The Soviet men who controlled the country weren’t always so keen on encouraging or even maintaining radical egalitarianism

See The World’s Greatest Feminist Experiment Was Not Where You’d Think: In “Motherland,” the journalist Julia Ioffe charts the Russian campaign to emancipate women — and the country’s failure to live up to that promise by Jennifer Szalai. Excerpt:

"But as “Motherland” also shows, the Soviet men who controlled the country weren’t always so keen on encouraging or even maintaining radical egalitarianism. And when they were intent on so-called equality, it was often to punish women because of their connection to men who happened to run afoul of the Kremlin. In Kazakhstan, the Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland was just one node in the sprawling network of the Gulag. Children born in captivity were sent to an orphanage where they were sometimes so neglected that they didn’t learn how to speak. One mother compared the sounds such children made to “the muted moans of pigeons.”

Having children, it turned out, would be a consistent obsession of the Soviet regime. Abortion was legalized, then outlawed, then legalized again. Stalin introduced a tax on childlessness. After the demographic disaster of World War II, the new superpower needed an expanding population. Ioffe notes that Stalin’s strategy for development relied mostly on “vast human sacrifice.” Men would make the big political decisions, while women would make more babies: “They would give up their sons for the country, pretend their children were heroes rather than cannon fodder, and when those sons fell in battle, they would have more.”

Alongside this official history, Ioffe traces a private one. One of her great-grandmothers survived a pogrom. Another, the pediatrician, was forced by the secret police to work at a military hospital during World War II. The women in her family would eventually learn that their stellar professional achievements did not mean a break from domestic work.

As the Soviet economy sputtered in the 1970s and ’80s, a dearth of consumer goods also made household tasks infinitely harder. It was impossible to procure disposable diapers or washing machines. (Politburo wives, by stark contrast, had access to special stores filled with otherwise scarce goods at discounted prices.) Women with Ph.D.s and full-time jobs spent their evenings pickling mushrooms and mending clothes. Even basic menstrual products were scarce."