Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its Pan-European Context

Beginning in the nineteenth century and coming to fruition after the First World War, there developed a new way of thinking about population resources and their importance to national power. Previously, management of reproduction had been unthinkable, because it had been regarded as a natural phenomenon. But with the rise of demography, statistics (censuses), sociology, and other social sciences, reproduction became a subject of rational study and scientific management.