Did Stalin’s policies improve the lives of Soviet women?

The short answer

• 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.

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.