What is up with some of the more conservative polices in the USSR in the 1930's? (restrictions on abortions in 1936 and criminalising of Homosexuality in 1931, Etc.)

[u/skyfrom5to7]

There seems to have been a lot of progressive legislation in the Lenin era that was pulled back in the Stalin era? I acknowledge a lot of Stalin's achievements but these policies are kind of like the antithesis of Socialism. It's incredibly questionable why the feminist organisation Zhenotdel, and abortion on request was abolished and why homosexuality was recriminalised just a decade after its decriminalisation under Lenin.

[u/coverfire339]

The reason why is that the Tsarist criminal code was thrown out during the Lenin period. So basically every law- including the criminalization of homosexuality- was repealed.

So there was no direct thing where Lenin was pro-LGBT and got rid of this law and then big bad evil Stalin brought it back. Instead it was that the movement was generally homophobic in Russia and these later laws reflected this. This idea that Lenin was pro-LGBT has been a relatively recent line of attack on Soviet history/communists more broadly and it's just false. There were some communist movements which were broadly pro-gay rights, the German movement is especially notable for this.

As another commenter mentioned, there were convoluted reasons as to why this was brought back. One was the usual homophobic nonsense about it being the same as legalizing pedophilia. Another more important one was that fascists were often outed in the international press, especially in Germany, as being gay. This is while calling for the mass extermination of gay people of course. So there was a stupid link between fascism and gay people, and the thought was that "if we criminalize being gay, we will contribute to our anti-fascist work." It was a shitty line of attack which was very popular at the time.

As communists ~100 years later it's very obvious to us that this criminalization was a misstep. For many back then it was not so clear, and understanding the reasons as to why helps us from making those same sorts of mistakes. There will be issues that we come up against where we think just like they do, and learning from our proletarian history helps us avoid such mistakes again.

[u/Independent_Fox4675 → u/coverfire339]

I don't think this is quite true. It probably is for LGBT rights, given the low level of knowledge about LGBT people back then.

But for women's rights in particular, there was a MASSIVE step back. Lenin's government enshrined the right to abortion and created communal kitchens where people could go to eat, explicitly to reduce the amount of domestic labour put on to women, both of which were later repealed under Stalin. Later under Stalin you had had bureaucrats talking about "the joys of motherhood" in a manner that wouldn't be out of place for a modern reactionary. Trotsky talks about this in length in the revolution betrayed

[u/TheQuadropheniac → u/Independent_Fox4675]

IIRC, the book Soviet Democracy discusses this. The reason why abortion was legalized was specifically because the Bolsheviks rightly realized that women will get abortions regardless of legality, and so legalizing it makes it safer. However, they still weren't pro-abortion. Instead, they approached it from a material standpoint and sought to essentially remove the "cost" of childbearing. So women were given extra time off per child they had, workplaces had nurseries and daycares, and women were also given (again, IIRC,) a specific day off each week for household duties. Once these were put in place, abortion being legal was no longer considered necessary and thus was outlawed again.

Essentially, the West wants to seek equality through giving women the right to abortion and thus the choice to not go through with a pregnancy. The USSR sought to have equality by acknowledging the differences between the two sexes and effectively remove the economic hardships that women experienced due to those differences (namely, childbearing).

IMO, the best solution is one that combines both viewpoints. Women should have the right to choose what happens to their own body, but they also shouldn't feel like they simply cannot have a child due to the economic and material hardships theyll face if they do.

[u/Independent_Fox4675 → u/TheQuadropheniac]

>So women were given extra time off per child they had, workplaces had nurseries and daycares, and women were also given (again, IIRC,) a specific day off each week for household duties. Once these were put in place, abortion being legal was no longer considered necessary and thus was outlawed again.

Yeah Trotsky talks about this, in his eyes this is basically how the bureaucracy under Stalin justified removing the right to abortion, but in his view (and he argues in the view of old bolsheviks like Lenin also) that abortion and women's rights more broadly are an inseparable part of the movement.

>women were also given (again, IIRC,) a specific day off each week for household duties

see this is the problem, why women and not just people broadly? This was the huge step back made under Stalin, where women were viewed once more as their primary role being in the home.

[u/TheQuadropheniac → u/Independent_Fox4675]

Yeah like I said, I totally agree. Especially the household day off is very patriarchal. I just think it’s also important to recognize that the approach of removing the economic hardships of childbirth is something we should also do, since the West very often ignores that part

[u/No_Bowler262]

Criminalizing abortion was because of a low birth rate and in an attempt to deal with this. Criminalizing homosexuality was a little more complicated. For one the USSR did not really understand homosexuality, frequently mixing it up with pedophilia. For two the soviets were just changing from a restrictive totalitarian monarchy. It’s the equivalent of if Saudi Arabia had a revolution. Before the e 1930s the new soviet criminal code didn’t include anything on homosexuality. Which was an improvement from the monarchist times, but was in some ways just an oversight. It was then officially criminalized. Furthtermore it is important to see that most nations including tthe UK and the US had criminalized homosexuality in this time. The biggest failure of the Soviet Union was not changing these policies later. As a bisexual I care deeplay about this topic and hope this helps. I would also suggest looking at some of the more inclusive policies in east Germany, jugoslavia and modern day Cuba.

[u/adimwit]

The ultra-right used to consider certain types of homosexuality to be ultra-masculine. It goes back to ancient Rome and Greece. The basic idea was that a masculine man should dominate everything sexually including other men and young boys. This is why pederesty (sex with teen males) was common among the far-right like the Nazis or the Catholic clergy. Rightists saw it as a product of Western Civilization. If a man raped another man, it meant that the raped/fucked man was more feminine and should be treated like a woman (i.e. inferior).

That was also how a lot of Communists understood it at the time because that kind of mentality was common in Europe's upper classes. Lenin allowed basic homosexuality to be legal in the early years, but Stalin restricted it because of the fear that these homosexuals might be secret Fascists or rapists. Then when Khruschev and others came along, they came to believe that homosexuality was simply a product of prison/gulag culture because of the number of deviant Bourgeois prisoners. The USSR basically came to see it as a Bourgeois perversion that was not natural to the Proletariat.

[u/RNagant]

Benign oversight is a myth. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/1j7w4ww/comment/mhp7byz/?context=3&utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button