Thanks for the detailed responses, I see where you come from. Some quick answers to your points:
- The USSR was not a socially conservative country in the 1960s-80s. for example, women were working at higher rates than in the West, when they only started joining the wokforce "en masse" in the 1980s. Women were more masculine than in the West, working in blue collar jobs, and with their female athletes dominating. Abortion was always legal throughout the eastern block, and Christianity was still harshly suppressed.
Soviet women seemed a lot more like the modern American or Australian women, and western women were still quite feminine through the 1980s. It seems like the situation flipped today with third wave feminism sweeping the west today while the FSU went back to a more classic ideal, also corresponding with a revival of the Church in many parts of this region...
North Korea is the one example of a socially conservative socialist country, they ban women from wearing pants, encourage feminine behavior, and families. I don't think the Soviet bloc was quite like this. One of my older cousins, who was a classical pianist, attended a conservatory in the GDR in the late 70s and ended up living there, she said it was a less conservative society than in France or even the Federal Republic.
-On the population: I think a large part of the purges was misattributed to WW2 losses, up to half of the 30M labeled as war losses, as a way to hide their crimes. The same way for example the Soviet propaganda blamed their large massacres of Poles on the Nazis.
- The USSR was not a socially conservative country in the 1960s-80s. for example, women were working at higher rates than in the West, when they only started joining the wokforce "en masse" in the 1980s. Women were more masculine than in the West, working in blue collar jobs, and with their female athletes dominating. Abortion was always legal throughout the eastern block, and Christianity was still harshly suppressed.
Soviet women seemed a lot more like the modern American or Australian women, and western women were still quite feminine through the 1980s. It seems like the situation flipped today with third wave feminism sweeping the west today while the FSU went back to a more classic ideal, also corresponding with a revival of the Church in many parts of this region...
North Korea is the one example of a socially conservative socialist country, they ban women from wearing pants, encourage feminine behavior, and families. I don't think the Soviet bloc was quite like this. One of my older cousins, who was a classical pianist, attended a conservatory in the GDR in the late 70s and ended up living there, she said it was a less conservative society than in France or even the Federal Republic.
-On the population: I think a large part of the purges was misattributed to WW2 losses, up to half of the 30M labeled as war losses, as a way to hide their crimes. The same way for example the Soviet propaganda blamed their large massacres of Poles on the Nazis.
“Nothing is more useful than to look upon the world as it really is.”