Following the end of World War II, the Soviet Union

Following the end of World War II, the Soviet Union experienced a serious 失衡 in the gender ratio between men and women, resulting in an increase in the number of women unable to marry. At this time, the government came up with a solution that went beyond common sense.

When the war ended in 1945, the Soviet Union won, but its land was almost in ruins. Young men were found even on foot, and approximately 27 million people died. Everyone was shocked when national statistics came out in 1946. There are only 74 million men left in the country, while 96 million women, which is equivalent to every three women. In areas where the war was most intense, such as Stalingrad, the gender ratio between young people reached 1:4, making it more difficult for women to find a spouse.

This was not the end of the problem. It took labor to work to start the factory and farm, but there were few workplaces. Women had to take over a lot of hard work and hard work. Women could be seen everywhere in ironmaking, mining, tractor driving, and construction. They worked well, but when they returned home, they had a lonely table and no partner to talk to. The lives of many widows and the maidens who could not marry were very tight. No one to work, no army, and in 20 years the population will be even smaller, so how can this country recover?

A famine broke out in 1947. The Volga River basin was flooded with heavy rain, and not even mice could run around because the grounds were empty. People were forced to eat tree bark and grass roots, and they could see people starving to death on the side of the road. Less than half of babies survive three days after birth, and the number of newborns in the Rostov region has decreased by 60 percent from before the war. The nation anticipated that the birth rate would rise after the war, but the population gradually declined. Children in school classrooms were decreasing year by year, and some schools had to close. Military commanders began to worry that if this continues, they might not be able to recruit new recruits in 10 years.

Some even proposed a ridiculous proposal to introduce polygamy. The logic was that if a man marries multiple women, the birth rate would increase. However, this proposal was immediately rejected. The Soviet Union was a socialist country that advocated gender equality, so it could not go back in history. Women also opposed it. During the war, they, too, went to the front line and worked in factories with sweat, but they couldn't accept their demands to be concubines now.

When the government was in trouble, its eyes turned to the prisoners of war. By the end of the war, the Soviet Union had captured approximately 600,000 Japanese prisoners in the Far East, who were sent to harsh regions in Siberia to engage in forced labor, such as railway construction, mining, and logging. 80% of them were men between the ages of 20 and 40, who worked in good health and earnest. Over time, some of the Soviet female soldiers and female guards who monitored them exchanged hearts with Japanese prisoners. Regulations prohibited this, and although they were caught, they were removed from their positions and sentenced to exile, they could not stop their emotions. In 1947 alone, there were more than 30,000 couples meeting secretly, and it was not enough to crack down.

Seeing this situation, the superiors decided that it could no longer be stopped, so they decided to use the flow. A document was issued in the spring of 1948 permitting the marriage of Japanese prisoners of war and Soviet women with conditions. Conditions were strict. They had to acquire Soviet citizenship, convert to Orthodoxy, and undergo several stages of examination from the labor camp to the Ministry of the Interior. This was done to thoroughly investigate the possibility of espionage. These prisoners were granted special residence status and became quasi-citizens if approval was granted. Their Soviet wives were given additional rationing and had access to housing priority distribution and medical benefits.

This policy was first implemented in the most labor-deficient areas, such as Kazakh farms and railway construction sites in Siberia. Not a few of these Japanese prisoners of war were able. Some were skilled in machine repair and construction, while others taught rice farming techniques to increase production by 30%. Local officials, who were originally opposed, gradually changed their attitude when they saw their actual contribution. The prisoners of war who formed the family worked more faithfully. Having a wife and a child, my heart settled here.

Not everyone was in favor of this policy, however. Some conservatives were enraged by this and argued that giving our sisters to an enemy was an act of betraying the fallen. There was heated debate in the conference room. The reality was stronger, however. The state needed people to work, women wanted to build a family, and children wanted a father. In the face of this desperate reality, I had no choice but to choose this path in the end. By about 1955, more than 80,000 families had been born between them and more than 150,000 mixed-race children. On the streets, it was easy to see children with fluent Russian on Asian faces. They gradually became integrated into the local community, playing a role in the reconstruction of the Soviet Union and contributing to the gradual return of the population decline.

In all this, women were burdened the most. The state encouraged childbirth by awarding a "Heroic Mother" medal to mothers of ten children, and in the other hand, demanded that they work hard in factories. On the poster were an image of a woman holding a child and a factory behind her and the words "Thank you mother and worker." However, the reality was dark. They had to wake up before sunrise to cook, bring the child to school, work at the factory all day, go grocery shopping on their way home, and take care of housework and childcare when they came home. I was so tired that I couldn't straighten my back when the day was over. It was before the war that the state said it would free women from the kitchen. After the war, they were rather bound by the double burden of work and childcare and led a more tired life than before.

War changed everything. The Soviet Union won the war, but lost a generation of men as a whole. In order to solve this huge problem, they