THE EFFECTS OF THE WAR ON THE FAMILY AND GENDER IDEAS

As the front ebbed and flowed across the western landscape, many died, many fled, and in the chaos, families became separated. By 1943, almost seven hundred thousand homeless children were living in orphanages.⁶⁶ Women who managed to keep their loved ones nearby found that the double shift had become far more burdensome because their hours at work were so much longer. Childcare became a struggle as daycare centers and schools closed intermittently because of air raids, power outages, and shortages of teachers. Moscow’s entire school system shut down for the academic year 1941–42. Many of the teenagers released from school found work: the legal minimum age for employment was fourteen, but children as young as twelve were often hired, and their income made a crucial contribution to their families’ survival. Other youngsters roamed the streets, adding to the crime wave that swept through Soviet cities during the war. For mothers, therefore, the burdens of endless work were exacerbated by fears about their children.

Those who were married coped with long separations. Soldiers at the front worried about how their wives were managing without them and whether they were being faithful. Soldiers in all the armies of World War II had these worries, in part because they knew that people were taking a more relaxed attitude toward marital fidelity during the crisis. Given the shortage of men on the Soviet home front, and the manifold difficulties women faced providing for themselves and their children, it seems unlikely that many wives had the time or the opportunity to have love affairs. Instead, they lived in constant fear of joining the ranks of war widows. Millions did.

Soviet authorities worried about the war’s effects on the family. People married in great numbers in the summer of 1941, before the draft carried the men away, but thereafter the rates of marriages and births fell precipitously and remained low until 1944. When men began to return in that year, the birthrate rose, as did the number of divorces, for the years of separation and the post‑traumatic stress that men and women experienced made the readjustment to living together very difficult for many.

Wishing to encourage marriage and childbearing, the government took a familiar course: it revised the marriage law yet again. The Family Law of 1944 attempted to discourage divorce by raising the fees charged for it and extending the period of time required to complete the process. Realizing that the immense losses of young men in the war meant that many women would never marry, and wanting to encourage them to have children anyway, the lawmakers promised government‑funded benefits to single mothers. The law also lengthened pregnancy leave to seventy‑seven days, raised the food rations allotted to pregnant and nursing mothers, and cut the fees charged by daycare centers to families with more than two children. The new marriage law also reaffirmed an income tax, first instituted in 1941, on people of childbearing age who did not have children. To prevent single mothers from breaking up marriages by claiming child support from the fathers of their children, the drafters of the code prohibited such claims.

It was also in 1944 that the Soviet government launched the much‑publicized “mother‑heroine” campaigns. Women who bore more than two children received cash bonuses on the birth of each additional child. The award rose to the substantial sum of five thousand rubles when the tenth baby arrived. Women with seven or more children also received medals and were written up in the Soviet press. The heroine‑mother awards continued on after the war, becoming the source of many Soviet jokes while having little impact on the birthrate.

The authorities need not have feared that the war had caused permanent changes in Soviet family values. For most people, it had made family seem more precious than ever. Virtually all the surviving female soldiers, who had lived the most unconventional lives during the war, did as Egorova did, that is, they left the army as soon as they could and tried to build a peacetime life. “When the war was over,” remembered Zinaida Korzh, a medic from Minsk, “I wanted to forget about it as quickly as possible.” Her comrade, Tamara Umniagina, agreed. “We’d had enough of it, the girls who served at the front.” zinaida’s sister Olga, also a medic, remembered that on Victory Day, May 8, 1945, “I felt then as if I had wakened from a terrible dream…. Suddenly we all began to talk about the future. We talked about love. We all wanted to love. And although we had lived through a grim war, nevertheless we all managed to give birth to beautiful children. That’s the most important thing.”⁶⁷