The Soviet Legalisation and Ban of Abortion and the Recriminalisation of Sodomy

Before the revolution: the abortion ban, the sodomy law and the case for repeal

The Russian Orthodox Church, citing Canon 91 of the Council in Trullo and Canon 8 of Basil the Great, treated women who gave or took drugs to expel a foetus as murderers. In the seventeenth century a decree of Tsar Alexis equated abortion with infanticide and punished it with death, a penalty Peter the Great abolished in 1715. Article 1462 of the 1845 Code of Criminal and Correctional Punishments made “criminal expulsion of the foetus” an offence of both the person performing it and the pregnant woman. Medical training counted as an aggravating circumstance: a doctor faced four to ten years of hard labour, the woman four to six years of exile or prison, and those found guilty under articles 1462 and 1463 could be deprived of civil rights and exiled or sentenced to hard labour. 1 2

Harsh as the law was, it was seldom enforced. Between 1910 and 1914 only 139 sentences for abortion were handed down in the whole empire; the yearly figures were 20 in 1910, 28 in 1911, 31 in 1912 and 60 in 1914. Abortions meanwhile multiplied: in Moscow they rose two and a half times between 1909 and 1914, and in St Petersburg far more steeply between 1897 and 1912. Most were performed not by physicians but by practitioners of folk medicine, the midwives known as babki, who served as nurses and midwives in a countryside without doctors and performed abortions as well as delivering babies. 1 2

From the late nineteenth century doctors and jurists began to call for relaxing the abortion laws and spreading contraception, with the aim of making abortion less dangerous. Historians note that the movement arose differently from Western Europe: its advocates came not from politics, as in France, but from medicine. In 1889 the Third Congress of the Pirogov Society, a medical society of great influence in Russia, first discussed decriminalising abortion. The Fourth Congress of the Society of Russian Midwives in 1911, the Pirogov Society’s Twelfth Congress in 1913 and the Russian group of the International Society of Criminologists in 1914 followed in support of decriminalisation. When the Bolsheviks issued their decree in 1920 they drew on this medical debate built up before the revolution. 2 1

Tsarist Russia punished sex between men too. Nicholas I’s code of laws, modelled on German penal law, made “sodomy” a crime for the whole civilian population for the first time from 1 January 1835, with loss of all rights of status, flogging and exile; the Code of Criminal and Correctional Punishments of 1845 added church penance. Between 1874 and 1904, 1,066 men and 4 women were tried for sodomy and 440 were convicted. From the 1880s jurists debated repeal, and Vladimir Nabokov, later a co-founder of the Constitutional Democratic Party, argued for decriminalisation on the ground that the state had no business with an adult’s right to dispose of their own body. The criminal code of 1903 merely reduced the penalty for consensual relations to imprisonment of at least three months, and even that code never came into force outside the Baltic provinces. 3

November 1920: the first legalisation of abortion in the world

The decrees of the first months after the October Revolution transformed women’s legal position. The eight-hour-day decree of 29 October (11 November) 1917 banned night work for women; a decree of 14 (27) November established maternity leave and benefits; the decrees on wages set a minimum wage regardless of sex and equal pay for men and women. The civil marriage decree of 18 (31) December gave women equal rights in family and marriage, and the RSFSR constitution of 10 July 1918 gave women the right to vote and stand for election to the soviets. The Bolsheviks replaced religious with civil marriage, made divorce easy, gave children born in and out of wedlock equal rights before the law and gave unwed mothers special protection. 4 5

Famine and poverty after the revolution and civil war multiplied back-alley abortions. Under pressure from doctors and jurists, the People’s Commissariats of Health and of Justice issued a joint resolution “On the Protection of Women’s Health” in November 1920; sources date it to the 16th or the 18th, and the preamble of the 1936 ban gives 18 November. It made abortion free and available at the woman’s request, and Soviet Russia became the first country in the world to legalise it. It was also the first time in history that women had the right to free abortions in state hospitals. The Commissar of Health was Nikolai Semashko, in office from July 1918 to January 1930; the Commissar of Justice was Dmitry Kursky, who held the post from 1918 to 1928. 5 6 1 7 8 9 10

The push to legalise abortion came from the party Central Committee’s women’s department, the Zhenotdel, founded in 1919 by Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai; Armand was its first head until 1920, when Kollontai succeeded her. The debate among government and medical officials was nonetheless intense. Opponents argued that abortion would harm population growth or was too dangerous to women’s health. The government saw legalisation as a temporary necessity: after nearly a decade of unrest, war, revolution and civil war, women unable to care for a child would seek abortions anyway, and the state could regulate and control abortion only if it was legal. Abortion was seen as a necessary evil born of economic hardship rather than a woman’s right to control her own reproduction, and in the first half of the 1920s officials and jurists still often called it a “social evil”. 7 4 2 5 1

Scholars read the decree both as part of the widening of women’s rights in Russia at the time, alongside women’s suffrage and the ban on forced marriage, and as a shift in medical ethics away from religious views of pregnancy. After the Russian republic, the law was introduced in Ukraine on 5 July 1921 and then in the rest of the Soviet Union. Histories of abortion in Ukraine begin with the decrees of Lenin, who is described there as regarding the right to abortion as one of women’s basic rights. What the government hoped for above all was that trained doctors, rather than babki, would perform abortions in safe conditions. 1 2 11

One of those in charge of the policy inside the Commissariat of Health was the physician Vera Lebedeva, head of its department for the protection of motherhood and infancy from 1918 to 1929. A Bolshevik since 1907, she had worked at the university gynaecological clinic in Geneva in exile and returned in 1917. She set up the world’s first public health programme to reduce infant mortality, a network of nurseries and preschools each with a paediatrician to monitor children’s health and advise parents. In 1922 she founded the Institute for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy, and as an ardent advocate of abortion on social grounds she edited A. B. Gens’s Abortion in the Village, which argued at length that such abortions were justified. She saw legal abortion as a positive policy supporting women in the workforce, and said that despite general poverty they had nearly halved infant mortality. In 1928 she and Semashko published Working Woman and Peasant Woman, Guard Your Health. 12 13

1918–1928: sodomy dropped from the criminal code

The revolution that legalised abortion also ended the punishment of consensual sex between men. The draft criminal code that the Left Socialist Revolutionary justice commissar Isaac Steinberg put forward in 1918 copied the 1903 code almost word for word but dropped the punishment of consensual same-sex relations. The draft by Mieczysław Kozłowski, issued in 1920 under Justice Commissar Kursky and modelled in part on the code of the French Revolution, did not punish them either, and it became the basis of the RSFSR criminal codes of 1922 and 1926. Britain and Germany were still prosecuting homosexuals at the time. 3 14

The Commissariat of Health publicised the decision. In January 1923 a delegation led by Semashko visited Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, and at international congresses on sexuality between 1921 and 1930 Soviet delegates called for the legalisation of private, consensual relations between adults. Grigory Batkis, director of the Institute for Social Hygiene in Moscow, wrote in The Sexual Revolution in Russia (1923, 1925) that Soviet law treated sex as a private matter and did not punish homosexuality, which he called “perfectly natural”. 14 3 15

Tolerance was uneven, however. The criminal codes of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Abkhazia kept the tsarist prohibition, and the Uzbek republic’s 1926 code punished sex between men in its chapter on “local customary crimes”. In the show trials of priests during the anti-religious campaign, accusations of homosexuality served as proof of a depravity alien to workers and peasants. In the late 1920s homosexuality was labelled an illness and a mental disorder; Semashko reduced his support, and in 1928 Batkis and other sex researchers repudiated their earlier views. 3 14

Abortion in practice in the 1920s: hospitals, commissions and the countryside

In the cities the legalisation of abortion had a great effect: by 1925 as many as 75 per cent of abortions in Moscow were performed in hospitals. According to official Soviet statistics, legalisation cut women’s mortality from abortion from 4 per cent to 0.28 per cent. In 1925 the large cities recorded an average of six abortions per thousand inhabitants, and 400,000 abortions were recorded in 1926 alone. In the countryside, where there were no doctors, no transport or neither, the effect was far smaller: women relied on traditional medicine and went on seeing babki, midwives, hairdressers, nurses and others for the procedure after legalisation. 2 6 1 5

By the mid-1920s hospitals were so congested with abortions that special clinics had to be opened to free beds. The enormous number of procedures alarmed many doctors, and restrictions followed: abortion after the third month was limited, priority went to women deemed too poor, single or already with several children, and six months had to pass between a first and a second abortion. From 1924 a special commission examined each case, admitting grounds such as danger to the woman’s life or health or pregnancy from rape, and without its approval no abortion could be performed. These restrictions were lifted in 1926, but abortion in a first pregnancy, and within six months of a previous abortion, was banned outright; from 1930 abortions had to be paid for. 2 1

The legalisation of abortion also launched a drive against unlicensed abortionists: legal abortion left babki with no excuse to operate, and a fair number were caught and punished, though the effort was temporarily put on the back burner during the collectivisation drives of the early 1930s. Contraception, meanwhile, barely spread. The main method in the early USSR was coitus interruptus; a shortage of rubber made condoms and diaphragms unavailable, and politicians rarely discussed contraception. Abortion technique did advance: in 1927 the Russian doctor S. G. Bykov improved suction aspiration, a method used during the liberal period of 1920–1936 and later in China and Japan before it reached Britain and the United States in the 1960s. 2 5 16

The debate on sexual morality and the 1926 family code

With abortion and divorce freed, the 1920s saw a debate over a new sexual morality. The so-called glass-of-water theory denied love and reduced relations between men and women to an instinctive need to be satisfied without “bourgeois conventions”, as simply as quenching one’s thirst with a glass of water. The comparison was at its most popular in the 1920s, written about in the press and debated at Komsomol meetings. Kollontai and Clara Zetkin are often named as its authors, but neither ever compared love to a glass of water; Kollontai wrote instead that “society must learn to recognise all forms of marital relations, however unfamiliar their contours.” In 1923 she published “Make Way for Winged Eros! (A Letter to Working Youth)” in the journal Molodaya Gvardiya. 17 18

Party leaders were cool towards the theory. According to Zetkin’s recollections Lenin called it “completely un-Marxist and, moreover, anti-social”: thirst must be quenched, he said, but would a normal person lie down in the mud and drink from a puddle, or from a glass whose rim had been touched by dozens of lips? Anatoly Lunacharsky criticised it in a Leningrad lecture of December 1926, saying that socialism must have serious, deeply restrained and beautiful love in place of bourgeois debauchery and the “nihilist” view of “naked” sexual need. In 1926–1929 the theory came under heavy criticism and persecution, and 1929 is usually counted as the end of the Bolshevik sexual revolution, though some researchers date its formal end to 1935, when a law made pornography a criminal offence. 17

Aron Zalkind’s “Twelve Sexual Commandments of the Revolutionary Proletariat”, published in 1924, codified this mood. The psychiatrist urged against too early a sexual life, for abstinence until marriage at full social and biological maturity at 20 to 25, for monogamy, and for remembering in every sexual act that a child might be conceived; the last commandment declared that the class had the right, in the interests of revolutionary expediency, to intervene in its members’ sex lives. Its point was that the proletariat’s energy should not be wasted on sexual relations useless to its historic mission. The code was an educational recommendation, not law, and was far from always followed. Conservative voices also grew in the Zhenotdel. Sofia Smidovich, who ousted Kollontai in 1922 and led the women’s department until 1924, openly rejected Kollontai’s ideas of free love and the destruction of the family, calling instead for a healthy family of equal partners and attention to the plight of single mothers. 19 17 20 21

The family code of 1926 answered these social problems. Where the 1918 code had sought to lead society towards socialist relations in marriage and the family, the 1926 code tried to solve immediate problems, above all the financial security of women and children. With seven million homeless children in 1921 alone, it reinstated adoption. The end of labour conscription under the New Economic Policy sent female unemployment soaring, and hundreds of thousands of unemployed women without registered marriages were left with no protection after a separation. The 1926 code therefore recognised unregistered de facto marriages, extending alimony to de facto wives, required property acquired during marriage to be divided equally as common property, and let a judge assign paternity. The jurists saw this not as an ideological retreat from socialism but as “temporary” measures until communal care materialised. 5

The turn of the early 1930s: the Zhenotdel dissolved, the birth rate and the abortion crackdown

With the five-year plans the women’s movement lost ground. A resolution of the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923 had already warned that the women’s departments were creating soil for “feminist deviations” that might cut working women off from the general class struggle. In 1926 the work of organising women was transferred to the local factory unions, and in 1927 the Politburo judged that the Zhenotdel merely duplicated the rest of the party’s work and wasted resources. In January 1930 the Zhenotdel was dissolved and replaced by women’s sectors in the departments of agitation and mass campaigns, which lasted until 1934; around then Stalin declared the “woman question” in the USSR solved. What industrialisation demanded was drawing women into labour under the slogan “Women into production!” 4 7

The birth rate meanwhile kept falling. With urbanisation and industrialisation the number of children per family fell from 6.8 in 1925 to 4.25 in 1940; in 1935 Russia’s total fertility rate was almost 40 per cent below that of 1927, and natural increase had nearly halved, from 21 to 11 per thousand. One account holds that as women were mobilised en masse into building social infrastructure during collectivisation and industrialisation, by the 1930s there was on average less than one child per woman, a situation the authorities judged critical and which led them to rethink family policy. In 1935 the production of contraceptives was halted. 22 23

Stalin presented population growth as an achievement of the system. Reporting to the Seventeenth Party Congress on 26 January 1934, he cited growth “from 160.5 millions at the end of 1930 to 168 millions at the end of 1933”, and at a meeting with collective farmers on 1 December 1935 he said, to laughter, that because “life has become better and more fun” the population was growing by three million a year, “as much as the whole of Finland”. By his reckoning the population should have reached about 180 million in 1937. Yet the census due in 1933, after that of 1926, was postponed again and again, most probably out of reluctance to reveal the demographic results of the famine of 1932–1933. 24

The state tightened the campaign against illegal abortion. In 1934 stricter laws on performing illegal abortions were passed, and the RSFSR Procuracy sent regional prosecutors a circular urging them to step up the fight against unsanctioned abortion. It cited a letter from an anonymous citizen decrying the harm babki did to women in one rural district, and the major newspapers ran extensive stories on it; a month later Izvestiia condemned “the plight of young women who ended up at the abortionist’s doorstep after being unable to find employment.” According to a report quoted by the exiled Trotsky, in 1935 “195 women mutilated by midwives” passed through a single village hospital in one district of the Urals, among them 33 working women, 28 clerical workers, 65 collective farm women and 58 housewives. 2 25

1933–1934: the return of the sodomy law

With the first five-year plan, disciplines that put the social environment above biology gained ground, and homosexuality moved from “illness” to “criminal social vice”. As collectivisation and economic collapse set people adrift, the regime’s internal passports and “social cleansing of the cities” targeted homosexuals visible on the streets together with prostitutes, beggars and vagrants. In Germany, meanwhile, the homosexuality of the SA chief Ernst Röhm had become public in 1931, and first the Social Democrats and then the communists used it in political attacks. 3

The Nazis cast Marinus van der Lubbe, the Dutchman who set fire to the Reichstag in February 1933, as a communist terrorist. The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, published in Paris that August by exiled communists including Willi Münzenberg, claimed that he was a male prostitute procured for Röhm by Röhm’s aide Georg Bell and that the fire had been set by homosexual stormtroopers led by Edmund Heines; there was no evidence for this. To distance itself from van der Lubbe, the Comintern used aggressively homophobic rhetoric, calling him a Nazi collaborator sexually dependent on Röhm. 26 3

The propaganda made its way into the Soviet Union too. According to the historian Dan Healey, in January 1934 military counter-intelligence in Leningrad, investigating local homosexuals, claimed to have seized a document titled “Open letter of the homosexuals of Moscow and Kharkov to Mr. Marinus van der Lubbe”. Later historians strongly suspect it was fabricated, but at the time it served as evidence that an international of homosexuals, the so-called “Homintern”, was anti-Soviet. 27

In August and September 1933 the OGPU arrested several hundred homosexuals in Leningrad, Moscow and Kharkov. On 15 September its deputy chairman Genrikh Yagoda reported to Stalin that an “association of pederasts” was turning into spy cells that corrupted youth and the armed forces, and Stalin passed it to Kaganovich: “The scoundrels must be punished in exemplary fashion, and a corresponding guiding decree introduced into legislation.” Kalinin argued for extrajudicial handling by the OGPU rather than a law, but the Politburo approved Yagoda’s draft on 16 December, and decrees of the Presidium of the Soviet Central Executive Committee of 17 December 1933 and 7 March 1934 told the republics to add the new article to their codes. 3 14

Ukraine was the first to adopt the sodomy article, on 11 January 1934, and the RSFSR added Article 154-a to its criminal code on 1 April; setting a minimum sentence was a novelty in the law of the time. 3

Article 154-a. Sexual intercourse of a man with a man (sodomy) is punished by deprivation of liberty for three to five years. Sodomy committed with the use of violence or by taking advantage of the victim’s dependent position is punished by deprivation of liberty for five to eight years. 3

154-а. Половое сношение мужчины с мужчиной (мужеложство) — лишение свободы на срок от трёх до пяти лет. Мужеложство, совершённое с применением насилия или с использованием зависимого положения потерпевшего, — лишение свободы на срок от пяти до восьми лет. 3

In Moscow the British communist Harry Whyte took a stand against the sodomy law. A 27-year-old journalist from Edinburgh, he had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1931, worked from 1932 on the English-language Moscow Daily News under Mikhail Borodin and in 1933 became head of its editorial staff. When a man with whom he had had relations was arrested, he asked the OGPU, the Commissariat of Justice and psychiatrists for the grounds of the law and got only contradictory answers. In May 1934 he sent Stalin a long letter, “Can a homosexual be a member of the Communist Party?”, arguing that the decree of 7 March contradicted both the facts of life and the principles of Marxism-Leninism. 28

Whyte saw the condition of working-class homosexuals as analogous to that of women under capitalism, of the coloured races oppressed by imperialism and of the Jews under Hitler. Distinguishing those homosexual from birth from those who had become so out of need or depravity, he argued that science put constitutional homosexuals at about two per cent of the population, some two million in the Soviet Union: could so many really be imprisoned? Capitalism, needing “cannon fodder” and a reserve army of labour, persecuted homosexuality as a threat to the birth rate, but so small a minority could not threaten the birth rate of a socialist state. Fascism, he noted, had used “the pederast van der Lubbe” as a weapon of provocation while crushing Hirschfeld’s emancipation movement, and the homosexual André Gide had not lost the trust of the French masses. Citing Engels, who had called an aristocratic sodomy scandal “hardly political”, and Stalin’s own report to the 17th Party Congress, which condemned “levelling” in personal life as a “reactionary absurdity”, he called the law an opportunist change of principle and asked for “an authoritative statement”. 28

No answer came. On the first page Stalin wrote: “Archive. An idiot and a degenerate. J. Stalin.” The Russian «идиот и дегенерат» uses дегенерат, a word from late nineteenth-century degeneration theory for a mentally and morally “degenerate” person. The letter lay in the Presidential Archive until 1993, when the journal Istochnik first printed it under the rubric “Humour from the secret archives”. At about the same time, on 23 May 1934, Gorky’s “Proletarian Humanism”, printed at Stalin’s order in both Pravda and Izvestia, spread the saying “Destroy the homosexuals and fascism will disappear”. A month later, on 30 June, the Night of the Long Knives began in Germany, in which Hitler had Röhm and the SA leadership killed. In March 1936 Justice Commissar Krylenko called homosexuality a product of the moral decay of the exploiting classes and dismissed the idea that it was inborn as a doctrine of “Western bourgeois schools”. 28 3 14 29

27 June 1936: the decree banning abortion

On 9 March 1936 the Politburo of the Central Committee decided to set up a commission to draft a law banning abortion, aiding mothers and expanding the network of nurseries and children’s homes. Grigory Kaminsky, Commissar of Health of the RSFSR since February 1934, submitted an extensive list of medical conditions entitling women to a legal abortion, meaning to widen access to safe abortions and reduce criminal ones; it drew Stalin’s disapproval. Counted with Semashko among the founders of preventive Soviet medicine, Kaminsky also became Commissar of Health of the USSR on 20 July 1936. 30

The draft abortion law was submitted to so-called universal popular discussion, and even through the fine sieve of the Soviet press many bitter complaints and stifled protests broke out; according to Trotsky the discussion was cut off as suddenly as it had been announced. Aron Solts, a member of the highest Soviet court and a specialist on matrimonial questions, justified the ban on the ground that in a socialist society without unemployment a woman had no right to decline “the joys of motherhood”, concluding: “We have need of people.” Trotsky called this the philosophy of a priest endowed with the powers of a gendarme, and wrote that millions of toiling women might have answered, had their lips not been sealed, “Then have the kindness to bear them yourselves.” 25

On 27 June 1936 the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars issued a resolution with a long title: “On the prohibition of abortions, the increase of material aid to women in childbirth, the establishment of state assistance to large families, the extension of the network of maternity homes, nurseries and kindergartens, the tightening of criminal punishment for non-payment of alimony, and certain changes in divorce legislation”. Its preamble declared that “in no country in the world does woman, as mother and citizen, on whom lies the great and responsible duty of bearing and raising citizens, enjoy such respect and protection of the law as in the USSR”. It recalled that abortion had been allowed on 18 November 1920 because “the moral survivals of the past and the hard economic conditions of the present” still drove some women to it, and held that with exploitation abolished and living standards rising that resolution could now be revisited. Abortion was dealt with in the four articles of section I. 10

I. On the prohibition of abortions

1. In view of the established harmfulness of abortions, to prohibit their performance both in hospitals and special medical institutions and in doctors’ homes and the private flats of pregnant women. The performance of abortions is permitted only where continuing the pregnancy threatens the life or gravely endangers the health of the pregnant woman, or where the parents have serious hereditary diseases, and only in hospitals and maternity homes.

2. For performing an abortion outside a hospital, or in a hospital in breach of these conditions, the doctor performing it shall be punished by one to two years’ imprisonment; for performing an abortion in unsanitary conditions or by persons without special medical training, by not less than three years’ imprisonment.

3. For compelling a woman to have an abortion, imprisonment of up to two years.

4. For pregnant women who have an abortion in breach of this prohibition, the criminal penalty shall be public censure, and for a repeated breach of the law prohibiting abortions a fine of up to 300 roubles. 10

I. О запрещении абортов

1. В связи с установленной вредностью абортов, запретить производство таковых как в больницах и специальных лечебных заведениях, так и на дому у врачей и на частных квартирах беременных. Производство абортов допустить исключительно в тех случаях, когда продолжение беременности представляет угрозу жизни или грозит тяжелым ущербом здоровью беременной женщины, а равно при наличии передающихся по наследству тяжелых заболеваний родителей и только в обстановке больниц и родильных домов.

2. За производство абортов вне больниц или в больнице, но с нарушением указанных условий, установить уголовное наказание врачу, производящему аборт, — от одного года до двух лет тюремного заключения, а за производство абортов в антисанитарной обстановке или лицами, не имеющими специального медицинского образования, установить уголовное наказание не ниже трех лет тюремного заключения.

3. За понуждение женщины к производству аборта установить уголовное наказание — тюремное заключение до двух лет.

4. В отношении беременных женщин, производящих аборт в нарушение указанного запрещения, установить, как уголовное наказание, — общественное порицание, а при повторном нарушении закона о запрещении абортов — штраф до 300 рублей. 10

The resolution did more than ban abortion. The layette allowance paid by social insurance to insured mothers rose from 32 to 45 roubles and the nursing allowance from 5 to 10 roubles a month, and women office employees received the same 56 days’ leave before and after childbirth as women workers. Refusing to hire a woman, or cutting her pay, because she was pregnant became a criminal offence. A mother of six received 2,000 roubles a year for five years for each further child, and a mother of ten 5,000 roubles at once for each further child and 3,000 roubles a year for the next four years. Divorce became harder: both parties had to appear and pay a fee, and failure to pay child support could bring harsh penalties. The law came with an eruption of pro-family propaganda that elevated motherhood to a patriotic, Stakhanovite form of labour, while the country’s leaders extolled the joys of children and family: “We need people.” At a meeting with Stakhanovite workers Stalin said that “of all the valuable capitals available in the world, the most valuable and decisive capital is the people”. 10 2 5

Consequences of the abortion ban: illegal abortion and the census

The abortion ban provoked resentment and opposition among urban women, who argued that having a child was often impossible while they were trying to build careers, at a time when the state actively promoted women’s education and employment, and that housing and the supplies needed to raise children were inadequate. In practice the law was only marginally more enforceable than in tsarist times. Babki went on plying their trade, knowing there was little risk of being caught; many women checked into hospitals after botched abortions, but it was usually impossible to tell a miscarriage from a self-induced abortion or one performed by a babka. An unwritten code of female solidarity held strong, and women seldom informed on babki. 2

The abortion ban greatly increased criminal and self-induced abortions. Deaths of women from abortion and its complications in Russia’s cities rose at once from 451 in 1935 to 910 in 1936, and kept rising until 1940, when they exceeded 2,000; no such statistics were kept for the countryside. Infanticide also increased. More than a million cases were registered between 1937 and 1940, and professional doctors and nurses made up less than a quarter of those who performed them. The birth rate rose during the ban, but only slightly because of other adverse factors, and researchers conclude that the ban had no positive effect on it. Between 1935 and 1940 infant mortality rose, apparently because women injured in illegal abortions could no longer bear healthy children. 6 1 2

A leadership counting on a recovering birth rate soon faced the census figures. The census of 6 January 1937 showed growth from 147 million in 1926 to 162 million, far short both of the 170–172 million implied by the registered births and deaths and of Stalin’s expectations. On 24 January Ivan Kraval, head of the central statistical administration, reported to Stalin and Molotov a first preliminary figure of 156 million, excluding those counted by the NKVD and the defence commissariat. Within ten days the results were declared “harmful”, and the officials responsible for the census were arrested and repressed. 24 31

Kaminsky did not escape. He was arrested on 25 June 1937, the very day he spoke at the Central Committee plenum, and the next day was expelled from the Central Committee candidacy and the party “as not deserving trust”. On 8 February 1938 the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court sentenced him to death under Article 58; he was shot on 10 February and buried at Kommunarka, and was rehabilitated posthumously on 2 March 1955. Meanwhile the course of 1936 continued. In 1942 single people and childless married couples were subjected to additional taxes; the family edict of 1944 recognised only registered marriages and left divorce to court discretion, and on 8 July of the same year the title and order of “Mother Heroine” were created for mothers who bore and raised ten or more children. 30 5 32

1955: abortion legalised again

Despite the 1936 ban abortion did not decline. In 1944 there were about 30.5 abortions per 100 pregnancies in the Soviet Union and 46.2 in the RSFSR, and the level stayed high after the war: over a million were recorded in 1950, some 90 per cent of them criminal. Complications of underground abortions are estimated to have caused about 4,000 deaths a year. Women went on seeking illegal abortions under policies that encouraged married women to work while favouring heavy industry and defence over housing and consumer goods. Yet many criminal cases opened over abortions never reached court. After a meeting on 16 August 1945 the Commissariat of Health tried to fight abortion through explanatory work and by encouraging large families, with little effect. 1 2

After Stalin’s death abortion policy began to relax. The list of medical grounds for termination was widened in 1951, and a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 5 August 1954 ended criminal liability for women who had abortions. The decree “On the abolition of the prohibition of abortions” of 23 November 1955 again allowed abortion at a woman’s request in medical institutions up to the twelfth week. Abortions outside medical institutions remained punishable, but the woman herself was not. Abortion statistics were state secrets until the late 1980s, and the USSR had one of the highest ratios of abortions to births in the world: abortions peaked at around 5.5 million a year in 1964–1965, and more than 260 million took place in the Soviet Union between 1920 and 1991. 1 6 33 2

1934–1993: the sodomy law enforced and repealed

Even before the sodomy law the OGPU had rounded up homosexuals in the big cities as part of its “passport operations”; of 175 arrested in Leningrad, 89 were office workers, 29 artists and 24 workers. Some were sentenced under Article 58 for counter-revolution, and the diplomat Dmitry Florinsky and the musicologist Boris Przybyszewski, sentenced for sodomy in 1934, were shot as spies in 1937. In 1939 “sodomy” was among the charges against Yezhov. In the Gulag men sent down under the article fell into the most despised caste, from which there was no way out. 3

The new RSFSR code of 1960 kept the offence as Article 121, dropping only the minimum sentence. Convictions rose by 40 per cent between 1960 and 1970, and the article was also used against dissidents such as the director Sergei Parajanov. Estimates of the men convicted over almost sixty years range from 25,000 to 250,000, with 60,000 the figure most often given. The article was repealed by a Russian federal law of 29 April 1993, in force from 27 May, when Yagoda’s and Stalin’s correspondence and Whyte’s letter were declassified. The abortion ban was lifted in 1955; the sodomy law outlived it by thirty-eight years. 3

Assessment: between liberation and “Thermidor”

In 1936, the year of the abortion ban, Trotsky, exiled in Norway, attacked it head-on in The Revolution Betrayed. The right to abortion, he wrote, was in conditions of want and family distress one of a woman’s most important civil, political and cultural rights, which was why the revolutionary power had granted it; having revealed its inability to give women forced into abortion the necessary medical aid and sanitation, the state had sharply changed course and taken the road of prohibition. Those who fell into the jailer’s claws, he predicted, would be chiefly working women, servants and peasant wives, while “our women” would go on doing as they pleased under the nose of an indulgent justice. To him the law was “the natural and logical fruit of a Thermidorian reaction”: socialism was meant to remove the causes that drove women to abortion, not to force the “joys of motherhood” on them through police interference. 25 34

The marriage and family laws of the October revolution, Trotsky observed, once the object of its legitimate pride, were being remade and mutilated by vast borrowings from the law books of bourgeois countries, and the very arguments once advanced for unconditional freedom of divorce and abortion, “the liberation of women”, “defence of the rights of personality”, “protection of motherhood”, were now repeated in favour of their limitation and complete prohibition. The most compelling motive of the new cult of the family, he wrote, was the bureaucracy’s need for a stable hierarchy and the disciplining of youth. Historians likewise see the 1936 code as an ideological break with revolutionary visions of the family: the “withering-away” doctrine for family, law and state was anathematised, and motherhood became a socialist duty added to the duty to work on a par with men, placing a double burden on women. 25 5 23

For campaigners against abortion bans in Western Europe, the Soviet Union of the 1920s was a point of reference. In Germany abortion took place illegally under Paragraph 218 of the penal code; the 45th German Doctors’ Congress estimated in 1926 that there were 500,000 to 800,000 abortions a year, with some 10,000 deaths. Friedrich Wolf’s play Cyankali, premiered at Berlin’s Lessing Theatre on 6 September 1929, set off a wide debate over Paragraph 218 and became the most successful German-language play of the 1929/1930 season. The Soviet Union is still cited as the first modern country to legalise abortion. But while its law changed twice, contraception lagged behind, and a so-called “abortion culture” took hold in which abortion became the main means of controlling births. 35 16 2

The return of the sodomy law was part of the same reversal. In the early 1930s human sexuality became a political matter, and homosexuality passed from an “illness” for biology to explain, to a “criminal vice” bred by social conditions, and on to a mark of “counter-revolutionary elements”. Just as the law of 1936 abandoned the “withering away” of the family and made childbearing and the family tasks of the state, the sodomy law belonged to the same drive for births and “healthy” sexuality. As Whyte pointed out, it overturned a principle Soviet law had itself laid down in the 1920s: that the state did not interfere in the sex lives of adults. 3 5 28

Historians disagree on the motives of the sodomy law. Besides propaganda that painted homosexuality as a sign of fascism, they point to a political tool against dissidents, a means of solidifying opposition to Nazi Germany, and, as in Yagoda’s report, the secret police’s suspicion that homosexual circles were spy networks. In the known Moscow trials of the 1930s most defendants were workers and office employees, and the stigma branded on such prisoners in the Gulag spread through Soviet society. Researchers see the homophobia of twenty-first-century Russia as a direct legacy of this Stalinist repression. 14 15 3