Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

Sarah Ashwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134609666
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: Social Sciences

One of the few English language studies to focus on the male experiences, this book addresses the important questions raised by the rise and fall of the Soviet experiment in transforming gender relations. Issues covered include; * the paternal role * women as breadwinners * men's loss of status at work * changing gender roles in the press * the relationship between the sexual and gender revoloutions. Featuring an outstanding panel of Russian contributors, this collection is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Politics, Gender Studies and Russian Studies.

1 From duty to pleasure?

Motherhood in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia

Olga Issoupova

This chapter considers the changing construction of motherhood in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. It is divided into two sections: the first section considers the Soviet approach to motherhood through an analysis of the official state journal Voprosy materinstva i mladenchestva (‘Questions of Motherhood and Infancy’), between 1926 and 1937, during which time the main elements of the Soviet attitude to motherhood were established.¹ The second half considers the transformation in attitudes towards motherhood set in train by the collapse of the Soviet state. My research is based on two sources: a review of the contemporary Russian press, and interviews with women of child-bearing age, which were designed to gauge how far the change in the ideological climate has been reflected in the subjective perceptions of ordinary women.

Methodology

In terms of the review of the press, the form of analysis which was used to study the two eras - Soviet and post-Soviet Russia - was somewhat different in each case. Voprosy materinstva i mladenchestva was a mouthpiece for state policy with regard to motherhood and infancy, and I treat it as such in this chapter. The discussion of this journal is thus a study of state policy and its official representation. By contrast, in the post-Soviet era, there is no ‘official’ state position on motherhood. I have therefore attempted to capture the main strands of contemporary opinion as presented in the press through studying a representative cross-section of the print media between the period 20 July 1996 to 10 August 1996. In total, I monitored over twenty papers, including the main national newspapers and the Moscow local papers, and analysed all articles which in one way or another related to the subject of motherhood.² In 1995-6 three new women’s magazines were launched: the Russian editions of Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping (Domashnii ochag), and Motherhood (Materinstvo), and I included the September issues of these magazines in my analysis. I also included issues of the monthly magazines Rabotnitsa and Krest’yanka (‘Woman Worker’ and ‘Peasant Woman’, respectively, the two most popular women’s magazines of the Soviet era), published between January and September 1996. Issues of Sostial’naya zashchita (‘Social Protection’) for this period were also included since this publication considers questions relating to social protection of motherhood.

Between 1996 and 1998 I conducted detailed interviews with thirty-three women of child-bearing age, the youngest of whom was 19 and the oldest 40. Whether or not these women had children, I worked from the assumption that all of them would have given some thought to the ‘maternal question’. Eleven of the women I interviewed were relinquishing mothers (women who had given up their children for adoption), as I was particularly interested in the motivation of such women during the transition era. As a whole, the women interviewed were in a variety of different situations - childless, married, single, cohabiting, and so forth. My questions focused on the women’s motivations regarding motherhood, and their perceptions of the ‘prerequisites’ of this in the transition era.

The construction of motherhood in early Soviet Russia

The specialist journal Voprosy materinstva i mladenchestva (‘Questions of Motherhood and Infancy’) is an excellent source through which to examine the development of the Soviet conception of motherhood and childcare. The journal was established in 1926 with the goal of medical enlightenment of the population in questions of reproduction, through the transmission of the latest scientific information about pregnancy, birth and child-rearing. At the same time, however, it served as a means through which the state transmitted its policies; indeed, this function gradually began to dominate during the Stalin era. What were the main priorities of the nascent Soviet state? The emerging politics of motherhood and infancy can be examined under three headings. First, reproduction was seen as a state function , for which women should be rewarded. Second, in line with this, the state was concerned with the quality of future generations. This implied that women’s bodies were valuable vessels in which the state had a legitimate interest. Third, children, once produced, should be brought up as communists. Early plans to socialise childcare completely were abandoned for practical reasons, but the quest to ensure control of child-rearing continued. In place of the development of ‘child colonies’, the state sought to develop a special alliance with mothers, whose care was to be supplemented by nursery provision. This, however, was at the expense of fathers who were symbolically excluded from the state-mother-child triad.

Motherhood: ‘the highest form of service’

In the first issue of Voprosy materinstva i mladenchestva , V. Lebedeva (1926) wrote that ‘motherhood is the social function of women - this is our watchword’. The aim of the Bolshevik government, in Lebedeva’s opinion, was to ‘grant women equal conditions at work, take from them the burden of housekeeping and child care’ so that they would no longer be ‘tired and downtrodden’. In the absence of such reforms society hindered ‘a woman’s very nature, her maternity’. This article highlights three key Bolshevik positions with regard to maternity: first, that motherhood was not a private matter, but a social one; second, that motherhood was the ‘natural’ destiny of women; and third, that it was a function which was to be facilitated and rewarded by the state.

If motherhood was a social function, it followed that it should be exercised in accordance with the needs of society (and, as is well known, according to Leninist doctrine, it was only the Communist Party which was capable of discerning where the interests of society lay). In the mid-1920s, however, there was still some room for debate within the Party over what sort of motherhood would best serve Soviet society: ‘conscious’ or compulsory. In the first year of the journal an article by Rachmanov (1926), entitled ‘On the road to conscious motherhood’, advocated the use of birth control: pregnancy should be a deliberate choice. He claimed that across the world ‘a shift’ was occurring: ‘men don’t want families and women don’t want to give birth’. This was also characteristic of many builders of communism in the USSR, for ‘it’s better to climb mountains unburdened’. In such conditions, the author concluded, children would fare best when they were wanted. Rachmanov was thus appealing to the idea that builders of communism understandably had other priorities. Others, however, did not take such a lenient view of the difficulties of Soviet mountaineers. Levi (1927), for example, focused on the medical profession, warning that ‘medical workers are falling behind’ in their ‘execution of the maternal function’. He produced figures to show what he saw as the lamentably low birth rate among female doctors and nurses, and their over-use of abortion. His stern warning about the backwardness of medical workers was clearly grounded on the assumption that it was a woman’s duty to give birth as often as possible.

Paradoxically, once industrialisation began in earnest and many women were taken up with other tasks, the authorities gradually attempted to close off the option of any kind of individual choice with regard to motherhood. This manifested itself most clearly in the area of abortion. Given the unreliability of other forms of contraception available to Soviet women at the time, this was often used as a form of birth control. In 1930, however, the journal reported that women would only be able to have abortions after obtaining permission from a specially created commission.³ In 1935 it was announced that abortions would henceforth have to be paid for, and the following year they were banned.

The journal treated the 1936 ban on abortion as an issue related to women’s health. Nogina (1936) noted that the number of abortions had begun to decrease, and the birth rate increase, before the adoption of the law: that is, the journal attempted to argue that the law had simply confirmed an existing tendency. Failed underground abortions became more common, however; Nogina (1936; 1937) reported that women were turning up in hospital with life-threatening complications. Meanwhile, she noted that in the first month after the ban on abortion many doctors still ‘found all sorts of unimportant reasons through which they obtained permission for an abortion’ (Nogina, 1937). Another article, entitled ‘We will precisely and unerringly implement the government decree on the banning of abortion’ (Levi, 1937), dealt in detail with the experience of one Moscow clinic and argued that it was necessary to reduce further the number of abortions carried out on medical grounds. Schizophrenia, tuberculosis and heart defects were only to be considered grounds for abortion in the most extreme cases, while syphilis was completely ruled out as grounds for an abortion. Nogina, meanwhile, wrote with pride about how the birth rate had doubled in comparison with the year before, not because of the ban on abortions, but because ‘our women are not afraid to give birth because the Soviet state assists them at all stages of motherhood’ (Nogina, 1937). At the same time, however, reporting of the rapid building of new maternity units made it clear that this decree put pressure on the maternity hospitals which were not ready for this upsurge in births (Nogina, 1936; 1937). This pressure was also felt in industry, as can be seen from the publication of articles with such titles as, ‘ The experience of organisation of breast feeding rooms and breast milk collecting points in factory workshops’ (Tsykhanskii, 1937).

Since motherhood was a duty to the state, it was logical that it should be rewarded. At the same time as the ban on abortion, therefore, a number of rewards for motherhood were introduced, including, in principle, the liberation of pregnant women from the prison camps (in practice, however, far from all of them were released). These rewards above all concerned mothers of several children. A woman was entitled to become a heroine mother only when she was the biological mother of ten or more children - step-children, adopted children and children who died were not taken into account. The title ‘hero father’ was not introduced. The state gave the title and the money to the mother, and thus developed a direct relationship with her as the producer of the children, and the man was excluded from this relationship as an insignificant figure (if not as a competitor for the woman’s loyalty). Meanwhile, the status of the mother was increased in relation to that of the woman worker: as Kaminskii proclaimed ‘the word “mother” is the most respected, motherhood is the highest form of service to one’s people and state’ (Kaminskii, 1936).

Kaminskii’s words echoed those of Lebedeva (1926), writing in the first issue of Voprosy materinstva i mladenchestva. This serves to underline the continuity of policy with regard to motherhood during the NEP (New Economic Policy) and Stalin eras. Beginning with Trotsky ([1937] 1972), commentators have tended to treat the ban on abortion as part of the ‘Thermidor in the family ’, a symptom of the reactionary subversion of the revolution by the Stalinist bureaucracy. They have therefore seen the policy of the 1930s as qualitatively different from that of the earlier period. But it is important to stress that since the revolution access to abortion had always been regulated; it was never treated as a woman’s ‘right’.⁴ This is not surprising given that, as should be clear from the above account, the Bolsheviks never saw motherhood as a private matter. It was a social function, and, as such, the state had the right to regulate it. The ban on abortion was in this sense a continuation of past policy - it was only the severity of the regulation which distinguished it from the earlier approach.

Protecting the genetic inheritance; controlling the ‘living machine’

As well as being concerned with the number of children women produced, the state was also interested in the quality of future generations. This implied that the state had an interest in the ‘protection’ of women’s bodies. A significant proportion of articles in the journal were therefore concerned with promoting what was perceived to be healthy living. This continued a long tradition: the Bolsheviks added only an ideological twist to the pre-revolutionary practice of the Russian intelligentsia for whom medical enlightenment of the (mainly peasant) population had always been a key concern. The main difference between the approach of the Bolsheviks and that of their philanthropic predecessors, however, was that the former extended beyond the propagation of best practice into active control of women’s behaviour. Such control was justified on the grounds that women’s bodies were the incubators of the new generation of communists.

A typical example of interest taken in the conduct of ‘future mothers’ was an article by Professor Durnovo, entitled ‘Heredity and the new generation’, which examined the negative consequences of the destruction of the Civil War on the offspring of the current generation (Durnovo, 1926). This did not fail to mention other negative influences on future generations such as abortion and sexual disease. Having an abortion before the first child was claimed to be a potential cause of sterility. Meanwhile, in other articles written during the same period shocking evidence of the prevalence of syphilis in rural Russia was presented. Although such discussions were obviously in part motivated by genuine medical concern, they also legitimised the proscription of certain types of behaviour deemed to be undesirable by the state. This can be seen, for example, in an article by Grigo entitled ‘The work of Soviet power in the area of sexual enlightenment of the female population’. Grigo emphasised the need to protect young women from depravity entailing disease and early abortions ‘in order not to upset the living machine: the human being’ (Grigo, 1930: 18). The wording here made it clear that the female ‘human being’ was perceived as just another asset of the Soviet state.

A series of other issues were also considered in terms of their implications for the genetic inheritance of the country. For example, a number of articles looked at the harmful influence of women returning to work too early after childbirth.⁵ This was said to be bad for the woman’s health and hence for her capacity to work and give birth to healthy children in the future - an idea which was soon to be brushed away amid the fervour of Stalinist industrialisation. Similarly, a scheme to provide medical support and occupational training to homeless women who were pregnant was justified on the grounds that this would improve the quality of their offspring. In fact, however, the author notes that in general the only women who found work as a result of this training were trade union members (Davydov, 1927).

The interest of the state did not stop at ‘protecting’ future mothers. There was a ‘correct’ way to do most things, and this included giving birth. For example, a number of articles were published regarding the practice of midwifery by the different peoples of the USSR. ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Gender, state and society in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia
• 1 From duty to pleasure? Motherhood in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia
• 2 Russia’s female breadwinners: the changing subjective experience
• 3 Fathers and patriarchs in communist and post-communist Russia
• 4 ‘Once we were kings’: male experiences of loss of status at work in post-communist Russia
• 5 New Russian men: masculinity regained?
• 6 The changing representation of gender roles in the Soviet and post-Soviet press
• 7 ‘My body, my friend?’ Provincial youth between the sexual and the gender revolutions
• Index