In today’s Russia, feminism is often regarded as something imported from the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union, just like foreign finance or the internet. In this context, the story of how Soviet women won the right to abortion is a sad case of lost memory — it having been forgotten that it was achieved here earlier than in Western countries. Yet this fight was an important example of Soviet women’s political activism — and a story that helps us reconstruct a wider history of socialist feminism in the USSR.

Such a reading runs against the long-dominant “totalitarian” approach to writing Soviet history. This latter assumes that the USSR was a wholly top-down entity where everyone simply obeyed the orders of a monolithic party, and nothing else. Clearly, such an undifferentiated landscape leaves no place for the history of the women who fought for their rights. While since the 1980s this approach has faced a strong revisionist challenge, it remains persistent in gender history.

The influence of this approach is visible in the way that the chronology of Soviet gender politics is usually structured. Focusing on the main changes of political leadership, this chronology comes to an end with the abolition of the Zhenotdel (women’s department) in 1930 — a move which brought the near-complete exclusion of women from political participation. Yet further exploring women’s agency in Soviet gender politics, we can see that the history of feminist struggle never stopped — for it never reached final victory.