Aims and results of policies: Impact of Stalin's policies on women and minorities Notes

Impact on policies on women and minorities

Gender policies: the ‘Great Retreat’

1. Stalin reversed many of Lenin’s progressive gender policies by the mid-1930s, deeming earlier experiments in sexual liberation and easy divorce as social failures.
2. His 1936 decree reinstated the family as the fundamental unit of Soviet society, outlawed homosexuality, restricted abortion, and made divorce more difficult.

1. Despite official rhetoric about women’s emancipation, Stalinist industrialization imposed a ‘double burden’ on women who were expected to fulfill demanding roles both as workers in factories and as mothers at home.
2. The war intensified this exploitation: women became essential to sustaining wartime production and military roles, yet their economic rewards were limited, with real wages for women actually falling between 1930 and 1945.
3. Recognizing the declining birthrate and wartime population losses, Stalin’s government introduced policies that incentivized large families. By 1944, mothers with more than two children were honored as ‘heroines of the Soviet Union,’ while abortions were banned outright and taxes penalized small families.
4. Over half a million women served in the Red Army during World War II, highlighting their indispensable role in the Soviet war effort. However, the reality was grim: newly available archival evidence reveals widespread sexual abuse of female soldiers, particularly by officers, exposing the dark underside of their militarized participation and the regime’s failure to protect or properly honor these women.
5. Early Bolshevik feminist organizations like Zhenotdel were disbanded by 1930, signaling the state’s withdrawal from promoting independent female voices.