15. Women and Capitalist Restoration¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 15: Women and Capitalist Restoration¶
The restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union precipitated a catastrophic reversal of the gains won by women under state socialism. Following the USSR’s collapse, the Yeltsin government dismantled the social safety net, plunging women into mass unemployment and poverty. Where the Bolsheviks had enshrined full legal equality in 1917, guaranteed equal pay, abortion rights, and extensive social infrastructure—albeit undermined by economic backwardness and Stalinist bureaucracy—capitalism swiftly rescinded these achievements. Yeltsin’s officials openly declared that women should not work; female unemployment, which had been negligible, soared to comprise 70 per cent of the jobless by the mid-1990s, with 90 per cent of those earning under $20 a month being women. Life expectancy for women fell from 74 to 72 years between 1989 and 1995 as the Semashko healthcare system was slashed from 3.4 to 1.8 per cent of the national budget, allowing epidemics of diphtheria, tuberculosis, and cholera to return. The fertility rate collapsed from 2.1 to 1.3, and schools deteriorated so severely that 20,000 closed and half of all students attended on a shift basis.
The state’s response to demographic decline was not to restore socialised childcare or job security—factors a World Bank study found most strongly correlated with women choosing to have a second child—but to impose coercive natalist policies. The 1999 means-tested cash benefits failed to address women’s real concerns, and from 2003 a series of abortion restrictions were introduced, culminating in a 2015 agreement between the Ministry of Health and the Russian Orthodox Church that placed Church representatives in medical institutions to intervene against abortions. By 2020, 41 of 44 Moscow public hospitals had suspended abortion provision. Simultaneously, the state and Church promoted “traditional values”—defined by Putin in 2013 as conservative family and religious values—reintroducing single-sex education and expunging sex education from schools in favour of pro-life moral instruction. The Orthodox Church’s influence grew to the point where church and state became “two sides of the same coin”.
Alongside the assault on women’s rights, the capitalist restoration unleashed a relentless campaign against LGBT people. Yeltsin had decriminalised male homosexuality in 1993, but Putin’s 2013 law banning homosexual “propaganda” among minors was written so broadly that it effectively banned all public LGBT expression, and was used to persecute activists, dismiss gay teachers, and block events. The Health Ministry declared transgender identities a “mental disorder”, and the 2020 referendum constitutionally banned same-sex marriage. Homophobic violence rose, abetted by state television describing openly gay Olympians as “perverted” and far-right groups hunting gay teenagers. The authors argue that this manufactured homophobia serves to divide the working class, and that the Russian LGBT movement lacks a Marxist understanding of oppression’s roots in bourgeois society. They conclude that only a socialist workers’ state can end such oppression, and that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, by voicing homophobic prejudices, blocks unity between the LGBT struggle and the labour movement.