Stalin’s Soviet Union · CHAPTER 9 ·
Women and daily life under Stalin
Chapter 9 of The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953: “Daily Life, Women and Family”
Industrialisation drew millions of peasants into Soviet cities, and the urban population grew from about 26 million in 1926 to 56 million in 1939. Newcomers gained jobs, schooling and promotion but faced communal flats, rationing until 1935 and harsh labour laws, while women carried a double burden of work and home.
Chapter 9 is included with every paid plan. WW2 is free in full, and chapter 1 of every atlas is free. A free account opens 3 more chapters a day. Starter, at $9 a month, opens all 21 with no daily limit — see the plans.
Free printable Stalin’s Soviet Union study guide, sent by email ↓
The map above is the world of The Soviet Union, June–August 1940 — The labour decree; the Baltic states annexed.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1940 · Europe in 1940.
Part of IB History: The Soviet Union under Stalin →
SHORT EXPLANATION
The arrows on the map follow a vast movement from the countryside to Soviet cities and building sites. Between 1926 and 1939 the urban population rose from about 26 million to 56 million. Stalin’s revolution changed daily life across the country, but a person’s place in the new society made a great difference to whether that change seemed an improvement.
The state needed educated workers, engineers, managers and teachers. A young worker who qualified as an engineer could do better than his parents. Yet city newcomers faced crowded barracks or a single room for a family in a communal apartment, rationing until 1935, queues and severe labour laws. Collective farmers, paid like sharecroppers from what the state left, deportees and wives of arrested men could fare much worse.
Women gained the vote, easy divorce and legal abortion from 1920; during the 1930s millions entered factories, offices and universities. By the end of the decade they formed about two-fifths of industrial workers. Paid employment came on top of cooking, cleaning, queuing and childcare: the “double burden” left women little time of their own.
In June 1936 the government banned abortion and made divorce harder. The sociologist Nicholas Timasheff called the wider return to traditional values the “Great Retreat”. In Central Asia a campaign against the veil met violent resistance. The state wanted women to work and to raise families, and its demands in both roles could fall on the same person.
The full story
The new industrial towns needed workers, and the countryside supplied them. Some peasants fled collectivisation—the forced merger of farms into state-run collectives—and famine; factories recruited others. The arrows on the map trace routes to Moscow, the Donbas mines, Magnitogorsk and other industrial centres. In little more than a decade the movement changed the make-up of Soviet society.
The towns could offer employment more readily than housing. A family in a kommunalka had one room and shared a kitchen and toilet with other families, rather like a permanent house-share with strangers. At Magnitogorsk builders occupied tents, barracks and earth dugouts. Food rationing lasted from 1929 to 1935, with better allocations for industrial workers and officials; the privileged could also shop in “closed” stores. The internal passport introduced in 1932 functioned like a residence permit, allowing the state to control who lived in a city. For many migrants, these conditions were nevertheless preferable to the collective farm.
Education could make the move worthwhile in another way. The state expanded schooling and higher education, literacy rose sharply, and workers’ and peasants’ children entered a new technical class. The vydvizhentsy, the “promoted ones”, were first-generation graduates advanced rapidly into management. A worker’s son might become a factory director within ten years. The Great Terror of 1937–38 created more vacancies when mass arrests and shootings emptied senior posts. Such opportunities help explain support for a regime that also imposed considerable hardship.
After rationing ended in 1935, the government promised that “life has become better”. Some people enjoyed parks, the Moscow Metro, cinemas and holiday resorts. Their rewards were far from equal: managers and Stakhanovites—record-breaking workers celebrated as models, rather like employees of the month—earned many times an unskilled worker’s pay. The state also limited a worker’s freedom to leave. Under the June 1940 labour law, quitting a job or arriving more than twenty minutes late became a crime, and courts enforced the discipline on which industrial expansion depended.
Women experienced both the opportunities and the demands of this society. Their share of industrial workers grew from under a third in 1929 to about two-fifths by 1940; they formed most of the workforce in Ivanovo’s textile mills. Propaganda celebrated women as engineers, doctors, pilots and tractor drivers. Yet a woman returning from a shift still faced almost all the housework, while shortages could make obtaining food a matter of hours in a queue.
The government worried that the birth rate was falling and in June 1936 banned abortion, raised divorce fees and rewarded mothers of large families. Births rose briefly, then fell as illegal abortions spread. Other policies brought state power into women’s lives in different ways. Uzbekistan’s hujum (“assault”) of 1927 pressed women to unveil in public. From 1937 wives of arrested men were sent to camps including ALZhIR, the Akmolinsk camp for wives of “traitors to the motherland”. More women could enter public occupations while their private choices were restricted.
FULL EXPLANATION
A “Great Retreat”?
In 1946 the émigré sociologist Nicholas Timasheff gave a name to an apparent reversal: the “Great Retreat”. The 1936 family law seemed to turn away from revolutionary experiment, as did restored school uniforms and exams, army ranks, the rehabilitation of Russian history and conservative artistic tastes. The family law remains his strongest evidence, though later historians have made the picture more complicated. David Hoffmann’s Stalinist Values (2003) argues that family and patriotism served modern state purposes, including mobilisation and population growth. Wendy Goldman’s Women, the State and Revolution (1993) shows a difficulty with the earlier experiment itself: some husbands used easy divorce to escape child support, leaving women abandoned. Some women consequently welcomed stricter rules. The 1936 law responded to real problems and marked a conservative turn, but it imposed a solution without regard for women’s own choices.
Who gained and who lost?
A new graduate’s rapid promotion tells only part of the story. In Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism (1999), shortage makes urban survival depend on patrons in workplaces and offices and on personal connections, or blat. Officials, engineers, Stakhanovites, military personnel and the cultural elite received apartments, dachas and access to closed shops. Fitzpatrick and others describe a new privileged class; Trotsky in exile called it a bureaucratic caste. Education and promotion opened on an unprecedented scale to young people from worker and peasant families. Collective farmers, paid little and unable to leave, stood in a different position, as did the old elites’ “former people”, families of arrested people and deported nations. Urban workers’ real wages fell in the early 1930s and had recovered only partly by 1937. Diaries and letters suggest that people judged the system partly by their own passage through it: those it had raised were more likely to accept it.
Work and punishment
Workers in the early 1930s often moved between jobs looking for better pay and housing, and many missed work. The state tried to make this mobile workforce easier to control. From December 1938 managers held labour books recording each worker’s employment. As war approached, the decree of 26 June 1940 lengthened the day from seven to eight hours and replaced the six-day cycle with a seven-day week, leaving Sunday as the sole rest day. The decree also barred departure from a job without permission and made absence a crime; more than twenty minutes’ lateness counted as absence. Courts convicted close to a million people within months. Historians estimate roughly a million convictions a year in the early 1940s, mostly sentences of up to six months’ corrective labour at the workplace with a quarter of pay withheld. Workers who quit faced two to four months in prison. Donald Filtzer and other historians show that managers often ignored the law to retain workers. Even so, the rules made the workplace a site of criminal justice until 1956.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Industrialisation needed millions of new workers. The industrial workforce more than doubled between 1928 and 1932 as the Five-Year Plans created jobs. Collectivisation and famine simultaneously pushed peasants out of villages. Towns had to absorb the arrivals, but housing, transport and food supplies lagged behind. Magnitogorsk and other new towns grew faster than homes for their workers; the resulting shortages shaped urban life for a generation.
The state needed a new technical elite. The regime distrusted many specialists trained before 1917, putting engineers and others on trial as “wreckers” in 1928–31. It expanded schools and institutes to train a technical class from workers’ and peasants’ families. The Terror then removed many first-generation Soviet managers, opening further posts to their newly trained successors. For young people, rapid promotion became a normal expectation.
A falling birth rate worried the leadership. Famine, upheaval and easy divorce and abortion had lowered the birth rate. Preparing for war, Stalin and his colleagues wanted workers and soldiers and saw a strong family as the foundation of a strong state. Their June 1936 decree banned abortion except on medical grounds, increased divorce costs and paid mothers of large families. Many letters in the public discussion opposed the proposed ban, but the final law ignored them. Consultation displayed participation without altering the decision.
Shortage shaped every choice. Heavy industry took priority, leaving food, consumer goods and housing scarce. People searched through queues, markets, closed shops and personal connections for what they needed. The state rationed supplies and gave preferred groups better food, housing and holidays. Access to necessities became a means of political control, while connections called blat became essential to getting things done.
THE TURNING POINT
Ivanovo and the law of June 1936. The decree of 27 June 1936 changed family life by banning abortion, legal since 1920, making divorce expensive and rewarding motherhood as a duty. In Ivanovo most textile workers were women, so the law fell on people already working full shifts and spending time in food queues. Births rose in 1937, then fell as illegal abortions spread, suggesting quiet resistance. The decree is a hinge of the Great Retreat: women retained the right and duty to work, while losing the choice of whether to bear children.
What it changed
A society of new cities and new classes. The urban share of the population rose from one in five in 1926 to one in three by 1939. Workers’ and peasants’ families also supplied an educated class of engineers, managers and specialists. This class became a backbone of the Soviet state and among its most loyal supporters; some members, including Brezhnev, governed into the 1980s.
Women’s double burden became permanent. Women replaced men in factories and fields during the war, and many remained in paid work afterwards. The expectation that they would run households survived too, and shortages made that work exhausting. Soviet sociologists measured the double burden in the 1960s; it persisted until 1991. Equality at work had not produced equality at home.
Harsh labour laws fed the Gulag. Ordinary workers could receive prison or corrective labour under the labour laws of 1938–40 and the 1947 theft laws, often for minor offences. Absence or theft could mean years in a camp. Millions were sentenced under these laws, helping explain why most Gulag prisoners were not political prisoners and why the camps continued to grow after the Terror.
Expectations the regime could not meet. The promise that “life has become better” raised expectations that scarce housing, food and goods could not meet. After victory, veterans and workers expected rewards; police reports recorded their grumbling at the gap. Khrushchev’s late-1950s housing programme, with its famous five-storey blocks, addressed a backlog and acknowledged that the promise of 1935 had gone unmet for twenty years.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — To what extent did Stalin’s policies improve the lives of Soviet women?
The answer depends on whose life we consider and which changes we measure. Millions of women entered industry, education and professions, female literacy rose sharply, and women made up about two-fifths of industrial workers by 1940. Some became engineers, doctors and pilots. These opportunities mattered. Yet paid work was added to housework and queues amid shortages. The 1936 decree removed the right to abortion and made divorce harder; wives of arrested men could themselves be imprisoned at ALZhIR. Peasant women on collective farms and women of deported nations gained little. Goldman emphasizes the state’s use of the family to reduce its costs, while Hoffmann sees modernising mobilisation through traditional forms. Stalinism widened women’s opportunities as workers while restricting their choices as individuals: legal equality and real freedom could move in opposite directions.
An interesting fact
The January 1937 census asked adults, “Are you a believer?” Stalin personally reviewed it. Despite nearly a decade of church closures and campaigns by the League of the Militant Godless, about 57 per cent of respondents aged 16 and over answered yes; among peasant women the share was far higher. The answer was one reason the census was declared defective and suppressed. No subsequent Soviet census repeated the religion question, and the results became known only after archives opened in the early 1990s.
Related
THE FREE PRINTABLE STUDY GUIDE
Get the printable study guide for The Soviet Union under Stalin free. I’ll send you a few short letters, then one when a new atlas opens. That’s all. — Paul
NO TRACKING · YOUR ADDRESS IS USED FOR THE DISPATCH AND NOTHING ELSE · UNSUBSCRIBE ANYTIME