Beginning with the middle-1920s, the Soviet government gradually reversed its original permissiveness and began to adopt a more conservative approach to family affairs. Behind this reversal was a realization that the main causes of social problems were not only the so-called petty-bourgeois remnants and external catastrophes such as war or famine, but also factors operating within Soviet society itself. Disintegration of the family which the revolution had caused and even encouraged was identified as one of these factors. The first signal of discontent with developments in family matters came in fact from Lenin, shortly before his death in 1924, when he urged more discipline and less personal freedom as proper revolutionary attitudes:
Although I am nothing but a gloomy ascetic, the so-called 'new sexual life1 of the youth — and sometimes of the old — often seems to me to be purely bourgeois, an extension of bourgeois brothels. That has nothing whatever in common with freedom of love as we Communists understand it... The revolution demands concentration, increase of forces. From the masses, from individuals. It cannot tolerate orgiastic conditions... If harmful tendencies are appearing, creeping over from bourgeois society into the world of revolution — as the roots of many weeds spread — it is better to combat them early (quoted in Zetkin,
1929: 57 and 60).
In 1924, new regulations were published introducing a high fee for abortion as a deterrent, although it was often waived in cases where the woman could not pay. At the same time, special commissions were established to control the number of free-of-charge procedures (Avdeev, 1989; Popov, 1993).
Yet the years between 1921 and 1928 were still years of increasing prosperity, the result of Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP) which temporarily returned to private ownership and to a certain extent re-established capitalism. While all key sectors of industry were retained in state administration, private entrepreneurship was encouraged in small-scale factories, the market was resuscitated, and joint farming was given full support (Nove, 1989). A period of famine in 1921-22 preceded better times, but the NEP eventually was a success, and by 1927 the pre-war levels of production had been restored in industry and surpassed in agriculture (Baradat, 1992).
Lenin's death in January 1924 became an important moment in Soviet history, since it brought to the fore the questions of succession and the future orientation of the Soviet state. Finally, it was Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) who had sufficiently consolidated his support to be able to take power. Stalin brought together a mix of Marxist theory, Leninist authoritarianism, traditions of Tsarist absolutism, and his own personality. Within a few years he had eliminated all opponents, gained total power over the Communist Party (which meant over the Soviet Union), and imposed a harsh one-person rule that later became known as a 'cult of personality'. As Stalin sun/eyed the state of the country over which he now held sway, he became convinced that precious time had been wasted in fruitless daydreams. Abandoning Lenin's goal of world revolution and proclaiming the end of the NEP, Stalin concentrated on a single objective: to build socialism in the Soviet Union. From that point on, Russia was to be considered the bastion of the communist movement, and anything that added to the strength of Russia as a nation was good for that movement.
By the end of the 1920s, the whole country had embarked on a massive program of forced industrialization and collectivization of agriculture based on a series of five-year plans and the centralization of economic control. The First Five-Year Plan (1928-32) laid down targets for the production of everything necessary for an advanced economy. The main goals were electrification and the production of steel and coal, which meant the economic subordination of light industry and communal services to heavy industry. Such economic advances could come only at an enormous price. The Stalinist recipe for industrialization required a closed economy in which human resources, like all others, were completely subject to central command. In an effort to mobilize the populace, Stalin sponsored an era of political oppression that resulted in unprecedented repression of individual rights. For instance, the Plan incorporated a policy of forced dislocation of people from the country to industrial centres.11 To increase labour discipline and overall productiveness, an escalating succession of restrictive laws and limitations in welfare policies were used. The years that followed the promulgation of the Plan were marked by a stress on productivity and by an unprecedentedly harsh attitude towards those who did not participate.12 The cost of these policies in terms of the losses
11 Migration to the cities averaged 1.1 million per year in 1926-29 and increased to about 3 million per year in 1930-32 (Livi-Bacci, 1993).
12 For more details about Stalinist social policies, see Lorimer (1958), Petersen (1964), Bronfenbrenner (1968), Juviler (1976), Conquest (1986), Lewis (1987), Livi-Bacci (1993).
suffered was enormous; 'seldom was any government to wreak such havoc in its own country' (Lewin, 1968: 515).13
It is a commonly accepted fact that industrialization, urbanization and the movement of populations to the cities lead in most societies, at least in the initial stages of these processes, to a decrease in the birth rate. The Soviet Union cannot have escaped this phenomenon. Precise figures were never published, but estimates made by different demographers consistently indicate a substantial decline in Soviet birth rates during the late 1920s and early 1930s (Table 2.2). Although plausible data on abortion are not available, it may be assumed that the decrease in birth rates coincided with increased resort to abortion, particularly in the period of acute decline in living standards that accompanied the first wave of collectivization and intense effort at rapid industrialization (Avdeev, 1989). There is also some evidence that high numbers of applications for abortion raised serious difficulties in hospital accommodation (Field, 1956; Hyde, 1970). Sooner or later it must have become apparent to the regime that its liberal family legislation on divorce, alimony and abortion encouraged 'frivolous attitudes toward the family and family obligations' (Juviler, 1967: 32). People living in such an environment were unlikely to become the stable, hard-working and conscientious workers required for a socialist society. Fertility decline and related social phenomena were considered even more alarming in view of the worsening international situation and the growing possibility of war.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s access to abortion was gradually restricted. A number of political and medical exceptions were introduced to curtail the use of legal abortion services; for example, Communist Party members were de facto denied access to legal abortion (Avdeev, 1989; Popov, 1993). Beginning in 1935, a new regulation was issued, forbidding abortions for first pregnancies, restricting the time limit to the first three months after conception with a minimum of six months between operations, and prescribing curettage without anaesthetic as the only method of pregnancy termination (Mace and Mace, 1963; Knarr, 1977). In May 1936 a draft law was formulated that, among other things, prohibited abortion and provided that not only the doctor but also the woman having an abortion would be punished. The state authorities, in an
13 Among other things, Stalinist policies resulted in a period of catastrophe-level mortality and morbidity in the Soviet population. It has been estimated that between 1928 and 1933 the infant mortality rate increased from 182 to 317 per 1000 live births, and that life expectancy dropped from 38.9 years to an almost unbelievable level of 11.6 years (Andreev, Darsky, and Kharkova, 1994).
Table 2.2: Estimates of crude birth rates for the Soviet Union, 1914-45
Y e a r Total area: E uropean area:
(a) (b) (c) (d) (b) (c) 1915 37.4 39.7 1916 32.5 29.9 1917 28.8 23.9 1918 32.4 32.0 31.8 32.0 1919 30.6 31.0 30.8 31.0 1920 31.7 31.2 31.0 31.2 1921 35.0 35.5 35.3 35.5 1922 36.2 37.3 36.8 37.3 1923 44.0 43.9 42.8 43.9 1924 42.3 41.0 43.1 42.0 1925 43.8 45.0 44.7 44.7 1926 42.3 44.0 44.0 43.7 43.7 1927 41.6 43.7 46.8 43.4 43.4 1928 41.1 44.3 44.3 45.8 42.2 42.2 1929 38.8 41.8 44.5 39.8 39.8 1930 38.0 41.2 42.5 39.2 39.2 1931 34.1 32.6 40.7 31.0 1932 29.2 32.6 36.1 31.0 31.0 1933 30.3 32.6 34.0 31.0 1934 25.0 32.6 30.5 31.0 1935 28.4 28.6 31.6 36.2 30.1 1936 31.7 32.3 34.3 34.9 1937 37.1 38.7 38.7 40.3 1938 36.9 37.5 37.5 39.4 1939* 33.3 36.5 36.5 40.4 1940* 31.2 31.2 31.2 36.3 1941 31.5 1942 24.9 1943 20.5 1944 17.2 1945 15.9
Notes: * USSR borders changed considerably between September 1939 and August 1940, see Lorimer (1946: 184-190)
Sources: a - Biraben (1958), b - Heer (1968b), c - Urlanis (1977), d - Andreev et al. (1994).
exceptional moment of democracy, invited the Soviet public to discuss the new proposal. Although a number of statements published promptly in the Soviet press reflected the prevailing feeling that couples should have the right to determine the number of their children, 14 popular debate on abortion was
suddenly cut off. The propagandist journal Pod znamenem marxizma (Under the
14 For examples of quotations illustrating public opinion, see Schlesinger (1949), Field (1956), Mace and Mace (1963), Holt (1980).
Flag of Marxism) published a statement which signalled that the government had already decided on an energetic course against abortions:
The principal motives for abortion have been liquidated in our socialist State... Therefore, mass abortions resorted to for egoistic reasons are not to be tolerated. The Soviet State cannot countenance the fact that tens of thousands of women ruin their health and delay the growth of a new generation for socialist society (quoted in Schlesinger, 1949: 310).
The new legislation, practically unchanged from the original draft, was published on June 27, 1936, together with a large commentary (Schlesinger, 1949: 269- 272). It stated that owing to the vast growth of material well-being in the USSR, and taking into consideration the high political and cultural level of the Soviet people, it was 'possible seriously to organize the struggle against abortions by prohibitive laws as well as by other means' (Schlesinger, 1949: 270). The 1920 liberal law was justified as a measure related merely to the social chaos of the Civil War period 1917-20; now, emphasis had to be placed on protecting the health of Soviet women against injuries resulting from abortions, as revealed by medical evidence that was previously neglected. Abortions were forbidden except under narrowly defined medical indications where the continuation of pregnancy endangered the life or threatened serious injury to the health of the pregnant woman, or if there was the likelihood of hereditary disease. A doctor performing an illegal abortion was liable to imprisonment for up to two years, rising to three years for unqualified persons. A woman undergoing such an abortion was to be reprimanded for the first offence and fined for a second offence. No action was taken against contraception, but nothing further was done to promote its acceptance. At this time also, family allowances were initiated for parents with seven or more children, as well as several other measures promoting natality, expanding the child-care networks, and discouraging the dissolution of families.15
Thus, Soviet ideology entirely abandoned its earlier concept that woman's primary function, like that of man, is social activity, and that bearing children should be accessory to this function. As long as it was not possible for the state to accept the social disorganization attested to by emerging patterns in demographic behaviour, the equalitarian and antistatist elements of Marxist ideology had to give way. Marxism in this sphere, as in others, became little more than a collection of quotations, useful only in justifying current policies.
15 For more details about Soviet pronatalist policies of the mid-1930s, see Lorimer (1946, 1958), Schlesinger (1949), Heer and Bryden (1967), Madison (1968), DiMaio (1981).
The status of the family was changed from that of a barely tolerated 'survival of the past' to that of an indispensable primary cell in Soviet society. Motherhood was practically declared a profession to be encouraged, even when carried to a point hardly compatible with any other form of productive activity. The promulgation of a restrictive abortion law disregarded prevailing public sentiment, and was indicative of the suppression of personal freedoms which had existed in the early years of the Soviet era. Though women were not encouraged to abandon their jobs for the home — a development which neither they themselves nor the state could afford — traditional sex roles within the family were by and large reasserted. As the ex-revolutionary and once Lenin's collaborator Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) commented from his exile in Norway, 'a Thermidorean reaction in the sphere of the family set in' (Trotsky, 1973 [1936]:
86).
Concurrently with the legislative developments there occurred a marked shift in the overall propaganda approach towards sex and family matters. Those in power now placed emphasis in their speeches on the increase of population in the Soviet Union contrasting with the decadence of capitalist nations; on the equality of women in all matters, with special accent on their share in productive labour; and on the glory of motherhood in the Soviet Union (Lorimer, 1958; Besemeres, 1980). Information related to sex and reproduction was increasingly restricted. From 1936 even sex research, sex education, and all kinds of erotic art were absolutely forbidden, leaving the population sexually ignorant (Kon, 1992; Khomassuridze, 1993).
For the people the best way to cope with the restrictive situation would perhaps have been to resort to contraception. Yet such a solution was not very relevant given the conditions of the Soviet population in the 1930s. It seems that at that time major segments of this largely peasant population were not much used to the possibility of influencing procreative practices. Demographic data indicate that the country as a whole had not yet reached the point of transition from uncontrolled to controlled fertility; that is, it was in a similar situation to most of Western Europe in the mid-nineteenth century.16 Moreover, scholars who studied the situation in Soviet society during the post-revolution years noted signs of fatalism, ignorance, male chauvinism, and deeply rooted religious inhibitions, all of which made for widespread unwillingness to use
contraception.17 In addition, the Soviet regime from its early days was largely reticent on the subjects of sex and contraception. What sorts of attitudes the official propaganda promoted may be deduced from a statement made by N. Semashko, the first People's Commissar for Public Health, in an address to students which he made in 1927:
Comrades: You have to come to the universities and technical institutes in order to study. This is now the main goal of your lives. And even as all your impulses and views are subordinated to this goal, as you must deny yourselves not infrequently many extraneous pleasures because they would be detrimental to your main goal — that of studying and becoming educated collaborators in the reconstruction of the state — by the same token you will have to subordinate ail other activities of your life to this same goal. For at this time the state is too poor to support you, to undertake the rearing of your children, and to care for parents. Therefore we advise you: Abstain! (quoted in Reich, 1974 [1930]: 197)
On the rare occasions when the mass media mentioned sex matters and birth control, they did so in the spirit of this general consensus, or followed an even more uncompromising line. Thus the author of an article published in the women's journal Rabotnitsa( Working Woman) in 1927 wrote:
We must make clear from the very beginning that the application of any means of preventing pregnancy is abnormal. The healthy woman must be a mother, for only maternity brings the full development of her physical and spiritual strength. In other words, the result of sexual intercourse must be conception (quoted in Holt, 1980: 101; italics in original).
Given such standpoints, it is scarcely surprising that the state authorities did little to produce or publicize contraceptives, and that the available means were chronically 'lacking in variety, reliability, and quality' (Geiger, 1968: 193). For many decades, the Soviet people had to rely almost exclusively on rather primitive forms of fertility control, such as abstinence, coitus interruptus,
douching, and homemade devices. Whatever shifts in private behaviour the state institutions hoped to attain through policy measures, a need for family planning was likely to remain high.
The effects of changes to the 1920 legislation on abortion were dramatic. The immediate result of the virtual prohibition of abortion was widespread confusion,
17 For more information about contraceptive use in various parts of the Soviet Union in the inter war period, see Schlesinger (1949), Lorimer (1958), Geiger (1968), Millett (1971), Holt (1980), David and McIntyre (1981).
since many women came as usual to the hospitals only to be turned away (Mace and Mace, 1963). It can easily be surmised that prohibition did not remove the popular demand for abortion, but rather sent abortion practices underground. There is some evidence that cases violating the legal provisions were frequent, and often resulted in grave health complications, since doctors and backyard abortionists were under pressure from the population to perform abortions illegally. The authors of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1973, vol. 1: 26) write:
The number of abortions in [the Soviet Union] in 1937 as compared with 1935 fell by a factor of more than three, but in subsequent years the number of abortions began to rise again, mainly as a result of nonhospital abortions, which accounted for 80 to 90 per cent of the total.
Field (1956: 425) quotes a Russian emigre, a gynaecologist who in the 1930s had worked in Leningrad, as saying that there was a constant stream of infections caused by unsterile abortions:
About 70 per cent of the women in our department were there because of complications following botched up abortions... Beds reserved for maternity cases had been increased, while those reserved for gynaecology had been decreased; we had so many of these cases we didn't know what to do with them. And the mortality was very high... .
Notwithstanding the demand for abortion, the sanctions for those who violated the law remained severe. Chalidze (1977) reported that doctors were obliged to report to the authorities women with complications after illegal abortion, and even to refuse to treat them unless they revealed who had performed the abortion. A Procurator's Instruction of November 1940 on the 'War on criminal abortion' required the doctor suspecting abortion to keep detailed records, especially concerning who the woman was, and to preserve all evidence, including the foetus (Savage, 1988).
Demographically speaking, the main outcome following the abortion law of 1936 was a sharp change in the Soviet birth rate. However, although it may be assumed that reasonably accurate information on the population of the Soviet Union was available to Stalin's government at that time, no data on vital events were published.18 Available estimates (Table 2.2) indicate an increase in the
18 Presumably, such a practice had some advantages from the viewpoint of communist propaganda: as Lorimer (1958: 228) pointed out, 'it concealed a good many skeletons', such as the negative demographic consequences of collectivization.
birth rate from 28-36 births per 1,000 population in 1935 to 32-35 in 1936, and 37-40 in 1937; thus, in the USSR as a whole the 1937 birth rate is estimated to be 13-20 per cent higher than that of 1936. In the cities of European Russia, the impact on the number of births was presumably even more dramatic. According to Heer (1968b: 231), in Moscow the number of births in 1937 increased by 92 per cent over the 1936 figure, in Leningrad by 69 per cent, in Minsk by 39 per cent, and in Baku by 39 per cent.19 Yet these effects were only short-lived; presumably, Soviet couples largely resorted to illegal methods of birth control.