“If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” This quip, attributed to a Boston taxi driver by Gloria Steinem, is mostly associated with reproductive policy in the US, where anti-abortion politics have been fueled by religious institutions, notably the Roman Catholic Church. But Mie Nakachi shows that in the very different ideological and demographic circumstances of the postwar Soviet Union, the same wry observation holds. In her well researched and perceptive study, Nakachi assesses the response of the overwhelmingly male Soviet leaders to the demographic crisis caused by the massive population losses of the Great Patriotic War/World War II, and abortion as a key part of their policy decisions.
Since the 1986 publication of Joan Wallach Scott's pathbreaking American Historical Review article, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” discussions of gender have become essential aspects of historical scholarship. The field of Russian and Soviet studies has not been exempt from this expansion of the usual historical categories. Elizabeth Wood's germinal The Baba and the Comrade, published just over a decade later, in 1997, claimed to be the first to examine “the role of women in Soviet society” through examining “gender as an organizing principle.”Footnote 7 Since then, a number of monographs have focused on gender in assessing Soviet and post-Soviet history. Most have discussed the late tsarist and early revolutionary periods. The Great Patriotic War and postwar Soviet times have been less commonly covered.
The Soviet Union's bonafides in relation to women's liberation were considerable. As Wood notes, in the 1920s, “if there was a spectre haunting Europe in the 1920s, it was that of the New Woman.”Footnote 8 Revolutionary Russia was the first country in the world to legalize abortion. Soon after the successful Bolshevik coup, Vladimir Lenin touted the new nation's commitment to women's equality, claiming that more had been done for women's equality “than has been done during the past one hundred and thirty years by all the advanced, enlightened, ‘democratic’ republics of the world taken together.”Footnote 9
Nakachi thoroughly surveys the postwar Soviet landscape and the dilemmas confronting the country's leaders. Her well researched monograph demonstrates that the response to the gender imbalance created by the war fell far short of the socialist ideals of the early years, and again reflected the ambivalence toward women and their needs that characterized the entire history of the USSR. She surveys key issues related to population growth, including abortion, marital status, single motherhood, divorce, and ethnic differences in birth rates.
In the process, the push and pull of the top-down policies of the authoritarian state and resistance from below, ultimately forced the government to adjust its policies, moving away from draconian measures to raise the birthrate to policies more supportive of women, such as increased childcare options and subsidies for mothers. Nevertheless, the changes had their limits, and policymakers never challenged basic patriarchal norms. Throughout, whatever the policy, the emphasis on privileging fathers and placing responsibility for increasing the birthrate almost entirely on women remained fairly constant.
The issue of single motherhood was particularly complicated because in the Russian language, people are addressed formally by using their patronymic. Everyone had to have a father's name. This led to some women using the names of their fathers for their children rather than acknowledging the paternity of men who had betrayed them, and/or with whom they had had a brief encounter. State policies generally did not force fathers to support their out of wedlock offspring.
As Nakachi shows, while Soviet leaders were recognized for reforming the system inherited from Iosif Stalin in many areas, they were remarkably consistent in their population policies: “The one parent pronatalism that allocated unequal parental responsibilities between the mother and the father was largely unchanged from 1944 until 1991” (20). From Nikita Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev, leaders emphasized “women's inherent destiny as motherhood and homemaking” (13).
Mariia Kovrigina, Minister of Health after Stalin's death from 1953–57 and the first of only two women Ministers in the entire history of the USSR, proved a key figure in the evolution of early postwar Soviet health policy. Kovrigina, a physician who played a critical role in caring for refugees from the siege of Leningrad in Cheliabinsk, was no unblemished heroine. Her initial actions as Deputy Minister of Health reflected the vein of anti-Jewish racism that emerged as part of government policy after the war. As part of the Zhdanovshchina, she spearheaded a purge at the Moscow Institute for Gynecology and Obstetrics, arguing that: “doctors must reflect this field of medicine in the spirit of pure Soviet patriotism” (83). As a result of these actions, the number of doctors of Slavic origin shrank by 15%, while Jewish doctors were reduced by 55%, and the Moscow Institute lost its position as the leading Soviet academic institution in the field.
Kovrigina is best known for her role in re-legalizing abortion in the USSR. After Stalin's death, she pushed initially for the reform of the 1944 Family Law. Recognizing that Khrushchev supported the Law, she and her allies moved from a direct assault on the Law to a push for the decriminalization and then for the legalization of abortion. In this they succeeded, but attempts to undo the 1944 Law as a whole had to wait until Khrushchev no longer held power.
Post-Stalin, the Soviet Union moved from a terror state to a police state. No more would demographers be shot for providing census data that contradicted the Great Leader's pronouncements. But this did not end policies that policed women's bodies. Khrushchev continued the pronatalist tilt, blocking reform of the 1944 Family Law. A combination of support from population experts and physicians, a growing chorus of women's voices expressed through the media, and Kovrigina's deft maneuvering, led to the repeal of the abortion prohibition in 1955.
In a key section of the book, Nakachi charts the campaign, which resulted in the USSR pioneering in providing abortion on demand. Nevertheless, although bringing the country back to earlier, more progressive reproductive rights policies, the abortion victory was framed not as a victory for women's rights but the magnanimity of the state:
In the actual law legalizing abortion on November 23, 1955, it was not a woman's “right”
that was provided but the state allowing the “possibility” of [a woman] deciding the question of motherhood by herself. . . . . . paternalistic language replaced the ideas of right and justice. . . . . . The language of women's reproductive rights would never appear in public under socialism (181– 82).
This was as far as the Soviets would go in nodding to women's reproductive needs. Some modest improvements were made in support services for mothers, but abortion remained the chief means of birth control. While the west and other satellite countries, notably East Germany, made contraceptives widely available, the Soviet state lagged well behind. Condoms, popularly called “galoshes” for their thickness and ungainliness, did not catch on. As was described powerfully in the 1979 samizdat feminist journal Al΄manakh: Women and Russia, abortions were performed crudely in mass clinics, often without anesthesia.
Pronatalism returned, with a touch of racism. Less attention was paid to Hero Mothers of large families, often Central Asia, and more on smaller families, more urban and more Slavic. Women demanded a fairer division of domestic work and more childcare facilities, but the state favored stricter sex roles: “gender education actively discouraged male participation in household work; teachers told boys not to share ‘feminine’ duties and girls not to let husbands help with ‘women's work’” (214).
If there is one weakness in the book, it is that Nakachi underplays the resistance to this kind of pronatalism. Throughout the post-Stalin period, passionate debates about the failure of the state to provide the necessary supports for women to have more children filled the letters sections of national and regional newspapers, with a remarkable range of opinions expressed.
In an Epilogue, Nakachi touches on the post-Soviet era. Under Vladimir Putin, pronatalism and strict gender differentiation is even stronger, with a leader known for his hypermasculine tropes and homophobia. Differing perspectives about women's roles have been silenced.
Overall, using a combination of archival materials and evidence from literature, the print media, and films, Mie Nakachi, using a gender lens, adds powerfully to our understanding of how a revolutionary country strayed far from its egalitarian and idealistic roots, and its leaders became more concerned about increasing women's reproduction than on making them equal citizens.
