ABSTRACT
Perestroika connotes for its Soviet sponsors a comprehensive renewal of Soviet society by freeing human potential. This chapter reviews the impact of perestroika on problems of family size and issues of ethnic differences, women's role conflict, family health, abortions, and family instability, the new beginnings of family and women's advocacy, and the turn to family enterprise. A party decree in 1930 under Joseph Stalin put an end to "harmful Utopian schemes" of eliminating the family, calling them premature in the light of both resources and attitudes. The modest demographic turnabout in the 1980s appears to have vindicated noncoercive approaches to shaping family choices. Demographers have debated for years whether funds for family support should differentiate among nationalities. The campaign for peasant-family enterprise in the USSR limped along after 1987 Party resolutions, prompting the Party under Mikhail Gorbachev's prodding to reiterate its support of contract farming in 1989.
