Rural Women in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia

‘Real Orthodox men’: religious masculinities and the new Russian culture of military patriotism

“…In the late 1980s and early 1990s, this search stimulated the creation of grassroots martial arts associations that cast physical training as part of a larger project of ethical self‐cultivation centred on patriarchal visions of masculinity, Slavic nationalism, and various forms of spirituality, often gravitating towards neo‐paganism rather than Orthodox Christianity. Kept underground and confined to private, domestic realms during Soviet rule, the Orthodox tradition, which was in many ways preserved by the piety of elderly women (Denisova 2010), came to be perceived by Russian men as a ‘feminized culture’, governed by the proverbial ‘grandmas in headscarves’ whom Stepan evokes. However, following the massive revival of religion in the Russian public sphere after the collapse of Soviet socialism, Orthodox faith started to overcome its association with passivity, submission, and femininity in the public consciousness, gradually regaining its appeal for young men.…”

Some Aspects of the Image of a Soviet Latvian Woman in Latvian Prose in the 1960s and 1970s

“…In some ways, readers and literary scholars today are in the same position as Western society in the second half of the 20th century, because so much knowledge about Soviet daily life and "thought patterns and expectations of the Soviet people" comes from literary works. There is much anthropological and social science research being done on Soviet-era women (for example : Denisova 2010;Ilic 2018;Ilic 2020;McKinney 2020). Studies have been conducted on literary texts, visual arts, films, and women's magazines as depictions of Soviet realities, particularly in relation to women's social roles and the socialist way of life (for example : Attwood 1993;Attwood 1999;Baločkaitė 2011;Golubev, Smolyak 2013;Giustino 2015).…”

Sexual Revolution, Mobilization or Civil War: How to Understand the Soviet Transformation of Sexuality (The Case of Soviet Lithuania)

“…The shortage of men in Lithuania was much lower than in Russia 68 , which also led to a lower share of illegitimate children. In the mid-1950s there were 17% of illegitimate children in the USSR 69 , whereas in Lithuania there were 12.5% of illegitimate children registered in 1950, and in 1955 -9.7%, then stabilized at 6-7% (the same percentage of illegitimate children was in interwar Lithuania), 70 although sexual mobilization was finally abandoned in 1968. Even if we take into account that the birth rate of illegitimate children was somewhat slowed down by the increase in the number of abortions after 1955, there is still doubt that post-war policies made a significant contribution to the increase in the number of illegitimate children, as historiography suggests.…”