per cent in the 1990 elections.^[42]

The Bolsheviks had encouraged women to stand for election to the Soviets. In the early days, this had been done by Zhenotdel, and after its disbandment, the elections of deputies to all Soviets were decided by party committees. By 1934, the percentages of women elected to urban and peasant Soviets was 32 and 27 per cent, respectively. Eventually it was agreed that a quota of 33 per cent of deputies to the Supreme Soviet would be women. There was therefore a significant female presence throughout the legislature, but the government’s pronatalist stance and promotion of the family had two severe and adverse effects on the advancement of women. The pronatalist stance meant the continuity of service of younger women was seriously undermined. The policy of bolstering the importance of the family meant that it was expected that most women would view their primary duties as a mother and wife, and refrain from competing with men in political activities. These factors, combined with the socially-reactionary attitudes of the nomenklatura, meant a remarkable lack of women in the highest echelons of the party and state. A study of the 1989 elections showed that almost all the women selected were from the bureaucracy, being rewarded for long and loyal service.

Symbolically, Gorbachev appointed Alexandra Biryukova as an Alternate Member of the Politburo, and Galina Semyonova as a full member. Women took the opportunity to discuss and evaluate their position in society. Articles appeared in Pravda, Izvestia, Literaturnaya Gazeta and others, discussing problems women faced, highlighting their double burden, their absence from the decision-making bodies of party and state, and the disparity between their legal rights and reality.

However, Gorbachev’s reform package was doomed from the start. On the one hand, he wished to increase the participation of women in politics and decision-making while on the other, he constrained them within the family, strengthening traditional roles and returning women “to their purely womanly mission”. His book, Perestroika, published in 1987, showed his awareness of the problem and his blindness as to the cause:

… our problems … in our morals, culture, and in production are partially caused by the weakening of family ties and slack attitude towards family responsibilities. This is a paradoxical result of our sincere and politically justified desire to make women equal with men in everything.^[43]

The Gorbachev era opened opportunities for women to assess their situation, but the only real solution, creating the conditions for the withering away of the family, was excluded from consideration.

Gorbachev’s reform had an impact on schools, and from 1985 students aged sixteen and seventeen were offered sex education, which had long been taboo. Tass, the official news agency, announced a new course entitled ‘Family Life, Ethics, and Psychology’, to be taught by specially trained teachers. The course included a section, ‘Physiological-Hygiene’, which contained “conversations on friendship and love, marriage and family life, and physiological-hygienic aspects of mutual relations of young people.” The course was compulsory although students were neither graded nor given academic credits for completing it. The announcement was applauded by the Soviet Union’s handful of sex education specialists who, working within the system, had blamed soaring divorce rates on the absence of formal sex education in the schools.

14.4.5 Nomenklatura and the Family

At a time when the great majority (90 per cent in some areas) of parents claimed to be satisfied with the state of public childcare provision, the nomenklatura expressed its hostility to the levelling effect of collective upbringing. Facilities were subjected to a barrage of criticism. The argument used was that socialisation of the child should, primarily, be through the family not social institutions. Family values should be the most important factor in a child’s upbringing. The nomenklatura claimed to be especially concerned with “the proper moral upbringing of children” with “inculcating appropriate values”, and providing the necessary conditions “for the internalisation of adult values”. One wonders what ‘morals’ and ‘values’ were considered proper and appropriate by parents whose aim was to procure maximum privileges for themselves and their families.

Education had played a key role in offering opportunities across Soviet society, and the nomenklatura actively sought to ensure access to elite education for its children, to preserve for them the most desirable jobs. It was now argued that, even if the transfer of family functions to society was achievable, it should be rejected in the interests of maintaining the ‘socialist family’. Sections of the bureaucracy maintained that the ‘socialist family’ should be a primary cell of socialist society, going so far as to argue that socialisation of everyday life was acceptable only in so far as it was compatible with the ‘socialist family’. In other words, compatible with their ambitions for themselves and their children.

In the Soviet Union, healthcare was usually organised by workplace, but the healthcare provided to nomenklatura families was of a completely different standard from that of the workers; medical wonderlands compared to the hospitals for the masses which were increasingly understaffed, overcrowded and lacking necessary medications. Prior to Brezhnev, these perks were confined to a relatively narrow layer right at the top of the party, state, and industry. Brezhnev extended this privilege to lower officials and special facilities were built for mid-level bosses and their families in seaside resorts like Riga and Sochi.^[44]

Amongst the intelligentsia, there was an ongoing and intense debate about female roles – the significance of part-time work for women, the seriousness of declining birth rates, the relevance and availability of child services. A wealth of suggestions was proposed, such as provision of extra childcare facilities, reducing women’s domestic load, and getting men to do more housework. The one contribution missing was how to democratise Soviet society and socialise domestic functions. The ‘Woman Question’ continued to be formulated as the contradiction between a woman being present in the maternity ward or on the factory floor.

The ‘swinging 60s’ in the West had their effects behind the Iron Curtain, one being that during the 1980s, publications and discussion on sexual relations and sexuality were permitted. But there were big differences from the views of Armand who had called for change in the nature of female-male relations. Soviet literature in the 1980s continued to stress the same theme it had since the mid-1930s: the durability of the family structure and the desirability of early marriage and early childbirth. ‘Sex manuals’ were produced, but the central message was that the joy of parenting was so great that couples should not put off having children. When the contraceptive pill arrived in the West, the Soviet Ministry of Health reacted by claiming hormonal contraception had negative effects on women’s health, leaving couples to rely on less effective birth control methods.

Also, in the 1980s official publications began to accept that an unfair distribution of household responsibilities had led to smaller families due largely to women’s dissatisfaction with marriage and family life. To better preserve the family, it was proposed that men should assume a greater share of the domestic roles, so that the female double burden would be alleviated; marriages might be more stable, divorce less likely, and more children a possibility.^[45] While applauding greater equality in the home, these articles were inspired by quite different priorities from those of Armand and Lenin, who had argued that the success of socialism depended on the withering away of the family and the socialisation of housework.

Women continued to be subordinate to the perceived needs of the bureaucracy, which required the preservation of the family. Rejecting the socialising of housework and holding to a patriarchal model of the family, the best the bureaucracy could do was to call on men to take greater responsibility in the home. Eliminating women’s double burden was posed as something that could be achieved without eliminating the family, without fundamentally changing women’s or men’s social roles and duties, and so was doomed to failure.^[46]

14.5 LGBT Oppression Post-Stalin

Under Stalin, all who wanted to hold a position within the CPSU or civil service, were expected to marry a person of the opposite sex. To amplify public hostility to homosexuals, the government deliberately conflated homosexuality with paedophilia. Article 121, signed in late 1933, criminalised homosexuality. According to official figures, between 1933 and 1993 it was used to imprison more than 25,000 men. However, this is a gross under-estimate of how many homosexuals were jailed, as the courts often gave some pretext for the offence rather than stipulating homosexuality, as happened to well-known gay poet Nikolai Klyuev, arrested in 1933 for his “counter-revolutionary activities” and shot in 1937. Integral to the bureaucracy’s efforts to emphasise the key role of the nuclear family in society, was the enforcement of gender norms by oppression of women, gays and lesbians. Women were to care for the present and future generations of workers at minimal cost to the state, but at enormous cost to themselves.

Under Khrushchev, homosexuality remained criminal and generally unmentionable, though some references did appear in Soviet sex education manuals such as The Youth Becomes a Man, in the context of warning the reader that “homosexuality is a punishable crime”.^[47] The debate on homosexuality followed much the same lines as in tsarist times. Scholars argued that homosexuality was a disease, not a crime, and had to be dealt with medically; that investigating sodomy cases where both partners consented, was pointless; and because homosexuality was congenital, gay people were not guilty of a crime. The Interior Ministry opposed decriminalising consensual homosexuality on the grounds that if it were not controlled by law, it could become widespread. When groups of gay men dared to meet and attempted to organise activities, the KGB was sent in to quickly shut them down, and thousands of men continued to be imprisoned for homosexuality.^[48]

Lesbian relations were not criminal, but women who desired other women were often diagnosed with a form of schizophrenia – the same diagnosis the authorities used for political dissidents – and became caught up in the psychiatric system. When such a woman could not be ‘cured’, rather than admit failure officials would change the gender on her official documents allowing her to be given a transgender identity. This had a number of unintended benefits; a woman could wear a man’s work uniform, marry her girlfriend, and from the 1980s also go to a specialist hospital that could perform certain surgical procedures to help masculinise her body.^[49]

Official figures for those convicted under Article 121 have been released since 1987, from which time they steadily decreased. In 1987, 831 men were sentenced; in 1989, 539 men; and in 1991, 462 men. It was not until later in the glasnost period that public discussion was permitted about re-legalising private, consenting adult homosexual relations, and in 1989-1990, a Moscow gay rights organisation was permitted to exist with its own gay newspaper, Tema. There was a proliferation of small groups, many with their own publication.

In August 1991, a coup was attempted by the most conservative bureaucrats (see Section 15.3) and it is reported that many gay activists were on the barricades supporting Yeltsin. That his leaflets were printed on the xerox machines of gay organisations that feared reversion to a more conservative regime, under which recent gains would be threatened, is a real condemnation of the Stalinist treatment of gays and lesbians. The irony is, of course, that the reversion to capitalism would mean worse treatment for LGBT people.

The collapse of the Soviet Union soon followed the failed coup, and many, perhaps most, LGBT people in Russia saw – and still see – the gains made as resulting from that collapse. Yeltsin officially ended sixty years of criminal prosecution for male homosexual relations by signing a bill legalising homosexual acts between consenting adults. At the time, Yeltsin was seeking to obtain a place in the Council of Europe and to acquire massive loans to keep his regime afloat. Under pressure, in April 1993, he revoked anti-homosexual legislation as part of a wide-ranging reform law. However, this change in the law was not publicised in Russia, and Yeltsin’s lack of interest in this matter can be seen by the number of homosexuals who were refused release from prison and by the continued arrests of homosexuals. Nevertheless, most Russian homosexuals saw capitalist restoration as the means of their liberation with a number of LGBT rights organisations and publications launched in Moscow and Leningrad. However, all soon collapsed due to a mix of a lack of funding, as well as legal and social harassment.

14.6 Post-War Years, Strengthening of the Bureaucracy and Inherent Contradictions

It was not Trotsky who coined the phrase bureaucratically deformed workers’ state. It was Lenin who first described the Soviet Union as a “workers’ state with bureaucratic distortions”.^[50] Lenin had also posed the possibility of an eventual thermidor in the Soviet Union in his notes for the Tenth Party Conference in 1921, “Thermidor? Logically one has to say: it’s possible, isn’t it? Will it arrive? We will see”.^[51] If anyone had published Lenin’s quote in the last days of the Soviet Union, they could have received a sentence of up to ten years forced labour in a Gulag for “defamation of the soviet authorities”, nor was it permitted to talk of the “withering away of the state”.

The essence of a state bureaucracy was described over 150 years ago by Marx in Part Three of his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Marx describes how the bureaucracy identifies itself with the state, viewing the state as its private property. In the Soviet Union this inevitably turned into a crass materialism, with the bureaucracy taking the lion’s share of the surplus product created by the workers, and the gap between privileged officials and the masses increasing faster than the growth in production.^[52]

In the post-war years, the ratio between the wages of an industrial worker and the salary of the highest officials in the Soviet Union widened considerably. In the UK civil service, for example, the pay ratio between new entrants and the top civil servants was about 10:1. In the Soviet Union the corresponding pay ratio could be as high as 30:1. However, one must also take into consideration the many services available to officials at public expense (food coupons, holidays, personal transport, etc.), the total value translated into monetary terms could make the ratio 50:1.^[53]

Lenin in The State and Revolution had warned of the need for the proletariat to take measures to prevent the rise of a bureaucracy. But Soviet reality went in the opposite direction, and instead of officials being elected subject to recall by the electors, they were appointed and removed by the diktat of the Secretariat. Instead of the pay of officials not exceeding that of a skilled worker, a hierarchy of privilege was in place that gave party tops a luxurious lifestyle while workers went hungry. Instead of officials being subject to control and supervision by all, officials ruled through the truncheons of the KGB and the threat of the Gulag. Instead of the state withering away, it mushroomed into an expensive monstrosity. The bureaucracy rose above society and protected itself by imprisoning and murdering its critics by the hundreds of thousands. These were not the marks of a society on the road toward socialism.

The more the bureaucracy took as perks, the more it feared for itself. The result was an enormous and ever-increasing proportion of resources consumed by the KGB, prisons, and other means of social control. This reduced the funds available for investment in new plant and machinery, and research and development, suppressing future benefits and limiting present consumption. Sooner or later the increasing distortion in the distribution of goods and services had to impact on the means of production.

Stalin died suddenly on 5 March 1953, after which a purge of top hard-line Stalinists was carried through. Beria was shot and the secret police were brought to heel, the most draconian laws were rescinded, and the forced-labour camps were reduced in number. But the bureaucracy continued its policy of insisting on limited spending on products for consumption, believing this would guarantee a higher level of future economic growth. This assumption was, however, increasingly at odds with reality. The producers – the workers – compared their own lifestyles with those of the bureaucrats, they were fed up with the poor quality of the goods supplied to them and were not satisfied with either their working or living conditions (including the absence of political and civil rights). The results were goods of poor quality, a low level of productivity, and a never-ending conflict between workers and managers. The latter forever attempted to accelerate production and demand better quality work, while the workers asserted themselves by working slowly and indifferently. In a capitalist economy, productivity and quality of work are controlled by market forces: wages, investment in new technologies, competition and, of course, fear of losing one’s job. But the Soviet Union was not a capitalist society; instead of the laws of the market there was a plethora of managerial controls backed by the threat of repression. The bureaucracy simply could not get a grip on product quality:

The Soviet products are as though branded with the gray label of indifference. Under a nationalised economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative; conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery. Soviet democracy had become a matter of life-and-death for the USSR.^[54]

There are limits to the successes of bureaucratic planning – the more complex the system the greater the need for workers’ democracy. The lack of any critical input meant there were few constraints on the plans proposed by the top bureaucrats, so vast projects such as cotton growing around the Aral Sea were launched and became environmental disasters. There was also a staggering amount of labour power wasted in non-productive activities. In 1982, after he was elected General Secretary of the CPSU, Yuri Andropov estimated that one third of all hours worked were wasted in this way. This was a damning indictment of the bureaucracy’s management of the Soviet economy.

Making a fetish of the state justified denying Soviet workers the freedom to organise in independent unions, or undertake independent political activity, or produce and distribute a leaflet or pamphlet without prior state approval. Doing so risked losing one’s job, or spending time in a labour camp or psychiatric hospital. In the absence of an effective workers’ democracy, social despotism and economic dysfunction are inevitable. However, when the state controls the means of production and distribution of social surplus, even economic demands become political and decisive for the dynamics of society.

The main signs of this contradiction were the inability to increase the quantity or improve the quality of consumer products because such a course required listening to the workers and consumers. The decrease in the rate of growth of the economy meant a growing contradiction between continuing to expand the privileges of the bureaucracy, and maintaining the living standards of the masses, in particular the national health service. There was growing opposition to the arbitrary decisions of the regime amongst the young and the oppressed nationalities. The obvious inconsistencies between the slogans of the regime and the reality of life were destroying social cohesion, generating a moral malaise that was eating away at society.

The bureaucracy attempted a series of ‘reforms’, but so long as bureaucratic centralism remained, the system continued to be despotic and wasteful. That was why the post-Stalin reforms introduced by party tops to rescue the bureaucracy from the ever-deepening crisis were doomed to failure. They were all dead ends designed to protect the bureaucratic system that was the cause of the problem.

Economic stagnation was followed by absolute decline. The situation continued to worsen, consumer goods disappeared from the shops, taken by various mafias for sale in street markets at exorbitant prices. The Soviet Union under the Stalinist bureaucracy was wracked by the structural contradiction of a nationalised planned economy, bursting to be free of the constraints imposed by a bureaucracy concerned primarily with preserving its privileged position. There comes a time when society and the economy are so complex that an undemocratic system cannot cope. The inefficiency inherent in the bureaucracy had reduced the planned economy to chaos, and by the late 1980s the Soviet Union was facing an absolute fall in productivity (see Appendix).

None of this invalidates the October Revolution, nor does it lessen the significance of the gains made by the Soviet Union in the seventy years of its existence. The nationalised, planned economy was the motor force that drove Russia into the modern era despite the brake of the bureaucracy with its deficiencies and crimes. The most astonishing advances were achieved in a remarkably short time, transforming the Soviet Union from a backward, semi-feudal, mainly illiterate country into the world’s second industrial power. But by 1990, the contradiction between the bourgeois nature of the distribution of consumer goods and the socialised industrial economic base had reached its limit.

Endnotes

[1] See J. Wright, ‘The Crisis in the Soviet Union’.

[2] Quoted in J. Wright, ‘Stalin’s Regime as Mirrored in Emergency Legislation’, 1940. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/wright/1940/12/laws.htm (accessed 3 February 2023).

[3] J. Wright, ‘Stalin’s New Labor Laws’, Fourth International, 1940. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/wright/1940/09/newlaws.htm (accessed 3 February 2023).

[4] J. Wright, ‘Class Relations in the Soviet Union’, Fourth International, 1941. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/wright/1941/07/class-su.htm (accessed 3 February 2023).

[5] See H. Sakaida, Heroines of the Soviet Union: 1941-45.

[6] M. Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, pp. 120-1.

[7] A. Orlov, ‘On the Education of Boys and Girls Apart in Separate Schools’, Izvestia, August 1943.

[8] Fourth International, ‘The Stalinist “Left Turn” and the Internal Crisis of the Kremlin Regime’, 1946. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol07/no04/stalinist.htm (accessed 3 February 2023).

[9] See L. Kaminsky, ‘Utopian Visions of Family Life in the Stalin-Era Soviet Union’.

[10] See M. Muravyeva, ‘Family Violence in Soviet Russia’.

[11] See P. Juviler, Revolutionary Law and Order.

[12] See ibid.

[13] See M. Buckley, ‘The “Woman Question” in the Contemporary Soviet Union’.

[14] See M. Muravyeva, ‘Family Violence in Soviet Russia’.

[15] See T. Zabelina, Sexual Violence Towards Women.

[16] See M. Muravyeva, ‘Family Violence in Soviet Russia’.

[17] V. I. Lenin, ‘A Great Beginning’, June 1919, LCW, Vol. 29, p. 429.

[18] See L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed.

[19] See S. Wheatcroft, ‘The Soviet Famine of 1946-47’.

[20] See G. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society.

[21] Quoted in M. Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union, University of Michigan Press, 1990, p. 123.

[22] See L. Armand, ‘Articles, Speeches and Letters’.

[23] See M. Buckley, ‘The “Woman Question” in the Contemporary Soviet Union’.

[24] See G. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society.

[25] United States Census Bureau, ‘Historical Poverty Tables 1959-2019’. Available at: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-poverty-people.html (accessed 3 February 2023).

[26] See A. Hegewisch, and H. Hartmann, ‘Occupational Segregation and the Gender Wage Gap’.

[27] See B. Jancar, Women Under Communism.

[28] See V. Strauss, ‘Hiding in Plain Sight: The Adult Literacy Crisis’.

[29] D. Brown, The Role and Status of Women in the Soviet Union, Teachers College Press, 1968, p. 58.

[30] See G. Curtis, ‘Russia: A Country Study’.

[31] See ibid.

[32] See W. Goldman, Women at the Gates.

[33] See M. Savage, ‘The Law on Abortion in the USSR’.

[34] The decision by the US Supreme Court protecting the right of a woman to have an abortion. However, this was overturned in 2022.

[35] See G. Smith, ‘Rethinking Soviet Population Policy’.

[36] General Secretary of the CPSU between 1953-64.

[37] See M. Buckley, ‘The “Woman Question” in the Contemporary Soviet Union’.

[38] General Secretary between 1964-82.

[39] See G. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society.

[40] General Secretary, 1985-91.

[41] The changes proposed by Gorbachev were an attempt to extend the limited democratic rights of the Soviet masses. The gains were only partial, but they were real. For example, under Stalin there were millions of political prisoners. Under Gorbachev there were fewer than in the USA. Under Stalin, all strikes were bloodily suppressed. Under Gorbachev there are no reports of strikers being shot.

[42] See K. Usha, ‘Political Empowerment of Women in Soviet Union and Russia’.

[43] M. Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for our Country and the World, Harper Collins, 1987, p. 177.

[44] See L. Brezhnev, The World I Left Behind.

[45] See M. Buckley, ‘The “Woman Question” in the Contemporary Soviet Union’.

[46] See K. Ghodsee, ‘Red Nostalgia?’.

[47] R. Alexander, Sex Education and the Depiction of Homosexuality under Khrushchev, Palgrave, 2018, p. 353.

[48] See A. Rustam, ‘New Light on the Prosecution of Soviet Homosexuals under Brezhnev’. 

[49] See L. Essig, Queer in Russia.

[50] V. I. Lenin, ‘The Party Crisis’, January 1921, Vol. 32, pp. 45-53.

[51] V. I. Lenin, Sochineniya [Complete works in Russian], 43(403), fifth edition.

[52] See R. Medvedev, Let History Judge.

[53] See R. Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy.

[54] L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Wellred Books, 2015, p. 198.