This article introduces to Japanese readers an analysis of the Soviet Union’s postwar pronatalist policy and its effects on gender and society as published in Mie Nakachi, Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union (Oxford University Press, 2021). In particular, it highlights the evolution of the 1944 Family Law’s formulation and implementation, explaining how the introduction of this policy eventually led to the world’s first legalization of abortion based on the recognition of women’s right to abortion in a country where no feminist movements were allowed.

On July 8, 1944 the Soviet government promulgated the new family law. This was in response to the unprecedented scale of demographic crisis the Soviet Union faced after WWII: the loss of 27 million people and an extremely skewed sex imbalance. Millions of women had lost their past partners or future mates in the war. In order to recover from this crisis at an accelerated pace, N. S. Khrushchev, the leader in Ukraine during the war, drafted a pronatalist proposal and sent it to Moscow, where after multiple revisions it became the postwar family law.

One of the most significant and questionable features of Khrushchev’s brainchild was the encouragement of the birth of out-of-wedlock children. In order to achieve this goal, the law encompassed several fundamental changes, such as making only registered marriage legal, denying out-of-wedlock children the right to be registered under their fathers’ names, and releasing fathers from legal and financial responsibilities for their out-of-wedlock children. In consequence, women’s standing in gender relations suffered. Moreover, equality between children born in marriage and those born out-of-wedlock, established after the 1917 Revolution, would disappear.

Eleven years later, in 1955, the Soviet government re-legalized abortion. Does this mean that the pronatalist policy had ended? If so, did Soviet demography recover from the war, thanks to the postwar pronatalist policy of 1944? Or was this reform a part of the broader de-Stalinization process?

This article discusses the policy’s effects on demography, gender relations, and family and argues that the most important context for the reversal of the Stalinist criminalization of abortion in 1936 was not the death of Stalin in 1953, but the ongoing criticism of postwar pronatalist policy coming from Soviet professionals, particularly doctors, female party members, and women, a drumroll that had already begun in the late 1940s. Mariia D. Kovrigina, the first and last female All-Union Health Minister, promoted the idea of women’s right to abortion, which became the core of re-legalization. However, this historic development was muted due to the special, typically Soviet, circumstances of this process. In this way, this article points out possibilities as well as limitations for the reproductive rights movement under state socialism.

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It is known that the depth of the Tatar Strait passage is not enough to pass large cargo boats, and only small ships can pass through it from Okhotsk Sea to Japan Sea, or sail from these waters through Amur River to Nicholaevsk-na-Amure and Komsomol'sk-na-Amure. Against such common sense, the Soviet government planned to dredge and prepare channels in the Amur Estuary so as to make them deep enough to pass large boats such as liberty ships. It was a very hard task, and the Construction Unit no. 201 under the NKVD had organized and engaged in this work, so much work was done by prisoners. The Unit had once dissolved in 1942, but in the next year, the Unit and its work were assumed by the Kommisarriat of Sea Transportation. The channels helped to navigate many cargo boats from the United States to the ports in the Russian Far East. When World War II started, the US began to assist the Allied Powers, providing huge amount of materials useful to perform the war. After Nazi-Germany started war with the Soviet Union, the US began to assist the Soviet Union on large scale under lend-lease terms. The most used cargo route from the US to the Soviet Union was from West Coast of the US via North Pacific Ocean to Russian Far East ports, especially Vladivostok, After Japan started war with the US, Japan had limited navigation of foreign vessels through the Tsugaru Strait, so boats on this route had to pass the La Pérouse Straits or the Tatar Strait. The Japanese Navy watched the La Pérouse Strait carefully, but could not extend their eyes to the Tatar Strait and failed to grasp the situation of lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union. The Japanese government and Army had collected information on the lend-lease to the Soviet Union and analyzed it, but this was insufficient, and did not urge Japanese leaders to reconsider their hope of German victory, or later, achieving peace through the intermediation of the Soviet Union.

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