Yet, as soon as the Great Patriotic War ended, and the existential threat to the Soviet Union was destroyed, they got rid of all the women in combat roles and pretty much all the women in their military. And they didn't really "downsize" their military after the war ended....
You'd think if it was such a great idea, the Communists/Socialists would have kept it. But they didn't for some reason....
So the Soviets were phalocentric aholes, as everyone else was/apparently still is?
Having lost roughly a quarter of its population during the war (solid figures are hard to come by, but consensus is more or less about 40 million military and civilian deaths in the war of a total prewar population of about 165 million), the Soviets embarked on a campaign to rebuild the nation, continuing programs from the 1920s that encouraged women to have children. LOTS of children.
Its a lot tougher for a woman to do that when she's serving in the military.
"And they didn't really "downsize" their military after the war ended...."
Uhm... yeah. They did, and rather quickly, and rather dramatically.
At the end of the war in 1945 the Soviet military had somewhere between 11-13 million men and women at arms.
Starting with demobilization right after the war, western analysts estimated that Soviet military strength fluctuated between roughly 3 to 5 million from roughly 1948 through the rest of the Cold War period.
Don't think for a moment that the Soviets came out of World War II and kept their military at 12 million for the next 45 years. That would be a ludicrous concept.
