Russia’s Radical Promise Turned Tribal Nightmare
By 1989, the Soviet Union—home to just 6 percent of the world’s people—accounted for 20 percent of its abortions. Eighty percent of Soviet women endured at least one forced or coerced procedure. No Western democracy has ever matched that toll.
In 1917, the Bolsheviks thundered onto the world stage promising liberation. Women would be free from “bourgeois marriage,” economic dependence and the tyranny of the family. They granted no-fault divorce, paid maternity leave, free education—and, by 1920, state-funded abortion on demand.
At first, it sounded revolutionary. Soviet women flooded factories and lecture halls. They served as cabinet ministers, diplomats and combat pilots. The “Night Witches” alone—an all-female bomber regiment—raided German lines under cover of night, racking up 12,000 confirmed kills.
But the experiment collapsed under its own contradictions. Stalin banned abortion in 1936, then unleashed secret-police terror. Women who dared protest vanished into camps. Children born of those survivors were warehoused in orphans’ homes where they starved, suffered and, in many cases, never spoke again.
World War II resurrected female combat roles—but only because Moscow had no choice. Twenty-one million Soviet men died. The regime needed bodies, male or female, to stem the Nazi tide. The “honor” was fleeting. By the 1950s, Khrushchev outlawed single motherhood and re-legalized abortion, rewarding men for desertion and women for silence.
In the collapse of 1991, Russia lurched from state terror to oligarchic plunder. Daughters of diplomats turned to “Sexpionage,” selling their bodies for influence. The Kremlin’s new bride parade—where top officials sidle up to gold-bank accounts rather than credentials—proved that wealth, not character, determines female worth.
Today’s Russia is an autocracy disguised in pseudo-conservatism. Women are celebrated only when they serve the regime’s narrative—whether as trophy brides, propaganda pilots or sobbing mothers clutching placards for fallen sons in Ukraine. Genuine agency is a foreign export, not a domestic product.
Contrast that with America’s conservative vision: individual rights, strong families, faith-based support networks and free markets that reward talent, not party loyalty. Here, women choose their paths without the state’s boot at their throat or the oligarch’s golden leash.
We cannot admire the Soviet record—or its modern heir—without condemning its price. Empowerment that begins with government mandates ends with government bullets. True liberty grows from voluntary association, not coercive collectivism.
The lesson is unmistakable: the road to female equality is paved by individual responsibility, economic freedom and moral clarity. Anything else is a mirage—and a warning from history.
