Book Review: The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights by Thomas Holt

Abstract

women exclusively responsible for household labour and childcare, and condemn single mothers to social stigma and financial hardship. Nakachi skilfully analyses a wide range of issues that are fundamentally important for understanding gender and sexuality in late Soviet society, but have been either subject to sweeping generalisation or underexplored in existing scholarship. The discourses on women’s rights and critiques of women’s double burden that emerged throughout the 1950s and 1960s in response to the 1944 Family Law cast a long shadow into the Brezhnev era and became important rallying cries for feminist groups during Gorbachev’s glasnost. The inadequacies of Soviet contraceptives have long been noted in historical scholarship, but Nakachi reveals how and why the Soviet government prevented the mass manufacture and application of the hormonal pill and intrauterine devices, much to the frustration of medical experts. Replacing the Dead also provides a fascinating insight into the centrality of Ukraine in the development of Soviet postwar pronatalist policy. Nikita Khrushchev – the architect of the 1944 Family Law – was head of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and therefore, readily exposed to the wartime decimation of the Ukrainian population during Nazi occupation and Soviet recapture. Khrushchev consulted with Ukrainian demographers, held a women’s conference in Kyiv to discuss a draft of the law, and made his All-Union policy recommendations and financial projections based on the specific social and economic conditions of Ukraine. Here Nakachi provides a welcome reminder of the importance of looking beyond Russia in Soviet history, but unfortunately, this close attention to the regional diversity of the USSR does not run throughout the entire book. In the introduction, Russian and Soviet are sometimes used synonymously, and the epilogue focuses exclusively on echoes of Soviet pronatalism in post-socialist Russia. References to the implementation of demographic policy in Soviet Central Asia are tantalisingly brief and Nakachi does not address how Soviet pronatalism played out in regions that were subject to invasion, annexation, and brutal Sovietisation during the war and immediately thereafter, such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These issues notwithstanding, Replacing the Dead is a crucially important work of social, cultural, and medical history that significantly advances our understanding of the postwar Soviet Union. Nakachi’s book is essential reading for anybody interested in gender and sexuality in the Soviet context and it invites reflection on the lingering impact of Soviet policies in the post-Soviet world.