ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that discussion of Soviet women's economics begins with an overview of the period from the 1920s to the mid-1960s. During that period, foundational ideas were developed that continued to dominate Soviet economic discourse until the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, those ideas actively blocked reforms that could have prevented that collapse. In these crucial decades, the New Economic Policy experiment was replaced with a command economy, and the Soviet Political Economy, its apologetic, was constructed and reached its zenith, a work in which women, along with men, had a long-lasting impact. In the era of Soviet reforms, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, Soviet economists, faced with the increasingly undeniable problem of economic inefficiency, reoriented their focus from how a planned economy was supposed to function to how it actually operated. Efficiency and optimality were finally recognized, if not by an overwhelming majority, as key economic problems.
