Women, the family and the 'Great Retreat'
The radical family policies of the 1920s were reversed in the 1930s: the regime rebuilt the stable family and rewarded motherhood — even as women poured into industry and shouldered the 'double burden'.
The story of women under Stalin is one of sharp REVERSAL. After 1917 the Bolsheviks had pursued a radical, liberationist family policy: easy 'postcard' divorce, legal abortion (1920), civil marriage and a stated aim of freeing women from the 'slavery' of the home. By the mid-1930s Stalin had thrown this into reverse — the change historians call the 'Great Retreat'.
The 'Great Retreat' in family policy
- The regime now praised the stable, traditional family as the basic cell of socialist society — almost the opposite of 1920s rhetoric.
- The 1936 Family Code made divorce expensive and difficult (rising fees for repeat divorces) and banned abortion except on strict medical grounds.
- Motherhood was rewarded with payments and medals for large families ('Heroine Mother'); the family was promoted as patriotic and respectable.
- The aims were partly practical — to raise the birth rate and stabilise a society shaken by collectivisation, famine and the purges — and partly conservative: a return to order and hierarchy.
Women in the workplace — real opportunity, real burden
- Industrialisation under the Five-Year Plans pulled millions of women into the factories, the professions and public life — as engineers, doctors, teachers and workers. This was a genuine and lasting change.
- BUT women carried the 'double burden': a full day's paid work AND virtually all the housework, childcare, shopping and queuing. The state freed women to work without freeing them from the home.
National groups within the USSR
- The early promise of a 'brotherhood of peoples' gave way to Russification: the promotion of Russian language and culture as superior.
- Minority nationalities faced suppression, and whole groups would later be deported (e.g. on suspicion of disloyalty). This exposed the limits of socialist equality in practice.
- 1920s = radical: easy divorce, legal abortion (1920), the family downgraded.
- 1930s 'Great Retreat' = the family rebuilt: the 1936 Family Code restricted divorce and banned abortion, and rewarded motherhood.
- Women DID enter industry and the professions in huge numbers — a real change.
- But the 'double burden' (work + all the housework) limited true liberation.
- National groups: Russification, suppression and (later) deportation of minorities.