Heroine Mothers and Demographic Crises: the Legacy of the Late Soviet Era

The figure of the ‘Heroine Mother’, a woman who had borne ten or more children, took her place in Soviet propaganda in the wake of the catastrophic losses of the Second World War. In 1944, a draconian piece of family legislation which made divorce virtually impossible simultaneously instituted a range of honours for the mothers of large families.1 By the 1970s, however, a quarter century after the death of Stalin, the ‘Heroine Mothers’ could be easily dismissed as an anachronism. As the 1944 law was superceded by the more humane family legislation of the 1960s, these ‘Heroines’ of an earlier pronatalist policy appeared to be simply a leftover from the Stalinist past. Though the array of orders and medals on offer to mothers of five or more children still remained, their relevance to the majority of the population was increasingly doubtful. Their presence, if it was felt at all, appeared to be largely confined to the obligatory tables in the annual statistical yearbooks. Indeed, so rare were the holders of these awards that most people outside the territories of the Soviet Central Asian republics were unlikely ever to have met one: in the entire history of honouring mothers in this way in the USSR, only 8000 women received an award, just over 400 attaining the pinnacle of ‘Heroine Mother’.2 It was something of a surprise, therefore, when, in the late 1970s, the Heroine Mothers became the focus of sustained propaganda as the Communist Party leadership once more became concerned at demographic developments.