Elena M. Likhodey

The purpose of the article is to reveal the process of transition in the country's social policy from the protection of motherhood and childhood to the protection of women's rights in 1990-1993 during the work of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation. At present, the state faces the task of raising demography and its solution is associated with the experience of the previous period. The article used comparative-historical, historical-systemic, logical and cause-and-effect methods. Scientific novelty is due to documents that have not been introduced into scientific circulation: documents of the office documentation of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation. Documents reflecting statistical data were also used: the report of the Russian Federation on the implementation of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, prepared by the Government of the Russian Federation, and data from the periodicals of the specified years. The study shows that in the late 1980s, due to changing socio-economic conditions and the transition to a market economy, which required a clearer formulation of the rights of participants in market relations, the transformation of Soviet state policy in the field of motherhood and childhood protection began. In the Russian Federation, attempts to move from the abstract concept of protecting motherhood and childhood to considering women's rights within the framework of the concept of human rights have not yet succeeded in the period under review. But at that time, the foundations were laid for the transition in the 1990s to a policy that considers women's rights as a system of individual rights, which better corresponds to the realities of a market economy.