Reading this article:
While women in capitalist countries were struggling for the most basic rights, such as the right to vote, the transitional workers’ state created by the Russian Revolution implemented measures to promote socialized housework. This was one of the fundamental pillars of the Bolsheviks’ policy for female emancipation aimed at ending women’s isolation in the home and promoting their inclusion in public and political life.1 This socialization policy was never fully realized because of the breakout of the civil war and severe economic crisis. The policy was later crushed by Stalinism, which promoted traditional gender roles.
I've read a couple posts on here recently that claim that "Stalinism" is an imaginary phenomenon made-up by people who think international blockades, outright military aggression, and the external sponsoring of internal destabilisation and plots never happen in the real world (VOTE!) and political violence has no place in politics and blah blah blah. But I know the Soviets got the first woman into space so I started to wonder if the gender roles from the article was accurate.
Is it true what the article said about gender roles, especially during Stalin's time?
The article is interesting, though, and it's topic can be roughly summed up with this paragraph:
Capitalism relegates women to unpaid reproductive labor, although today it would be more correct to say that for the vast majority of women, it overburdens them with it. Capitalism relies on these unpaid tasks for the reproduction of labor power, although no surplus value is extracted from this activity since it does not generate exchange value (i.e., it cannot be exchanged on the market). Reproductive labor is indispensable, although it does not generate value or surplus value. According to the logic of capital, it is thus unproductive labor.
The idea of Stalin being soley responsible for it (or anything else in the ussr) is absurd. That said, it is true that under Stalin in the mid 30s the Communist Party stopped, dropped and rolled back many of the progressive social/cultural changes they introduced in the 20s (after like 1924, also under Stalin!). This included gender roles, arts, nationalities policy, labour, etc.
The influence of the rank and file party members through property party procedures and through refusing to carry out policy cannot be ignored. In the late 20s, for example the whole CEC is onboard with indigenization of the national republics, but party members (especially Great Russians) often disapproved and refused to carry out orders. A large part of this is a large minority, bordering on majority of the rank and file party members, were russians who disapproved of affirmative action and having to learn and use non-russian languages
For a variety of reasons, those refusing to carry out economic orders were punished much, much more harshly than refusing to carry out social/cultural orders, so e.g. suspected "national right communists" were punished much more harshly than confirmed "Great Russian Chauvinists." In all instances, the priority (particularly from 1929 on) was increasing production, with all other goals often ignored if and when inhibiting increased production.
The result is that some.Russian saying e.g. "Kazakh concerns over new agricultural methods are just local superstitions" gets a reprimand; while "our people dont agree with this new factory on our land" gets a prison sentance. I havent studied it in detail, but i have seen mentioned (in Martin, Affirmative Action Empire) that similar processes were at work wrt gender