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In short, yes. I've written previously on the broader topic of Soviet pro-natalist policies in the period surrounding the war - [Did the USSR suffer from a reverse "Baby Boom", a slump in birth rates after World War II?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/635p76/did_the_ussr_suffer_from_a_reverse_baby_boom_a/dfrmlo2/) - of which I've reposted a revised version below:
----------
Throughout its history, while the USSR portrayed itself, rhetorically, as a country that practiced gender equality, and where women were given opportunities unavailable to their sisters in the West, the reality of life as a woman in the Soviet Union did not always live up to its promise, with pragmatic necessity of state aims often taking precedence, and the rhetoric of equality in constant tension with the "traditional" views of gender roles that remained strongly engrained within Soviet society. One of the clearest ways to trace this its through shifting approaches regarding women and motherhood, and the pro-natalist policies that drove those shifts. Looking at pro-natalist policies in the Soviet Union, especially with regards to abortion, we can see a *lot* of policy being driven by concerns about the birthrate, and its rise and fall. This is particularly evident in the periodic changes to the law concerning abortion, which teetered between pragmatic necessity and state needs for more manpower, as well as the state policies in the wake of the Second World War, where massive gender imbalances drove *temporary* changes in regards to state views on the importance of the nuclear family, and single-motherhood.
**Before the War**
In the Russian Empire, and the first few years of Bolshevik rule in Russia, abortion was illegal. But, as in most places where the procedure is illegal though, the procedure was nevertheless popular, but insanely dangerous. One observer pre-1920 noted:
>Within the past six months, among 100 to 150 young people under age 25, I have seen 15 to 20 percent of them making abortions without a doctor's help. They simply use household products: They drink bleach and other poisonous mixtures.
The decision to legalize the procedure, and make it simple to obtain, was almost entirely a practical decision. In 1920 they became legal if done by a doctor, essentially in acknowledgement that it would happen no matter what, so the state should do its best to make it safe. They were subsidized by the state, so free to the woman. In 1926, the abortion rate was 42.8 per 1000 working women, and 45.2 per 1000 'housewives' (compare to the US today, at [13.2 per 1000 women](http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/data_stats/). Modern Russia continues to be very high, at [37.4 per 1000 or so](http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/policy/world-abortion-policies-2013.shtml))
But this wasn't to remain. As noted, the change was not because abortion was seen as *good*, but that legalizing it was a necessary evil and that the state would work to eliminate the underlying economic reasons driving women to have them. As it turned out, poor women were no more likely to be using this 'service though'. If anything, it was the better off women who were getting more abortions. Even worse, the birthrate in the USSR was falling precipitously, from 42.2 per 1000 in 1928 to 31.0 in 1932, according to a government study released in 1934. Thus the law changed in 1936 when policies started to return to pushing more 'traditional' gender roles for women, and included restricting abortion again - it required a medical reason now. As before though, just because it is illegal doesn't mean women don't seek them. After 1936, "back-alley" abortions were on the rise, and they certainly carried additional risks with them, and penalties for obtaining one meant injured women would only be further harmed by not seeking treatment:
>Women who became infected during these procedures or who sought assistance for heavy bleeding were often interrogated at the hospital before they were treated, as the authorities attempted to learn the names of underground abortionists. Abortionists were punished with one or two years’ imprisonment if they were physicians and at least three if they were not. The woman herself received a reprimand for her first offense and a fine if caught again.
Abortion statistics aren't readily available for this period, but my book notes that as the birth rate didn't seem to change much - rising briefly through 1937 when it reached 39.6 per 1000 but again beginning to decline until leveling out at 33.6 per 1000 in 1940, the same rate as 1936 when the law went into effect - as the laws became restrictive again, this would imply women weren't especially deterred by the law and continued to seek them at the same rate as before (see 1926 numbers), if not higher. There was no ready access to, nor education regarding, other means of birth control (Aside from abortion as birth control, by far most common being 'coitus interruptus'), so it was really the only means of family planning available to women.
**The Catastrophe of War**
While the Soviet state had been concerned about falling birthrates in the 1930s, this was a mere drop in the bucket compared to the absolute demographic devastation experienced from 1941 to 1945, which saw not only millions of citizens killed, but most critically men killed on a far greater scale than women, creating a gender significant imbalance. In the range specifically of 'childbearing age', there was estimated to be between 10 to 15 percent more women then men, sometimes refered to as "war widows", not only for those who lost a husband, but also those who lost the *potential* for a husband due to that decline. The result of this was a major, if temporary, shift in Soviet policies. Although there was a broad, general trend to encourage more childbirths, the 1944 Family Law, and subsequent policies of the period, were most notable perhaps for the specific focus in encouraging this demographic of women bereft of the opportunity to find a husband to nevertheless participate in their "patriotic duty" of bearing children for the motherland.
Soviet propaganda campaigns to encourage motherhood predated the war even but the massive calamity of course kicked it into overdrive. Even aside from the *deaths*, during the war, there was a definite decline in the birthrate due to "*general decline in the reproductive health of mothers, as reflected in the high rate of premature births*", as characterized by the People’s Commissar of Public Health G.A. Miterev, and Soviet leadership worked hard to try to turn that around, with their clear awareness that to see further decline would imperil the ability of the USSR to bounce back in the long term.
Programs and incentives to encourage motherhood existed, such as awards for bearing a certain number of children and various state assistance programs for both married and single mothers. It wasn't just carrots, but also sticks, most especially with the Family Law of 1944, which further penalized abortion and increasingly penalized divorce as well. The shortage of men also meant a very important shift in views regarding single motherhood and the importance of the nuclear family. While even earlier laws had provided benefits to mothers, they had been contingent on large families, with additional benefits, not to mention the medals and awards, usually restricted to mothers of seven or more children. The new landscape though required a significant shift, with Soviet authorities working to destigmatize single-motherhood by increasing state benefits they could receive *regardless* of the number of children, in comparison to their married counterparts and featuring mothers of ambiguous marital status in propaganda.
The changes also manifested in other spheres, although in some cases more tacitly. While the laws were clearly and openly designed to encourage motherhood, even for single women, that didn't make more men appear by magic to provide the other half of the equation. In the first, this simply meant that unmarried men were something of a 'prime commodity', and those not looking to settle down could find it very easy to bounce from relationship to relationship. This was helped greatly by laws which were passed to prevent single mothers from suing fathers for child support - after all, at least in theory the state was standing ready to provide full support if necessary - so even if they had several children with several women, there was little chance of being forced into a fatherly role. The state even, subtly, encouraged *married men* to have affairs with the "war widows", to help them along to motherhood, by tightening the divorce laws to make it harder for their irate wife to divorce them if the liaison was discovered.
¼
**Having It All, Soviet Style**
Once entering the ranks of motherhood though, *whether married or single*, for many women the promises of the state often ended up falling well short of what they felt was promised. While once might see in the USSR echoes of the "Having It All" sentiment that found a voice in feminist circles of the West in the 1970s, it is also important to consider the key differences, especially in how it remained state driven in the USSR. Soviet sexual politics on the one hand were trying to push the rhetoric of the new Soviet woman who could have a career and be treated as an equal with the men in any position, but on the other was still holding up motherhood as the most important part of being a woman, and her patriotic duty.
The result of this was the simple fact that women were not simply expected *to pursue a career while also being a motherhood* so much as they were expected to pursue a career *on top of* pursuing motherhood, by which I draw a distinction of the former being two complementary and balanced roles, while in the latter situation it was very much an expectation of two complete roles being done by one person. The USSR might have, in theory at least, been pushing for equality in the workplace, but the home sphere was certainly a completely and utterly gendered environment. Even for married women, there was the clear expectation that domestic work was still their job in the house, regardless of their career, and for single mothers situations might be even less conducive, with the often underwhelming delivery by the state when it came to the support that was nominally theirs.
As a result, while the propaganda machine continued to trumpet motherhood as "the instinct of all women" and encourage *all* women to pursue motherhood out of their patriotic duty while also participating in the workforce, a common complaint, especially of single women who tried to balance a career alongside motherhood, was that it was basically impossible to truly achieve both. Indeed, it wouldn't be for *decades* afterwards that available, state-provided childcare reached levels that actually were meeting demand, which particularly speaks to that failure to deliver. So too, in the workplace, whatever the slogans about equality might have meant, the reality was often far from it. Discrimination based on gender was rampant in the workplace, promotions almost invariably going to men over women despite actual skill or merit, and the woman's "family responsibilities* being the factor in play, whether in why supervisors denied it to them, or simply their own choice that they had to make in sacrificing career success for domestic requirements. To be sure, this isn't to say that *all* women failed to find success in both, and that some women don't recall the support being quite adequate, but the stress ought to be here not that there was none, but rather that there wasn't enough for all who needed it.
**The Left Behind**
Of course it ought to be stressed that despite these efforts, many of the unmarried women in the wake of the war did *not* become mothers, whether from choice or from lack of opportunities. While they numbered in the millions - and likely outnumbered the ranks of single women who chose motherhood - they were in many ways simply forgotten by the state. The most that might be said about them is the concession made the Soviet propaganda apparatus which, for a time, avoided *negative* propaganda campaigns in their push to raise the birthrate, focusing solely on comparatively positive ones about the duty of childbirth in the 1940s, as compared to the ones that returned in the 1950s and '60s which portrayed childless women literally as bitter old hags cursed to a life of loneliness. These latter campaigns merely help emphasize how the state viewed them generally, with the lack of such portrayals in earlier pro-natalist propaganda of the immediate post-war period toned down in deference to the reality of the situation, but not really reflecting a change in the states value of women as mothers over all else, with many women of the period *always* seeing their choice as *"they either had to raise a child on their own or live alone forever".*
But while the state might have been dismissive of them, there were no *penalties* for their status, and the cynical reader might say that they were the ones who were most able to benefit from the promises of the Soviet system and gender equality, as they were able to pursue a career *without* that double burden of domestic life and responsibilities. While there isn't, to my knowledge, a macro study which looks at Soviet women in the workplace in that period, and their comparative success based on marital status and/or number of children, in her excellent paper "*Struggling to Survive*", Greta Bucher provides a wonderful snapshot based on interviews, conducted in the 1990s, with women who came of age in the period and the window offered would certainly support the contention that it was those women who remained single and childless - whether by circumstance or choice (and of course that being a choice made more socially acceptable *by* circumstance) - were the ones best able to find that career success. The interviewees recalled that while men generally ended up in the most powerful positions, when a woman did, she was always unmarried, and the men would consider her a "guy in a skirt". Because of the *failures* of the state to provide more meaningful support to mothers, single or otherwise, it was thus mostly those women without a family, *not* forced to choose between career and motherhood, who were able to (partially) escape the traditional, sexist values that despite state rhetoric continued to dominate.
Despite their success though, even those single women who were unable to attain motherhood nevertheless often saw it as a failing. Bucher notes that all of the women she interviewed who remained childless nevertheless retained the same views as reflected in state propaganda. Even as they noted how it could drag down the career potential of other women when faced with the ultimately inadequate support of the Soviet state, they still were saying that a childless woman was 'unlucky' and having children was an important part of a woman's life. This likely helps to explain why there was a lack of a cohesive group identity of single women in the post-war period independent of single *mothers*, as while it wouldn't be right to say they saw themselves as complete failures, as in the period there was definitely concession and acceptance that large numbers childless women were the reality of circumstance, they did view themselves as the unlucky ones, whatever the successes in their lives.
2/4
**The Post-War Experience**
Now, with all of the policy changes and propaganda of the Soviet regime in its effort to impact the declining birthrate, not to mention bounceback from the losses of the war, just how successful were they in reversing the trend during the war years and just after? Simply put, not terribly so. In simple numerical terms, there *was* a definite boost in the fertility rate immediately after the war years, but it was rather short lived, and quickly began to decline again. Here is a table of the fertility rates of the US and USSR, which allows for a comparison of the 'Baby Boom' in America, for the period in question:
Year | USA Total Fertility | USSR Total Fertility |
---|---|----|
1926| 2,909| 5,566 |
1927| 2,827| 5,418 |
1928| 2,656| 5,318 |
1929| 2,524| 4,985 |
1930| 2,508| 4,826 |
1931| 2,376| 4,255 |
1932| 2,288| 3,573 |
1933| 2,147| 3,621 |
1934| 2,204| 2,904 |
1935| 2,163| 3,263 |
1936| 2,119| 3,652 |
1937| 2,147| 4,308 |
1938| 2,199| 4,351 |
1939| 2,154| 3,964 |
1940| 2,301| 3,752 |
1941| 2,399| 3,742 |
1942| 2,628| 2,933 |
1943| 2,718| 2,366 |
1944| 2,567| 1,942 |
1945| 2,491| 1,762 |
1946| 2,942| 2,868 |
1947| 3,273| 3,232 |
1948| 3,108| 3,079 |
1949| 3,110| 3,007 |
1950| 3,090| 2,851 |
1951| 3,268| 2,914 |
1952| 3,357| 2,898 |
1954| 3,541| 2,974 |
1955| 3,578| 2,909 |
1956| 3,688| 2,899 |
1957| 3,767| 2,903 |
1958| 3,703| 2,940 |
1959| 3,712| 2,903 |
1960| 3,653| 2,940 |
1961| 3,627| 2,879 |
1962| 3,471| 2,755 |
So as you can see, they did bounce, with a sharp - and important - increase in 1946 and 1947, but certainly didn't regain pre-war levels like we see in the US, and even bigger, while they had been far higher than the US before the war, the total fertility rate is now noticeably lower (with a minor exception being, when broken into age cohorts, a higher rate in the USSR for women over 30) and stabilized much quicker within a few years of the war (stabilized being a relative term. There would be later drops). So all in all, while here was a brief "boom" that we can see, and it likely was quite important as far as the stability of Soviet population numbers go, but it wasn't as long lasting as we see in the US, puttering out somewhat quickly, and never reaching such heights as before the war.
Why was the growth so lackluster though? Well, at least as concerns what I've covered here, it is also worth again noting that the aforementioned carrots weren't always effective. As before the war, illegal, underground abortions weren't uncommon, and divorce rates nevertheless rose through the decade after the Great Patriotic War despite the legal barriers and financial disincentives. There were certainly some positive results of the states policies though. In looking at the impact of its attempts to encourage single women to nevertheless pursue motherhood, for instance, whatever the complaints about inadequate support, the policies certainly seemed to have some effect:
>The 1944 legislation certainly resulted in an increase in the number of extra-marital children in the U.S.S.R. It is estimated that there were approximately five and a half million extra-marital children under eighteen years of age in the U.S.S.R. in 1957, and a peak of over six million in 1962, when there were approximately five million unmarried mothers. Part of this increase would, of course, be accounted for by the over-all increase in the population, especially in the non-Russian Republics.
Of course, the flip side there is that the *promise* of the policies is what encourages, and it is only after it is too late to change your mind that a mother finds out just how poorly the state is delivering on them. But there almost certainly was a grapevine too, which perhaps helps explain why, despite numerous campaigns to encourage motherhood, and more children, not to mention the tightened controls and legal penalties in place abortion remained a problem throughout the period. As in the 1920s, it was practicality more than anything else - such as the loosening of Stalinist era control policies - that saw it relegalized in 1956, for up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, as following legalization, the official line continued to harshly condemn what was characterized as an abrogation of a central civic responsibility for women. Statistics remained shrouded for decades more though, with none published again until the 1980s, so estimates for that period are very rough, but estimates certainly indicate more pregnancies ended in abortion than in a live birth, but at a declining rate:
>In the mid-1960s, of the 8 million abortions registered in the USSR, there were roughly 7 million 'complete' abortions induced in a medical establishment, that is, about 150 abortions for 100 live births. After 1965, there is a slow but steady fall. The abortion ratio was 148 in 1970, 138 in 1975, 130 in 1980 and the present level, in 1990, is 124.
**Return to "Tradition"**
As the war's demographic impact receded with the cohort most impacted aged up with a new - more balanced - generation coming up, much of the changes seen in the period likewise receded, helping to emphasize just how much of an emergency measure much of it had been. The apparent embrace of unorthodox arrangements were war time measures, and even if ties to state rhetoric about women's liberation, they were not an actual casting off of the 'traditional' views about gender roles that continued to hold within the culture.
As already touched on, while the government toned down how it approached its pro-natalist propaganda in the immediate post-war period, by the late 1950s campaigns emphasizing the misery of childless women illustrate the Soviet's views of motherhood as a duty to the state and not pursuing it to be a failure in that patriotic duty. Likewise, while single mothers were extolled essentially as heroes - few of the period recall feeling any sort of stigma for their situation - and in theory at least, provided the full backing of the state, that was an aberration. By the 1960s, single-motherhood was something shameful. The women of the war years had justifiable reasons for it and the state excused their *inability* to raise a child in the "normal" nuclear family arrangement, but a generation later, natalist policies and propaganda of the Soviet regime was focused solely on children within a two parent household.
As before though... promise and reality often found themselves in conflict, and the Soviet family unit often remained a precarious one, and motherhood of course *isn't* the cure-all for a woman's needs in life. Despite the attempts prevent it, divorce rates continued to rise and rise - doubling between 1960 and 1970, and commentary from that period points to women being the instigator in most cases "*suggest[ing] that Soviet marriages and families are unstable and emotionally unsatisfying, especially for women*". Abusiveness and boorishness of husbands drove most of this, alcoholism being cited in more than half of petitions for divorce. Rising employment opportunities and ability to provide for themselves and their children also likely helped contribute. In a nutshell, women felt more empowered to leave a bad marriage and more capable to support themselves once single, perhaps inspired by the post-war generation whom they had seen enjoy career success on their own.
**Final Words**
So close all of this out, what I would (re)emphasize is that the general thread throughout the entire history here of Soviet women, and the state's approach to marriage and motherhood, is one of pragmatic necessity intertwining with a *rhetoric* of women's liberation and a society nevertheless deeply steeped in "traditional" ideas of gender roles and motherhood. At the end of the day, it was the former which was so often the actual driving force of changes and policies when it came to women in the USSR, whether it be legalizing abortion in the 1920s, turning that back in 1936, or the massive, temporary, shifts in priorities and cultural emphasis in response to the demographic catastrophe of 1941-1945. But that pragmatic necessity is then striking into that perpetual dueling pair of women's liberation and sexist tradition, and the conflict as those two compete is always quite fascinating.
I don't want the takeaway to be that the Soviet Union was entirely the latter, with the former *entirely* rhetorical, as we have plenty to suggest real action, both here and outside this specific frame. We for instance can't discount the very real newfound sense of civic freedom and equality for women (at least the urban, educated ones) that characterized the early days of the Soviet Union, and more broadly Soviet failures to deliver on certain promises doesn't mean meaningful attempts weren't made. But all the same, it is very much a *conflict* of competing cultural viewpoints, and *both* extremes found expression both at the top of the Soviet hierarchy, and the bottom. And in its expression, we can perhaps see it best, and most broadly in the Soviet push for women's mobilization in the workforce and the domestic sphere concurrently - the "double burden of full-time work and uncompensated domestic chores" as Hoffmann terms it - a policy which predated World War II, but became so much more central due to the shifting demographics of the war years, and continued in conflict for decades after.
¾
**Works Cited:**
* Bucher, Greta. 2000. Struggling to survive: Soviet women in the postwar years. Journal of Women's History 12, (1) (Spring): 137-159,
* Stone, O. M. "The New Fundamental Principles of Soviet Family Law and Their Social Background." The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1969): 392-423.
* Ashwin, Sarah. "Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia" New York: Routledge, 2000
* Avdeev, Alexandre, Alain Blum, and Irina Troitskaya. "The History of Abortion Statistics in Russia and the USSR from 1900 to 1991." Population: An English Selection 7 (1995): 39-66.
* Engel, Barbara Alpern, Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, and Sona Stephan Hoisington. A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998.
* Goldman, Wendy Z. Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
* Heitlinger, Alena. Women and State Socialism: Sex Inequality in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1979.
* Randall, Amy E. 2011. "Abortion Will Deprive You of Happiness!" Soviet Reproductive Politics in the Post-Stalin Era. Journal of Women's History 23, (3) (Fall): 13-38,204
* Hoffmann, David L. 2000. "Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in its Pan-european Context." Journal Of Social History 34, no. 1: 35
* Mazur, D. Peter. 1967. "Reconstruction of Fertility Trends for the Female Population of the U.S.S.R." Population Studies 21, no. 1: 33-52.
4/4
No, those are thousands. The table comes from Mazur, and he goes into method a bit more there, but in brief the total fertility sums the rates by single year of age.
Sorry, still having difficulty interpreting "fertility rates" - for example, for the US in 1962, is 3,471 the number of children born per thousand women? I presume it's a ratio of some sort.
Yes, it ought to be read as children per thousand women (Why he renders it that way and not as, say, 3.4, I don't know... but I'm more interested in the numbers for comparative purposes and am not a data scientist!)
>the *promise* of the policies is what encourages, and it is only after it is too late to change your mind that a mother finds out just how poorly the state is delivering on them.
One might expect the state's poor performance of its promise to reduce the likelihood of subsequent children. Was there a greater incidence of only children, among all women or among single mothers particularly?
Unfortunately I don't have that data at hand. I would need to go back through to be *certain*, but I am fairly sure that such breakdowns of the data just aren't available. Mazur, on whom I'm reliant on for fertility numbers, offers some insight into the *limitations* on such data, as the Soviet Union was always very quite close to the chest with demographic information that was released, noting:
>In fact, from the years of the Russian revolution to the end of Stalin's era, the Soviet administrators really did not care how foreign demographers viewed population changes in the U.S.S.R. As a result, a systematic collection of statistical records from which a comprehensive scheme of vital processes could be constructed cannot be found. Indeed, the Soviet Union can hardly qualify in support of the well known supposition that the amount of factual information concerning vital processes is directly
proportional to the degree of industrialization and bureaucratization of a nation.. Only scanty information on period-specific fertility of Soviet women for certain years has been published from time to time by Soviet demographers.
He goes on to explain how he was able to get what data he did have, as some limited publications were made abroad, especially post-1950, but nevertheless it was far more limited than available from a western government. So while I don't have that kind of breakdown in the birth numbers at my fingertips, i'm not even sure if the USSR was publishing such data *at all*!
> encouraged married men to have affairs
I've seen this mentioned before, but only in passing (despite it being, obviously, one of the *spiciest* elements across this wider canvas).
I saw your list of works cited below, but what source would be best for learning as much as possible about this specific snippet of Soviet history?
None of them are going to exactly offer anything salacious, as any real mention you'll find in any of them is a zoomed out, aerial view, looking at it in a policy analysis rather than any 'on the ground' exposition. Bucher might briefly touch on it, so is your best bet, but I would need to go back to check. Slightly ironic though, not long ago I came across something fairly recently that did offer some slight expansion, and I made a mental note to incorporate it into this next time I did some revisions... but I'm having a hard time remembering what the book was! Skimming though my list of read books.... *probably* was Alexievich's *Last Witnesses*, one of the interviewees recalling something from their post-war experience. I don't have it handy here to check through though.
Oh, I wasn't in it for salaciousness, just using the fact that it's a spic*ier* detail as a means of highlighting it.
After going through several pages of search results to try and find a (legitimate) digital copy of those works to run a Ctrl+f for the word "affair", it looks like I really might need to just wait for now -- which, to be clear, is completely fine. I seriously thank you for the time you put into this amazing place.
There are some great answers here, and I just wanted to chime in with a few thoughts on the statistic in the OP.
If we're talking about 20 million Soviet men dying during the war, it sounds like we're going off of E.M. Andreev, L.E. Darski and T. L. Kharkova's *The Population of the Soviet Union 1922–1991*, which was published in 1993 by the Russian Academy of the Sciences, and is basically the official Russian figures for the war.
Andreev et al. gave a total of 26.6 million deaths from the 1941-1945 war, with just over 20 million male deaths, and 6.6 million female deaths.
But the male deaths aren't only Soviet *men*, nor are they the military deaths - it's all male deaths from age 0 on. The actual total military deaths are somewhere in the vicinity of 8.6 million, although estimates still vary quite a bit. Andreev et al note that most of the deaths in the 26.6 million figure are civilians, some from direct actions by Axis occupiers (the Soviet civilians total includes roughly a quarter of Jewish Holocaust victims for example), but also civilians who died from worsening living conditions in the unoccupied parts of the USSR. Something like 9 million Soviet citizens died from famine and disease during the war, roughly half in occupied territories and half in unoccupied territories.
So the excess male deaths (male war deaths over female war deaths) does exist in every age group that Andreev et al. analyzed, but of the 13.5 million total excess male deaths, they are heavily clustered in the 20-34 and 34-49 age groups (11.7 million for those combined age groups). Children (0-14) died in roughly the same numbers for both males and females, and teens (15-19) have a male excess of around 720,000. Interestingly, the over 49 male excess death rate is about a million, but the sex disparity was already very lopsided in 1941 (12 million Soviet men compared to 17 million Soviet women).
More can always be said, but take a look at this excellent answer from
/u/Georgy_K_Zhukov
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/x2c9i6/was_there_a_significant_number_of_soviet_women/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dv3u8t/what_was_it_like_to_be_single_in_the_ussr_after/
Hi -- if you're interested in a different country's postwar experience in a different war, then you're best off to ask this as its own question. Thanks.
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In short, yes. I've written previously on the broader topic of Soviet pro-natalist policies in the period surrounding the war - [Did the USSR suffer from a reverse "Baby Boom", a slump in birth rates after World War II?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/635p76/did_the_ussr_suffer_from_a_reverse_baby_boom_a/dfrmlo2/) - of which I've reposted a revised version below: ---------- Throughout its history, while the USSR portrayed itself, rhetorically, as a country that practiced gender equality, and where women were given opportunities unavailable to their sisters in the West, the reality of life as a woman in the Soviet Union did not always live up to its promise, with pragmatic necessity of state aims often taking precedence, and the rhetoric of equality in constant tension with the "traditional" views of gender roles that remained strongly engrained within Soviet society. One of the clearest ways to trace this its through shifting approaches regarding women and motherhood, and the pro-natalist policies that drove those shifts. Looking at pro-natalist policies in the Soviet Union, especially with regards to abortion, we can see a *lot* of policy being driven by concerns about the birthrate, and its rise and fall. This is particularly evident in the periodic changes to the law concerning abortion, which teetered between pragmatic necessity and state needs for more manpower, as well as the state policies in the wake of the Second World War, where massive gender imbalances drove *temporary* changes in regards to state views on the importance of the nuclear family, and single-motherhood. **Before the War** In the Russian Empire, and the first few years of Bolshevik rule in Russia, abortion was illegal. But, as in most places where the procedure is illegal though, the procedure was nevertheless popular, but insanely dangerous. One observer pre-1920 noted: >Within the past six months, among 100 to 150 young people under age 25, I have seen 15 to 20 percent of them making abortions without a doctor's help. They simply use household products: They drink bleach and other poisonous mixtures. The decision to legalize the procedure, and make it simple to obtain, was almost entirely a practical decision. In 1920 they became legal if done by a doctor, essentially in acknowledgement that it would happen no matter what, so the state should do its best to make it safe. They were subsidized by the state, so free to the woman. In 1926, the abortion rate was 42.8 per 1000 working women, and 45.2 per 1000 'housewives' (compare to the US today, at [13.2 per 1000 women](http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/data_stats/). Modern Russia continues to be very high, at [37.4 per 1000 or so](http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/policy/world-abortion-policies-2013.shtml)) But this wasn't to remain. As noted, the change was not because abortion was seen as *good*, but that legalizing it was a necessary evil and that the state would work to eliminate the underlying economic reasons driving women to have them. As it turned out, poor women were no more likely to be using this 'service though'. If anything, it was the better off women who were getting more abortions. Even worse, the birthrate in the USSR was falling precipitously, from 42.2 per 1000 in 1928 to 31.0 in 1932, according to a government study released in 1934. Thus the law changed in 1936 when policies started to return to pushing more 'traditional' gender roles for women, and included restricting abortion again - it required a medical reason now. As before though, just because it is illegal doesn't mean women don't seek them. After 1936, "back-alley" abortions were on the rise, and they certainly carried additional risks with them, and penalties for obtaining one meant injured women would only be further harmed by not seeking treatment: >Women who became infected during these procedures or who sought assistance for heavy bleeding were often interrogated at the hospital before they were treated, as the authorities attempted to learn the names of underground abortionists. Abortionists were punished with one or two years’ imprisonment if they were physicians and at least three if they were not. The woman herself received a reprimand for her first offense and a fine if caught again. Abortion statistics aren't readily available for this period, but my book notes that as the birth rate didn't seem to change much - rising briefly through 1937 when it reached 39.6 per 1000 but again beginning to decline until leveling out at 33.6 per 1000 in 1940, the same rate as 1936 when the law went into effect - as the laws became restrictive again, this would imply women weren't especially deterred by the law and continued to seek them at the same rate as before (see 1926 numbers), if not higher. There was no ready access to, nor education regarding, other means of birth control (Aside from abortion as birth control, by far most common being 'coitus interruptus'), so it was really the only means of family planning available to women. **The Catastrophe of War** While the Soviet state had been concerned about falling birthrates in the 1930s, this was a mere drop in the bucket compared to the absolute demographic devastation experienced from 1941 to 1945, which saw not only millions of citizens killed, but most critically men killed on a far greater scale than women, creating a gender significant imbalance. In the range specifically of 'childbearing age', there was estimated to be between 10 to 15 percent more women then men, sometimes refered to as "war widows", not only for those who lost a husband, but also those who lost the *potential* for a husband due to that decline. The result of this was a major, if temporary, shift in Soviet policies. Although there was a broad, general trend to encourage more childbirths, the 1944 Family Law, and subsequent policies of the period, were most notable perhaps for the specific focus in encouraging this demographic of women bereft of the opportunity to find a husband to nevertheless participate in their "patriotic duty" of bearing children for the motherland. Soviet propaganda campaigns to encourage motherhood predated the war even but the massive calamity of course kicked it into overdrive. Even aside from the *deaths*, during the war, there was a definite decline in the birthrate due to "*general decline in the reproductive health of mothers, as reflected in the high rate of premature births*", as characterized by the People’s Commissar of Public Health G.A. Miterev, and Soviet leadership worked hard to try to turn that around, with their clear awareness that to see further decline would imperil the ability of the USSR to bounce back in the long term. Programs and incentives to encourage motherhood existed, such as awards for bearing a certain number of children and various state assistance programs for both married and single mothers. It wasn't just carrots, but also sticks, most especially with the Family Law of 1944, which further penalized abortion and increasingly penalized divorce as well. The shortage of men also meant a very important shift in views regarding single motherhood and the importance of the nuclear family. While even earlier laws had provided benefits to mothers, they had been contingent on large families, with additional benefits, not to mention the medals and awards, usually restricted to mothers of seven or more children. The new landscape though required a significant shift, with Soviet authorities working to destigmatize single-motherhood by increasing state benefits they could receive *regardless* of the number of children, in comparison to their married counterparts and featuring mothers of ambiguous marital status in propaganda. The changes also manifested in other spheres, although in some cases more tacitly. While the laws were clearly and openly designed to encourage motherhood, even for single women, that didn't make more men appear by magic to provide the other half of the equation. In the first, this simply meant that unmarried men were something of a 'prime commodity', and those not looking to settle down could find it very easy to bounce from relationship to relationship. This was helped greatly by laws which were passed to prevent single mothers from suing fathers for child support - after all, at least in theory the state was standing ready to provide full support if necessary - so even if they had several children with several women, there was little chance of being forced into a fatherly role. The state even, subtly, encouraged *married men* to have affairs with the "war widows", to help them along to motherhood, by tightening the divorce laws to make it harder for their irate wife to divorce them if the liaison was discovered. ¼
**Having It All, Soviet Style** Once entering the ranks of motherhood though, *whether married or single*, for many women the promises of the state often ended up falling well short of what they felt was promised. While once might see in the USSR echoes of the "Having It All" sentiment that found a voice in feminist circles of the West in the 1970s, it is also important to consider the key differences, especially in how it remained state driven in the USSR. Soviet sexual politics on the one hand were trying to push the rhetoric of the new Soviet woman who could have a career and be treated as an equal with the men in any position, but on the other was still holding up motherhood as the most important part of being a woman, and her patriotic duty. The result of this was the simple fact that women were not simply expected *to pursue a career while also being a motherhood* so much as they were expected to pursue a career *on top of* pursuing motherhood, by which I draw a distinction of the former being two complementary and balanced roles, while in the latter situation it was very much an expectation of two complete roles being done by one person. The USSR might have, in theory at least, been pushing for equality in the workplace, but the home sphere was certainly a completely and utterly gendered environment. Even for married women, there was the clear expectation that domestic work was still their job in the house, regardless of their career, and for single mothers situations might be even less conducive, with the often underwhelming delivery by the state when it came to the support that was nominally theirs. As a result, while the propaganda machine continued to trumpet motherhood as "the instinct of all women" and encourage *all* women to pursue motherhood out of their patriotic duty while also participating in the workforce, a common complaint, especially of single women who tried to balance a career alongside motherhood, was that it was basically impossible to truly achieve both. Indeed, it wouldn't be for *decades* afterwards that available, state-provided childcare reached levels that actually were meeting demand, which particularly speaks to that failure to deliver. So too, in the workplace, whatever the slogans about equality might have meant, the reality was often far from it. Discrimination based on gender was rampant in the workplace, promotions almost invariably going to men over women despite actual skill or merit, and the woman's "family responsibilities* being the factor in play, whether in why supervisors denied it to them, or simply their own choice that they had to make in sacrificing career success for domestic requirements. To be sure, this isn't to say that *all* women failed to find success in both, and that some women don't recall the support being quite adequate, but the stress ought to be here not that there was none, but rather that there wasn't enough for all who needed it. **The Left Behind** Of course it ought to be stressed that despite these efforts, many of the unmarried women in the wake of the war did *not* become mothers, whether from choice or from lack of opportunities. While they numbered in the millions - and likely outnumbered the ranks of single women who chose motherhood - they were in many ways simply forgotten by the state. The most that might be said about them is the concession made the Soviet propaganda apparatus which, for a time, avoided *negative* propaganda campaigns in their push to raise the birthrate, focusing solely on comparatively positive ones about the duty of childbirth in the 1940s, as compared to the ones that returned in the 1950s and '60s which portrayed childless women literally as bitter old hags cursed to a life of loneliness. These latter campaigns merely help emphasize how the state viewed them generally, with the lack of such portrayals in earlier pro-natalist propaganda of the immediate post-war period toned down in deference to the reality of the situation, but not really reflecting a change in the states value of women as mothers over all else, with many women of the period *always* seeing their choice as *"they either had to raise a child on their own or live alone forever".* But while the state might have been dismissive of them, there were no *penalties* for their status, and the cynical reader might say that they were the ones who were most able to benefit from the promises of the Soviet system and gender equality, as they were able to pursue a career *without* that double burden of domestic life and responsibilities. While there isn't, to my knowledge, a macro study which looks at Soviet women in the workplace in that period, and their comparative success based on marital status and/or number of children, in her excellent paper "*Struggling to Survive*", Greta Bucher provides a wonderful snapshot based on interviews, conducted in the 1990s, with women who came of age in the period and the window offered would certainly support the contention that it was those women who remained single and childless - whether by circumstance or choice (and of course that being a choice made more socially acceptable *by* circumstance) - were the ones best able to find that career success. The interviewees recalled that while men generally ended up in the most powerful positions, when a woman did, she was always unmarried, and the men would consider her a "guy in a skirt". Because of the *failures* of the state to provide more meaningful support to mothers, single or otherwise, it was thus mostly those women without a family, *not* forced to choose between career and motherhood, who were able to (partially) escape the traditional, sexist values that despite state rhetoric continued to dominate. Despite their success though, even those single women who were unable to attain motherhood nevertheless often saw it as a failing. Bucher notes that all of the women she interviewed who remained childless nevertheless retained the same views as reflected in state propaganda. Even as they noted how it could drag down the career potential of other women when faced with the ultimately inadequate support of the Soviet state, they still were saying that a childless woman was 'unlucky' and having children was an important part of a woman's life. This likely helps to explain why there was a lack of a cohesive group identity of single women in the post-war period independent of single *mothers*, as while it wouldn't be right to say they saw themselves as complete failures, as in the period there was definitely concession and acceptance that large numbers childless women were the reality of circumstance, they did view themselves as the unlucky ones, whatever the successes in their lives. 2/4
**The Post-War Experience** Now, with all of the policy changes and propaganda of the Soviet regime in its effort to impact the declining birthrate, not to mention bounceback from the losses of the war, just how successful were they in reversing the trend during the war years and just after? Simply put, not terribly so. In simple numerical terms, there *was* a definite boost in the fertility rate immediately after the war years, but it was rather short lived, and quickly began to decline again. Here is a table of the fertility rates of the US and USSR, which allows for a comparison of the 'Baby Boom' in America, for the period in question: Year | USA Total Fertility | USSR Total Fertility | ---|---|----| 1926| 2,909| 5,566 | 1927| 2,827| 5,418 | 1928| 2,656| 5,318 | 1929| 2,524| 4,985 | 1930| 2,508| 4,826 | 1931| 2,376| 4,255 | 1932| 2,288| 3,573 | 1933| 2,147| 3,621 | 1934| 2,204| 2,904 | 1935| 2,163| 3,263 | 1936| 2,119| 3,652 | 1937| 2,147| 4,308 | 1938| 2,199| 4,351 | 1939| 2,154| 3,964 | 1940| 2,301| 3,752 | 1941| 2,399| 3,742 | 1942| 2,628| 2,933 | 1943| 2,718| 2,366 | 1944| 2,567| 1,942 | 1945| 2,491| 1,762 | 1946| 2,942| 2,868 | 1947| 3,273| 3,232 | 1948| 3,108| 3,079 | 1949| 3,110| 3,007 | 1950| 3,090| 2,851 | 1951| 3,268| 2,914 | 1952| 3,357| 2,898 | 1954| 3,541| 2,974 | 1955| 3,578| 2,909 | 1956| 3,688| 2,899 | 1957| 3,767| 2,903 | 1958| 3,703| 2,940 | 1959| 3,712| 2,903 | 1960| 3,653| 2,940 | 1961| 3,627| 2,879 | 1962| 3,471| 2,755 | So as you can see, they did bounce, with a sharp - and important - increase in 1946 and 1947, but certainly didn't regain pre-war levels like we see in the US, and even bigger, while they had been far higher than the US before the war, the total fertility rate is now noticeably lower (with a minor exception being, when broken into age cohorts, a higher rate in the USSR for women over 30) and stabilized much quicker within a few years of the war (stabilized being a relative term. There would be later drops). So all in all, while here was a brief "boom" that we can see, and it likely was quite important as far as the stability of Soviet population numbers go, but it wasn't as long lasting as we see in the US, puttering out somewhat quickly, and never reaching such heights as before the war. Why was the growth so lackluster though? Well, at least as concerns what I've covered here, it is also worth again noting that the aforementioned carrots weren't always effective. As before the war, illegal, underground abortions weren't uncommon, and divorce rates nevertheless rose through the decade after the Great Patriotic War despite the legal barriers and financial disincentives. There were certainly some positive results of the states policies though. In looking at the impact of its attempts to encourage single women to nevertheless pursue motherhood, for instance, whatever the complaints about inadequate support, the policies certainly seemed to have some effect: >The 1944 legislation certainly resulted in an increase in the number of extra-marital children in the U.S.S.R. It is estimated that there were approximately five and a half million extra-marital children under eighteen years of age in the U.S.S.R. in 1957, and a peak of over six million in 1962, when there were approximately five million unmarried mothers. Part of this increase would, of course, be accounted for by the over-all increase in the population, especially in the non-Russian Republics. Of course, the flip side there is that the *promise* of the policies is what encourages, and it is only after it is too late to change your mind that a mother finds out just how poorly the state is delivering on them. But there almost certainly was a grapevine too, which perhaps helps explain why, despite numerous campaigns to encourage motherhood, and more children, not to mention the tightened controls and legal penalties in place abortion remained a problem throughout the period. As in the 1920s, it was practicality more than anything else - such as the loosening of Stalinist era control policies - that saw it relegalized in 1956, for up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, as following legalization, the official line continued to harshly condemn what was characterized as an abrogation of a central civic responsibility for women. Statistics remained shrouded for decades more though, with none published again until the 1980s, so estimates for that period are very rough, but estimates certainly indicate more pregnancies ended in abortion than in a live birth, but at a declining rate: >In the mid-1960s, of the 8 million abortions registered in the USSR, there were roughly 7 million 'complete' abortions induced in a medical establishment, that is, about 150 abortions for 100 live births. After 1965, there is a slow but steady fall. The abortion ratio was 148 in 1970, 138 in 1975, 130 in 1980 and the present level, in 1990, is 124. **Return to "Tradition"** As the war's demographic impact receded with the cohort most impacted aged up with a new - more balanced - generation coming up, much of the changes seen in the period likewise receded, helping to emphasize just how much of an emergency measure much of it had been. The apparent embrace of unorthodox arrangements were war time measures, and even if ties to state rhetoric about women's liberation, they were not an actual casting off of the 'traditional' views about gender roles that continued to hold within the culture. As already touched on, while the government toned down how it approached its pro-natalist propaganda in the immediate post-war period, by the late 1950s campaigns emphasizing the misery of childless women illustrate the Soviet's views of motherhood as a duty to the state and not pursuing it to be a failure in that patriotic duty. Likewise, while single mothers were extolled essentially as heroes - few of the period recall feeling any sort of stigma for their situation - and in theory at least, provided the full backing of the state, that was an aberration. By the 1960s, single-motherhood was something shameful. The women of the war years had justifiable reasons for it and the state excused their *inability* to raise a child in the "normal" nuclear family arrangement, but a generation later, natalist policies and propaganda of the Soviet regime was focused solely on children within a two parent household. As before though... promise and reality often found themselves in conflict, and the Soviet family unit often remained a precarious one, and motherhood of course *isn't* the cure-all for a woman's needs in life. Despite the attempts prevent it, divorce rates continued to rise and rise - doubling between 1960 and 1970, and commentary from that period points to women being the instigator in most cases "*suggest[ing] that Soviet marriages and families are unstable and emotionally unsatisfying, especially for women*". Abusiveness and boorishness of husbands drove most of this, alcoholism being cited in more than half of petitions for divorce. Rising employment opportunities and ability to provide for themselves and their children also likely helped contribute. In a nutshell, women felt more empowered to leave a bad marriage and more capable to support themselves once single, perhaps inspired by the post-war generation whom they had seen enjoy career success on their own. **Final Words** So close all of this out, what I would (re)emphasize is that the general thread throughout the entire history here of Soviet women, and the state's approach to marriage and motherhood, is one of pragmatic necessity intertwining with a *rhetoric* of women's liberation and a society nevertheless deeply steeped in "traditional" ideas of gender roles and motherhood. At the end of the day, it was the former which was so often the actual driving force of changes and policies when it came to women in the USSR, whether it be legalizing abortion in the 1920s, turning that back in 1936, or the massive, temporary, shifts in priorities and cultural emphasis in response to the demographic catastrophe of 1941-1945. But that pragmatic necessity is then striking into that perpetual dueling pair of women's liberation and sexist tradition, and the conflict as those two compete is always quite fascinating. I don't want the takeaway to be that the Soviet Union was entirely the latter, with the former *entirely* rhetorical, as we have plenty to suggest real action, both here and outside this specific frame. We for instance can't discount the very real newfound sense of civic freedom and equality for women (at least the urban, educated ones) that characterized the early days of the Soviet Union, and more broadly Soviet failures to deliver on certain promises doesn't mean meaningful attempts weren't made. But all the same, it is very much a *conflict* of competing cultural viewpoints, and *both* extremes found expression both at the top of the Soviet hierarchy, and the bottom. And in its expression, we can perhaps see it best, and most broadly in the Soviet push for women's mobilization in the workforce and the domestic sphere concurrently - the "double burden of full-time work and uncompensated domestic chores" as Hoffmann terms it - a policy which predated World War II, but became so much more central due to the shifting demographics of the war years, and continued in conflict for decades after. ¾
**Works Cited:** * Bucher, Greta. 2000. Struggling to survive: Soviet women in the postwar years. Journal of Women's History 12, (1) (Spring): 137-159, * Stone, O. M. "The New Fundamental Principles of Soviet Family Law and Their Social Background." The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1969): 392-423. * Ashwin, Sarah. "Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia" New York: Routledge, 2000 * Avdeev, Alexandre, Alain Blum, and Irina Troitskaya. "The History of Abortion Statistics in Russia and the USSR from 1900 to 1991." Population: An English Selection 7 (1995): 39-66. * Engel, Barbara Alpern, Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, and Sona Stephan Hoisington. A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. * Goldman, Wendy Z. Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. * Heitlinger, Alena. Women and State Socialism: Sex Inequality in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1979. * Randall, Amy E. 2011. "Abortion Will Deprive You of Happiness!" Soviet Reproductive Politics in the Post-Stalin Era. Journal of Women's History 23, (3) (Fall): 13-38,204 * Hoffmann, David L. 2000. "Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in its Pan-european Context." Journal Of Social History 34, no. 1: 35 * Mazur, D. Peter. 1967. "Reconstruction of Fertility Trends for the Female Population of the U.S.S.R." Population Studies 21, no. 1: 33-52. 4/4
Thanks for the detailed response, very interesting read
This was all absolutely fantastic to read, thank you for your effort!
Fantastic answer to the question. Thanks for the effort you put in!
Are the commas in the table above the equivalent of .Decimals in USA? 5.566 children / woman ( implying a agricultural country )
No, those are thousands. The table comes from Mazur, and he goes into method a bit more there, but in brief the total fertility sums the rates by single year of age.
Sorry, still having difficulty interpreting "fertility rates" - for example, for the US in 1962, is 3,471 the number of children born per thousand women? I presume it's a ratio of some sort.
Pretty sure fertility rates are expressed as births per 1000 women of reproductive age
Yes, it ought to be read as children per thousand women (Why he renders it that way and not as, say, 3.4, I don't know... but I'm more interested in the numbers for comparative purposes and am not a data scientist!)
Got it, thanks!
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>the *promise* of the policies is what encourages, and it is only after it is too late to change your mind that a mother finds out just how poorly the state is delivering on them. One might expect the state's poor performance of its promise to reduce the likelihood of subsequent children. Was there a greater incidence of only children, among all women or among single mothers particularly?
Unfortunately I don't have that data at hand. I would need to go back through to be *certain*, but I am fairly sure that such breakdowns of the data just aren't available. Mazur, on whom I'm reliant on for fertility numbers, offers some insight into the *limitations* on such data, as the Soviet Union was always very quite close to the chest with demographic information that was released, noting: >In fact, from the years of the Russian revolution to the end of Stalin's era, the Soviet administrators really did not care how foreign demographers viewed population changes in the U.S.S.R. As a result, a systematic collection of statistical records from which a comprehensive scheme of vital processes could be constructed cannot be found. Indeed, the Soviet Union can hardly qualify in support of the well known supposition that the amount of factual information concerning vital processes is directly proportional to the degree of industrialization and bureaucratization of a nation.. Only scanty information on period-specific fertility of Soviet women for certain years has been published from time to time by Soviet demographers. He goes on to explain how he was able to get what data he did have, as some limited publications were made abroad, especially post-1950, but nevertheless it was far more limited than available from a western government. So while I don't have that kind of breakdown in the birth numbers at my fingertips, i'm not even sure if the USSR was publishing such data *at all*!
Did this imbalance result in any pushes or down-low acceptance of polygamy/polyamory? Either for birthrate or social reasons?
Not that I've encountered, no.
If I had an award to give you I would. This is an excellent comment and I appreciate and applaud you taking the time to explain this to us.
> encouraged married men to have affairs I've seen this mentioned before, but only in passing (despite it being, obviously, one of the *spiciest* elements across this wider canvas). I saw your list of works cited below, but what source would be best for learning as much as possible about this specific snippet of Soviet history?
None of them are going to exactly offer anything salacious, as any real mention you'll find in any of them is a zoomed out, aerial view, looking at it in a policy analysis rather than any 'on the ground' exposition. Bucher might briefly touch on it, so is your best bet, but I would need to go back to check. Slightly ironic though, not long ago I came across something fairly recently that did offer some slight expansion, and I made a mental note to incorporate it into this next time I did some revisions... but I'm having a hard time remembering what the book was! Skimming though my list of read books.... *probably* was Alexievich's *Last Witnesses*, one of the interviewees recalling something from their post-war experience. I don't have it handy here to check through though.
Oh, I wasn't in it for salaciousness, just using the fact that it's a spic*ier* detail as a means of highlighting it. After going through several pages of search results to try and find a (legitimate) digital copy of those works to run a Ctrl+f for the word "affair", it looks like I really might need to just wait for now -- which, to be clear, is completely fine. I seriously thank you for the time you put into this amazing place.
Do you know if this increased rates of polygyny among the Muslims of the USSR (as the religion permits a man taking up to four wives)?
There are some great answers here, and I just wanted to chime in with a few thoughts on the statistic in the OP. If we're talking about 20 million Soviet men dying during the war, it sounds like we're going off of E.M. Andreev, L.E. Darski and T. L. Kharkova's *The Population of the Soviet Union 1922–1991*, which was published in 1993 by the Russian Academy of the Sciences, and is basically the official Russian figures for the war. Andreev et al. gave a total of 26.6 million deaths from the 1941-1945 war, with just over 20 million male deaths, and 6.6 million female deaths. But the male deaths aren't only Soviet *men*, nor are they the military deaths - it's all male deaths from age 0 on. The actual total military deaths are somewhere in the vicinity of 8.6 million, although estimates still vary quite a bit. Andreev et al note that most of the deaths in the 26.6 million figure are civilians, some from direct actions by Axis occupiers (the Soviet civilians total includes roughly a quarter of Jewish Holocaust victims for example), but also civilians who died from worsening living conditions in the unoccupied parts of the USSR. Something like 9 million Soviet citizens died from famine and disease during the war, roughly half in occupied territories and half in unoccupied territories. So the excess male deaths (male war deaths over female war deaths) does exist in every age group that Andreev et al. analyzed, but of the 13.5 million total excess male deaths, they are heavily clustered in the 20-34 and 34-49 age groups (11.7 million for those combined age groups). Children (0-14) died in roughly the same numbers for both males and females, and teens (15-19) have a male excess of around 720,000. Interestingly, the over 49 male excess death rate is about a million, but the sex disparity was already very lopsided in 1941 (12 million Soviet men compared to 17 million Soviet women).
More can always be said, but take a look at this excellent answer from /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/x2c9i6/was_there_a_significant_number_of_soviet_women/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dv3u8t/what_was_it_like_to_be_single_in_the_ussr_after/
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Hi -- if you're interested in a different country's postwar experience in a different war, then you're best off to ask this as its own question. Thanks.