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Podcast: NBN Book of the Day
Episode: Mie Nakachi, "Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Description: Today I talked to Mie Nakachi about Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union (Oxford UP, 2021)In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to legalize abortion on demand. But in 1936, the Soviet leadership criminalized abortion: the collectivization of the early 1930s was followed by famine that took the lives of millions of people, and the government grew eager to recover the population. Drawing on an amazing wealth of archival material, Nakachi traces the dynamic of Soviet reproductive policies that were invariably guided by pronatalist goals but almost always had...