A Bad Year

From Dirty Little Secrets of World War Ii : Military Information No One Told You About the Greatest, Most Terrible War in History:

Nearly 80 percent of the males born in the Soviet Union in 1923 did not survive World War II. The war was also hard on the females born in that year, as many were unable to find husbands. In recognition of this situation, after the war the Soviet government urged men (married or not) to help these "war widows" to get pregnantso they could at least have children, even if their potential husbands had been killed during the war. Many of the elderly and impoverished Russian women seen in the wake of the Cold War are these same women born in the early 1920s, only to see their hopes for a family killed during World War II battles.

Comments

[Dave Munger]

I always wondered why they didn't just go polygynous, Stalin had the power to decree that.