Brezhnev and the Woman Question, 1964–82

By October 1964, Communist Party leaders had tired of Khrushchev’s bombast, his poorly planned reforms, his misadventures in foreign policy, and his increasingly autocratic behavior. They forced him to resign and replaced him with a coalition led by Leonid Brezhnev. Under Brezhnev the Politburo continued to experiment with reform, but it prized restraint and careful planning, as Khrushchev had not. The new leadership greatly increased spending on the military and invested more in agriculture. Wages improved, as did social services. Consumer goods remained in short supply, so to meet pent‑up demand the government permitted a black market in imported clothing and electronics. It also brought in foreign investment to pump up the economy and it permitted Soviet students to study abroad. Contacts with the world outside the Eastern Bloc countries of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, first encouraged by Khrushchev, expanded.

Brezhnev and his colleagues understood, as Soviet leaders had since the 1920s, that the double shift limited women’s productivity in the workplace and caused them to keep their families small. They considered both outcomes undesirable. The Soviet Union, they believed, required increasing labor productivity and robust population growth to raise the standard of living and keep up in the Cold War’s arms race. The leaders of the Brezhnev era also saw that Stalin’s coercive measures–outlawing abortion and making divorce more difficult to obtain–had not remedied the situation. Most urban women were still having no more than two children and were also working fewer hours than men because of their domestic duties.

The government, following Khrushchev’s example, attempted to replace the sticks with carrots. To alleviate the double shift, it improved social services. By 1970, 50 percent of urban children were enrolled in daycare, and the numbers continued to climb thereafter. Subsidies paid during maternity and family leave were raised, and welfare payments for children in low‑income families were instituted. In the early 1980s the government extended fully paid maternity leave to eight weeks before the baby’s birth and eight weeks after. Women could take an additional ten months off without loss of seniority at work. The government also increased pensions paid to retirees, the great majority of whom were women. These improvements mitigated the long‑standing problem of women, by virtue of their lower wages, being financially dependent on their husbands, and they provided support for the millions of single women of all ages. They were equivalent to or superior to those provided by most Western European countries and far superior to the minimal benefits available to American women.⁷

The government also eased the restrictions on divorce. It issued new laws in 1965 and 1968 that simplified divorce procedures and reduced fees. The 1968 code also legalized community property and instituted no‑fault divorce, waiving the requirement for a court appearance for couples with no children. Courts were still to oversee the divorce and custody arrangements of parents with minor children. These revisions kept the Soviet Union at the forefront of European nations in the permissiveness of its divorce laws, a position it had held since the Revolution.

These improvements in benefits were accompanied by a propaganda campaign in the arts and the electronic and print media, which restated the Stalinist credo on the importance of family life. Now the government put more stress on mothering, rather less on women’s civilizing of their husbands. Women were told that kindness and care‑giving came more naturally to them than to men, and were more important to them emotionally. So, although it was important for women to work in the wider world and to develop their own interests, being a mother would be the most fulfilling part of their lives. These ideas required very little selling, for they were widely believed by Soviet people and, indeed, by people across the European world.

There was a crucial difference between the Soviet and the Western European or American rhapsodies on domesticity, however: the Soviet ones also sang the praises of women’s work outside the home. That work was seen by the regime and by many in the nation as crucial to women’s sense of self and to their equality in the larger world. The goal of public policy and social services, therefore, should be to assist women to enjoy fulfilling work and family lives. In a short history entitled Woman in the Development of Socialist Society, Z. E. Novikova wrote that “the improvement of the social position of women and their development as individuals demands purposeful and objective work, so that they receive new, always more beneficial possibilities for successfully combining their professional and social activities with maternity, family, and everyday life.”⁸

To assist in the attainment of all this, the Brezhnev government sponsored academic study of women’s problems. The result was the largest collection of scholarly studies on women’s work and family lives, as well as of public opinion on gender issues, produced since the 1920s. Differences of opinion quickly surfaced. Specialists in education, many of them men, declared that women should concentrate on their families. Sociologists, many of them women, disagreed. They argued that there should be more equality between spouses, that men should do their share of housework, that women needed to work outside the home in order to realize themselves as individuals, and that being involved in the larger world would make them better mothers. Some academics even criticized Marxist economic theory for not valuing the contribution that domestic labor made to the national economy.

The revival of feminism to the west affected the academic study of the woman question in the Brezhnev era. This so‑called “second‑wave feminism” emerged in the United States in the 1960s and quickly grew into an international movement that broadened feminist theory, expanded educational and employment opportunities, overturned discriminatory laws, and propagated more egalitarian norms of family life. Its theoreticians paid a great deal of attention to the Marxist critique of “bourgeois feminism” and to the Soviet program of women’s emancipation, much of which they admired. They also pointed out its shortcomings, particularly its subordination of women’s emancipation to other government priorities and its inattention to lingering sexism in the family and the larger society. Brezhnev’s government responded by encouraging journalists and scholars to publicize the many Soviet accomplishments. To support research into Western feminist thought, a few libraries established special collections, accessible only to approved people, and in short order, studies confirming the righteousness of the Soviet system began appearing.

Even as they followed the party line, some of those permitted to read the germinal works of second‑wave feminism found them very persuasive. More than half the feminist activists from Moscow interviewed by Valerie Sperling in the 1990s reported that research into Western feminism in the Brezhnev years had awakened them to the pervasiveness of sexism in the Soviet Union. Some read as well the histories of women in Russia being written in the West and were inspired by the pre‑revolutionary feminists, who had been demonized in Soviet historiography. Gradually and surreptitiously, the intelligentsia’s connection to international feminist thought, so strong in Russia before 1917, was being revived.⁹