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Replacing the Dead
Replacing the Dead
The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar
Soviet Union
M I E NA KAC H I
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190635138.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
For my family
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Glossary xiii
Introduction 1
1. The Patronymic of Her Choice: Nikita S. Khrushchev
and Postwar Pronatalist Policy 21
2. Abortion Surveillance and Women’s Medicine 56
3. Postwar Marriage and Divorce: The New Single Mother
and Her “Fatherless” Children 88
4. Who Is Responsible for Abortions? Demographic
Politics and Postwar Studies of Abortion 123
5. Women’s Reproductive Right and the 1955 Re-legalization
of Abortion 153
6. Beyond Replacing the Dead: Women’s Welfare and
the End of the Soviet Union 186
Epilogue: Reviving Pronatalism in Post-Socialist Russia 216
Notes 223
Bibliography 291
Index 313
Acknowledgments
Writing this book was a long journey. Without generous and persistent sup-
port and encouragement from many individuals and institutions, this pro-
ject would have never been completed. First, I thank my interviewees who
invited me to their homes and told me memories of postwar family life, in-
cluding intimate episodes from the most difficult moments of their repro-
ductive lives. These women inspired this book.
The project began as a dissertation at the University of Chicago. I would
like to express my gratitude to Sheila Fitzpatrick who guided me at every step,
always generously shared her knowledge, and inculcated in me her love for
archival research. Her prolific work and diverse interests have been a great
example and inspiration. David Ransel made me aware of the importance
of the language of rights, which became a major theme of this book. Susan
Gal introduced me to gender analysis of reproduction and politics under so-
cialism. The late Richard Hellie taught me the importance of statistics in ana-
lyzing history.
I had many opportunities to present versions of various parts of this book
and benefited from comments, guidance, and advice. Particularly I would
like to thank the participants of the Chicago Russian History Workshop,
the Berkeley Kruzhok, the Historian’s Seminar at Harvard’s Davis Center,
Seminar at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, the
Russian History Seminar of Washington, DC, and the Shiokawa Seminar
at Tokyo University. I am especially grateful to my hosts at these lively
exchanges: the late Reggie Zelnik, Yuri Slezkine, Terry Martin, Catherine
Evtuhov, Michael David-Fox, and Nobuaki Shiokawa.
Many individuals offered comments, guidance, and support. I can men-
tion only a few here. Mark Edele has been a generous comrade and best
critic, who commented on the entire manuscript. Charles Hachten shared
a key set of archival documents with me. Chris Burton guided me through
the Ministry of Health archive. Alan Barenberg, Ed Cohn, Brian LaPierre,
and Ben Zajicek provided insightful comments on earlier versions of
chapters. Their company brightened the otherwise lonely process of re-
search and writing. Alain Blum gave me a lecture on the history of Soviet
x Acknowledgments
studies and research. Miho, Yutaka, and Yu always made sure that I didn’t
miss out on important and fun family events, even when I had to keep
writing. Akira always brought me the greatest joy throughout this journey.
David read the whole manuscript and insisted that these women’s stories
were too important not to be published. Without his loving support
through a nuclear crisis, great flood, earthquake, and now pandemic, this
book would have never been finished.
Glossary
Replacing the Dead. Mie Nakachi, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190635138.003.0001
2 Replacing the Dead
abortions. But Lena insisted that “women on average had five to ten abortions
in their lives.”2 Like Lena, lucky women did not have complications and
never got caught. Unlucky ones were caught, suffered medical complications,
or died. Some had successful underground abortions, but could not conceive
later in life.3
Underground abortion was hardly a new postwar phenomenon, but dem-
ographic chaos during the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in
Russia, created many conditions for a postwar increase in abortions. During
the war, a total of 34 million men and 600,000 women were mobilized into
the armed forces. These numbers included those who worked as military
administrators and those in training, so not all left immediately, but most
were relocated to the front, military bases, and production units, leaving
their families behind.4 The process of family breakup was also accelerated by
evacuation. Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia became destinations for
approximately 16.5 million evacuees from the western border regions of the
Soviet Union.5 In German-occupied areas, civilians were sorted and killed,
most notably over 2 million Jews. Other able-bodied women and men were
taken for labor.6 In the midst of such demographic turmoil, many family
members lost contact with each other.
Many wanted to wait for their partners until the end of the war. But not all
could wait, nor could all who waited be reunited.7 Most tragically, vast num-
bers of partners never came back, as the war took the lives of approximately
27 million Soviet citizens, of whom an estimated 20 million were male.8 As a
result, the postwar sex ratio in Russian society would be extremely skewed.
In 1944, the average ratio of adult men to women of reproductive ages in
rural areas was 28 men per 100 women, with great regional variation.9
And high mobility among the wartime and immediate postwar population
meant an increased chance of new liaisons in the military, on transporta-
tion, on the home front, and in the occupied areas. All of these conditions
multiplied difficulties for the postwar development of families and women’s
reproductive lives.
The Soviet government did not know the exact number of deaths and
casualties at that time, but leaders understood that the war’s demographic
damage was unprecedented.10 They were aware that postwar conditions were
far from ideal for families, but the country needed a labor force for recon-
struction and development. To replace the dead, the government introduced
an extreme pronatalist policy, the July 8, 1944, decree entitled “On increasing
government support for pregnant women, mothers with many children,
Introduction 3