14. Women, the Great Patriotic War and ‘Post-Stalinism’¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 14: Women, the Great Patriotic War and ‘Post-Stalinism’
This chapter traces the progressive erosion of women’s liberation in the Soviet Union from the war years through to perestroika, arguing that the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution fatally undermined the Marxist project of gender emancipation. The October Revolution’s historical credit allowed the parasitic bureaucracy to pose as progressive for two generations, yet by 1939 the economy was strangling under bureaucratic constraints: cement plant capacity rose from 6.7 to 8.2 million tons, but utilisation fell so sharply that actual use dropped from 5.9 to 5.2 million tons. The war itself confirmed the superiority of a nationalised planned economy—the evacuation of enterprises east of the Urals was an unequalled feat—yet simultaneously marked a regressive turn. Women constituted 39 per cent of the civilian labour force at the war’s start, rising from 13 to 16 million, with half a million serving in the armed forces. Yet in 1943, co-education in urban schools was abolished, reintroducing gender-differentiated curricula, and the 1944 Family Law abolished recognition of de facto marriages, restored illegitimacy, raised divorce costs, and introduced taxes on single and small-family citizens. The bureaucracy strengthened the patriarchal family as a conservative base.
The post-Stalin era deepened this betrayal. Despite formal legal equality, women’s wages averaged 70 per cent of men’s due to occupational sex segregation, and the central problem of the double burden was never addressed by replacing the bureaucracy with workers’ democracy. Natalya Baranskaya’s 1969 story A Week Like Any Other reopened the ‘Woman Question’ by exposing the gap between legal rights and lived reality. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev all pursued pronatalist policies that reasserted traditional family roles. Gorbachev’s Perestroika (1987) explicitly blamed women’s equality for weakening family ties, calling for women to return to a ‘purely womanly mission’. The only real solution—creating conditions for the family to wither away—was excluded. Debates among the intelligentsia proposed part-time work and men sharing housework, but never the socialisation of domestic labour. The nomenklatura opposed collective upbringing, securing elite education for their own children while the state failed to treat domestic and sexual violence as systemic issues. By 1990, women’s representation in the Supreme Soviet had fallen from 33 per cent to 15.6 per cent. The chapter concludes that the Soviet Union’s failure to fully socialise domestic labour and transform gender relations meant women’s liberation remained incomplete—a fundamental betrayal of the Marxist programme outlined by Lenin and Trotsky.