In 1918, Lenin highly praised the contributions of working women in the socialist revolution and passionately proclaimed that one of the fundamental tasks of the Soviet Republic was to abolish all restrictions on women’s rights. Stalin, however, rendered this vision shattered. Because of the male population loss during the war, the women’s rights could no longer be an end in itself. Rather women became politically significant only as the means of reproduction to a large extent. Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union by Mie Nakachi aims to explore the issues of nationalising Soviet women’s body therein. How might the population policy of the postwar era respond to the gender-imbalanced society? How should the government utilise women’s reproductive capability? What roles did doctors and experts play? How did ideology reshape the identities and rights of women?

The book examines the Soviet population problem after the World War II and the resulting 1944 Family Law with great precision. In the context of massive labour losses during the war, the Soviet Union required women to go to two front lines of production: the factories, where they produced commodities for the sake of ‘Soviet Modernisation’, and maternity wards, where they produced babies for the sake of ‘replacing the dead’. Nikita Khrushchev, then the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine and future Soviet leader, offered a proposal on reproductive policy that later became the basis for the 1944 Family Law. The author describes the Law as pro-natalist and patriarchal, because it contained a large number of maternal obligations for women, such as strict abortion bans, enticing baby bonuses, difficult divorce proceedings and heavy taxes on childless families and the single. However, it indirectly acquiesced to the absence of fathers by preventing single mothers from suing irresponsible biological fathers to obtain child support and denying unmarried mothers’ right to put the father’s name on the birth certificate. Moreover, the failure to effectively enact the state aid system promised by the Law exacerbated gender and social issues. Thus, the debates over abortion issues, population science and fundamental rights of women unfolded in the Soviet Union in 1940s and 1950s, which comprise the bulk of the book.

In Chapter 1, the author introduces the demographic catastrophe that befell the Soviet Union after the war, and, using recently disclosed archives, uncovers the high-level discussions that led to the formulation of the 1944 Family Law. Chapter 2 describes the intricate interactions and delicate relationships among Soviet doctors, demographers, policymakers and pitiful pregnant women requesting assistance. Chapter 3 illustrates the significant impact of the Law on the social life, including marital relation, female psychology and moral status of the single mothers and the fatherless children. In the meantime, the legal experts were attempting to amend the Law and had some initial achievements. Chapter 4 details the beginning of the relaxation of the Law, that is, the interministerial survey of clinical and underground abortions after the dismal news of ‘1948 birth rate crisis’ reached the Soviet leaders’ ears and so led to the abortion reform movement. Chapter 5 discusses the efforts of doctors and medical administrators to decriminalise abortion and the final successful re-legalisation of abortion amid there – backdrop of ‘de-Stalinization’ in 1955. Chapter 6 analyses why the fertility rate remained stubbornly low after authorities’ legalising abortion and women’s regaining the personal autonomy of reproduction in the ‘developed socialist’ USSR. In the epilogue, the author addresses the politics of population and the retrogression of women’s rights in today’s Russia.

One of the recurring topics in this book is how a nation exerts control over its population. This is a typical Foucaultian question, and this book also gives us some Foucaultian answers. The author’s observation of the roles of scientists and doctors in the politics of reproduction indicates power-knowledge governmentality. The science of producing population knowledge is allied with the politics of controlling population and upgrading national power. As the aftermath of the Purge continued to spread ideological terror among scientists, statisticians tended to adopt the viewpoints of their leaders and seek scientific justification for them. Nevertheless, some doctors quietly carried out illegal abortion procedures and developed birth control methods for women with unintended pregnancies. As they campaigned for the reform, their motivations, however, were not only their compassion, but also their advocacy for racial purity, scientific eugenics and other covert agendas.

Moreover, the Soviet Union’s measures to enhance its power within the country shifted the governance model from the individual to the collective, and its postwar reproductive management policy confronted a formidable conundrum, which could compare with the famine metaphor that Foucault outlined. To handle the population problem, a communist country must either stick to the ‘discipline’ by outlawing abortion, which can be viewed as ‘mercantile’ measures, or take ‘laisser-faire’ strategy by liberalising abortion as a ‘physiocratic’ system. However, there will never be ‘enough’ population in a state, and it conflicted with the post-war Soviet implicit ideal of maintaining the classical pastoral system in the field of population. The contradictions between legislation and abrogation presented in this book showed the logical breakdown between state rationality and governance practice. As it uncovers universal features of modern governance concerning bio-politics of population, this book can also provide reflections on nowadays population control programs in the United States, China, India and other countries.