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

The short answer

• Industrialisation needed millions of new workers. The Five-Year Plans created jobs faster than towns could absorb people, and the industrial workforce more than doubled between 1928 and 1932. Collectivisation and famine pushed peasants out of the villages at the same time. The result was a mass migration that overwhelmed housing, transport and food supply, and shaped urban life for a generation, since new towns such as Magnitogorsk were built faster than homes for the people who worked in them.
• The state needed a new technical elite. The regime distrusted the engineers and specialists trained before 1917, many of whom were tried as “wreckers” in 1928–31. It set out to train its own technical class from workers and peasants, expanding schools and institutes and promoting the young. The Terror then removed many of the first generation of Soviet managers, which opened still more posts to the newly trained and made rapid promotion a normal expectation for the young.
• A falling birth rate worried the leadership. Famine, upheaval and easy divorce and abortion had lowered the birth rate, and a state preparing for war wanted soldiers and workers. Stalin and his colleagues saw a strong family as the basis of a strong state. The decree of June 1936 banned abortion except on medical grounds, made divorce costlier and offered payments to mothers of large families. A public discussion of the draft drew many letters opposing the ban, which the final law ignored, so consultation served as display.
• Shortage shaped every choice. Because heavy industry came first, consumer goods, housing and food were always scarce. Daily life became a search for goods through queues, closed shops, markets and personal connections. The state rationed what it could not provide and rewarded those it valued most with better rations, housing and holidays, which turned access to goods into a form of political control and made personal connections, called blat, essential to getting anything done.

What it changed

A society of new cities and new classes. Stalin’s revolution created an urban society: by 1939 one Soviet citizen in three lived in a town, against one in five in 1926, and a new educated class of engineers, managers and specialists had risen from workers and peasants. This group became the backbone of the Soviet state and its most loyal supporters, and some, like Brezhnev, governed it until the 1980s.

Women’s double burden became permanent. Women stayed in the workforce in large numbers through the war, when they replaced men in factories and fields, and afterwards. The expectation that they would also run the household did not change, and shortages kept housework exhausting. Soviet sociologists in the 1960s measured the double burden, and it remained a feature of Soviet life until 1991, so equality at work never became equality at home.

Harsh labour laws fed the Gulag. The labour laws of 1938–40 and the theft laws of 1947 sent millions of ordinary workers to prison or corrective labour, often for minor offences. Absence or theft could mean years in a camp. These laws explain why most Gulag prisoners were not political prisoners, and why the camps kept growing after the Terror ended: the law itself produced prisoners.

Expectations the regime could not meet. The promise that “life has become better” raised hopes that housing, food and goods could not satisfy. After the war, veterans and workers expected rewards for victory, and the gap between promise and reality fuelled the grumbling recorded in police reports. Khrushchev’s housing programme of the late 1950s, the famous five-storey blocks, was a response to this backlog, an admission that the promise of 1935 had gone unmet for twenty years.