The left talks a lot about gender inequality, but despite the fact that women’s liberation was noted as one of the objectives of the Marxist revolution, with the exception of the right to hard work, that society provided little to women that they had not already achieved. in other countries. Many of the restrictions and prejudices of tsarist absolutism against the female sex were maintained throughout the Stalinist period and even survived it.
After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin enacted a law that clarified the role of women in proletarian society. The brief period of feminine liberality of the first years of the revolution, which allowed free love and condemned the old traditions regarding marriage as anachronistic, was thus buried with this Stalinist initiative. The provision prohibited abortion, which was allowed at the beginning of Bolshevism, made the rules of divorce more rigid and with the elimination of the patronymic and the use in its place of a little line, equivalent in Russian to the son of nobody, the mother was condemned natural children with an identity clause, which remained in force 16 years after Stalin’s death.
The Stalinist regime did not differ in this respect from Tsarism. Its provisions against divorce established, for example, the non-protection of the girl mother, that is, single mothers, and what became known as the anagraphic punishment of their children, who were forced to bear the maternal surname without the patronymic formed with the declined name of the father.
These restrictions relegated the role of women in Soviet society to a secondary level throughout the Stalinist period and many years after. The liberation that began to be introduced later did nothing more than give Soviet women what those of the West had already achieved before.
