12. The Second Five-Year Plan, A Woman’s Right to Choose¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 12: The Second Five-Year Plan, A Woman’s Right to Choose¶
By the end of the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin’s leadership was secure and the bureaucracy had consolidated its control, adopting increasingly reactionary policies toward the family. The family served the bureaucracy’s need for conservative social supports and was the cheapest method of providing basic services under conditions of scarcity. The state rewrote revolutionary marriage laws, trumpeted family sanctity, and promoted motherhood and obedience to parents, with a second aim of increasing the birth rate as urban families restricted themselves to two or fewer children. The regime justified growing social inequality by attacking egalitarianism as anti-socialist, removing the partmaksimum on party members’ salaries in 1932 and improving pay for engineers and managers. Stalin introduced anti-Marxist concepts, declaring the class struggle sharpens under socialism and redefining socialism by emphasising property ownership while ignoring social inequalities and lack of democracy.
The factory shop, canteen, childcare, and housing were used by managers to spur productivity and impose labour discipline, particularly on women workers. Ration cards tied workers to factories; the working week was lengthened, night shifts increased, and holidays reduced. The Stakhanovite movement intensified labour, though gains were offset by increased accidents and supply chain failures. In 1934, homosexuality was recriminalised, punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment, with GPU deputy chief Yagoda presenting homosexuals as counter-revolutionary spies. Commissar of Justice Krylenko declared all homosexuals class enemies; hundreds of thousands were imprisoned in the Gulag, while lesbians were often declared mentally ill and subjected to psychiatric ‘treatment’.
The 1936 ‘Family Law’ reasserted the traditional family as an economic unit and instrument to boost population growth, making parents legally responsible for children’s actions and introducing a progressive tax on divorce. Abortion restrictions were tightened in 1934-35, and the draft law ‘On the Protection of Motherhood and Childhood’ presented the family as permanent, with previous ideas of its withering away denounced as the work of enemies of the people. The government announced a public discussion but limited it to one month, making clear it did not want genuine mass involvement. Public opinion was heavily opposed; women party members vigorously condemned the law, but the official debate framed motherhood as a patriotic duty. The final decree on 27 June banned abortion except where pregnancy endangered life or involved serious hereditary disease, with physicians facing one to two years’ imprisonment for violations. The law produced a noticeable increase in the urban birth rate, but illegal abortions and related morbidity and mortality rose sharply. The 1937 Census revealed a much lower population than expected; its authors were jailed and shot. Child support was formalised, but many fathers could not support two families; Soviet criminologists estimated half of infanticides were fathers killing children to avoid payments. Trotsky described the law as a “sexual thermidor” and legislation against women, arguing the rehabilitation of the bourgeois family was a step towards restoring capitalism. The bureaucracy declared the Woman Question solved while women lost control of their bodies and the double burden was ignored.