Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union

Drawing on never before used archival materials, Replacing the Dead exposes the history of Soviet and Russian abortion policy.It is not unusual for nations recovering from wars to incentivize their populations to raise their birthrates. The post-World War II Soviet pronatalism campaign attempted this on an unprecedented scale, aiming to replace a lost population of 27 million. Why, then, did the USSR re-legalize abortion in 1955? Mie Nakachi uses previously hidden archival data to reveal that decisions made by Stalin and Khruschev under the rubric of ‘family law’ created a society of broken marriages,