Replacing the dead: The politics of reproduction in the postwar Soviet Union, 1944--1955

What was Soviet pronatalism? Was it successful? This dissertation examines these questions by focusing on the postwar period. During WWII the Soviet Union lost approximately 27 million soldiers and civilians. This enormous loss of predominantly adult males significantly reduced the workforce and posed a threat to economic recovery. The top leadership of the USSR was alarmed and adopted a pronatalist policy recommended by Nikita S. Khrushchev, at that time the leader of liberated Ukraine.;The extreme pronatalist policy, promulgated as the 1944 Family Law, encouraged births among unmarried women and widows, set a graduated hierarchy of rewards and penalties based on the number of children, provided single mothers with the "right" to leave their children in state-run orphanages, and relieved biological fathers from prewar child support responsibilities. This led to the creation of illegitimacy as a legal category and the loss of out-of-wedlock children's right to register the father's name. As a result, 8.7 million "fatherless" children were born between 1945 and 1955. Clearly, extramarital sexuality was officially, although not explicitly, promoted.;This dissertation analyzes the late Stalinist policymaking process and the consequences of pronatalism for gender relations, the health of mothers and children, and fertility, focusing on the period up to the 1955 re-legalization of abortion. The roles of medical and legal experts as well as demographers and statisticians are examined. Drawing on archival materials related to politics, medicine, law, and demography, as well as interviews, this dissertation argues that postwar Soviet pronatalist policy was a failure creating millions of underprivileged out-of-wedlock children and unstable marital relationships. Under these circumstances, without effective contraception, women often chose abortion, even though it was illegal. By word and by deed, women were also the force behind the 1955 re-legalization.;This dissertation also provides broader perspectives on the ideology and practice of socialist population policy, explores tensions between pronatalism and women's liberation, reveals the gendered experiences of war and postwar, and questions the balance of continuity and change from Stalin to Khrushchev.