Authors

Discussion

This paper examines Soviet documentary films on childcare and motherhood produced in the aftermath of the 1936 Constitution, which both declared gender equality and banned abortion. The Stalinist turn to profamily policy was accompanied by an intensive campaign of visual propaganda that sought to normalise new reproductive laws and promote the “joys of motherhood.” The criminalisation of abortion signalled a broader shift in the state’s understanding of the family as an indispensable unit of social discipline and behaviour. Documentary film was instrumental in translating these policies into everyday practices and into the collective imagination of Soviet citizens.

Focusing on films such as Stalinskaia zabota (Stalin’s Care, 1936), Radostnoe detstvo (Happy Childhood, 1936), Kolybel’naia (Lullaby, 1937), and the newsreel series Pioneriia, I analyse how documentary cinema represented the ideal Soviet healthcare system and the new socialist family. These films depicted joyful, healthy children in kindergartens and nurseries, where nurses weighed and washed them, emphasising hygiene and safety, while mothers worked alongside men as equal participants in the labour force. Whereas in the 1920s Soviet non-fiction films often contrasted old prerevolutionary life with new Soviet modernity through topics of health and hygiene, the films emerging after the 1936 Constitution erased all social tensions and comparisons, presenting instead an idealised, static vision of the Stalinist family. In line with the visual imperatives of socialist realism, these films depicted Stalin himself as a paternal figure caring for every mother and every child.

An important feature of these productions is their authorship. The vast majority of motherhood films were created by young women filmmakers such as Arsha Ovanesova, Olga Podgoretskaia, and Lidiia Stepanova, who were commissioned to develop a new cinematic discourse around motherhood and children. This feminised sphere of documentary production highlights how questions of childcare and reproductive politics became gendered domains within Soviet film culture, shaping both professional trajectories and thematic specialisations of women in cinema.

By combining archival research, contemporary newspapers and journals, and close analysis of film texts, I argue that these motherhood films functioned as a form of body politics: they disciplined female reproductive behaviour, visualised state healthcare as universally accessible, and projected an idealised image of the socialist child. At the same time, they expose the contradictions of Stalinist cultural policy, in which women’s bodies were simultaneously celebrated, regulated, and instrumentalised for the state’s demographic and ideological goals.